19805: Esser: U.S. policy damaging to Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

Mar 4, 2004
Akenji Ndumu
U.S. policy damaging to Haiti

In January, members of Global Justice, an official justice advocacy
group in Washington, along with 13 students from across the country,
visited Zanmi Lasante, a medical center in Haiti. There we witnessed
optimism amid the despair that is Haiti. Throughout the trip we
couldn't escape the looming shadow of U.S. foreign policy in
perpetrating the suffering of Haiti's poor. What hand, you may ask,
does the United States really have in the situation in Haiti right
now?

Haiti's modern politics are complex and have been marked by shady
politics and shifting alliances. What is important to consider is the
class divide in Haiti, where a vast majority of people are
desperately poor, while the rest are well-off. There is almost no
middle class, and minority rule has taken place in Haiti for close to
190 years.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide was an incredibly popular and fearless priest
who helped deliver Haiti's poor from the hands of Duvalier family
dictatorships (more often than not supported by U.S. Cold War
politics) and was elected by a wide margin to the presidency. He was
deposed seven months later in a coup led by the deposed military
leaders, who perpetrated repression and murder, most notably the
massacres at Raboteau in central Haiti. When U.S. military
intervention during the Clinton administration restored Aristide to
power, a lot of the former military leaders were either prosecuted
and jailed or fled to the neighboring Dominican Republic. Aristide
returned to power, weakened by economic restructuring deals he had to
concede to as leverage for being put back in power. He was re-elected
in December 2000. Ever since then, the minority opposition coalition
in Haiti (which is indirectly funded by the U.S. Agency for
International Development) has sought to undermine Aristide's
presidency.

Because of flawed legislative elections in 2000 (the presidential
elections were internationally recognized as legitimate), in which
seven seats were rightfully contested, the opposition has moved to
stall the process of democracy by calling for the president to step
down, despite having secured the resignation of six of those
legislators. The United States supported this by halting all
humanitarian and development aid into the country, undermining a
government already strapped for cash. The opposition has refused
every single international deal to have elections because they know
full well they would never win any popular vote in Haiti. Many
"popular" protests in the Haitian capital have seen significant
participation by people paid to protest. What becomes apparent, then,
is the United States has been hell-bent on Aristide's ouster. One of
Aristide's most vocal opponents was Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), and
his staffer Roger Noriega is now in charge of Haitian policy at the
State Department under Colin Powell. This is not to say that the
Aristide government does not have shortcomings. Accusations of
corruption and violence are leveraged against Aristide, despite the
fact that he has by far one of the best human rights records of any
Haitian leader.

The problem with the current situation is not Aristide. It is a
problem of the United States deliberately undermining the sovereignty
of foreign nations, and for a country that spouts a doctrine of
"democracy," assisting in a coup against an elected president goes
against the very principles founded by George Washington et al.
Apparently, the United States has a monopoly on the language of
democracy. In Haiti, they should have given democracy a chance! It is
unseemly for this country to continue its repression of Haiti's poor
with its cooperation with rebels with spotty human rights records and
an opposition that doesn't respect the concept of democracy. In the
long run, time will tell, despite the pronouncements of the popular
press, that the recent outcome of events is not in the best interests
of the majority of the Haitian people.


Akenji Ndumu is the president of the university's Student Global AIDS
Campaign. He can be reached at akenji@umd.edu.
.