23490: Esser: Powell and Latortue Blame Aristide, When the Blame Lies With Them (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser <torx@joimail.com>

The Council on Hemispheric Affairs - COHA
http://www.coha.org

October 13, 2004

Violence in Haiti: Colin Powell and Gerard Latortue Blame Aristide,
When the Blame Lies With Them

On October 4, Haitians staged yet another in the country’s growing
number of street demonstrations, calling for the return of
democratically-elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was
ousted by a State Department-scripted coup last February 29. In
recent days, these manifestations have cost 30 lives in the
Port-au-Prince area alone, generating further popular anger against
the U.S.-sanctioned local authorities. The latest protest pitted the
island’s ill-trained police and Brazilian-led U.N. peacekeepers
against pro-Aristide supporters, resulting in fourteen dead,
including three police officers. In comments to the Miami Herald,
Interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue blamed the violence on “The
Aristide loyalists [who] were trying to intimidate and derail the
municipal, legislative and presidential elections scheduled for next
year.”


Setting the Scene

 From Latortue’s first days in office, members of Aristide’s Lavalas
Party—rather than renegade ex-police and military personnel, and
members of the previous junta—were the interim president’s enemy. But
in recent days, Latortue has been stepping up his anti-Aristide
rhetoric with the probable goal of building a case against the
participation of the former Haitian president and his party in next
year’s elections. There is no doubt that Latortue will soon be using
the perilous security situation to build support for reconstituting
the brutal Haitian armed forces. He will also use the situation to
advance the electoral prospects of Haiti’s business-led rightwing
political movement, in particular the Group of 184, led by the
unscrupulous sweatshop labor king, Andy Apaid Jr., a U.S. national.
Rather than this far-fetched explanation of the alleged threat posed
by Aristide, based on a ballot that might not happen (at least not by
next year), Latortue instead should have traced part of the blame for
the recent series of public protests to the gross incompetence that
he and his government have displayed ever since he was raised up from
obscurity by a State Department press release declaring the formation
of his government. Latortue’s appointment was announced shortly after
Aristide had been hustled onto an airplane and flown into exile in
the Central African Republic.


Team Members: Latortue and Powell

A recent example of Latortue’s ineptitude was his hapless response to
Tropical Storm Jeanne, the natural tragedy that took several thousand
lives on the island and cost tens of millions of dollars in personal
and public property loss. While the storm was raging, Latortue and
his confederates were not even competent enough to take the basic
step of establishing an emergency national radio grid over which they
could have broadcast calls to the population to go to high ground in
order to escape from the flooding. This abdication of responsibility
alone should have been enough to justify calling for his and his
colleague’s resignations.

In addition to Latortue, Secretary of State Colin Powell was quick to
blame last week’s street violence on supporters of Aristide’s Lavalas
Party, stating that “These are the old Aristide elements and some
criminal elements who are trying to take advantage of the situation.”
However, protesters present at the demonstration claim that it was
the police who first opened fire on a crowd of, at that time, unarmed
pro-Aristide militants.

What Powell refuses to acknowledge is that the recent violence and
protests in Haiti are not random acts, but are the direct result of
popular resentment against the U.S.-executed coup d’etat which he
authored, and which brought about the replacement of Aristide last
February with someone whom the citizens view as an impostor. Haitians
are also outraged over the manner in which Latortue has embraced
rather than condemned the island’s ex-military and rebel police who
have persecuted thousands of Lavalas members, solely on the basis of
their political beliefs. In Latortue’s first public appearance as
prime minister, he went so far as to acclaim Haiti’s rebel
leaders—many of whom are now highly regarded by the current
government for their gun-slinging abilities. He also praised thugs
and FRAPH paramilitary death squad members, whom he has since
referred to as “freedom fighters.” This even sent his State
Department godfathers into a free fall.


For and Against Aristide

For their part, rather than protecting Aristide and the principles of
the constitutional government, U.S. Embassy officials, acting under
the instructions of Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega, with
the approval of Powell, skillfully stage-managed the removal of
Aristide from the country. There was no confusion over what
Washington wanted; a number of inter-agency meetings in Washington
established that Noriega, hiding behind the phrase, “a high State
Department source,” had been lobbying to oust Aristide weeks before
the president’s eventual flight into exile.

The Bush administration’s strategy was to rid itself once and for all
of that meddlesome troublemaker, choosing to avail itself of
Aristide’s desperate situation, on the eve of his departure. Not only
did Powell refuse to authorize peacekeepers to be sent to protect
Aristide and Port-au-Prince, but he would not even authorize the
shipment of tear gas and other riot control devices necessary to
preserve law and order and control the security situation.
Consequently, it should come as no surprise that the majority of
Haitians today are alienated by and deeply suspicious of Washington’s
motives in imposing an unelected government of its own choosing upon
them. They also resent foreign troops being brought in to maintain
discipline over the population while a jerry-rigged ballot is
prepared, in which most likely neither Aristide nor his main
political allies will be allowed to take part.

Public protests are one of the few mechanisms at hand for the poor to
voice their discontent. Moreover, many Haitians are mystified over
who Latortue actually is, aside from being a long-time resident of
Boca Raton, Florida, and not having been a Haitian resident for
decades. Most Haitians still consider Aristide to be their only
legitimate leader. Alix Jean, a Lavalas supporter, captured the
sentiment of many Haitians when he noted that, “We believe in
democracy, and we have a democratically elected leader. His name is
Jean-Bertrand Aristide.”


Friends and Foes

Moreover, Haitians are not alone in their refusal to acquiesce to the
U.S. hybrid government. In spite of Washington’s pressure on the
leadership of Guyana, Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the
Grenadines, as part of an overall strategy to reintegrate the now
U.S. satellite into CARICOM’s regional trade bloc activities, these
doughty mini-nations have refused to interact with the Latortue
government. At this point, CARICOM—although a number of its members
are in favor of lifting Haiti’s suspension—will not move to
reintegrate Latortue’s regime as a CARICOM member until the matter is
brought up at its next scheduled meeting. Why then did Powell expect
fiercely nationalist Haitians to meekly accept a U.S.-dependent
government without displaying their fury in one of the few methods
still available to them—street demonstrations?


Why They Protest

In fact, many patriotic Haitians consider it nothing less than their
duty to manifest their chagrin over the shrouded departure of their
lawful president. Despite the Bush administration’s ultimate
responsibility for Haiti’s current morass, Powell has joined Latortue
in blaming Aristide supporters for the turmoil that is increasingly
gripping the small Caribbean nation. The record, however, speaks
differently. The Latortue government—and for that matter the
U.S.-installed and led emergency peacekeeping unit and then the
current U.N. interim peacekeepers— characteristically have stood idly
by and watched as a rising tide of pro-Aristide Haitians have been
harassed, arrested, tortured and, in many instances, killed for their
political dissent and support of Aristide. In a San Francisco Bay
View article, Haitian expert Anthony Fenton cited the July 19
publication of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti in
which it was reported that, “Morgue employees from the General
Hospital in Port-au-Prince have revealed that 800 bodies on Sunday,
March 7, and another 200 bodies on Sunday, March 28, were dumped and
buried in a mass grave at Titanyen. These figures are unusual for
such a short period of time (100 is normal for a month).” The
document continued to note that, “Interviewees have reported that the
victims were supporters of Aristide or Haiti’s former constitutional
government.”

Another example of the interim government’s single-minded persecution
of Lavalas supporters—much of it under the watch of one of Latortue’s
most diabolical cabinet figures, Justice Minister Bernard Gousse—was
the detention of former Prime Minister Yvon Neptune on July 27, 2004.
After nearly three months in hiding, Neptune was detained and
imprisoned in the national penitentiary on invented charges to ensure
that he would not be able to participate in the upcoming 2005
elections. “There’s no case against [Neptune],” charged U.S.
Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) in an interview with the Council
on Hemispheric Affairs. It was “unconscionable that he [Neptune] has
been arrested—this is another attempt by the puppet government to cut
off the head of Lavalas.”
Amnesty International echoed Congresswoman Waters’ interpretation in
a stinging indictment of the Latortue government’s behavior last
June. The organization claimed that, “The interim government has
swiftly moved to arrest members of former President Aristide’s
Lavalas Family Party suspected of acts of political violence or
corruption. However, the government has failed to act against a
number of convicted perpetrators of grave human rights violations who
were freed from prison before or during the recent insurgency≤ None
of them have been re-arrested, and a few are reportedly terrorizing
their victims and others involved in their prosecution.”

This analysis was prepared by Jenna Michelle Liut and Larry Birns,
respectively COHA Research Associate and Director.
.