19656: Esser: Don't fall for Washington's spin on Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

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

Columns

Don't fall for Washington's spin on Haiti

Jeffrey Sachs
Wednesday, March 03, 2004

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 eight 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 US$500 million 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
pretences, 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 US$500 million should
start immediately. These steps would rescue a dying democracy and at
least help avert a possible bloodbath.

Jeffrey Sachs is director of the Earth Institute at Columbia
University, New York City, New York, USA.
.