19847: radtimes: Haiti Fears a Repeat of the Past as New Rulers Arrive (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: radtimes <resist@best.com>

Haiti Fears a Repeat of the Past as New Rulers Arrive

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/030404D.shtml

     By Phil Davison
     The Independent UK
     Wednesday 03 March 2004

      It is, as they say, déjà vu all over again. American troops in the
presidential palace, their guns trained on the Haitian people. Army
officers and troops back in their old headquarters across the road, the
same building from which they once dispatched death squads and from which
they came within minutes of facing down the American President, Bill
Clinton, and 20,000 US troops in 1994.

      The thousands of poor Haitians, many of them barefoot, who peered
through the tall green railings of the palace yesterday, down the barrels
of the US Marines' Humvee-mounted-machine-guns, are not yet quite sure what
to think. The events of the past month happened so fast that they don't yet
know what hit them.

      Have they been liberated? Was this a popular rebellion, a foreign
intervention or a coup d'état? Whatever it is, it sometimes looks as though
it was all done with mirrors.

      The two or three hundred "rebels" who spearheaded the military
movement against Jean-Bertrand Aristide and were cheered by many in the
capital on Monday, appeared almost to have vanished into thin air yesterday.

      Had the Americans, widely thought here to have armed and supported
them, now told them to keep quiet?

      The US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, made it clear on Monday that
he considered some of the rebel leaders unsavoury and that he would not
like to see them involved in governing this country.

      But Guy Philippe, a rebel leader, was out in the open. From a hotel
in the posh Petionville district high above the capital, said he would run
the newly constituted army.

      "I am the chief," he insisted, hastening to add, "... the military
chief. I will answer to the President." Minutes later he said he would
arrest the Prime Minister, Yvon Neptune.

      As it turned out yesterday, many of the rebels were closeted inside
the white-painted colonial-style former headquarters of the Haitian army,
turned into government buildings by Mr Aristide when he disbanded the army
with Washington's blessing in 1995.

      They had locked themselves in, away from hundreds of curious
passers-by, but the men we could see through the railings looked exactly
like the men of the old Haitian army, the army of the Duvalier dictators,
of the death squads, of the cocaine trafficking and of the 1991 coup that
forced Mr Aristide to flee first time round. They had the same uniforms
and, perhaps more frightening, the same dread-inspiring look.

      Some of them had boasted on Monday that they were determined to root
out Mr Aristide's chimères gunmen, who have now blended into the scenery of
the city's seething slums. They did not beat around the bush. They wanted
to execute such men on the spot. Staunch supporters of Aristide's Lavalas
party have gone underground.

      There was no sign yesterday of Louis-Jodel Chamblain, the rebel
leader who was convicted of the massacre of 26 Aristide supporters in 1994
and was once linked with army death squads. Amnesty International is
calling for his arrest.

      So Haiti is about to have an army again, perhaps the last thing it
needs. And now we hear that ousted dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier
wants to come home. Am I dreaming all this?

      It took only a couple of dozen US Marines to secure the grubby port
yesterday, so far their only deployment outside the airport, the American
embassy and the presidential palace.

      They have not yet decided whether to go out on patrol, something
George Bush may want to avoid after the Iraq experience. There is, though,
no sign of any hostility to the American, French or Canadian troops now
here at the forefront of what may become a peace force of 5,000.

      But neither were the foreigners cheered. Haitians have seen it all
before.

      With the port secure, many Haitians asked whether President Bush
would send what is more vital to them than new governments or foreign
troops ­ food.

      Regardless of his faults, and they were many, Aristide left this
nation's starving masses one great legacy: the belief that they were worth
something and that their votes counted. Whether that belief will be
shattered during the next cycle of events remains to be seen.

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