29422: Dailey re Montas (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Peter Dailey <phdailey@msn.com>

Michele Montas is one of Haiti's most original and incisive voices whose views 
are always of interest, whether one agrees with her conclusions or not. In 
February 2004, an interviewer from In These Times noted "In 1986, the people 
pushed out Duvalier. In 2004, they are the bystanders." Her precise and 
succinct assessment of what was unfolding at the time would be hard to top:

"They (the people) are aside and just looking at the whole thing. It's 
Aristide's thugs against the other thugs. Many certainly feel betrayed by 
Aristide. People won't fight to have him back. But most don't find anything in 
the opposition reassuring them, either.There are drug-dealers, convicts, 
ex-generals, and mass murderers among them. To me, the danger right now is that 
the popular movement that brought Aristide to power is mistaken with the 
"chimeres" out in the street attacking people. There was a tremendous amount of 
hope among people that things would change for the Haitian majority. The dream 
is still there. What people worry about now is a return to the old system where 
Haitian elites control everything.

Colonel Holmstead charged earlier that the people calling for justice in the 
Jean Dominique case were abruptly silenced by Dany Toussaint's political volte 
face. Several of us appealed to the Col. to let us have a peek at his evidence 
for this, but he has so far kept it to himself, selfishly in my opinion. There 
is one aspect of this situation that I continue to find puzzling. Many people, 
myself among them, assumed that the reason that Aristide was sabotaging the 
investigation was to protect a powerful political ally- Toussaint, in addition 
to being the top vote getter in the May, 2000 parliamentary elections had, with 
his lieutenant Richard "ChaCha" Salomon, an unrivalled network of connections 
with Port-au-Prince's 200+ street gangs. However, if this was the case, why, 
after Toussaint turned on him, did Aristide continue to suppress the 
investigation, when allowing it to go forward would have redounded to his 
credit internationally, as well as showing Toussaint that there was a price 
attached to betraying him.

Does anyone have any theories?

Peter Dailey