24520: (news) This Week in Haiti 23 # 1 3/16/205 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Haïti Progrès <editor@haiti-progres.com>

                      HAITI PROGRES
          "Le journal qui offre une alternative"

                  * THIS WEEK IN HAITI *

                   March 16 - 22, 2005
                     Vol. 23, No. 1

CANADA'S GROWING ROLE IN HAITIAN AFFAIRS
by Anthony Fenton

The Canadian government is following through on its commitment to "take
the lead" in Haiti on behalf of the Bush Administration.

It has been almost one year since the nature of this request was made
explicit in Canada's Parliamentarian Standing Committee on Foreign
Affairs. During one of several meetings which took place about one month
after the removal of President Jean Bertrand Aristide, Carlo Dade of the
Canadian government funded hemispheric policy think-tank, FOCAL
(Canadian Foundation for the Americas), had this to say on April 1,
2004: "The U.S. would welcome Canadian involvement and Canada's taking
the lead in Haiti. The administration in Washington has its hands more
than full with Afghanistan, Iraq, and the potential in Korea and the
Mideast. There is simply not the ability to concentrate... [T]o really
succeed in Haiti, you need long-term attention at the highest levels...
This is a chance for Canada to step up and provide that sort of focused
attention and leadership, and the administration would welcome this."

Dade also made it clear that "this was something of interest" to
Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega, and USAID Latin America
administrator Adolfo Franco, who had visited Ottawa just days earlier.

Dade's comments were somewhat facetious, given that the Canadian
government had already been playing a key role in the pre-coup
destabilization of Haiti's Lavalas government. Most notably, Canadian MP
Denis Paradis hosted a "high-level roundtable meeting on Haiti" January
31-February 1, 2003 (see HaVti ProgrPs, Vol. 20, No. 51, 3/5/2003).
According to the original internal communiqués, recently obtained
through an Access to Information Act request, the meeting was supposed
to address "the current political situation in Haiti." Notably, the
affair was "envisaged to be of a restricted and intimate nature." This,
"in order to facilitate a free exchange of views and brainstorming among
the invited participants."

Nowhere among the invitees were any Haitian representatives. Aristide
government officials were only told about the meeting after Paradis
leaked the details of it to L'Actualité reporter Michel Vastel in March,
2003, which facilitated a predictable period of "damage-control."
Paradis told Vastel that the themes of Aristide's possible removal, the
potential return of Haiti's disbanded military , and the option of
imposing a Kosovo-like trusteeship on Haiti, were discussed during the
meeting. Vastel published this information, which caused a considerable
stir in Haiti, the U.S., and Ottawa, forcing Paradis and the Canadian
government to deny that such things were considered. Paradis was
subsequently stripped of his position as Secretary of State for Latin
America, and was replaced as Minister of La Francophonie, under whose
auspices the meeting was hosted. Denis Coderre replaced Paradis, and
today functions as Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin's Special Adviser
to Haiti.

Significantly, Vastel continues to stand by the original article,
claiming not only Paradis told him the details but that French officials
corroborated them. On January 31, 2003, both Vastel and French Minister
Pierre-Andre Wiltzer, spoke on the same panel, the title of which was
"Obligation morale internationale; Perspectives, idées nouvelles et
démarches B explorer." During a September 11, 2004 interview, Paradis
repeatedly invoked the notion that he was misinterpreted by Vastel, that
the meeting could, essentially, be boiled down to the "responsibility to
protect," a Canadian-made "humanitarian intervention" doctrine that, if
adopted by the UN through a process that Martin is now attempting to
facilitate, powerful countries would give themselves the right (or
"responsibility") to militarily intervene in a country that they deem to
have reached a state of "failure."

Whether or not military intervention was discussed explicitly, as Vastel
contends, or implicitly, as Paradis insists, the important fact is that
military intervention did take place, Aristide was removed, the Haitian
army has effectively returned, and a de facto trusteeship is being
imposed on the Haitian people.

JUSTIFYING THE INTERVENTION

In order to pull the intervention off and assume thereafter a key
"leadership role," the Canadian government has gone to considerable
lengths to cover, albeit poorly, its tracks. This is a process that also
has its origins in the pre-coup period. Documents recently obtained from
the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) show that, with
exclusivity, organizations that are ideologically opposed to Aristide
and Lavalas are receiving Canadian government funding. The list includes
the likes of ENFOFANM, SOFA, Kay Fanm, GARR, CRESFED, PAJ, POHDH/SAKS,
and the Haiti branch of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights
(NCHR).

In the months prior to Aristide's ouster, virtually all of these
organizations assisted the official Canadian government policy toward
Haiti. The most telling example of this can be found in a document
entitled "Haiti: a Bitter Bicentennial," which was produced by the
similarly CIDA-funded "Rights and Democracy," a "Canadian institution
with an international mandate." In September 2003, Rights and Democracy
sent a delegation to Haiti. Seeking to "make a contribution to"
resolving the "enduring crisis" in Haiti, Rights and Democracy
determined "several approaches to intervention," that might assist Haiti
through the crisis. Besides providing legitimacy for the political
opposition fronts Democratic Convergence and Group of 184, the report
clearly lays the blame for Haiti's political turmoil on Aristide and
Lavalas.

While the details of the report are of themselves interesting, herein it
is the list of those organizations that Rights and Democracy met with at
the time that we should find particularly revealing. But for a single
representative of the Haitian government, the remaining Haitians met
with were aligned with the political opposition. All the organizations
listed above, today receiving CIDA funding, are on this Rights and
Democracy list. It is possible that several of the groups were receiving
Canadian funding prior to the coup.

What is known for certain, and perhaps most insidiously, is that NCHR
received $100,000 for the specific purpose of juridical, medical,
psychological, and logistical assistance for the "victims" of the
alleged La Scierie massacre. On March 9, 2005, HaVti-ProgrPs put NCHR
into proper context in this respect: "The illegal government has charged
both [former Prime Minister] Neptune and [former Interior Minister]
Privert with involvement in a supposed 'massacre' on February 11, 2004
in St. Marc, an event which reporters and human rights groups almost
universally agree never happened. Only the pro-coup U.S.
government-backed National Coalition of Haitian Rights (NCHR) charges
that some 50 people were slaughtered by pro-Lavalas partisans. Pierre
Espérance, the NCHR's Haiti bureau chief, says that the remains of the
supposed victims were 'eaten by dogs' to explain the absence of any
forensic evidence" (see HaVti ProgrPs, Vol. 22, No. 52, 3/9/2005).

At this point it is doubtful that many Canadian taxpayers are aware that
they are funding such a partisan and thereby illegitimate "human rights"
organization such as NCHR. In an independent report published around the
same time that the Canadian Embassy in Haiti announced the funding for
NCHR (April 14, 2004), the National Lawyers Guild laid out NCHR's
deficiencies as a human rights organization. NCHR "could not name a
single case in which a Lavalas supporter was a victim," and took the
delegation to a room "where the wall was adorned with a a large 'wanted'
poster featuring Aristide and his cabinet." Unanimously, the NLG report
concluded: "We condemn the National Coalition for Haitian Rights (NCHR)
in Haiti for not maintaining its impartiality as a human rights
organization."

Despite this, NCHR remains the most often cited human rights
organization in Haiti by the international and local elite-owned media.
Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin has echoed Pierre Espérance, who
insists that "there are no political prisoners in Haiti." Rather, the
700 or more imprisoned without charge, are common criminals who just
happen to be Lavalas. On the whole uncritical of the hand-selected
Latortue government, the NCHR has played an critical role in
legitimizing the coup and keeping international public opinion
confounded on the issue of human rights abuses directed against
pro-democracy activists.

With several independent human rights reports recently and exhaustively
exposing the systematic repression of perceived supporters of Aristide
and/or constitutionality, the NCHR is gradually being seen as naked, not
unlike the emperors on whose behalf they are working. In a March 11
press release, the director of NCHR-New York, Jocelyn McCalla, who
himself has been criticized widely in the past for being partisan,
publicly distanced his organization from Espérance's Haiti-based NCHR:
"Neither Mr. Espérance, nor any member of the staff of NCHR-Haiti, speak
for or on behalf of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights (NCHR),
its board or its staff."

McCalla accused Espérance of "defending a dysfunctional Haitian judicial
system which delivers little other than injustice." Here, McCalla was
referring to the continued detention of Neptune despite having "not been
formally charged" by Haitian authorities for his alleged involvement in
the "massacre" in St. Marc on February 11, 2004. Neptune's three-week
long hunger strike, which protested the "dysfunctional Haitian judicial
system" while demanding his and Privert's unconditional release, came to
an end when he was brought to a UN hospital and treated for dehydration
on March 11.

Author and co-ordinator of the Committee for the Defense of the Haitian
People's Rights, Ronald Saint-Jean, has documented and analyzed the
circumstances surrounding NCHR's role in what he characterizes as the
fabrication of the "massacre" in St. Marc. (See: "A propos du "Génocide
de la Scierie": Exiger de la NCHR toute la verité," 2004) Saint-Jean was
in Ottawa and Montreal earlier this month and denounced Canada's funding
of NCHR, telling officials and the press that if Neptune dies his blood
is on Canada's hands.

The author is an independent journalist based in Vancouver.

All articles copyrighted Haiti Progres, Inc. REPRINTS ENCOURAGED.
Please credit Haiti Progres.

                              -30-