20313: Esser: Haiti's Democracy in Flames (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

IN THESE TIMES
http://inthesetimes.com

3.13.04

Haiti’s Democracy in Flames
Powell’s dirty-dealing demolishes the tattered remnants of his
credibility
By Larry Birns


In the fall of 1990, Jean-Bertrand Aristide officially left his
position as a parish priest to embark on an unanticipated political
career. Within weeks he became the most popular president in Haiti’s
200-year history. Aristide’s Lavelas Party, meaning “flood,” referred
both to the near-universal applause of Aristide’s fundamental tenets
and the presumed cleansing effects it would have on remnants of the
Duvalier dictatorship. Despite the country’s Provisional Electoral
Council’s (CEP) approval of 11 presidential candidates for the 1990
elections, Aristide’s surge in polls was overwhelming. He won the
first free and fair election in the country’s history with 67 percent
of the vote.

Despite Aristide’s exultant inauguration, threats remained in the
form of the Duvaliers’ still-menacing band of supporters and their
Praetorian Guard—the Tontons Macoutes—not to mention the cabal of
military plotters who seized power after Baby Doc fled the country.

These groups, along with the country’s traditionally dominant
economic elite (1 percent of the population controls 45 percent of
the wealth), feared that Aristide’s radical agenda would curtail
their opportunities for graft, corruption, drug trafficking and
cronyism. They also were embittered by the CEP’s rejection of key
associates of the Duvalier regime, such as Claude Raymond and Roger
Lafontant, as qualified candidates for the 1990 presidential race.
(The CEP’s action was based on the 1987 constitution’s provision
barring any Duvalier-era officials from running for public office.)
Those scorned by this process, together with a large percentage of
the country’s severely compromised military, waited for the right
moment to oust Aristide. This was accomplished in 1991 and again in
late February.

The Bush administration, less through confusion than by design, sent
troops into Haiti on February 29, all but guaranteeing that this
deeply scarred society will soon recuperate. While the villains who
helped bring down Haiti’s constitutional rule will face the scrutiny
of objective critics in the months and years to come, no reputation
will be more tarnished than that of Secretary of State Colin Powell.

In effect, Powell let U.S. Haiti policy become the captive of two of
the administration’s most-obsessive right-wing ideologues—Assistant
Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega (see
“Smear Campaign,” page 8) and White House aide Otto Reich. The two
are backed by a White House that is more-than-eager to please the
right wing Latin American émigré community in Miami.

Reich, a Cuban exile, achieved infamy during the Reagan
administration as head of the Office for Latin America and the
Caribbean, where he employed Army psychological
operations—psyops—specialists to try to convince the American public
to support the U.S. backed Contras in their war against Nicaragua’s
Sandinista government. Bush nominated Reich to head the State
Department’s Latin American desk, but couldn’t get him confirmed, so
he hired him as a White House advisor. The job instead went to
Noriega.

Powell’s Haitian policy was dazzlingly inept. Only days before
Aristide was put on a plane February 29 for his State
Department-arranged flight into exile in the Central African
Republic, Powell repeatedly acknowledged the legitimacy of Aristide’s
rule and denounced the opposition’s violent “thugs”. He further
insisted that they would not be allowed to shoot their way to power
nor would Aristide be forced to resign. Once engaged, Powell began
insisting that the anti-Aristide political opposition must negotiate
with the government and that Washington would not sanction regime
change or insist upon Aristide’s forced ouster. Then, scarcely 24
hours before Aristide’s State Department-scripted travel arrangement,
Powell reversed himself and ignored Haiti’s constitution, which
stipulates that a president must convey his resignation only to the
country’s legislature.

If Powell really meant what he said, then why didn’t he adhere to it?
Aristide had done nothing to justify this 180 degree reversal in U.S.
policy. Powell’s rhetoric appeared to represent the high road on the
issue, but he was either deceiving the public or being undermined by
Noriega and Reich, who, in off-the-record briefings to journalists
and other interested parties, made it clear that regime change was
very much an option and that Aristide could be muscled aside in any
negotiation process.

When it came to Haiti, Powell’s defense of democracy was more
apparent than real. To begin, the U.S. embassy in Port-Au-Prince was
rarely merely a passive bystander to Haiti’s ongoing turmoil. In
effect, Ambassador James Foley, as was the case with his recent
predecessors at the Port-au-Prince post, saw his embassy as Fort
Apache and the locals as restless Indians having to be kept in place
by an agile embassy playmaker calling the shots. The cumulative
result was that, by February, the space left to President Aristide to
politically function continued to atrophy until his position had
become all but untenable.

Similarly, in Venezuela two years ago, a failed coup was hatched
against President Hugo Chávez thanks to the political backing and
covert funding provided by Reich, the then-chief U.S. regional
policymaker. In an indisputable contravention of its Organization of
American States resolutions aimed at mandating democratic legitimacy
throughout the hemisphere, the United States turned out to be the
lead conspirator in the destruction of Haiti’s civil society. His
ouster was the culmination of a U.S. foreign policy goal to eliminate
or bypass Aristide, by draining him of his agenda-setting powers or,
preferably, getting rid of them altogether, in order to void his
inconvenient but undeniable democratic credentials.

In January, as the crisis began to mount and the political opposition
became more clamorous in the streets of Port-Au-Prince, Washington’s
end-game strategy to resolve Haiti’s political crisis began to take
form. A U.S.-sanctioned international peace force would be introduced
into Haiti but only to uphold a political agreement that would be
fashioned between Aristide and the Port-Au-Prince-based political
opposition, led by the businessmen-dominated Group of 184.

The central credo of the latter body was to not, under any
circumstance, carry on a dialogue with Aristide. And because there
were to be no negotiations, there could be no agreement. But
according to Powell’s formula, there would be no peacekeeping
initiative unless such negotiations took place and a resolution
achieved.

Aristide had conceded to every demand made on him by the OAS, the
European Union (especially France), the United Nations, the United
States, and the English-speaking Caribbean nations to share power
with the opposition, yet it was he who was repeatedly denounced by
Powell and the international community for obstructionism, and rarely
the opposition, which saw its vested interest intrinsically better
served by chaos than peace. This was a solid strategy on the
opposition’s part, because it knew it lacked the popularity to win
the elections that successful talks inevitably would help bring about.

Powell’s thesis that a political solution must precede the arrival of
a peace force was indefensible on grounds of logic. A peace force
would be much more relevant while violence was occurring and the
government was dangerously tottering, rather than after a peace
agreement had been achieved. Brazil, Canada, Chile, France and for
that matter, the United Nations and the OAS, signed on to Powell’s
diktat strategy of taking no action until it was too late to save
Haitian democracy. Powell blamed Aristide for dilly-dallying;
however, it was he who purposefully used up the Aristide government’s
precious remaining moments with inaction, even though there was time
enough for the United States to demonstrate it meant to guarantee
continued democratic rule.

Mexico’s silence over Haiti on the eve of President Vicente Fox’s
visit to the Bush family ranch was sadly understandable, given the
Mexican leader’s forlorn quest for U.S. immigration reform. But the
silence of the region’s other heavy hitters was incomprehensible. One
would expect languorous behavior from an already discredited OAS
Secretary General César Gaviria, or from President Ricardo Lagos of
Chile, whose military (which he is dispatching to Haiti) under
General Augusto Pinochet routinely tortured and murdered anyone with
a radical agenda similar to Aristide’s. Meanwhile, Brazil’s Lula de
Silva was also preparing his troop contingents, while Argentina’s
Nestor Kirchner chose to sit out of the controversy. Neither bothered
to comment on comment on Powell’s preposterous formulations.

Canada’s new prime minister, Paul Martin, intent on improving
relations with Washington, signed on to Powell’s formula for
all-but-guaranteeing Aristide’s eventual ouster, never mind that such
a policy ill-served his country’s reputation for having a less
patronizing attitude toward the rest of the hemisphere. Ottawa’s
supine accommodation to Powell’s elusive timetable for intervention
was pathetic, in that the governing Liberal Party had not allowed its
police trainers to remain in Haiti long enough back in 1994-96 to
adequately professionalize the country’s security force.

At the end of the day, standing almost alone, Jamaica’s Prime
Minister, P.J. Patterson, upheld the region’s honor by implicitly
rebuking the timidity of other hemisphere leaders, in spite of the
vulnerability of Jamaica’s sagging economy and its need for
Washington’s financial backing.

Aside from Powell, the world leader most deserving of derision is
French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin. The French diplomat at
first boldly confronted the rapidly deteriorating situation in Haiti
by calling for urgent action to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe in
the country, but he then embraced Powell’s thesis that a political
solution must precede dispatching any peace forces.

U.S. Embassy authorities were able to thrust a resignation letter
into an understandably-befuddled Aristide’s hands for him to sign.
This was done under the implicit threat that only then could he and
his family be flown out of the country to safety. Once airborne,
Aristide was told that his ultimate destination would be the Central
African Republic only a half-hour before his scheduled landing. He
was denied any ability to communicate with the outside world. Nor was
he told where he would be going during a four-hour layover. Such
behavior exemplifies the utter contempt in which he was held by U.S.
officials. Powell’s defense of this scenario was based on his now
revised line that Aristide was a “flawed” president who brought on
his own downfall.

Today Haiti is a horrific mess, but it can’t entirely be attributed
to President Aristide’s “flawed performance.” If Aristide was flawed,
it was largely due to the impossible conditions laid down by
Washington for him to rule.

Powell had exacerbated Haiti’s last three years of strife and misery
by caving into Noreiga and Reich’s Miami-bred zealotry and accepting
their interpretation of events. He supported the continued freeze of
$500 million in multilateral assistance to Haiti based on the
exaggerations and distortion of what took place in the May 2000
senate elections, when Aristide was not president. Again, as he
repeatedly had done in Iraq, Powell presented the American public
with an entirely false picture of what caused Haiti’s political and
economic difficulties.

There is no disputing that the extremism and mean-spirited nature of
Washington’s Haitian policy prevented democratic practices from
taking root on the island. Secretary of State Powell must be
condemned for sponsoring a strategy that was superficial, illogical,
narrowly conceptualized and damaging both to the U.S. national
interest and Haiti’s most basic needs. The kind of human misery that
has propelled tens of thousands of Haitians over the past decade to
risk their lives trying to reach south Florida is not likely to be
assuaged by forcing Haiti into a political process when it lacks
popular natural leaders and when there are no reasons for the
citizenry to trust their new U.S.-imposed officials.


Larry Birns is director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs,
www.coha.org COHA Research Associate Jill Shelly asssisted with this
article.

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