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Crisis in Haiti
 Crisis in Haiti-1February 9, 2004
Haitian Pres. Jean-Bertrand Aristide's government faces a massive and deadly insurgency: A maze of barricades were thrown up in the sprawling slums and streets of Saint Marc, the largest town on the road north from the capital to the country's fourth-largest city, Gonaives, where police tried unsuccessfully on Saturday to restore control after being driven out two days earlier. Youth gangs, many of whose members carried handguns tucked under their T-shirts, controlled all travelers to and from Gonaives. Cars could not pass the barricades made of vehicle carcasses, felled trees, boulders and smoldering garbage. In addition to the uprising in Saint Marc, police headquarters were attacked in the cities of Trou de Nord, Listere and Grand Goave, independent Radio Metropole said.Randy Paul is following events, chiefly through the Miami Herald (link obsolete). According to the MH, the uprising involves a faction whose leader, Amiot Metayer, was assassinated (20 Sept 2003; allegedly with Aristide's connivance). This suspicion is so ingrained large numbers of police officers have been lynched and their corpses mutilated. The WP mentions that the Group is dominated by a group known as the "Cannibals", but doesn't mention Metayer. In order to fill the reader in, I'm going to refer to one of the most revealing books on the topic I've read, State against Nation. The link is to the Amazon listing; my review is there for all to read. One has to realize that the deep division in Haitian society is between the outward-looking, mercantile segment of Haiti and the inward looking, frustrated peasantry. The latter are divided as to the path to a better life, but have often been seduced by the idea of a hyper-regimented, "Noirist" ("pro-Black") ideology which looks longingly back to Jean-Jacques Dessalines (r.1804-1806). This clash reached a boiling point in July 1915, when Haiti's president was killed and hacked to pieces by a mob; American marines arrived the next day, and established a puppet state dominated by the minority "mulâtre" caste. This was to prove a misfortune for the mulâtres who did not ask for participation in the occupation, and who were afterwards condemned by other Haitians as a sort of quisling-caste. The polarization of Haiti seems a bit odd to outsiders, insofar as there are conservative, nationalist, non-mulâtre bourgeoisie who tend to favor a strong, central leadership; and there are radical leftists, also non-mulâtre, who have a sort of Leninist spin on the ideology of la noirisme. In 1957, a noirist ideologue named François Duvalier won presidential elections and set up a totalitarian state dominated by organized mob violence and a ritualized demonization of the mulâtres. While similar in many respects to the Hutu-power movement of Juvenal Habyarimana (Rwanda, 1973-1994), the regime of the Duvaliers was extremely luxurious; it did not nurture some Wagnerian dream of a ragnarak, in which the hated "other" would be massacred in a unifying, state-creating orgy of violence. The Duvaliers—thank God—were too pleasure-loving and swinish for that. And the mulâtres were far too important a bargaining chip in Duvalier's relationship with the USA and France. But his regime, the longest in Haiti’s history, was a reign of terror; political opponents were summarily executed, and the populace was kept in a state of abject fear by the notorious Tonton Macoutes. Under Duvalier, the economy of Haiti continued to deteriorate, and the illiteracy rate remained at about 90%" (Columbia Encyclopedia). In 1971 François died and was succeeded by his 19-year old son Jean-Claude as president-for-life. The repression, emiseration, and plunder of the nation continued until a series of uprisings, coupled with international pressure, caused Jean-Claude to flee the country (1986; see documents). The country tottered amid military factions until 7 February 1991, when Jean-Bertrand Aristite was inaugurated as the country's first democratically elected eader. Less than seven months later, he was ousted by Raoul Cédras in a coup d'état organized by a falangist group known as FRAPH. The rule of Cedras and FRAPH was extremely cruel; about 3,000 were murdered and about 100,000 attempted to flee the country. The methods of murder, extortion, and terrorism against the Haitians were astonishly savage. Moreover, the twin flows of refugees from Cuba and Haiti posed intractible problems for the Bush Administration. In 1993, Pres. Clinton came to office, and intensified the pressure on the junta to resign. In October 1994, under threat of invasion, Cecras finally agreed to step down and go into exile. Aristide returned. Unfortunately, Aristide's term in office was marred by a poor security situation, in large measure handed to him by the Interim Security Force (created by American forces from refugees at Guantanamo Naval Base). American troops remained in Haiti until March 1995. UN peacekeepers remained until 1997. Aristide objected that they failed to disarm the armed gangs in Haiti, leaving him and Préval vulnerable to numerous assassination attempts. Constant, the execrable founder of FRAPH, has fought deportation proceedings against him and lives in New York. Préval had to struggle with a parliament heavily influenced by collaborators with the Cédras regime; in Jan 1999 theyshut down the workings of parliament in an effort to force Préval to carry out their privatization plans. Republican congressmen, most notably Benjamin Gilman (R-NY) and Porter Goss (R- FL) flew to Port-a-Prince to meet with opposition [collaborator] lawmakers and then helped FRAPH's loyal ally, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) draft a resolution condeming Préval for allegedly being "heavy-handed." After his restoration, Aristide governed to Oct. '96. He had served 31 months of a 72-month term. He was succeeded, however, by fellow Lavalas member, René Garcia Préval. Eventually, Préval knuckled under; he had been frustrated, had eventually cut deals to govern the country, and had essentially liquidated most of the social gains under the Aristide government. Labor contracts with the teachers had been violated, pollution was exploding, and estimates of the number of street children tripled. In 2000, when Aristide returned as president, he had to repeat the efforts of his previous administration. This, under a dire new financial picture for Haiti. The urban economy had boomed, then imploded; the flush years had left Haiti with more capital flight and external debt. Moreover, the US and EU were withholding aid, alleging that Aristide's November 2000 victory was marred by intimidation and fraud. Ironically, there was probably more reason to challenge the legitmacy of the American President's victory than the Haitian President's, since the Haitian election had been supervised by foreign volunteers (Haiti's government had requested UN technical assistance, but was turned down. Gangs attacked polling places in the south and western departments, but the main dilemma was that the pro-IMF opposition had little chance against Aristide, so they boycotted the poll. Aristide's 2nd term as president was thus plagued by an especially vituperative opposition (the web page I found first characterized him as a "hell-sent dictator") who had minimal public support but did enjoy the backing of the Paris Club of creditor nations; diminished international recognition, despite efforts to get technical assistance from the UN for elections subsequently rejected by major donors; and a self-appointed government in exile. The Lavalas Family (Famny Lavalas), as the party was now known, was obligated to resort to armed vigante groups which had ruled the countryside since the end of military rule 6 years before. One of these was the "Cannibal Army," led by one Amiot Métayer. In May 2002, after allegations arose that the "Army" had staged attacks on a rival gang in Gonaives, Métayer was arrested. Subsequently, he escaped and was later killed (gunshot wound to each eye, and a third to the chest). In a speech made after the corpse was found, Aristide condemned the murder; but relatives insisted that it was an employee of the National Palace who had murdered Amiot. Meanwhile, the opposition leader declared they were glad he was dead, since there seemed little likelihood he would have been brought to brook for his many crimes. Finally, beginning in late October Army commandoes stormed his slum attempting to disarm his private army. It would appear that this feud is what has spun out of control.
If I have got this wrong, I would welcome advice and corrections.
Crisis in Haiti-2: InsurgencyFebruary 10, 2004
(Previous-Haiti)
It's a fine and worthy thing that the gang violence that boiled over in Gonaives and Saint-Marc last week has been been quelled there(map, Reuters), but the countryside of much of the country is the scene of violence and fighting between rival factions (Reuters—link obsolete). Once-and-present Pres. Jean-Bertrand Aristide is an opponent of neoliberal policies which had disastrous effects when implemented in 1995-1999.2.1 As a consequence, the US Department of State, in an ugly replay of April 2002, is asking Aristide to step down, despite the fact that the insurgency has nothing whatever to do with Aristide's parliamentary opposition. This has to do with an ongoing battle between rival militia set up in the past by military kleptocrats, militia that Aristide and Rene Préval have struggled to disarm. It's not easy; US and UN troops occupied the country to 1997, and left them intact.
It will be objected by certain readers that Aristide and the ruling Famny Lavalas created this problem by dissolving the Haitian Army on their return to power, leaving the police to address the militia; and they obviously had a modus vivendi with the "Army of Cannibals," one of the most effective of the militia. This was not really a choice for the government of Haiti; first, there is no politically viable opposition the Famny Lavalas, just as there was not a viable opposition to the ANC in the '94 elections in the RSA: the ANC was the party that represented a newly enfranchised majority, the same as Lavalas. So the Haitian opposition could only wait for the return of military rule. Second, Aristide inherited a security situation left by an extremely grudging occupation force, in which he could either defy the militia and be hacked to pieces when they blew into Port-a-Prince, or he could seek their cooperation until peace starved them out of existence.
How successful has he been? Clearly, Haiti is in violent turmoil and there is widespread looting and murder. However, it must be remembered that the country was bristling with armed gangs in 1994, and these came from the most aggrieved imaginable population, a section which was Lavalas' base of support. This is not a situation any leader has handled very well.
NOTE: 2.1 For a formal treatment of the effects of neo-liberal policies on Haiti, please see "The Challenge of Haiti's Future," U.S. Army War College, Georgetown University(PDF) for references. Obviously, the US Army War College is not a leftist outfit. The cited article takes the structural reforms mandated by the IMF as a given, but regards them as an obstacle to achieving other sorts of favorable outcomes. Another, more frank assessment which I think is extremely good is Dani Rodrik's "The Global Governance of Trade as if Development Really Mattered," which actually refers to IMF analysis of Haiti's progress at structural reform and the outcomes thereof (not bad and dreadful).
Crisis in Haiti-3: Haiti and the State DepartmentFebruary 20, 2004
Haiti is now in the grips of all-out civil war. The militia formerly known as "The Cannibal Army" has set up a rival government, while the political opposition is apparently trying to piggyback itself onto the insurgency. So has the US State Department, which has long opposed Pres. Aristide:
[...] We have seen the Government of Haiti take small steps toward fulfilling its commitments. The 2000 Carrefour-Feuilles and Raboteau trials proved that the judiciary can be effective when there is political will. The recent arrest of one of Haiti’s most infamous criminals and other political thugs demonstrates the Government of Haiti’s ability to address impunity. And on May 15, Haiti finally signed a Letter of Agreement on Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement with the United States, which could be the beginning of closer cooperation with us on counternarcotics initiatives. However, we are disappointed with President Aristide’s overall progress to date on the implementation of these commitments, which are important to our mutual interests. We expect a much deeper commitment to basic democratic principles and to efforts to resolve the political impasse.The "impasse" is, of course, that Aristide obeyed the demands of the State Department to arrest Amiot Metayer, who then escaped from custody and was found murdered. This was the pretext for the Cannibal Army taking power. So the State Department is awarding power to Mssr. Metayer's militia? Or to the tiny minority of urban elites who have been out of power since the restoration of civilian rule in 1994? After all, Aristide's opposition consists of these two groups. The impasse is that Aristide's opposition has been begging foreign powers or vigilante gangs to seize power from the elected government—there's no other way they can win power. Aristide is under attack from a populist vigilante militia which once favored him. That such militia exist should come as no surprise: during the four years of FRAPH/military rule, the poorest districts were targets of a campaign of terror waged by the Haitian Army. The extract from the State Department's letter on Haiti is especially rich, accusing Aristide of fostering a culture of impunity when it provides sanctuary to the worst killers in Haitian history. The Raboteau Massacre (1994) is specifically mentioned by the passage above; this Amnesty International report points out that the US State Department, along with helpers in Panama and Honduras, are actually refusing to extradite the perptrators. It is becoming increasingly apparent to your very insignificant, feeble correspondent that our government has stepped up a campaign to oust Aristide and paint him as an illegitimate tyrant. The object is to perpetuate the immunity of collaborators with the military and the CIA. But of course the misery of Haitians makes the status quo increasingly untennable. UPDATE: "U.S. to Mediate in Haiti Crisis; Urges Americans to Leave" (NYT): Americans have been urged to evacuate Haiti, including Peace Corps volunteers. France, the OAS and the UN are to propse specific steps that the rival factions can commit to. This is the NYT version. It looks to me a lot like the situation in Venezuela, where a president was elected whom the Bush Administration found inconvenient. The OAS is generally perceived as a front for conservative US interests in the region; for example, it suspended Cuba's membership after its Marxist revolution, but has never suspended the membership of states which fell under military dictatorships—not Guatemala, not Argentina, not Chile, not Brazil, not the Dominican Republic and not Haiti. In November 2002, after the failure of the CIA-backed coup against Chávez, Secretary General César Gaviria Trujillo threw the power of his office (link replaced)behind the effort to hold elections in Venezuela until the Venezuelans had the prudence to elect someone satisfactory to the Bush Administration. In the case of Venezuela, the OAS eventually lost its credibility and Chávez has soldiered on with the Venezuelan Constitution on his side. In the case of Haiti, a more subtle strategy is being followed in which assistance will flow to Aristide's armed opponents until Aristide accedes to demands for his resignation. SEE ALSO: James Dobbs column in NYT Thursday. Dobbs points out that in the last 10 years US policy towards Haiti has swung wildly, from Pres. Clinton's deployment of 20,000 troops to restore Aristide, to Pres. Bush's withdrawal of aid; Dobbs might have added that under Bush pere, the CIA colluded with Aristide's ouster. Dobbs observes that the most effective strategy would be to help Aristide complete his term and prepare for a peaceful transition to his successor. Unfortunately, Mr. Dobb's sensible and well-informed plan pre-supposes that the Bush Administration cares about Haiti. Clearly, the Bush Administration cares about winning against the poor of Haiti, not helping them. NOTE: FRAPH = Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti; the founder of FRAPH, Emannuel Constant, was a CIA informer who now enjoys sanctuary in the USA. Constant's group was responsible for the disappearance and murder of about 3,000 Haitians, including a fire set in the Citie du Soleil slum, where about 900 persons died. Not only is Constant implicated in massive homicide against political opponents, he is responsible for outright terrorism. FRAPH was actually founded after the 1991 coup from some precursor organizations.
Crisis in Haiti-4: Haitian Civil WarFebruary 20, 2004
The rebels who have seized several towns in Haiti have declared independence from the rest of the country (see Departmental Map). The breakaway Republic of Artibonite is named for the department, or administrative region, which the rebels now control; its new "President" is Buter Metayer, leader of the militia formerly known as "The Cannibal Army," and brother of the slain Amiot Metayer. This is not the first time that Haiti has been partitioned. Artibonite is the main food-producing area of Haiti, though, so food aid has become critical to residents in the capital Port-a-Prince. Claire Marshall of the BBC filed this report last week when she visited the rebel stronghold in Gonaives. She quoted Mssr Metayer of promising to march on Port-a-Prince by March, so the secession plan may signal a retrenchment of the insurgents. Secretary of State Colin Powell, God bless him, had this to say about any future plan to end the violence in Haiti: Crisis in Haiti-5: the Fulfillment of a VendettaFebruary 29, 2004
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former parish priest who egregiously failed to turn a desperately poor, polluted, and divided nation into a Caribbean version of Switzerland, has been driven from his post as President of Haiti (Reuters). Readers will know I regard this as a fulfillment of the Bush Administration's long-standing vendetta against Aristide. The obsessive hatred of many conservatives for this man—Jesse Helms repeatedly insisted on the Senate floor in 1992 that he was "as bad as Hitler"—is fairly difficult to understand, and even political moderates have been inclined to assume that there must have been something wrong about him that merited such loathing.
But stepping far back from hysterical similies like Helms', it has to be noted that Aristide was not even another Fidel Castro. While his political adversaries represent uniformily worse people than Fulgencio Batista, to say nothing of Castro's present-day opponents, Aristide is opposed by FRAPH, the Touton Macoutes (the noirist fanatics of the Duvalier regime) and a group of thoroughly apolitical gangsters. No, Aristide did not have a jacobinist agenda to implement; the Lavalas Movement was not a Leninist organization with political prisoners. Much has been made of the fact that some of the gangs that dominate the hinterlands of that country declared their loyalty to a popular leader(!) then sought to terrorize in his name. In this sense, Aristide is hardly worse than Jesus of Nazereth.
Aristide is being condemned for failing to perform a miracle. Chief amongst his accusers, as we have seen, was the US Department of State that provided sanctuary to Emannuel Constant, founder of FRAPH and CIA informant; and this same department of the same government has condemned Aristide for failing to crack down on the "culture of impunity" (meaning, that Aristide had mysteriously failed to arrest his deadliest enemies or apply moral suasion to get them to turn themselves in).
Your humble correspondent is not appealing to leftist sympathies here. Haiti has been subjected to an insidiously promoted storm of violence, unmistakably fostered and promoted by murky groups in the USA. Out of a previous maelstrom of violence Aristide had struggled to create a movement that could defend the vast majority of Haitians from terror and exploitation. Haiti, in other words, has not been a society at peace. It was in a state where terrorism was endemic and a neighboring superpower was fostering that terrorism. So Aristide and Lavalas preached not just social justice, but social self-defense. A lot of American liberals have been piously droning about how gangs "loyal" to Aristide were also guilty of crimes. This is like blaming UN Secretary General Kofi Annan of every bad thing that UN member governments have done since 1997 since he is, after all, the leader of the organization.
Of course it is rather curious how those who purport to disapprove of things like the CIA support of the contras (Nicaragua), or Suharto's coup (Indonesia), Operation Condor (Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Paraguay), and so on, somehow get the vapors when they hear that populist leaders have a truculent attitude. Let's be reasonable here: God knows I don't want to be strident here. So I should point out that people like Patrice Lumumba, Salvadore Allende and Muhammad Mussadeq suffered from a propensity to go overboard, and surely have only themselves to blame for their ouster/assassination. I think such has been said of Eduard Beneš.
However, I am not in the giving vein to-day, and it seems to me irrelevant that Aristide's second interrupted tenure as President was not as smooth as, say, Jean-Claude Juncker's performance in office has been. All countries are not alike, and do not face the same constraints. Haiti was cursed by a singularly intense phase of praetorianism, and Aristide tried harder than anyone in Haitian history to break it. In everything for which he has been rebuked, he was stymied by the US Department of State and the Bush Administration. For this reason, speak not to me of his failure to transform Haiti overnight into Singapore. I have no patience at all for such offal.
Crisis in Haiti-6: the Heart of a ScotMarch 1, 2004
Your humble correspondent is of Celtic extraction, and as such prone to intense flashes of anger. In such a one as gripped the fearsome Plantagenets is he now, or o'ercame as the Duke of York when Queen Margaret presented him with a handkerchief dipped in the blood of his slaughtered bairn. The murder of a popular government in Haiti by a crew of rancid villains is so much the worse when they are accepted (it would seem) as the arbiters of morality and good sense. Think he's upset? Everywhere I turn I see princely hypocrites refusing to distinguish between Aristide's pleas for solidarity and self-defense, and the squalid thuggery of his enemies—amongst them, that prince of smiles, the canker Robert Noriega, whose cherubic face is prove that he can smile, and murders while he smiles, and wets his cheek with artificial tears, and cry "content!" to that which grieves his flinty heart! And he has hewn his way from this thicket of popular will with a bloody ax. Yet all about me I am beset with bobble-heads who shrug and say "Aristide was no saint." You fools, will you cavill about errors as if they justify wrongers blacker than death or night? Oh ye gods, I will go mad! Have all the moderate commentariat outside of Haiti forgotten when 5,000 peasants were massacred by that brainchild of Jesse Helms, FRAPH? When hundreds of thousands tendered their fates to the sea rather than live under the tender mercies of Raoul Cedras? Our boy, Constant? When Allende fell the world blazed with rage; live we now with souls so dead that we look upon this heinous crime with tongue-clicking patience? Styled a villain in Shakespeare's play, MacBeth is driven to distraction by Banquo's ghost; the scoundrels who rule our roost have, it seems, no such compunctions... or any other redeeming virtue. Does it strike you as odd that the White House is really worried about refugees now? Now, that the thugs they armed and paid, and reward with such treasure as they can steal with their fingernails from the lacerated flesh of Haiti's slumdwellers—now that they can rule unperturbed by a turbulent priest, now our moral magistrates fear refugees? Now? Would that I could revert to swinish ignorance! But I do remember when they came, and when the INS locked them up in camps surpassing the slums of Port-a-Prince in squalor! And at the same time, the Cubans were treated rather differently—indeed, the refugees from Cuba now live in Miami and vote. Yes, my life would be far placid and efficient if I could forget these things. But I live in a country where murder is law and felony is virtue, where villainy preaches and decency is ostracized! No wonder Jefferson trembled.
Crisis in Haiti-7: Après le dèlugeMarch 5, 2004
(Haiti Archive)
The plaything of its own exiles, Haiti is now forgotten by the Aristide-hating segment of the Haitian community. Aristide is in exile now in the Central African Republic. Haiti's three weeks of rebellion have cost the national treasury $300 million—the equivalent of a year's budget (imagine if a civil war in the USA cost $2.7 trillion). Defenders of the rebellion have insisted that they were not carrying a brief for FRAPH. Fair enough. But it is FRAPH who is now evening scores, despite the fact that the motly rabble have been driven from the streets of the major cities by the peacekeepers. Let us set aside the matter of the lynchings by immolation. That was the thing the peacekeepers were sent to forestall. No, we are talking about a vendetta executed by the police. According to the Boston Globe, for example, Haitians are complaining that the US marines have not interferred in killings of Aristide supporters—they have merely insured there is no local rival to their control of the streets. (The had been anxiety for several days that the local militia would challenge the marines).
The Republic of South Africa has called for an investigation into the circumstances of Aristide's exile; Aristide says he was made to leave by American commandos who entered the presidential palace. The State Department denies the allegations but rejects an investigation. Richard Boucher, dripping with scorn, declared "We can't be called upon, expected or required to intervene every time there is violence against a failed leader. We can't spend our time running around the world and the hemisphere saving people who botched their chance at leadership." Ah, but Mr. Boucher, need you labor so hard to ensure he fails? Why is the State Department so afraid of an investigation?
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