27451: Haiti Progres (News) This Week In Haiti 23:47 2/1/2006 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

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

"This Week in Haiti" is the English section of HAITI PROGRES
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and Creole, please contact the paper at (tel) 718-434-8100,
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              HAITI PROGRES
     "Le journal qui offre une alternative"

         * THIS WEEK IN HAITI *

         February 1 - 7, 2006
           Vol. 23, No. 47



FATHER GÉRARD JEAN-JUSTE PROVISIONALLY FREED FOR MEDICAL TREATMENT

In the face of mounting international pressure, on Jan. 29 Haitian de
facto authorities allowed political prisoner Father Gérard Jean-Juste to
provisionally leave his jail cell and fly to Miami to obtain medical
treatment for recently contracted pneumonia as well as leukemia, with
which he was diagnosed almost two months ago (see HaVti ProgrPs, Vol.
23, No. 39, 12/7/2006).

Accompanied from Haiti by one of his North American lawyers, Bill
Quigley, Jean-Juste flew on American Airlines to Miami where he was met
at the airport by about 25 people, including leaders from Veye Yo, the
Miami-based popular organization he helped found in the 1980s when he
directed the Haitian Refugee Center. Among those in the welcoming
committee were Lavarice Gaudin, Farah Juste, Lucie Tondreau, Veronique
Fleurimé, and Reginald "KonpP Rere" Boyer. North American supporters
like Jack Lieberman, Carolyn Thompson, and Steve Forester were also on
hand.

Jean-Juste was then driven directly to Jackson Memorial Hospital, where
Dr. Paul Farmer of Partners in Health awaited him to do an examination.
He was admitted to the hospital and will spend several days receiving
tests and treatment.

"The doctor performed a biopsy, and we'll have results in about three
days," reports Tony Jean-Thénord, a Veye Yo leader, on Jan. 31. "His
neck is still swollen. But he is in good spirits, fighting spirits, as
usual."

Jean-Juste had been held without charges in jail for 192 days, since he
was arrested on Jul. 21, 2005 after helping to officiate at the funeral
of assassinated journalist Jacques Roche, who was also his cousin (see
HaVti ProgrPs, Vol. 23, No. 19, 7/27/2005). He was accused informally of
organizing Roche's murder, although he was out of the country at the
time.

A Haitian judge last week dismissed those charges but brought others
against the priest for illegal weapons possession and criminal
conspiracy (see HaVti ProgrPs, Vol. 23, No. 46, ½5/2006). Jean-Juste's
lawyers are appealing the indictment.

Unless the indictments are dismissed on appeal, Jean-Juste has agreed to
eventually return to Haiti to stand trial.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, thousands of Haitians spontaneously massed outside
the Veye Yo meeting hall on Little Haiti's 54th Street, expecting
Jean-Juste to show up. The Miami Police began to get aggressive with the
crowd and Veye Yo leaders had to call Representative Kendrick Meek. He
intervened with the Miami police chief, diffusing the confrontation. The
demonstrators rallied all day until about 9 p.m.

"It was a very joyous day for the Haitian community in Miami," said
Lavarice Gaudin.



NEW YORK TIMES REVEALS U.S. SUPPORT OF 2004 HAITI COUP

Finally, almost two years after the fact, it's official: the Bush
administration backed and encouraged the February 29, 2004 coup d'état
against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

This is the message delivered by a long article entitled "Democracy
Undone: Mixed U.S. Signals Helped Tilt Haiti Toward Chaos" by Walt
Bogdanich and Jenny Nordberg in the U.S. journal of record , The New
York Times, on Sunday, Jan. 30, 2006.

The Times' revelations, although obvious to most Haitians and
international observers well before the fateful day when U.S. Special
forces kidnapped Aristide from his home and exiled him to Africa, is
important because it comes from the flagship publication of the U.S.
establishment. In fact, the article's broad outlines are similar to that
of a piece published by independent journalist Max Blumenthal in Salon.
Com on Jul. 16, 2004 (see
www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/07/16/haiti_coup/index_np.html).

Nonetheless, Bogdanich and Nordberg provide important new details of the
inner struggles and workings of the U.S. government.

In many ways, the article falls within the larger struggle that the U.S.
liberal establishment is presently waging against George Bush and Dick
Cheney's neo-conservative cabal, which has led the U.S. empire to the
brink of disaster. Establishment media like the Times as well as
high-ranking Democrats, who were cheering Bush only months ago, are now
savaging the president and his clique for the war in Iraq, spying on
American citizens, and alienating governments and peoples around the
world. Now the liberals are adding the mess in Haiti to the list of Bush
failures.

The main protagonist of the Times piece is former U.S. Ambassador to
Haiti Brian Dean Curran, a Clinton appointee who complains that the Bush
administration worked "to undermine the reconciliation process after
disputed 2000 Senate elections threw Haiti into a violent political
crisis," the Times reported.

Buttressing Curran's charges is Luigi Einaudi, the former U.S.
representative to the Organization of American States, who said
that"Haiti came to symbolize within the United States a point of
friction between Democrats and Republicans that did not facilitate
bipartisanship or stable policy or communication."

Indeed, Stanley Lucas, the infamous operative of the National Endowment
for Democracy's International Republican Institute (IRI) in Haiti since
1998, is singled out as the principal U.S. agent responsible for
ringleading Haiti's armed and "unarmed" opposition into intransigence
against Aristide.

As early as July 2002, Curran was warning Washington that Lucas' role in
Haiti "will, at best, lead to confusion as to U.S. policy objectives,
which continue to eschew unconstitutional acts and favor negotiations
and, at worst, contribute to political destabilization in Haiti."

Many will be skeptical that constitutionality and "negotiations" were
ever really "U.S. policy objectives," as the terribly naive or
disingenuous Curran contends. But the Times makes it clear that Lucas,
by Curran's account, was central to encouraging "the opposition to stand
firm, and not work with Mr. Aristide, as a way to cripple his government
and drive him from power."

The story offers a penetrating account of how, "with Washington's
approval, Mr. Lucas used taxpayer money to fly hundreds of opposition
members - but no one from Mr. Aristide's Lavalas party - to a hotel in
the Dominican Republic for political training that began in late 2002.
Two leaders of the armed rebellion told The Times that they were in the
same hotel during some of those meetings, but did not attend."

Those two leaders - Guy Philippe and Paul Arcelin - may have had secret
back-room meetings at the luxurious Santo Domingo Hotel with Lucas and
other "civil" opposition leaders, the Times reports. Politician Marc
Bazin's representatives, who attended the 2002 meetings in Santo
Domingo, told their boss that "more was going on than routine political
training."

"The report I got from my people was that there were two meetings - open
meetings where democracy would be discussed and closed meetings where
other things would be discussed, and we are not invited to the other
meetings," Bazin told the Times.

"Mr. Bazin said people who had attended the closed meetings told him
that 'there are things you don't know' - that Mr. Aristide would
ultimately be removed and that he should stop calling for compromise,"
Bogdanich and Nordberg write.

The Times story also singles out Otto Reich, former Assistant Secretary
of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, and his successor, Roger
Noriega, as the powers that kept Lucas operating despite Curran's
objections.

Bogdanich and Nordberg deftly reveal Reich to be a liar. When
interviewed by the Times, Reich claimed that Curran "never expressed any
problems with Stanley Lucas to me, and I was his boss."

"Asked why his name showed up on cables as having received Mr. Curran's
complaints, and why Mr. Curran's cables detailed discussions with him,
Mr. Reich replied: 'I have absolutely no recollection of that. I'm not
questioning it, I just have no recollection of that,'" the Times writes.

Curran called Reich's assertion that he never complained "a patent lie."

For all its weight and usefulness, the Times story is weak in many
respects. It never refers to Aristide's overthrow as a coup d'état, and
it lends credence to Curran's claim that Aristide "disappointed" him and
engaged in "human rights abuses."

The story also implies that Clinton and the Democrats were somehow less
meddling and more well-meaning than Bush's administration. In fact,
there are only differences of approach and style. Since the U.S.
intervention in 1994, Clinton demanded neoliberal reform, denied
Aristide the three years he'd spent in exile, and exerted heavy
political pressure on the government of President René Préval. Clinton
began the U.S. aid cut-off to Haiti in 2000 when Préval was still in
office.

In short, Lucas was not a rogue agent of a rogue institution subverting
U.S. goals, as the article suggests. Lucas and IRI are just more
aggressive, uncompromising, and brutal in pursuing the empire's goals.

These shortcomings aside, Bogdanich and Nordberg do clearly demonstrate
how "a democracy-building group close to the White House, and financed
by American taxpayers, undercut the official United States policy and
the ambassador assigned to carry it out."

Indeed, one is reminded of how the U.S.'s "invisible" government of the
CIA and Pentagon sabotaged the Clinton administration's first attempt to
restore Aristide in October 1993, when a few dozen FRAPH thugs
theatrically scared away the U.S. troop carrier Harlan County.

It is nice to see Stanley Lucas exposed once again, as he was by
Blumenthal, as a lying agent of Washington. Bogdanich and Nordberg
easily dispel his clumsy misrepresentations. For example, Lucas claims
to not know "rebel" leader Guy Philippe. But the Times reports that
Philippe calls Lucas "a good friend" whom he has know for years.
Philippe also says he met Lucas in Ecuador "once or twice" in 2000 or
2001. Is it chance that those meetings coincide with the start of Guy
Philippe's rise as a "rebel" leader?

Now working for IRI in Afghanistan, Lucas was not allowed by his bosses
to talk directly to the Times. Perhaps they feared he might make the
kind of revelations that a boasting Emmanuel "Toto" Constant, the FRAPH
death squad leader, did about being a CIA agent in a 1996 CBS-TV "60
Minutes" interview.

Bogdanich and Nordberg also produced a video program entitled "Haiti:
Democracy Undone," which expands on their Times' investigation. It
premiered this week in Canada and in the U.S. on the Discovery Times
Channel.

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

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