22085: Esser: United States has a hand in Haiti's trouble (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

Columbia Daily Tribune [Missouri]
http://www.columbiatribune.com

first Published Tuesday, March 23, 2004

Commentary

United States has a hand in Haiti’s trouble
By VALERIE KAUSSEN and FLORE ZEPHIR


National Public Radio’s Diane Rehm recently said Jean-Bertrand
Aristide "resigned and fled" Haiti in the face of escalating rebel
violence around that nation’s capital, Port-au-Prince. She echoes
what the mainstream press has repeated daily since Feb. 29: Aristide,
despite his previous insistence to the contrary, had decided of "his
own free will" to step down to avoid more bloodshed. Even if Aristide
was not literally "kidnapped," it is clear by all accounts that U.S.
representatives in Haiti made him resign by their refusal to protect
the president or his family and aides.

Secretary of State Colin Powell and various representatives of the
U.S. government deny the allegations but also admit that when
Aristide’s people asked whether U.S. military personnel would protect
the presidential palace, their answer was "no." On Feb. 28, Aristide
and his family were facing death at the hands of the armed rebel
insurgent army. Thus, it is hard to fathom that he willingly "fled"
the country. However, the Bush administration insists Aristide left
voluntarily, contending that any opinion to the contrary amounts to
"conspiracy theory."

Scott McClellan, speaking for the White House, smugly adds,
"Conspiracy theories like that do nothing to help the Haitian people
realize the future that they aspire to." According to this logic,
what is past is past, including the murders and human-rights abuses
perpetrated by those who now are putatively leading the Haitian
people toward their brighter future.

Louis Jodel Chamblain and Jean Tatun are known leaders of the
notorious paramilitary organization known as FRAPH - in French, "to
hit" - which is responsible for thousands of deaths during the
1991-94 coup period. Having been sentenced to life in prison,
Chamblain, before his triumphant return to Haiti a few weeks ago, had
been in exile in the Dominican Republic. Tatun escaped from prison in
2002 while serving a life sentence. Another leader of the group, Guy
Philippe, trained by U.S. special forces in Ecuador, is a former
police chief found responsible for numerous assassinations and an
attempted coup in 2001.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media’s suggestion that the insurgency is
the work of a ragtag militia toting weapons supplied to them by
Aristide is highly misleading. The gang leaders who turned on
Aristide dropped out of the picture rather precipitously. Two weeks
before Port-au-Prince fell, Chamblain and Tatun crossed the border
from the Dominican Republic with a trained commando unit and an
arsenal of sophisticated weaponry: M-16s, M-60s and rocket-propelled
grenade launchers. It is the contention of many Haiti observers,
including Ira Kurzban, general counsel to the Haitian government in
the United States, that these weapons more likely originated in the
Dominican Republic.

A November 2002 Miami Herald article said the United States had
pledged to donate 20,000 M-16 assault rifles to the Dominican army,
an organization that, along with the CIA, has well-known ties to
Haiti’s various dictatorships and paramilitary organizations.

Haiti is struggling to shake off a 200-year history of illegal
seizures of power, including assassinations and military coups, often
backed by the major powers. As historian and policy analyst Michael
Clark has written in an article on the formation of the Haitian
state, "States don’t have international relations; they are
international relations," i.e., states are formed through a dynamic
struggle in an international sphere. Haitian struggles for democracy
have always been shaped by U.S. foreign and domestic needs. Despite
Haiti’s independence from France in 1804 after the only successful
slave revolt in history, the United States refused to recognize its
national status until after the Civil War.

In the 20th century, U.S. involvement in Haiti included a 19-year
military occupation starting in 1915 and the support of the
decades-long Duvalier family dictatorship. U.S. Cold War foreign
policy supported dictators such as Duvalier who were committed to the
anti-communist cause. Financial support from the United States poured
into Haiti during this period despite the fact that Duvalier was
responsible for thousands of deaths and human-rights abuses.

In 1986, a popular democratic movement finally chased the younger
Duvalier, Baby Doc, from power, and the long, slow process of
building a democracy in Haiti began.

In 1990, Aristide became the first democratically elected president
in the nation’s history. He was deposed in a military coup nine
months later. In 2000, he was again elected president. But Aristide
was not the Bush administration’s first choice for Haiti’s leader.
The United States spearheaded a campaign to hold up all foreign aid
to Haiti until the dispute was resolved. It wasn’t resolved, partly
because of Aristide’s mishandling of the situation. Nonetheless, the
United States and Western Europe left Haitians alone to duke it out
in a country with upward of 80 percent unemployment, no judicial or
security system to speak of and opposition financed by the United
States but without much real popular support in Haiti.

The country has been in a free fall for the past decade, inevitably
leading to the crisis we are witnessing today. When Aristide lost
control to insurgent rebels, many of whom were either members of the
death squads that operated during his first exile or associated with
coups in the past five years, the Bush administration saw an
opportunity to install a Haitian government more amenable to its
economic needs.

The United States publicly has demonstrated its support of one of
Haiti’s most destructive traditions: violent seizure of power.

If the truth of U.S. foreign policy matched the rhetoric, the Bush
administration would have protected Aristide and allowed him to
finish out his term, a move that effectively would have required the
opposition to agree to the power-sharing plan outlined by members of
the Caribbean Community organization. Aristide signed the agreement,
though it diminished his powers considerably. The opposition,
confident of U.S. support, knew it just had to wait for history to
repeat itself. Just as Bush senior had supported the coup d’état that
deposed Aristide in 1991, so "Baby Bush" would follow suit.
Meanwhile, the Haitian people witness the hypocrisy of "democracy" as
it is pursued in U.S. foreign interventions.


• Valerie Kaussen and Flore Zephir are University of Missouri
professors of French language and literature. Kaussen is a member of
UMC Faculty, Students and Staff Concerned About Democracy and Public
Knowledge.
.