19591: radtimes: Don't fall for Washington's spin on Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: radtimes <resist@best.com>

Don't fall for Washington's spin on Haiti

[URL at end]

By Jeffrey Sachs
February 29 2004
Financial Times

The crisis in Haiti is another case of brazen US manipulation of a small,
impoverished country. Much of the media portrayed President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide as an undemocratic leader who betrayed Haiti's democratic hopes
and thereby lost the support of his erstwhile backers. He "stole" elections
and intransigently refused to address opposition concerns. As a result he
had to leave office, which he did on Sunday at the insistence of the US and
France. Unfortunately, this is a very distorted view.

President George Bush's foreign policy team came into office intent on
toppling Mr Aristide, and their efforts were apparently consummated on
Sunday. Mr Aristide was long reviled by powerful US conservatives such as
former senator Jesse Helms, who obsessively saw him as another Fidel Castro
in the Caribbean. Such critics fulminated when President Bill Clinton
restored Mr Aristide to power in 1994, and they succeeded in forcing the
withdrawal of US troops from Haiti soon afterwards, well before the
situation in the country could be stabilised. In terms of help to rebuild
Haiti, the US Marines left behind about 8 miles of paved roads in
Port-au-Prince and essentially little else.

In the meantime, the so-called "opposition," a coterie of rich Haitians
linked to the preceding Duvalier regime, former (and perhaps current) CIA
operatives and decommissioned officers of the brutal Duvalier army
disbanded by Mr Aristide, worked Washington political circles to lobby
against him.

In 2000, Haiti ran parliamentary and then presidential elections,
unprecedented in their scope. The parliamentary elections went off
adequately, although not perfectly. Mr Aristide's party, Fanmi Lavalas,
clearly won the election, although candidates who won a plurality rather
than a majority, and who should have faced a second-round election, also
gained seats. Objective observers declared the elections broadly
successful, albeit flawed.

Mr Aristide won the presidential election later that year. The US media now
reports that those elections were "boycotted by the opposition," and hence
not legitimate, but this is a cruel joke to those who know Haiti. In fact,
Haiti's voters elected Mr Aristide in late 2000 with an overwhelming
mandate and the opposition, such as it was, ducked the elections. Duvalier
thugs hardly constituted a winning ticket and as a result, they did not
even try. Nor did they have to.

Mr Aristide's foes in Haiti benefited from tight links with the incoming
Bush team; and thereby followed one of the great recent scandals of US
foreign policy. The Bush team told Mr Aristide it would freeze all aid
unless he agreed with the opposition over new elections for the contested
Senate seats, among other political demands. The wrangling led to the
freezing of $500m in emergency humanitarian aid from the US, the World Bank
and other multilateral organisations.

The tragedy, or joke, is that Mr Aristide had agreed to compromise, but the
opposition simply came up with one excuse after another - it was never the
right time to hold new elections, as proposed by Mr Aristide, because of
"security" problems, they said. Whatever the pretext, the US maintained its
aid freeze and Haiti's economy, cut off from bilateral and multilateral
financing, went into a tailspin.

All this is now being replayed before our eyes. As Haiti slipped into
deeper turmoil last month, Caribbean leaders called for a power-sharing
compromise between Mr Aristide and the opposition. Once again, Mr Aristide
agreed and the opposition balked, saying instead that the president had to
leave. US Secretary of State Colin Powell reportedly pressed opposition
leaders to accept a compromise but they refused again. But rather than
defending Mr Aristide and dealing with opposition intransigence, the White
House announced the president should step down.

The ease with which another Latin American democracy crumbled is stunning.
What, though, has been the role of US intelligence agencies among the
anti-Aristide rebels? How much money went from US-funded institutions and
government agencies to help the opposition. And why did the White House
abandon the Caribbean compromise proposal it had endorsed just days before?
These questions have not been asked. Then again, we live in an age when
entire wars can be launched on phony pretenses, with few questions asked in
the aftermath.

What should happen now is unlikely to pass. The United Nations should help
restore Mr Aristide to power for his remaining two years in office, making
clear that Sunday's events were an illegal power grab. Second, the US
should call on the opposition, which is largely a US construct, to stop all
violence, immediately and unconditionally. Third, after years of literally
starving the people of Haiti, the long-promised and long-frozen aid flows
of $500m should start immediately. These steps would rescue a dying
democracy and at least help avert a possible bloodbath.

The writer is director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University

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