| For three years Washington and the European Union have imposed an aid embargo on Haiti, squeezing the hemisphere’s poorest nation until it screamed – and then squeezing harder.
Despite ever deepening misery, Haiti’s poor majority stuck with their popularly elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Washington had expected to remove the former priest through massive demonstrations – a counter-revolution by acclamation – hopefully before this year’s celebrations of Haiti’s 200th anniversary. U.S. and European media tried mightily to paint a picture of overwhelming popular disaffection with Aristide. However, the Haitian people are intimately familiar with the faces and history of the “opposition,” gathered opportunistically under the banner of Group 184. U.S. media routinely exaggerated the size of opposition demonstrations, while ignoring far larger pro-government rallies. But you can’t tell a bald-faced lie to people about events they have witnessed with their own eyes. Americans may have been fooled, but Haitians were not. Aristide remained. |
Where else are we seeing this exact same story of a democratically elected president and U.S. attempts to prop up an opposition and sell it to U.S. audiences as a majority? Venezuela perhaps?
| Frustrated, the U.S. unleashed the mad dogs of the old regime, based in the neighboring Dominican Republic.The Haitian elite, too tiny and effete to field any forces of their own, enlisted drug gangs as shock troops for what Prime Minister Yvon Neptune called the ”coup in motion.”
Much of the northern part of the country has fallen to the gangsters and former death squads. The U.S. has delivered Haiti into Hell, as planned. Now Washington waits for the proper moment to declare Haiti a failed state. |
The article quotes Stan Goff, a Viet Nam U.S. Special Forces officer who was stationed for a period of time in Haiti. (If you've been with YWA for a while, you may recall the name Stan Goff. If you haven't read his open letter to troops serving in the Middle East, I very highly recommend doing so.)
| If the legitimately elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide fails to take aggressive action to recapture these cities, there may be a successful coup within weeks. While the tactical target of this paramilitary action is the Aristide government, the political target is – as it always has been – the popular sovereignty of the Haitian masses. It is a tragic irony that this situation has developed this far on the bicentennial of the heroic Haitian Revolution, and that it is being led by an imperial power that wants to annihilate popular sovereignty wherever it raises its head. |
Included is Goff's journal describing the history of Haiti's fight for independence, and an account of today's class distinctions. He reacts to the installation of Colin Powell:
| January 19, 2001. A fellow Haiti-phile has forwarded me an article by email about the confirmation hearings of Colin Powell. The hearings are, of course, a love-fest. Powell wears white denial as his personal armor – the almost-Black Knight. No one dares speak the forbidden – My Lai, Panama, Iraq. No one can acknowledge – on pain of political suicide – that this man is a brilliant hack, a well-groomed ticket puncher who will order the annihilation of thousands of innocents, but whose real talent is hiding the bodies. The obsequious, lily-white Senators ask him about Haiti, this almost-a-negro and a West Indian to boot, and he doesn't hesitate. He puts Haiti firmly in its place.
...The Administration of George W. Bush, Powell explains, will tentatively accept the grotesque capitulation of a wavering Aristide to reschedule the legitimate elections of several of his own party members in response to a US/OAS campaign of demagogy to discredit those elections. It is a breathtaking betrayal by Aristide. Powell calls this acquiescent, nay, submissive posture "an appropriate road map to get started," but adds that the Administration can not rule out additional demands. No careful Clintonesque camouflage from this administration. The colonial relation will be naked and unashamed. U.S. policy, the Secretary of State-designee explains, always has been and always will be to keep Haitians from coming to the United States, and on their knees at home. |
Once again, in Venezuela, the U.S. has insinuated itself into the electoral politics of a sovereign nation....and a democratic one, at that.
What imperial arrogance! Venezuela is undoubtedly in a better situation than Haiti to refuse this outrage, but Chavez' government is also permitting the U.S. and the OAS to monitor its current recall petition status. I can understand the need to do so, but that need was created by U.S. assumption of global domination backed by U.S. might and money. And every flag waver here thinks the world hates us because they are jealous of our freedom - of our democracy.
| [The National Popular Party] PPN's sharp criticisms of Aristide aside, they defend him not because of some personal quality and not based on his program, but because he was chosen by Haiti's majority, unlike Dubya, who seized power through a judicial coup d'etat. "The population selected him, and if he betrays them, the population can reject him. We are not defending just Aristide. We are defending the people's right to select their own leaders. And we are defending our sovereignty." |
| Harry Numa: "These attacks on Aristide from Convergence and the reactionaries will continue regardless of what concessions Aristide makes. It is not Aristide they hate, but his connection to the masses that they fear. He was elected with 92 percent of the vote.
This is a terrible power as they see it." There it is again. The one true constant. |
And that is the same constant in the situation in Venezuela. Chavez' connection to the masses.
For all the similarities, it would appear that Haiti's current dire situation results in part from Aristede's capitulation in great part to demands of the U.S.-backed opposition, and its lack of Venezuela's oil wealth to stabilize the economy.
From this 2001 perspective, Goff continues:
| [T]he Powell Doctrine for the U.S. military....Begin with a measurable objective. Apply overwhelming high-tech force and limit American casualties to an absolute minimum. Gain control over the press, and give complacent America its morality play.
No, American invasion is surely no recipe for Haiti. They can bomb the existing infrastructure into an ash heap and it will leave 75 percent of the country yawning. Infrastructure? What's that? The international press can enter Haiti through its porous borders with near impunity. And the last occupation, beginning in 1994, in which I participated, is an indication of what the next would be... indeterminate, intimidating no one for more than a moment, and a risk that our own soldiers – especially black soldiers – will see more than they ought of our own government's motives and methods. Haiti is slippery. It's hard to get hold of. Sometimes it bites. |
Look at this entry for January 27, 2001:
| The government, anxious to avoid all criticism, dispatches a phalanx of PNH to provide security for Convergence. Threats have been called in. Indeed, arrests are made when two men are caught with anti-Convergence leaflets and bag loads of throwing stones. Oddly, it's Convergence who appeals for their release. Both men are identified as members of a Convergence affiliate.
Had this charade not been unmasked, the State Department and the New York Times would doubtless have been decrying, a la Gillman and Goss, Aristide-inspired acts of violence. |
Indeed, this is the same tactic that did take place in the attempted coup on Chavez in 2002. And in that case, it worked - the opposition sat snipers onto the pro-Chavez crowd and then filmed the crowd returning fire, which film they broadcast to the world saying that Chavez was slaughtering a peaceful opposition crowd of protestors. That was the news that was carried in the U.S. In fact, no opposition members were killed. The deaths were all Chavez supporters. But, as Stan Goff says in his remarks about Haiti...."facts have never been obstacles to Republicans."
| Back to 2004:
All warnings that the finger would give way to the hand are coming to pass. Hopefully the Aristide government will take all action necessary to secure the nation, and if they do they will be vilified by the US press. That's why we need to get this story out there now, so there is at least some perspective to help the left avoid heading down the wrong path. Aristide needs to wage a ruthless fight to retake each of those towns in turn, to acknowledge that the macouto-bourgeoisie is waging a civil war, and to state that this is war, openly, in order to do what is necessary. If not, then the right-wing paramilitaries will maintain the initiative, they will operate within the logic of war, and they will topple Aristide's government and clamp down yet again on popular sovereignty, with assistance from the hegemon to the north. To stay abreast of developments in Haiti without relying on the capitalist press, go to the English section of www.haiti-progres.com. |
And now, perhaps you will see an extra callousness in Bush's proclamation today that we will refuse entry to any Haitian refugee from a civil war that we have been stirring.
| With Haiti inching toward civil war, President George W. Bush said yesterday the U.S. Coast Guard would turn back any Haitians fleeing in boats to U.S. shores.
That declaration - which was essentially an affirmation of current policy - drew swift denunciations from critics, who called it inhumane and racist. Also, about 20 members of the Congressional Black Caucus told Bush in an impassioned meeting that the United States must be prepared to use force and offer aid to prevent total chaos in Haiti. At the White House, Bush told reporters, "I have made it abundantly clear to the Coast Guard that we will turn back any refugee that attempts to reach our shore." He spoke amid growing concerns that the rebellion against Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide will lead to a new exodus of boat people. |
There is a saying in Haiti. If you don't say 'Good morning' to the devil, he will eat you. If you do say 'Good morning' to the devil... he will eat you.
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