US
Marines Expand Operations In Haiti
By Keith Jones
11 March 2004
World Socialist Web
Having
used a rebel force led by thugs of previous Haitian dictators
to force the countrys elected president from power, the Bush administration
is now trying to patch together a constitutional and democratic façade
for a new, US-sponsored governmentwhat the New York Times politely
calls a pro-US regime.
On Monday, the head
of Haitis Supreme Court, Boniface Alexandre, was sworn in as deposed
president Jean-Bertrand Aristides successor. This was Alexandres
second induction as president. On February 29, shortly after American
military and diplomatic personnel had hustled Aristide from Haiti, the
US Ambassador stage-managed Alexandres swearing-in at the home
of Prime Minister Yvon Neptune. However, this ceremony was deemed to
have lacked decorum, and so Alexandres swearing-in was restaged
for the television cameras at the National Palace.
The next day, a
seven-member committee of eminent Haitians that had been
set up by the US and French, with United Nations sanction, announced
it had selected Gérard Latortue to replace Neptune as Haitis
prime minister. The committee included just one representative of Aristides
Lavalas Party.
A lawyer, business
consultant, and ex-UN official who served in the brief post-Duvalier
government of Leslie Manigat, Latortue has lived in the US since at
least 1994. For the past year, he has hosted a South Florida television
talk show, which has often served as a soapbox for the right-wing opposition
to Aristide.
Latortue has said
he will ask retired general Herard Abraham to become his minister of
security and defence. Abraham was a senior officer during the dictatorships
of both Duvalier fils and Prosper Avril, then himself briefly held the
reins of power in the run-up to the 1991 elections. He had been on the
short-list of prime ministerial candidates, but with the so-called rebels
and much of the anti-Aristide Democratic Platform demanding the resurrection
of Haitis disbanded army, his selection was considered too inflammatory,
according to the Miami Herald.
The choice of Latortue
was immediately condemned by Aristide supporters. Generally, the international
press has parroted the propaganda of the Democratic Platforma
coalition that includes some elements formerly associated with Aristide,
but is led by Haitis traditional authoritarian business and political
elite. Yet some reporters have had to concede that in the slums of Port-au-Prince
there is much opposition to the toppling of Aristide, with many viewing
the UN-sanctioned, US-led stabilization force as enforcers
of a coup against Haitis elected president. According to the New
York Times, when a contingent of about 75 marines patrolled neighbourhoods
loyal to Aristide Tuesday, they were taunted by residents,
many of whom shouted You kidnapped our president! and Aristide,
five years.
Since Aristides
ouster violence has escalated in the capital. The Associated Press reports
that at least 300 people have died in reprisal killings
against Aristide supporters. At the same time, there has been widespread
looting, with armed gangs loyal to Aristide, the so-called chimères,
and ordinary slum dwellers storming shops and other businesses.
Given the business
elites hostility to Aristide and Haitis stark poverty and
social inequalitymore than half of the population lives on less
than a dollar per day and one third are chronically malnourishedsuch
a reaction to the breakdown of government is hardly surprising. But
it has only whetted the appetite of Haitis traditional elite for
a settling of accounts with the masses and a reassertion of its traditional
unfettered power.
In response to mounting
international criticism over the manner in which Aristide was forced
from office and complaints from the Haitian elite over the failure of
US troops to stop the looting, US Marine Colonel Charles Gurganus announced
Tuesday that henceforth the stabilization force would disarm
men who are illegally armed in public.
Gurganus provided
no details as to how the disarmament campaign would proceed, except
to say that the force under his command, which now numbers 2,300 US,
French, Chilean and Canadian troops and gendarmes, would act in concert
with the Haitian National Police. The disarmament will be both
active and reactive, but Im not going to say any more about it,
he declared.
Previously, Gurganus
and his superiors had said that disarming gunmen, whether the rebels
or supporters of Aristide, was solely the task of Haitis police.
US officials are
warning that pacifying Haiti will be a long and difficult process. In
testimony Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, CIA director
George Tenet warned of the possibility of civil war. A humanitarian
disaster or mass migration remains possible. A cycle of clashes and
revenge killings could easily be set off, given the large number of
angry, well-armed people on both sides.
To date, US forces
in Haiti have killed four people. Three of them were reputedly killed
in armed exchanges. The fourth, an unarmed worker driving to his home
in a poor district of Port-au-Prince, was shot after allegedly failing
to slow down at a US checkpoint.
In keeping with
the Bush administrations claims that it neither demanded Aristides
resignation nor welcomed the overrunning of the northern half of the
country by the anti-Aristide gunmen, US officials are seeking to give
an even-handed impression of opposing both the armed supporters
of Aristide and the rebels.
The political purpose
of this posturing is to try to lend some constitutional, if not democrati,c
legitimacy to a regime that is not only un-elected and US-created, but
which came to power as the result of a multi-year destabilization campaign
against Aristides government that culminated in an armed right-wing
rebellion.
The brunt of any
disarmament campaign will be directed at the slums of Port-au-Prince
and other Haitian cities. Although senior officials in the Bush administration
have condemned the rebel leaders as killers and thugs, none has called
for any of them to be arrested.
In large swathes
of the country outside of Port-au-Prince, including Haitis second
largest city, Cap-Haitien, the rebels have been allowed to function
as the de facto government. The leaders of the Democratic Platformthose
whom Washington portrays as the vanguard of democratic reformhave
themselves demonstratively embraced the fascistic rebels.
The enthusiasm of
the so-called democratic opposition for the likes of rebel commander
Guy Philippe, who initially declared himself Haitis new military
strongman, has proven something of an embarrassment for Washington.
The Bush administration would like the rebels to fade into the backgroundwhether
to be incorporated into Haitis security forces or the numerous
private gunmen of Haitis elite. But much of Haitis ruling
class may resist such an outcome, believing that only through a regime
of naked violence, like that it supported under Duvalier and Cédras,
can it keep the masses underfoot.
Adding to the crisis
surrounding the puppet regime the US is seeking to establish is its
lack of international legitimacy. On Tuesday, the African Union added
its voice to CARICOM, the organization of Caribbean states, in condemning
the unconstitutional manner in which Aristide was stripped
of his presidency. The African Union communiqué warned that the
recent events in Haiti constitute a dangerous precedent
for all constitutionally elected governments.
A political kidnapping
Aristide has reiterated
before the world press his charge that US diplomatic and military personnel
kidnapped him in the climactic stage of a coup against his democratically-elected
government. There was a political kidnapping, I reiterate that,
Aristide told journalists Monday in Bangui, the capital of the Central
African Republic.
Insisting he was
still Haitis president, Aristide called for peaceful resistance
to restore Haitis constitutional order.
Aristides
press conference was his first public appearance since he was spirited
from Haiti on February 29 and brought to the Central African Republi,c
an impoverished West African state whose dictator has close ties to
France, the former colonial power.
There have been
repeated reports that Aristide is being held prisoner in the Central
African Republic. A delegation of Aristide supporters from the US was
not allowed to see him Sunday.
Guards at the presidential
compound where Aristide has been staying told representatives from the
Haiti Support Network and the International Action Center that they
could not enter, nor was Haitis deposed president free to come
out of the compound to see them. The guards also refused to deliver
a message to Aristide or allow his US visitors to contact him by phone.
Later the same day,
Central African Republic Foreign Minister Charles Herve Wenezoui ordered
Aristides wife not to speak to reporters when she brought them
a two-sentence note her husband had scribbled on a postcard.
At Mondays
press conference, Aristide was careful not to antagonize the Central
African Republic government, which has voiced its displeasure over the
criticisms he has leveled in telephone interviews against the US and
French governments. I have never been a prisoner in Bangui, and
I am not now, said Haitis deposed president.
Aristide has accused
Washington and Paris of using threats and lies to get him to leave Haiti
and allowing his government to be overthrown by terrorists. At the press
conference, Aristide provided no new details of the events of Feb. 28-29.
Previously, he said that US officials threatened him and his wife with
imminent death, telling them a rebel attack on Haitis capital
was about to begin and that the US would do nothing to prevent their
murder. The US government also worked, according to Aristide, to sabotage
his personal security detail, which was supplied by a San Francisco
based-firm with close links to the Pentagon and the State Department.
Aristide told a
Pacifica Radio correspondent, The 28th of February at night, suddenly
American military personnel, who were already all over Port-au-Prince,
descended on my house in Tabarre to tell me, first, that all the American
security agents who have contracts with the [Haitian] government only
have two options. Either they leave immediately to go to the United
States, or fight to die. Secondly, the remaining 25 of the American
security agents [hired by the Haitian government] who were to come on
the 29th of February as reinforcements were under interdiction to come
to Haiti.
On leaving his residence,
Aristide says he was told that he was being driven to a press conference.
Instead, as he explained Monday, I found myself at the airport.
The airport was under the control of the Americans. After he was
hustled onto a waiting plane, Aristide claims he was treated like a
prisoner. For twenty hours, that is, until only minutes before landing
in Bangui, his captors refused to tell him where he was being taken.
The Bush administration
has responded to Aristides charges by effectively ordering him
to shut up. If Mr. Aristide really wants to serve his country,
declared State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, he really
has to ... let his nation get on with the future and not try to stir
up the past again.
Aristide: already in the USs grip
Much of the account
Aristide has provided of his last hours in Haiti has been independently
confirmed. But if Aristide could be bullied and swindled by Washington
into fleeing Haiti, it was because he had long since delivered himself
into the hands of imperialism, serving as its agent in politically emasculating
the mass movement that convulsed Haiti between 1986 and 1991, and then
imposing the dictates of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
An exponent of liberation
theology, Aristide first came to prominence as a critic of US
imperialism and advocate of social reforms. Yet in 1991, when his eight-month-old
government was toppled by the military, he rejected a struggle to mobilize
the Haitian and international working class against imperialism and
its Haitian agents, and instead urged the masses to join with him in
petitioning Washington, the former sponsor of the Duvaliers, to restore
democracy.
Aristide received
the cold shoulder from the administration of Bush senior, which had
given Cedras 1991 coup the green light. But the Clinton administration
restored Aristide to power, after extracting from him a commitment to
impose the restructuring policies demanded by the IMF, including privatizations,
cuts in public spending, and the elimination of tariff barriers to US
agricultural exports.
While Aristide was
able to win re-election in 2001, his right-wing policies and increasing
reliance on patronage and violence to sustain his rule led to a decline
in his popular support. Thus, when confronted with an armed rebellion
last month, he was reduced to pleading with the imperialist powers to
shore up his government. Instead, he discovered that the Bush administration
and Franceeager to restore friendly relations with Washingtonwere
quite prepared to use the henchmen of past dictatorships and plunge
Haiti into further turmoil to effect regime change.