20194: (Chamberlain) Aristide's Haiti was just left to drift (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

(Toronto Globe and Mail, 10 March 04)


Aristide's Haiti was just left to drift

By PAUL KNOX



How different it might have been.

If the rest of the world had been paying attention to Haiti while the
disgruntled ex-soldiers we called rebels were conspiring in the Dominican
Republic against the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

If a $50-million (U.S.) proposal last fall to have the Organization of
American States put 600 human-rights observers, conflict-resolution
specialists and police advisers in small teams around the country had been
accepted.

If the countries who vowed at the 2001 Quebec City summit to support
constitutional rule across the Americas had kept their promise, instead of
allowing the rebels to depose Mr. Aristide.

If Mr. Aristide had transcended his messianic roots and made a clean break
with Haiti's long tradition of personalized rule, instead of perpetuating
it.

Answering Mr. Aristide's appeal for help, in the week before his departure,
would have been a tough call. He was unwilling or unable to rein in his
violent allies. Politically, he proved remarkably inept. His demand for
$21.7-billion from France as compensation for an independence settlement
200 years ago may have led Jacques Chirac's government to issue the first
call for his resignation.

But taking a stand against armed insurrection would have been preferable to
the current situation on the streets of Port-au-Prince. The U.S.-led
multinational interim force, which will include Canadian troops by the end
of this week, has become the effective police force of a regime whose
legitimacy is more dubious than that of Mr. Aristide.

U.S. Marines yesterday shot and killed the driver of a car that sped
through a checkpoint in an industrial district ravaged by looting since Mr.
Aristide's departure. On Sunday, they killed a gunman who took potshots at
them during an anti-Aristide demonstration.

The Marines say they're not police. But the Haitian National Police (PNH),
by the admission of its new chief, Leon Charles, is in disarray. The PNH
and foreign forces are supposed to be doing joint patrols, but many of them
include only French troops or Marines. I saw the French in battle dress
tramping through a downtown street market the other day. They looked like
aliens from a distant planet. To equip each one of them probably cost the
yearly income of several Haitians.

Port-au-Prince is not Baghdad. There are no suicide bombers; no trucks
packed with explosives. But it seems incongruous to send more armoured
firepower than Haiti would ever be able to muster on its own, and not do
anything with it. Five people died on Sunday when armed assailants attacked
the anti-Aristide march, and many Haitians couldn't understand why the
foreign forces let it happen.

I asked the Marine commander, Colonel Mark Gurganus, how many more people
have to die before the PNH gets its act together. His reply, I thought,
betrayed a fundamental incomprehension of the implications of the foreign
forces' presence. "As far as people being killed every day, I think that's
been going on a long time before we got here," he said.

Partisans of Mr. Aristide are likely to see the foregoing as naive or
idealistic. Many say the toppling of Haiti's president was a U.S. plot from
start to finish; why argue that there was ever any possibility of
intervention on his behalf?

The United States has much to answer for in its conduct toward Haiti over
the past two decades. It allowed Mr. Aristide to be overthrown in 1991
after winning a landslide election, and its agents were linked to
organizers of death squads in the next few years. It restored him to power
not out of principle but to stem an exodus of boat people. It refuses to
extradite death-squad leader Emmanuel (Toto) Constant. We don't yet know
how much U.S. officials knew about the plotting that was going on in the
Dominican Republic over the past few years, but it's a good bet they were
au courant.

Nevertheless, a week before Mr. Aristide was overthrown, a senior U.S.
representative came to Haiti as part of an international delegation that
sought and won the president's agreement to a power-sharing plan. U.S.
Secretary of State Colin Powell then spent several days trying to convince
the opposition to accept it. That's hardly the behaviour of people intent
on deposing him at all costs.

At some point during the week before Mr. Aristide was forced out, other
agencies in Washington got involved. By that time, anyone coming in cold to
the deteriorating situation must have seen it as unsalvageable without the
president's departure. What happened in Haiti last month was
unconscionable. But there's much to suggest it was the product of too
little attention, rather than too much.