19462: Esser: USAID, the CIA, and the Coup in Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

USAID, the CIA, and the Coup in Haiti

Saturday, February 28th, 2004
Neil Elliott

The first democratic government of Haiti appears to be in its death
throes. To add vicious insult to continuing injury, the American
mainstream media continue to present Haitian affairs as the sorry
result of the dismal leadership of one man, President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide, despite the best efforts of the United States. The headline
that graced the Star Tribune’s front page on February 18th – “USA,
France reluctant to intervene in Haiti” – would be laughably absurd
if the reality it obscured were not so dreadful.

One doesn’t have to wander far from the Associated Press wires to
find abundant information about the United States’ enthusiastic
long-term “intervention” in Haiti. The so-called “democratic
convergence” that has dogged Aristide’s elected government is, in
fact, a tiny group of malcontents who are working with elements of
the Bush administration to turn Haiti into one vast sweatshop zone.

Having been soundly rejected in every election in which they’ve run
against Aristide’s grass-roots “Lavalas” party, they’ve used millions
of USA tax dollars to organize street demonstrations, buy up radio
and television stations, and, most recently, field a vicious army of
thugs, styling themselves the “Cannibal Army,” who have attacked
police stations and set about occupying Haitian cities.

All this has been funded from the USA Agency for International
Development (USAID), under the guise of its falsely so-called
“Democracy Enhancement” program. USAID has long been notorious for
channeling money to the tiny pro-business elite and its armed goons.
It was USAID money that helped a CIA agent persuade Emmanuel “Toto”
Constant to organize the murderous FRAPH in 1991. That terrorist
organization was responsible for some 5,000 murders in the wake of
the military coup that removed Aristide from his first term as
elected president. Constant now lives as a real estate agent in
Brooklyn, thanks to the protection of the USA State and Justice
departments.

In Haiti today, it’s déjà vu all over again. In 1993, a CIA-spawned
military junta ruled Haiti through even greater terror than the
USA-sponsored Duvalier dictatorships had achieved. Meanwhile deposed
president Aristide, living in exile in New York, had become an
international cause célèbre. Under tremendous popular pressure, the
Clinton administration dispatched retired chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell to “negotiate” the withdrawal of the
coup regime ahead of a USA military intervention. Powell’s team
arranged immunity from prosecution for the lead criminals and safe
passage to other countries like the Dominican Republic, from which
many of the thugs have now returned as elements of the “Cannibal
Army.”

The USA occupation was a tragedy of errors that have now become all
too familiar: failures to disarm elements of the coup regime or to
safeguard strategic sites, channeling all aid money to USA
contractors who lined their own pockets, and hog-tying the new
government with requirements that the nation’s economy be surrendered
to USA investors. Aristide refused. The United States withheld aid
and began funding opposition groups, and their contra army, under the
guise of “democracy enhancement.”

Powell, now secretary of state, mewls that he prefers a “political
solution” to the present crisis. By this he apparently means that
Aristide, who (as even Powell’s State Department concedes)
indisputably won 60 percent of the 2000 election, should be forced to
form a coalition government with the heavily subsidized detritus who
now wage war in the streets of Hinche and Cap Haitien – or else step
down.

Sweeping through the slums of Haiti’s poor, the Cannibal Army offer a
foretaste of the future for a ‘new democratic’ Haitian Republic.

I was in Haiti in the spring of 2001 to meet with my Haitian
counterparts on the staff of an international nongovernmental
organization. My Haitian colleagues were courageous veterans of the
popular democratic movement that had driven Jean-Claude Duvalier from
power.

All of them had considered Aristide a godsend, at first. But now some
of them spoke with a bitter sense of betrayal. What was Aristide
doing to rebuild Haiti, to prosecute the participants in the coup
regime’s reign of terror, to stand up to the “Starvation Plan” of the
World Bank and the United States?

When I asked them if they recognized the constraints the United
States had imposed on Aristide’s government, my Haitian friends
hissed with contempt. They knew all too well the hypocrisy of USA
government policy, and cackled with derisive laughter at the
presumption of George W. Bush lecturing Haitians on “electoral
irregularities” in their 2000 vote.

But they deeply resented the notion that their proud nation, sponsor
of the first successful slave revolution in the Western Hemisphere,
should be subservient to the whims of a foreign power. And they
blamed Aristide, not for standing in the way of USA “structural
adjustment” plans for their country, but for not doing enough to
thwart them.

In 1991-1994, a groundswell of popular opposition in this country
deflected the course of USA policy toward Haiti. It may not be too
late to prevent the present coup attempt. Urge our representatives to
support Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., in her efforts to end
clandestine USA patronage for the fraudulent “democratic
convergence.” Demand an investigation into USA covert policy. Tell
the White House to give genuine democracy a chance in Haiti.


Neil Elliott, White Bear Lake, served as associate director of the
non-profit relief organization, “The Lambi Fund of Haiti”, in
2000-01, and as a member of the Haiti Justice Committee of the Twin
Cities from 1991 to 1994.

Article courtesy of Minneapolis Star Tribune
.