20456: Esser: Class Hatred and the Hijacking of Aristide (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

Inter Press Service News Agency
http://www.ipsnews.net

Mar. 16, 2004

Class Hatred and the Hijacking of Aristide
Analysis - By Marty Logan

MONTREAL, Mar 16 (IPS) - Some observers have described the Feb. 29
putsch against Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide as a Bush
administration plot while many others label Washington's policy as an
indirect one, such as "malign" or "wilful" neglect or "estranged
engagement".

But almost all Haiti-watchers agree that various anti-Aristide forces
have been at work in the U.S. capital for as long as the former
Catholic priest has been leading his campaign on behalf of the poor
in the western hemisphere's most impoverished nation.

Those opposition elements include the International Republican
Institute on International Affairs, linked to the National Endowment
for Democracy, which has worked closely with the civil opposition in
Haiti.

Politicians from Bush's Republican Party like former Senator Jesse
Helms demonised the former president, who was forced to flee the
country Feb. 29 as armed rebels seized control of major cities in
Haiti's north and descended toward the capital Port-au-Prince.

Helms in turn influenced such right-wing officials as Roger Noriega,
a member of his staff for several years and now assistant secretary
of state for western hemisphere affairs, and Otto Reich, the
presidential envoy for western hemisphere affairs, who worked with
Helms on anti-Cuba legislation as a lobbyist in the 1990s.

With the Bush administration intent on waging its "war on terrorism",
these lower-tier officials were able to apply heat to Haiti's
political tinderbox.

But while the players in the shadow drama against Aristide, Haiti's
first democratically elected president, are well known, their
motivations are less clear. Their enmity might be personal, suggests
Robert Fatton Jr, chairman of the government and foreign affairs
department at the University of Virginia.

"There was something about Aristide that really generated profound
hatred on the part of members of the Haitian elite and some
right-wing Republicans. You can even sense that (now), because
Noriega said (after Aristide's ouster), 'we're certainly not going to
spend any money or American lives on Aristide'," Fatton told IPS.

"I think Aristide from the very beginning -- we're talking about 1990
when he was elected à always was perceived by the right wing in the
Republican Party as an enemy of the United States, as someone who was
trouble, a wild card, and a dangerous man à when they (Republicans)
came back in power with Bush the son, I think that antagonism was
reactivated".

Fatton's assessment is backed by Shannon Field, deputy director of
the Institute for Global Dialogue in Johannesburg, South Africa, in a
recent interview with Radio Netherlands.

"There has been a number of attacks by Republicans as soon as Bush
entered office. I think many of them saw (Aristide) not only as a
socialist, a populist, perhaps the next Fidel Castro, someone who
throughout the 1980s had preached liberation theology, and I think
that they were very much against the nature of his governance."

But while Fatton believes Aristide was a stronger symbolic than
actual threat, Field argues that the forces galvanised against the
populist president in Washington, and Haiti's former colonial power
France, feared reverberations from his rule.

"I think France was quite concerned that the islands that it controls
-- Martinique and Guadeloupe -- that if you have quite a strong
independent leader in Haiti, that he might export his ideas of
revolution and socialism to those islands."

"And similarly the U.S. also was enjoying quite a strong domination
over the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, and I think that it felt
that a leader that didn't toe the U.S. line in Haiti would also
probably be a threat to its dominance over those two islands," Field
added.

Fatton acknowledges, "Haiti and Aristide had good relations with Cuba
-- you have about 500 Cuban doctors in Haiti -- so that might have
just been perceived as something they shouldn't do, and I'm sure that
Noriega and Otto Reich have that conviction."

"But there are other countries in Latin America that have good
relations with Cuba so I'm not sure why they would 'pick' Haiti in
that sense."

He also argues that while Aristide, whose administration eventually
sunk into corruption and wielded violence against its opponents, rose
to power on the back of his anti-elite, anti-U.S. rhetoric, he was
"clearly following the instructions of the IMF (International
Monetary Fund) and World Bank".

"So while he was talking in a very radical way, the economic policies
themselves were not that radical," Fatton says.

Other commentators have suggested economic interests motivated the
backroom plotting that gnawed away at the foundation of Aristide's
rule.

"The troops of this intervention, called democracy enhancement by AID
(the U.S. Agency for International Development) and low intensity
democracy by others, are technicians and experts. Their weapons are
development projects and lots of money," wrote Jane Regan -- now an
IPS contributor -- in 1995, just months after 20,000 U.S. Marines had
restored Aristide to power.

"Their goal is to impose a neo-liberal economic agenda, to undermine
grassroots participatory democracy, to create political stability
conducive to a good business climate, and to bring Haiti into the new
world order appendaged to the U.S. as a source for markets and cheap
labour."

But Fatton, a Haitian, does not completely buy the economic arguments.

"Haiti really does not have any strategic significance. And we have
very little to offer -- people talk about cheap labour but there are
plenty of other countries with it."

"There is no oil, there is no uranium, there are no real natural
resources; so in terms of an overall economic strategic interest, I
don't see it," he added.

Even the illegal drug business, often cited as a motivating interest
in U.S.-Haiti relations and certainly a major concern of recent
administrations, declined in the last two years, as cocaine shipped
via Haiti fell from 15-20 percent of the U.S. supply to about eight
percent according to the State Department, says Fatton.

While all observers stress the administration's fear of a second wave
of Haitian boat people landing on U.S. shores -- the first group,
escaping the regime that overthrew Aristide in 1991, counted 70,000
people, most intercepted by U.S. ships and returned to Haiti -- for
Washington's decision to not prop up Aristide last month, Fatton
stresses animosity toward the ruler as a prime reason for his
long-time low standing in Washington's Republican circles.

"Among the Haitian elite the hatred for Aristide was absolutely
incredible; it was an obsession. And it's still an obsession."

"It's the way he talked à he had that very calm, cold way of putting
it: 'we've waited very long, we the poor; it's our time to take
over'."

In 1987, 16 months after dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier fled Haiti,
then-parish priest Aristide told a New York Times reporter, ''You
must understand the 'American Plan', the plan of Delatour (then
minister of finance) and the rich. First, they want to destroy our
agriculture: to destroy our rice and all the crops Haiti produces.
Why? So the people will come here from the land to work in those
American factories for almost nothing''.

"Vive la guerre! (Long live the war!) So that we will all have
bread," Aristide told the congregation jammed into the Church of St.
Jean Bosco days later. "Vive la guerre! So that we will all have
houses. Vive la guerre! So that we will all have land".

"He was threatening," says Fatton, "and (the elite) just couldn't put
up with it. Not only did he come from the lower classes but he was
talking a language that to them was really confrontational,
threatening, and therefore (they) could not tolerate the guy".

"I think those people in the Bush administration feel much more
comfortable with members of the Haitian elite, so you have kind of an
affinity à you could call it a level of comfort."

In a Sep. 14, 1994 speech to the Senate, which was debating a U.S.
attack on the military regime that overthrew Aristide less than one
year after his ballot-box victory in 1990, Helms described the
deposed president:

"In his autobiography, Aristide identifies his role models as being
Che Guevara, the (Argentine-)Cuban communist revolutionary; Salvador
Allende, the Marxist president of Chile; and Robespierre, the 18th
century French revolutionary who was an architect of the bloody reign
of terror in France," said Helms.

"Aristide speaks of 'beauty, dignity, respect and love', but his
heroes are history's synonyms of brutality and violent revolution à
Aristide has no relationship whatsoever with democracy; he is neither
a peace-lover nor a peacemaker. He is a mean-spirited revolutionary
and an anti-American demagogue," he added.

Washington restored Aristide to power soon afterwards but by then he
had already signalled -- by following the economic agenda of the
World Bank and IMF, for instance -- that, "his rhetoric was much more
radical than anything", says Fatton.

Aristide's impotence could explain the Bush administration's
ambivalent, inconsistent approach to Haiti, and why the powers in
Washington behind the scenes -- fixated on the former priest as the
symbol of the rising poor -- never relented in their opposition.
.