29611: Ferdinand (reply) Re: kathleen (29588) Aristide departure (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Anna Ferdinand


During the period just before Aristide left the country I was working on a
film with some independent producers as well as working for the BBC and a
German television crew.  All of these people were based at the El Rancho
hotel and so I was there on daily basis, when we weren't out covering the
story.  There were some interesting characters staying at the hotel, most of
whom were on a mission to have Aristide leave the country, paying the
one-hundred dollar daily rate just waiting for something to happen.  One was
a pilot for a company who ran small planes from Cap Haitian to
Port-au-Prince.  He was approaching the journalists about a story, telling
them Aristide was planning on attacking the people of St. Marc with a
helicopter with a red cross painted on it.  I ran into him quite a few times
during that period.  As Phillipe's group came closer to Port-au-Prince and
towns fell, I'd see him around the hotel.  Once, just a couple days before
Aristide was gone, I asked him what he thought would happen.  He mimicked
shooting Aristide point blank in the head; this only to underscore where he
sat politically.  Well, the day Aristide left on the unmarked plane I ran
into the pilot at the hotel eating dinner.  I asked him if he was happy now
that his mission seemed accomplished.  He told me to sit down.  He told me
he knew a bodyguard of Aristide's who had been at Tabarre when the US
ambassador came with a bunch of Marines.  He said Aristide ran to the
bathroom to hide.  It wasn't until they brought up Ketan, the convicted drug
dealer who conveniently accused Aristide just days before Aristide's
departure that Aristide had come out.  He said Aristide had no choice.  This
is obviously antecdotal.  But the pilot, who had been so intent on seeing
Aristide leave, was actually indignant at the humiliation his, after all,
fellow countryman had suffered at the hands of the US despite his vitriolic
desire to have him removed from power.  I guess he would have preferred that
it was Phillipe who had somehow triumphed.