20767: This Week in Haiti 22:02 03/24/2004 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

"This Week in Haiti" is the English section of HAITI PROGRES
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                           HAITI PROGRES
              "Le journal qui offre une alternative"

                      * THIS WEEK IN HAITI *

                        March 24 - 30, 2004
                         Vol. 22, No. 2

THE FEBRUARY 29TH COUP D'ETAT AGAINST PRESIDENT JEAN BERTRAND
ARISTIDE AND THE ROLE OF THE UNITED STATES IN THE COUP
by Ira Kurzban

(Second of two articles)

In last week's installment, Kurzban outlined how the U.S.
concocted a crisis over the May 2000 elections despite
Organization of American States (OAS) election observers
characterizing the polling as "a great success for the Haitian
population." Washington made a fuss over the methodology used to
determine run-offs, which affected only eight senate races, and
later tried to call the whole election into question. However, a
USAID-sponsored Gallup poll revealed that a majority of Haitian
voters felt the elections had been honest and fair.

Nonetheless, the U.S.-backed opposition still boycotted the
November 2000 presidential race, which Aristide won handily. As a
gesture of goodwill, the seven Lavalas Family party senators
involved resigned their posts shortly after Aristide's
inauguration. But Washington maintained an economic aid embargo
on the country, which increased misery and discontent, as well as
an arms embargo, which crippled the effectiveness of Haiti's
police force to keep order.

The Negotiations  With the "Opposition"

As the Gallup Poll indicated, Haiti simply did not have a serious
opposition in the wake of the 2000 parliamentary and Presidential
elections. The result was a strategy orchestrated and funded by
the U.S. through IRI and others to de-legitimize the Aristide
government and stall as long as possible to allow economic chaos
to reign so that Aristide's government would topple.

The next two years were spent in "negotiations" with the
opposition over how and when to have elections. Each time the
opposition made an excuse, no matter how patently absurd, the
U.S. government agreed with them and put more pressure on
Aristide and his government. The international community, led by
the U.S. and the OAS as their surrogate, for example, required
the Haitian government to pay millions of dollars in restitution
to opposition parties arising out of the attempted December 17th
coup (during which opposition commandos briefly took over the
National Palace) before they would pressure the opposition to
make an agreement. When the government, whose resources were
exhausted due to the embargo, paid the funds to the opposition,
new demands were created. When Aristide agreed to the naming of a
new CEP which would be controlled by the opposition, the
opposition disagreed. When he asked them to seat their members on
the CEP, they refused. The opposition was never pressured to take
any steps required under the OAS resolution because they
interpreted the document to require sequencing whereby the
government had to act first. The U.S., with the opposition,
always determined that the government failed to comply, and
therefore they were never obligated to take any action.

The most disingenuous claim used repeatedly by the opposition and
the U.S. was that the "security situation" was not sufficient to
maintain a fair election. Long before the destabilizing efforts
of Guy Philippe and Louis Jodel Chamblain, the U.S. claimed the
security situation was not adequate for an election. However,
Haiti did not have a recent history of violence in its elections,
and the United States long advocated elections to diminish
conflict in such countries as El Salvador or Guatemala even in
the midst of their civil wars. At the same time, the U.S.
continued its financial and arms embargo thereby making it
impossible for the Haitian government, with virtually no
resources, to further strengthen the police.

The desire to disrupt the country through economic
destabilization however was not completely successful in the
short run. Haitians were upset but they still supported democracy
and knew that if Aristide was thrown out it meant the end of
democracy in the country. The "opposition" recognizing they could
not beat Aristide at the polls eventually developed a "street"
strategy of confrontation.

The IRI, the Dominican Republic, the Group of 184 and Haitian
Radio

By the end of 2002, it was clear that, despite the efforts of the
U.S. and the opposition, they remained a small electoral force in
the politics of Haiti. Most of their leaders had been
marginalized within Haiti by the positions they were taking
politically. In addition, their association with some of the
worst elements of the former coup regime, who were now demanding
the return of the army, further diminished their standing in the
eyes of the Haitian people.

The IRI, realizing that their former strategy was not working
decided to create a new opposition. They arranged a secret
meeting, which became public in the Haitian press, in the
Dominican Republic with assembly industry owner Andy Apaid, other
business leaders, student activists, the Democratic Convergence,
and other elements of the former regime, including those who were
calling for the return of the army. Andy Apaid is a millionaire
Lebanese American businessman in Haiti who bitterly opposed
Aristide in his desire to increase the minimum wage and who was
involved in a fraud on the Haitian telephone company through the
"grey market" in international telephone transmission. He was
ultimately fined 2,000,000 gourdes for the fraud.

Despite press reports of his "dual nationality," he is not a
Haitian citizen. Haitian law does not permit dual nationality.
Mr. Apaid was born in New York City on April 24, 1952. He never
renounced his U.S. citizenship. Although he obtained several
Haitian passports by fraud, an immigration officer, doing his
job, asked Apaid to produce a renunciation of U.S. citizenship
before his Haitian passport could be renewed. He refused, and the
officer refused to issue him a new Haitian passport. Apaid had
long ties to the U.S. and particularly to the right-wing elements
within the U.S. government.

As a result of the meeting in the DR, a new group called Group
184 was formed. Although the group claimed to represent 184
different organizations, most of these organizations had few or
no members or did not exist at all. The significance of Group 184
was that it was a group of business leaders and the elite who
were trying to force Aristide to have a negotiated settlement and
to share power in a government of "national reconciliation."

After their return from the DR, they announced the formation of
the Group 184 and went to different cities promoting an agenda
that was perceived in Haiti as simply an effort to topple the
government. The demonstrations and meetings they held met with
very little success, and they were largely seen as the elite
trying to reimpose the old agenda on Haiti. Although they
received a big boost from the events of December 5, 2003 where,
under very clouded circumstances, the Haitian National Police
were criticized for allowing popular organization members to
enter the National University resulting in a number of injuries,
their numbers were still relatively small.

Haitian radio stations, through gross distortions, sought to
create the image that the Group 184 had major support within the
country. When they had a demonstration of 100 people, radios
would say that it was 1,000. When they had a demonstration of
10,000, they would report it was 50,000. Haitian radio was used
in a way very similar to the use of TV in the coup attempt in
Venezuela to confuse and demoralize government support and to
exaggerate opposition support. It is no surprise that they would
do this because the radio stations were owned by Apaid and the
other business leaders who were part of Group 184. In fact one of
these stations, Vision 2000, was given a small amount of money by
USAID to strengthen its signal. The international press often
relied on these radio stations to obtain the news, knowing that
they were distorted and owned by the very opposition that was
seeking power.

A media campaign was also launched in the United States to split
the Haitian community and to undermine the support of the
Congressional Black Caucus for democracy in Haiti. First, the
U.S. Ambassador to Haiti made frequent trips to Miami and New
York to organize a radio opposition to Lavalas and to appear on
radio programs throughout South Florida. His message consistently
faulted Aristide for all of Haiti's problems and praised the
opposition. As a result of his trips, numerous anti-Aristide
programs were initiated. These programs distorted the
government's position and distorted the news coming out of Haiti.
A second component of this disinformation campaign was the
formation of the Haiti Democracy Project. Although it was funded,
at least in part, by members of the opposition including Reginald
Boulos, it was referred to by journalists as an independent and
reliable source on Haiti. In fact, its articles and statements
were vehemently anti-Aristide and little more than propaganda.
Third, the elite-owned radio stations in Haiti, such as Vision
2000, expended more resources to provide programming that was
used in the United States.

Gonaïves, Tatoune, Chamblain and the "Rag Tag" Army

The final stages of the movement to end the democratic government
of President Aristide began in Gonaïves. The press described the
events in terms of a group who were Aristide supporters but had
turned against him. The claim was that Butteur Metayer was
seeking revenge against Aristide for ordering the execution of
his brother, Amiot Metayer, and was using the weapons that
Aristide gave his brother to topple Aristide. This "blowback"
theory was quite popular in the press and Metayer was paraded
around Gonaïves as the sponsor of the revolution against
Aristide.

In fact, the real power in Gonaïves was Jean Tatoune, a former
member of FRAPH and the Haitian army. Tatoune had been convicted
of gross human rights violations and murder in the Raboto
massacre that occurred in April 1994 during the coup. Tatoune was
put on trial and was serving a life sentence when he and Amiot
Metayer were broken out of prison. Although the U.S. consistently
pressured the Aristide government to re-arrest Metayer (who was
eventually executed by unknown persons), they never asked
Aristide to arrest Tatoune. This was clearly taken as a sign that
Tatoune was involved with the U.S. government in some way. In any
event, Tatoune was never in the press but was organizing a
military operation against Aristide in Gonaïves. He was
successful, and Gonaïves was taken over in early February.

As soon as Gonaïves was taken over through Tatoune's work, Jodel
Chamblain, the co-founder of the paramilitary death squad FRAPH,
and Guy Philippe, a former Haitian Army officer and well-known
drug dealer, appeared in Gonaïves. They were accompanied by about
30 or 40 military personnel. Some people have alleged that some
members of the group accompanying them spoke only Spanish. They
were well armed, with new uniforms and flak-jackets. They were an
obviously military-trained corps. They brought two truckloads of
weapons from the Dominican Republic including M-16s, M-60s,
rocket propelled grenades, and sufficient equipment to shoot down
the one helicopter that the government had in its possession. The
U.S. Department of Defense has admitted that the M-16s may have
come from the 20,000 M-16s that the U.S. gave to the Dominican
Army in February 2003 as part of "Operation Jaded Task." This
Operation, which was apparently secret because many Dominican
legislators claimed they did not know about it, was ostensibly to
train the Dominican army in counter-insurgency. It seems likely
that Chamblain and his group were trained by the U.S. at that
time.

Just as the press focused on Metayer in Gonaïves instead of
Tatoune, they are now focusing on Philippe instead of Chamblain.
However, Chamblain has long standing ties to the CIA and the DIA
(Defense Intelligence Agency). He was the co-founder of the
paramilitary FRAPH organization that operated terrorist/execution
squads against Lavalas supporters during the first military coup
against President Aristide. Allan Nairn wrote a series of
articles explaining how FRAPH was created at the direction of
U.S. Col. Collins who was the DIA attaché at the U.S. Embassy in
Port-au-Prince during 1993. Prior to the actual formation of
FRAPH and one month after the military coup in 1991, the CIA
helped to form the Haitian Resistance League as a precursor to
FRAPH. In addition, Chamblain's co-founder in FRAPH, Emmanuel
(Toto) Constant, stated on CBS's "60 Minutes" in 1995 that he was
an employee of the CIA while he worked for FRAPH. He stated it
publicly because the US government was going to deport him after
Aristide's return. Chamblain had also been convicted of the
murder of Antoine Izméry, a prominent Haitian businessman.

After Chamblain entered Haiti with this well trained military
group, they easily went from town to town where the police,
eviscerated by the financial and arms embargo, had no weapons to
defend themselves. The police were facing M-16s and M-60s with 38
caliber pistols. It was no match. In addition, Chamblain began a
U.S. military textbook psychological operations program using the
Haitian radio stations owned by the elite to spread fear and
terror among the police and the population.

As Chamblain's group took over town after town, the international
community rushed to Haiti to solve the problem by forcing
Aristide into a power-sharing arrangement with the opposition. On
Saturday, Feb. 18, 2004, President Aristide agreed to the power-
sharing arrangement.

Roger Noriega, a fervent opponent of Aristide since his first
election and a former staffer for Jessie Helms, represents the
U.S. as the Assistant Secretary of State for InterAmerican
Affairs. He and the other members of the international community
then meet with the "opposition," including Andy Apaid. At the end
of the meeting, the opposition said they need to wait until
Monday, Feb. 20. Noriega and the others give them the delay. On
Sunday, Chamblain and his paramilitary group captured Cap
Haïtien, the second largest city in Haiti. In order to capture
the city, they must travel over very rugged terrain in the
Haitian countryside because popular organizations (the only
people left defending the city) blocked the only road into the
city. Only experienced military personnel could have gone over
that rugged terrain in order to accomplish the mission. Guy
Philippe after capturing the city tells the AP that he was not in
"official contact" with Apaid and the opposition. He also says he
has been funded by Haitian businessmen.

As the days drag on and Secretary of State Powell personally begs
Mr. Apaid to accept the deal, Chamblain and his paramilitary unit
get closer and closer to Port-au-Prince. They arrive in Port-au-
Prince on February 26, 2004 and the city is in a state of panic
because the radio stations, as part of a psychological operations
campaign, are spreading rumors that Aristide has left the country
and that an invasion is imminent. Philippe then announces that he
and his soldiers will not enter the city because they are waiting
to see what the U.S. will do.

The stage is now set for the final squeeze play on Aristide.
After stating publicly that the U.S. will not ask the President
to step down, the State Department changes its position. Powell
says that Aristide should "seriously consider" his position,
suggesting he should go. President Bush joins the chorus. The
French already set the stage the day before by saying that
Aristide must leave. When the U.S. is asked why they will not
send in troops to protect the constitutionally elected
government, they say they are waiting for a political solution.

On Saturday afternoon, the Steele Foundation (the US security
company protecting the President) tells the President that the
U.S. has asked them to leave the country and has blocked their
efforts to bring additional security that could have protected
the President. To confirm this, the Counsel for the Government of
Haiti receives a call on Friday night telling him that the Steele
Foundation cannot send additional security to Haiti until Monday.
When the Counsel says that Monday will be too late, there is
silence on the line.

With Chamblain's paramilitary group acting as the proverbial
wolf-at-the- door and after the Steele Foundation tells the
President they cannot provide the protection he needs to survive,
the U.S. sends Deputy Chief of Mission Luis Moreno to meet with
Aristide to deliver the coup de grace. From this point on,
Aristide and his wife are told not to make any telephone calls
because it is "too dangerous." Moreno tells Aristide that he, his
wife and all his followers will be killed. He tells him the U.S.
will stand aside and allow it to happen and that the U.S. can
provide aircraft for him to leave if he provides a resignation
letter. They escort him to a Department of State rented aircraft
in the early hours of Sunday morning under heavily armed U.S.
guard. When Aristide refuses to give the U.S. the "resignation"
letter until he is on the aircraft and knows where he is going,
Moreno tells him they will not allow him on the aircraft and that
he will be killed.

Aristide turns over the letter and, from that point on, he and
his wife, who is a U.S. citizen, are kidnapped. Marines surround
Aristide. He is separated from his security. He is told that
neither he nor his wife can use a telephone despite the existence
of telephones and faxes on the aircraft. He is told he cannot
leave the aircraft when it stops. He is told by the Marines that
they are instructed not to tell him where they are or where they
are going. He is even told that he cannot open the shade on the
window, and when his wife tries to do so, she is instructed to
shut the shade. Aristide is unaware that he is going to the
Central African Republic until close to the time they land in the
country. Because the Central African Republic is a military
dictatorship that overthrew a democratically elected government
and because the military dictatorship has close ties to the
French government, the Central African Republic is the last place
Aristide would choose to go.

Both President Bush and Secretary Powell said that they would not
send U.S. troops to Haiti until there was a political solution.
Within an hour of Aristide's departure, they order U.S. troops to
Haiti without any political solution.

All articles copyrighted Haiti Progres, Inc. REPRINTS ENCOURAGED.
Please credit Haiti Progres.

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