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27799: Kondrat: (letter to editor) NY Times, Tracy Kidder (fwd)
submitted by Peter Kondrat
printed in The New York Times, February 13, 2006
To the Editor:
"Haiti's Orphan Democracy," by Amy Wilentz (Op-Ed, Feb. 7),
is right on the money ? except for one sentence.
Ms. Wilentz writes that Haiti's last democratically elected president,
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was driven from office "with the support of the
right-wing elite and a nod from Washington." But Washington did more than nod.
Members of the Bush administration systematically engineered the
blockage
of foreign aid to Haiti's elected government. That and a variety of other
measures were clearly aimed at destabilizing the Aristide administration.
Washington might have tried to help democracy take hold in Haiti. That
would have been the right thing to do, and the hard thing to do. But
Washington chose to do what was easy: to undermine a nascent democracy in a
desperately impoverished country that lacked even the semblance of an
effective police force.
Tracy Kidder