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27403: Jean-Pierre- (News) The Other Regime Change -Max Blumental -Salon.com
From: JJEANPIERRE1@aol.com
HLLN Note: "The Other Regime Change - Did the Bush administration allow a
network of right-wing Republicans to foment a violent coup in Haiti?" an
article
written by Max Blumental, July 16, 2004, that extensively detailed IRI and
Stanley Lucas' role in the overthrow of Haiti's elected government was
originally published at Salon.com
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/07/16/haiti_coup/index.html . Below
Max Blumental comments on the recent New York Times story: "Democracy Undone -
Mixed U.S. Signals Helped Tilt Haiti Toward Chaos."
*****************
Uncovering A US-Planned Coup In Haiti: The Original Version
On Sunday, the New York Times ran a lengthy investigative piece by Walt
Bogdanovich and Jenny Nordberg, "Mixed U.S. Signals Helped Tilt Haiti Toward
Chaos," which claimed to expose how the a taxpayer funded Washington non-
profit
with close ties to the Bush administration, the International Republican
Institute, and its Haiti operative, Stanley Lucas, fomented a coup in Haiti
that
deposed its democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
In fact, the story was remarkably similar to a story I wrote nearly two
years ago for Salon.com. On January 3, 2005, a New York Times staffer named
Ursula Andrews emailed me, asking for help with research. I was excited that
the
newspaper of record was finally picking up on the story, and complied with
their request. When the Times published its story, it contained no citation of
my work.
So here is my article, "The Other Regime Change," in its entirety. Unlike
the Times, my story includes well-sourced details of Stanley Lucas' sordid
personal history, like his family's orchestration of a bloody peasant
massacre,
his role in training death squad personnel, and his campaign to destroy former
US Ambassor Brian Dean Curran. You may be surprised at what your tax dollars
are funding in the name of democracy promotion:
The other regime change
Did the Bush administration allow a network of right-wing Republicans to
foment a violent coup in Haiti?
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Max Blumenthal
July 16, 2004 | On Feb. 8, 2001, the federally funded International
Republican Institute's (IRI) senior program officer for Haiti, Stanley Lucas,
appeared on the Haitian station Radio Tropicale to suggest three strategies
for
vanquishing Haiti's president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. First, Lucas proposed
forcing Aristide to accept early elections and be voted out; second, he could
be
charged with corruption and arrested; and finally, Lucas raised dealing with
Aristide the way the Congolese people had dealt with President Laurent Kabila
the month before. "You did see what happened to Kabila?" Lucas asked his
audience.
Kabila had been assassinated.
IRI's communications director, Thayer Scott, in an interview with Salon,
characterized Lucas' radio remarks as "a comparative analysis of countries
that
embrace democracy and those that do not."
Whatever the case, Lucas and IRI, a nonprofit political group backed by
powerful Republicans close to the Bush administration, did more than talk.
Throughout the last six years, IRI, whose stated mission is to "promote the
practice of democracy" abroad, conducted a $3 million party-building program
in
Haiti, training Aristide's political opponents, uniting them into a single
bloc
and, according to a former U.S. ambassador there, encouraging them to reject
internationally sanctioned power-sharing agreements in order to heighten
Haiti's political crisis. Moreover, Lucas' controversial personal background
and
his ties to Haitian opposition figures with violent histories -- including
some who participated in a coup against Aristide in February -- raise
questions
about whether IRI's Haiti program violated its own guidelines and those of
its funders.
The recent political turmoil in Haiti and in Venezuela (where the Bush White
House tacitly supported a coup against President Hugo Chavez in 2002, and
where IRI also has a murky history of involvement) reflect a troubling pattern
in the Bush administration's prevailing approach to the export of
"democracy." When George W. Bush entered the White House in 2001, he adopted a
policy of
studied neglect toward Haiti, scaling back President Clinton's policy of
direct engagement while appointing veteran anti-Aristide ideologues to key
State
Department positions. Meanwhile, the well-connected, smooth-talking Lucas
acted as the Haitian version of Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile who helped
neoconservatives in Washington promote the war against Saddam Hussein. Like
Chalabi, Lucas ingratiated himself with powerful Republicans sympathetic to
the
concept of regime change in his native country and lobbied for increased
funding
to the opposition groups he advised and helped train.
Impeccably dressed and charming, as a young man Lucas gained renown as a
Caribbean judo champion and well-connected socialite. He is the scion of a
pro-Duvalier Haitian landowning family from the town of Jean Rebel. According
to
Amnesty International and a longtime Jean Rebel resident now in the U.S. who
spoke on condition of anonymity, in 1987 Lucas' cousins Leonard and Remy
organized a machete-wielding mob to hack to death 250 peasants protesting for
land
redistribution outside their ranch. IRI's Scott dismisses the massacre as an
"urban legend."
At the time of the massacre, Lucas was active in plans to crush Haiti's
nascent democracy movement. According to Kim Ives, who has known Lucas since
1986
and is editor of the independent Haitian weekly Haiti Progres, during a
chance encounter in 1988 in Port-au-Prince, Lucas told him he was training
Haitian soldiers in counterinsurgency tactics. "I'd always pictured him as
more
of
a playboy than anything," Ives recounted. "That was the first time I realized
he was a serious player involved with the soldiers preparing to put down the
popular uprisings to come."
According to Bob Maguire, a leading Haiti expert at Trinity College and
former State Department official, Lucas' personal history raises serious
questions about IRI's integrity. "Having this guy as your point person for
Haiti,
with this kind of background, is just incredibly provocative," says Maguire.
"If
your organization wants to have a useful, balanced program, how could you
have this guy as your program officer?"
The role of figures like Lucas in the coup suggests a complex web of
Republican connections to Aristide's ouster that may never be known. What is
clear,
though, is that the destabilization of Aristide's government was initiated
early on by IRI, a group of right-wing congressmen and their staffers by
imposing draconian sanctions, training Aristide's opponents and encouraging
them in
their intransigence. The Bush administration appears to have gone along,
delegating Haiti policy to right-wing underlings like the assistant secretary
for the Western Hemisphere, Roger Noriega, a former staffer to Sen. Jesse
Helms, R-N.C. Not only did Noriega collaborate with IRI to increase funding to
Aristide's opponents, but as a mediator to Haiti's political crisis he appears
to have routinely acquiesced with the opposition's divisive tactics.
In February 2004, as insurgents went on the offensive and Haiti began
descending into chaos, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld outlined the Bush
administration's view of the situation at a Feb. 10 press
briefing: "Everyone's
hopeful that the situation, which tends to ebb and flow down there, will stay
below a certain threshold ... we have no plans to do anything." Two weeks
later,
an international delegation was unable to broker a compromise; Aristide
agreed to a power-sharing peace deal, but the rebels declined. With the
insurgency
sweeping toward the capital on Feb. 28, top Bush officials convened, but
rather than send in troops to protect Aristide's government, they reversed
their
official position of support, asking Aristide to leave the country
immediately under U.S. stewardship. Haiti's elected leader left on a plane the
following day in the company of U.S. diplomats, bound for exile in the Central
African Republic.
To be sure, Aristide was a corrupt, problematic leader -- but since his
ouster, the situation in Haiti appears to have deteriorated to a point lower
than
at any moment during his tenure. The looting that followed Aristide's
departure has cost Haitian businesses hundreds of millions of dollars; most of
the
Haitian national police force's weapons and equipment were stolen and over
half of its officers quit; and the price of rice, essential to the diet of
Haiti's poor, has more than doubled in the last four months. Moreover, recent
reports describe rampant human rights abuses and extra-judicial killings
filling
the power void.
For the majority of Haitians who live on one meal and less than a dollar a
day, regime change has only brought more violence, chaos and starvation.
The right-wing campaign to oust Aristide has its roots in the GOP's
longstanding support for pro-U.S. dictators in Haiti. In 1971, President Nixon
restored U.S. military aid to the brutal regime of dictator Jean-Claude
Duvalier,
whom he considered an anticommunist counterweight to Cuba. The Duvalier regime
eventually crumbled beneath a wave of popular opposition in 1986; a
procession of GOP-backed puppets and military dictators followed, until the
charismatic Aristide won Haiti's first democratic election in 1990. But
Aristide was
overthrown a year later by FRAPH, a CIA-backed junta led by Raoul Cedras, a
Haitian army officer trained by the U.S. Army and openly supported by
prominent
Washington conservatives like Helms.
When Aristide fled Haiti in 1991, he was given sanctuary in Washington by
sympathetic liberal politicians and intellectuals, especially members of the
Congressional Black Caucus, who were eager to show solidarity with the first
democratically elected leader of the world's oldest black republic. In 1994,
under intense pressure from congressional Democrats, President Clinton
returned
Aristide to power by military force. Though Aristide accepted onerous
economic reforms as a condition of his return, his legacy as a
liberation-theology
preaching slum priest thrust to power by Haiti's poor masses fueled a
perception among conservatives that he was the next Fidel Castro.
The GOP secured a majority in Congress in 1994. Soon afterwards Helms, who
chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; his counterpart in the House,
Ben Gilman, R-N.Y.; and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss,
R-Fla. (now considered a potential successor to former CIA Director George
Tenet) passed a stream of bills ordering U.S. troops out of Haiti, terminating
a
host of infrastructure-building initiatives there and imposing an embargo on
lethal and nonlethal weapons to the Haitian national police force. Helms even
presented a now-discredited CIA document on the Senate floor in 1995
claiming Aristide was "psychotic."
With conditions deteriorating, Aristide clung to power using a mixture of
firebrand rhetoric and repression, surrounding himself with cronies and hiring
armed gangs to intimidate his opponents. Meanwhile, confronted with a Clinton
White House that preferred to hold its nose to Aristide's corruption and
focus on building Haiti's fragile democracy, a coalition of Republicans used
IRI
as a Trojan horse. From the beginning of its Haiti program, in direct
contradiction of many of its own guidelines, IRI embraced reactionary
political
elements far more antidemocratic than Aristide.
IRI was created by Congress in 1983. It has an approximately $20 million
annual budget granted by its bureaucratic parent, the National Endowment for
Democracy, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and conservative
corporate and philanthropic groups. But past IRI activity highlights an agenda
for
regime change far from democratic in its methods, from organizing groups
that participated in a 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela, to hosting delegates
from
right-wing European parties at a September 2002 conference in Prague to
rally support for war on Iraq. Its Haiti program is the brainchild of its vice
president, Georges Fauriol, who is a member of the Republican National
Committee and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. At CSIS, a
conservative Washington think tank, Fauriol worked closely with Otto Reich, a
hawkish
Iran-Contra figure who served as the Bush administration's special envoy to
the Western Hemisphere until his resignation this June. Fauriol, who rejected
an interview request, has worked as a Latin America expert for CSIS since
the days when Duvalier ruled Haiti.
By 1992, while the U.S.-friendly Cedras' FRAPH death squads rampaged through
Haiti's slums and slaughtered Aristide supporters by the thousands, IRI
hired Haitian national Stanley Lucas to head its operations there. Though
elections had already been nullified by Cedras, IRI spokesman Scott says the
group's
work in Haiti at the time consisted of "election monitoring." Lucas himself
rejected an interview request.
For IRI's Washington backers, Lucas meant unparalleled access to the key
anti-Aristide figures on Haiti's political scene. By 1998, when IRI's
"party-building" program officially began, Lucas spearheaded the training of
an
array
of small parties at IRI meetings in Port-au-Prince. IRI's Scott characterized
the seminars as benign lessons in "Democracy 101."
Indeed, Lucas and IRI's involvement with some of Aristide's most unsavory
enemies suggested an altogether different agenda. Among invitees to IRI's
seminars were members of CREDDO, the personal political platform of Gen.
Prosper
Avril, the former Haitian dictator who ruled with an iron fist from 1988 to
1990, declaring a state of siege and arbitrarily torturing his opponents.
Avril
wrote about IRI's meetings in his 1999 memoir, "The Truth About a Singular
Lawsuit," describing a truce he signed "under the auspices of IRI" with his
former torture victim Evans Paul. Thanks in part to the rapprochement, Paul
became the de facto spokesman for the coalition of parties trained in 1999 by
Lucas and IRI: the Democratic Convergence.
Despite IRI's efforts to create a credible opposition to Aristide, the
Convergence proved a lame horse; the party was blown out by Aristide's popular
Lavalas party in the 2000 local and parliamentary elections. Yet questionable
vote counting prompted the Clinton administration to block over $400 million
in
multilateral loans to Haiti. As economic conditions deteriorated there,
Convergence changed its tactics. In addition to boycotting the 2000
presidential
elections, between 2000 and 2002 Convergence rejected 20 proposed
power-sharing compromises designed to ease Haiti's political crisis. In 2003
the party
formed an ersatz transitional government to challenge Aristide's legitimacy,
and its relationship with IRI and Washington Republicans grew even cozier.
According to IRI's Scott, from 1998 to 2002, IRI bolstered Convergence with
"less than $2 million." In 2000, $34,994 of that money was granted to IRI from
NED to junket Convergence leaders to several meetings in Washington designed
"to open channels of communication" with "relevant policy makers and
analysts." IRI met Convergence leaders again in February 2002 in the Dominican
Republic with a delegation of congressional Republicans including Caleb
McCarry, a
staunchly anti-Aristide staffer on the House Foreign Relations Committee
who, according to a former senior State Department official, "worked hand in
glove with Lucas to tie funding to the opposition."
Secretary of State Colin Powell advised the continuation of Clinton's Haiti
policy -- Aristide had eventually "corrected" the election results -- calling
for increased international aid, but his diplomatic efforts were stymied by
Convergence's rejectionism -- and by a White House that seemed determined to
move Haiti policy in an opposite direction. By 2002, Bush had eliminated the
State Department position of special Haiti coordinator and removed the
national security advisor from daily involvement with Haiti. He also appointed
Helms' ideological heir, Noriega, first as the U.S. ambassador to the OAS, and
later to assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere, in turn
strengthening the influence of IRI.
Meanwhile, IRI's Lucas began to sabotage the U.S. ambassador, Brian Dean
Curran, a career diplomat and Clinton appointee who had evidence that Lucas
was
undermining diplomatic efforts to resolve Haiti's political crisis. Seeking to
weaken Curran politically, Lucas spread destructive rumors about his
personal life, according to a close associate of Curran's who asked to remain
anonymous. A journalist with access to U.S. diplomats in Haiti offered a
similar
account. Curran's associate also said that Lucas threatened Curran and another
embassy official, claiming they would be fired "as soon as the real U.S.
policy is enacted." IRI refused to discuss Lucas' interactions with Curran or
embassy officials.
In response to Lucas' freebooting, Curran demanded that USAID block him from
participating in IRI's Haiti program. During a March 10, 2004, Senate
hearing on Haiti, Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., pressed Noriega for details of
Lucas'
involvement. "The approval of this new grant was conditioned on the IRI
[Haiti] director, Stanley Lucas, being barred from participating in this
program
for a period of time because the U.S. ambassador in Haiti had evidence that he
was undermining U.S. efforts to encourage Haitian opposition cooperation with
the OAS efforts to broker a compromise. Is that not true as well?" Dodd
asked Noriega.
"Yes, sir," Noriega conceded.
Dodd continued: "Is Stanley Lucas still involved?"
"As far as I know, he is still part of the program," Noriega said. According
to IRI's Scott, Lucas was barred for only four months by USAID.
Lucas' continued role frustrated Curran; he resigned in July 2003. In his
farewell address in Port-au-Prince, Curran remarked, "There were many in Haiti
who preferred not to listen to me, the president's representative, but to
their own friends in Washington, sirens of extremism or revanchism on the one
hand or apologists on the other," Curran said. "They don't hold official
positions. I call then the 'chimeres' [a Haitian slang term for "political
thugs"]
of Washington."
By the time of Curran's departure, IRI's Haiti program was flush with a $1.2
million grant from USAID for 2003 and 2004. According to IRI's Scott,
"roughly $200,000" of that grant was used to junket over 600 Haitian
opposition
figures to the Dominican Republic and the U.S. to meet with IRI. With IRI's
help, they formed a new coalition called Group of 184 representing the "civil
society" wing of the opposition. IRI currently hosts Group of 184's home page
on
its Haiti policy Web site, which features photos of anti-Aristide
demonstrations in Port-au-Prince last March. And Scott acknowledged that "IRI
played an
advisory role in Group of 184's formation."
Group of 184's power brokers were divided into two camps: its majority
constitutional wing, which emphasized protests and diplomacy as the path to
forcing Aristide out, and a hard-line faction quietly determined to oust
Aristide
by any means necessary. The constitutionalists were represented by Group of
184's spokesman and most prominent member, Andre Apaid Jr., a Haitian-American
of Lebanese descent who controls one of Haiti's oldest and largest sweatshop
empires. The hard-liners were led by Wendell Claude, a politician who was
hell-bent on avenging the death of his brother Sylvio, a church minister
burned
to death by a pro-Aristide mob after the coup in 1991.
While the constitutional wing mounted a series of anti-Aristide street
protests through late 2003, provoking increasing unrest, Claude and the
hard-liners hatched plans for a coup. They tapped Guy Phillippe, a U.S.-
trained
former
Haitian police chief with a dubious human rights record. He was to lead a
band of insurgents consisting almost entirely of exiled members of FRAPH death
squads and former soldiers of the Haitian army, which Aristide had disbanded
in 1995. For three years, they camped in Perenal, a border town in the
Dominican Republic, using it as a staging point for acts of sabotage against
Aristide's government, including a July 2001 hit-and-run attack on the Haitian
police academy that killed five and wounded 14.
Lucas appears to have had at least casual contact with the insurgents. In an
interview by cellphone from Haiti, Phillippe said he and Lucas grew up
together and that Lucas is a longtime family friend. And though Phillippe said
he
met with Lucas late last year in the Dominican Republic, he maintained the
meeting was not political: "He [Lucas] was helping organize a democratic
opposition. I really don't know about his job because I never would talk about
politics with him."
Others describe more formal ties between IRI and the insurgents. Jean Michel
Caroit, chief correspondent in the Dominican Republic for the French daily
Le Monde, says he saw Phillippe's political advisor, Paul Arcelin, at an IRI
meeting at Hotel Santo Domingo in December 2003. Caroit, who was having drinks
in the lobby with several attendees, said the meeting was convened "quite
discreetly." His account dovetailed with that of a Haitian journalist who told
Salon on condition of anonymity that Arcelin often attended IRI meetings in
Santo Domingo as Convergence's representative to the Dominican Republic.
IRI's Scott fervently denies involvement with the insurgents. "IRI has never
dealt with Guy Phillippe or the leaders of other violent groups," he says.
During Senate hearings on Haiti this March, Sen. Dodd probed Secretary Noriega
about links between Lucas and Phillippe, and he, too, issued a denial: "I
have never heard that [Lucas and Phillippe were associated in any way], and to
my knowledge, it wouldn't be the case. It certainly wouldn't be acceptable."
Besides violating its own stated guidelines, IRI also may have broken the
rules of its chief funder, USAID, which forbids grantees from working with
"undemocratic parties" that do not "eschew the use of violence to overthrow
democratic institutions" or "have endorsed or sponsored violence in the past."
In February 2004 the insurgents attacked, crossing into Haiti and laying
siege to its second largest city, Cap-Haitien. Rather than send troops to stop
them, the Bush administration sent Noriega on Feb. 18 to attempt to stanch the
violence with a power-sharing deal between Aristide and the opposition,
which was represented by Group of 184's Apaid. That afternoon, Noriega
presented
the proposal to Aristide, accompanied by his general counsel, Ira Kurzban.
"Within two hours," Kurzban said, Aristide agreed to the proposal.
But when Noriega sat down with Apaid that evening, he handled him with kid
gloves. "Once we explained to Noriega the situation in Haiti, he understood. I
cannot say that he pushed us," said Charles Baker, Apaid's brother-in-law
and a Group of 184 board member who was briefed on the meeting by Apaid.
"This guy's an American citizen," Kurzban said of Apaid, who was born in New
York. "You don't think if the U.S. wanted to put pressure on him, they
couldn't put pressure on him? So it's like, OK, Andy,' with a wink and a nod,
'Take another couple of days to decide.'" Needless to say, Apaid rejected the
compromise.
The following day, Phillippe and a band of 200 insurgents armed with vintage
rifles and M-16's (some of which, according to Le Monde's Caroit, were
provided by the U.S.-armed Dominican military) captured Cap Haitien and began
their advance on Port-au-Prince.
On Feb. 28, Bush's top foreign policy officials, including Dick Cheney,
Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, held a teleconference
meeting
and, according to the Washington Post, decided to press for Aristide's
ouster. The next day, with Haiti's police in full retreat and the insurgents
bearing down on Aristide's residence, U.S. Embassy officials presented
Aristide
with a stark choice: stay in Haiti without protection or accept a
U.S.-chartered plane into exile. He took the plane. The following day,
Phillippe marched
into the capital, greeted cheering supporters and boasted to foreign reporters
that he was "the chief."
According to the Post, Bush was not involved in the decision to press for
Aristide's ouster nor was the president aware a decision had been made to
ferry
Aristide into exile. When Aristide was flown out of the country on Feb. 29,
Bush had to be awakened from his slumber by a late-night phone call from Rice
to inform him. It was only then that he authorized the deployment of U.S.
Marines to quell the violence in Haiti.
Aristide's corruption and authoritarianism may have justified his ouster in
the eyes of his opponents, but now that he is gone, is Haiti any better off?
The answer, at present, is that by giving anti-Aristide figures in
Washington and Haiti a free hand, the Bush administration has created a
situation
worse than the one it inherited -- and one reminiscent of Iraq after the fall
of
Saddam. In the wake of Aristide's departure, widespread looting erupted
across Haiti; well-armed thugs terrorized businesses and ravaged the country's
public infrastructure. Virtually every prison in the country was emptied,
freeing both common criminals and human rights violators -- including Stanley
Lucas' notorious cousin, Remy.
Many Haiti experts, including Trinity College's Maguire, project the next
elections there will be held sometime in the next two years. For now, Haiti's
president is Gerard Latortue, a former World Bank official hailed by Florida
Gov. Jeb Bush in a March 23 Washington Post editorial for his "integrity and
selfless service." Yet with no domestic constituency, Latortue has had to
kowtow to Phillippe and the insurgents, whom he has publicly called "freedom
fighters." Like another Bush-installed leader -- Afghan President Hamid
Karzai,
whose shaky administration relies on U.N. peacekeeping forces concentrated in
his country's capital -- Latortue's government wields little authority:
According to a June 15 press release from the nonpartisan Council on
Hemispheric
Affairs in Washington, in addition to many hundreds of Aristide supporters
murdered inside Port-au-Prince itself, convicted criminals, former
paramilitary
leaders and other vigilantes retain effective control of most of the Haitian
countryside.
And, as it did with European governments on Iraq, the Bush administration's
Haiti policy has provoked a diplomatic crisis in the Caribbean basin: Over
four months after Aristide's departure from Haiti, the 15-nation Caribbean
Community still refuses to recognize Latortue's government, and in June the
OAS
opened an investigation into Aristide's ouster. U.S. troops handed over
control of the peacekeeping mission in Haiti to the U.N. on June 20.
"One has to be very concerned with the country's direction," says Maguire.
"An awful lot of people who have been discredited in the past for abusing
power and people have been climbing back into government. So far there is no
sign
that the new government or the U.S. will confront these antidemocratic
forces."
An April press release from the independent Haitian factory workers' union,
Batay Ouvriye, made an urgent plea:
"There is no person legitimately in charge anywhere. A whole series of
upstarts have taken advantage of this situation to set themselves up as the
authorities, as chiefs, and, in the process, the people are really suffering.
THIS
SITUATION CANNOT CONTINUE!"
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