25572: Hermantin (letters to the editor)Don't blame Aristide for violence in Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Miami Herald

Posted on Tue, Jul. 05, 2005



Don't blame Aristide for violence in Haiti


Re the June 24 article Aristide accused of fostering violence: The claim by 
Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega that former President Jean-Bertrand 
Aristide is behind the violence in Haiti is nothing but hyperbole. Gangs in 
Haiti only have allegiance to the highest bidder. I would suggest that 
following the money would reveal whose interests they serve. I am no apologist 
for Aristide. He had an opportunity to change the course of Haiti's tragic 
history and failed. But to say that he is ''singularly responsible'' for the 
violence is simplistic and reflects Noriega's black-and-white view of Haiti and 
his unhealthy fixation on Aristide. Interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue 
recently said that the violence is mainly caused by criminals deported to Haiti 
from the United States.

Noriega's obsession with Aristide has distorted U.S. policy toward Haiti for 
years, even before he became the official architect of it. As a staffer for 
Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., in the late 1990s, Noriega held up desperately needed 
assistance for human-rights observers, the police and the judiciary. Now his 
hatred for Aristide is blinding him to the reality that Haiti is well on its 
way to becoming a failed state -- if it is not one already.

Noriega should forget about Aristide and work to help millions of other 
Haitians struggling to survive before the situation deteriorates into chaos and 
bloodshed of unimaginable proportions. Or else he should get out of the way.

REP. WILLIAM D. DELAHUNT, Washington, D.C.

(William Delahunt, a Democrat from Massachusetts, serves on the House 
International Relations Committee -- Ed.)

In her June 27 Other Views column, Country consumed by violence despite U.N. 
forces, Nancy Roc's selective memory about the dynamics of today's violence in 
Haiti is stunning.

The vigor and thoroughness with which the international media, including Roc, 
have covered recent kidnappings of middle- and upper-class Haitians and 
foreigners is an insult to the hundreds of poor Haitians killed by Haitian 
state-security forces while the media slept.

It was not President Aristide who triggered a class war. France introduced that 
more than 200 years ago in Haiti, and it has been used quite effectively by its 
elite to keep the majority of Haitians in grinding poverty and perpetual 
hunger. Labels invented by rich Haitians to slander the poor -- such as 
''Rwanda,'' ''Somalization'' and ''Operation Baghdad'' -- cannot mask the truth 
about what Haiti has become -- a hell created by Haiti's elite and their 
international backers. It is a place where the security apparatus is used to 
silence the demand of the poor for the only thing that they believe will bring 
them out of this hell -- the return of the democratically elected Aristide.

SHIRLEY PATE, Washington, D.C.