20826: Esser: Who is Guy Philippe? (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. E s s e r <torx@joimail.com>

Catalyzer Online Journal
http://www.catalyzerjournal.com

March 13, 2004

The Theater of Coup.
Dramatis Personae: Who is Guy Philippe?
by Gilbert Wesley Purdy

Ever since a small rebel force appeared from across the Haitian
border with the Dominican Republic and took the city of Gonaives, the
members of the various American media have been asking the question
“Who is Guy Philippe?”  Philippe is presented as the leader of the
rebels.  As they have taken one town after another, and turned their
attention toward Port Au Prince, the capitol city of Haiti, he has
held press conferences, acting as the porte-parole (spokesperson) for
the group.  He has proved surprisingly deft at both aspects of his
dual role.

Like so many adventurers on the Haitian political scene he has become
known, to Haiti insiders, for a patchwork of activities — the most
recent being the present coup.  Like so many, his allegiances are
unclear from one day to the next.  Having begun in the ranks of the
Haitian army (the FAD’H), his work has been mostly for the right-wing
of the political spectrum.  The FAD’H’s raison d’être was to enforce
the will of the tiny elite of wealthy Haitians who ruled the country.

To his credit, it does not appear that he was ever a member of the
infamous Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH).  In
an attempt to prevent any return to a popular government, after the
first successful coup of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 1991, FRAPH was
formed.  During the presidency of Rauol Cedras, from 1991 to 1994,
thousands were murdered by the organization.  Sadly, the leadership
of FRAPH had a particularly close relationship with U. S.
Intelligence, which had infiltrated it, in its early stages, at the
cost of facilitating the efforts of an organization it knew to be a
right-wing death squad.

When the army was disbanded, upon the return of Aristide to office,
in 1994, Philippe was made the chief-of-police of the Delmas section
of Port-Au-Prince.  It is unclear, by whose influence the appointment
was accomplished.  It is widely reported that he had been flown to
Ecuador, after the first Aristide coup, in 1991, where he was trained
by U. S. Intelligence Special Forces, and that U. S. officials
recommended him for the position.  During the period of time that he
is alleged to have received the training, he met and married Nathalie
Philippe, a United States citizen, in Ecuador.

He is alleged to have been brutal in his effort to police the Delmas
slums.  The claim does not come to much by itself.  Haiti is a
violent country.  The good guys only tend to be less brutal than the
bad.  He was later made assistant-chief of Cap Hatien: a key port
city in the north of the country.

It was late in the year 2000 that Guy Philippe embarked upon the path
that would make him a well-known figure on the Haitian political
scene.  Haitian authorities discovered a group of ex-military
officers in the midst of planning a coup.  Many among the group were
arrested.  Among the members of the coup that managed to escape was
the assistant chief of police Guy Philippe.  He probably escaped over
the border into the Dominican Republic where he has a brother and
where the Haitian opposition group Democratic Convergence maintains a
Dominican branch office.

Philippe was back in the news late the next year.  On December 17th,
2001, shots were fired into the presidential palace of Jean-Bertrand
Aristide.  Security forces fired back and the perpetrators
scattered.  Neither President Aristide nor his family were harmed.

One of the perpetrators, Pierre Richardson, an ex-sergeant in the
Haitian army, was captured as he tried to escape by car into the
Dominican Republic.  Under interrogation, he named his
co-conspirators in what he himself admitted had been an attempted
coup.  Among the names he mentioned was that of Philippe.  Also
implicated, by Richardson, were: Antoine Saati, a millionaire U. S.
citizen of Haitian descent; Albert Dorelien, at whose house the
conspirators had allegedly gathered before the incident, and whose
brother, Carl, a particularly virulent ex-member of FRAPH, was in
hiding in the United States; a number of recently fired Haitian
police chiefs; the U. S. military attaché in Haiti, Major Douyon; and
the U. S. Chargé d’Affaires, Leslie Alexander.  Richardson, Saati and
a Col. Guy Francois were imprisoned awaiting trial.  Warrants were
issued for the other alleged participants not associated with the U.
S. Embassy.

Antoine “Tony” Saati owns a candy manufacturing business
headquartered in Miami, Florida.  The U. S. Embassy, in Haiti,
replied to his sister, Gina’s, frantic calls with assurances that
they would quietly work to have him released.  They advised her not
to speak with the media.  After three weeks without results, she went
public saying that Saati had been beaten and given cleaning fluid to
drink.  He was innocent, she asserted, and sure to die soon if not
released to the U. S. authorities.  Saati was free and back in Miami
in a matter of days but Gina’s impatience meant the story had made
the transition from Haitian French to American English.

What didn’t make it into the American press was the fact that Antoine
is the brother of George Saati, the co-founder of the extreme
right-wing Haitian party Movement for National Unity, known by its
acronym MOUN, which is closely allied with the Democratic Convergence
and the Group of 184.  George Saati also owns the Haitian
manufacturing concern Simi Global Corporation and is wealthy in his
own right.  Antoine explained his arrest as a vendetta instigated by
one Eddy Deeb against whom his brother was then taking civil action
in the Haitian courts.  It turns out that getting to know Guy
Philippe will properly involve cameo appearances by many such figures
as Antoine and George Saati.

The Democratic Convergence, the Group of 184, and MOUN, for all
intents and purposes, make up the opposition to popular government in
Haiti.  Their respective leaders — Evans Paul, Andre Apaid and George
Saati — are the leadership of the opposition, with Apaid, an American
citizen of Haitian descent, clearly having gained precedence over the
others.  These are each umbrella organizations which claim the
membership of scores of Haitian non-government organizations (NGOs). 

While some of the organizations under their umbrellas legitimately
exist most are little more than registered names under which the
opposition in the country can do business.  The lists of such
organizations under these umbrellas are intended to impress the
uninitiated with the upswell of opposition, while, in fact, all of
them taken together represent only a tiny minority of the population:
the wealthy elites and their paid retinues, members of the leadership
of the disbanded army, some few legitimate groups disaffected from
Aristides Fanmil Lavalas party.  Perhaps more to the point, they
serve as entities by which U. S. taxpayers’ money can be funneled to
the political machine of the wealthy elite of Haiti via the U. S.
Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Endowment
for Democracy and the International Republican Institute.

“The Opposition” as they have recently been called in the American
press, is closely advised by the International Republican Institute,
in the United States.  The IRI is chaired by Senator John McKain and
is largely managed by high-level neo-conservative Republicans, many
actively serving in the Congress of the United States.  It is a
private think tank that receives its funding from the U. S. taxpayer
via the National Endowment for Democracy.  The de facto executive
committee of “The Opposition” is the Haiti Democracy Project, also an
American NGO largely managed by high-level neo-conservative
Republicans

Albert Dorelien’s brother, Carl, was living in Port St. Lucie,
Florida, at the time of the December 17th coup attempt.  Carl, a
colonel in the Haitian military, had been a participant in the first
coup against Aristide in 1991, and a member of the Haitian team that
negotiated the agreement, with Jimmy Carter and General Colin Powell,
during the Clinton Administration, to restore Aristide to the
presidency.  In between, he was a member of the senior leadership of
FRAPH.  In 1995 he was exiled, by Aristide, to Spain.  Shortly
thereafter, he was openly living the United States by virtue of a
visa he claimed, in an interview with the Boston Globe, to have
received, before departing Haiti, from a Lt. Col. Steven Lovasz of
the U. S. Army.

In June of 1997, while living in Port St. Lucie, Carl Dorelien was
convicted, in absentia, of crimes against humanity perpetrated under
his FRAPH command.  He was sentenced to life in prison at hard
labor.  On June 28, 1997, he held one of two winning tickets for the
Florida Lottery drawing, at which time he began to receive
installments of $159,000 per year for 20 years.  Florida’s Haitian
community objected to a convicted violator of human rights in Haiti
receiving the lottery prize.  The Florida Lottery Commission replied
that it was simply its job to disburse the money to the winners.  The
U. S. Government was silent on the matter.

Not long after the December 17 coup attempt, he was arrested for
having overstayed his visa, and became an inmate at the Krome
Detention Center, in Miami.  On January 28, 2003, after an extended
court process, during which he sent letters to John Ashcroft, and
other key government officials, claiming, among other things, that he
had done work for U. S. Intelligence, he was repatriated to Haiti,
and incarcerated in the National Prison, in Port Au Prince.  Dorelien
had gone public, in an attempt to leverage his release from Krome,
posting the letters and other “supporting documents” on an Internet
site.  The site has since been stripped, along with its cache pages.

The day after Guy Philippe’s rebels released the “political
prisoners” from the National Prison, American reporter Kevin Pina
reported, to the Radio Pacifica program Flashpoints, that he had
observed Carl Dorelien “eating a cheese and ham omelet [on the patio
of] the Hotel Montana“ in Port Au Prince.

As for Philippe himself, he arrived by commercial airline in Quito,
Ecuador, on December 18th, after a stopover in Panama.  At 2:40 p.m.,
on December 25, he and his wife arrived by commercial airline in
Santo Domingo, capitol city of the Dominican Republic.  He was
immediately recognized and his presence reported to the authorities. 
In a highly unusual move, General Fernando Cruz Mendez, director of
the Dominican Republic’s National Investigative unit, chose to
proceed to the airport to arrest Philippe personally.  The prisoner
mysteriously escaped immediately after being taken into custody by
Mendez.

President Hipolito Mejias, of the Dominican Republic, declared that
the country would be a laughing stock if it did not recover
Philippe.  A manhunt was launched.  He was captured, again, on the
27th, “at the house of a friend,” in the town of Bonao, about 40
miles north of the capitol.  There being no extradition treaty
between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, he was allowed to remain at
large until arrangements could be made to extradite him to Ecuador or
Panama.  In the end, he remained free inside the Dominican Republic,
reportedly living in posh hotels and eating in the finest restaurants
although he had no ascertainable means of support.

On January 12, 2002, President Aristide granted an interview to the
Listin Diario, a Dominican newspaper.  In it he confirmed a list of
the persons then in the Dominican Republic that Haiti wished
extradited for trial in the matter of the December 17 coup attempt. 
The list includes: Guy Philippe; Joseph Bagidi, an ex-police chief;
Erar Abraham Goulos; George Saati, the brother of Antoine Saati; Guy
Francois, now referred to as a Haitian businessman living in
Santiago, Chile; and Paul Arcelen, the representative of the
Democratic Convergence in the Dominican Republic.

Throughout 2002 there seems to have been little opportunity for
adventurers of the armed sort and little is known about the
activities of Philippe.  The Opposition had created several new front
groups to be self-appointed “official observers” of the 2000 election
and had all too predictably discovered a range of irregularities. 
Through their American handlers they had managed to have their
“findings” put before the Organization of American States (OAS).  The
matter was being hashed out during 2002 and a strategy being unfolded.

The Opposition had been assisted by their American handlers in
assembling a media machine, as well.  Talk radio hosts, newspapers
and web-sites had emblazoned the news that “official observers” had
declared the elections corrupt and would continue to repeat the story
until the coup of February 2004.  Members of the IRI and the HDP, and
unaffiliated journalists simply too lazy to ascertain the truth of
the matter, transferred the claims into the U. S. media as
established fact.  The Rush Limbaugh school of journalism was
actively molding American public opinion in preparation for the time
it would be called upon to welcome the ouster of the thug and tyrant
Aristide.

The OAS sought to mediate — its point man being U.S. Assistant
Secretary General, Luigi Einaudi — and adopted a resolution in which
a Provisional Electoral Council was established, upon which both the
massively popular government and the tiny combined opposition would
serve.  Both would have to sign-off in order for elections to
proceed.  From that point forward, The Opposition refused to sign-off
on any election so long as Aristide remained president.  At the time
of the February 2004 coup, there were many elective offices vacant in
the country. Aristide was blamed personally for the resulting
failures of government services, for the failure to hold elections
and for trying to rule as a dictator.  The U.S. media dutifully
reported the allegations without providing context.

On May 7, 2003, the hydro-power plant at Peligre, in Haiti’s Central
Plateau region, was attacked.  Two power plant operators were killed
and the plant set on fire.  The city of Port Au Prince and much of
the rest of the country lost power.  The perpetrators escaped across
the plateau and the Dominican border, wounding two police officers
during the ensuing chase.  The plateau had recently become a violent
place.  The attacks always ended in a race to the Dominican border.

 As it turns out, the day before, on May 6, Guy Philippe and a group
of Haitians, were arrested in the Dominican town of Dajabon, just
over the border from the Central Plateau region.  The group included:
Paul Arcelin, the representative of the Democratic Convergence in the
Dominican Republic; Bonivel Alcegard, a Port Au Prince banker;
Presler Toussaint, an ex-inspecteur at the Haitian police academy;
and Hans Jermain, an ex-member of the Haitian military.  The group
was reportedly arrested on suspicion of plotting against the Haitian
government.  They were reportedly held overnight, while the Peligre
incident occurred, and were released the next morning for lack of
evidence.  Philippe told the press that they had merely met for an
innocent reunion of old friends.

 On May 9, 2003, an American missionary, James Glenn White, was
arrested in Gonaives.  According to the Haitian spokesman, Mario
Dupuy, he was charged with receiving a shipment of assault rifles,
grenade launchers, ammunition and other military equipment. 
According to White, he was arrested for receiving shipment of an
AR-15 sport rifle, and a set of fatigues reading “God’s Army,” as a
favor to a friend.  According to everyone, the items arrived packaged
inside a refrigerator.  American Christians of every persuasion
prayed for White’s liberation from the horrifying conditions of the
prison of that tyrant Aristide.  White was fined $1000 and deported.

Throughout the summer, some 25 to 50 people would be killed in
attacks in the Central Plateau region.  On July 25, a delegation from
the Haitian Interior Ministry attended a ceremony near the Dominican
border.  The delegation was ambushed as it left to return to Port Au
Prince.  Four were killed and one seriously wounded, according to the
Associated Press.  On July 31, Victor Beniot and Paul Denis,
spokesman, and leaders, of the Democratic Convergence, announced that
“All Convergence members and supporters must rally to overthrow the
constitutional authorities.”

 In the months that followed, The Opposition organized protest
marches in every corner of the country.  The marches were designed to
be a provocative as possible.  Counter marchers and/or bystanders
were taunted — often by acts of violence.  When the police arrived to
intervene, the Opposition media machine announced that Aristide had
brutally put down demonstrations against his government.  It was yet
another indication that he had become a dictator.  For all of its
efforts, however, The Opposition still could not begin to approach
Aristide’s popularity with the electorate.

In early February, another demonstration was organized in Gonaives. 
It was quite small and led by a former FRAPH enforcer.  A battle
ensued.  Blood was shed.  On February 5, Guy Philippe arrived with a
band of some 300 “patriots,” armed with M-16s and grenade launchers,
to restore the peace.  By some reports, they arrived in light-armored
personnel carriers and wearing spiffy new fatigues.  Some wore body
armor.  After “liberating” Gonaives from that tyrant Aristide, they
went on to “liberate” the north of the country.

President Aristide appealed to the U.S. government and the
international community to come to the rescue of the constitutional
government of Haiti.  Aristide having, by all accounts, descended to
a thug and a tyrant, the Bush administration could find no enthusiasm
for dispatching military aid.  They did, however, provide a flight
out of the country and the hemisphere.  Once Aristide was gone, U.S.
troops were sent to keep the peace and to protect American
interests.  Philippe and his men proceeded to Port Au Prince where
they spent several “free days” terrorizing and killing members and
supporters of Aristides Fanmil Lavalas party and destroying their
resources.


Gilbert Wesley Purdy’s work in poetry, prose and translation, has
appeared in many journals, paper and electronic, including: Jacket
Magazine (Australia); Poetry International (San Diego State
University); Grand Street; SLANT (University of Central Arkansas);
Orbis (UK); XS; Eclectica; and The Danforth Review (Can.). His work
in journalism has appeared in The Schenectady Gazette, The Source
(Albany, N.Y.) and the Eye on Saratoga. Query to gwpurdy@yahoo.com. .