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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 04.07
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Friday, February 13, 2004
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Haiti: Waiting for Something Bad to Happen
• Political violence in Haiti continues to mount,
placing the country’s hard-won democracy in an increasingly perilous position
and raising widespread fears of a violent coup that would return a military-led
caretaker junta to power. Those who are
guilty of jeopardizing the nation’s stability include a collection of brigands
who participated in the 1991-1994 military junta, along with paramilitary thugs
and those guilty of human rights violations in that period (like Emmanuel
Constant, and Gen. Raul Cedras), as well as members
of the island’s tiny economic elite.
• The “democratic opposition,” made up of
Democratic Convergence and Group of 184, has demonstrated its true nature and
what was once considered an opposition movement—albeit violent and narrowly
constituted—is now in a de facto alliance with a paramilitary force made up of
armed street gangs that pose a genuine danger of being able to stage a
concerted attack on the Haitian state and its democratic institutions.
• CARICOM straddles the fence, as does the
OAS, while the State Department is already in the bad neighbor’s next-door
yard.
• The State Department under Secretary of
State Powell and his Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere
Affairs Roger Noriega, at first appears to have remained inactive over Haiti,
which is in itself a policy. Rather than
rushing down anti-riot equipment to Port-Au-Prince, as it
repeatedly has done in other cases where constitutional governments are being
threatened by street mobs, U.S. officials have
sat on their hands waiting for a successful coup scenario to unfold. Meanwhile, rather than seek to trigger a
process in the OAS to pacify the burgeoning threat to the Aristide government,
and most of all, lift the U.S. imposed freeze on hundreds of millions of
dollars in aid pledged to Port-Au-Prince (which has economically asphyxiated
the island), Noriega and his department stall for time and await some new
incident in which the Aristide government is further undermined and
discredited. Meanwhile, the opposition
groups, which have long been funded by the National Endowment for Democracy,
through the International Republican Institute, and coddled by hardliner
Republican policymakers, seek to preserve the legacy of longtime
Aristide-hater, former Senator Jesse Helms.
• Given the opposition’s heavy dependence
on U.S. support, an open and specific denunciation of their obstructionist
tactics by the Bush administration could immediately force the Democratic
Convergence and Group 184 to abandon their attempts to overthrow the Aristide
government by intimidation, threats and street violence. Refusing to force them to turn to
negotiation, the administration has not uttered even a weak acknowledgment of
the latter’s culpability in the deteriorating situation in Haiti. Instead, it covertly works for Aristide’s
resignation, which in fact is Washington’s very policy,
as it acknowledges that it is preparing to house upwards of 15,000 Haitian boat
people after they are interdicted on their way to Florida.
• With its inferences that a resolution of
this “crisis”—the euphemism for an open attempt at a coup—might require the
consideration of the resignation of President Aristide, Washington has
demonstrated yet again, aside from its meaningless rhetoric, the inability of
the Powell team to project a strong assent for democratic governance to the
rest of the hemisphere.
The State Department Eyes Haiti
Over the past two hundred years, Haiti has been no stranger to instances of political violence,
coups and the perversion of democracy.
Many of them were executed with the support of the United States, which has at times considered popular democratic
government in Latin America to be a privilege awarded only to those nations deemed
sufficiently ebullient in their unwavering pro-Washington subservience. The latest chapter in the disheartening drama
is now unfolding, as the in part U.S.-funded Democratic Convergence and Group
of 184, long the favored instruments of Washington hardline Latin American
policymakers, redouble their efforts to destabilize the elected government of
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide through violent takeovers of nearly a dozen
towns in northern and western Haiti that began on February 5. These venomously
anti-Aristide groups are attempting to cloak their naked self-serving and
illegal actions by insisting that what took place in Gonaives and other urban areas was a supposed popular uprising
against an oppressive government, to which they were not directly linked.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration has coolly signaled
its passivity if not acquiescence regarding the effort of this
non-representative cabal to oust President Aristide, who was popularly elected
in what was only the third free election in Haiti’s history. The State Department, with practiced
diplomatic obfuscation, has stated that “we recognize that reaching a political
settlement will require some fairly thorough changes in the way Haiti is governed.” A State Department official later
clarified this statement by noting that this “could indeed involve changes in
Aristide’s position.” Thus, while
President Bush and his would-be kingmakers in the bureau of Western Hemisphere
Affairs tout their efforts to build democracy abroad, the president’s Latin
American team headed by the State Department’s Roger Noriega and Dan Fisk,
along with the White House’s Otto Reich, all but openly support the unseating
of an Aristide government. These actions
are a clear signal that the most flagrant excesses of Cold War policy towards
the hemisphere are still being nurtured in Washington by those who emotionally
need some leftist figure to bash, even if such a person poses no threat to this
country’s national interests.
The Opposition Revealed
What previously had been deemed a
situation of growing political tension and a challenge by a narrowly-based
opportunistic group has now erupted into an open rebellion.
This self-denominated “democratic opposition” previously had not ruled out all
talks with the government. But starting last December, all pretenses have been
abandoned. Previously, Group 184 justified
its refusal to reengage in the political process by citing perceived
transgressions by the Aristide government: its corruption, its inability to
establish an appropriately secure climate of security, its failures to combat
the politicization of the police force, and a number of other accusations
repeated as well by the U.S. Embassy in Port-Au-Prince. The opposition’s
modus operandi was to engage in
subtle plotting with former military personnel and rapid anti-Aristide elements
for the common purpose of restraining the president from implementing his
left-of-center platform, but it incredulously insisted that it entirely abided
by its non-violent principles. But now,
the opposition has finally openly acknowledged what the vast majority of
Haitians have long known: that it has no natural leader or a coherent agenda
other than ousting Aristide from office by any means. It sees the Haitian president as a dangerous
radical who must be purged at any cost because of his demobilization of the
Haitian army, long the tool of repression employed by the Haitian elite and
whose former officers remain the backbone of the opposition parties.
For example, in a recent interview, Democratic
Convergence leader Evans Paul stated, “We are willing to negotiate through which
door he [President Aristide] leaves the palace, through the front door or the
back door.” Such gutter statements made
by an un-elected official with very dubious credentials and who lacks a
significant constituency make clear the reason why the government’s repeated
attempts at negotiation with the opposition have failed. The problem may be that Democratic
Convergence and Group 184 are not so much political parties with a predictable
platform of demands that they are willing to negotiate and enter into later
compromises. Rather, they are vehicles for the ambition of a small group of
often self-serving island heavyweights who hope to achieve through a violent
power grab what they could not win through the ballot box. There is no mystery about the opposition’s
preposterous intentions. Evans Paul,
along with opposition leaders Gerard Pierre-Charles, Victor Benoit, Charles
Baker and Andre Apaid, have repeatedly implied, if not openly stated, a
preferential option for violent street actions or uprooting (dechoukaj),
rather than elections.
CARICOM’s Initiative
Most recently, the
opposition has stymied the latest mediation effort by the 15-member Caribbean
Community (CARICOM), who sent a delegation headed by Bahamian Foreign Minister Fred
Mitchell and CARICOM Assistant Secretary General Colin Granderson
to Haiti on February 4, in an attempt to find a resolution to the
standoff. The opposition once again
refused any attempts at negotiation, with Evans Paul, contending that, “If we
negotiate with Aristide, we lose our credibility,” a concern on the part of an
opposition group that has only won negligible electoral support and is widely
accused of bribing crowds to participate in their marches. The armed takeovers in Gonaives, long a center of political activism in Haiti and integral to the political opposition regarding the
Duvalier dictatorship, involved heavy casualties. The fourth largest Haitian
city was considered one of Aristide’s strongest bases of popular support. The
fact that the offensive against Gonaives began after CARICOM’s diplomatic initiative was
formulated, was an affront against that body. CARICOM’s failed (at least for
now) mission to Haiti raised widespread accusations that the opposition’s
meetings with its representatives were essentially a diversionary tactic
intended to buy time while also distracting attention from the opposition’s
continued political obstructionism. As Haiti’s General Counsel Ira Kurzban
described it, “I believe the incident in Gonaives was timed purposely to downplay CARICOM and the
opposition’s non-response...to distract the ‘public’ from the real story.” The question deserves to be asked whether
CARICOM was being used and whether the opposition believed that the body was
willing to settle at the lowest common denominator, even if it meant
establishing a regency on the island, severely limiting Aristide’s authority,
or even agree to some formula which would ease the Haitian President out of
office. But the basic flaw of CARICOM’s
position was that it classified Aristide and the opposition in the same
category with equal status- the victim being twinned with the victimizer.
Villains of Haiti’s Past Resurface in
Gonaives
The recent opposition takeover
in Gonaives held clear and disturbing echoes of the brutal violence
and political oppression that marked Haiti’s most recent period of military rule, which ended in
1994 after the U.S. led-intervention which returned Aristide to power. This followed President Aristide’s ouster in
a military coup in 1991, only months after he had been elected to his first
term. The attack and takeover of
Gonaives ostensibly was led by a group formerly known as the Cannibal Army and
renamed the Artibonite Resistance Front, many of whose street leaders were once
members of FRAPH, the murderous paramilitary organization that terrorized Haiti
on behalf of its military rulers in the early 1990s. This paramilitary force was headed at the
time by Emmanuel Constant, who was responsible for several thousand political
killings. Constant, who admitted on an
appearance on “Sixty Minutes,” that he had been on the payroll of the CIA,
remains at large in New
York City, as a
result of a de facto asylum granted to him by the Clinton administration, which has been continued by the Bush
White House.
In fact, one of
the leaders of the recent attack was Jean Tatoune, a former FRAPH leader who
was sentenced to forced labor for life in 2000 for his participation in the
1994 massacre in Raboteau, a village near Gonaives where almost a score of Aristide supporters were
systematically murdered by military and FRAPH thugs. Tatoune was subsequently imprisoned in
Gonaives, from where he escaped in August 2002, only to return last week with
his band of street fighters in an attack in which the city prison was destroyed
and the remaining inmates were freed (including some jailed for drug offenses),
government buildings, stores and homes burned and more than 30 people, police
and civilians, killed.
As Robert Fatton, a University of Virginia professor and political analyst on Haiti,
put it, “If what is happening in Gonaives is the opposition’s vision for Haiti, then the future is pretty grim indeed.” Meanwhile, Andre Apaid, the wealthy
businessmen who leads the opposition Group 184, asserted that “We continue to
maintain the nonviolent approach.” This is a hugely tongue-in-cheek statement
because his circle of political comrades consistently has called for the
reconstitution of the army and his associate, Evans Paul, openly has preached the
kind of violent acts that have been perpetrated in Gonaives by former army members.
Washington Demonstrates Its Complicity in
Opposition’s Intransigence
As political violence has mounted in Haiti over the past
six months, the State Department has made nothing but anemic purrings regarding
its concern over the violence in the country, despite the obvious fact that
given the opposition’s ideological and financial ties with the U.S. government,
a clear denunciation of the latter’s tactics by the State Department would most
certainly have had to produce an immediate alteration in the situation in
Haiti. Should the Bush administration
now demand that Group 184 and Democratic Convergence nominate their
representatives to the Provisional Electoral Council in order to allow
parliamentary elections to proceed, while expressing its support for the
integrity of the democratic process in Haiti and the need for President
Aristide to serve out his full term, the opposition groups will have to change
their strategy from featuring a bellicose mixture of non-negotiation and
violent street action.
The State Department’s Ideologues
Yet no such call has been forthcoming; on the contrary,
the State Department is subtlety
supporting the opposition’s attempts to undemocratically oust President
Aristide in a scenario of “regime change” that must by now be quite familiar to
Secretary of State Colin Powell. The
reasons for Washington’s openly anti-Aristide policy are not hard to
discern. U.S. foreign policy towards Latin America
remains in the hands of a small group of hardline policymakers led by Assistant
Secretary of State Roger Noriega and Special Presidential Envoy Otto Reich, the
ideological heirs to former Senator Jesse Helms, who is said to have never met
a right-wing Latin American dictator he didn’t like. Conversely, he also had little affection for
democratically-elected presidents, among which was his nemesis Aristide, who he
considered to be the next Castro of the Caribbean. These Washington extremists have had no
interest in ensuring that Aristide serves out his constitutionally mandated
tenure; on the contrary, they are no doubt eager to see him go, and hence quite
content to let the opposition continue to wreak havoc without meddlesome
interference from the Washington other than a stream of pro-forma statements
about how troubled the White House is by the violence in Haiti, but
unaccompanied by desperately needed anti-riot equipment shipments to
Port-Au-Prince.
Needless to say, the State Department has a litany of
anti-Aristide criticisms they are happy to cite to reporters off-the-record in
order to justify their tacit endorsement of the overthrow of President
Aristide. The most common is the old but
still resilient accusation regarding the supposedly rigged 2000 elections and
the Aristide government’s failure to comply with the provisions of Resolution
822 of the Organization of American States, which was passed in 2000, to
provide a framework for the reestablishment of “political normalcy” in Haiti. First of all,
any suggestion that the so-called Haitian “electoral crisis” still continues is
pure rubbish, given that the eight senators whose legitimacy was being
questioned at the time have all since left the Senate and Aristide repeatedly
has since eagerly called for new elections.
Washington is also well aware that the Aristide government’s failure to
hold new legislative elections, especially given that the terms of a third of
the parliament expired last month, has left Haiti without any legal legislative
body because the opposition refuses to accept its designated seats on the
Provisional Elections Council, which is an essential first step for any
balloting to occur. These events effectively have forced the president to rule
by decree. The State Department
persistently neglects to mention that this is the only obstacle to the prompt
holding of elections in Haiti, at the same time that it has never vigorously
condemned the opposition’s persistent refusal to participate in the electoral
council that is required to supervise the elections. Nor has the State
Department condemned the opposition’s open rejection of the entire concept of
elections and a democratic transfer of power.
The opposition’s justification for this intransigence,
insofar as it provides one, is the lack of security in Haiti, another common complaint of the Bush
administration. It is to be wondered,
however, what type of security the Aristide government is expected to provide
as it struggles to maintain a 4000-member national police force to afford
protection to 8 million Haitians as part of a total Haitian federal budget of
less than $300 million dollars a year. Meanwhile, the N.Y.C. Police Department
has almost 62,000 officers to provide comparable service to approximately the
same number of people. This is
especially the case, since the Aristide government has received no direct
bilateral aid from the United States since 2000. The
Aristide government is widely accused of failing to professionalize and
de-politicize the police force; however, it was the United States and Canada
which cut off the aid that they were providing, following Aristide’s return to
Haiti in 1994, for police training and professionalization,
and they were the countries who originally trained the often criticized police
and set up the courts after the military was overthrown.
Condemnations of the Aristide government for its lack of
commitment to democratic procedures and its failure to establish a much-desired
climate of domestic security verges on hypocrisy on Washington’s part, which
has sought virtually at every turn to cripple the ability of the government to
govern effectively, and consistently has systematically supported the
opposition in its unceasing efforts to sabotage democracy in Haiti.
Bush Administration Remains the Ultimate
Culprit
While the
Aristide government remains poised precariously in Port-au-Prince and fears of
a coup and a new wave of political violence and repression sweep across Haiti,
the State Department appears content to watch passively from afar, perhaps
hoping that the elite-dominated opposition will have more success in unseating
Aristide than a comparable U.S.-backed opposition had in the case of another
pesky Latin American populist, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. The Bush administration’s refusal to openly
condemn the activities of the opposition has made it more than obvious that a
decade has not been long enough to eradicate the Cold War mentality from the
halls of the State Department, or at least the halls of its Western
Hemisphere bureau. On
the contrary, Washington’s covert
battle against the hemisphere’s dangerously “leftist” leaders is alive and
well, led by the ever-vigilant keystone cops, Noriega and Reich, with Haiti’s hard-won
democracy perhaps becoming its next casualty.
Don’t be surprised if Constant and Gen. Cedras
and his drug-related fortune in the millions are once again seen in Port-au-Prince, as Washington navigates
to restore the ancien régime there.
This analysis was prepared by Jessica Leight,
COHA Research Fellow.
The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, founded in 1975, is an
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