20226: radtimes: Haiti: US Marines expand operations as Washington assembles puppet regime (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: radtimes <resist@best.com>

Haiti: US Marines expand operations as Washington assembles puppet regime

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/mar2004/hait-m11.shtml

By Keith Jones
11 March 2004

Having used a "rebel" force led by thugs of previous Haitian dictators to
force the country's elected president from power, the Bush administration
is now trying to patch together a constitutional and democratic façade for
a new, US-sponsored government—what the New York Times politely calls a
"pro-US" regime.

On Monday, the head of Haiti's Supreme Court, Boniface Alexandre, was sworn
in as deposed president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's successor. This was
Alexandre's second induction as president. On February 29, shortly after
American military and diplomatic personnel had hustled Aristide from Haiti,
the US Ambassador stage-managed Alexandre's swearing-in at the home of
Prime Minister Yvon Neptune. However, this ceremony was deemed to have
lacked decorum, and so Alexandre's swearing-in was restaged for the
television cameras at the National Palace.

The next day, a seven-member committee of "eminent Haitians" that had been
set up by the US and French, with United Nations sanction, announced it had
selected Gérard Latortue to replace Neptune as Haiti's prime minister. The
committee included just one representative of Aristide's Lavalas Party.

A lawyer, business consultant, and ex-UN official who served in the brief
post-Duvalier government of Leslie Manigat, Latortue has lived in the US
since at least 1994. For the past year, he has hosted a South Florida
television talk show, which has often served as a soapbox for the
right-wing opposition to Aristide.

Latortue has said he will ask retired general Herard Abraham to become his
minister of security and defence. Abraham was a senior officer during the
dictatorships of both Duvalier fils and Prosper Avril, then himself briefly
held the reins of power in the run-up to the 1991 elections. He had been on
the short-list of prime ministerial candidates, but with the so-called
"rebels" and much of the anti-Aristide Democratic Platform demanding the
resurrection of Haiti's disbanded army, his selection was considered too
inflammatory, according to the Miami Herald.

The choice of Latortue was immediately condemned by Aristide supporters.
Generally, the international press has parroted the propaganda of the
Democratic Platform—a coalition that includes some elements formerly
associated with Aristide, but is led by Haiti's traditional authoritarian
business and political elite. Yet some reporters have had to concede that
in the slums of Port-au-Prince there is much opposition to the toppling of
Aristide, with many viewing the UN-sanctioned, US-led "stabilization" force
as enforcers of a coup against Haiti's elected president. According to the
New York Times, when a contingent of about 75 marines patrolled
neighbourhoods loyal to Aristide Tuesday, "they were taunted by residents,"
many of whom shouted "You kidnapped our president!" and "Aristide, five years."

Since Aristide's ouster violence has escalated in the capital. The
Associated Press reports that at least 300 people have died in "reprisal
killings" against Aristide supporters. At the same time, there has been
widespread looting, with armed gangs loyal to Aristide, the so-called
chimères, and ordinary slum dwellers storming shops and other businesses.

Given the business elite's hostility to Aristide and Haiti's stark poverty
and social inequality—more than half of the population lives on less than a
dollar per day and one third are chronically malnourished—such a reaction
to the breakdown of government is hardly surprising. But it has only
whetted the appetite of Haiti's traditional elite for a settling of
accounts with the masses and a reassertion of its traditional unfettered power.

In response to mounting international criticism over the manner in which
Aristide was forced from office and complaints from the Haitian elite over
the failure of US troops to stop the looting, US Marine Colonel Charles
Gurganus announced Tuesday that henceforth the "stabilization force" would
"disarm men who are illegally armed in public."

Gurganus provided no details as to how the disarmament campaign would
proceed, except to say that the force under his command, which now numbers
2,300 US, French, Chilean and Canadian troops and gendarmes, would act in
concert with the Haitian National Police. "The disarmament will be both
active and reactive, but I'm not going to say any more about it," he declared.

Previously, Gurganus and his superiors had said that disarming gunmen,
whether the rebels or supporters of Aristide, was solely the task of
Haiti's police.

US officials are warning that pacifying Haiti will be a long and difficult
process. In testimony Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee,
CIA director George Tenet warned of the possibility of civil war. "A
humanitarian disaster or mass migration remains possible. A cycle of
clashes and revenge killings could easily be set off, given the large
number of angry, well-armed people on both sides."

To date, US forces in Haiti have killed four people. Three of them were
reputedly killed in armed exchanges. The fourth, an unarmed worker driving
to his home in a poor district of Port-au-Prince, was shot after allegedly
failing to slow down at a US checkpoint.

In keeping with the Bush administration's claims that it neither demanded
Aristide's resignation nor welcomed the overrunning of the northern half of
the country by the anti-Aristide gunmen, US officials are seeking to give
an "even-handed" impression of opposing both the armed supporters of
Aristide and the rebels.

The political purpose of this posturing is to try to lend some
constitutional, if not democrati,c legitimacy to a regime that is not only
un-elected and US-created, but which came to power as the result of a
multi-year destabilization campaign against Aristide's government that
culminated in an armed right-wing rebellion.

The brunt of any disarmament campaign will be directed at the slums of
Port-au-Prince and other Haitian cities. Although senior officials in the
Bush administration have condemned the rebel leaders as killers and thugs,
none has called for any of them to be arrested.

In large swathes of the country outside of Port-au-Prince, including
Haiti's second largest city, Cap-Haitien, the rebels have been allowed to
function as the de facto government. The leaders of the Democratic
Platform—those whom Washington portrays as the vanguard of democratic
reform—have themselves demonstratively embraced the fascistic rebels.

The enthusiasm of the so-called democratic opposition for the likes of
rebel commander Guy Philippe, who initially declared himself Haiti's new
military strongman, has proven something of an embarrassment for
Washington. The Bush administration would like the rebels to fade into the
background—whether to be incorporated into Haiti's security forces or the
numerous private gunmen of Haiti's elite. But much of Haiti's ruling class
may resist such an outcome, believing that only through a regime of naked
violence, like that it supported under Duvalier and Cédras, can it keep the
masses underfoot.

Adding to the crisis surrounding the puppet regime the US is seeking to
establish is its lack of international legitimacy. On Tuesday, the African
Union added its voice to CARICOM, the organization of Caribbean states, in
condemning the "unconstitutional manner" in which Aristide was stripped of
his presidency. The African Union communiqué warned that the recent events
in Haiti constitute "a dangerous precedent" for all constitutionally
elected governments.

A political kidnapping

Aristide has reiterated before the world press his charge that US
diplomatic and military personnel kidnapped him in the climactic stage of a
coup against his democratically-elected government. "There was a political
kidnapping, I reiterate that," Aristide told journalists Monday in Bangui,
the capital of the Central African Republic.

Insisting he was still Haiti's president, Aristide called for "peaceful
resistance" to restore Haiti's "constitutional order."

Aristide's press conference was his first public appearance since he was
spirited from Haiti on February 29 and brought to the Central African
Republi,c an impoverished West African state whose dictator has close ties
to France, the former colonial power.

There have been repeated reports that Aristide is being held prisoner in
the Central African Republic. A delegation of Aristide supporters from the
US was not allowed to see him Sunday.

Guards at the presidential compound where Aristide has been staying told
representatives from the Haiti Support Network and the International Action
Center that they could not enter, nor was Haiti's deposed president free to
come out of the compound to see them. The guards also refused to deliver a
message to Aristide or allow his US visitors to contact him by phone.

Later the same day, Central African Republic Foreign Minister Charles Herve
Wenezoui ordered Aristide's wife not to speak to reporters when she brought
them a two-sentence note her husband had scribbled on a postcard.

At Monday's press conference, Aristide was careful not to antagonize the
Central African Republic government, which has voiced its displeasure over
the criticisms he has leveled in telephone interviews against the US and
French governments. "I have never been a prisoner in Bangui, and I am not
now," said Haiti's deposed president.

Aristide has accused Washington and Paris of using threats and lies to get
him to leave Haiti and allowing his government to be overthrown by
terrorists. At the press conference, Aristide provided no new details of
the events of Feb. 28-29. Previously, he said that US officials threatened
him and his wife with imminent death, telling them a rebel attack on
Haiti's capital was about to begin and that the US would do nothing to
prevent their murder. The US government also worked, according to Aristide,
to sabotage his personal security detail, which was supplied by a San
Francisco based-firm with close links to the Pentagon and the State Department.

Aristide told a Pacifica Radio correspondent, "The 28th of February at
night, suddenly American military personnel, who were already all over
Port-au-Prince, descended on my house in Tabarre to tell me, first, that
all the American security agents who have contracts with the [Haitian]
government only have two options. Either they leave immediately to go to
the United States, or fight to die. Secondly, the remaining 25 of the
American security agents [hired by the Haitian government] who were to come
on the 29th of February as reinforcements were under interdiction to come
to Haiti."

On leaving his residence, Aristide says he was told that he was being
driven to a press conference. Instead, as he explained Monday, "I found
myself at the airport. The airport was under the control of the Americans."
After he was hustled onto a waiting plane, Aristide claims he was treated
like a prisoner. For twenty hours, that is, until only minutes before
landing in Bangui, his captors refused to tell him where he was being taken.

The Bush administration has responded to Aristide's charges by effectively
ordering him to shut up. "If Mr. Aristide really wants to serve his
country," declared State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, "he really
has to ... let his nation get on with the future and not try to stir up the
past again."

Aristide: already in the US's grip

Much of the account Aristide has provided of his last hours in Haiti has
been independently confirmed. But if Aristide could be bullied and swindled
by Washington into fleeing Haiti, it was because he had long since
delivered himself into the hands of imperialism, serving as its agent in
politically emasculating the mass movement that convulsed Haiti between
1986 and 1991, and then imposing the dictates of the International Monetary
Fund (IMF).

An exponent of "liberation theology," Aristide first came to prominence as
a critic of US imperialism and advocate of social reforms. Yet in 1991,
when his eight-month-old government was toppled by the military, he
rejected a struggle to mobilize the Haitian and international working class
against imperialism and its Haitian agents, and instead urged the masses to
join with him in petitioning Washington, the former sponsor of the
Duvaliers, to "restore democracy."

Aristide received the cold shoulder from the administration of Bush senior,
which had given Cedras' 1991 coup the green light. But the Clinton
administration restored Aristide to power, after extracting from him a
commitment to impose the restructuring policies demanded by the IMF,
including privatizations, cuts in public spending, and the elimination of
tariff barriers to US agricultural exports.

While Aristide was able to win re-election in 2001, his right-wing policies
and increasing reliance on patronage and violence to sustain his rule led
to a decline in his popular support. Thus, when confronted with an armed
rebellion last month, he was reduced to pleading with the imperialist
powers to shore up his government. Instead, he discovered that the Bush
administration and France—eager to restore friendly relations with
Washington—were quite prepared to use the henchmen of past dictatorships
and plunge Haiti into further turmoil to effect "regime change."

.