20519: radtimes: Why Haiti? Why now? (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: radtimes <resist@best.com>

Why Haiti? Why now?

http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_1338.shtml

By J. Damu
-Guest Columnist-
Mar 15, 2004

  (FinalCall.com) - All people who love and honor democracy and social
justice have to be outraged at the seemingly cloaked-in-darkness gunpoint
kidnapping of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide by U.S. militarists
on February 29. We must speak as one to denounce the foreign policy of the
Bush administration, which is beginning to resemble, more and more, that of
the German Nazi era.

Despite this moral outrage committed against the long suffering people of
Haiti, the first anywhere to successfully rise up against their slave
masters—an act of defiance for which they've never been forgiven—the
questions asked by many protestors, as hundreds streamed from San
Francisco's underground rail system to demonstrate against President George
Bush, were "Why Haiti?" and "Why now?"

Both questions can be answered simply and succinctly with just two
words—Cuba, Venezuela.

The removal of Pres. Aristide has been a long simmering coup in the making
that dates back at least to the Clinton presidency and the refusal of
Congress to release promised funding to the economically devastated island.
However, the timing and execution of the Haitian coup has to be placed
within a regional and world context. The "coup," or extra-democratic
process, which brought George Bush to the White House, allowed him to hand
over U.S. foreign policy decision-making, as it affects the Western
Hemisphere, to naturalized U.S. Cubans dedicated to the overthrow of the
Cuban Revolution.

Their policies, although geared to the overthrow of Fidel Castro and
socialism in Cuba, converge neatly with U.S. designs to destabilize the
Caribbean and Central-South American region and insure U.S. supremacy and
access to Venezuela's all-important oil.

Therefore, it is no surprise Otto Juan Reich's fingerprints are all over
the exile of President Aristide. Otto Reich is the Under-Secretary of State
for the Western Hemisphere who helped to orchestrate the short-lived ouster
of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. That kidnapping was undone when the
people rose up and re-installed Mr. Chavez, because the perpetrators had
failed to remove him completely from the country. Not to make the same
mistake twice.

In an overall strategy that parallels the worldwide concept of the
Department of Defense—to simultaneously fight wars to extend U.S. imperial
power to control energy sources overseas, under the cover of fighting
terrorism—hard-line, reactionary Cubans within the U.S. diplomatic
community have been handed near carte blanche powers to destabilize
progressive regimes in the Western Hemisphere.

Otto Reich, as a diplomatic appointee to Venezuela during the Reagan
administration, helped to arrange the transferring from Venezuela and
releasing to U.S. streets of Orlando Bosch, who was convicted for the 1976
blowing up of a Cuban airliner. Mr. Reich's right-hand man is Roger
Noriega, a former Jesse Helms protege who recently served as U.S.
ambassador to the Organization of American States and now also to the State
Department's Western Hemisphere Bureau. By his side is also John
Negroponte, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who also, as a Reagan
appointee, served as U.S. ambassador to Honduras. He officially covered up,
if not actually facilitated, the death squads there in support of that
country's actions against Nicaragua's Sandinista government.

There can be little doubt all three of these men, with common roots in the
hard-line Florida community of Cuban exiles inside and outside the U.S.,
played key roles in facilitating the recent events in Haiti. For instance,
it is widely known that the leadership of the so-called Haitian rebels, Guy
Phillippe, Emanuel Constant and Jodel Chamblain, were all trained at the
U.S.-held Manta airbase in Ecuador.

This military installation, developed with U.S. funds ostensibly to help
launch strikes in the war against the drug trade, is being used as a
training and staging area for paramilitary and military operations in the
region—much as Panama's Howard airbase was previously used, according to
former U.S. military's Southern Command chief, General Charles Wilhelm.
Published news accounts say all three men occupied the same house at Manta
airbase during their training there and Constant admits to being on the CIA
payroll for some years now.

Of course, there is an entire constellation of Haitian and U.S. characters
and organizations, as well as international policy and funding
organizations, that helped create the machinery and climate for Pres.
Aristide's kidnapping, and also serve to diffuse attention from the Cuban
right-wing policymakers.

The overthrow of Pres. Aristide was relatively simple to physically
accomplish, but the larger message was to Cuba and Venezuela, and even to
Brazil—that dangerous times lie immediately ahead.

(J. Damu is the acting Western Regional Representative for N'COBRA, the
National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America. For more
information about how you can help Haiti or to become involved, please
contact the Haiti Action Committee at (510) 483-7481 or write HAC, P.O. Box
2218, Berkeley, Ca. 94702 or visit their website www.haitiaction.org.)

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