U.S. Council on Hemispheric Affairs comments on Haiti

Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs, dubbed by US Senator Edward Kennedy as "one of the most respected bodies of scholars and policymakers", said on Monday that no one's reputation is "more likely to be tarnished by the role played in bringing down President Aristide's constitutional rule than Secretary of State Colin Powell". Saying that he had become a "willingly captive of the Bush Administration's obsessive right-wing ideologues", the Council said Powell's Haitian policy was "dazzlingly inept". In a stinging article on Monday which also attacked France, Canada, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, the United Nations(UN) and the Organization of American States(OAS) for their inaction in preventing Aristide's fall, the Council said, "reminiscent of Ethiopia's Haile Selassie's mournful appearance before the League of Nations in Geneva in 1936, where he pleaded for help to suppress Mussolini's legions, only the English-speaking Caribbean, led by Jamaican Prime Minister P.J. Patterson, displayed any spunk in challenging the inelegant US-orchestrated game plan". ...Said the Council: "At the end of the day, standing almost alone, it was Jamaica's Prime Minister PJ Patterson who upheld the region's honour by implicitly rebuking the timidity of other hemisphere leaders in their hiding behind 'Jesuitic' reasoning to justify their decisions to be irrelevant, if not indifferent to the fateful interruption of the democratic process in Haiti. Patterson took this stand in spite of the vulnerability of Jamaica's sagging economy and its need for Washington's financial backing." ...In a February 19 interview on radio with Sam Donaldson, Powell strongly defended Jean-Bertrand Aristide against the rebel attacks he was coming under. In a report prepared by the US State Department itself , Powell is quoted as telling Donaldson that "Since he (Aristide) is the elected leader, we should not be putting forward a plan that would require him to step down. Right now President Aristide is the elected president of Haiti and that is what we are standing behind". The State Department writer noted that "Armed gangs - have vowed to attack the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince within a week if Aristide does not step down. Powell insisted that these threats must not succeed." Note that very carefully. Now here's the direct quote from Powell: "We cannot allow these thugs to come out of the hills or even an opposition to simply rise up and say "we want you to leave" in an undemocratic, non-constitutional manner. We want this situation to play out in a constitutional manner". That was February 19-not 2002 or 2003, but 2004. By February 29 he had changed his tune completely and was in the media saying what an awful fellow Aristide was. Just this past Monday in an interview with National Public Radio's Juan Williams, Powell said though Aristide was democratically elected he was "governing very poorly. He governed in a way that allowed thugs to take over. He governed in a way that allowed the legislature, frankly, to be unable to do its work and finally had to come out of existence. The police became corrupt and he essentially allowed conditions of chaos to exist".

  Jamaica Gleaner article

Boy, Aristide did all that in just ten days!

Well, we've seen Powell play patsy whore to the Bush administration before. Sooner or later perhaps he'll just quit saying anything until they tell him what to parrot.

Now, here's a little more that I haven't seen much about in the ongoing bits and pieces we get. I certainly have not been following Aristide's presidency. Whatever the case, it still will not answer for the U.S. to decide which leaders will be permitted to stay and which will go. That said....

Colin Powell has the right to comment on how Aristide governed, not only that he was democratically elected. (And keep in mind, too, that the 2000 elections were disputed and were at the heart of the issues that led to his downfall). Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and others showed that Aristide violated human rights and persecuted journalists. He did, indeed, have thugs who murdered people and he seemed to have corrupted the police force. He was no saint or pure black hero, as some is mythologising him. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights carried out on-site visits to Haiti in 2002 and issued a report stating that it was "deeply preoccupied by the weakness of human rights in Haiti, the lack of an independent judiciary, the climate of insecurity, the existence of armed groups that act with total impunity and threats, to which some journalists have been subjected." And the OAS Special Rappateur for freedom of expression documented increases in the acts of harassment against journalists. What is significant about CARICOM's mediatorial effort was that it did not gloss over these problems and, in fact, that CARICOM Prior Action Plan which Chairman Patterson and the group had Aristide agree to contained steps to deal with this issue. It is not true that CARICOM simply wanted to save Aristide and was unconcerned about the quality of his governance. The facts don't bear that out.

Read the rest of the article for an explanation of the Caricom plan for Haiti.

I might comment on one more thing....

The Opposition had been using one excuse after the other not to co-operate with the Government and had made it clear for a long time that it would accept nothing less than the removal of Aristide. And you have the situation of the world's only Superpower bowing to this rag-tag group of people.

I don't see it quite that way. I think the Superpower is more likely to have been instigating and funding that rag-tag group, all while maintaining an embargo that kept Haiti one of the world's most impoverished nations.

Of course, we have been involved in Haiti's affairs for a long time. From the information I have read, the CIA has funded and trained the military in Haiti which orchestrated the first coup on Aristide and set about slaughtering his supporters. It was only when Haitian refugees continued to pour out of Haiti to Florida and Guantanamo that the Clinton administration realized the problem would not go away and set the conditions for Aristide's return. Conditions which included naming a prime minister approved by the U.S. and Haiti's elite opposition to the leftist Aristide. The deal also called for a typical World Bank/IMF condition that proves disastrous for Third World countries: privatize everything, and permit corporations to continue exploiting cheap labor (ten to twenty-five cents an hour in 1994).

So, it's really no wonder that Aristide has not been able to improve Haiti's lot. Also, it appears that while the U.S. was imposing sanctions on Haiti due to its human rights record, we permitted industries to continue import/export buisness capitalizing on the cheap source of labor. Source: Killing Hope, by William Blum - 1995.

Author Blum has this to claim as Aristide's failure:

As of this writing (late October 1994), Aristide's dreams of a living wage and civilized working conditions for the Haitian masses, a social security pension system, decent education, housing, health care, public transportation, etc. appear to be little more than that - dreams. What appears to be certain is that the rich will grow richer, and the poor will remain at the very bottom of Latin America's heap. Under Aristide's successor - whomever the United States is already grooming - it can only get worse. Aristide the radical reformer knew all this, and at certain points during September and October he may have had the option to get a much better deal, for Clinton needed him almost as much as he needed Clinton. If Aristide had threateneed to go public, and noisily so, about the betrayal in process, spelling out all the sleazy details so that the whole world could get beyond the headlined platitudes and understand what a sham Bill Clinton's expressed concerns about "democracy" and the welfare of the Haitian people were, the American president would have been faced with an embarrassment of scandalous proportion. -- p.382

Perhaps the U.S. fears that Mr. Aristide might not be silent any longer, and this is why Jamaica is being warned about letting him speak.

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