27676: Esser (news): Kofi Annan's Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser


New Left Review
<http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27110.shtml>

New Left Review 37
January-February 2006

Justin Podur on Michael Deibert, Notes from the Last Testament.
Untenable defence of Aristide’s overthrow, as Haiti’s poor come under
siege from militias tacitly sanctioned by UN forces.


JUSTIN PODUR
KOFI ANNAN’S HAITI

In the vast corrugated-iron shanty town of Cité Soleil, home to
quarter of a million people, all the schools are shut down and the
one hospital closed. White armoured UN personnel carriers patrol the
perimeter, half a dozen blue-helmeted heads poking out of the turret,
automatic weapons trained on the streets. It is the masked units of
the Police Nationale d’Haïti, bolstered by heavily armed irregulars
from the officially disbanded Haitian army, who take the lead in the
brutal raids into working-class neighbourhoods, but the Mission des
Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation en Haïti—MINUSTAH—who back them
up, blocking off exits as the PNH spread out through the area and the
gunfire begins. In the poor districts of Port-au-Prince—La Saline,
Bel Air—a 2004 human-rights investigation reported, such raids leave
‘dead bodies in the streets almost daily, including innocent
bystanders, women and children, with the UN forces visibly acting as
support for, rather than a check on, the official violence’. One
Québécois police officer attached to the UN force complained that all
he had done since getting to the island was ‘engage in daily
guerrilla warfare’.

Welcome to Kofi Annan’s Haiti. It is two years since the UN-backed
Multinational Interim Force headed by the US, France and Canada
toppled the constitutionally elected Lavalas government of
Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The case for military intervention was based
on claims of a possible ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ in the making, and
the mandate hurriedly bestowed by the UN, as Marines and Légionnaires
clomped into the National Palace, was to ‘promote the protection of
human rights’. France, Haiti’s former colonial master, had been the
moving force behind the invasion. The Bush Administration, bogged
down in Iraq, burnt by the failed coup against Chávez in 2002, and
counting down to the 2004 election, was chary of another military
engagement. Chirac and Villepin, keen to ingratiate themselves after
the contretemps over Operation Iraqi Freedom, offered a bespoke
package: UNSC backing for a multilateral invasion force with
guaranteed withdrawal in three months, to be replaced by a broader UN
mission. Chirac’s advisers, searching for a formula with which to
discount Aristide’s claim that Paris should repay the millions it had
once extorted from Haiti, had suggested that the bicentenary of the
demi-island’s 1804 independence offered France the opportunity to
‘shed the weight which servitude imposes on the master’. It was a
burden eagerly shouldered by Lula’s Brazil, Lagos’s Chile, Kirchner’s
Argentina and others as, from June 2004, they replaced the initial
France–US–Canada force in order to assist the ‘peaceful and
constitutional political process’.

In fact, as Peter Hallward argued in NLR 27, what had been unfolding
in Haiti in the run-up to the invasion was ‘less a “crisis of human
rights” than a low-level war between elements of the former armed
forces and the elected government that had disbanded them’. In
effect, the ‘international community’ has sided with the ex-junta and
their elite backers in that war, and is prosecuting it against an
astonishingly resilient mass of Lavalas loyalists. MINUSTAH forces
have made no effort to disarm the ex-combatants of the FADH—Forces
Armées d’Haïti—the soldiery that terrorized the island under the
military dictatorships of the 1980s and early 90s, and waged a
Contra-style insurgency against the Aristide government from the
neighbouring Dominican Republic after 2001.

On the contrary: FADH elements have been recruited into the PNH,
after minimal ‘screening’, and notorious death-squad leaders
rehabilitated to spearhead attacks on Lavalas supporters with the
apparent collusion of the UN. MINUSTAH troops were present when the
PNH opened fire on unarmed Lavalas demonstrators outside the UN
headquarters in Bel Air in April 2005, killing five protesters on the
spot and leaving four more mortally wounded. MINUSTAH forces and the
PNH killed some 25 people in Bel Air in early June 2005. The
following month they launched a joint raid on Cité Soleil which,
according to a Reuters TV crew, left another eight dead.

The interim government of Gérard Latortue, installed by the invasion
force with a primary mandate of organizing elections, is still in
office, unelected, two years later. In January 2006 elections were
postponed for the fourth time, on the grounds that voter registration
cards and polling stations were not ‘ready’; this despite the fact
that legislative and presidential elections had taken place on a
regular basis for ten years prior to the UN occupation, and Aristide
had boasted of his loyal upholding of the constitution. Leading
Lavalas politicians—including the former prime minister, Yvon
Neptune—have been held for months on end without charge; there have
been hundreds of illegal, warrantless arrests. The Lavalas priest
Gérard Jean-Juste, a strong contender as presidential candidate, has
been imprisoned without charge since the summer of 2005. Although
there has been a write-in campaign to get him on any forthcoming
ballot paper, his candidacy has been officially disqualified since he
is unable to present himself in person. Amnesty International has
recently declared him a prisoner of conscience.

The situation has led to increasing tensions within MINUSTAH itself.
In the summer of 2005 the Mission’s military commander, Brazilian
General Augusto Heleno Ribeiro Pereira, asked to be relieved of his
post at the end of his tour of duty, intimating that he was worried
about the killing of civilians that had been taking place and did not
wish to be held responsible for ‘war crimes’. Brazilian troops were
reported to be unhappy at going into neighbourhoods not so dissimilar
to those where their own families lived, and seeing unarmed women and
children die. Under his replacement, General Urano Teixeira da Matta
Bacellar, Brazilian soldiers tried to adopt a more conciliatory role,
including opening a health clinic in the shanty town. But MINUSTAH’s
civilian head of mission, former Chilean foreign minister Juan
Gabriel Valdés, has come under increasing pressure from Haitian
business elites to resume the offensive. ‘We are waiting for [Valdés]
to give clear instructions to the troops under his command to cleanse
Cité Soleil of the criminals, like they did in Bel Air’, Reginald
Boulos told Radio Métropole listeners on 5 January 2006:

On 6 January, the UN Security Council met to discuss the situation in
Haiti. The following day, General Teixeira da Matta was found dead in
his hotel room; the post-mortem established that it was suicide.
According to press reports, this followed a heated debate with Valdés
the night before.

After two years, the blatant deterioration of the human-rights and
security situation on the UN watch is clearly in need of some
explanation. What MINUSTAH’s backers require is an account that will,
firstly, make Aristide’s regime out to be so inhumanly terrible that
any alternative would be justified; and secondly, to argue that
Aristide himself is still to blame for everything that is wrong in
Haiti, even though exiled in faraway South Africa.

Right on cue Michael Deibert, who covered the destabilization of the
Aristide government between 2001 and 2003 for Reuters and the Miami
Herald, has produced Notes from the Last Testament. This sprawling
account of the Aristide years, poorly annotated (fifty-five
footnotes, for a book of 454 pages) and apparently unedited (typos
and repetitions abound), is of note primarily as a substantive
attempt to provide such ideological cover. Deibert has no doubts as
to the justice of the invasion:

Although he tries to tiptoe round the record of Latortue and his
foreign backers, Deibert sets clear pointers as to the major culprit.
‘Aristide had not run out of cards to play’ he writes of a clash on 7
March 2004, a week after the invasion, when the ousted president was
being shuttled, a virtual hostage, between African airports. A joint
PNH–MINUSTAH assault on a Lavalas demonstration in September 2004 is
described as ‘an explosion of violence by Aristide partisans’;
Deibert uncritically reproduces the Latortue government’s
unsubstantiated—and scarcely credible—assertion that ‘Aristide’s
financial and moral support of the rebellion from South Africa’ was
to blame for the deaths that ensued.

Notes from the Last Testament deploys the standard literary
techniques of the middlebrow foreign correspondent. The narrative is
essentially experiential: our man in Port-au-Prince leaves his flat,
attends a demonstration, breathes the air, encounters various
characters who mutter ominous words about Aristide or sigh about
what’s happening to the country. An aerosol of local colour—blue
skies, crowded lanes, pungent smells, snatches of kreyol, barefoot
kids, throbbing music—is spray-painted over a framework supported at
all key points by international officialdom. Time and again, the
clinching argument of a passage will be made by ‘a member of the OAS
team’, ‘a veteran of international observer missions’, or a seemingly
ubiquitous ‘US official’. Further claims are attributed to still more
anonymous sources: ‘many said’, ‘most said’, ‘critics wondered’, ‘it
appeared’; or simply to ‘rumours’, some of which were ‘unusually
detailed rumours’. Half a dozen interviews with prominent Haitian
opponents of the Lavalas government—Andy Apaid, Evans Paul, Chavannes
Jean-Baptiste, Hans Tippenhauer, Micha Gaillard, Pierre Esperance of
the National Coalition on Human Rights and (in Manhattan) Michele
Montas, widow of Jean Dominique, the radical radio journalist
profiled in Jonathan Demme’s The Agronomist—fill in the gaps.

Experiential narrative has the advantage of avoiding any necessity to
evaluate evidence, weigh contrasting claims or reckon with data
(Chomsky, a particular bogey for Deibert, is haughtily dismissed for
his ‘flurry of numbers’). Instead, it’s on to the next bar, the next
faceless OAS source. Deibert hurries over the social and economic
history of Haiti: the two hundred years from Toussaint to the
Duvaliers are dealt with in gobbet form, scattered as flashbacks
throughout the opening chapters. As a result, the reader may find it
hard to distinguish evasion from honest error, as when Deibert
describes the indemnity of 150 million francs demanded by France in
1825 as a basis for the restoration of trade relations as ‘the sum
Haiti was forced to pay the French government for recognition of its
independence’. The demand was, in fact, for cash compensation for the
loss of the former French slaves who, with the Declaration of 1804,
had proclaimed themselves free. To fulfil the 1825 agreement, and the
crippling trade terms which accompanied it, the Haitian government
was forced to borrow an initial 24 million francs at extortionate
interest rates from French banks, inaugurating a history of
structural indebtedness that has been used as a justification for
foreign interventions ever since.

Among the most damaging of these was the 19-year US military
occupation initiated by Woodrow Wilson in 1915. The Americans
re-engineered Haitian property relations to permit foreign ownership,
expropriated land for their own plantations and created a brutal
local military to do their bidding. The latter continued in power
after the US troops left in 1934, their terror balanced, after 1957,
by the Tontons Macoute, the private army created by François ‘Doc’
Duvalier to shore up his own dictatorship against any competition
from the generals. Gangs flourished amid the festering poverty
overseen from the presidential mansion by Papa Doc and, after his
death in 1971, his son Baby Doc, both firm friends of the US.
Murderous military juntas continued the repression after Baby Doc was
chased from power in 1986 by the ‘flood’—the kreyol word is
lavalas—of popular insurgency. Killings, with mutilated corpses
dumped as warnings in streets and alleyways, and the torching of
homes and packed churches, were everyday tools of terror for the
military elite. Poverty and brutality, reinforced by French and
American overlords, had scarred the half-island for generations
before Aristide’s first tremulous seven-month presidency in 1991.

Any objective assessment of Aristide’s role must start not from the
wild exaggerations of his power offered by Deibert and the current
‘interim’ Haitian government—or, for that matter, by his most fervent
supporters—but from a recognition of his weakness. One of many
Catholic priests preaching the Lavalas brand of liberation theology
in the Haitian slums, Aristide proved a highly popular choice as
presidential candidate for the democratic opposition in Haiti’s first
free elections after the overthrow of the military dictatorship in
1990, winning a surprising first-round victory over ex-World Banker
Marc Bazin. But he had little idea of what to do in office and
neither military nor economic elites were prepared to tolerate the
upstart for long. General Cédras, seizing power in September 1991,
unleashed a new wave of terror against Lavalas supporters in the
slums. Death squads led by Louis Jodel Chamblain, Jean Tatoune and
others slaughtered hundreds of oppositionists. Aristide escaped to
Washington. The Clinton Administration’s conditions for supporting
his return to office bound him hand and foot: a savage Structural
Adjustment Programme; a cabinet selected by Washington; full amnesty
for the junta; and his presidential term to end in 1995, as though he
had served the whole of it. Reinstalled by the US Marines, Aristide
arrived home in triumph, but a virtual prisoner.

The privatizations and, especially, the agricultural tariff cuts of
the SAP, unwillingly implemented, devastated the Haitian economy and
alienated key sectors of Lavalas support. As agreed, Aristide stepped
down in 1995. His successor as Lavalas presidential candidate, René
Préval, won an easy victory in the 1995 election. But political
tensions grew as living conditions worsened. In 1994 Aristide had
disbanded but, disastrously, not disarmed the brutal FADH, who
immediately began to regroup against him, provoking a
counter-militarization by some of Aristide’s supporters. Disputes
over the economic programme split the Lavalas coalition, with
Préval’s prime minister Rosny Smarth, a strong proponent of the SAP,
and others forming the Organisation du Peuple en Lutte, and Aristide
setting up Fanmi Lavalas, a personalized grouping with a strong
pro-poor rhetoric. The Assembly was deadlocked. The OPL disputed FL’s
gains in the 1997 legislative elections; in the slums, the rivalries
were played out at gang level. Punishment killings continued, though
at a far lower level than during the dictatorship years. Among the
senseless victims was Jean Dominique, seemingly killed for his
sympathies with peasants protesting Lavalas policies, whose leaders
had linked up with the OPL.

Officially, the turning-point for the campaign against Aristide was
supposed to come with the May 2000 legislative elections: minor
irregularities were alleged in the tallying of votes for the
lower-order parties, which might have averted some second-round
run-offs, though these would have had scant impact on the overall
outcome. But Deibert’s narrative, broadly chronological from 2000 on,
inadvertently lets a cat out of the bag: Convergence Démocratique,
the alliance of rich businessmen, Duvalierists, OPL and ex-Lavalas
supporters that would henceforth coordinate the campaign for US
intervention against Aristide, had denounced the election results
even before the count began. It was not vote-tallying anomalies, but
the clear prospect that Aristide and his supporters would
legitimately sweep both the legislative and the presidential
elections that year, and thus be in a position to implement even the
minute redistribution of wealth implied in Aristide’s meek promise to
‘lift people out of absolute misery into poverty with dignity’, that
was the motivating factor.

Despite what appears to be, on the evidence of his own account, an
easy familiarity with US officials working in the Caribbean, Deibert
tells us remarkably little about their actual interventions; a scant
half-paragraph addresses National Endowment for Democracy and USAID
funding in the most general terms. Haitian officials of the
USAID-funded International Foundation for Electoral Systems provided
far more information to the human-rights investigators in the 2004
report referred to above (compiled by Thomas Griffin for the
University of Miami School of Law). The officials explained that the
IFES ran a far-reaching ‘sensitization’ programme in support of the
anti-government campaign in Haiti, which included helping to set up
and fund student groups, in particular the Fédération des Etudiants
Universitaires d’Haïti at Port-au-Prince University; business and
private sector associations, such as the Group of 184; media and
journalist groups, to help ‘sensitize’ radio broadcasters in
particular to the anti-government message; and lawyers’ associations,
to ‘sensitize’ the judiciary. According to its own officials, the
IFES not only rented meeting halls and sound systems for the events
of those groups it was supporting, but provided catered meals,
accommodation, entertainment and per diem cash payments for those
attending. Meanwhile the Clinton Administration cut off Haiti’s aid
lifeline within weeks of the CONVERGENCE’s first press conference in
May 2000; a few months later the Inter-American Development Bank
followed suit, cancelling previously agreed loans and plunging the
impoverished state into economic crisis.

Still more lethally, paramilitary groups under the command of Guy
Philippe, Chamblain and other dictatorship-era commanders began
launching operations across the Dominican Republic border. Deibert
dismisses the idea that the US provided any support for the
anti-Aristide insurgents as ‘swirling conspiracy theories’, refuted
by the unnamed ‘American officials on the ground’. Elsewhere,
however, he describes how ‘US embassy officials . . . contacted Guy
Philippe on the latter’s cell phone . . . and successfully argued for
him to delay his planned assault on the Haitian capital for
forty-eight hours.’ In a further unwitting revelation of
circumstantial evidence of American involvement, Deibert mentions a
November 2002 Dominican newspaper report of the US ‘donating twenty
thousand M16 assault rifles to the Dominican army in an effort to
help the country reinforce its border with Haiti’. Later, he has the
paramilitaries arrive in Gonaïves and elsewhere from the Dominican
Republic flourishing ‘brand new M16 assault rifles’. These, he
quickly adds, were ‘looted from the Gonaïves police station’, though
he does not solve the mystery of how the Gonaïves police came to be
so well armed.

Was there a ‘human-rights catastrophe’ under Aristide’s government?
This was the argument used by the Western media to justify the
UN-backed coup against him, and Deibert’s ever-darkening mood music
certainly strives to make the case. News of killings—or ‘rumours’ of
them—is constantly being purveyed to him by one source or another as
he circumambulates Port-au-Prince. Yet tallying up the actual number
of deaths he reports between 2001 and 2004—each in itself a tragic
and brutalizing event—we reach a grand total of 212. Amnesty
International reports suggest a similar figure. These may, of course,
be gross underestimates. But a comparison with Uribe’s Colombia is
instructive. Here, Amnesty reports around 3,000 politically motivated
killings and 600 disappearances for 2003 alone, albeit in a
population six times as large: 42 million, compared to Haiti’s 8
million.

Deibert must thus rely heavily on insinuation to make his case.
Predictably, Aristide is likened to the Duvaliers (ten times) and Pol
Pot, and a pro-government newspaper to Streicher’s Der Stürmer.
Pro-Lavalas youth, and the opposition to the Convergence Démocratique
and the paramilitaries, are almost universally referred to as
chimeres in these pages—though Deibert never tells us how he
distinguishes a chimere from any other teenage boy—and linked
whenever possible to a suggestion of nameless vodou horrors. Killings
receive radically different treatment depending on the political
affiliation of the victim. Thus the murder of opposition journalist
Brignol Lindor by members of the pro-Lavalas Domi Nan Bwa is
described in detail in the prologue and repeated in chapter seven:
‘they spared him no mercy, and after stabbing, hacking and lynching
him, all that was left was for Lindor’s family to come and pick up
his mauled corpse.’ By contrast, the murder of the Lavalassian
Justice of the Peace Christophe Lozama is described in the passive
voice, as though the result of natural forces—‘Lozama . . . was
killed when a mêlée erupted between Lavalas and Convergence
protesters’—and further downgraded by the disparaging remark that:
‘In the coming days, the government and its foreign supporters would
turn Lozama’s killing into a cause du jour as they attempted to
deflect attention from government-sponsored attacks on demonstrators
and the press’.

Protest demonstrations, too, get partisan treatment. Deibert is
particularly tender about the student supporters of Convergence
Démocratique, though he omits any discussion of IFES funding for the
Port-au-Prince FEUH. A student rally in November 2002—clearly
something of a rampage, with young men in stars-and-stripes bandannas
trashing the rector’s house and then climbing the gates of the
National Palace to yell, ‘Aristide, murderer!’—is measured in
‘thousands’ and described in misty terms: ‘It was a small step
perhaps, but after a summer of being victimized, it was a victory,
and that was all the students needed to keep on going’. In contrast,
Deibert provides no estimate of the size of the crowd at a Lavalas
rally a few weeks later, stating only that ‘several hundreds’ joined
‘a far larger group’, where ‘speaker after speaker addressed the
crowd with . . . anti-foreign rhetoric’. In sum: ‘Rather
stage-managed . . . I thought’.

Lavalas activist and musician Annette Auguste, known as So [sister]
Anne, is singled out for special treatment. Auguste first appears as
a ‘sometime folk-singer who . . . had ingratiated herself’ with
Aristide; and then, a hundred pages later, as a ‘sometime folk-singer
who . . . had immersed herself in the most rancid criminal-political
underbelly of Aristide’s entourage’. Describing a clash between a few
hundred Convergence Démocratique supporters and a
counter-demonstration of ‘thousands of chimere’ outside the US
Embassy, in December 2002, Deibert tells us ominously that: ‘Among
the mob that day was Annette “So Anne” Auguste’. Some of the Lavalas
demonstrators were carrying small cowhide switches, and some unnamed
‘chimere’ later inform Deibert that So Anne had ‘“blessed” some of
the whips in a vodou ritual before the demonstration’. During another
clash between students and Lavalas supporters a year later Auguste,
according to Deibert, ‘was seen travelling through the area in a
car’. The charges culminate with Deibert’s uncritical reiteration of
a gang leader’s claim, from his Florida exile, that a baby missing
from a Port-au-Prince hospital had been kidnapped by So Anne and
murdered in a vodou ritual to strengthen Aristide. Given the extent
of her supernatural powers, it must be a relief to Deibert that the
elderly Auguste has been held in prison without charge since May 2004.
Though his final chapter touches on events up to the early summer of
2005, Deibert attempts to skirt issues such as the crushing of
democracy and the deterioration of social conditions under Latortue’s
‘interim’ government. The perpetual postponement of elections is, in
fact, the perfect solution to the main political problem he
identifies: the need to ‘shift the balance of power away from
Port-au-Prince, teeming as it is with would-be politicians and armies
of desperately poor young men’. The problem of over-politicization,
particularly among poor young men, had already been descried from New
York. Kofi Annan’s April 2004 report had warned that (regardless of
what the Haitian Constitution had to say on the matter), ‘the
international community [was] of the view that more time was needed’
before general elections could be held: ‘Haiti’s political life has
too often been dominated by highly personalized presidential
elections’.

Spreading democracy is a delicate matter; it may take years, decades,
even, in Haiti’s case, centuries, before a people is sufficiently
depoliticized to be ready for it.

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