19468: Esser: With friends like these. (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

The Jamaica Observer
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com

With friends like these.

COMMON SENSE
John Maxwell
Sunday, February 29, 2004

There is something positively Nixonian about the tribulations of
Haiti. 'Benign Neglect' may be applied to the malign but covert
subversion of Haitian democracy; President Aristide may be seen in
Washington as 'twisting slowly in the wind" and the Haitian people
may be described in that deathless aphorism of Charles 'Chuck'
Colson: "when you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will
follow."

Colin Powell, secretary of state, speaks glibly about not recognising
thugs or any thuggish overthrow of the Haitian Government, but his
hands-off attitude suggests that he would rather be in Bosnia.
President Bush has, in his usual statesman-like fashion, announced
that he has made sure that the Coast Guard clearly understands that
no Haitian refugee is to be allowed to set foot in the United States.
The UN Convention on Refugees - like most international law, is not
something he allows to worry his pretty head. The UN
secretary-general, Kofi Annan, who felt it preferable to take a
holiday in Tobago than to attend the Haitian bicentenary and find out
what was going on, is, like an old colonial civil servant, dithering
for all he is worth. His masterly inactivity would have made any
Jamaican colonial secretary proud.

And of course, there are the three mouseketeers, Patterson, Manning
and Knight. Haiti, with its long, heroic, honourable and mostly
unknown history, is once again to be sacrificed on the altar of
greed, expediency, ignorance and racism.
Behind everything said about Haiti by the major players one gets the
feeling that out of an abundance of ignorance they don't want to soil
their hands on Haiti. Rather like Simon Bolivar, who, having been
fed, watered, financed and armed by Haiti in his quest to liberate
South America, promptly forgot his promises to Haiti that having
freed the slavemasters from the Spanish yoke, he would free their
slaves.

In the whole constellation of stars in this Grand Guignol minstrel
show, the only person to emerge with any honour is President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide himself.
He is perfectly prepared to die, to defend Haitian integrity and
sovereignty, as Henri Christophe declared: "We will never become a
party to any treaty, to any condition, that may compromise the
honour, or the independence of the Haitian people; that, true to our
oath, we will sooner bury ourselves beneath the ruins of our native
country, than suffer an infraction of our political rights." Aristide
says the only way he leaves the Presidential Palace before his term
is up is if he is dead.

That, of course can be arranged. And, watching the progress of the
psychopathic face-choppers and torturers this last week, it may very
well have already been arranged.
The press has been squared, the world prepared for Aristide's
unfortunate demise, and you may be sure that the entire ignoble cast
of characters will have their representatives at his funeral. What
Caricom and the Organisation of American States and the United States
have made out of Haiti is an ungovernable mess.

When Aristide was elected first in 1991, there was no democratic
tradition in Haiti. The politicians and intellectuals had been killed
or driven into exile, and after 20 and 30 years, they were not likely
to return, having made lives elsewhere.
Haiti in 1991 was rather like Germany after the Second World War, its
dictator gone, but gone too were the working appurtenances of a
democratic state, political parties, trade unions, a judicial system
etc, because Hitler destroyed them. Aristide had to play the cards he
was dealt. A parish priest - a slum priest as the Western press
prefers to call him - is unlikely to develop statecraft ministering
to an oppressed and desperate flock while trying to escape
assassination.

Aristide was always a symbol - with big ideas, it is true - but
without the praxis, without the experience and network of contacts to
put his ideas into place. He was surrounded by people who depended on
patronage, whether rich or poor, and since old habits tend to linger,
they proceeded to behave exactly as they had before. It was Aristide
who appointed Cedras who deposed him. And it was because he knew he
couldn't trust the army that he dissolved it when he returned to
power.
Without an army and with a laughably small and half-trained police
force, it was always in the cards that gangs would develop in Haiti,
as they have in Jamaica, Brazil and other countries, to fill the
hiatus left by the state's armed forces. To describe such a situation
as an example of Aristide's corruption is not only self-serving, it
is dishonourable.

The Americans never liked Aristide. The CIA circulated a rumour in
1993 that he had been treated in a Montreal mental hospital. It was
easy for the Americans to decide to withdraw aid when Aristide
refused to hand over his Government completely to the World Bank and
the IMF. It was easy for his opponents to paint everything that
followed as Aristide's fault.
It is almost incredible that Caribbean politicians, reputed to be
intelligent, can have fallen for the warmed-up mess of propaganda
pottage served up by Aristide's enemies, demanding that he should
yield, when it was plain that it was the Opposition which was always
intransigent, unreasonable and anti-democratic. Before Aristide was
re-elected, the Opposition was saying that it would not recognise
him. On the day of his inauguration they decided to inaugurate a
president of their own. The situation has only gone downhill from
there.

Complicating the equation is the American decision to channel
whatever aid they were giving Haiti through NGOs. This, in effect,
established a new stream of patronage which, it was obvious, would
soon create its own arena of anti-Aristide claimants who could
logically blame Aristide for the lack of economic activity and then
add rumour, insult, slander or whatever to the mix. The murder of
Haiti's most prominent journalist has been ascribed to Aristide
supporters - which in Haiti covers a great deal of ground. Since
politics is either pro- or anti-Aristide, Aristide must be the author
of any lunacy perpetrated by anyone who claims to support him. On the
other hand, the so-called Opposition does not claim that the armed
gangsters who support their programme have anything to do with them.

But since the gangsters now appear have superiority of arms, it will
be interesting to see what accommodation Messrs Apaid and his fellows
make with the Front for Advancement of Progress in Haiti (FRAPH)
face-choppers and their assorted hoodlums if they ever ride into
Port-au-Prince in their SUVs.
The Haitians clearly saw themselves as their brothers' keepers when
they exported revolution in the 19th century. Having gained their own
freedom, they decided that it was their duty to help all others in
slavery to gain theirs. And in some ways they did, if only by putting
pressure on the British by their incendiary example. And to them, the
issue of freedom was not a racial issue, but a moral one.

Sad therefore, that 200 years later, in the bicentenary year of the
Haitian revolution, the people they helped free have betrayed them
for the second time in 10 years, abandoning Haiti to its predators.
In 1994, when Cedras and FRAPH terrorised Haiti, I wrote suggesting
that we had a duty to go into Haiti with armed force to chase out the
face choppers and restore to the Haitians some semblance of their
dignity and rights. Tanzania did a service to Uganda and the world
when Nyerere finally decided that Idi Amin needed to go.

In 1994, after months of pressuring Aristide, then in exile, the
Americans worked out the 'Governor's Island accords' which, among
other things, undertook the reformation and retraining of the army
and the police and the peaceful retirement of Cedras with an enormous
pension. As the first earnest of this undertaking, the USS Harlan
County, a tank-landing ship, was supposed to land the first US
troops. Unfortunately for them, FRAPH organised a small mob who fired
off some ancient blunderbusses, made 'monkey-faces' at the US
ambassador and made the Americans so uncertain about their reception
that they weighed anchor, made their excuses and left.

According to an account in the Military Review by Lieutenant
Commander Peter J A Riehm, US Navy officer who was part of the
expedition: "Television cameras captured the Harlan County turning
and steaming out of Port-au-Prince harbour. CNN broadcast the tape of
the unceremonious withdrawal with the commentary that the ship had
been thrown out of Haiti. The Front for Advancement of Progress in
Haiti, an anti-Aristide political organisation, celebrated the
first-ever Haitian repulse of the US Navy." Lt Cmdr Riehm has some
further comments on the affair: "One curious dimension to this
incident was the identity of the unruly mob. FRAPH had organised the
protesters. According to its leader, Emmanual Constant, the
anti-Aristide political organisation had been formed in mid-1993 at
the urging of the Defence Intelligence Agency and was paid by the CIA
to balance what some US agencies perceived as pro-Aristide-Lavalas
extremism. .It thus appears that FRAPH was intended to be a
counterpoise to Aristide's liberation theology.

"By October 1993, the nascent FRAPH was still without any real
political clout. It needed a vehicle to shape an image and establish
credibility. Fearing retribution should Aristide return, many
protesters were reluctant to seek publicity. Persuaded and bribed
with whiskey, FRAPH members were thrilled when they realised they had
successfully thwarted the US Navy's attempt to enter Port-au-Prince.
The Harlan County's departure signaled the solidification of FRAPH as
a viable political entity in Haiti.
"As Constant stated, "My people kept wanting to run away. but I took
the gamble and urged them to stay. Then the Americans pulled out! We
were astonished. That was the day FRAPH was actually born. Before,
everyone said we were crazy, suicidal, that we would all be burned if
Aristide returned. But, now we know he is never going to return."
Sounds familiar?
And now, you do understand democracy, don't you!

Copyright ©2004 John Maxwell
maxinf@cwjamaica

.