21938: Esser: OPTION ZERO IN HAITI - Part III (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

New Left Review 27, May-June 2004
http://www.newleftreview.net

for the article including links: www.newleftreview.net/NLR26102.shtml
Download as pdf: www.newleftreview.net/PDFarticles/NLR26102.pdf

[continued from Part II]


Demanding reimbursement

In April 2003, the desperately cash-starved Aristide attempted to
rally his countrymen with the demand that, in the bicentennial year
of Haitian independence, France should reimburse the 90 million
francs that Haiti had been forced to pay between 1825 and 1947 as
compensation for the loss of colonial property. Assuming a low return
of 5 per cent in annual interest, he calculated that the sum was now
equivalent to 21 billion American dollars. As Michael Dash has noted,
‘Aristide got a lot of support for this demand both inside and
outside of Haiti’, particularly in Africa and Latin America. [48]
Unlike most slavery-related reparation demands currently in the air,
the Haitian claim refers to a precise and documented sum of money
extracted in hard currency by the colonial power. Though quick to
pour scorn on the claim, the French government was clearly rattled,
with Chirac soon resorting to threat: ‘Before bringing up claims of
this nature’, he warned in the summer of 2003, ‘I cannot stress
enough to the authorities of Haiti the need to be very vigilant
about—how should I put it—the nature of their actions and their
regime’. [49]

The commission dispatched by the Foreign Ministry to devise a more
‘philosophical’ defence of the French position duly concluded that,
while Haiti had indeed been ‘impeccable’ in its own payments to
France, there was no ‘legal case’ for the reimbursement claim. To
general applause from the French media, the Commission’s Report
described the fl’s demand as ‘aggressive propaganda’ based on
‘hallucinatory accounting’. It noted with some satisfaction that ‘no
member of the democratic opposition to Aristide takes the
reimbursement claims seriously’. It recognized, however, that the
opposition and paramilitaries lacked sufficient ‘mobilizing force’ to
see the job through; and that the Americans, though hamstrung by
domestic considerations (‘boat-people, Black Caucus’), were looking
for ‘an honourable way out of the crisis’. It stressed that a ‘more
affirmative’ French engagement in Haiti would not be carried out
against the interests of the us, but in a spirit of ‘harmony and
farsightedness’. At stake was an opportunity for ‘audacious and
resolute coordination’. [50]

Without such intervention, as the Report acknowledged, the Lavalas
government could not have been dislodged. The stumbling block was
Aristide’s continuing popularity. The battering of the last fifteen
years had taken its toll on his support, but as the most detailed—and
by no means uncritical—study of the recent period concludes, there
was no doubt that Aristide still enjoyed ‘undisputed and overwhelming
popularity’ among the mass of Haitians. [51] The Gallup poll
conducted in October 2000 rated the fl as thirteen times more popular
than its closest competitor, and over half of those polled identified
Aristide as their most trusted leader. [52] According to the latest
reliable measure, a further Gallup poll conducted in March 2002, the
fl remained four times more popular than all its significant
competitors combined. [53]

Return of the old guard

The real goals of the occupation that began on 29 February 2004 are
perfectly apparent: to silence or obliterate all that remains of this
support. During the first week of their deployment, the
Franco-American invasion force operated almost exclusively in
pro-Aristide neighbourhoods and killed only fl supporters. Their new
puppet Prime Minister Gérard Latortue (a 69-year-old ex-un factotum
and Miami talk-show host) publicly embraced the convicted
mass-murderer Tatoune and his ex-army rebels in Gonaïves as ‘freedom
fighters’—a move interpreted by the New York Times as ‘sending a
clear message of stability’. [54] Latortue’s ‘national unity
government’ is composed exclusively of members of the traditional
elite. On March 14, the Haitian police began arresting Lavalas
militants on suspicion of unidentified crimes, but decided not to
pursue the rebel death squad leaders, even those already convicted of
atrocities. The new National Police chief, Léon Charles, explained
that while ‘there’s a lot of Aristide supporters’ to be arrested, the
government ‘still has to make a decision about the rebels—that’s over
my head’. [55] On March 22 Latortue’s new Interior Minister, the
ex-General Hérard Abraham, announced plans to integrate the
paramilitaries into the police force and confirmed his intention to
re-establish the army which Aristide abolished in 1995. [56] In late
March, anti-Aristide death squads continued to control the country’s
second largest city, Cap Haïtien, where ‘dozens of bullet-riddled
bodies have been brought to the morgue over the last month’. [57]
While scores of other Aristide supporters were being killed up and
down the country, the us Coast Guard applied Bush’s order, in keeping
with usual us practice (but in flagrant violation of international
law), to refuse all Haitian applications for asylum in advance.

The Security Council resolution that mandated the invading
Franco-American troops as a un Multinational Interim Force on 29
February 2004 called for a follow-up un Stabilization Force to take
over three months later. In March, Kofi Annan duly sent his Special
Advisor, John Reginald Dumas, and Hocine Medili, to assess the
situation on the ground. The ‘Report of the Secretary-General on
Haiti’, published in April, took the obfuscatory euphemism of un
discourse to new levels. ‘It is unfortunate that, in its bicentennial
year, Haiti had to call again on the international community to help
it overcome a serious political and security situation’, wrote Annan.
The circumstances of the elected President’s overthrow were
decorously skirted, the Secretary-General merely noting that: ‘Early
on February 29, Mr Aristide left the country’. The toppling of the
constitutional government was deemed to offer Haitians the
opportunity of ‘a peaceful, democratic and locally-owned future’. [58]

Admittedly, the realization of that future was to be somewhat
protracted. Annan noted that, while the local political parties,
including the Fanmi Lavalas and Convergence Démocratique, all hoped
for general elections before the end of 2004, ‘members of civil
society and the international community were of the view that more
time would be needed’. Moreover, democracy—when the time was
right—should begin at parish-pump levels, since ‘Haiti’s political
life has too often been dominated by highly personalized presidential
elections, fostering inflammatory rhetoric and distracting the
population’s attention from local challenges’. On April 29, the
Security Council voted unanimously to send an 8,300-strong un
Stabilization Force from 1 June, under the leadership of Lula’s
Brazil, to ‘foster democratic governance’ and, of course, ‘empower
the Haitian people’. Among the paragons of popular empowerment
dispatching troops to Haiti are Nepal, Angola, Benin and Pakistan.
[59] ‘We will stay until democracy is reinstated’, announced the
Chilean un ambassador, whose country had joined the initial invasion
force along with the us, France and Canada. The latter may soon be
coming under renewed pressure to prove its loyalty, since—what with
the Ivory Coast and Burundi—the un reports having difficulty in
mustering enough Francophone forces for all the missions in hand. As
un spokesman David Wimhurst confessed to the la Times: ‘There’s a
surge in peacekeeping, and there’s a squeeze on troops. We’re
concerned that it will be difficult for French-speaking countries to
step up to the plate.’ [60]

Exemplary Haiti

In 1804, the outcome of Haiti’s war of independence dealt an
unprecedented blow to the colonial order. The victory celebrated two
hundred years ago was to inspire generations of revolutionary leaders
all over Africa and the Americas. The triumph of neo-colonialism
achieved in February 2004 was clearly meant to ensure that Haiti will
never again furnish the ‘threat of a good example’. Reduced to
poverty and debt-dependence by reparation payments to its former
colonial master, the country was further brutalized by the dramatic
polarization of wealth and power imposed by its tiny ruling elite. By
the mid-80s, the brutal and corrupt Duvalier dictatorships ended by
provoking a mass protest movement too powerful for them to control.
When the Haitian elite lost confidence in Jean-Claude Duvalier’s
power to preserve the status quo, it initially sought merely to
replace his regime with another form of military rule. This solution
lasted from 1986 to 1990, but the army could only suppress the
growing movement by resorting to unacceptably public levels of
violence. Unrelenting repression brought Haiti to the brink of
revolution.

What began following the Lavalas election victory of 1990 was the
deployment of a partially new strategy for disarming this revolution,
at a moment when the Cold War no longer offered automatic
justification for the repression of mass movements by the
overwhelming use of force. Designed not simply to suppress the
popular movement but to discredit and destroy it beyond repair, the
key to this strategy was the implementation of economic measures
intended to intensify already crippling levels of mass
impoverishment, backed up by old-fashioned military repression and
propaganda designed to portray resistance to elite interests as
undemocratic and corrupt. The operation has been remarkably
successful—so successful that in 2004, with the enthusiastic backing
of the media, the un and the wider ‘international community’, it
resulted in the removal of a constitutionally elected government
whose leadership had always enjoyed the support of a large majority
of the population.

There is every reason to suspect that by the end of this year, many
hundreds of fl activists will have been killed. With them will die
the chances of rebuilding any inclusive popular movement for at least
another generation. The Lavalas leadership had many faults, and there
is much to learn from its defeat. But Lavalas was the only
organization of the last half-century to have successfully mobilized
the Haitian masses in a social and political challenge to their
intolerable situation, and it was removed from office through the
combined efforts of those who, for obvious reasons, feared and
opposed that challenge. If Lavalas also remains a bitterly divisive
force, this is largely because it was the only large-scale popular
movement ever to question the massive inequalities of power,
influence and wealth which have always divided Haitian society. That
Lavalas managed to do little to reduce them may say less about the
weakness of the movement than it does about the extraordinary
strength, today, of such inequalities.

1 May 2004

[1] I am very grateful to Paul Farmer, Brian Concannon, Randall
White, Charles Arthur, Dominique Esser, Richard Watts and Cécile
Winter for their help with various aspects of this article.

[2] Régis Debray, Rapport du comité indépendant de réflexion et de
propositions sur les relations franco-haïtiennes, January 2004, pp.
5, 53.

[3] un Security Council, Report of the Secretary-General on Haiti, 16
April 2004.

[4] See Patrick Sabatier, Libération, 31 December 2003 and 24 February
2004.

[5] Financial Times, 2 March 2004; International Herald Tribune, 4
March 2004; Sabatier, Libération, 1 March 2004; Elaine Sciolino, New
York Times, 3 March 2004.

[6] Debray, Rapport, pp. 6, 9.

[7] Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, London 1989, p.
258.

[8] Hallward, ‘Haitian Inspiration: Notes on the bicentenary of
Haiti’s independence’, Radical Philosophy 123, Jan–Feb 2004.

[9] Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: the Saint Domingue revolution
from below, Knoxville 1990, p. 249; World Bank, Haiti: The Challenges
of Poverty Reduction, August 1998, p. 4.

[10] Mark Danner, ‘Haiti on the Verge’, New York Review of Books, 4
November 1993.

[11] Aristide, Eyes of the Heart: Seeking a Path for the Poor in the
Age of Globalization, Monroe, me 2000.

[12] Wargny, Le Monde, 23 February 2004; and Haïti n’existe pas, Paris
2004.

[13] The elite, Brahimi explained, should ‘know two things: that
political changes are inevitable, but that, on the ideological,
economic front, they have the sympathy of Big Brother, capitalism’.
Cited in Haiti Briefing 25, September 1997.

[14] See Kim Ives in Haïti Progrès, 12 March 2003 and 27 November 2002.

[15] Oxfam, Trade Blues, May 2002.

[16] National Labor Committee, The us in Haiti: How to Get Rich on 11
Cents an Hour, New York 1996, and nlc, Why is Disney Lying?, New York
2004; see also Ray Laforest in Haïti Progrès,13 August 1997.

[17] Charles Arthur, Haiti in Focus, London 2002, p. 51.

[18] Economist Intelligence Unit, Haiti: Country Profile 2003, pp. 24,
19.

[19] eiu, Profile, p. 17.

[20] Lisa McGowan, Democracy Undermined, Economic Justice Denied:
Structural Adjustment and the Aid Juggernaut in Haiti, Washington, dc
1997.

[21] Aristide, Eyes of the Heart, pp. 31, 15.

[22] For a summary of these achievements, see in particular the Haiti
Action Committee’s 2003 pamphlet, Hidden from the Headlines: The us
War Against Haiti.

[23] Fatton, quoted in Marty Logan, ‘Class Hatred and the Hijacking
of Aristide’, Inter Press Service News Agency, 16 March 2004.

[24] David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour, and
National Independence in Haiti, New Brunswick, nj 1996.

[25] On Aristide’s early mix of revolutionary rhetoric and
constitutional practice see Mark Danner, ‘The Fall of the Prophet’,
New York Review of Books, 2 December 1993 and Alex Dupuy, Haiti in
the New World Order: The Limits of the Democratic Revolution,
Boulder, co 1997, pp. 128–9.

[26] Robert Fatton, Haiti’s Predatory Republic: The Unending
Transition to Democracy, Boulder, co 1997, pp. 86–7.

[27] Tracy Kidder, ‘Trials of Haiti’, The Nation, 27 October 2003.

[28] François, quoted in ‘Behind Aristide’s Fall’, Socialist Worker,
12 March 2004, p. 6.

[29] Arthur, Haiti in Focus, p. 60; cf. Paul Farmer, The Uses of
Haiti, Monroe, me 2003, pp. 113–4.

[30] Stan Goff, ‘A Brief Account of Haiti’, brc-news October 1999;
cf. Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier’s Memoir of the us Invasion of
Haiti, New York 2000.

[31] Wargny, ‘Haiti’s Last Chance’, Le Monde diplomatique, July 2000.

[32] Lak, ‘Poverty and pride in Port-au-Prince’, bbc Radio 4, 20 March
2004.

[33] Farmer, Uses of Haiti, pp. 348–75; Farmer, ‘Who Removed
Aristide?’, London Review of Books, 15 April 2004.

[34] See Béatrice Pouligny, Libération, 13 February 2001; Fatton,
Haiti’s Predatory Republic, pp. 144–7, 169 fn. 40.

[35] eiu,Country Report January 2004: Dominican Republic, Haiti, pp.
40–1.

[36] Established under the 1987 Constitution, the National Assembly
comprises an 83-seat Chamber of Deputies, directly elected from the
municipalities, and a 27-seat Senate, three senators representing
each of Haiti’s nine provinces.

[37] Dupuy, Haiti in the New World Order, p. 172.

[38] Between June 2000 and February 2004, the cd rejected each fl
offer of new elections right through to the final attempt at a
peaceful resolution to the conflict, a caricom-brokered proposal
approved by the oas in mid-February 2004, whereby Aristide would
accept one of his opponents as his prime minister, hold new
legislative elections and serve out the remainder of his term with
severely limited powers. Aristide accepted the deal immediately, as
did France and the us. The cd refused it just as immediately and then
somehow managed to ‘persuade’ its imperial patrons to follow suit,
leaving Aristide with a choice between exile or civil war.

[39] For 1991, see the influential contributions by New York Times
reporter Howard French, e.g. ‘Aristide’s Autocratic Ways Ended
Haiti’s Embrace of Democracy’, New York Times, 22 October 1991. In
many ways, French’s articles read like rough drafts for recent
attacks—such as the tirade by Andrew Gumbel: ‘The Little Priest Who
Became a Bloody Dictator Like the One He Once Despised’, Independent,
21 February 2004; Lyonel Trouillot, ‘In Haiti, All the Bridges Are
Burned’, New York Times, 26 February 2004; Peter Dailey, ‘Fall of the
House of Aristide’, New York Review of Books, 13 March 2003. Kim Ives
subjects this last article to a point-by-point rebuttal in Haïti
Progrès, 12 March 2003.

[40] Final Report of oas Mission in Haiti, 13 December 2000, p. 2. A
more substantial report by the International Coalition of Observers
likewise concluded that the 2000 elections were both ‘fair and
peaceful’: Melinda Miles and Moira Feeney, Elections 2000:
Participatory Democracy in Haiti, February 2001. Henry Carey, ‘Not
Perfect, But Improving’, Miami Herald, 12 June 2000.

[41] Haïti Progrès, 31 May 2000. In the North-East department, to
take one of the examples least favourable to Lavalas, a total of
132,613 votes were cast for two Senate seats. If all candidates’
votes were counted, 33,154 votes would be needed to win a seat on the
first round; with only the top four candidates’ counted, the fl
candidates—who won 32,969 and 30,736 votes respectively; their
closest rival polled less than 16,000—went through with comfortable
majorities. The head of the cep maintained that this method was in
keeping with past practice: Haïti Progrès, 28 June 2000; the point
was disputed by the us State Department and opponents of the fl:
James Morrell, ‘Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory’, Centre
for International Policy, August 2000.

[42] Anne Street, Haiti: A Nation in Crisis, Catholic Institute for
International Relations Briefing, London 2004, p. 4.

[43] Janice Stromsem and Joseph Trincellito, ‘Building the Haitian
National Police’, Haiti Papers 6, Washington, dc April 2003.

[44] Jean-Claude Jean and Marc Maesschalck, Transition politique en
Haïti: radiographie du pouvoir Lavalas, Paris 1999, pp. 104–11.

[45] In 2000, Amnesty reported that ‘a number of electoral
candidates, party members and their relatives were killed, most by
unidentified assailants’, among them the courageous left-wing radio
journalist Jean Dominique. There were also ‘several reports of
unlawful killings by police; most of the victims were criminal
suspects’. In 2001, another journalist, Brignol Lindor, was killed
‘by a mob which included members of a pro-fl organization’, and
Amnesty refers to ‘several killings of alleged criminal suspects by
police or crowds carrying out “popular justice”’, but identifies only
one such victim (Mackenson Fleurimon, who ‘on 11 October was
reportedly shot dead by the police in the Cité Soleil neighbourhood
of Port-au-Prince’). In 2002, ‘at least five people were reportedly
killed’ in confrontations between members of opposing parties, and
seven people (three of whom are identified as fl supporters) appear
to have been either executed or ‘disappeared’. Amnesty also refers to
two other killings in 2002: the shooting of Christophe Lozama, a
pro-fl justice of the peace, and the assassination of the bodyguard
protecting the widow of Jean Dominique. Pending publication of its
2004 report (which will cover 2003), an Amnesty briefing paper
released on 8 October 2003 refers to mounting violence in clashes
between fl opponents and supporters; it identifies two fl supporters
killed in political confrontations and refers to government claims
that four other fl supporters were killed in Cité Soleil. All reports
on www.amnesty.org. See also Arthur, Haiti in Focus, p. 25; Patrick
Bellegarde Smith, Haiti: The Breached Citadel, Boulder, co 1990, pp.
97–101.

[46] Washington Post, 2 February 2001.

[47] Fatton, Haiti’s Predatory Republic, pp. 184–5, 206–7.

[48] Quoted in Dionne Jackson Miller, ‘Aristide’s Call for
Reparations from France Unlikely to Die’, Inter Press Service News
Agency, 12 March 2004.

[49] Miami Herald, 18 December 2003; Heather Williams, ‘A Coup for
the Entente Cordiale! Why France Joined the us in Haiti’,
Counterpunch, 16 February 2004.

[50] Debray, Rapport, pp. 13, 11, 12, 52–4.

[51] Fatton, Haiti’s Predatory Republic, p. 182.

[52] In the October 2000 poll, Aristide’s closest rivals, Evans Paul
and Gérard Pierre-Charles, both disaffected members of the original
Lavalas coalition, scored only 3.8 and 2.1 per cent respectively; the
hapless Bazin, Aristide’s rival in 1990, scored less than 1 per cent.

[53] A brief exchange in early March on the bbc’s flagship news
programme illustrates how that support has generally been treated by
the world media. After a short interview with the now exiled
Aristide, in which he repeated his claim that he had been forced out
of office under us pressure, the programme anchor turned to bbc
correspondent Daniel Lak in Port-au-Prince and asked, in the
corporation’s characteristically even-handed way: ‘So it’s not
completely made up, Aristide does have people who support him, it’s
not just a handful of thugs who are paid by him?’ Lak replied: ‘Oh
absolutely. The people who support him are the poor of this country,
the vast majority. There are 8 million Haitians, and probably 95 per
cent of them are desperately poor . . . It’s the rich and the small
middle class who support Aristide’s opponents, and the poor who
generally support Aristide.’ What then about the conflicting
explanations of Aristide’s departure: was it effectively a coup, or a
voluntary resignation? ‘Is it possible to peer through and establish
any truth about this’, asked the anchor, ‘or is it just too
difficult, from where you’re standing?’ Lak’s answer speaks volumes:
‘I think it’s just too difficult, um . . . The two options are pretty
stark. But it’s clear that the Americans did want to see the back of
Mr Aristide’ (‘The World at One’, bbc Radio 4, 8 March 2004).

[54] New York Times, 21 March 2004.

[55] Michael Christie, ‘Haiti police begin rounding up Aristide
associates’, Reuters, 14 March 2004.

[56] Ibon Villelabeitia and Joseph Guyler Delva, ‘Haiti to integrate
rebels into police force’, Reuters, 23 March 2004.

[57] Paisley Dodds, ‘Cap-Haïtien scene’, Associated Press, 23 March
2004.

[58] unsc, ‘Report of the Secretary-General on Haiti’, 16 April 2004,
pp. 31, 3.

[59] Voting for the occupation force, in addition to the permanent
five: Algeria, Angola, Benin, Brazil, Chile, Germany, Pakistan,
Philippines, Romania and Spain.

[60] Los Angeles Times, 1 May 2004.
.