Washington
Utilizes
Rightist Terror To Effect
Regime Change In Haiti
By A Reporter
World
Socialist Website
26 February 2004
The
Bush administration is utilizing an armed rebellion by fascistic thugs
in the north and center of Haiti to effect a longstanding goal of regime
change in the impoverished Caribbean nation.
With armed gangs
led by former death squad leaders and ex-military coup plotters having
overrun more than half the country, including Cap-Haitien, Haitis
second-largest city, Washington is attempting to force through a power-sharing
agreement in the capital of Port-au-Prince between Haitis so-called
nonviolent political opposition and the countrys elected
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Essentially, the
arrangement put forward last weekend by Roger F. Noriega, the right-wing
US assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, grants
the opposition all of its political demands save onethe immediate
ouster of Aristide, who was elected to a term that lasts until February
2006. It would reduce the former Catholic priest to a figurehead chief
executive, with real power relegated to an appointed prime minister
and a tripartite commission that would be effectively controlled by
US officials. The commission would organize new elections and oversee
the reorganization of security forces under different leadership. According
to press reports, the State Department has further offered the opposition
guarantees that Washington would itself move to oust Aristide if he
did not comply with the terms of the deal.
While US Secretary
of State Colin Powell intervened personally Monday to ask the opposition
to give the US plan further consideration, it appeared yesterday that
they were prepared to reject it. There will be no more delays.
Our answer remains the same. Aristide must resign, said Maurice
Lafortune, president of the Haitian Chamber of Commerce, which forms
part of the Democratic Platform. He said that a letter was being drafted
to Powell rejecting the deal.
The US media has
presented the unraveling situation in Haiti as one in which the US administration
is attempting to bring together the bourgeois political opposition,
led by the Group of 184, and Aristide, in order to avoid a potential
bloodbath should the armed opposition in the north carry out its threat
to march on the capital.
In reality, Haiti
is confronting two interconnected coups, one in the north and one in
the south, both of them led by individuals who are intimately connected
to the US government.
In the north, the
so-called rebels are utilizing the traditional methods of fascist terrorconducting
house-to-house searches for Aristide supporters, looting and burning
their homes and, according to some accounts, executing them. Those in
charge are well known to US officials.
One of them is Louis
Jodel Chamblain, who, together with Emmanuel Toto Constant,
led the so-called Revolutionary Front for Haitian Advance and Progress
during the 1991-94 period of military dictatorship that followed the
overthrow of Aristide, who was first elected president in 1990. The
group was known by its acronym, FRAPH, which resembles the French and
Creole word to beat. It carried out the torture and murder
of the dictatorships opponents and the assassination of several
prominent political figures, including Haitis Justice Minister
Guy Malary and political activist Antoine Izméry.
Constant, it was
revealed, was an operative on the CIA payroll, and he was subsequently
granted US protection and asylum. When the Clinton administration ordered
a US military intervention in 1994 to restore Aristide to power, US
forces seized documents from the FRAPH headquarters to conceal Washingtons
relations with the right-wing death squad.
The other leading
figure in the armed actions in the north is Guy Philippe, a former member
of the Haitian army, which was disbanded by Aristide in 1995. He was
one of a group of hand-picked Haitian officers who was trained by US
Special Forces in Ecuador during the period of the 1991-94 military
regime. After the US intervention, he was made a police chief, first
in a Port-au-Prince suburb and then in Cap-Haitien.
Meanwhile, in the
south, the so-called nonviolent opposition is led by a collection of
politicians representing Haitis ruling elite, including former
supporters of the Duvalier dynastic dictatorship and the military regime
of Gen. Raoul Cédras, as well as others who had aligned themselves
previously with Aristide. Determined only to defend their wealth and
privileges in a country where 70 percent of the people are unemployed
and half are malnourished, they have tried to dress themselves up as
democratic campaigners by seizing on manipulation of the
results of the last legislative elections. While such manipulation undoubtedly
took place, there is no evidence that, had it not, these elements would
have achieved significantly greater political power.
At the head of this
coalition, which has received ample financial support from both the
US and France, is Andy Apaid, a sweatshop owner and a US citizen. These
layers are among the most servile in relation to Washington. Their new-found
courage to reject the US State Departments power-sharing scheme
stems from their confidence that the armed actions in the north are
being carried out at least with the tacit acceptance of Washington and
will only increase pressure for Aristide to resign. They are also confident
that a Republican administration will not intervene to save Aristidewho
has long been viewed by the US right as an anti-American socialist.
The democratic
oppositions denials of any connection with the armed insurgents
appear increasingly suspect. Asked whether he had any connections with
the anti-Aristide politicians in Port-au-Prince, Philippe, the former
army officer, answered with a smile, not officially, according
to the Associated Press. Significantly, Apaid has embraced one of the
principal demands of the armed groupsthe reconstitution of the
disbanded Haitian army.
Moreover, a somewhat
cryptic reference in an article published by the New York Times Tuesday
indicated that Washington is pursuing a two-track policy, maintaining
connections to both the former death squad leaders in the north and
their ostensibly more respectable counterparts in the capital. Over
the weekend, Mr. Powell called a leader of the opposition, André
Apaid, to urge him to sign onto the agreement, and American diplomats
made similar contacts with rebel leaders, officials said, the
Times reported. We told them if they need more time, to take more
time, a senior State Department official said.
While no doubt Washington
sees the mayhem carried out by its erstwhile agents from FRAPH and the
Haitian army as a useful lever against Aristide, it can hardly welcome
a pitched battle in the streets of Port-au-Prince and the kind of massive
social crisis that the coming to power of these criminal and fascistic
elements would unleash. It is attempting with increasing desperation
to patch together a deal that would allow the intervention of some kind
of multinational force to preserve order. US officials have indicated
that they are prepared to go the United Nations Security Council to
propose such a mission. Stretched beyond its limits by the continuing
interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military has little stomach
for the deployment of any sizeable force in Haiti.
Aristide, meanwhile,
has been reduced to pleading for a speeded-up foreign intervention.
We need the presence of the international community as soon as
possible, he told a news conference on Tuesday. He went further,
predicting that continued violence would provoke another wave of Haitian
boat people heading for US shores, a transparent bid to
pressure Washington into intervening.
The fact of the
matter is that Washington is already intervening, and Aristide is in
such a hopeless position because, over the course of the past decade,
he has lost the substantial popular support he enjoyed when he was first
elected. Having been restored to power by the US military in 1994, he
committed himself and his hand-picked successor, René Prévalwhose
presidency from 1996 to 2001 Aristide continued to dominateto
the implementation of International Monetary Fund austerity programs
that had devastating consequences for the masses of Haitian working
people. Having abandoned his earlier pretensions of national reformism,
he settled into the traditional methods of corruption, political patronage
and repression employed by Haitis bourgeois politicians.
The failure of the
Aristide government to meet any of its promises to provide jobs, social
services and adequate incomes to Haitis impoverished masses has
found its finished political expression in the fall of more than half
the country to a few hundred well-armed thugs. Aristides political
supporters have thus far proven totally incapable of organizing mass
popular resistance to these elements.
In the final analysis,
Aristide and his opponents in the Group of 184 represent two opposing
factions of Haitis corrupt ruling class, both looking to the US
and Francenot the Haitian peoplefor political support. Whether
Aristide is able to salvage his presidency through even more concessions
to Washington and thereby bring about the US-backed military intervention
he seeks, or is forced out by a US-backed opposition, the result will
be a further deepening of the appalling social crisis confronting the
Haitian masses.