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1730 M Street NW, Suite 1010, Washington, D.C. 20036 Phone: 202-216-9261
Fax: 202-223-6435
Email: coha@coha.org Website: www.coha.org
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Council On Hemispheric Affairs
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Monitoring
Political, Economic and Diplomatic Issues Affecting the Western Hemisphere
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Memorandum to the Press 04.03
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Thursday, January 15, 2004
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Unfair
and Indecent Diplomacy: Washington’s Vendetta against Haiti’s President
Aristide
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The Bush administration, like the Clinton administration
before it, continues to pursue a ruinously counterproductive policy towards the
democratically-elected government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti.
·
Deterioration of Aristide rule deplorable, but
explainable.
·
Some foreign journalists and the administration’s leading
group of radicalized regional policymakers accuse the Aristide government of
prolonging a political stalemate and failing to establish a climate of
“security,” neglecting to acknowledge that it is the intransigence of the
U.S.-sponsored opposition that has crippled democratic processes in Haiti.
·
The vast majority of the population of
what already is the hemisphere’s poorest country are the victims of a de
facto $500 million aid embargo imposed on the Aristide government by Washington
and other committed international donors.
·
The Bush administration should immediately re-engage
directly with the government of Haiti and openly
denounce the opposition’s refusal to participate in democratic processes that
would lead up to new, monitored legislative elections this year.
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Haiti deserves the
same respect that the White House automatically accords the principalities of San Marino or Monte Carlo.
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As governance deteriorates in resources-deprived Haiti, the
likelihood of a harmful self-fulfilling prophecy increasingly becomes a
certainty.
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Another flood of Haitians could again brave the 700-mile
voyage and set sail for Miami as the result
of Washington’s misguided
policy.
As thousands of desperate and
impoverished Haitians weigh whether they should undertake the dangerous
700-mile voyage to Florida in order to flee starvation, critics of President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide—most pointedly U.S. regional policy-makers—accuse him of tolerating a
worrisome drift to authoritarian rule.
Certainly violence and corruption have increased and the tide of public
opinion against Aristide is rising as the outbreak of gang warfare between
rival government and opposition hoodlums worsens and increased numbers of
disaffected Haitians join opposition rallies.
But there is compelling evidence to charge that Aristide’s slide is not
due to any dramatic charge in the nature of the Haitian president, but is the
result of a calculated campaign that is now being brainstormed by André Apaid Jr., who is one of the island’s richest individuals.
This effort has the tacit if not overt support of the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince. This policy, which has long been in place, is now being
guided by Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger
Noriega, along with like minded radicalized rightist colleagues such as Special
Presidential Envoy to the Western Hemisphere Otto Reich. What is fully apparent
is that Washington wants to be rid of Aristide, who has been able to
survive, but only barely, in spite of every affliction and economic cut-off
that the Bush administration could visit upon him. The danger is that Washington is succeeding and will soon have to confront a
self-fulfilling prophecy of its own making. It may be successful in convincing
the world that Aristide should be deposed, which could be a catastrophic
occurrence.
The bicentennial of Haiti’s independence on January 1, 2004 marked the two hundredth anniversary of the second
oldest independent republic in the Western
Hemisphere and the celebration
of the victory of the only nation in the world to independently overthrow
slavery. Yet the occasion could equally
well be deemed the two hundredth anniversary of a belligerent, unjust and
mindless U.S. policy towards Haiti, a policy that began with Washington’s
initial refusal to recognize the newly independent country until 1862, nearly
six decades after its independence, continued through the often brutal U.S.
military occupation of 1915-34, and culminated in the U.S.’s enthusiastic
support of the corrupt dictatorships of the Duvaliers,
both father and son, and their military successors. Historically, the State Department has always
felt that second best was good enough for this Black republic.
Today, Washington’s openly patronizing policy towards the island is at its
peak, as the Bush administration continues to thwart all attempts by the
current government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to move Haiti towards a more stable democracy, a stronger economy and
a more equitable society. As political
violence in the country intensifies, there have been proliferating denunciations
of the Aristide government by several prejudiced foreign reporters that
periodically lapse into skewed journalism, functionaries at the U.S. embassy in
Port-au-Prince who automatically assume the right of dabbling in Haiti’s pond,
and a small group of State Department appointees led by Noriega and Reich who “boffo-like”, see Aristide as little more than a beardless
Castro. These sources repeatedly have accused the president and his Lavalas Family political movement of facilitating and even
fomenting political violence by promoting attacks by their street gangs and
failing to engage in good-faith negotiations between the opposition and
government officials.
However, these strident
accusations against the government bear little or no relation to Haiti’s political realities, where the functioning of a
democratically-elected government that possessed overwhelming popular support
at the time of the 2000 election persistently has been sabotaged by an
unprincipled and intransigent opposition.
This opposition was founded and continues to operate with the full, if
not always open, support of the United States, channeled through such
controversial Cold War institutions as the International Republican Institute
(IRI) and the former office of Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), a long-time chairman
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee prior to his 2002 retirement and who
was the prevailing Gauleiter
in the “get” Aristide crusade.
President Aristide has been
shaped by his environment but he also is stunningly self-disciplined. He is a
brave man, having skirted assassination on several occasions. He is stubborn
and calculating, and is also self-contained and enormously intelligent. He is
seized by the notion of his importance, both to his people and as a symbol to the
world. Although he always calls for pacification and conflict resolution, he is
not above lapsing into an Old Testament, “eye for an eye,” mode. He was the
island’s most precious national democratic asset, but years of being hounded by
U.S. political manipulation and a non-democratic opposition,
the quality of his rule has diminished and the atmosphere in which he has been
made to live, and in turn to which he has contributed, has become increasingly
ugly.
Paralyzed Legislature the Most Recent Avatar of Obstructionism
On January 12, the terms of
one-third of the members of Haiti’s two-chamber parliament expired, leaving the
legislative branch of the Haitian government without a sufficient quorum to
officially function. As of now, no elections had been held for the seats, which
remain empty, and no parliamentary elections have been scheduled, although
Aristide hopes to hold them this year.
Responsibility for this onset of political paralysis has been pinned on
a President Aristide who is entering the second-to-last year of his second term
in the presidency. He now has been placed in the uncomfortable position of
choosing between unilaterally lengthening the expired terms of the now
redundant legislators, or effectively ruling by decree
due to the lack of a Parliament to pass legislation. Either choice would no doubt be immediately
seized upon by opposition groups, such as Democratic Convergence (DC) and the
newly formed Group 184, as evidence of the government’s undemocratic
nature. This malevolent rhetoric is
energetically echoed by the State Department, which regards President Aristide
and his Lavalas party (whose members overwhelming
come from the nation’s poor) as being too radical and too “populist” to merit Washington’s support, or even tolerance.
The Opposition’s Lack of Good Faith
In fact, however, blame for
the delay and turmoil surrounding the parliamentary election issues falls
almost entirely on the ill-will of the opposition groups, which persistently
have refused to nominate representatives to the provisional electoral council
(CEP) that must be formed before elections can proceed. The issue of the CEP, still unsettled, can be
expected to be the stumbling point for President Aristide’s recently announced
intention to hold legislative elections within six months. The underlying motives of the opposition in
thwarting any progress towards new elections, which is a strategy that goes
back four years and has long been abetted by the IRI, are not difficult to
discern. Both the Democratic Convergence—the
first highly visible (although of minute membership) anti-Aristide opposition
group to appear—and the more recently formed Group 184 (headed by André Apaid, Jr.) are primarily parties of the tiny Haitian
elite, the same strata that controlled the country for decades under the
repressive Duvalier regimes prior to the 1990
election of Aristide in the country’s first democratic ballot. The ironically named Democratic Convergence
in particular has had a distinct history of being a coalition of micro-factions
looking for a constituency; through most of its history it has represented no
more than 8% of registered voters, according to a poll commissioned by the U.S. four years ago.
The opposition’s only policy goal seems to be reconstituting the army (a
notorious instrument of oppression that terrorized the nation and especially
the poor for decades before it was finally dismantled by President Aristide in
1995). They also back the implementation
of rigorous structural adjustment programs in line with the now widely
discredited Washington consensus, which would slash already meager government
services, drive real wages down and further impoverish the vast majority of
Haitians.
Not surprisingly, this platform has won the opposition
little popular support even at this late date.
A U.S.-commissioned poll in 2000 found that the Democratic Convergence
leadership had only a 4% credibility rating, while a mere 8% of the local
population named Convergence as the party with which they most
sympathized. Clearly, the opposition’s
prospects for a victory at the ballot box are slim if not nonexistent; hence
they have embraced a strategy of perpetual delays, hoping that the resulting
volatile political stalemate together with Washington’s policy of isolation and the economic asphyxiation will
sufficiently debilitate Aristide’s rule that he will be brought down by growing
defections among his one-time supporters.
At
this point the opposition’s hope is that the country can be destabilized to
where the current government will be unable to serve out its mandated term
through 2005.
This script does not markedly differ from the events of
1991, when President Aristide was ousted only nine months after his first
inauguration in a coup that ushered in three years of brutal military rule,
including some of the worst political violence in the country’s history. The opposition’s adamant refusal to enter
into a new round of elections raises, for the majority of the population, the specter
of a return to a cycle of coup d’etats and brutal
political repression in the aftermath of a prospective Aristide downfall, a
fear that heightens the level of political tension now seizing the country and
creates a situation ripe for violence. The opposition’s demand that Aristide
must resign if elections are to take place represents pure bluff on its part,
as well as a recognition that, even under the current grim circumstances of
Haiti’s poor conditions and Aristide’s fading popularity, it does not have a
prayer of a chance to win a free and fair election.
The Security Bugaboo
Needless to say, opposition leaders present a very
different story line to justify their continuing refusal to go through the
procedures and allow elections to take place, arguing that the current climate
of “insecurity” is not conducive to free and fair voting, even though the
Haitian president has agreed to every conceivable reform that was possible to
undo the perceived flaws of the disputed legislative election of May 2000. The opposition’s argument, which in general
has been unaccountably well received by the foreign press and U.S. backers of the opposition, can be traced back to the
provisions of OAS resolution 822. That resolution, passed after the
presidential elections of November 2000, called on the Aristide government to
restore a climate of security as a condition for breaking the political
stalemate. Obviously, such a condition
is hardly a quantifiable concept, and the OAS initiative offered no more
concrete guidelines on how this might be met.
It also should be noted that “security” depends upon a
professional police force and a credible judiciary, which in fact were supposed
to result from the training provided by U.S. and Canadian specialists after
U.S.-led forces had intervened in 1994 and restored Aristide to office in
Haiti, after his bitter three-year exile in Washington. During that period, the Clinton administration, through the efforts of special envoy
Larry Pezzullo, attempted to push Aristide into
coalition with the Haitian ruling military junta because it feared the Haitian
leader’s radical political credo.
Eventually, the Congressional Black Caucus was instrumental in
persuading President Clinton to dismiss Pezzullo for
his hounding of the Haitian president.
The fact that these specialists and trainers were
prematurely withdrawn by their governments from Haiti provides much of the explanation for many of the
problems that the island faces today.
Moreover, it should be recalled that the Clinton White House
deliberately defined a narrow role for the U.S. forces occupying Haiti in 1994, which prevented them from disarming the forces
of the former military junta or taking significant steps to improve security in
rural Haiti. Thus, the newly
installed Haitian government lead by Aristide was left to face a difficult
security situation with thousands of weapons hidden by his opponents throughout
the island and with very limited resources, along with disaffected former
military leaders lurking in the Dominican Republic waiting for the opportunity to return and seek revenge.
What has ensued has been an endless political game with
perpetually shifting goalposts: no step taken by the Aristide government to
improve policing has been judged sufficient, and every incident of violence,
regardless of the identity of the perpetrators or the particulars of the case,
is cited as further evidence of the persistence of a climate of insecurity
authored by the Aristide camp that justifies the postponement of
elections. This postponement has
heightened political tensions and makes violence ever more likely, thus
underscoring the bankruptcy of current U.S. policy towards the island.
Moreover, details surrounding civil
unrest in Haiti are routinely distorted so as to place the Aristide
government, the national police and pro-Lavalas
supporters in the worst possible light.
For example, much was made in the foreign press of events surrounding a
violent incident on December 5, when pro-Lavalas
supporters purportedly attacked pro-opposition university students holding a
demonstration inside their university.
However, members of the Haitian Student Collective, a highly regarded
pro-Aristide student organization, has asserted that the demonstration in
question began when 50 armed men—not students—entered university facilities and
then began to taunt Lavalas supporters standing
outside, seriously injuring one with a rock fired by a slingshot. In the subsequent melee, student bystanders
tragically paid a heavy price for the opposition’s provocations. Moreover, it is widely believed in Haiti that
at least some of the students who have participated in anti-Aristide protests,
such as in the march in Port-au-Prince on January 12, had been openly bribed by
the opposition with money or promises of trips abroad. Yet evidence of complicity of the opposition
in the violence, as well as the meager following of Group 184 (reputedly in the
low hundreds) has received little to no attention from either the U.S. media or
State Department policymakers, who prefer to repeat the patent cop out of
“security concerns” as the justification for their policies of promoting a cordon sanitaire around
Aristide and his supporters.
De Facto Embargo Targets
Haitian Poor
The Bush administration’s
failure to openly condemn the unyielding intransigency of the opposition—which
has closely aligned itself since its founding with such questionable U.S.
rightwing institutions as the International Republican Institute—forms only
part of a long-running campaign, funded by U.S. taxpayers via the National
Endowment for Democracy (which in turn funds the IRI) to undermine the
legitimacy of Aristide’s leadership at every turn. This policy has culminated in the imposition
of a de facto embargo on aid to the Haitian government which now has been in
place since 2000, and which is defended by repeated, if vague, accusations of
government corruption and mismanagement. These charges seem less than credible
given that Haiti has received substantial funding from multilateral
organizations with extremely rigorous management criteria, most notably the
Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. However, the U.S. unilaterally-imposed a
block on $193 million in loans to Haiti that had been approved by the
Inter-American Development Bank for education, health, roads and water, which
finally may be disbursed this year, four years late. In addition, the U.S. continues to refuse to give bilateral aid to the
Aristide government—an interesting contrast to Washington’s long-standing and generous support of the previous Duvalier dictatorship—while insisting on funneling its
relatively meager aid contributions through non-governmental organizations.
A Troubling Record
This U.S. policy has had the predictable effect of further
weakening cash-strapped Port-au-Prince and limiting its ability to provide desperately needed
public services to its population, including basic education, a public health
care system, and improved access to potable water. This also has meant one disappointment after
another for the long-suffering Haitian population. As well, it also has prevented the Aristide
government from further expanding the training and professionalization
of its 4,000-member police force, on which the heavy burden falls of
maintaining a much-vaunted “climate of security.” The supposed politicization of the police has
been a frequent target of State Department criticism, and, Washington’s criticism’s aside, it certainly cannot be doubted that
improvements are needed here. Yet, given
that Haiti’s entire governmental budget amounts to less than three hundred
million dollars a year for a population of nearly eight million, it is far from
surprising that Haitian authorities have been unable to make significant
progress in the professionalization of the police
force while at the same time facing a host of other competing and equally
urgent priorities.
Washington’s Inglorious
History
In addition, it is worth comparing the series of U.S. accusations of police brutality and human rights’ abuses
tolerated by the Aristide government to the history of Washington’s relations with some of the country’s most notorious
murderers, as well as its current use of such concerns to manipulate Haiti’s political environment.
For example, in 2001, the Aristide government detained former dictator
General Prosper Avril, who had been guilty of a
number of appalling human rights abuses during his regime from 1988-90. At the
time, this move was viewed as a significant advance in dealing with the human
rights situation in Haiti. Astonishingly enough,
the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince—which for years, and through a succession of
ambassadors, has seen itself as the island’s pro-consul, with the right to bark
out orders to the national palace—continues to deem Avril
a “political prisoner” and has issued calls for his release, despite the fact
that it has been reliably established that Avril had
served as a CIA asset while in the Haitian military.
At the same time, Emmanuel Constant, head of the
notorious FRAPH militia during the period of military rule, and to whom
President Clinton once referred to as “a thug,” remains a resident of Queens, New York, where he freely walks the streets. He is protected from prosecution back in
Haiti by his former employer, the CIA (which he acknowledged during an
interview on CBS “Sixty Minutes”), despite his conviction in Haitian courts and
a deportation order from the INS, and the fact that he was responsible, as FRAPH’s commander, for the murder of at least 3,000
Haitians. And Washington’s lame excuse for not extraditing him? U.S. authorities maintain that the U.S.-trained Haitian court
system is not equipped to afford him a fair trial. Set against this tawdry
script, the abuses of the police force under President Aristide seem minor
indeed. It is brazen hypocrisy on the
part of the Bush administration to call for improvements in the security forces
in Haiti at the same time that it systematically freezes the aid
needed to make such reforms possible.
U.S. Policy:
The Undoing of a Democratic Society
Ultimately, Washington’s current policy towards the Aristide government amounts
to an elaborately contrived and admittedly lethal, but patently
self-destructive, snare. Institutionally
and financially bereft of even minimal resources, Haitian authorities struggle
to achieve a semblance of security in the face of increasing public unrest and
political violence, which is then used by Washington to justify a continued cutoff of desperately needed aid.
At the same time, the U.S. does nothing to discourage the opposition’s blatant
political obstructionism and continues to blame the government for not being
willing to “compromise.” The obvious
conclusion is that the true goal of U.S. policy in Haiti is nothing less than the destabilization of a
democratically-elected popular government, the result of a confused, illogical
and destructive game plan to favor a group of Haitian in part composed of
cutpurses and villainous brigands who are driven by a pathological hatred of
Aristide. The irony is that many of these sociopaths are technically not even
eligible to travel to the U.S. under the administration’s new policy of excluding from
this country corrupt government officials.
It is precisely such blatantly anti-democratic and belligerent policy
that has so tarnished the U.S.’s reputation in the hemisphere in the past, and
which continues to attempt to, at every turn, thwart Haiti’s struggle to
survive and prosper.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
This COHA research memorandum was authored by Jessica Leight, who was recently a member of a delegation that
spent a week in Haiti investigating the political and public
health situation in the country. Ms. Leight is a
Research Fellow with the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs.
The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, founded in 1975, is an
independent, non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt research and information
organization. It has been described on the Senate floor as being “one of the
nation’s most respected bodies of scholars and policy makers.” For more
information, please see our web page at www.coha.org; or contact our Washington offices by phone (202) 216-9261, fax
(202) 223-6035, or email coha@coha.org.