Haiti: The Forgotten
Milestone In Bushs Crusade For Freedom
By Bill Van Auken
12 March 2005
World
Socialist Web
Dozens
of Haitian men, women and children drowned when their rickety homemade
craft went down in the waters of the Caribbean, the Associated Press
reported Thursday. Some 50 people had crowded onto the boat, which sank
under their weight.
Three survivors
made it ashore to tell of the disaster, while officials reported recovering
nine bodies, which were buried in a mass grave. Theres nothing
we can do, said Cap-Haitien Mayor Apile Fleurent. Were
just waiting to see how many bodies are brought in by the waves.
While the victims
were in all likelihood trying to reach the United States, their deaths
passed unnoticed in the American media. They were only a relative handful
among the thousands of refugees attempting to flee the island nation,
an exodus that has grown dramatically in the year since the Bush administration
orchestrated a coup that overthrew the countrys elected president,
Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Their deaths represented,
moreover, only a fraction of the daily toll that political violence,
disease and hunger wreak upon the Haitian people.
The anniversary
of Washingtons liberation of Haiti came and went at
the end of last monthalso with little notice from the US media.
In the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, masked cops fired tear gas
and then live ammunition into a February 28 march of several thousand
demanding Aristides return. When the shooting stopped, three lay
dead and several more were severely wounded.
The incident was
part of a wave of killing that has continued throughout the country
over the past year, escalating around the anniversary of the coup. Large
parts of Haiti remain under the control of right-wing ex-army thugs
whose rampage last year set the stage for the US military intervention.
These forces kill, torture and rape with impunity.
In the capital and
its surrounding area, the killing and repression are carried out by
a combination of local forces and United Nations troops. The UN came
to Washingtons aid last summer, providing military units from
Brazil, Uruguay, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and other countries to replace
the Marines, who were badly needed to suppress resistance to the US
occupation of Iraq. Haitian government security forces are augmented
by privately funded death squads that operate unhindered in pro-Aristide
slums like Cité Soleil, Cité de Dieu, Bel Air and La Saline.
An inhuman
horror is the way a recent report issued by the University of
Miamis Center for Human Rights describes the situation since the
US intervention last year. The report provides ample information as
well as appalling photographic evidence to back up this assessment.
http://www.law.miami.edu/cshr/CSHR_Report_02082005_v2.pdf
Summary executions
are a police tactic, and even well-meaning officers treat poor neighborhoods
seeking a democratic voice as enemy territory where they must kill or
be killed, the report states. Haitis brutal and disbanded
army has returned to join the fray. Suspected dissidents fill the prisons,
their constitutional rights ignored.... UN police and soldiers, unable
to speak the language of most Haitians, are overwhelmed by the firestorm.
Unable to communicate with the police, they resort to heavy-handed incursions
into the poorest neighborhoods that force intermittent peace at the
expense of innocent residents.
The injured
prefer to die at home rather than risk arrest at the hospital. Those
who reach the hospital soak in puddles of their own blood, ignored by
doctors. Not even death ends the tragedy: bodies pile in the morgue,
quickly devoured out of recognition by maggots.
The report cites
the activities of a death squad armed and funded by the countrys
wealthiest businessmen, including Andy Apaid, the factory owner and
US citizen who played a central role in preparing the coup against Aristide.
The squads leader, Thomas Robinson, alias Labanye,
operates with the full protection of the police in terrorizing the sprawling
Cité Soleil shantytown.
Kneeling before the US flag
Citing multiple
sources, the report states, Labanye has a large United States
flag draped in front of his headquarters under which he forces victims
to kneel and beg for their lives before killing them.
Those luckier than
the refugees who drowned off the Haitian coast this week face fresh
persecution upon landing on US soil.
A case in point
is that of 81-year-old Joseph Danticat, a Baptist minister and uncle
of the well-known Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat. After facing
death threats, he flew to the US with his son, both of whom had valid
passports and visas. When they asked for temporary asylum at Miami International
Airport, they were taken into custody by Homeland Security and thrown
into the Krome detention camp. There, the frail and elderly man was
held as a national security risk, denied access to his family or lawyers
and deprived of his medicine. Within four days he was dead.
Meanwhile, the US
Justice Department andat least until nowthe courts have
rejected appeals for asylum despite the petitioners well-substantiated
claims that they will be tortured if returned to Haiti. As a March 11
New York Times article on the case of Napoleon Bonaparte Auguste made
clear, the US government has rationalized that, in subjecting prisoners
to beatings, burns and electric shocksnot to mention inhuman overcrowding
in its jailsthe Haitian regime is not intentionally
torturing them, but merely fighting crime.
All who live
in tyranny and hopelessness can know the United States will not ignore
your oppression or excuse your oppressors, George W. Bush declared
at his second inauguration last January. As he spoke, killers paid by
US businessmen and protected by a US-installed puppet regime were summarily
executing Haitian workers and youth beneath the Stars and Stripes, and
Haitian refugees were languishing in the Krome detention camp waiting
to be shipped back to these same killers or die behind bars in the US
itself.
Haiti today provides
one of the best vantage points for understanding the Bush administrations
worldwide crusade for democracy against tyranny. This is
a country where Washington succeeded in toppling a government it disliked
and bringing to power one that is indisputably Made in the USA.
The overthrow of
Aristide was a US operation from start to finish. The Bush administration
hated the former priest, both because of his association with the movement
that brought down the US-backed Duvalier dictatorship and his failure
to fully implement IMF-dictated austerity measures. No amount of genuflection
toward Washington on Aristides part could change this attitude.
The Bush administration
subjected the countrywhere the majority of the population is unemployed
and subsists on $1 or less a dayto cruel economic sanctions. While
denying any aid, it poured millions of dollars into an effort mounted
by US government bureaus like the Agency for International Development
and the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as their private contractors,
to foment anti-government protests. Several of those who were hired
locally for this purpose have since been rewarded with cabinet posts.
Meanwhile, it provided
covert backing to armed terrorists who invaded the country from the
neighboring Dominican Republic. Led by former Haitian army officials
and long-time assets of the CIA, these gunmen killed hundreds
in their march on Port-au-Prince.
CIA counter-terrorism
operatives then kidnapped Aristide, hustling him onto a plane bound
for Africa. Washingtons apologists dispute the kidnapping charge,
claiming that the CIA agents merely offered Aristide a choiceleave
or staylive or dieand that he made his own decision.
Today, Haiti is
ostensibly ruled by a government headed by Prime Minister Gerard Latortue,
a former UN official who was brought back from Florida after living
for decades out of the country. His government consists of fellow rightists
and veterans of previous military regimes and the Duvalier dictatorship.
The real power, however, rests with wealthy businessmen like Andy Apaid
and the gunmen they pay.
This collection
of reactionaries and assassins had no chance of winning a fair election,
which is why Washington targeted the elected Aristide regime as a tyranny
from which the people were to be liberated.
The culmination
of this exercise is supposed to take place at the end of this year with
the holding of free elections. Key leaders of the party
that won the overwhelming majority of the vote in the last electionAristides
Fanmi Lavalas (FL)remain imprisoned without charges. Hundreds
of their followers have been jailed or murdered by the death squads.
The election itself
will be organized by the same US officials and contractors who orchestrated
the political destabilization campaign that culminated in Aristides
ouster and the landing of US Marines.
Haiti is a small
country of just 8 million people, intensely poor and just a few hundred
miles off the US coast. Here, more than anywhere else, one can see the
unadulterated impact of US imperialisms powerimposed over
a century of military interventions, occupations and political strong-arming.
With its death squads,
political prisoners and abject poverty, it stands as a showcase for
Bushs crusade for freedom. Anyone harboring illusions about Washingtons
aims in countries like Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Iran should turn their
eyes to Haiti to see the real face of American imperialisms democratizing
mission.