20129: Esser: "A War Waged on the Aristide Regime" (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

CounterPunch
http://www.counterpunch.org

March 8, 2004

"A War Waged on the Aristide Regime"
An Interview with Robert Fatton
By ERIC RUDER

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 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.

Eric Ruder writes for the Socialist Worker, where this interview
originally appeared.
.