21105: radtimes:Why US troops are occupying Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: radtimes <resist@best.com>

Why US troops are occupying Haiti

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/apr2004/hait-a05.shtml

By Richard Dufour and Keith Jones
5 April 2004

The World Socialist Web Site has received several letters from readers
asking why the Bush administration has deployed US troops to occupy Haiti.
Typical were the following two comments:

"I don't dispute your reporters' overall fact finding and analysis on
Haiti," wrote GW. "But what I can't fathom, digest or whatever, is why
France, the US, etc. would go to such lengths on this hapless, resourceless
country, when the imperialists have so much bigger fish to fry at this moment?"

Wrote a second reader: "In Iraq it is obviously the oil, not love of
humanity, which guides US policy. But what does Haiti have?"

That oil was a key motivation for last year's invasion of Iraq is a basic
truth that the US political establishment and corporate media have sought
to hide with a litany of lies about weapons of mass destruction and Sadam
Hussein's ties to al-Qaeda. From its first days in office, the Bush
administration began searching for a suitable pretext for military action
aimed at seizing control of the world's second largest oil reserves.

Haiti, by contrast, did not figure high on the Bush administration's list
of foreign policy concerns, let alone targets for military action, in
January 2001 or even January 2004. The prevailing attitude of US business
and political leaders toward Haiti has been one of callous indifference as
exemplified in Secretary of State Colin Powell's talk of Washington's
"Haiti fatigue."

The small Caribbean island-republic has been so decimated by decades of
imperialist oppression—much of the population is illiterate and
malnourished and what little infrastructure exits is crumbling—that despite
far and away the lowest wages in the Western hemisphere, Haiti has failed
to attract significant foreign investment over the past two decades and
most of the off-shore assembly operations that were established in the
early and middle 1980s have closed down or moved elsewhere.

The basic truth that US foreign policy expresses the predatory interests
and ambitions of Wall Street should not be taken to mean, however, that the
drive to secure natural resources and markets are its only determinant.
Even in the case of the invasion of oil-rich Iraq, other factors were at
play. These included, US imperialism's attempt to bolster its position vis
a vis its European and East Asian rivals by securing a stranglehold over
the world's oil resources and the Bush administration's attempt to use the
war as a means to divert the attention of the American people from mounting
social and economic problems at home.

As we shall show below, the current US military occupation of Haiti is
aimed at upholding the US's role as the principal economi,c military and
geo-political power in the Caribbean region; ensuring that the turmoil in
Haiti does not cut across the Bush administration's agenda; and
establishing a government in Port-au-Prince even more pliant to Washington
and Wall Street.

The greater Caribbean region, with its geographical proximity to the United
States and major assets like the Panama Canal and Venezuelan oil, has long
been pivotal to US foreign policy—from the turn of the last century when it
became the launching pad for America's ascent as an imperialist power, to
the Cold War conflict with the Stalinist Soviet bureaucracy over Cuba in
the 1960s, and the bloody counter-insurgency interventions in Central
America in the 1980s.

Here is not the place to retrace the bloodstained history of US-Haitian
relations. But it is impossible to understand the reasons for the current
US occupation or why the country has been reduced to such wretched poverty
without recognizing that Haiti has been in US imperialism's grip since at
least 1915, when Marines invaded the island-country. That occupation, which
lasted till 1934, had three principal objectives: to thwart German designs
on Haiti; to bolster the US's hold on the Panama Canal; and to reorganize
Haiti's state and political economy so US companies could benefit from its
agricultural resources and cheap labor. (For much of the eighteenth
century, Haiti was arguably the world's most profitable colony).

US troops would return in the 1990s, but throughout the intervening six
decades Haiti remained in the US's shadow. For more than a quarter-century
Washington sustained the bloody Duvalier dictatorship. Indeed, the
Duvaliers and the Somoza family dictatorship in Nicaragua were viewed by
Washington as pillars of its Cold War strategy in the Caribbean region.

Containing the fallout from the collapse of the US-sponsored Duvalier
dictatorship

Since 1986, the pivot of US foreign policy toward Haiti has been to try to
contain the fallout from the collapse of the Duvalier dictatorship and
above all prevent any challenge to the country's socio-economic order—the
markets and investments of US firms, but also the property of their allies
and clients, the Haitian bourgeoisie.

Initially, Washington hoped to accomplish a surgical removal of Duvalier,
creating a new pro-US regime that would both enjoy greater popular
legitimacy and support the dismantling of the state-owned companies,
state-licensed export and import monopolies, and tariff barriers the
Duvaliers had used to promote a thin layer of "crony capitalists."

But Washington's attempt to find a new stable political basis for
maintaining the prevalent conditions of abject poverty foundered in the
face of the popular ferment unleashed in the toppling of the Duvalier
regime. The first four post-Duvalier years saw a series of military
strongmen and civilian figureheads come and go as the working class and
peasantry resisted state repression and kept pushing for a better life.

In 1990 Washington insisted that Haiti's next government be chosen through
elections. US policy-makers felt confident that they could manipulate the
process to the benefit of their preferred candidate, former World Bank
official Marc Bazin, and thereby give Haiti's new-made-in-the US government
greater legitimacy in the eyes of the Haitian masses and world opinion. But
the more Washington touted Bazin, the more Haiti's poor, who had not
forgotten the thirty years of American support for the hated Duvaliers,
grew suspicious of him.

It is within this context that Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former priest who
had emerged in the mid-1980s as a leading figure of the struggle against
the crumbling Duvalier regime and the following military juntas, abruptly
reversed his previous calls for a boycott of the "US-made elections." He
ran as the presidential candidate of a broad coalition of business leaders
and grassroots organizations known as Lavalas (flood in creole), coupling
promises of wide-ranging social reforms with appeals to the private
business sector and calls for a "marriage" between the people and the army.
Aristide's landslide victory took Washington completely by surprise.

Undoing the results of the 1990 elections

The next fourteen years of American policy toward Haiti can be summarized
as an unrelenting attempt by Republican and Democratic administrations to
undo—not without bitter divisions within the US ruling elite over the
appropriate means—the results of the 1990 elections, the first time a
Haitian president had been chosen not by Washington or the country's venal
bourgeois elite but by Haiti's poor majority.

The first attempt came in September 1991, a mere eight months after
Aristide took office, in the form of a bloody coup led by General Raoul
Cédras which enjoyed de facto support from the Bush senior administration.
A wave of terror was then unleashed by the military and CIA-backed
paramilitary death squads in the poor neighborhoods of the capital where
support for Aristide remained strong. Thousands of Haitians tried a
desperate escape on board overcrowded boats sailing for Florida, only to be
denied refuge on US soil by American officials. Rather they were
incarcerated en masse in makeshift refugee camps at the US base of
Guantanamo, Cuba.

In the initial period after the 1992 US elections, the new Democratic
administration took no serious steps against Haiti's military junta and,
notwithstanding Clinton's previous criticisms of the inhumane treatment of
Haitians fleeing the Cédras dictatorship, even maintained the refugee
policy of Bush Sr. A 1993 attempt to bring in unarmed United Nations "peace
keepers" on board a US Navy ship was prevented by rock-throwing mobs of
Cédras supporters in the harbor of Port-au-Prince. This, coupled with the
Somalia fiasco the same year, convinced the Clinton administration that the
continuation of the Cédras regime was damaging the international prestige
of the United States and subjecting the Clinton administration to ridicule
from its domestic opponents.

Even then, it took another full year for the Clinton administration to push
Cédras out. The intervening time was used to extract further pledges of
loyalty from Aristide, who had responded to the 1990 coup by proclaiming
that the only force to which the Haitian masses could turn in opposing
Cédras and his supporters in Haiti's traditional political and economic
elite was Washington.

In exchange for the Clinton administration's restoring him to power,
Aristide firstly agreed there should be no extension of his five-year
presidential mandate even though he had spent three years of it in exile;
secondly promised to incorporate leading members of the business elite and
the old Duvalier political machine into his government and thirdly gave a
written pledge he would carry out IMF-mandated privatizations of state
companies and cuts in social spending.

In other words, Aristide was flown back in September 1994 in the baggage of
a 20,000-strong US occupation force as little more than a political
reincarnation of Marc Bazin, the "US candidate" he had defeated in the 1990
elections.

Nevertheless, Aristide's return was bitterly opposed by the Republican
Party. Its far right elements such as Senator Jesse Helms, for many years
the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, denounced Aristide
as a mentally deranged communist. This expressed most crudely the
sentiments of those elements of the US ruling elite who would capture the
White House in the 2000 elections. For them any infringement on the right
to pile up obscene levels of private wealth by plundering the planet is
tantamount to high treason. If such elements couldn't be reconciled to an
administration headed by such a proven defender of US imperialism as Bill
Clinton, they certainly weren't about to tolerate US support for a
de-frocked priest who had gained a mass following among Haiti's poor by
denouncing US imperialism.

Aristide managed to survive longer than the Clinton administration probably
planned for. He maneuvered to have his protégé René Préval chosen as his
party's presidential candidate in the 1995 election campaign. Préval won,
then went on to impose a sweeping program of privatizations, mass layoffs
in the public sector and the abolition of state subsidies on food and
transportation.

While Haiti's constitution bars two consecutive presidential terms,
Aristide was eligible to run again in December 2000, which he did
successfully, a reflection not so much of continuing popular enthusiasm for
his Lavalas party as the deep popular hostility to the traditional ruling
elite.

This elite, for its part, was incensed at its continued political
marginalization. Because of Haiti's poverty and backwardness, control of
the state apparatus has long been the principal source of enrichment and
thus the focus of the most intense power-struggles. But the vehemence of
the traditional elite's opposition to Aristide was also rooted in his
previous association with a popular challenge to their privileges—the call
for a redistribution of wealth in favor of the country's poor.

The Republican Party establishment likewise remained bitterly hostile to
Aristide. It considered his restoration to be one of Clinton's "crimes" and
held Haiti up as the number one exhibit in its campaign against the
so-called folly of US-led "nation-building." Aristide's promotion of warm
bilateral relations with Cuba and subsequently the Venezuelan government of
Hugo Chavez, also incensed the Republican right, as well as Florida's
anti-Castro Cuban exile community, which has come to exert such a
disproportionate influence in the formulation of US government policy
toward Latin America and the Caribbean basin.

The Clinton administration responded to Lavalas' sweep of the May 2000
elections by once again trying to force Aristide to include representatives
of the traditional elite in the government, so as to make it even more
subservient to Washington. Some relatively minor violations of democratic
procedure were declared gross electoral fraud and steps taken to block
hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and aid to Haiti.

Bolstered by this move and by Bush's theft of the 2000 elections, Haiti's
right-wing opposition forces—with political and financial backing from the
International Republican Institute—tried to take the offensive. Soon after
Bush came to power they initiated a campaign to unseat Haiti's newly
elected president, going so far as to designate their own "president" of
Haiti, as part of a scheme to win international recognition for a parallel
government.

But to their dismay, the expected support from Washington didn't
materialize. Bush administration officials doubted that opposition had
sufficient popular support to topple Aristide, an assessment confirmed by
the opposition's decision not to stand a candidate against him in the 2000
elections. More importantly, Washington had other more pressing concerns:
first among them, its plans to invade Iraq and the need to fabricate a
suitable pretext.

The Bush administration, therefore, chose to contract out the task of
regime change in Haiti to US-dominated regional bodies such as the OAS
(Organization of American States) and Caricom (the Caribbean Community). To
tie Aristide's hands and push him further right, aid to Haiti was tied to
his ceding opposition leaders key positions in the government. Aristide
repeatedly bowed before the OAS's demands. For example, he quickly agreed
to annul the contested election of nine Lavalas senators. But the
right-wing opposition refused these concessions and the OAS responded by
demanding that Aristide do more to facilitate a "power-sharing" agreement.

The toppling of Aristide and the US occupation of Haiti

By the end of 2003, the Aristide government was mired in corruption and
presiding over a deepening economic and social crisis—a crisis exacerbated
by the cut-off of foreign aid and for which it had no solution except state
repression and the mobilization of lumpen-criminal elements based in the
slums of Port-au-Prince.

Emboldened by Aristide's mounting unpopularity and the rallying to its side
of sections of the professional middle class that had previously supported
the government, Haiti's traditional business and political elite launched a
new drive to bring down the government. Although claiming majority support,
they refused to cooperate in the organization of new legislative elections
and instead mounted a destabilization campaign aimed at pressuring the Bush
administration to intervene.

Initially, the Bush administration resisted the opposition's appeals for it
to invade Haiti and maintained the previous policy of pressing for a
power-sharing agreement. Not only were US military forces stretched thin
due to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the administration was
increasingly under threat from the unravelling of the lies it used to
justify the Iraq war and by mounting economic problems.

But whilst it viewed the Haitian crisis as an unwanted distraction, the
Bush administration could not ignore the political turmoil that its
longstanding campaign to subvert Aristide's government and restore the
unfettered domination of its Haitian clients had produced in the
island-republic.

Two weeks after Defence Secretary Rumsfeld declared that there were no
plans to deploy US troops to Haiti, Bush ordered the third US military
occupation of the country in the past century.

Why this reversal?

The administration feared chaos in Haiti could lead to a mass exodus of
impoverished and terror-stricken Haitians that would destabilize the
Caribbean region as a whole. Their first concern was the impact a refugee
exodus would have on Florida, a key battleground in the coming presidential
elections. But Washington also feared a further shock to the Dominican
Republic. An important site of US assembly operations, the Dominican
Republic has been rocked over the past year by an economic crisis,
including the failure of the country's third largest bank, and mounting
social struggles.

An even more important reason to dispatch US troops to Haiti was to ensure
that the anti-Aristide coup gave rise to a government tailored to
Washington's specifications.

The Bush administration's readiness to use a rebel force led by thugs of
previous dictatorial regimes to oust Aristide's government was causing
considerable international dismay and further undermining the Bush
administration's claims to be acting on the world arena, and especially in
Iraq, as a force for democracy. By dispatching US troops to Haiti when the
rebels were at the gates of Port au Prince, but after Aristide had been
hustled from the country, the Bush administration could claim to be
overseeing a constitutional handover of power. Moreover, Washington wanted
to ensure that the rebels did not unleash a reign of terror so horrific as
to fatally undermine the new regime or at the very least strip it any
international legitimacy. In pressing for Aristide to quit Haiti, US
diplomatic and military personnel themselves repeatedly invoked the threat
of a rebel bloodbath.

A further reason for the dispatch of US troops was the need to reassert US
predominance in the Caribbean, if only to calm criticism from within the US
foreign-policy establishment. Alarm bells had been set off in many a
Washington think tank and New York editorial office when the French
government took the initiative in demanding that Aristide resign and
announced its readiness to deploy French troops once he was forced from
office. The French soon made clear that their aim was to assist and placate
Washington, not cut across US interests. Nevertheless, there was pointed
commentary in leading papers and journals that the Bush administration was
failing to give proper attention to minding the US's traditional "backyard."

Last but not least, the US military intervention in Haiti must be seen
within the context of growing concern in Washington over the growth of
opposition to Wall Street and to IMF-imposed "liberalization" across Latin
America. Last week, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services
Committee, General James T. Hill, the head of the US military's Southern
Command, observed: "The security picture in Latin America and the Caribbean
has grown more complex over the past year. ... Some leaders in the region
are tapping into deep-seated frustrations over the failure of democratic
reforms to deliver expected goods and services. By tapping into these
frustrations, which run concurrently with frustrations caused by social and
economic inequality, the leaders are at the same time able to reinforce
their radical positions by inflaming anti-US sentiment."

There is a now a debate in Washington over the objectives and duration of
the current US military occupation of Haiti. The Bush administration is
eager to contract out the job of propping up the new pro-US government, and
may well be willing—now that international attention has been turned
elsewhere—to see the rebels incorporated into Haiti's security forces.

However, the nature of imperialist oppression is that it repeatedly
produces "failed states" to which US troops must be dispatched to ensure US
economic and geo-political domination and the perpetuation of a grossly
unjust and outmoded social order.

.