19851: radtimes: A war waged on the Aristide regime (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: radtimes <resist@best.com>

Author Robert Fatton on the background to the crisis

"A war waged on the Aristide regime"

http://www.socialistworker.org/2004-1/489/489_02_Fatton.shtml

March 5, 2004 | Page 2

ROBERT FATTON is the Haitian-born author of Haiti's Predatory Republic: The
Unending Transition to Democracy. He teaches political science at the
University of Virginia. Fatton talked to Socialist Worker's ERIC RUDER
after the U.S. government engineered the toppling of Haitian President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THE U.S. media present the crisis in Haiti as a confusing clash between
armed gangs. What's really going on?

YOU NEED to get some kind of historical perspective on the whole thing in
order to understand how we got here. When Aristide was first elected in
1990, he had overwhelming popularity among the very poor and among,
essentially, all progressive groups in Haiti.

Immediately after his election in December 1990, before he had even assumed
power, there was an attempted coup launched by the forces of the old
Duvalier dictatorship and one of the leaders of the Tonton Macout death
squads. That attempted coup failed because people from the slums decided
that they were not going to put up with it, and they came out in front of
the national palace. At that point, they were willing to die so that the
old reactionary forces would not get back to power.

The coup failed, and eventually, Aristide became president, but in a
situation of extreme polarization, in spite of the fact that he had won the
election by an overwhelming majority. What you had from the very beginning
was an attempt by the traditional ruling groups in Haiti--in particular,
the business community and old Duvalierists--to topple the guy.

He's made a lot of mistakes, too. The attempted coup before he became
president gave him a false sense of security. He assumed that anything the
army would do, the people in the slums would be able to counteract it. But
the army learned its lesson. When they launched the coup in 1991, the first
thing that they did was not only to get Aristide, but to cordon off all the
slums, so there couldn't be any mobilization from there.

There was a period of very nasty repression of what was then real popular
organization. Once the military was installed in power, you had the U.S.
embargo against the military dictatorship, from 1991 to 1994, which created
a situation where an economy that was already in bad shape became really
horrible.

The people who were most affected by the embargo were clearly not the very
wealthy--because there was a lot of black-market activity that actually
made a lot of millionaires in the Dominican Republic, etc. This is also
when the drug business started in Haiti with a vengeance. But the vast
majority of Haitians lost whatever jobs they may have had. The economy was
doing poor.

IN 1994, the U.S. invaded Haiti and returned Aristide to power. What
happened at that point?

WHEN ARISTIDE comes back to power, he's a very different fellow. In order
to get back, he has to depend initially on the U.S. Marines. The assumption
was that it was the only way he could get back into power--with American
support.

He had to make all kinds of compromises, and that led to very compromising
alliances. He had to accept the International Monetary Fund's structural
adjustment program. He had to accept integrating all the government people
who had actually participated in the Duvalier regime. He had to make huge
concessions.

So when he got back to Haiti, he no longer had the capacity to implement
even a mildly reformist government, and he was surrounded by people who are
not necessarily committed to any fundamental transformation of Haitian society.

When Aristide went back, he felt absolutely impeached by the possibility of
another coup. So he disbanded the army--and created some poorly trained
police units. When they were first created, they were to a large degree
groups from the popular organizations in the slums, and they were given
some weapons so that if there was an attempted coup, they could resist it.

What happened with the passage of time is that you have the beginning of
fragmentation within the Lavalas movement that Aristide led. By 1995 and
1996, Lavalas is really divided over what do you do with power, given the
precarious nature of the government in Haiti.

MEANWHILE, THE U.S. continued to apply pressure.

YES. HAITI basically was faced with structural adjustment or nothing. You
could try to stop this, but if you stopped it, you would get no investment
whatsoever. You'd essentially get a strike on the part of the international
financial institutions and all of the businessmen in Haiti.

You have all these limitations that were reluctantly accepted by Aristide.
The result is that the Haitian economy now is probably the most open
economy in the world. This has had devastating consequences for the vast
majority of Haitians. The very few jobs that we had have been lost. The
agricultural sector is in really horrible shape.

It seems to me that we could more or less produce enough rice for the
country. But, what has happened is that with the opening of the market,
subsidized American rice has permeated the Haitian market and destroyed
rice production in Haiti--because the American rice is significantly cheaper.

Also, with all of the compromises, you're talking about the beginning of
real corruption within the Lavalas movement. The government that you had in
the last four years under Aristide is a government increasingly marred by
corruption. If you go to Haiti, the people in the government ride around in
huge SUVs, they have big houses. Clearly you had a very different reality
from the rhetoric that "we are defending the poor."

So that has contributed to the decline of Aristide's popularity. As we can
see, we didn't have the whole slum, like in 1990, going in front of the
national palace and telling the armed insurgents, "Come and get us."

If you went to Port-au-Prince, you would see big billboards saying,
"Aristide cries Haiti"--that kind of bizarre messianic assumption that one
individual, and only one, is the embodiment of everything. By the end, the
Lavalas movement was lodged with Aristide himself--with all of the problems
which that entails.

In spite of all of that, I'm convinced that Aristide is still the most
popular individual in Haiti. And that tells you something about the
opposition. If you had elections--so-called "free and fair" elections--I'm
sure that he would win, in spite of all the corruption and all of the
problems that he has, because the opposition, even though they used to
support Aristide, have essentially merged with very conservative business
groups. I think those are the groups that will ultimately take over now.

There's a slight difference between those very conservative groups and the
armed insurgents. And I'm not quite sure who's funding those armed
insurgents. I've heard all kinds of different rumors, and I don't know if
any of them are correct. People say that it's the CIA, which may well be
the case--because some of the key leaders of the armed insurgents are
people from the FRAPH, the death squads from the military dictatorship.
They're back.

But there are also people like Guy Philippe. Philippe was actually a member
of the Aristide group, and then he fell out of favor and left the country
and attempted a coup two years ago. You have former military people and
former police who were part, to some extent, of the Aristide regime, but
who have now merged against Aristide. And then you have a civil opposition
that is trying, on the one hand, to say that they are not like the armed
opposition, but basically they have the same aims.

What is clear to me is that Aristide would never have been toppled had it
not been for the armed insurgents. I don't think that the civil opposition,
although it became larger and broader in its appeal, was in any way capable
of forcing Aristide out of power. It's only when you had the armed
insurgents that you have the opportunity for the so-called "civil society"
to force the issue.

Then, you have the United States and France, which have never liked
Aristide to begin with. I think the disorder in Haiti provided to both
French and the Americans the opportunity to state what was unstated--that
Aristide had to go.

So you have a combination of factors--corruption and the decay, to some
extent, of the Lavalas movement, which meant that it lost popular support;
you have on the other hand the civil opposition, which was funded by the
United States and was essentially waging a kind of low-intensity attack on
the government; and then you have the armed insurgents, which were clearly
waging a war against the Aristide regime. When you have that--plus
international support for the ousting of Aristide--it's not surprising that
the guy's no longer there.

THE BUSH administration has used charges that the 2000 election was rigged
as a reason to cut off aid and contribute to the economic strangulation
that has eroded support for Aristide.

THERE'S NO doubt about that. When you look at the Latin American desk of
the State Department, those guys clearly never liked Aristide--and would
have done anything they could to undermine him. Plus there were people who
were very instrumental in forging links with the civil opposition.

There was a huge amount of money--at least in the context of Haiti--to fund
the opposition. The opposition was also from the European community. What
you have here are linkages between some of the European social democratic
parties, particularly the Socialist Party in France, and some of the small
political parties in Haiti that were opposed to Aristide.

It's not surprising that the French were actually even more vocal in the
last two weeks about asking for the departure of Aristide than the
Americans. The French have essentially put their resources and time into
the kind of social democratic groups that are part of the civil opposition.

IS IT true that the armed opposition was training in the Dominican Republic
in preparation for this kind of uprising?

THIS IS where the CIA link may be, although I have no proof of it. I'm sure
that five or six years from now, when they start to declassify documents,
we'll find that there were linkages.

Last year, the Dominican army received a huge number of new M-16s, and it
looked like many of those M-16s found their way into the hands of the armed
insurgents who were training in the Dominican Republic. If you're training
in the Dominican Republic, and you have 200 or 300 people, there's no way
that the Dominican Republic army wouldn't know about the presence those
fellows. There are all kinds of complexities that are still murky, but one
has to assume that the CIA, if it was not directly involved, knew about it,
and didn't do anything to stop it.

The other question of the day is that you have a significant number of the
military guys in the Dominican Republic who may have contributed to the
funding of that army. And the final possibility is that many members of the
ruling class in Haiti itself would have contributed financially to those
groups, because many of those people now have businesses in the Dominican
Republic.

You could have a constellation of groups that wasn't necessarily united by
a core political program, but united as wanting to get Aristide out, and
they put their resources together to oust the guy. All of that is, as I
said, pure conjecture, but when you look at it, it looks very, very, very,
very likely.

It would be interesting to tie together the sources of money, because that
will tell you who exactly is behind what. The other possibility is drug
money. All of those different groups are not mutually exclusive, so you
could have all of them giving resources to insurgents.

WHAT IS your reaction of the U.S. government's policy of sending refugees
back to Haiti?

I FIND the policy absolutely outrageous. There were people who were in
Miami yesterday, and the U.S. returned them yesterday, when Port-au-Prince
was in flames. I found that utterly outrageous. I can't understand how you
can send people back to a situation where the likelihood is that they might
die.

The U.S. has no guarantee that there wouldn't be a huge eruption, and it
put them in the middle of that. Obviously, that's politically expedient on
the part of the Bush administration, but in my mind, it is morally outrageous.

It's a reflection of the American political system, which doesn't give a
damn about Haitian Americans. They don't count for very much in the
political culture. If they vote, they typically vote for Democrats, and so
they are totally ignored. And it plays well with the more racist elements
in Florida.

So I'm not surprised that they did exactly what they did. But nonetheless,
I found it morally repugnant.

WHAT DO you think the future holds now?

WHAT WE'VE seen in the last few weeks is a symptom of a much, much deeper
crisis in terms of the economy--in terms of the huge chasm that exists
between the different social classes. Those questions are not going to be
really dealt with by any of regimes coming out of the crisis that we have now.

What we've seen is symptomatic of a very poor society. And if you don't
deal with that when that's the real issue, you are going to get crisis
after crisis. But in order to deal with the issue of inequality, you need a
government that can in fact challenge the powers that be.

We have yet to learn how to navigate the very complex situations both
domestically and externally, and it's not clear that we have anything now
in Haiti that could do the job. But I hope I'm wrong.

.