19585: Esser: Haiti as Target Practice (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

CounterPunch
http://www.counterpunch.org

March 1, 2004

Haiti as Target Practice
How the US Press Missed the Story

By HEATHER WILLIAMS

"The fact that the group in charge of Haiti policy today in the State
Department has been literally gunning for Aristide since before his
initial election as a champion of democracy in 1990 has been left all
but unmentioned by the US press."

Now that bodies are littering the streets of Cap Haitien and Port Au
Prince, major print news outlets have seen well enough to send a
handful of cameramen and correpondents to send back news of the
crisis. Even so, the campaign of violence that has finally ousted
Haitian President Aristide has been investigated and reported to the
American public with appalling indolence. The official reasoning
appears to be that if Haiti is the hemisphere's eternal basket case-a
dismal repository of poverty where there is no future-- how on earth
could its past possibly matter?

But those who view Haiti's current violence as merely one of an
eternal humanitarian crisis in temporary overdrive miss the story. It
is no simple tale of a corrupt regime collapsing under the weight of
popular anger and bad management. A cursory glance at events of the
last fourteen years suggests that the fall of the Aristide regime was
a foregone conclusion at the entrance of President George W. Bush and
the installation of a cabal of appointees with a grim record of
utilizing official and covert channels to destabilize uncooperative
governments in the Western Hemisphere. What is immediately ominous
about the current crisis in Haiti is the likely prospect that leaders
of armed groups making a final assault on the capital will play
important roles in a post-Aristide order. Such armed groups include
the Tontons Macoutes, the gunmen who viciously supervised repression
under both father and son Duvaliers' dictatorships until 1986. They
also include members of the disbanded Haitian army that held power
for three years following the coup against President Aristide in
1991, and the FRAPH death squads that mowed down the ranks of
democratic civil society during that period, leaving over 3,000 dead
and thousands more in exile. What is also now worrisome about this
crisis is what it likely indicates about the intentions of the U.S.
State Department and security apparatus elsewhere in the Caribbean.

Now that Aristide's government, protected by a flimsy police force
and a smattering of civilian gangs, has collapsed, quiet references
in news stories and opinion pieces suggest that editors are wishing
that perhaps they had a few more questions along the way about what
indeed was going on in Haiti. Notably, until mid-February of this
year The New York Times instructed its readers, for weeks on end,
with no evidence whatsoever, that the armed groups referred to
generically and occasionally quite sympathetically as "rebels"
represent a home-grown anti-Aristide opposition. For weeks the New
York Tinmes used AP and Reuters dispatches to present the Haitian
crisis as one simply of domestic protest and unrest. It wasn't until
February 15 that the NYT's own reporter, Lydia Polgreen bothered to
mention that the group marching on Gonaïves known a the Cannibal Army
was led by "sinister figures from [Haiti's] past," including the
infamous Louis-Jodel Chamblain, a soldier who led death squads in the
1980s through the mid-1990s and was convicted in absentia for his
involvement in the murder of Antoine Izméry, a well-known
pro-democracy activist. Also unexplored by the same reporters were
reports that the groups terrorizing Gonaïves had come from across the
border, from the Dominican Republic. Given this knowledge, it is
curious that no reporter then bothered to inquire how these groups
obtained ample caches of brand-new M-16s, M-60s, armor piercing
weapons, all-terrain vehicles, and rocket-propelled grenade
launchers-equipment far beyond the reach of the Haiti's own
impecunious security forces.

Was the story too dangerous to investigate? Was the situation
indecipherable? Was the prospect of a weak regime giving way to
another in the hemisphere's poorest country just not a story worth
the time and effort? The tragedy of this episode is that much of it
was abundantly transparent. Running a sixty-second web search on any
of the principals involved leads one to a fetid two-decade history of
CIA and U.S. ultra-right subterfuge in Haiti. The fact that the group
in charge of Haiti policy today in the State Department has been
literally gunning for Aristide since before his initial election as a
champion of democracy in 1990 has been left all but unmentioned by
the press. Also forgotten is the fact that members of the armed
groups burning their way through Haiti's cities today include groups
that, (according to myriad sources including sworn testimony before
Congress by U.S. officials, reporters, and reports of Haitian
recipients of covert aid,) were funneling drugs to the U.S. while in
the pay of U.S. intelligence agents.

The point is not that the public has been lied to by the government.
Governments lie, particularly this administration. The point is that
even those on the left who are indignant about systematic
misinformation elsewhere have not bothered to jog their memories on
Haiti to smell the sulfur emanating from this episode,. The press
apparatus reporting on the Caribbean is either too broken or too
racist to remember that Haiti's anguish is connected to forces quite
beyond poor judgment or even bad will by President Aristide. The ease
with which armed thugs have upended a civilian regime, eliciting only
murmurs of disquiet from onlookers abroad who ought to know better is
cause for worry. Surely zealots in charge of U.S. foreign policy have
taken note. If it's this easy to destabilize Haiti , Cuba will
unquestionably appear a more viable target for direct intervention in
the not-so-distant future.

At least four lines of inquiry were left nearly untouched in the last
four weeks of reporting of Haiti.

First, no one bothered to ask who the rebels were and why they were
advancing on major cities. If in fact they represented a broad
opposition, as reporters readily implied or stated openly, why were
the rebels unable to furnish the barest credible details of their
demands, their civilian bases of support, and their connections to
leaders of civil society groups? Despite literally weeks of lead
time, no Haitians in positions of authority, no public figures, and
no Haitian intellectuals living here or on the island emerged in
press stories as sources of reliable information. Haitians who were
quoted in news stories tended to be taxi drivers presumably shuttling
skittish reporters from hotel to dinner, or randomly-chosen opponents
of Aristide on the street. Predictably, such individuals expressed
generic discontent with the government. Thus, even though a number of
more respectable political opponents of President Aristide were
claiming that armed groups outside the capital were not acting on
their behalf, the story by default became a spurious tale of an
embattled people challenging a repressive and incompetent government.
Stories closer to the truth supported by evidence were likely never
taken up because such messiness would necessitate a greater number of
column inches than editors were going to allot to Haiti.

The second instance of media negligence was the near-universal
acceptance of the idea in the English-language press that Aristide's
government had lost all popular legitimacy due to reported
irregularities in the 2000 parliamentary elections. This is an
extraordinary leap given the monkey business plaguing U.S. elections
of the same year. According to Tom Reeves, the admittedly
poorly-attended elections were not the stuff of grand vote larceny.
"All sides," he wrote in a very fine article last fall in Dollars and
Sense, "concede that Aristide won the presidential ballot with 92
percent of the voteThe sole disagreement is over run-off elections
for seven senators from Aristide's part who obtained pluralities but
not majorities in the first round. The seven senators eventually
resigned, making way for new elections." Nonetheless, these electoral
"abuses" were grounds for the Bush administration and pliant
international partners in Europe to suspend hundreds of millions of
dollars in credit lines and aid to Haiti. Allegations of fraud were
used to permanently block the release of $400 million in
already-approved loans from the Interamerican Development Bank. The
IMF, World Bank, and European Union were also pressed to cut off
crucial lines of credit. Meanwhile, Haiti was brutally taken to task
for its external financial obligations, emptying its coffers in July
2003 to pay $32 million in debt service arrears. As a final blow,
Haiti's ability to conserve any remaining foreign reserves was
foreclosed by agreements signed with the U.S. government under
President Clinton in 1996. These obliged Haiti to abolish tariffs on
U.S. imports in the name of what was curiously called "free trade"
but was in fact commodity dumping by U.S. exporters. Under threat of
huge fines, Haiti was obliged to accept the import of foodstuffs
priced far below the cost of production. (Direct subsidies to U.S.
farmers since the mid-1990s have averaged over $30 billion a year.)
In a nation where the majority of the population works in
agriculture, this all but shut down production in the rice-producing
northwest of Haiti, as well as among livestock producers throughout
the country. Under these conditions, it stands to reason that no
government could dodge the discontent of the population.

The third line of neglected inquiry was the question of who the
injured "opposition" was in Haiti, on whose behalf this official
bloodletting took place. According to Stan Goff, whose thorough
article appeared in on this Counterpunch site on February 9 of this
year, the fifteen-party anti-Aristide coalition known as
"Convergence" includes "every faction of the Haitian dominant class,
factions who are generally at war with one another." Despite anemic
support from the voting public (never approaching even 20 percent in
opinion polls conducted even by the U.S.) what apparently they were
able to converge on was three million dollars a year in funding in
from the International Republican Institute, a Republican-party
backed arm of the National Endowment for Democracy.

Finally, no one has asked questions about the wildly partisan
officials in U.S. State Department now running U.S. policy in the
Caribbean and Latin America. These include such Blast-from-the-Past
supporters of Reagan era highjinks in Central America as Otto Reich,
John Negroponte, Elliot Abrams, and (before his ignominious departure
last summer) John Poindexter. The most visible in recent weeks on
Haiti has been Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere
Affairs Roger Noriega, a man who has had Aristide in his gunsights
for over a decade. As senior staff member for the Committee on
Foreign Relations of the U.S. Senate, and advisor to Senator Jesse
Helms and John Burton, he was party to a three-year campaign to
prevent to defame Aristide and prevent his return to power; all the
while CIA-backed thugs left carnage in the streets daily in Port Au
Prince. In his capacity in the State Department since 2003, and for
two years before that as the U.S. Permanent Representative to the
OAS, he has aggressively advertised his intention to oust Aristide a
second time. For example, in April of last year, speaking at the
Council of the Americas conference in Washington, he linked U.S.
policies in Haiti to those in Venezuela and Cuba. He congratulated
the OAS for overcoming "irrelevance in the past years" by adopting
the Inter-American Democratic Charter. Article 20, he said, lays out
a series of actions to be takenin the event that a member state
should fail to uphold the essential elements of democratic life. He
added the "President Chavez and President Aristide havecontributed
willfully to a polarized and confrontational environment. It is my
fervent hope," he added ominously, "that the good people of Cuba are
studying the Democratic Charter."

Given the inability of Haitians at present to question the direction
of whatever succession takes place in the coming weeks, the question
of how fully Noriega and his fanatical friends will control U.S.
foreign policy in the Americas is crucial. Secretary of State Colin
Powell has been cravenly circumspect in his statements on Haiti,
straddling the line between encouraging Aristide to step down and
discouraging those who would involve the U.S. extensively in any
transition effort or state-building mission. What Powell's late
entrance into the situation suggests strongly is that Latin America
and the Caribbean are considered so insignificant that Noriega and
his half-cocked cronies are generally left to play with matches until
the fire alarm goes off. In this case, Florida voters were that
alarm. Undoubtedly higher-ups in the White House were a bit uneasy at
the prospect of thousands of Haitians fleeing chaos being thrown back
into the sea by the US Coast Guard in an election year. But the modus
operandi of Noriega and company is unmistakeable: fund an opposition,
report every clash as repression against the population, arm pliable
thugs and mercenaries in exile, embargo the government, precipitate
acute crisis, play up the discontent of a hungry population, and then
happily leave it to internationalist liberals to lead the charge for
military intervention on humanitarian grounds. So with President
Aristide neutralized now, it's time to look elsewhere, maybe west
across the sea to Cuba.

Heather Williams is assistant professor of politics at Pomona
College. She can be reached hwilliams@pomona.edu