21480: Esser: Haiti Politics Come Stateside (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

Africana
http://www.africana.com

April 21, 2004

Haiti Politics Come Stateside

Aristide’s controversial exile has reinvigorated the status of Haiti
and its deposed leader as a favored leftist cause.

By Natalie Hopkinson

Only a handful of people can say for sure whether Haitian President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide was jacked up or “escorted” out of his realm
via U.S. military motorcade a few weeks ago, but that hasn’t stopped
knees from jerking on both sides. To paraphrase our Dubya, it seems
you’re either for Aristide or you’re against him. The former Catholic
priest is the kind of populist lightening rod who evokes nothing in
between. It's too bad the reality is so much messier and more human
than that.

"Colin Powell has allowed himself to be pimped."— Marx Aristide

At a forum last week at which l’affaire Aristide was discussed by a
standing-room only panel of activists, attorneys and economists in
Washington, it was clear that Aristide’s controversial exile has
reinvigorated the status of Haiti and its deposed leader as a favored
leftist cause.

Inside the United Nations Conference Center where the TransAfrica
Forum-affiliated Justice For Haiti Initiative held the forum, a
scruffy vendor stood at the entrance peddling classic revolutionary
texts along with crisp copies of The Militant. A gigantic poster
board advised passersby to CANCEL HAITI’S DEBTS. A deluge of neon
fliers urged the multiculti crowd to save or march against something
or other.

Sporting fresh sunburns from their return three days before from a
10-day fact-finding mission to Haiti sponsored by the suburban
Maryland nonprofit Quixote Center, several panelists painted a
harrowing picture of lawlessness and chaos on the island. “What we
saw in Haiti is a campaign of terror,” said Melinda Miles, an
American activist who at the time of the February, 29 coup was
working in a rural Haiti on literacy and reforestation projects.

After the coup, Miles recounted hearing names broadcast on the radio
to report to police headquarters. Soldiers snatching people covered
in black cloths in the middle of the night. Through interviews with
witnesses, she learned details about a massacre in one Port-au-Prince
neighborhood which left 78 dead. These observations pointedly
included very few details about the atmosphere preceding Aristide’s
ouster — the thousands who rallied, the disillusionment of some
former supporters, the desperation among average people — but focused
on the confusion and panic that have settled in since. Miles
described U.S. Marine helicopters flying low over neighborhoods “to
scare people….They were going into houses, targeting the poor.”
Several panelists repeatedly reminded the audience that the newly
installed interim Haitian Prime Minister Gerard Latortue was whisked
away from his home in — insert eye rolls here — manicured Boca Raton.
“We were outraged at the arrogance,” Miles said.

When panelist Marx Aristide (no relation), a Haitian-born research
economist suggested that the U.S.-Haiti relations had been strained
in part because of its exchanges with Cuba to train Haitian doctors,
a few audience members visibly bristled at the mention of another
Caribbean maverick and leftist icon. “That’s it,” a 20-ish
bespectacled young man in the audience. “That’s why!” Noting that
Secretary of State Colin Powell had weeks earlier expressed support
for Haiti in media reports, the economist Aristide concluded that
Powell “has allowed himself to be pimped,” he said. “I think there
was some sincerity, but somehow there are some hawks in the
Administration who just had enough of Aristide and wanted him out.
Basically Powell is the water carrier for this policy.”

There was little talk that veered from this Aristide, Man of the
People narrative, although support for him, while loud and forceful
from the black Washington political establishment, is not universal.
The current tepid response from Haitian Americans was markedly
different from the near-universal outrage of the community when
Aristide was first tossed from power in 1991, the economist Aristide
acknowledged. “The community is more divided this time,” he said.

Instead of examining the reasons why, he and other panelists aimed
their fire for the bigger, juicier target. “We cannot be sucked into
a debate about [Aristide’s] policies,” he thundered. “It cannot be
tolerated that a president of a country is removed.” Still, those
Aristide policies helped contribute to the uprising that likely would
have left the Haitian president dead or deposed even without the U.S.
interference. (Although as Aristide’s attorney Brian Concannon
reported from the panel, there is evidence that the U.S. may have
helped to fan dissent by allowing rebel leaders to train openly in
the Dominican Republic and funneling $20,000 worth of U.S. firearms
to the rebels via the Dominican Republic.)

The panel was asked whether there might be more support from abroad
if not for the role of chimere in crushing peaceful dissent from
Haitian students. Several Aristide critics have challenged his moral
standing because of the presence of the chimere or youth gangs armed
to counter militant insurgency. “Chimere” has become shorthand for
all manner of Haitian thuggery, but mostly as an invective lobbed at
Aristide, said activist Jacob Kurtzer, fresh from the Quixote
fact-finding mission. “We kept hearing ‘ chimere chimere,’ All of a
sudden, this word became so loaded. It’s used to…to….to malign him,”
an indignant Miles added.

“There were gangs acting in their own interest,” Kurtzer concluded.
Aristide’s attorney brushed off the student uprisings, claiming that
the movement had crested by December. “They weren’t in favor of
violent regime change,” Concannon said. “They dropped out. They were
concerned with getting back to school.”

Kurtzer’s comments were among the most tempered of the panel, which
may have something to do with his day job as a staff assistant in the
office of U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler — a Democrat who happens to
represent the good people of Boca Raton. (Kurtzer said he was not
expressing Wexler’s views.) During interviews with Haitians, Kurtzer
said he encountered widespread dissatisfaction with Aristide’s
administration — but even more outrage that the U.S. stripped them of
the opportunity to evict Aristide legitimately.

For all of the class warfare and posturing that took place at the
Washington panel, Kurtzer said the people who were able to meet with
the Quixote delegation were not necessarily the run-of-the-mill
Haitians. Speaking in an interview following the panel, Kurtzer
shrugged: “Everyone we spoke to had an agenda.”


About the Author:
Natalie Hopkinson is a staff writer for the Washington Post.
.