From
His First Day in Office,
Bush Was Ousting Aristide
By Jeffrey D.
Sachs
05 March, 2004
Los Angeles Times
If
the circumstances were not so calamitous, the American-orchestrated
removal of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from Haiti would
be farcical.
According to Aristide,
American officials in Port-au-Prince told him that rebels were on the
way to the presidential residence and that he and his family were unlikely
to survive unless they immediately boarded an American-chartered plane
standing by to take them to exile. The United States made it clear,
he said, that it would provide no protection for him at the official
residence, despite the ease with which this could have been arranged.
Indeed, according
to Aristide's lawyer, the U.S. blocked reinforcement of Aristide's own
security detail. At the airport, Aristide said, U.S. officials refused
him entry to the airplane until he handed over a signed letter of resignation.
After being hustled
aboard, Aristide was denied access to a phone for nearly 24 hours, and
he knew nothing of his destination until he and his family were summarily
deposited in the Central African Republic. He has since been kept hidden
from view. Yet this Keystone Kops coup has apparently not worked entirely
according to plan: Aristide has used a cellphone to notify the world
that he was forcibly removed from Haiti at risk of death and to describe
the way his resignation was staged by American forces.
The U.S. government
dismisses Aristide's charges as ridiculous. Secretary of State Colin
L. Powell has offered an official version of the events, a blanket denial
based on the government's word alone. In essence, Washington is telling
us not to look back, only forward. The U.S. government's stonewalling
brings to mind Groucho Marx's old line, "Who are you going to believe,
me or your own eyes?"
There are several
tragedies in this surrealistic episode. The first is the apparent incapacity
of the U.S. government to speak honestly about such matters as toppling
governments. Instead, it brushes aside crucial questions: Did the U.S.
summarily deny military protection to Aristide, and if so, why and when?
Did the U.S. supply weapons to the rebels, who showed up in Haiti last
month with sophisticated equipment that last year reportedly had been
taken by the U.S. military to the Dominican Republic, next door to Haiti?
Why did the U.S. cynically abandon the call of European and Caribbean
leaders for a political compromise, a compromise that Aristide had already
accepted? Most important, did the U.S. in fact bankroll a coup in Haiti,
a scenario that seems likely based on present evidence?
Only someone ignorant
of U.S. history and of the administrations of George H.W. Bush and George
W. Bush would dismiss these questions. The United States has repeatedly
sponsored coups and uprisings in Haiti and in neighboring Caribbean
countries.
Ominously, before
this week, the most recent such episode in Haiti came in 1991, during
the first Bush administration, when thugs on the CIA payroll were among
the leaders of paramilitary groups that toppled Aristide after his 1990
election.
Some of the players
in this round are familiar from the previous Bush administration, including
of course Powell and Vice President Dick Cheney. Also key is U.S. Assistant
Secretary of State Roger Noriega a longtime aide to Jesse Helms
and a notorious Aristide-hater widely thought to have been central
to the departure of Aristide. He is going to find it much harder to
engineer the departure of gun-toting rebels who entered Port-au-Prince
on Wednesday.
Rarely has an episode
so brilliantly exposed Santayana's famous aphorism that "those
who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
In 1991, when Congressional
Black Caucus members demanded an investigation into the U.S. role in
Aristide's overthrow, the first Bush administration laughed them off,
just as this administration is doing today in facing new queries from
Congressional Black Caucus members.
Indeed, those who
are questioning the administration about Haiti are being smeared as
naive and unpatriotic. Aristide himself is being smeared with ludicrous
propaganda and, most cynically of all, is being accused of dereliction
in the failure to lift his country out of poverty.
In point of fact,
this U.S. administration froze all multilateral development assistance
to Haiti from the day that George W. Bush came into office, squeezing
Haiti's economy dry and causing untold suffering for its citizens. U.S.
officials surely knew that the aid embargo would mean a balance-of-payments
crisis, a rise in inflation and a collapse of living standards, all
of which fed the rebellion.
Another tragedy
in this episode is the silence of the media when it comes to asking
all the questions that need answers. Just as in the war on Iraq's phony
WMD, wherein the mainstream media initially failed to ask questions
about the administration's claims, major news organizations have refused
to go to the mat over the administration's accounts on Haiti. The media
haven't had the gumption to find Aristide and, in failing to do so,
to point out that he is being held away from such contact.
With a violence-prone
U.S. government operating with impunity in many parts of the world,
only the public's perseverance in getting at the truth can save us,
and others, from our own worst behavior.
Jeffrey D. Sachs,
director of the Earth Institute
at Columbia University, is a former economic advisor to governments
in Latin America and around the world.
Copyright 2004 Los
Angeles Times