22720: Holmstead: The Other Regime Change (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: John Holmstead <cyberkismet5@yahoo.com>

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/07/16/haiti_coup/index_np.html
(See photo)

The Other Regime Change
Did the Bush administration allow a network of
right-wing Republicans
to
foment a violent coup in Haiti?
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Max Blumenthal

July 16, 2004  |  On Feb. 8, 2001, the federally
funded International
Republican Institute's (IRI) senior program officer
for Haiti, Stanley
Lucas,
appeared on the Haitian station Radio Tropicale to
suggest three
strategies for
vanquishing Haiti's president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
First, Lucas
proposed
forcing Aristide to accept early elections and be
voted out; second, he
could be
charged with corruption and arrested; and finally,
Lucas raised dealing
with
Aristide the way the Congolese people had dealt with
President Laurent
Kabila the
month before. "You did see what happened to Kabila?"
Lucas asked his
audience.

Kabila had been assassinated.

IRI's communications director, Thayer Scott, in an
interview with
Salon,
characterized Lucas' radio remarks as "a comparative
analysis of
countries that
embrace democracy and those that do not."

Whatever the case, Lucas and IRI, a nonprofit
political group backed by
powerful Republicans close to the Bush administration,
did more than
talk.
Throughout the last six years, IRI, whose stated
mission is to "promote
the practice
of democracy" abroad, conducted a $3 million
party-building program in
Haiti,
training Aristide's political opponents, uniting them
into a single
bloc and,
according to a former U.S. ambassador there,
encouraging them to reject
internationally sanctioned power-sharing agreements in
order to
heighten Haiti's
political crisis. Moreover, Lucas' controversial
personal background
and his ties
to Haitian opposition figures with violent histories
-- including some
who
participated in a coup against Aristide in February --
raise questions
about
whether IRI's Haiti program violated its own
guidelines and those of
its funders.

The recent political turmoil in Haiti and in Venezuela
(where the Bush
White
House tacitly supported a coup against President Hugo
Chavez in 2002,
and
where IRI also has a murky history of involvement)
reflect a troubling
pattern in
the Bush administration's prevailing approach to the
export of
"democracy."
When George W. Bush entered the White House in 2001,
he adopted a
policy of
studied neglect toward Haiti, scaling back President
Clinton's policy
of direct
engagement while appointing veteran anti-Aristide
ideologues to key
State
Department positions. Meanwhile, the well-connected,
smooth-talking
Lucas acted as
the Haitian version of Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile
who helped
neoconservatives in Washington promote the war against
Saddam Hussein.
Like Chalabi, Lucas
ingratiated himself with powerful Republicans
sympathetic to the
concept of
regime change in his native country and lobbied for
increased funding
to the
opposition groups he advised and helped train.

Impeccably dressed and charming, as a young man Lucas
gained renown as
a
Caribbean judo champion and well-connected socialite.
He is the scion
of a
pro-Duvalier Haitian landowning family from the town
of Jean Rebel.
According to
Amnesty International and a longtime Jean Rebel
resident now in the
U.S. who spoke
on condition of anonymity, in 1987 Lucas' cousins
Leonard and Remy
organized
a machete-wielding mob to hack to death 250 peasants
protesting for
land
redistribution outside their ranch. IRI's Scott
dismisses the massacre
as an "urban
legend."

At the time of the massacre, Lucas was active in plans
to crush Haiti's
nascent democracy movement. According to Kim Ives, who
has known Lucas
since 1986
and is editor of the independent Haitian weekly Haiti
Progres, during a
chance
encounter in 1988 in Port-au-Prince, Lucas told him he
was training
Haitian
soldiers in counterinsurgency tactics. "I'd always
pictured him as more
of a
playboy than anything," Ives recounted. "That was the
first time I
realized he
was a serious player involved with the soldiers
preparing to put down
the
popular uprisings to come."

According to Bob Maguire, a leading Haiti expert at
Trinity College and
former State Department official, Lucas' personal
history raises
serious questions
about IRI's integrity. "Having this guy as your point
person for Haiti,
with
this kind of background, is just incredibly
provocative," says Maguire.
"If
your organization wants to have a useful, balanced
program, how could
you have
this guy as your program officer?"

The role of figures like Lucas in the coup suggests a
complex web of
Republican connections to Aristide's ouster that may
never be known.
What is clear,
though, is that the destabilization of Aristide's
government was
initiated early
on by IRI, a group of right-wing congressmen and their
staffers by
imposing
draconian sanctions, training Aristide's opponents and
encouraging them
in
their intransigence. The Bush administration appears
to have gone
along,
delegating Haiti policy to right-wing underlings like
the assistant
secretary for the
Western Hemisphere, Roger Noriega, a former staffer to
Sen. Jesse
Helms, R-N.C.
Not only did Noriega collaborate with IRI to increase
funding to
Aristide's
opponents, but as a mediator to Haiti's political
crisis he appears to
have
routinely acquiesced with the opposition's divisive
tactics.

In February 2003, as insurgents went on the offensive
and Haiti began
descending into chaos, Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld outlined the
Bush
administration's view of the situation at a Feb. 10
press briefing:
"Everyone's hopeful
that the situation, which tends to ebb and flow down
there, will stay
below a
certain threshold ... we have no plans to do
anything." Two weeks
later, an
international delegation was unable to broker a
compromise; Aristide
agreed to a
power-sharing peace deal, but the rebels declined.
With the insurgency
sweeping toward the capital on Feb. 28, top Bush
officials convened,
but rather than
send in troops to protect Aristide's government, they
reversed their
official
position of support, asking Aristide to leave the
country immediately
under
U.S. stewardship. Haiti's elected leader left on a
plane the following
day in
the company of U.S. diplomats, bound for exile in the
Central African
Republic.

To be sure, Aristide was a corrupt, problematic leader
-- but since his
ouster, the situation in Haiti appears to have
deteriorated to a point
lower than
at any moment during his tenure. The looting that
followed Aristide's
departure
has cost Haitian businesses hundreds of millions of
dollars; most of
the
Haitian national police force's weapons and equipment
were stolen and
over half of
its officers quit; and the price of rice, essential to
the diet of
Haiti's
poor, has more than doubled in the last four months.
Moreover, recent
reports
describe rampant human rights abuses and
extra-judicial killings
filling the
power void.

For the majority of Haitians who live on one meal and
less than a
dollar a
day, regime change has only brought more violence,
chaos and
starvation.

The right-wing campaign to oust Aristide has its roots
in the GOP's
longstanding support for pro-U.S. dictators in Haiti.
In 1971,
President Nixon restored
U.S. military aid to the brutal regime of dictator
Jean-Claude
Duvalier, whom
he considered an anticommunist counterweight to Cuba.
The Duvalier
regime
eventually crumbled beneath a wave of popular
opposition in 1986; a
procession of
GOP-backed puppets and military dictators followed,
until the
charismatic
Aristide won Haiti's first democratic election in
1990. But Aristide
was
overthrown a year later by FRAPH, a CIA-backed junta
led by Raoul
Cedras, a Haitian
army officer trained by the U.S. Army and openly
supported by prominent
Washington conservatives like Helms.

When Aristide fled Haiti in 1991, he was given
sanctuary in Washington
by
sympathetic liberal politicians and intellectuals,
especially members
of the
Congressional Black Caucus, who were eager to show
solidarity with the
first
democratically elected leader of the world's oldest
black republic. In
1994, under
intense pressure from congressional Democrats,
President Clinton
returned
Aristide to power by military force. Though Aristide
accepted onerous
economic
reforms as a condition of his return, his legacy as a
liberation-theology
preaching slum priest thrust to power by Haiti's poor
masses fueled a
perception
among conservatives that he was the next Fidel Castro.


The GOP secured a majority in Congress in 1994. Soon
afterwards Helms,
who
chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; his
counterpart in the
House,
Ben Gilman, R-N.Y.; and House Intelligence Committee
Chairman Porter
Goss,
R-Fla. (now considered a potential successor to former
CIA Director
George Tenet)
passed a stream of bills ordering U.S. troops out of
Haiti, terminating
a host
of infrastructure-building initiatives there and
imposing an embargo on
lethal
and nonlethal weapons to the Haitian national police
force. Helms even
presented a now-discredited CIA document on the Senate
floor in 1995
claiming
Aristide was "psychotic."

With conditions deteriorating, Aristide clung to power
using a mixture
of
firebrand rhetoric and repression, surrounding himself
with cronies and
hiring
armed gangs to intimidate his opponents. Meanwhile,
confronted with a
Clinton
White House that preferred to hold its nose to
Aristide's corruption
and focus
on building Haiti's fragile democracy, a coalition of
Republicans used
IRI as a
Trojan horse. From the beginning of its Haiti program,
in direct
contradiction of many of its own guidelines, IRI
embraced reactionary
political elements
far more antidemocratic than Aristide.

IRI was created by Congress in 1983. It has an
approximately $20
million
annual budget granted by its bureaucratic parent, the
National
Endowment for
Democracy, the U.S. Agency for International
Development, and
conservative
corporate and philanthropic groups. But past IRI
activity highlights an
agenda for
regime change far from democratic in its methods, from
organizing
groups that
participated in a 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela, to
hosting delegates
from
right-wing European parties at a September 2002
conference in Prague to
rally
support for war on Iraq. Its Haiti program is the
brainchild of its
vice president,
Georges Fauriol, who is a member of the Republican
National Committee
and the
Center for Strategic and International Studies. At
CSIS, a conservative
Washington think tank, Fauriol worked closely with
Otto Reich, a
hawkish
Iran-Contra figure who served as the Bush
administration's special
envoy to the Western
Hemisphere until his resignation this June. Fauriol,
who rejected an
interview
request, has worked as a Latin America expert for CSIS
since the days
when
Duvalier ruled Haiti.

By 1992, while the U.S.-friendly Cedras' FRAPH death
squads rampaged
through
Haiti's slums and slaughtered Aristide supporters by
the thousands,
Fauriol
hired Haitian national Stanley Lucas to head IRI's
operations there.
Though
elections had already been nullified by Cedras, IRI
spokesman Scott
says the
group's work in Haiti at the time consisted of
"election monitoring."
Lucas himself
rejected an interview request.

For IRI's Washington backers, Lucas meant unparalleled
access to the
key
anti-Aristide figures on Haiti's political scene. By
1998, when IRI's
"party-building" program officially began, Lucas
spearheaded the
training of an array of
small parties at IRI meetings in Port-au-Prince. IRI's
Scott
characterized the
seminars as benign lessons in "Democracy 101."

Indeed, Lucas and IRI's involvement with some of
Aristide's most
unsavory
enemies suggested an altogether different agenda.
Among invitees to
IRI's
seminars were members of CREDDO, the personal
political platform of
Gen. Prosper
Avril, the former Haitian dictator who ruled with an
iron fist from
1988 to 1990,
declaring a state of siege and arbitrarily torturing
his opponents.
Avril
wrote about IRI's meetings in his 1999 memoir, "The
Truth About a
Singular
Lawsuit," describing a truce he signed "under the
auspices of IRI" with
his former
torture victim Evans Paul. Thanks in part to the
rapprochement, Paul
became the
de facto spokesman for the coalition of parties
trained in 1999 by
Lucas and
IRI: the Democratic Convergence.

Despite IRI's efforts to create a credible opposition
to Aristide, the
Convergence proved a lame horse; the party was blown
out by Aristide's
popular
Lavalas party in the 2000 local and parliamentary
elections. Yet
questionable vote
counting prompted the Clinton administration to block
over $400 million
in
multilateral loans to Haiti. As economic conditions
deteriorated there,
Convergence changed its tactics. In addition to
boycotting the 2000
presidential
elections, between 2000 and 2002 Convergence rejected
20 proposed
power-sharing
compromises designed to ease Haiti's political crisis.
In 2003 the
party formed an
ersatz transitional government to challenge Aristide's
legitimacy, and
its
relationship with IRI and Washington Republicans grew
even cozier.

According to IRI's Scott, from 1998 to 2002, IRI
bolstered Convergence
with
"less than $2 million." In 2000, $34,994 of that money
was granted to
IRI from
NED to junket Convergence leaders to several meetings
in Washington
designed
"to open channels of communication" with "relevant
policy makers and
analysts."
IRI met Convergence leaders again in February 2002 in
the Dominican
Republic
with a delegation of congressional Republicans
including Caleb McCarry,
a
staunchly anti-Aristide staffer on the House Foreign
Relations
Committee who,
according to a former senior State Department
official, "worked hand in
glove with
Lucas to tie funding to the opposition."

Secretary of State Colin Powell advised the
continuation of Clinton's
Haiti
policy -- Aristide had eventually "corrected" the
election results --
calling
for increased international aid, but his diplomatic
efforts were
stymied by
Convergence's rejectionism -- and by a White House
that seemed
determined to move
Haiti policy in an opposite direction. By 2002, Bush
had eliminated the
State
Department position of special Haiti coordinator and
removed the
national
security advisor from daily involvement with Haiti. He
also appointed
Helms'
ideological heir, Noriega, first as the U.S.
ambassador to the OAS, and
later to
assistant secretary of state for the Western
Hemisphere, in turn
strengthening
the influence of IRI.

Meanwhile, IRI's Lucas began to sabotage the U.S.
ambassador, Brian
Dean
Curran, a career diplomat and Clinton appointee who
had evidence that
Lucas was
undermining diplomatic efforts to resolve Haiti's
political crisis.
Seeking to
weaken Curran politically, Lucas spread destructive
rumors about his
personal
life, according to a close associate of Curran's who
asked to remain
anonymous.
A journalist with access to U.S. diplomats in Haiti
offered a similar
account. Curran's associate also said that Lucas
threatened Curran and
another
embassy official, claiming they would be fired "as
soon as the real
U.S. policy is
enacted." IRI refused to discuss Lucas' interactions
with Curran or
embassy
officials.

In response to Lucas' freebooting, Curran demanded
that USAID block him
from
participating in IRI's Haiti program. During a March
10, 2004, Senate
hearing
on Haiti, Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., pressed Noriega
for details of
Lucas'
involvement. "The approval of this new grant was
conditioned on the IRI
[Haiti]
director, Stanley Lucas, being barred from
participating in this
program for a
period of time because the U.S. ambassador in Haiti
had evidence that
he was
undermining U.S. efforts to encourage Haitian
opposition cooperation
with the
OAS efforts to broker a compromise. Is that not true
as well?" Dodd
asked
Noriega.

"Yes, sir," Noriega conceded.

Dodd continued: "Is Stanley Lucas still involved?"

"As far as I know, he is still part of the program,"
Noriega said.
According
to IRI's Scott, Lucas was barred for only four months
by USAID.

Lucas' continued role frustrated Curran; he resigned
in July 2003. In
his
farewell address in Port-au-Prince, Curran remarked,
"There were many
in Haiti
who preferred not to listen to me, the president's
representative, but
to their
own friends in Washington, sirens of extremism or
revanchism on the one
hand
or apologists on the other," Curran said. "They don't
hold official
positions.
I call then the 'chimeres' [a Haitian slang term for
"political thugs"]
of
Washington."

By the time of Curran's departure, IRI's Haiti program
was flush with a
$1.2
million grant from USAID for 2003 and 2004. According
to IRI's Scott,
"roughly
$200,000" of that grant was used to junket over 600
Haitian opposition
figures to the Dominican Republic and the U.S. to meet
with IRI. With
IRI's help,
they formed a new coalition called Group of 184
representing the "civil
society"
wing of the opposition. IRI currently hosts Group of
184's home page on
its
Haiti policy Web site, which features photos of
anti-Aristide
demonstrations in
Port-au-Prince last March. And Scott acknowledged that
"IRI played an
advisory role in Group of 184's formation."

Group of 184's power brokers were divided into two
camps: its majority
constitutional wing, which emphasized protests and
diplomacy as the
path to forcing
Aristide out, and a hard-line faction quietly
determined to oust
Aristide by
any means necessary. The constitutionalists were
represented by Group
of 184's
spokesman and most prominent member, Andre Apaid Jr.,
a
Haitian-American of
Lebanese descent who controls one of Haiti's oldest
and largest
sweatshop
empires. The hard-liners were led by Wendell Claude, a
politician who
was hell-bent
on avenging the death of his brother Sylvio, a church
minister burned
to death
by a pro-Aristide mob after the coup in 1991.

While the constitutional wing mounted a series of
anti-Aristide street
protests through late 2003, provoking increasing
unrest, Claude and the
hard-liners
hatched plans for a coup. They tapped Guy Phillippe, a
U.S.-trained
former
Haitian police chief with a dubious human rights
record. He was to lead
a band of
insurgents consisting almost entirely of exiled
members of FRAPH death
squads
and former soldiers of the Haitian army, which
Aristide had disbanded
in
1995. For three years, they camped in Perenal, a
border town in the
Dominican
Republic, using it as a staging point for acts of
sabotage against
Aristide's
government, including a July 2001 hit-and-run attack
on the Haitian
police academy
that killed five and wounded 14.

Lucas appears to have had at least casual contact with
the insurgents.
In an
interview by cellphone from Haiti, Phillippe said he
and Lucas grew up
together and that Lucas is a longtime family friend.
And though
Phillippe said he met
with Lucas late last year in the Dominican Republic,
he maintained the
meeting was not political: "He [Lucas] was helping
organize a
democratic opposition.
I really don't know about his job because I never
would talk about
politics
with him."

Others describe more formal ties between IRI and the
insurgents. Jean
Michel
Caroit, chief correspondent in the Dominican Republic
for the French
daily Le
Monde, says he saw Phillippe's political advisor, Paul
Arcelin, at an
IRI
meeting at Hotel Santo Domingo in December 2003.
Caroit, who was having
drinks in
the lobby with several attendees, said the meeting was
convened "quite
discreetly." His account dovetailed with that of a
Haitian journalist
who told Salon
on condition of anonymity that Arcelin often attended
IRI meetings in
Santo
Domingo as Convergence's representative to the
Dominican Republic.

IRI's Scott fervently denies involvement with the
insurgents. "IRI has
never
dealt with Guy Phillippe or the leaders of other
violent groups," he
says.
During Senate hearings on Haiti this March, Sen. Dodd
probed Secretary
Noriega
about links between Lucas and Phillippe, and he, too,
issued a denial:
"I have
never heard that [Lucas and Phillippe were associated
in any way], and
to my
knowledge, it wouldn't be the case. It certainly
wouldn't be
acceptable."

Besides violating its own stated guidelines, IRI also
may have broken
the
rules of its chief funder, USAID, which forbids
grantees from working
with
"undemocratic parties" that do not "eschew the use of
violence to
overthrow
democratic institutions" or "have endorsed or
sponsored violence in the
past."

In February 2002 the insurgents attacked, crossing
into Haiti and
laying
siege to its second largest city, Cap-Haitien. Rather
than send troops
to stop
them, the Bush administration sent Noriega on Feb. 18
to attempt to
stanch the
violence with a power-sharing deal between Aristide
and the opposition,
which
was represented by Group of 184's Apaid. That
afternoon, Noriega
presented the
proposal to Aristide, accompanied by his general
counsel, Ira Kurzban.
"Within
two hours," Kurzban said, Aristide agreed to the
proposal.

But when Noriega sat down with Apaid that evening, he
handled him with
kid
gloves. "Once we explained to Noriega the situation in
Haiti, he
understood. I
cannot say that he pushed us," said Charles Baker,
Apaid's
brother-in-law and a
Group of 184 board member who was briefed on the
meeting by Apaid.

"This guy's an American citizen," Kurzban said of
Apaid, who was born
in New
York. "You don't think if the U.S. wanted to put
pressure on him, they
couldn't put pressure on him? So it's like, OK, Andy,'
with a wink and
a nod, 'Take
another couple of days to decide.'" Needless to say,
Apaid rejected the
compromise.

The following day, Phillippe and a band of 200
insurgents armed with
vintage
rifles and M-16's (some of which, according to Le
Monde's Caroit, were
provided by the U.S.-armed Dominican military)
captured Cap Haitien and
began their
advance on Port-au-Prince.

On Feb. 28, Bush's top foreign policy officials,
including Dick Cheney,
Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell,
held a
teleconference meeting
and, according to the Washington Post, decided to
press for Aristide's
ouster.
The next day, with Haiti's police in full retreat and
the insurgents
bearing
down on Aristide's residence, U.S. Embassy officials
presented Aristide
with a
stark choice: stay in Haiti without protection or
accept a
U.S.-chartered
plane into exile. He took the plane. The following
day, Phillippe
marched into the
capital, greeted cheering supporters and boasted to
foreign reporters
that he
was "the chief."

According to the Post, Bush was not involved in the
decision to press
for
Aristide's ouster nor was the president aware a
decision had been made
to ferry
Aristide into exile. When Aristide was flown out of
the country on Feb.
29,
Bush had to be awakened from his slumber by a
late-night phone call
from Rice to
inform him. It was only then that he authorized the
deployment of U.S.
Marines
to quell the violence in Haiti.

Aristide's corruption and authoritarianism may have
justified his
ouster in
the eyes of his opponents, but now that he is gone, is
Haiti any better
off?

The answer, at present, is that by giving
anti-Aristide figures in
Washington
and Haiti a free hand, the Bush administration has
created a situation
worse
than the one it inherited -- and one reminiscent of
Iraq after the fall
of
Saddam. In the wake of Aristide's departure,
widespread looting erupted
across
Haiti; well-armed thugs terrorized businesses and
ravaged the country's
public
infrastructure. Virtually every prison in the country
was emptied,
freeing both
common criminals and human rights violators --
including Stanley Lucas'
notorious cousin, Remy.

Many Haiti experts, including Trinity College's
Maguire, project the
next
elections there will be held sometime in the next two
years. For now,
Haiti's
president is Gerard Latortue, a former World Bank
official hailed by
Florida Gov.
Jeb Bush in a March 23 Washington Post editorial for
his "integrity and
selfless service." Yet with no domestic constituency,
Latortue has had
to kowtow to
Phillippe and the insurgents, whom he has publicly
called "freedom
fighters."
Like another Bush-installed leader -- Afghan President
Hamid Karzai,
whose
shaky administration relies on U.N. peacekeeping
forces concentrated in
his
country's capital -- Latortue's government wields
little authority:
According to a
June 15 press release from the nonpartisan Council on
Hemispheric
Affairs in
Washington, in addition to many hundreds of Aristide
supporters
murdered
inside Port-au-Prince itself, convicted criminals,
former paramilitary
leaders and
other vigilantes retain effective control of most of
the
 Haitian countryside.

And, as it did with European governments on Iraq, the
Bush
administration's
Haiti policy has provoked a diplomatic crisis in the
Caribbean basin:
Over four
months after Aristide's departure from Haiti, the
15-nation Caribbean
Community still refuses to recognize Latortue's
government, and in June
the OAS
opened an investigation into Aristide's ouster. U.S.
troops handed over
control of
the peacekeeping mission in Haiti to the U.N. on June
20.

"One has to be very concerned with the country's
direction," says
Maguire.
"An awful lot of people who have been discredited in
the past for
abusing power
and people have been climbing back into government. So
far there is no
sign
that the new government or the U.S. will confront
these antidemocratic
forces."

An April press release from the independent Haitian
factory workers'
union,
Batay Ouvriye, made an urgent plea:

"There is no person legitimately in charge anywhere. A
whole series of
upstarts have taken advantage of this situation to set
themselves up as
the
authorities, as chiefs, and, in the process, the
people are really
suffering. THIS
SITUATION CANNOT CONTINUE!"

*
About the writer
Max Blumenthal is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.

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