21979: Esser: The Invasion of Haiti - Anthony Fenton interviews Stan Goff (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

ZNet | Haiti
http://www.zmag.org

May 19, 2004

The Invasion of Haiti
Anthony Fenton interviews Stan Goff

by Stan Goff and Anthony Fenton; May 19, 2004

In late March, the International Action Centre
[http://www.iacenter.org] organized a delegation to the Dominican
Republic to investigate the US role on the February 29th, 2004 coup
that overthrew democratically elected President Jean Bertrand
Aristide and the Lavalas government. The Haitian "rebels" are known
to have trained and in and entered Haiti from the neighbouring
Dominican Republic. 

Retired US Army Master Sergeant and author of Hideous Dream and Full
Spectrum Disorder, was one of the investigators.

Fenton: What kind of background should one be familiar with when
undertaking this type of investigation?

Goff: There's been a longstanding relationship between the Dominican
military and the old military apparatus that developed after Papa Doc
had his rapprochment with the Americans.

A lot of people think that Papa Doc was vaulted into power by the
Americans, but actually, the opposite was true. The ideology of Papa
Doc was one that grew out of a very xenophobic and nationalistic
resistance against the Americans, and they in fact plotted a coup
against him early on. There were two factions of the ruling class:
one was was very much based on the old share-cropping land system and
then there were the up and coming compradore class that were much
more international and cosmopolitan in their outlook and they were
the ones that were gaining the most from the military occupation -
the 19 year military occupation from right after World War I, all the
way up until the mid-30s, by the United States.

For 19 years the US Marines basically ran Haiti directly, and Papa
Doc was vaulted into power in reaction  to that because the
Capitalist form of agriculture that was brought into Haiti was a real
threat to this land tendency system, this share cropping system. This
is really the social base of Papa Doc's movement was this landed
class, the big land owners. One of the origins of the tonton macoutes
was that this was a militia that he used to protect himself from an
army that was still in many ways loyal to this competitor class, the
compradors, and were politically unreliable until Papa Doc had time
to affect his own transformation  in the military.

This military that developed under Papa Doc had a relationship with
the Dominican military. In fact , they sort of existed with one
another as their raison d'etre. They both collaborated in a lot of
ways: they collaborated in criminal enterprises, they collaborated in
security issues, they collaborated politically, because both of them
were sort of the armed enforcement wing of their respective states,
and had a direct interest in stability on both sides of the border,
and this relationship has lasted. The Dominicans themselves, the
dominant Dominican elites, were not at all happy about Aristide, just
as many members of the Dominican military were unhappy about Aristide
dissolving the military {Aristide dissolved the military when he came
back the first time}.

Fenton: So when it comes to the recent activities, was this just a
matter of friend helping friends?

The question became: how did these guys - especially people like
[Louis] Jodel Chamblain, who was probably the tactical mastermind of
this whole thing, and Guy Philippe: how did these guys manage to hang
around in the Dominican Republic for ten years with Chamblain already
having been sentenced to two life sentences for the murder of Guy
Malory and Anoitne Izmewry? And he was convicted there should have
been no problem with an extradition order. Instead, they gave him
asylum over there.

We spoke to  customs agents who facilitated their passage back and
forth across the border numerous times and showed us where the
apartment was where Jodel Chamblain stayed |he had a girlfriend
right there in Santo Domingo.

Then we spoke with a general who had just retired; one who's sort of
dissident general, a Dominican general. His name is Nobel Espejo. He
had spent some time with the Venezuelans in the past as a part of his
professional development. He was very interested in Venezuela, he was
very interested in how the military has played a socially
transformative role, and how it has effectively used civil military
operations to increase the identification and contact with just plain
people, as opposed to being something that's out there over and above
the people; it's something that's more "of"  the people. He's very
interested in that, and very interested in progressive change in the
Dominican Republic. I spoke with him for about half an hour.

Fenton: What were you able to glean from General Espejo?

Our question was: how did these guys get the equipment and training
that they needed to come back across the border?  Because, you know,
Haitians that are doing this in the Dominican Republic, they're going
to stand out; they're going to stick out like a sore thumb, because
the DR is not a place where people just run around with firearms. A
lot of people have firearms but it's very controlled and its normally
police or militaryâ€|Haitians stand out also because they're watched
very closely, and its easy to identify they're accent.

It turns out that according to Espejo, that a military base not too
far from the border, called Constanza, was normally home to a
battalion of what they call Castasdores, which is like "Rangers" or
"Shock Infantry".  One battalion was stationed here. At one point in
the year 2000, they amplified that; they transferred two additional
battalions of Castadores over to Constanza. They did this because the
people of the town of Constanza already knew the people that were
assigned there. Any new faces would stand out but by bringing in two
additional battalions from, other bases into Constanza, they
overwhelmed the community with a bunch of new soldiers and mixed in
with those soldiers were the Haitian paramilitaries, who were wearing
Dominican uniforms, integrated into the Dominican units, and
receiving training with the Dominican military.

Fenton: This began happening back in 2000? Did anyone else know about
this?

There was a military attaché at the US Embassy at the time, and this
military attaché was upset about this. Not upset that it happened,
but upset that nobody told him about it |there's a sort of colonial
mentality up there at the US Embassy in Santo Domingo. He attempted
to go down there and see what was going on and he was turned away
from Constanza; he became enraged and tried to bully his way in.
Apparently, someone from the Dominican general's staff, according to
Espejo, contacted the US Embassy. It's very, very much a violation
of  protocol for a military staff officer in a host nation military,
to go directly to the Chief of Station. They always go through their
liaison, which is the military attaché, or the military attaché at
the US Embassy.

It would be a complete violation of protocol for them to go over
their head, but in this case that's exactly what they did; they went
around this guy to an interim ambassador, and this guy was fired.
Obviously this was something that was very politically sensitive at
the time, but it sort of confirmed everything we'd been hearing about
the Haitians receiving training while they were there. I think that
pretty well married with all of the other things we were hearing.

Fenton: What about the issue of American weapons finding their way
into these Haitian paramilitaries hands?

This is far too detailed and tedious to go into here, but there's a
specific linear practice for the importation of American weapons into
the Dominican Republic, that are then passed on to the Dominican
military. All arms procurement in the Dominican Republic is done by a
private company and then all weapons that are military in character
can only be resold to the Dominican military, they're not allowed to
be resold in the private market. Shotguns and hunting rifles, etc.
that's fine, but assault weapons no. The biggest arms procurement
company [Ejelio Peralte] in the Dominican Republic received a
consignment of 20,000 weapons, Espejo told us that there were 20,000
M16s that never arrived at the Dominican military, so they did come
in and they did go to this company, but all of the sudden there's
this disconnect. Well, where did they go? I've been told on the
civilian market; that would be a violation of Dominican law. We
strongly suspect that a lot of those ended up in the hands of
Haitians, and may very well be in Haiti right now.

Fenton: So these "rebels" were definitely trained and probably armed
by the United States and the Dominican Republic, dating back to 2000.
What are these "rebels" doing now and where does this information fit
in to the context of the recent coup?

 From all the reports we're hearing right now, these FRAPH
paramilitaries are now basically running around doing anything they
want, anywhere they want, in Haiti. The same people who were guilty
of all these crimes against humanity from 1991-1994; these right-wing
paramilitary death squads are now traveling around, armed, and not
being interfered with in the least by French, Canadian, or American
troops, and basically taking over town after town after town, and
basically imposing themselves as local governments. In fact there's a
contingent of French foreign legions in Cap Haitien right now. The
last we heard Chamblain was with all his guys was drinking beer in
the Mt. Jolie hotel, with their uniforms on. That's kind of the
situation.

This is a situation that nobody really understands right now. It was
a coup that had been planned and facilitated for the last four and a
half years by the United States government, clearly, and explicity,
and demonstrably done by the US government, if you look at the
millions of dollars that's been funneled by the NED and IRI to this
fake political opposition that created the "political crisis". It was
the United States that also compounded that with an economic crisis
by withholding almost a half a billion dollars in loans and
entitlements to the Haitian government in order to make sure that
Aristide's government could not deliver on any of its political
promises.

And then [they] followed up by a security crisis that was created by
this invasion of Haitian paramilitaries coming directly from the
Dominican Republic, and with the knowledge and probably the
complicity of the US Embassy there as well. Because it's important to
understand that the Dominican government does not do anything
militarily that the United States does not allow it to do.   The
Dominican government is a colonial government, and nothing else,
because they would suffer incredible and punitive economic sanctions
of they bucked the Washington Consensus. This is a context that a lot
of people don't understand when looking at what's going on over
there. None of this could have happened without the complicity of the
United States, without the facilitation by the United States, without
the funding  and support of the United States, and the icing on the
cake is the fact that at the last minute, American military
personnel, with weapons, enter the Presidential residence and tell
the President - the democraticaslly elected President of Haiti,
elected with 92% of the vote, that he has to leave. Not that 'we're
here top proptect you because there's paramilitaries marching here
coming to get you right now', but that 'the paramilitaries are on
their way: they're going to kill you and your family. Your option is
to stay here and die, or to leave with us on an airplane, to god
knows where'. For Colin Powell and some of the other Administration
Servants to sit there and say that this constitutes a voluntary
departure or not coercionâ€|.it defies belief. That's sort of the
nutshell version.

Fenton: Describe the current  political climate

Most of the country has just been abandoned to the Macoutes. This is
one anecdote of hundreds. Completely off of everybody's radar screen
there's an incredible atrocity that is taking place in Haiti right
now. People are being killed every single day, and not just a few.
This is really very similar to what happened under the
Cedras-Francois de facto government, except now thaere's not even any
direction to it, it's all over the place. There's no government there
at all, Latortue is a buffoon, he has no control over anything, and
in fact he is caught in a very unenviable position right now of being
caught between these two ruling facitons. These two ruling factions
will draw blood against one another in the not too distant future.
People are going to scratch their heads and say "oh, those crazy
Haitians, what are they doing?"

It's the fact [these factions] have antithetical economic interests.
When push comes to shove - The thing that put them together, this
"coalition" that was developed and supported by the United States
Embassy down there, was the intense fear of Haitian popular
sovereignty, a fear of the Haitian masses; not because Aristide did
establish that kind of popular sovereignty, but the fact that he had
the capacity to. The fact that Aristide had established a rapport
with the Haitian masses, with the poor, the peasants, the slum
dwellers. That's what made him a threat, and that's what made
Aristide, regardless of how many times he capitulated to the demands
of the Washington Consensus, the IMF, or anyone else, he would never
outlive that because he still maintained the capacity to rise these
masses. It was the fact that he could do this, that he couldn't
escape. Aristide's own government offered elections to the
opposition, which I think was a craven act of cowardice. Still, they
offered, and the reason the opposition rejected that, even as the US
press was reporting that Aristide was so unpopular, is because they
knew damn well that Aristide would have won in a landslide, again.
.