22421: This Week in Haiti 22:14 06/16/2004 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

"This Week in Haiti" is the English section of HAITI PROGRES
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                           HAITI PROGRES
              "Le journal qui offre une alternative"

                      * THIS WEEK IN HAITI *

                        June 16 - 22, 2004
                         Vol. 22, No. 14

ANOTHER FAILED WASHINGTON REGIME CHANGE:
HAITI'S CARICATURE OF DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE
by Jessica Leight

First of two parts

We present this week and next large extracts of an analysis by
Jessica Leight, a research fellow with the Washington, DC-based
Council on Hemispheric Affairs, that was issued June 15. It lays
out the farcical yet dangerous nature of the de facto Haitian
government, the criminal past of the formerly Dominican Republic-
based "rebels," and Washington's failed efforts to legitimize and
conceal its role in the Feb. 29 overthrow of President Jean-
Bertrand Aristide.

Kidnapping by Any Other Name. . .

On June 20, a U.N. peacekeeping force will take over day-to-day
command authority in a battered Haiti, which continues to limp
from crisis to crisis four months after February's abrupt and
violent "regime change." Yet ever since the sudden replacement of
former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in the early
morning hours of Feb. 29 and the simultaneous arrival of a
contingent of U.S. Marines in this war-torn country for the
second time in ten years, Western political leaders, veteran
journalists, and most members of Congress and opinion-makers in
Washington and across the hemisphere have demonstrated a notable
lack of curiosity about the real story behind how Aristide lost
his presidency, an event that there is good reason to believe
represented the thirty-third coup in Haiti's bitter history.
While the U.S.-backed politicians now running Haiti   a mix of
unsuitable technocrats like Prime Minister Gerard Latortue and
lethal ideologues like Minister of Justice Bernard Gousse
promise an era of disciplined, apolitical technocracy, they in
fact spend perhaps most of their time attempting to besmirch
Aristide...
Yet the situation changed on June 8, when the Organization of
American States   a normally rather moribund organization that
under outgoing Secretary-General Cesar Gaviria has become little
better than a regional policy-making appendage of the State
Department   approved a resolution calling for an investigation
into the circumstances of former President Aristide's departure.
This initiative was passed despite the Bush administration's
incessant admonitions that political recriminations should be
avoided in order to prioritize rebuilding Haiti's democratic
institutions, a declaration that blatantly ignores the fact that
it is exactly those institutions that the recent coup had helped
to destroy. Thus it seems that the last word about this year's
events in Haiti have yet to be written. On the contrary,
Washington's overweening role in the uprising that ousted
Aristide, as well as its obvious bias in favor of the Haitian
political opposition movements Democratic Convergence and Group
184 (which had long heatedly called for such an ouster) may yet
emerge as one of the more shocking examples of U.S. interference
in the internal politics of a hemispheric nation over the last
half-century.

Rebels With a Shady Past

Questions about the deplorable human rights record of the rebels
who helped overthrow Aristide, many of whom have been
enthusiastically embraced by the current government as "freedom
fighters," have been swept aside as unnecessary "dwelling on the
past," and there has been shockingly little investigation of
repeated reports of political murders and massacres of mainly
pro-Aristide militants and members of his Lavalas party under the
aegis of the present U.S.-installed government led by business
consultant and Boca Raton resident Latortue. At the same time, it
seemed that no representative of the international community,
save the CARICOM nations (led by Jamaica) and several African
nations led by South Africa, dared to suggest that the transfer
of power to a prime minister essentially handpicked by the U.S.
embassy and the State Department is a demonstrably less than
democratic process...

Aristide Cries Foul

Having found permanent asylum in South Africa after brief
sojourns in the Central African Republic and Jamaica   a trip
that engendered stern criticism from the U.S. and led to the new
Haitian government suspending relations with Kingston in a fit of
pique   deposed president Aristide continues to assert that U.S.
military personnel and embassy officials played an improper, if
not overtly coercive, role in his abrupt departure from Haiti in
the early hours of Feb. 29. Aristide has claimed that on that
morning he expected to be escorted either to the National Palace
or to the U.S. Embassy to meet with journalists following
discussions with U.S. Ambassador James Foley, who had become
notorious for his manipulative tactics towards the Haitian
president over the months preceding his ouster. Instead, he was
brought to the airport and herded aboard a U.S.-chartered
aircraft, allegedly without his knowledge or consent. The plane
was presumably reserved by the embassy hours, if not days, before
as part of the pre-planning to get Aristide out of the country on
the pretext that Washington could not ensure his safety.

Upon arriving at the airport, Aristide found himself surrounded
by U.S. soldiers and without his private security force,
contracted from an American company, which had been instructed to
withdraw by U.S. officials in no uncertain terms. Though the
former president admits that he did not physically resist
boarding the plane, the destination of which remained unknown to
him until he landed in Bangui, the capital of the Central African
Republic, he maintains that an overwhelming presence of armed
U.S. personnel amounted to a clear effort on the part of the Bush
administration to intimidate him into resignation and flight.
Aristide continues to assert that he would not have yielded his
office without a struggle had it not been for Washington's
plenary role in scripting what was to happen in Haiti on an
almost hourly basis. Most recently, he has filed lawsuits against
unnamed French and U.S. officials for "threats, death threats,
abduction and illegal detention."

U.S. Denies Aristide's Charges

The White House, needless to say, has scoffed at these
accusations, with an unnamed senior administration official
telling the press that "In his letter of resignation, Mr.
Aristide noted that his departure was based on a desire to avoid
bloodshed in Haiti . . .Continuing false claims about his
resignation and departure embolden the armed gangs that Aristide
himself armed and unleashed in Haiti." Needless to say, the State
Department has not commented on the subsequent statement by the
renowned Creole linguist [and the State Department's official
Creole translator- Ed.] that translated Aristide's statement,
suggesting that he did not in fact officially resign, and the
question still remains whether the former president's
"resignation" was drafted by the U.S. embassy or the State
Department or if it was his own words.

It is clear that the administration has attempted to avoid any
damaging revelations on its own role in Aristide's demise by
engaging in the same campaign of "character assassination" that
it has waged against the domestic critics of its foreign
policies. But these diversionary tactics should not be allowed to
obscure the explosive nature of Aristide's accusations: namely,
that the U.S. government joined with Haiti's richest businessmen
in the Group 184 in an alliance to oust the elected government,
as well as silently watched several hundred unsavory thugs and
former paramilitaries rampage through the Haitian countryside as
they headed for Port-au-Prince without attempting in any way to
prevent the ouster of the third democratically elected president
in Haiti's history...

There remains a pressing need for a comprehensive and aggressive
investigation into U.S. involvement in Haiti over the past four
years, modeled after the Iran-contra hearings in the late 1980s,
which could call for punitive action against State Department
officials, either in Washington or in Port-au-Prince, found to
have played an improper role in the forced removal of Aristide
from office. Congressional advocates of a less aggressive and
more nuanced U.S. policy towards Latin America and especially
Haiti   which has suffered under a lengthy stream of U.S.-backed
dictators and periodic occupations over the past two hundred
years    should step up the volume of their calls for a full
accounting of Aristide's alleged kidnapping.

In addition, presumed Democratic presidential candidate John
Kerry would do well to return to his earlier sharp criticisms of
the Bush administration's Haiti policy (which was followed with a
later dismissive attack on Aristide) with a similar call for an
investigation, both in his capacity as the presumptive
presidential candidate and as a long-standing member of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee...

In League with Murderers

While Aristide crosses the globe to his new home in South Africa,
his supporters remaining in Haiti   which likely would constitute
a majority in any fair election, especially among the poor, both
rural and urban   continue to be targets of widespread political
murders and arrests at the hands of the erstwhile rebels. Many of
the rebels are former members of the Haitian army and the
CIA-created paramilitary group FRAPH (Revolutionary Front for the
Advancement and Progress of Haiti) that terrorized Aristide's
supporters in the slums in the aftermath of the first coup
against him, which then installed a military regime that ruled
from 1991 to 1994. Other allegations regarding the victimization
of Aristide supporters   including arbitrary arrests and
political assassinations in the capital, and the reported
imprisonment of some 20 Aristide supporters in a container in
Cap-Haïtien before they were allegedly dumped in the sea   cannot
be confirmed, due to the absence of an independent media, a
functioning justice system or international human rights
observers in a country now ruled by technocrats gone sour.

It is obvious, however, that the prevention of human rights
abuses and the prosecution of their perpetrators is far from
being a priority of the current government, a fact made
abundantly clear on Mar. 20, when newly installed Prime Minister
Latortue made a visit to Gonaïves, his home town and the city
where the recent anti-Aristide rebellion began. There, he hailed
the rebels (who had earlier been described by Secretary of State
Powell as a gang of thugs) as "freedom fighters" and called for a
moment of silence for all those who "fell fighting against the
dictatorship"   while standing on the stage with two convicted
criminals. The first was Jean-Pierre Baptiste, also known as Jean
Tatoune, who was freed from prison in a jailbreak last year after
being sentenced to a life term for his participation in the 1994
Raboteau massacre, in which a number of Aristide supporters in a
Gonaïves slum were killed by FRAPH and military thugs.

The second was Louis-Jodel Chamblain, who was convicted in
absentia of the 1993 murder of a beloved pro-Aristide businessman
and philanthropist, Antoine Izméry. Izméry was attending a
memorial service in a Port-au-Prince church [...], when he was
dragged out of the church by soldiers and shot execution-style in
the street outside the church. Chamblain subsequently went into
exile in the neighboring Dominican Republic, from which he
returned early this year to help lead the rebellion against the
Aristide government.

On April 22, Chamblain turned himself in to the police in
Port-au-Prince in an elaborate charade of heroism and sacrifice
[see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 22, No. 7, 4/27/2004]; before walking to
the prison, he stated at a press conference that he was
sacrificing himself "so that Haiti can have a chance for the real
democracy I have been fighting for," and he was escorted by the
omnipresent Justice Minister Bernard Gousse, who bizarrely called
the decision "a good and noble one"   perhaps not the phrase that
would immediately spring to mind to describe a convicted murderer
who agreed to return to jail. It is virtually impossible to
imagine any U.S. parallel to such a script. However, Baptiste,
rebel leader Guy Philippe, who fled to the Dominican Republic in
2000 after helping to plan an attack on the National Palace in an
attempted coup, and scores of other known human rights violators
or convicted criminals remain at large, having been earlier freed
by their rebel confederates, who resorted to massive jailbreaks
to spring them.

Gousse: Haiti's John Ashcroft

Gousse's deplorable behavior in the case of Chamblain's elaborate
self-confession is but one of many attacks on habeas corpus and
the rule of law that reveal him to be more of a John
Ashcroft-type justice minister than a prudent figure of public
rectitude. Gousse has long been known as a nasty far-right
ideologue, and his selection to his post as an anti-Aristide
gun-slinger by Latortue reflects poorly on the reckless and
amateur nature of the prime minister's rule. While he has
asserted that, "There is a plan to bring to justice everyone who
has broken the law," there has as yet been no evidence of the
existence of any such plan, at least as it regards rebel leaders
and other visceral opponents of the Aristide government. On the
contrary, he has indicated in other interviews with the
international press that his office does not intend to pursue
criminal prosecutions against rebel leaders, a rather alarming
assertion that he immediately attempted to soften by offering as
an afterthought the assurance that all human rights charges
lodged by citizens would be investigated. (As a side note, he
noted that since no complaints had been filed against Philippe,
there could be no criminal charges brought against him.)

Yet despite his sympathetic treatment of known criminals, Gousse
is happy to trumpet his personal vendetta against those who were
allied with the democratically-elected president of Haiti and his
relentless diligence in pursuing charges against the former
president on grounds of the latter's alleged embezzlement,
corruption and misuse of power. He has asserted more than once
that, "It's too early to say that tomorrow I will ask for his
extradition, but we will build a case." Accusations have
circulated widely among Haitian governmental officials that the
former Aristide government looted Haiti's already meager public
treasury. The interim finance minister, prominent Haitian
economist Henri Bazin, stated that upon assuming his position, he
found less than a month's foreign reserves in the Central Bank
and an immediate government deficit of $100 million. In fact,
this figure was more than the U.S.-coddled military junta left in
the treasury when it was forced to out by a belated U.S.
intervention in 1994. Other officials of the Aristide government
have been prevented from leaving the country as the current
administration pursues criminal cases against them, and former
interior minister Jocelerme Privert already has been jailed on
accusations of corruption and political violence, on the basis of
questionable supporting evidence.

Given increasing evidence of serious misconduct and corruption at
some levels of the former government, it is essential that
investigations of possible criminal actions should be pursued and
those responsible prosecuted (though it is important to note that
as of yet, the Latortue government has not presented any evidence
directly implicating Aristide in any wrongdoing.) At the same
time, the blatant partisanship obvious in the skewed version of
justice being propounded by Latortue and Gousse, in which already
convicted criminals and other figures notorious for past human
rights abusers freely walk the streets while the Justice Ministry
pours its scarce funds and manpower into investigating supposed
crimes of officials of the Aristide administration, adds up to a
serious blow to the credibility and ostensible neutrality of the
interim government...

"Technocracy" a Mask for Partisan Bias

Any reasonably well-informed observer of Haitian affairs must by
now have rejected the claim often repeated by U.S. and U.N.
officials that the Latortue government is simply an assemblage of
nonpartisan technocrats, working to provide competent
administration and good governance in this period of transition
until new elections are held. According to U.N. Special Envoy
Reginald Dumas, whose own bias against Aristide is one of the
real scandals of the Haitian intervention, this period is likely
to be at least 18 months. While the appointment of Alix Baptiste,
who held an administrative post in the Foreign Ministry under
Aristide, as secretary of state for Haitians living abroad, has
been noted as an exception to Latortue's nonpartisanship, far
less attention has been paid to several other glaring violations
of the government's supposed neutrality: Foreign Affairs Minister
Yvon Siméon previously had served as the Democratic Convergence
representative in Europe and Minister of Justice Bernard Gousse
has been described by Radio Metropole as an active member of
Group 184. The obviously anti-Aristide affiliations of these key
government officials suggest that far from being merely a
caretaker government of administrators, the Latortue
administration is the dream team of the Haitian opposition
parties, endorsed (and virtually hand-picked) by Washington to
sweep away all vestiges of the Aristide-ism and turn the country
in a more conservative, and decidedly more pro-U.S., direction
even though there is no constitutional sanction whatsoever for
this project. Washington has used the expulsion of the Haitian
president as an excuse to hijack the country's political
system...

(To be continued)

OCCUPATION TROOPS ATTACK HOME OF LAVALAS MAYOR

French troops led an attack by U.N. "peace-keeping" forces this
week on the home of Jean Charles Moïse, the elected mayor of the
northern town of Milot, according to the Haiti Action Committee
(HAC) and Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN).

According to a press release put out by the two groups, the
foreign troops raided Moïse's home at about 4:00 a.m. on June 14.
Not finding the mayor, the troops arrested his wife and possibly
other adults.

Moïse's home was "ransacked and damaged," according to the
groups, and his children left without either parent. The raid
violated Haiti's constitution, which says that arrests must be
performed between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. and in the presence of a
justice of the peace.

Moïse is a prominent and outspoken leader of President Jean-
Bertrand Aristide's Lavalas Family party, who led efforts in
Haiti's north to thwart the Washington-backed opposition's
destabilization campaign leading up to the Feb. 29 "coup-napping"
of Aristide.

He is the second prominent Lavalas leader to be targetted by
occupation troops in an illegal night-time raid. On May 10, U.S.
Marines arrested Lavalas popular organizer and singer Annette "So
Ann" Auguste with family members, including a 5-year-old
grandson, and trashed her home (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 22, No.
9, 5/12/2004).

"We have people like myself, mayors and other members of the
municipal government who have had to flee and are now sleeping in
the woods, and have gone to  the mountains," Moïse explained in
an interview with Pacific News Service, published March 14. "We
have church members and priests who have been beaten and  whose
cars have been destroyed. These people are also in hiding. We
could never  have imagined that we would be going back to this
situation that existed before.  It is intolerable."

"Since this whole thing started, I haven't seen my wife and my
children," he continued. "I have been in hiding. This cannot continue.
This is a catastrophe for the north of  Haiti and all the people of
Haiti."

The HAC and HLLN are calling on people to "demand the release of
the Mayor's wife, due compensation for the ransacked and
destroyed home, and a stop to this seemingly systematic witch-
hunt for only  Lavalas officials in Haiti and abroad." Readers
can protest the illegal June 14 raid and arrest by calling,
writing or sending email to the following people:

Kofi Annan
Secretary General
United Nations
New York, NY USA
inquiries@un.org

Ambassador James B. Foley
U.S. Embassy, Port-au-Prince, Haiti
phone: 509.223.7011 or 509.222.0200
fax: 509.223.9665
email: acspap@state.gov

Colin Powell, U.S. Secretary of State
fax: 202.647.2283 or 202.647.5169
phone: 202.647.5291 or 202.647.7098
email via:
http://contact-us.state.gov/ask_form_cat/ask_form_secretary.html

Haiti Desk, U.S. State Department:
phone: 202.647.5088
fax: 202.647.2901

Officers:
Joseph Tilghman
email: tilghmanjf@state.gov

Lawrence Connell
email: ConnellLF@state.gov

Vincent Mayer
email: MayerVf@state.gov

All articles copyrighted Haiti Progres, Inc. REPRINTS ENCOURAGED.
Please credit Haiti Progres.

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