19624: Halward: Re: Aristide editorial

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Peter Hallward <peter.hallward@kcl.ac.uk>
=================================

Why they had to crush Aristide

by Peter Hallward, 1 March 2004.

Aristide was re-elected president of Haiti in November 2000 with
more than 90% of the vote. He was elected by people who approved
his courageous dissolution, in 1995, of the armed forces that had
long terrorised Haiti and that overthrew his first administration
by force. He was elected by people who supported his tentative
efforts, made with virtually no resources or revenue, to invest in
education and health. He was elected by people who shared his
determination, in the face of crippling American opposition, to
improve the conditions of the most poorly paid workers in the
Western hemisphere.

	Over the last couple of years Aristide duly doubled a
minimum wage which had fallen below the 1993 level of $1.60 a day.
He continued the investment programme which, between 1994-2000,
had already seen the creation of more schools than in the whole
190 years of Haiti's previous history. He established medical
clinics and training programmes as part of a growing public
campaign against Aids.  He began building a national police force
to contain the ongoing threat of violence from those who used to
serve in the American-backed army or in Duvalier's death squads.

	This past Sunday Aristide was forced from office by a
combination of people who have little in common except their
opposition to his policies and their refusal of democracy as a way
of settling political differences. With the enthusiastic backing
of Haiti's former colonial master and near universal approval in
the mainstream press, a leader elected with overwhelming popular
support has just been replaced by a gaggle of convicted human
rights abusers, seditious ex-army officers and heavily
pro-American business leaders.

	Rarely has the prevailing meaning of 'democracy' been
applied with such implacable and revealing clarity.

	It's obvious that Aristide's expulsion offered Chirac a
long-awaited chance to restore relations with an American
administration it dared to oppose during the run-up to a
pre-emptive attack on Iraq. Conversion of a complex political
situation into a well-rehearsed scene of 'imminent anarchy' and
'impending humanitarian catastrophe' is just as obviously a tried
and tested way of preparing the ground for intervention by
supposedly benevolent imperial forces. It's even more obvious that
characterisation of Aristide as yet another crazed idealist
corrupted by absolute power fits perfectly with the political
vision championed by George W. Bush, and that Aristide's downfall
will only open the door to a yet more ruthless exploitation of
Latin American labour. But even if popular support for the
opposition to Aristide has risen in recent months from the 8%
estimated by the last reliable measure (a poll commissioned by the
US the same year Aristide was elected), what's rather less obvious
is how to present this new coup d'état as a triumph of democracy
and the rule of law.

	If you've been reading the mainstream press these last few
weeks, you'll know that this peculiar version of events has been
carefully prepared by repeated accusations that Aristide (1)
rigged fraudulent elections in 2000, (2) unleashed violent
militias against his political opponents, (3) brought Haiti's
economy to the point of collapse and its people to the brink of
humanitarian catastrophe. Surely there can be no more dreadful
combination of sins.

	Unless you've looked a little harder for an explanation of
what's really going on in Haiti, you're not likely to have learned
much about the real substance of any one of these accusations.

	Take those allegedly flawed elections, for starters. An
exhaustive and convincing report by the independent International
Coalition of Observers concluded that 'fair and peaceful elections
were held' in 2000, and this despite substantial neglect from the
UN and the US, despite major infrastructural obstacles, despite
the severe and widespread intimidation of Aristide supporters
[International Coalition of Independent Observers, Elections 2000:
Participatory Democracy in Haiti
(http://www.quixote.org/haiti/elections/)]. By any reasonable
standard the 2000 elections were just and lawful; by the standard
of the presidential elections held in the US that same year they
were positively exemplary.

	Why then were these elections characterised as 'flawed' by
the Organisation of American States (OAS)? Was it because the OAS
claimed that the polling itself had been tampered with, or that
any of the several thousand positions contested were won by fraud
or misconduct? No. It was because, after Aristide's Lavalas party
had won 16 out of the 17 contested Senate seats, the OAS contested
the methodology used to calculate the voting percentages in 8 of
these senatorial races. Curiously, neither the US nor OAS ever
judged this methodology (the same used in the 1990 elections)
problematic in the run-up to the elections themselves. In the wake
of the Lavalas victories, however, it was suddenly important
enough to warrant driving the country towards economic collapse.
Clinton invoked the OAS accusation in order to justify the
crippling economic embargo against Haiti that persists to this
day, and that effectively blocks the payment of around $500
million in desperately needed international aid. (Considering that
the Haitian government operates on a budget of less than $300
million a year, this is hardly a trivial sum).

	Just as curiously, the same newspapers who so often
describe these elections as 'rigged' or 'flawed' rarely mention
the fact that in July 2001 a bankrupt Aristide persuaded 7 of the
8 senators in question to resign (the eighth was re-elected). When
even this concession failed to impress his American enemies,
Aristide drew up plans for a new round of legislative elections,
several years ahead of schedule. The only reason why they never
took place is that the opposition, the perversely named
'Democratic Convergence', refused to take part unless Aristide
himself resigned first. Why?  Because otherwise everyone knew that
his party would once again win any such elections hands down. And
that, of course, wouldn't have been 'democratic'.

	What now about those gangs of Aristide supporters running
riot in the streets of Port-au-Prince? According to the latest
reports, around a dozen people have been killed in the city over
the last 48 hours. No doubt Aristide bears some responsibility for
these deaths. But given that his supporters had no army to protect
them, given that the police force serving the entire country
amounts to just a tenth of the force that patrols New York city
alone, it's worth remembering that this figure is a small fraction
of the number killed by the rebels in recent weeks and about equal
to the number who died during a now forgotten attack on the
presidential palace in December 2001 (to say nothing of dozens of
other documented killings of Aristide's supporters or officials in
the last few years, none of which were ever condemned by the US or
its allies). The rebels are led by people (Chamblain, Baptiste,
Phillipe...) who have immeasurably more blood on their hands than
does Aristide.

	Aristide, then, was no more corrupt or bloodthirsty than
he was responsible for Haiti's economic isolation.

	One of the real reasons why he has been so consistently
vilified in the press over the past few weeks is that the Reuters
and AP wire services upon which most coverage depends rely in turn
on local media (e.g. Radio Metropole, Tele-Haiti, Radio
Caraibe...) which are all owned and operated by opponents of
Aristide. The founder of Tele-Haiti, for instance, is none other
than Andy Apaid, the chief spokesman of the Group of 184 and one
of the richest men in the country; this group is frequently cited
as an important component of the opposition to Aristide and
praised as a bulwark of Haiti's fledgling 'civil society' [Yifat
Susskind, 'Haiti - Insurrection in the Making', Z Magazine,
February 25, 2004 (http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm)]. (In fact, Apaid
was a Duvalier supporter and remains an American citizen who
obtained a Haitian passport by falsely claiming to have been born
in Haiti, a country which doesn't allow dual-citizenship in any
case; not coincidentally, Apaid also owns 15 factories in Haiti
and led opposition to Aristide's campaign last year to raise the
minimum wage).

	Another and no doubt more important reason for the
vilification of Aristide is the fact that he has simply never
learned to cooperate with the one and only law of the land - the
need to pander unreservedly to foreign commercial interests. It's
true that he reluctantly accepted a series of severe IMF
structural adjustment plans, to the dismay of the working poor in
general and of local rice farmers in particular [Oxfam Briefing
Report no. 37, Make Trade Fair for the Americas, 2003, p. 9]. But
Aristide would only go so far. He refused to acquiesce in the
indiscriminate privatisation of state resources, and stuck to his
guns over wages, education and health.

	What happened in Haiti is not that a leader who was once
reasonable and principled suddenly went mad with power; the truth
is that a broadly consistent Aristide was never quite prepared to
abandon all his principles.

	Worst of all, Aristide remained indelibly associated with
what's left of a genuine popular movement for political and
economic empowerment.  For this reason alone, it was essential
that Aristide not only be forced from office but utterly
discredited in the eyes of his people and the world as a whole. As
Noam Chomsky has so often explained, the 'threat of a good
example' always solicits measures of retaliation that bear no
relation to the strategic or economic importance of the country in
question. This is why the leaders of the world have joined
together to crush a democracy in the name of democracy.




Peter Hallward teaches in the French department at King's College
London. An abbreviated version of this article appeared in the
Guardian, 2 March 2004 (online at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1159809,00.html).