23696: (pub) Esser: The Murder of Jean Dominique and the Coup of 2004 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

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

Centre for Research on Globalisation
www.globalresearch.ca

October 11, 2004

Haiti: The Coup D'Etat of April 3, 2000
by Patrick Élie

The URL of this article is:
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/ELI410A.html

Once again, tragedy has struck Haïti!

On the very year of the Bicentennial of her exemplary Independence,
she finds herself under foreign military occupation. Adding insult to
injury, French boots are this time, part of the contingent
desecrating her soil.

The vast majority of her people, poor peasants and their urban
descendants, have once again been brutally disenfranchised, robbed of
their hard-won citizenship by the Most Repugnant Elite, allied and
subservient to hostile and racist foreign powers.

Although this tragedy came to a sudden conclusion on that fateful
February 29, 2004, it was the result of a carefully and patiently
crafted and executed plot. In a perverse kind of way, Haïti has made
History again, proving unique albeit this time in her victimization.
Coups d'Etat are usually swift operations, and even when announced by
a long period of destabilization orchestrated and funded by
imperialist power(s), as in the 1973 Chilean coup, the final blow is
delivered by the local military. However, in the February 2004
“regime change,” the usual puppet masters had to step unto the stage
and quite openly deliver the coup de grace themselves.

This “new and improved” coup d’Etat, resembles a slowly unfolding
chess game, where unfortunately the Haïtian people was finally
checkmated last February 29.

But, as is often the case, things are not what they appear to be; the
outcome of that game had in fact been decided quite sometime ago,
almost exactly 4 years before, on April 3, 2000, at 6:00 a.m. to be
precise. Following this most tragic day all the agitation, maneuvers,
feints and counter-feints, amounted to little more than the pathetic
moves of a headless chicken, still trying to run away from the
butcher’s knife. The minute those 7 bullets were pumped into Jean
Dominique’s body, the Lavalas phase of the Haïtian popular democratic
movement was, for all intents and purposes, dead on its feet.

In fact, the permanent silencing of Jean Dominique, was THE logical
and indispensable prerequisite for the success of this new coup
against the Haïtian people; the third in less than 20 years, if one
includes as indeed one should, the pre-emptive strike of November 29,
1987, when voters where mowed down by the army assisted by FRAPH’s
precursors. This conclusion, though reached in hindsight, is
indisputable upon analysis of the nature and mechanism of the coup as
well as the nature and extent of Jean’s influence on the popular
democratic movement.

We are convinced, as were Haïti’s enemies, that JanDo would have
detected this new conspiracy, exposed its sponsors, objectives and
mechanisms, identified its local accomplices and rallied the national
forces necessary to foil it. Using his microphone to project his
great voice, harnessing his hard-won moral authority and his
legendary powers of persuasion in face-to-face discussion, Jean would
have single-handedly defeated this criminal plot.

We know many will doubt our assertion; indeed how could one man armed
only with a microphone and a radio station stop the two juggernauts
conspiring against Haïti; how could he have made a difference when
the two imperialist powers who had done the most harm to the Haïtian
people all through its history, combined their forces, one to
subjugate, the other to humiliate and extract revenge.

Such doubts might come easy to those who don't know the realities of
Haïti and who have not witnessed Jean's career and his tremendous
impact on Haïtian politics during the last 20 years. Given the short
attention span of international public opinion, specially where Haiti
is concerned, they certainly would not remember how Jean had
ridiculed and defeated a last ditch attempt by hired intellectuals to
derail Haiti's first democratic elections, in December 1990, by
warning against a plebiscite; how he had exposed and unraveled the
attempt by the economic elite to harness the just frustrations of a
significant fraction of the Haïtian masses and trick them into
serving their project to strengthen their hold on the economy while
regaining their monopoly on political power. The white knight of the
bourgeoisie was Oilvier Nadal then, rather than Andy Apaid, and Jean
paid dearly for daring to stand in his way: almost overnight most of
Radio Haïti’s publicity contracts were cancelled. Later on, JanDo
would similarly defeat a clever US sponsored plot to effectively
disenfranchise the poor people of Haïti, but this time by cunning
rather than by violence: electoral cards were to be issued sparingly
in with a bias guaranteed to exclude most of the electorate likely to
vote Lavalas.

Much more than a radio anchorman, much more than a political leader,
Jean Dominique was our collective radar spotting the traps of our
enemies long before they could spring shut on us; our lighthouse
cutting through the fog of confusion that has slowly descended upon
the Haitian popular democratic movement since 1994; our alarm siren
whose blast would have awaken and chastised our political leaders the
minute they started drifting into corruption or indifference to the
plight of our people. For if Jean had friends in power, he never was
a friend of power and he spared no one in his defense of the Haitian
masses true interest. There is no doubt in our mind, that even
someone as head-strong as Jean-Bertrand Aristide, would have been
forced to hear Jean and thus avoid at least the most fatal errors and
mistakes accumulated in the last 4 years.

As mentioned before, a close examination of the coup of February 29,
2004, would show why Jean would have been its most formidable
opponent. For despite the spectacular saber-rattling of the small
band of thugs armed and trained in the Dominican Republic before
being let loose upon our country, they were but a small cog in the
vast machine of political destabilization. Key to the success of the
plot was the role played by the self-anointed “independent press.”
 From 1994 on, but specially since 2000, the majority of radio
stations in Haïti had joined into an informal but very effective
alliance against the Lavalas movement. Jean, ever the astute observer
of Haïti’s political scene and a master at sniffing out the plots of
our international foes, had noted as early as the end of 1994, the
incredible number of new radio stations that had sprouted in the
country under the military dictatorship of Cedras, at a time when
there was no freedom of the press and the country was under economic
embargo to boot. For him, it was clear that something was amiss: the
enemy had decided to turn our most important weapon, radio stations,
against us. Jean was the fiercest defender of freedom of the press,
but he also understood this freedom to be at the service of a greater
good: the right of the people to untainted information. All during
these last 4 years, this right was being grossly violated by both the
State-owned media, spewing a steady stream of indecent pro-Aristide
propaganda, and by the “independent” radio stations drumming up a
coordinated climate of insurrection and intolerance. No doubt Jean
Dominique, even alone, would have remained the Haitian people’s
trustful compass in these times of confusion and treachery. Moreover,
the tremendous respect he commanded, even from his worst enemies,
would have carried enough weight to force all his colleagues, whether
state-employed or IRI-sponsored, into at least a modicum of respect
for objectivity and ethics in journalism. With Jean gone, the press
ran amok, with overzealous partisans of President Aristide making
open threats on the State-owned television and commercial radios
opening their microphone to convicted criminals, for their daily
'address to the Nation'.

Jean Dominique was our “army of one,” the political immune system of
the popular democratic movement. For the abomination of February 29,
2004 to succeed, he had to be permanently removed from the scene.

We must fight relentlessly for his killers to be brought to justice
and for the truth to come out about this brutal assassination. We
stand convinced today, that if the triggermen and local planners were
Haitians, the masterminds of the crime are the same who engineered
the February coup and who have always considered targeted
assassination as a normal tool of foreign policy.

Patrick Elie was Head of Security and Minister of Defense, in
Aristide's first government.


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