Haiti Under Occupation: 2004—

Gerard Latortue arrives in Haiti

March 12, 2004

Boca Raton resident Gerard Latortue arrived in Haiti on Wednesday to assume his new position as interim prime minister (Miami Herald). He does so in a country whose final shreds of agricultural sustenance are nearly gone. The multinational forces are concentrated in Port-au-Prince, which is hardly a cushy billet—a shantytown of 2 million, it is dominated by packed barrios and narrow streets, and hundreds of thousands of people who supported Aristide emotionally. Now they will adapt, as the very poor usually do, to the frustration of their will being thwarted by foreign meddlers. But if the reprisal killings continue against Aristide supporters then I suspect Port-au-Prince will begin to look more and more like the re-occupied cities of the West Bank.

EXPLANATORY NOTE (May 12, 2006): at the time the above was written, several towns heretofore granted administrative autonomy in the Occupied West Bank by the government of Israel were re-occupied by IDF, often accompanied by great violence. Jenin, in particular was severely devastated by the IDF with tanks and bombardment.

US Military Rounding Up Supporters of Aristide

June 19, 2004

Body & Soul—June 18, 2004—What do Haitian and Iraqi prisons have in common?

Have my readers heard of Matthew Hopkins?

Now that Aristide is out of the way...

October 16, 2004

(Haiti Archive; Reuters Photos from flooding, 1, 2, 3)

If you want to find a case study of a country molested by repeated invasions, occupations, manipulations by financial actors, CIA-backed coups and other classic narratives of the left, you need look no further than Haiti. In addition to an immaculate curriculum vita of neocolonial misery, populist leaders ousted by meddling superpowers, rightwing death squads, an expatriate community brutally misused by the police in this country, raw racism exported by US armed forces, and pecksniffian holdings-forth by snotty bureaucrats, Haiti is also a case of environmental calamity par excellence.

Virtually everything published in the mainstream press is misleading or dishonest. Aristide has been vilified as a leftist and wild-eyed fanatic whose followers terrorized political rivals; whose tenure in office was marked by ecoomic collapse; and whose ouster on two separate occasions by two US State Department-orchestrated insurgencies (1991 and 2004) was a "return to sanity." Of course, none of this is true. Aristide was the leader of perhaps the most savagely oppressed majority in modern history, the vast majority of African Haitians who live in abject destititution; he won popular elections twice, by massive majorities. The militia he is supposed to have controlled in fact played a key role in overthrowing him, and of course on the interim occasions when he was ousted, Haiti suffered economic and political calamity.

Reductionist explanations of anything are hateful to me, but it must be said that the astonishing gap between reality and perception on Haiti in the US public is probably a case of racism given entirely free rein. Haiti was occupied by the USA in 1915 and remained under occupation until '34; the neighboring Dominican Republic was occupied by US Marines from 1916 to '22. Both countries would experience subsequent occupations. Moreover, Haiti's police force was armed and trained by the US Marines to serve as a surrogate for the US government there. Most observers have remarked on the extremely obvious racism of US authorities in Haiti, few of whom bothered to conceal their contempt for Blacks en bloc.

Since that time, the US public has ignored Washington's support for fascist regimes in Haiti because it is one country where the population is assumed to be utterly incapable of self-rule. While "spreading freedom and democracy" remains the only remaining rationale for the invasion of Iraq, most commentators on Haiti have no shame as to the fact that our government has been utterly zealous about stamping it out.

Aristide was ousted because his populist ideology was a threat to a tiny minority of well-connected entrepreneurs and rentiers; the coup that ousted him was a group later known as FRAPH, which tortured and murdered thousands of Aristide-supporters; one of these massacres consisted of blocking off a slum and setting it on fire. In 1994, the ordeal came to an end because Washington was embarrassed by the obvious tacit support it was giving to the single worst human rights-violating regime in the Western Hemisphere, embarrassed by the way the neo-liberal FRAPHist regime was using Haiti as a nexus for narco-trafficking, and embarrassed by the double-standard it applied to refugees from Haiti and Cuba.¹

The US State Department was again in charge of Haiti after 60 years; its attitude towards Black populist leaders had not changed. There was no intention of disarming the FRAPHist forces who had ousted Aristide or subjected the country to a wave of mass terror; instead, the object was to leave these same serial killers with a veto power over Lavalas legislation. For the balance of Aristide's term in office (Oct '94-Feb '96) the country was under occupation by UN and US forces; during that time, little meaningful effort was made to disarm the militia, many of which had pro- or anti-Lavalas affiliations. Aristide had been in exile while the FRAPH inflicted monstrosities against entire classes of Haitians. Now Aristide was given 100% of the blame for the retributive violence that raged across Haiti.

The absurdity of this should on the face of it automatically explode the abject lies of Washington on Haiti and its role in the horrors there. However, journalists very seldom challenged this, and it must be admitted that few outside of the US did (examples may be found, but major news outlets usually parroted the official State Department line that Aristide was a sort of Caribbean Mugabe). A better parallel might be with Nelson Mandela; except the Apartheid regime in the RSA had incurred universal condemnation, and after '94, the ANC government was given considerable support. Imagine if a major world power had used every method available to oust Mandela and replace him with, say, Eugene Terreblanche, then collaborated with the White power regime to terrorize ANC supporters.

For the record, ANC supporters also committed atrocities against their opponents—a few, but enough to provide ammunition by white supremacists. In that case, the international community justly ignored these, since they were not the policy of the ANC, and because followers were sorely provoked. But in the case of Lavalas supporters, where Aristide had weaker powers to control his supporters, and where appeals to international suasion were obviously doomed to failure, these alleged atrocities ran away with all the newstype. Occasionally they were actually confirmed, but usually mainstream media outlets rubberstamped the image of a ferral Negro mob running amok wacking off heads.

Aristide was succeeded by René Préval in '96, who implemented an IMF SAP under intense pressure from the donor committee. However, under what amounted to IMF receivership, the Haitian economy imploded—the SAP was designed with little or no concern for Haiti's domestic interests. When Préval's term ended, Aristide was re-elected; his second election coincided with that of George W Bush's appointment by the SCOTUS, the worst possible timing for this uniquely unfortunate politician. Immediately, Aristide came under determined attack from the Bush Administration, which made no secret of its rejoincing when he was ousted by a militia 3 years later.

It's been six months since the man American political "conservatives" love to hate was exiled by their heavy-handed meddling (Jeffrey Sachs). State terrorism and impunity has returned to Haiti; while UN forces patrol the country (as they did 10 years ago), riots blaze across the country (WP, NYT). In the latest outburst of violence, most of the publications I've read tend to suggest they don't know who started them. The NYT article broadly hints that Aristide supporters castrated and beheaded a former military official, although this is very far from certain.

The "natural" disasters that have been especially merciless to Haiti are, of course, not natural at all; the waves of hurricanes and flooding hitting Hispaniola have caused scattered deaths in the Dominican Republic; in Haiti, they've caused stupendous devastation, with thousands dead and whole communities leveled. Logging is usually stimulated by concessions to foreign patrons. Logging also occurs because rural proletariats burn wood for charcoal; lack of electricity or and adequate farm land has meant displaced subsistence farmers must make an income cutting trees for urban dwellers to cook or heat. In the case of Haiti, however, it appears that the loss of forest cover is driven chiefly by commercial logging and agricultural expansion (cash crops and squatter farmers, in Haiti; see, for example "Economic causes of tropical deforestation - a global empirical application" (PDF; see p.20, note).

Needless to say, I'm as angry about this as it's possible to be. The US/UN (and French, and even the usually well-intentioned Canadian) interference in Haiti has been an unmitigated disaster; Aristide's Lavalas Party has never been allowed to administer its mandate, and the great majority of the country are finding themselves hemmed in by a recurring nightmare of coup and occupation, then fascist terrorism. Let's please set aside nonsense about "right" versus "left"; liberal economic policy has no potential role in Haiti, since the vast majority of the population, left to their household endowments of resources, cannot possibly emerge from desperation. If free enterprise had even a remote chance of doing that here, then it would have long ago: the resourcefulness and determination of the Haitians is well-established. Besides, foreign meddling has repeatedly destroyed whatever capital the urban poor ever accumulate.

Haiti is fast becoming the West Bank of the Western Hemiphere. NOTES: 1 For substantiation of these claims, one may peruse my archives, which are heavily linked; or else, check the Hartford University Archives. Please see also the Center for Cooperative Research's Haiti page.

Emanuel "Toto" Constant, a founder of FRAPH, is an associate of Guy Phillipe, the leader of the 29 Feb 04 Coup that ousted Aristide.