20771: Esser: Playing games with Aristide (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

Trinidad & Tobago Express
http://www.trinidadexpress.com

Playing games with Aristide [excerpt]

March 24th 2004

The arrogance of the United States knows no boundaries.

On the subject of Haiti and its deposed President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide, we are being lectured to by Dubya and his minions as though
we are first book school children.

It's the old Bush strategy of "if you are not with us you are against
us", a motto trampled in the dust of a number of European capitals in
demonstrations marking the first anniversary last week of the
invasion of Iraq.

We all know now that the springboard for the invasion rested on a bed
of lies: that Saddam Hussein harboured weapons of mass destruction,
chemical, biological and nuclear.

A year on nothing of the sort has been found. But the result of
Dubya's determination to make America No 1 in the world and to get
his hands on Iraq's oil is the collateral killing of thousands of
innocent Iraqis, the destruction of the capital, Baghdad, as well as
the death of American, British and Italian soldiers and the increase
in activity of those who resist the invasion and are branded
terrorists.

Spain has now paid in the blood of its citizens because its
government, against the wishes of 90 per cent of the population,
opted to hold hands with Dubya. In the event, the country has a new
Prime Minister, Bush's friend, Anzar, having been mugged in the
recent general election.

Now the fear is rising in London and Rome and Canberra that Britain
and Italy and Australia, governed by leaders who fell into Bush's WMD
trap, are next on the terrorists' list. An attack is inevitable,
Britain's most senior policeman was quoted as saying last week.

Far away from the scene of the action, we in the Caribbean Community
are unlikely to have to face up to this sort of predicament. But the
nervous Dubya and his proactive colleagues, Rumsfield, Cheney and
Rice, are at the centre of the Haitian maelstrom.

Every new day it becomes clearer that Bush and his team helped push
Aristide out of the way. They flew him across the Atlantic to the
Central African Republic, distant enough to keep him out of what they
would perceive as mischief.

But the Caribbean Community, even though an uncertain union of
independent states and small but proud, decided on their own
initiative to bring Aristide to Jamaica where he could reunite
temporarily with his two daughters in exile in the United States.

Bush and his colleagues view this as an unfriendly act, one of
hostility to the noble aims of the United States Government which are
to bring peace and prosperity to Haiti, a country they have joined
with the old colonialists in terrorising for two centuries.

The Caricom heads of government should take no notice of this Bush
administration's game plan. Aristide is Haiti's rightful President.
He won the office in an election as free and as fair as the one that
put Bush in the White House two years ago.

And the Americans do not rule us, at least not yet. So if we wish to
grant Aristide asylum that's our business, not theirs. And should
they wish that we deport our Cuban doctors and nurses and cool our
relations with Chavez in Caracas because they believe he is another
Castro, that's their concern, not ours.

...