8591: The Aristide presidency: the Terror challenge (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Jraphaelg@aol.com


Human rights/ The Aristide presidency


THE TERROR CHALLENGE : WHAT DID THE CLINTON-GORE ADMINISTRATION ACHIEVE, IN 
HAITI, IN OCTOBER 1994 ?

By the Haitian-American League for Human Rights

While Colin Powell, the first African-American to become secretary of 
state“is doing everything he can to keep the peace process moving forward” 
in the Middle East, Haiti is gasping for its last breath.  Last month, Mr. 
Arrested stunned nation.  He went to the national police headquarters and 
said(on t.v) to the policemen” from now on when you arrest a thief kill him.  
Since then across the country Aristide’s supporters keep burning people 
alive.  The Haitian-American League for Human Rights denounces this kind of 
his behavior as a subversion of the basics of democracy

In his ON WAR, Written more than one hundred years ago, the wise Prussian Karl
Von Clausewitz wrote “no one starts a war or rather no one in his senses 
should do so without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve 
by that war and how he intends to achieve it”.  Mistake number one in Haiti 
which led to Clausewitz’s rule number two.  “ political leaders must set a 
war’s objectives while armies achieve them’”

In October 1994, when former president Bill Clinton and his people used 
taxpayer
fund- $ 4 billion- and twenty thousand troops to “RESTORE DEMOCRACY” IN
Haiti what was in fact their purpose? What was the state of their minds?  
What do they
intend to achieve?

History will respond!

However as a human rights organization we have to take issue with them on the 
sorry
state of the US foreign policy toward Haiti.  The people of Haiti are not 
better off than 
twenty years ago- no electricity, no clean water, no adequate sanitation 
facilities- Mr.
Clinton and his friends have only created a permanent under-class of pauper 
people see
king hands out at the beginning of the twenty first century

THE ILLEGAL ARREST AND IMPRISONMENT OF EX-PRESIDENT PROSPER
AVRIL

The country belongs to 4 percent of Haitians.  Those in power in the name of 
restoring
democracy are an Island of new millionaires in a vast sea of despair, 
despotism, and
cynical opposition.  What the hell kind of leaders does Haiti have?
How can they talk about peace and democracy when the country had become a save
heaven for drug traffickers who have the power to name their own judges, 
whereas
political leaders are still in exile?

The recent arrest and imprisonment of ex-president Prosper Avril- although a 
ruling
of the Appeal court, Mr. Avril is still in jail!- member of the Democratic 
Convergence
signifies a major defeat for the rule of law

A BIN LADEN COMPLEX

It makes our blood boil to think that the LAVALAS REGIME has a BIN LADEN COM
PLEX.  Its leaders cannot operate out of their TERROR NETWORK
Is there an “homme serieux” in both the literal and broader senses among 
those in power
who pretend to want peace, to “ negotiate”? Had it has not been the reading 
of Nelson
Mandela’s LONG WALK TO FREEDOM we would have lost faith in the STRUGGLE
When we look into the facts nothing in his past seemed to show that Mister de 
KLERK
would change South Africa one day in “one sweeping action”.  Remember as 
education minister he had tried to keep black students out of white 
universities.  Astonishingly
on August 1989, two days after he sworn in as acting president in his 
inaugural address
de Klerk said his government was committed to peace and that it would 
negotiate with
any other group committed to peace

>From jail, Nelson Mandela wrote him a letter and asked a meeting.  Mandela 
started
meeting with a secret negotiating committee- only in Haiti negotiation is not 
secret
headed by Gerrit Viljoen, a brilliant mind with a doctorate in classics.  His 
role?
bring the discussion into a constitutional framework

What did Nelson Mandela do? he pressed the government to show evidence of
its good faith by releasing political prisoners at Pools Moor and Robben 
Island
While he promised the committee that the government could expect discipline
behavior from them, they had to be released unconditionally
The prisoners were released five days later . “ It was, wrote Nelson Mandela, 
an
action that rightly evoked praise here and abroad and I conveyed my 
appreciation
to mister de Klerk.  Then- after his ten thousand days of imprisonment- 
Mandela
added “to make peace with an enemy one must work with that enemy and that
enemy becomes one’s partner”

Neither mister Aristide’s Lavalas party nor his network terror can have such 
greatness
If you think Prosper Avril can write Jean Bertrand Aristide requesting a 
meeting...
then meet with him in his palace urging him to release political prisoners to 
display
evidence of his good intention you are a fool !!!

TWO FUNDAMENTAL CHALLENGES
 Arrested himself is a prisoner.  We have learned from Mandela “ A man who 
takes
away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the 
bars of
prejudice and narrow-mindedness.  I am not truly free if I am taking away 
someone
else’s freedom just as surely I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. 
 The
oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity”

America is a nation dedicated to the rule of law; as a practical matter, this 
means that
it is a nation ruled, effectively, by lawyers.  It is becoming a country obses
sed with
due process, virtually, to the exclusion of expeditiously applied  justice
Two fundamental challenges remain in the fight against the LAVALAS REGIME’s
TERROR NETWORK.  one is to ascertain, what its links might be with 
sophisticated
international sponsors of violence such as the dangerous Colombian drug 
Lords.  The
other is to prevail on the protectors of The Aristide’s Lavalas Party on THE 
HILL in
order to remind Americans and the rest of the world that terrorists like any 
other cri
minals, may be caught, tried, and punished for their crimes
 The United States of America won’t win the war on drug if they don’t help 
to bring
integrity to the Haitian criminal-justice system.  THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
may 29,2001-had it right.  “ For people connected with the 
Clinton-presidency-cum
political machine to attach themselves like pilot fish  to the bleeding ruin 
of Haiti under
Jean Bertrand Aristide, in the wake of an enormous commitment of American 
prestige
and money on behalf of Haiti’s people, doesn’t survive any conceivable smell 
test”

How could this happen here at this place- right in the back yard of America - 
one man
only one man, set up his own parliament and uses the judicial system to 
intimidate and
arrest his political and economic opponents?

humanrights@lihadh.com
  
 
”