23638: (pub) Esser: The Republican Coup Connection (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

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

Axis of Logic
http://www.axisoflogic.com/

October 27, 2004

Haiti

The Republican Coup Connection
By Joshua Kurlantzick

[Excerpt]

full article:
http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_13024.shtml

In early 2004, chaos overwhelmed Haiti. In January, a rebellion
erupted against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former slum
priest who had frequently angered the United States with his leftist
rhetoric. Aristide had twice been elected, but he had alienated many
Haitians with his increasing demagoguery and use of violence against
the opposition. Yet polls showed that Aristide remained relatively
popular, so even experienced Haiti watchers were surprised when, in
late February, armed militias marched on the nation’s capital while
demonstrators shut down the streets. In the violence, some 100
Haitians were killed. At dawn on February 29, with the militias
closing in, Aristide left Haiti on a U.S. government plane.

But did the rebellion really spring from nowhere? Maybe not. Several
leaders of the demonstrations—some of whom also had links to the
armed rebels—had been getting organizational help and training from a
U.S. government-financed organization. The group, the International
Republican Institute (IRI), is supposed to focus on nonpartisan,
grassroots democratization efforts overseas. But in Haiti and other
countries, such as Venezuela and Cambodia, the institute—which,
though not formally affiliated with the GOP, is run by prominent
Republicans and staffed by party insiders—has increasingly sided with
groups seeking the overthrow of elected but flawed leaders who are
disliked in Washington.

In 2002 and 2003, IRI used funding from the U.S. Agency for
International Development (USAID) to organize numerous political
training sessions in the Dominican Republic and Miami for some 600
Haitian leaders. Though IRI’s work is supposed to be nonpartisan—it
is official U.S. policy not to interfere in foreign elections—a
former U.S. diplomat says organizers of the workshops selected only
opponents of Aristide and attempted to mold them into a political
force.

The trainings were run by IRI’s Haiti program officer, Stanley Lucas,
the scion of a powerful Haitian family with long-standing animosity
toward Aristide—Amnesty International says some family members
participated in a 1987 peasant massacre. “To have Lucas as your
program officer sends a message to archconservatives that you’re on
their side,” says Robert Maguire, a Haiti expert at Trinity College
in Washington, D.C.

IRI’s anti-Aristide focus appeared to have support from the Bush
administration. The former U.S. diplomat in Haiti says Lucas was in
constant contact with Roger Noriega, the administration’s top Latin
America official, who had previously worked for Senator Jesse Helms
and had long sought to oust Aristide. Noriega and conservative
Republican congressional staffers kept in close touch with
IRI-trained opposition leaders and pushed for additional funding for
IRI’s Haiti activities. “The USAID director in Haiti was under
enormous pressure [from Congress] to fund IRI,” says the former
diplomat.

According to an internal report by the USAID inspector general
obtained by Mother Jones, in July 2002 the U.S. Embassy in Haiti
protested that IRI’s actions were undermining the official U.S.
policy of working with all sides in Haiti and that Lucas was
spreading unsubstantiated rumors about the U.S. ambassador. In
response, USAID barred Lucas from running the IRI program for 120
days. Lucas, according to several observers, threatened to use Bush
administration connections to have embassy officials fired. He
continued to essentially run the IRI Haiti program while serving as a
“translator,” in what IRI officials acknowledged was a violation of
USAID’s ban, according to the inspector general’s report.

In 2004, several of the people who had attended IRI trainings were
influential in the toppling of Aristide. Among them, according to Kim
Ives, a journalist with the newspaper Haiti Progres, was André Apaid,
a conservative Haitian politician who had backed a previous
anti-Aristide coup in 1991. Apaid became one of the leaders of the
Group of 184, which organized the street demonstrations against
Aristide. Other members of the group trained in the Dominican
Republic were in close contact with the thuggish armed
opposition—participating in rebel meetings, serving as liaisons
between the armed groups and foreign embassies, and negotiating for
the militia leaders. Among them was Paul Arcelin, a leading member of
the opposition who had served as an ambassador under Haiti’s previous
military junta. Arcelin told Canadian reporters that he and other
opposition leaders frequently met with Guy Philippe, the leader of
the armed rebels, to “prepare for Aristide’s downfall.”

When the uprising against Aristide began in late 2003, the White
House did little to stop it. In February 2004, as the militias were
marching on Port-au-Prince, President Bush issued a statement blaming
Aristide for the violence. In late February, the administration urged
Aristide to leave Haiti, and on February 29 he was flown into exile
in the Central African Republic on a U.S. plane dispatched by the
Pentagon. Today, conservative politicians and the military are
reinstalling themselves in power, Haiti experts report; the country’s
infamous intelligence services are being re-created, and violence
against Aristide supporters is commonplace. ...
.