19994: radtimes: Thousands march in Port-au-Prince against US-backed coup (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: radtimes <resist@best.com>

Thousands march in Port-au-Prince against US-backed coup

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/mar2004/hait-m06.shtml

By Keith Jones
6 March 2004

A crowd, estimated by Reuters at more than 10,000, marched on the US
embassy in Port-au-Prince Friday to denounce the US-orchestrated coup
against Haiti's elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and demand the
withdrawal of US and French troops from the Caribbean island country.

The demonstrators chanted "Bush terrorist," urged that Aristide who is now
in exile in the Central African Republic, be allowed to complete his
five-year presidential term, and charged that the ex-Haitian army
personnel, death-squad leaders and criminal-gang members that Washington
used to oust Aristide—the so-called rebels—are inflicting terror on the
slums of Port-au-Prince.

According to Reuters, one demonstrator shouted, "The bourgeoisie joined
with the international community to occupy Haiti and get rid of President
Aristide. The bourgeoisie never did anything for us, the masses. Now they
took away our president."

The demonstration erupted one day after the disappearance of gun-touting
rebel commandos from the downtown streets of Port-au-Prince. From Sunday
through Wednesday, the rebels had run amuck in Haiti's capital, terrorizing
and killing Aristide supporters, under the watchful eyes of the US Marines,
who had begun arriving in force on Sunday once Aristide had been hustled
out of the country.

Only when the rebels and their supporters marched on the house of Prime
Minister Yvon Neptune did the Marines intervene. Washington will soon
dispense with Neptune figuratively, if not literally—all his fellow cabinet
ministers have either fled the country or been driven underground. But
under conditions where he nominally remained Haiti's prime minister, US
authorities deemed it politic to keep him out of the hands of a lynch mob.

If by mid-week, Bush administration officials were issuing ever-sharper
warnings to the rebels, urging them to—in the words of Assistant Secretary
of State Roger Noriega—make themselves "scarce," it was because they were
disrupting Washington's efforts to hide a bloody coup behind a ramshackle
democratic façade.

It wasn't the killings so much. A pliant international press could be
counted upon to explain them away as a settling of accounts with the
chimères, the armed gangs on whose support Aristide had increasingly
relied. No what disturbed Washington was the rebels' swaggering before the
international press. After all, rebel commander Guy Philippe had gone
before the world's cameras, the notorious FRAPH death-squad leader
Louis-Jodel Chamblain at his side, to proclaim himself in charge of
security in Haiti and for all intents and purposes the country's next
political strongman. Then when asked if he would disarm, Philippe refused
to recognize the authority of the US-led expeditionary force.



Bush administration officials thus found themselves compelled to repeatedly
castigate Philippe and his commandos as thugs and criminals. But all this
shouting cannot drown out the truth: Washington invited these elements into
Port-au-Prince so as to realize its longstanding goal of regime change in Haiti

Indeed, only last week, the Weekly Standard, a standard-bearer for the
Republican right was exalting, "Both France and the United States now
appear to see that only those with guns were capable of rising against the
Aristide thugocracy."

Rewriting history

So blatant was the US's support for the rebels—culminating in their
entering into Haiti's capital simultaneously with US and French troops—that
the Bush administration is now frantically trying to rewrite history.

According to the latest version, the US never demanded Aristide'
resignation. No, it just

blocked the dispatch of an international security force to Haiti to bolster
Aristide against the rebels. And told him that if he did not flee the
country he would be killed, that the US would not intervene to spare his
life, and blocked his efforts to secure better security.

According to a report by Juan O. Tamayo of the Miami Herald, Aristide had
requested that an extra contingent of bodyguards be dispatched from the US
security firm that had been contracted to provide him with protection. "US
officials blocked a last-minute bid by Haitian President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide to bolster his bodyguard—mostly former US Special Forces members,"
Tamayo reported, citing "knowledgeable sources". Washington, he said,
"forced a small group of extra bodyguards from the San Francisco-based
Steele Foundation to delay their flight from the United States to Haiti"
until it was too late to prevent Aristide's ouster.

The governments of the impoverished Caribbean island states hardly have a
history of challenging Washington. But the readiness of the region's
principal powers—the US and France—to conspire against a constitutional and
democratically-elected government has given them pause. CARICOM, their
inter-state organization, is demanding an investigation into the role
played by Washington and Paris in Aristide's ouster, warning the manner in
which Aristide lost power "sets a dangerous precedent for
democratically-elected governments everywhere."

Referring to the UN Security Council decision to sanction the dispatch of
troops to Haiti, Jamaican Prime Minister P.J. Patterson said, "We could not
fail to observe what was impossible on Thursday [Feb. 26] could be
accomplished in an emergency meeting on Sunday [Feb. 29]" once Aristide had
been deposed. "We are disappointed in the extreme at the failure to act."



Needless to say, the Bush administration has dismissed CARICOM's concerns.
"There is nothing to investigate," declared State Department spokesman
Richard Boucher. "We did not advocate" Aristide's "stepping down."

No less spurious is the Bush administration's pretence that the rebels and
the self-proclaimed political opposition to Aristide and his Lavalas
Party—the Democratic Platform—are discrete forces, one tainted by past
associations with murderous repression, the other speaking for civil
society. The same venal economic and political establishment that supported
the Duvalier, Avril and Cédras dictatorships leads the Democratic Platform.
It was quick to embrace the rebels, its enthusiasm mounting as the rebels
swept the north of Haiti and then threatened to march on the capital.

On Monday, Democratic Platform leaders like Evans Paul, former mayor of
Port-au-Prince, fawned over rebel commander Guy Philippe. According to
Michel Gaillard another Democratic Platform spokesman, the meeting "went
very well. We have established that the Army of the North is free, powerful
and has great popular support. We are in no way antagonistic toward it."

On Friday the rebels and politicians met again. The day before Evans Paul
told France's LCI television, "We will need to work with Mr. Philippe and
other sectors of the country that played an important role in the great
insurrection that swept Mr. Aristide from power."

While trumpeting their readiness to work with the rebels, the Democratic
Platform is braying for the blood of their Lavalas Party opponents,
demanding the arrest of Neptune and scores of other Lavalas leaders.

The fraud of disarmament

The Bush administration's rhetoric about the rebels' future role may at
present differ in tone from that of the leaders of the Democratic Platform,
but there is every reason to believe that not only will the rebels not be
called to account for their crimes against the Haitian people, they will
continue to be held in reserve to terrorize the Haitian masses.

Bowing to US demands, Philippe has said the rebels will disarm. But the US
military has made clear that it has no intention of ensuring this takes
place. "We are not disarming," Army Major Richard Crusan, spokesman for the
US-led international force in Haiti, told reporters. "That is a job for the
Haitian police. We don't even want to touch [the rebels'] guns."

Much of the National Police, of which Guy Philippe is himself a former
commander, is openly sympathetic to the rebels. When the rebels entered
Port-au-Prince last Sunday, the National Police immediately joined them in
united sorties against Aristide supporters.

The rebels "political spokesman," Paul Arcelin, a former Haitian ambassador
to the neighbouring Dominican Republic, has publicly boasted that the
rebels will not disarm. Asked what they are doing with their weapons, he
said, "We hide them."

With the connivance of Washington, Haiti's elite has for decades ruled all
but exclusively through dictatorship and terror. This is the only means to
suppress the popular anger that is born of social inequality and mass
poverty unequalled in the Americas. Although Aristide's popular support had
crumbled because of his imposition of IMF austerity measures and increasing
reliance on racial demagogy and violence to remain in power, the Bush
administration and the sweatshop owners and retail merchants represented by
Democratic Platform, had ultimately to resort to the rebel thugs to oust
Aristide, because they could generate no mass popular support.

That said, it must be recognized that it was the petty bourgeois
nationalist politics of Aristide that paved the way for the resurgence of
reaction in Haiti and the reaffirmation of the rule of Haiti's traditional
elite, in alliance with Washington.

Aristide was brought to power as the result of the popular social upheaval
that toppled the Duvalier dictatorship and convulsed Haiti for the next
five years. For that he never lost the enmity of either Wall Street and the
Republican Party establishment or the dominant wing of the Haitian
bourgeoisie. But when ousted from power in a US-backed coup in 1991, he
instructed his supporters not to resist. Rendered by his class outlook
incapable of appealing to the international working class to oppose
imperialism and its Haitian clients, Aristide threw himself at the feet of
Washington, arguing that because of his popular support he would be better
able to contain the social ferment in Haiti than the generals.

Once returned to power in 1994, he abandoned his program of minimal
reforms, and over the next decade, whether formally in office or the power
behind the throne, applied the social-incendiary economic policies of the
IMF. In so far as Aristide opposed Haiti's traditional elite, it was based
on securing the support of Washington, which historically has played the
principal role in maintaining Haiti in economic and national bondage. And
when that patronage was decisively withdrawn, his regime proved powerless
in the face of what was a well-financed and well-armed, but nonetheless
tiny band of rebels.

Among the most politically advanced layers of the Haitian working people,
there must be a critical evaluation of this bitter strategic experience and
its fundamental lesson: imperialist oppression cannot be overcome on a
nationalist basis. It requires a unified struggle by the working class and
impoverished masses of Haiti, the Caribbean and the United States itself
against the global capitalist order.

.