20897: kakadjab: Class Hatred and the Hijacking of Aristide (IPS) (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Kakadjab@aol.com

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 -- 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 else",
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. (END/2004)

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