19683: Esser: Why they had to crush Aristide (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk
Comment

Why they had to crush Aristide
Haiti's elected leader was regarded as a threat by France and the US

Peter Hallward
Tuesday March 2, 2004

Jean-Bertrand 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 had overthrown his first
administration. 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 US opposition, to improve the
conditions of the most poorly paid workers in the western hemisphere.

Aristide was forced from office on Sunday by people who have little
in common except their opposition to his progressive policies and
their refusal of the democratic process. With the enthusiastic
backing of Haiti's former colonial master, a leader elected with
overwhelming popular support has been driven from office by a loose
association of convicted human rights abusers, seditious former army
officers and pro-American business leaders.

It's obvious that Aristide's expulsion offered Jacques Chirac a
long-awaited chance to restore relations with an American
administration he dared to oppose over the attack on Iraq. It's even
more obvious that the characterisation of Aristide as yet another
crazed idealist corrupted by absolute power sits perfectly with the
political vision championed by George Bush, and that the Haitian
leader's downfall should open the door to a yet more ruthless
exploitation of Latin American labour.

If you've been reading the mainstream press over the past few weeks,
you'll know that this peculiar version of events has been carefully
prepared by repeated accusations that Aristide rigged fraudulent
elections in 2000; unleashed violent militias against his political
opponents; and brought Haiti's economy to the point of collapse and
its people to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe.

But look a little harder at those elections. An exhaustive and
convincing report by the International Coalition of Independent
Observers concluded that "fair and peaceful elections were held" in
2000, and by the standard of the presidential elections held in the
US that same year they were positively exemplary.

Why then were they characterised as "flawed" by the Organisation of
American States (OAS)? It was because, after Aristide's Lavalas party
had won 16 out of 17 senate seats, the OAS contested the methodology
used to calculate the voting percentages. Curiously, neither the US
nor the OAS judged this methodology problematic in the run-up to the
elections.

However, in the wake of the Lavalas victories, it was suddenly
important enough to justify driving the country towards economic
collapse. Bill Clinton invoked the OAS accusation to justify the
crippling economic embargo against Haiti that persists to this day,
and which effectively blocks the payment of about $500m in
international aid.

But what about the gangs of Aristide supporters running riot in
Port-au-Prince? No doubt Aristide bears some responsibility for the
dozen reported deaths over the last 48 hours. But given that his
supporters have no army to protect them, and given that the police
force serving the entire country is just a tenth of the force that
patrols New York city, it's worth remembering that this figure is a
small fraction of the number killed by the rebels in recent weeks.

One of the reasons why Aristide has been consistently vilified in the
press is that the Reuters and AP wire services, on which most
coverage depends, rely on local media, which are all owned by
Aristide's opponents. Another, more important, reason for the
vilification is that Aristide never learned to pander unreservedly to
foreign commercial interests. He reluctantly accepted a series of
severe IMF structural adjustment plans, to the dismay of the working
poor, but 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
went mad with power; the truth is that a broadly consistent Aristide
was never quite prepared to abandon all his principles.

Worst of all, he 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 he not only be forced from
office but utterly discredited in the eyes of his people and the
world. As Noam Chomsky has said, the "threat of a good example"
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 French at King's College London and is the
author of Absolutely Postcolonial

peter.hallward@kcl.ac.uk
.