19858: Esser: Coup in Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

The Nation
http://www.thenation.com

Coup in Haiti
by AMY WILENTZ

[from the March 22, 2004 issue]

For those who know Haitian history, this has been a time of eerie,
unhappy déjà vu. Part of the pain is to see the elected president
coerced out of office by heavy-handed pressure from the United States
and France, accompanied by a show of force and the threat of a blood
bath. But to also hear that he's been spirited off to a secret
location is to be bluntly reminded of the fate of the fabled leader
of Haiti's revolution, former slave and stable boy Toussaint
L'Ouverture, who was entrapped by the French, bound, and hustled away
from Haiti on a ship, to die in solitary confinement in a fortress
prison in the Jura mountains in France.

When Aristide descended from his plane in Bangui, capital of the
Central African Republic, he made a brief statement: "In overthrowing
me, they cut down the tree of peace, but it will grow again, because
its roots are well planted." This was a deliberate allusion to
Toussaint, who said, from aboard the ship, never to see Haiti again:
"They have felled only the trunk of the tree. Branches will sprout
again, for its roots are numerous and deep." The echo can be missed
by no Haitian.

It's hard to justify contemporary comparisons to the founders of
nations, especially when made not by a third party but by the leader
himself. But in Bangui, Aristide was not so much comparing himself to
Toussaint as he was making a connection between the French betrayal
of Toussaint and the Americans' betrayal of his own presidency.
Though the indications had been many, especially since George W. Bush
came to power, Aristide had hesitated over the years--for reasons of
political expedience--to come right out and say what was patently
true.

But now he's saying it. What happened in Haiti was a coup d'état, and
it's almost funny to hear Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and Scott
McClellan call that claim "absurd" and "nonsense." The coup didn't
come in one fell strike, which fact camouflaged it for a time; we're
used to a coup being a coup--which means a cut or blow in
French--something sudden. But the coup against Aristide, and by
extension against the Haitian people, was prolonged, a chronic coup.
It began when Aristide was first elected at the end of 1990 and
continued right up until he was hustled aboard a plane and flown to
what he was told would be a place of his choice but that turned out
to be the former homeland of fabled killer and diamond collector
Jean-Bédel Bokassa, a country where, according to the CIA country
report available on the web, a ten-year elected civilian government
was recently replaced by a military coup d'état. Sound familiar?

One thing about coups: They don't just happen. In a country like
Haiti, where the military has been disbanded for nearly a decade,
soldiers don't simply emerge from the underbrush; they have to be
reorganized, retrained and resupplied. And of course, for something
to be organized, someone has to organize it. At the end of the 1700s
when heroic fighters like Henry Christophe, Jean-Jacques Dessalines
and Toussaint L'Ouverture joined forces to overthrow the French
planters, they did it in a fashion quite similar to these latter-day
brigands. Driving into one city after another with sabers drawn,
burning and looting and seizing control, they took the north and then
moved southward. Even then, with their scant means of communication,
they planned it, they organized it. And they too had help from
abroad--from the Americans, in fact.

In the current coup, there are several players. There is the
disgruntled former Haitian army (an institution with a violent and
unpalatable recent history), which has been wielded many times in the
service of coups d'état, often subsidized by its masters, the elite
of Haiti. The elite, too, had their hand in this coup--it's hard to
believe in this day and age, but they must be called the entrenched
class enemies of the Haitian people. There is "a growing enthusiasm
among businessmen to use the rebels as a security force," said a news
report from the Los Angeles Times after the remnants of the Haitian
army that helped engineer the coup descended on the capital. "[The
businessmen] welcomed the rebels."

You will notice in the next few weeks that the Haitian people, who
have been featured so prominently in recent weeks--those crowds
demonstrating, or those bands of opportunists looting and pillaging,
those people cowering as shots ring out or sprawled across a
pavement--will fade from the scene, because they have been used to
their full extent by the masters of the coup. Now the reconstituted
Haitian army in all its machismo will maraud through the slums
eradicating pockets of support for the deposed leader. The Marines
are there simply to do the sweep-up if they can, and if they dare,
given the the rebels' boldness. Now, according to a formulation
adopted when Aristide was still in power, the international community
will choose a committee, and the committee will select a "council of
wise men," and those wise men will select a prime minister. Perhaps
such steps will lead toward stability; without a leader, the Haitian
people may be more easily convinced to accept the decisions of these
committees and panels and unelected officials. But it's hard to
imagine the foreign forces setting up a panel of elders while across
the street, the new army's troops are burning artwork and shooting
passers-by.

The groundwork for this coup was laid during the months when Aristide
was first re-establishing his government. When the Clinton
Administration reinstated Aristide, it too brought in the Marines,
ostensibly for nation-building but also to make sure the reinstalled
president didn't get up to any populist shenanigans: Clinton knew he
was bringing Aristide back against the will of the Haitian elite, and
the US President feared both another coup by the elite against
Aristide, and then revenge by Aristide's supporters. So the Marines
secured the transition back to Aristide and then remained for about a
year and a half, during which time they did not disarm the Haitian
army or the remainder of the Duvaliers' feared Tontons Macoutes. It
was clear at the time that the Americans wanted to make sure there
would be arms floating around that could be used against the Haitian
government if need be.

One should be clear about the opposition in Haiti right now: although
it includes some very good people, it is largely a group of
malcontent career politicians, wealthy businessmen and ambitious
power-seekers. It is exactly the kind of "civil society" opposition
the United States encouraged and financed when it was attempting to
remove Manuel Noriega in Panama. The Haitian opposition, too, was
financed and organized during the Aristide years by US-funded groups
like USAID's Democracy Enhancement Project and the International
Republican Institute, an organization established in 1983 "to advance
democracy worldwide." These have played a central and critical role
in keeping an unpopular Haitian opposition alive and obstructionist.
At every turn, the US-backed opposition tried to bring political life
under Aristide to a halt.

It would be nice if Aristide were a saint. It's comfortable to take
the side of a saint. But he isn't one. Many people died under his
government who shouldn't have, and very few indeed are those who have
been brought to justice for those crimes. But he didn't start out to
be a brutal dictator: History and events and the international
community and his own flawed character conspired against him. He does
not deserve to suffer the same fate as Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc")
Duvalier, who was also nudged out by the United States and replaced
by a military-civilian junta.

When push came to shove this time around, the Bush Administration,
which paid lip service to the continuation in office of the
democratically elected president, refused to send in the Marines
until the president was bundled off and safely stowed away in the
heart of Africa, under virtual house arrest. It's not surprising,
after this long, sad history, that there are people who believe
Aristide when he says he was "kidnapped." He was kidnapped, in
effect. So was his presidency, and so was Haiti's attempt at
democracy.
.