24383: Esser: Haiti: One year after Washington's coup (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

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

Pravda.Ru
http://english.pravda.ru/

March 1, 2005


Haiti: One year after Washington's coup
by Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey


One year since President Aristide was kidnapped

  On Sunday 29th February 2004, the democratically elected President
of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced out of his home by
personnel from the US Embassy in Port au Prince, who threatened him
and his family, pushed them onto an aircraft and transported them to
the Central African Republic.

  Why? Because Aristide's progressive policies in Haiti were stepping
on a few toes and were making the ruling elite of this country, which
has close ties to Washington, unhappy. Out with Aristide went the
schooling and literacy programs and the policy to redistribute the
wealth in Haiti, a shining example of a tiny fraction of Haves owning
more than the vast number of Have-nots.

  Claims that the Haitian President had resigned were quaffed at by
Aristide himself, who told Congress member Maxine Walters from the
Palace of the Renaissance in the Central African Republic that he had
been kidnapped.

  The day after his kidnapping, the opposition forces ran riot,
murdering tens of Aristide supporters, ransacking shops, looting and
freeing criminals from prisons. They then started to blockade convoys
of food run by the UNO. The opposition, around 8% of the population,
led by members of the 1% representing the country's elite, who hold
over half of Haiti's wealth, had been running a campaign against
President Aristide since he began a program of progressive policies.

  A mixture of murders and accusations against the President formed
the backbone of the opposition's policy, which was supported by
Washington, which said nothing of the attacks and killings they
perpetrated, yet were the first to brand Aristide's supporters, from
the poorer section of society, as "militants" if there was any
retaliation.

  The Bush Administration immediately saw its chance to seize power
in the region, financing and equipping the fascist Convergence for
Democracy, composed by supporters of the hated former dictator
Duvalier, and the Group of 184, a pro-business group.

  The Convergence is led by paramilitary members of FRAPH, who,
backed by the CIA, had carried out the coup against Aristide in 1991,
in which 5.000 people were murdered. The Clinton administration later
reinstated Aristide, the country's first democratically elected
President, in power in 1994.

  The Convergence has strong ties with Haiti's elite and with the US
Republican Party, which aids it through the National Endowment for
Democracy and the International Republican Institute. Washington also
intervened directly by strangling the island with a blockade, at a
time when thousands of people were starving.

  All that President Aristide did wrong was to raise the minimum
wage, which would ruin the country's sweatshop owners who are in turn
supported by Washington. He had been forced to implement a reduction
of tariffs on rice imported from the USA, which bankrupted thousands
of Haitian farmers and had been forced to maintain the subsistence
wage of 1.60 USD per day to keep Washington's friends happy in their
sweatshops, producing cheap goods for the US market.

  At what human cost?

  However, Aristide doubled the minimum wage and gave priority to
education and healthcare programs, building schools and refurbishing
hospitals, setting up HIV screening and treatment centers,
subsidizing schoolbooks and school uniforms, extending free school
meal programs and subsidized transportation.

  What terrible crimes. We see clearly and yet again where the hearts
and minds of the Bush administration lie.


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