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23155: Slavin: Le Monde diplomatique - 2 Articles (fwd)



From: JPS390@aol.com

Le Monde diplomatique

   -----------------------------------------------------

   September 2004

            FROM PROPHET OF THE SLUMS TO CONTROLLING RULER

                       Haiti: Titide's downfall

                          by Maurice Lemoine

     IN THE beginning there was Titide, preacher of the slums and
     shantytowns and voice of the disenfranchised. Titide -
     Jean-Bertrand Aristide - was ordained in 1983 and served as
     parish priest at the Don Bosco church in Port-au-Prince.
     Haitians had suffered under the Duvaliers since 1957, when
     François "Papa Doc" took power. When the brutal dictatorship
     of his son, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" ended in 1986, Titide was
     the great hope of a desperate people.

     When Haitians finally voted in free elections in 1990, it was
     no surprise that Aristide was elected president. He waited
     until the last day of registration to announce his candidacy,
     ensuring an electrifying campaign called Lavalas, Creole for
     flood. With hindsight it is easy to see this rush of
     enthusiasm as excessive and misplaced. "We didn't have time
     to think about his personality as an individual," admits one
     of his many former supporters. "We didn't have time to think
     about how he would move from the status of a prophet,
     speaking out against evil, to a position of power."

     But what power? Even as a president newly elected by a
     massive majority, Aristide was not in full control of his
     destiny. The world saw how the United States invaded Grenada
     in 1984 and crushed the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. In Haiti,
     US intervention took the form of CIA aid to General Raoul
     Cédras, who ousted Aristide in a coup barely seven months
     after the election, to the delight of President George Bush
     Sr.

     On 29 September 1991 Haiti entered three years of
     orchestrated chaos that left many Lavalassiens dead. But the
     US did not intervene again until 19 September 1994, when Bill
     Clinton's ad ministration, with United Nations backing, sent
     20,000 soldiers to reinstate the legitimate government and
     (more importantly from the US viewpoint) stop an armada of
     boat people who sought refuge in the US.

     Yet Aristide's comeback was not a return to the good old
     days: by 29 February 2004 when his third term as president
     ended (René Préval served from 1995 to 2000), the consensus
     was that he no longer cared about anything but power and
     money. This assertion was accompanied by a list of the little
     curé's misdemeanours: he was thought to be an accomplice to
     (if not directly responsible for) every crime - drugs
     trafficking, political assassinations and the dead dogs in
     the street. Could this be the man who received the 1996
     Unesco prize for human rights education? Or is he being
     unfairly demonised, as popular leaders, notably Venezuela's
     Hugo Chávez, are when they have the nerve to upset the
     established disorder in the US's backyard?

     Aristide's experiences during his three-year exile in the US
     loom over this. He presumably arrived in a state of
     frustration and despair. But he returned transformed,
     Americanised: "He left as Aristide and came back as Harry
     Steed," says Anna Jean Charles of the Batay Ouvriyé union
     (see box below). In Washington the pitit soyèt (child of the
     people) aligned with the Democratic party and the
     Congressional Black Caucus (a grouping of black members of
     the House of Representatives) and discovered the US
     establishment, big business and capitalism. Treated as a
     serving president in charge of Haiti's frozen assets, he grew
     greedy. With the help of his new Democrat friends, he had an
     embargo imposed on Haiti, with devastating effects for his
     poorest compatriots. The new friends brought Aristide back to
     power and were richly rewarded in the ensuing round of
     privatisations, particularly in telecommunications.

                     No longer priest of the poor

     For, on his return to power, the former priest of the poor
     followed the instructions of the international financial
     institutions and liberalised the Haitian economy. He had his
     own peculiar way of doing this. Jean-Claude Bajeux was
     minister for culture when the first round of privatisations
     was debated by the cabinet. "When the prime minister, Michel
     Smarck, said we should draw up some invitations to tender,
     the president interrupted him: 'Why don't we just arrange it
     so we can share these things out between us?' "

     Yet this is the Aristide to whom Haiti owes its only ever
     peaceful transition of power between two democratically
     elected leaders. In December 1995, constitutionally excluded
     from standing for election immediately, he gave way to
     Préval, a friend and former prime minister. The seeds of the
     crisis in 2004 were sown during this period: Aristide moved
     into a grandiose villa on the edge of Port-au-Prince, no
     longer Titide but the "Duke of Tabarre" after the suburb in
     which it was built.

     The Lavalas Political Organisation (OPL), which had supported
     Aristide since 1991, more out of self-interest than political
     conviction, and was the largest party in parliament, defected
     from the Lavalas movement. The OPL prime minister, Rosny
     Smarth, resigned in June 1997, beginning a long period of
     political stagnation. There were already many cracks in
     Haiti's democratic system before the May 2000 elections,
     which were to fill 7,500 seats at local and national levels.

     Although international monitors judged that the vote had, on
     the whole, been properly handled, the results were fiercely
     contested. Seven seats in the senate were handed directly to
     candidates who should have had to win a second round to
     ensure election. It was a peculiar situation because Fanmi
     Lavalas (Lavalas Family), Aristide's new party, had been
     assured of a massive majority without having to cheat. "But
     he just had to control every single thing," recalls Micha
     Gaillard, who was a spokesman for Aristide while in exile:
     "He wanted 100% of the seats in parliament. As he said during
     the coup, 'I am the hub of a bicycle wheel and all the spokes
     point to me'."

     Some maintain that Aristide did not cheat and that the
     cheating was the work of a few overzealous members of his
     party who filled the urns to overflowing. His only error was
     that "he did not speak out and left the system to rot". Maybe
     so. But a revealing passage in the Fanmi Lavalas party
     constitution undermines such confidence: "President
     Jean-Bertrand Aristide has been elected National
     Representative" [party leader], reads clause 29, while clause
     32 states: "The position of National Representative becomes
     vacant if the Representative dies or resigns" (1). Nowhere is
     there any reference to internal elections. Aristide had
     declared himself president for life of his party. This
     revelation leaves little to distinguish his political
     philosophy from that of the Duvaliers.

     Aristide's artificially enhanced victory in the May 2000
     elections flew right back in his face. The opposition,
     electorally weak, was able to capitalise on this opportunity
     to cause a scandal by boycotting the presidential election
     that November. Although Aristide won that easily and
     genuinely, his fervent popular support undiminished, the
     international community froze most of its aid and loan
     payments to Haiti. The country plunged into destitution and
     chaos.

     Doubts as to whether Aristide was good or bad persisted,
     confusing Haiti. Father Frantz Gandoit, a priest of the
     Dominican order, was appointed and remains head of Haiti's
     literacy campaign. "On certain issues," he says, "Aristide
     maintained a true social vision. He was determined to succeed
     in certain areas. He genuinely wanted to see far-reaching
     improvements in education. But on other issues he engaged in
     realpolitik of the most Machiavellian kind." Some continued
     to see Aristide as a progressive leader struggling against
     the Yankee monster. But he no longer preached
     anti-Americanism: though he still cited Haiti's liberation
     hero, Toussaint L'Ouverture, in speeches, he dropped all
     mention of Charlemagne Péralte, martyr of the resistance
     against the 1915-1934 American occupation, who was executed
     in November 1919.

                      Hub of the bicycle wheel'

     As a lucky few amassed fortunes and all other Haitians
     scraped by from day to day, the ministry of social affairs
     systematically sided with bosses against the workers. The
     regime even used the assassination, on 27 May 2002 at a rally
     in Guacimale, of two unionists linked to Batay Ouvriyé as a
     pretext for arresting union members. Confidence in the regime
     evaporated further with the cooperatives scandal of
     2001-2002. In a speech at the national stadium, Aristide
     invited Haitians to save money by investing in new
     institutions called, for reasons unexplained, cooperatives.
     It was never clear who was in charge of these, hastily set up
     amid total disorganisation. While encouraging investors to
     act out of a spirit of social solidarity, they promised
     ludicrous rates of interest - 12% a month or 140% annually. A
     fever swept the middle-classes and some sold cars and homes
     in the hope of doubling their investment in a year. Even the
     poorest dug deep into their pockets. Then, suddenly and
     simultaneously, the cooperatives went bust. Around $170m had
     been invested. The government's only action was to imprison
     the chairman of the victims' association, Rosemond Jean. The
     anti-Aristide movement strengthened.

     Aristide bears much of the responsibility for this scandal
     but the opposition was not blameless. The OPL (it kept the
     acronym after dropping its association with Lavalas, calling
     itself Organisation du Peuple en Lutte, organisation of
     struggling peoples) attacked Aristide for complying with
     International Monetary Fund directives, forgetting that its
     own leader, Rosny Smarth, signed a structural adjustment plan
     when he was prime minister. The OPL claims that out of a
     spirit of compromise it did not enact its own programme when
     it was the largest party in parliament (1995-2000).

     After his re-election in November 2000, Aristide tried to
     correct the irregularities of the May vote by asking the
     seven improperly elected Fanmi Lavalas senators to resign.
     But the opposition had lost interest in compromise. It
     boycotted Congress and would not participate in government
     initiatives. Instead it denounced the state of the economy,
     due mostly to the US trade embargo, which was justified by
     the political crisis that its own attitude perpetuated. Even
     more hypocritically, it attacked the government for refusing
     to negotiate.

     Yet the opposition parties, united as the Demo cratic
     Convergence coalition (2), had little real electoral
     importance. Their survival depended on the support of the
     Group of 184, which brought together organisations within
     Haitian civil society. The leader of the Group was André
     Apaid, Haiti's largest industrial employer. His businesses
     had some 4,000 workers, each paid 68 US cents a day. Not
     content with ignoring Haiti's official minimum wage of $1.50,
     Apaid had opposed Aristide's proposals that it be increased.
     He was not the likeliest associate for a movement of broadly
     centre-left political parties.

                   Consensus on a range of issues'

     But that did not seem to worry the coalition. "There is
     consensus on a whole range of issues," said Gérard
     Pierre-Charles, general coordinator of the OPL, "democracy,
     civic freedoms, the need to change the way we live in Haiti."
     Divisions, potential divisions, old wounds and the lack of
     any common agenda were smoothed over in service of a single,
     unifying purpose: to get rid of Aristide. Pierre-Charles is
     one of many intellectuals, leaders and campaigners -
     including Micha Gaillard and Claude Bajeux of the National
     Congress of Democratic Movements (Konakom) - whose courage
     and probity are not in doubt. But all were part of a
     coalition whose ambiguous nature and intransigent tactics
     brought catastrophe to Haiti.

     Its refusal to negotiate with Aristide left him isolated,
     abandoned by the international community and deprived of aid.
     His only option was to fall back on the support of the
     impoverished masses, many of whom were unaware how their hero
     had changed. Most saw attacks on Titide as an attempt to take
     power away from the people. It is not hard to understand why.
     The Democratic Platform (a coalition of Democratic
     Convergence and the Group of 184) had not, as a political
     entity, proposed a single social policy reform. The violence
     always beneath the surface of Haitian society boiled over as
     the Chimères, armed gangs of Aristide supporters who recalled
     the Duvaliers' Tontons Macoutes (bogeymen), attacked the
     opposition.

     Aristide has been given more than his fair share of blame for
     the violence. "If you put people, no matter who, under this
     sort of pressure, if you plunge them deep into despair and
     crush them to death," says an angry Jacques Barros, former
     head of the French Institute in Haiti (3), "then this is what
     you get. You go from Weimar Republic to Hitler, from the
     League of the Just to Stalin, from the Salesians of Don Bosco
     to the Chimères." The people were used to being attacked:
     General Cédras's dictatorship had wiped out the leadership of
     the popular struggle and killed 4,000 followers. Attacks on
     Fanmi Lavalas supporters were still frequent as late as 2003
     - there were murderous raids at Petit-Goâve and in the
     central plain (4). Insecurity swept the country and any
     family that could afford to do so armed itself.

     This helps to explain, if not to justify, how Haitians came
     to be enthralled by a romantic image of themselves as a
     people in arms. Yet the emergence of the Chimères did change
     the nature of Haitian violence. Since Aristide had disbanded
     the army on return from exile, the state had armed its
     citizens as a defence against a repetition of the military
     coup that brought Cédras to power in 1991. Weapons were
     handed out to government officials, local councils and
     citizens with leadership qualities and a concern for social
     justice, or passed around the shantytown-dwellers. Some of
     these, once armed, began to make demands and threats.
     Greedily amassing power, they organised themselves into gangs
     and mafia networks. The police collaborated with these groups
     in operations from kidnapping to drugs-trafficking. Ruling
     their neighbourhoods with an iron hand, these gangs also
     engaged in political violence, supporting the president by
     attacking opposition demonstrations and burning down party
     headquarters.

                       Encouraging the violence

     There is no proof that Aristide had any hand in running these
     groups. But he never spoke out against them and made no
     attempt to quell their activities. "He did just the
     opposite," says a former ally, bitterly. "He explained that
     they were the products of destitution, which is true, but his
     whole tone was implicitly egging them on." What mattered for
     Aristide was to have a clientele within the popular movement,
     so that he could control the violence if he needed to do so.

     The strategy backfired. The rebellion in the port of Gonaïves
     in February 2004 was led by Butteur Métayer, a member of the
     Cannibal Army, a gang that supported Aristide in exchange for
     control over the port's customs. Métayer had fallen out of
     favour with the president and accused the regime of killing
     his brother. He changed sides. His uprising was soon joined
     by former soldiers, criminals, drug-traffickers and
     underworld figures from the Dominican Republic. The rebellion
     spread across Haiti until it controlled five of nine
     administrative areas and brought down the president.

     This mercenary army did not come out of nowhere. US
     Republicans may have hated Aristide, but he had maintained a
     state of relative calm and agreed to neoliberal reforms.
     Officially they supported him to the end. The Secretary of
     State, Colin Powell, made strenuous efforts to reach a deal
     with the opposition. Neither the CIA nor the
     ultra-conservative Roger Noriega, assistant secretary of
     state for Western hemisphere affairs, wanted to see Haiti
     taken over by men they had not chosen.

     In March 2004 in the Dominican capital Santo Domingo, the
     Haiti Commission of Inquiry, headed by former US
     attorney-general Ramsey Clark, published its preliminary
     findings. Aristide was languishing in Jamaica. Noting that
     200 US special forces had travelled to the Dominican Republic
     for "military exercises" in February 2003, the commission
     accused the US of arming and training Haitian rebels there.
     With permission from the Dominican president, Hipólito Mejía,
     US forces trained near the border, in an area used by former
     soldiers of the disbanded Haitian army to launch attacks on
     Haitian state property. (The Dominican Republic's collusion
     is not new. In the 1980s Honduras played a similar role in
     the US campaign against the Sandinistas of Nicaragua.)

     With US-trained fighters at their core, the rebel gangs
     spread to Haiti, creating the situation that enabled US
     ambassador James Foley to force Aristide out on 29 February
     2004. Washington's principal western ally was Paris. France
     was keen to repair relations with the US after the Iraq
     crisis and anxious to prevent the US from taking Haiti out of
     the French sphere of influence within which it had always
     been. France had little time for Aristide, who demanded $21bn
     as repayment for the 90m gold francs Haiti had paid for
     independence from France in 1804.

     Regardless of Aristide's personal faults, his departure has
     worried many observers, particularly leaders of other
     Caribbean and South American states: what right do powers
     such as the US and France have to remove a head of state this
     way? "I never received a single document saying that the
     president had resigned," says Ivon Feuillé of Famni Lavalas,
     chairman of the National Assembly at the time of Aristide's
     departure. Not without reason many see the Franco-American
     intervention in Haiti as a dangerous precedent that could
     encourage the US to do something similar in Cuba or Venezuela
     or even Colombia or Bolivia.

     But the former Haitian opposition has other things on its
     mind. It was partially robbed of its victory by the US. On 21
     February Aristide's opponents rejected a generous plan by
     which he had agreed to cooperate with them in forming a new,
     multi-party government, with an independent and neutral prime
     minister. For the rebels, though, Aristide had to go. And so
     he went. The rest of the script was written in Washington.
     The government was handed to an imported prime minister,
     Gérard Latortue (5), and many foreign troops moved on to
     Haitian soil (6). On 20 March Latortue referred to the
     self-declared rebels (many of them former torturers from the
     disbanded army) as freedom fighters, and there is talk of
     recruiting some to a police force desperately in need of new
     blood. In the countryside, they have taken charge, either by
     force or natural leadership, and are helping the big
     landowners and other Duvalier supporters to bring back the
     good old days, using terror to impose their will and steal
     land from small farmers.

     There is talk of elections. But for as long as the North (Cap
     Haïtien), Artibonite province (Gonaïves) and the central
     plateau remain in the hands of these armed gangs, it is hard
     to see how a campaign could be organised. Meanwhile the
     witch-hunt against Aristide's supporters goes on. Many have
     been forbidden to leave the country and their movements
     within Haiti restricted; there have been arrests and illegal
     extraditions. Many are in hiding; others have been murdered.
     Yet Fanmi Lavalas seems likely to remain, for the foreseeable
     future, the most popular political movement.
       ________________________________________________________

     (1) "Charte, statuts et règlements de Fanmi Lavalas", First
     Congress, 14-16 December 1999, Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

     (2) Democratic Convergence was made up of social-democratic
     parties: the OPL, Konakom, the Haitian Nationalist
     Revolutionary party, the Democratic Unity Convention;
     centrist parties including the Christian Democratic party;
     and four or five others.

     (3) Barros is also the author of Haiti de 1804 à nos jours,
     L'Harmattan, Paris, 1984.

     (4) "Haiti: Abuse of human rights: political violence as the
     200th anniversary of independence approaches",Amnesty
     International, London, October 2003.

     (5) Latortue is an international diplomat who has lived
     outside Haiti for 30 years.

     (6) The United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti, led by
     Brazil, has replaced the original interim peace-keeping force
     of troops from the US, France, Canada and Chile.



                                      Translated by Gulliver Cragg


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        ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © 1997-2004 Le Monde diplomatique

   <http://MondeDiplo.com/2004/09/09haiti>

Le Monde diplomatique

   -----------------------------------------------------

   September 2004

                Slave labour along the Massacre river

                          by Maurice Lemoine

     THE Massacre river in northern Hispaniola divides the
     Dominican Republic and Haiti. It is crossed by a crumbling
     bridge, with Ouanaminthe, Haiti, on one side and Dajabón,
     Dominican Republic, on the other. In 2002 Jean-Bertrand
     Aristide's government announced the creation of a free trade
     zone in Ouanaminthe. The proposal was fiercely resisted by
     local landowners, tenant farmers and agricultural labourers,
     who were promised compensation but have received none. But
     resistance was impossible: the tractors that tore up the
     crops were accompanied by armed guards, leaving the farmers
     helpless, homeless victims.

     The Dominican investor was clothing subcontractor Grupo M,
     the largest employer in the Dominican Republic, with 12,000
     workers in its factories and a reputation for treating them
     brutally and ignoring union rights and regulations. The World
     Bank's International Finance Corporation, possibly unaware of
     the malpractice, provided a loan of $20m for Grupo M to set
     up in Ouanaminthe. We may presume that Aristide was better
     informed about Grupo M's nature: on 8 April 2003, when he
     came to lay the foundation stone with the Dominican
     president, Hippólito Mejía, he did so in secret. Haitians
     only heard about it the day after, in the Dominican press.

     In August 2003 Grupo M opened two facilities in the new free
     trade zone, employing around 1,000 workers. The Codevi
     factory produces Levis 505s and 555s jeans while the MD
     factory makes T-shirts, all exported via the Dominican
     Republic.

     Grupo M's Haitian employees were made to work at high speed
     for long hours in terrible conditions and paid a pittance.
     They soon protested: on 13 October 2003 the Codevi Workers
     Union (Sokowa in Creole) was created in Ouanaminthe and
     affiliated to Batay Ouvriyé, Haiti's worker support
     organisation. On 2 March 2004, with the country in a power
     vacuum following Aristide's departure, Grupo M fired 34 union
     members, with militiamen from northern Haiti's "rebel army"
     on hand to crush resistance.

     On 13 April, after tough negotiations attended by
     representatives from the World Bank, Levi-Strauss & Co, and a
     tripartite commission from the new Haitian government, Grupo
     M agreed to reinstate the 34 workers. But, as Yannick Etienne
     of Batay Ouvriyé explains: "They forgot that there was also
     an agreement to let the union negotiate a new factory-wide
     contract."

     A new contract was urgently needed. Codevi employees were
     being made to work from Monday to Saturday, often doing 55
     hours instead of the official 48, with no overtime money.
     "You can't ask questions,"says Etienne. "If you do, they put
     your name down so they can fire you." Recalcitrants were
     called into the back room: "You're locked in there for hours,
     guarded by armed thugs. They put the air conditioning on full
     blast to make it uncomfortable." Female workers are given a
     mysterious injected "vaccination" every two months and many
     have complained of irregular and unnaturally long periods;
     there has been an abnormally high rate of unexplained
     miscarriages among Codevi workers.

     Sokowa continued to campaign for a new contract and on 7 June
     staged a half-hour work stoppage. On 8 June 40 heavily armed
     soldiers from the Dominican Republic arrived (on Haitian
     territory) to beat the workers. A 24-hour strike followed and
     Grupo M bosses closed the factory, illegally locking out its
     employees; 370 were laid off 48 hours later when the plant
     reopened.

     Since then the workload has increased further. Workers were
     expected to produce 1,000 pairs of jeans a day. They are now
     required to turn out 1,300 for 1,300 gourdes ($37) a week.
     "No one can meet these targets," says Etienne, "and you only
     get 432 gourdes ($12) if you don't manage it."

     While Dominican soldiers, now in plain clothes, continue to
     enforce order, Grupo M's chief executive officer, Fernando
     Capellán, has threatened to relocate. "We don't believe the
     factories will close," says Etienne, "but the threat is a
     clear signal that this is war." Batay Ouvriyé has fought
     tough battles before - it rose up in 1995 against the Walt
     Disney Corporation's Haitian subcontractors and the
     Association of Haitian Industrialists (ADHI). Capellán, a
     Dominican, is a member of the ADHI. Etienne is suspicious: "I
     think the Dominican and Haitian bosses want to work together
     to get rid of our young union and remove all workers' rights
     to ensure maximum exploitation."


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        ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © 1997-2004 Le Monde diplomatique



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J.P. Slavin
New York
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