Monday, July 05, 2004
The Invasion of Haiti. posted by Richard Seymour
"Haiti, again, is ablaze", Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics at Columbia University, writes: "Almost nobody, however, understands that today's chaos was made in Washington - deliberately, cynically, and steadfastly. History will bear this out." (Sachs, 'Fanning the flames of political chaos in Haiti', The Nation, February 28, 2004)
The Humanitarian Coup
The "international community" is often cited as either a bulwark against US imperialism, or as a counter-force to sovereign states which butcher their own people. In Haiti, it managed to be complicit with both.
The invasion of Haiti was the joint production of Presidents Bush and Chirac - together at last. And this tells an interesting kind of story. It is a story about "multilateralism", international law and "humanitarian intervention. Consider: Spain is pulling its troops from Iraq, but is sending troops to Haiti . The EU was broadly against the invasion of Iraq, but will release sanctions on Haiti because its new "interim government" promises elections in 2005. The Carribean Community (Caricom) collectively opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq, but it now wishes to recognise the government of Gerard Latortue and readmit Haiti to the Community. The French press overwhelmingly opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but were happy in 2004 to back their government's joint invasion of Haiti:
Chirac and Villepin had the virtually unanimous backing of the French media, from Le Figaro to Le Monde and L’Humanité, for military intervention in Haiti. Among the most feverish voices has been that of Libération, which held President Aristide—a ‘defrocked priest turned tyrant millionaire’, ‘the Père Ubu of the Caribbean’—personally responsible for the ‘risk of humanitarian catastrophe’ that was claimed to justify the invasion.
"Progressive" Latin American governments opposed the Iraq misadventure, but happily send troops now to support the putschists in Haiti. As Peter Hallward notes in the most recent New Left Review (May/June 2004):
Bush is entitled to take some comfort from the far more successful operation just completed in Haiti. No brusque pre-emptive strikes, domestic carping or splintering coalitions have marred the scene; objections from CARICOM and the African Union have carried no threats of reprisal. In overthrowing the constitutionally elected government of Jean Bertrand Aristide, Washington could hardly have provided a more exemplary show of multilateral courtesy. Allies were consulted, the UN Security Council’s blessing sought and immediately received. The signal sent to Chávez, Castro and other hemispheric opponents was unambiguous—yet it was not a bullying Uncle Sam but France that made the first call for international intervention in Haiti’s domestic affairs.
The context of the invasion was all but lost in the continual updates about the movements of the "rebels" or the latest statement from Aristide. What we did get were boasts from the new dictator, Latortue, that the violent coup leader was "one of the ones who helped bring democracy back to Haiti." He hailed Guy Phillipe, Louis Jodel-Chamblain and Jean Tatoune as "freedom fighters" , and considered reforming the Haitian army which had mounted the coup in 1991, at the putchists' request. Latortue, who had previously been a member of Leslie Malignat's dictatorship in 1988, formed after the overthrow of "Baby Doc" Duvalier, was a long-time opponent of Aristide. He is now a strong supporter of the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the IMF. So, those are his qualifications for the job.
How did he get the job?
Well, the standard narrative will begin with Aristide's incompetent economic rule, his increasingly despotic political rule, the alleged rigging of elections etc. and will end with an insurrection (not in anyway convoked by the United States or France) that was the inevitable reaction to that kind of misrule, but which the US and its allies nevertheless stepped in to pacify and curtail its worst aspects. But as those folks at Socialism in an Age of Waiting noted a while back, "reality is somewhere else".
Somewhere Else
The United States has backed every Haitian dictator, every grubby little thug to have emerged from the woodwork to do the bidding of international capitalism. More crucially, domestic landlords and capitalists have always required an iron fist to keep the poor from demanding tacky luxuries like clean water and blankets. The one thing they didn't need was Aristide, with his mass support, deriding capitalism as a mortal sin. So, when he won the elections in 1990, the CIA got in touch with some boys, and in very short order they were working with the FRAPH (according to a 1996 UN Human Rights report). Emmanuel Constant of the FRAPH worked as a paid CIA agent while that notorious group were carrying out some of their worst crimes.
Unsurprisingly, even when Aristide had been returned to power, the United States insisted that the main organisers of the outlandish bloodletting that ripped through Haiti in the early 1990s remained untouched. They freed Emmanuel "Toto" Constant , and when there were attempts to prosecute the worst war criminals, the US orchestrated a stunt in which they stole crucial documentary evidence from the offices of the FRAPH and subsequently refused to allow human rights lawyers to have access to them .
Aristide was unable to implement the programme upon which he had been elected, and consequently lost the support of the working poor of Haiti. As one of the opposition groups, the National Coordination for the Advance of Women's Rights, says, "After coming to power in 1994, the regime did everything to take things out of the hands of the popular masses and decapitate the social movements. From this resulted the terrible war which the regime wages without pity against the population from 2001 onwards." (Quoted, Chris Harman, Socialist Worker ).
As Gary Younge pointed out in The Guardian :
"Before Aristide had even considered fixing the elections, the west had already rigged the markets. Take rice. Forced by the agreement to lower its import tariffs, Haiti suddenly found itself flooded with subsidised rice from the US, which drove Haitian rice growers out of business and the country to import a product that it once produced. When the country fined American rice merchants $1.4m for allegedly evading customs duties, the US responded by withholding $30m in aid." This had been entirely predictable from the legacy of the 'free market reforms' under the World Bank-Marc Bazin junta, namely that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) declined by 30 percent (1992-1994).
Even when Aristide tried to recover his popularity and offered some concessions, he found his hands tied. While he had promised to increase the minimum wage, embark on school construction and literacy programs, the hands of the new government were tied. All major decisions regarding the State budget, the management of the public sector, public investment, privatization, trade and monetary policy had already been taken. They were part of the agreement reached with the IMF on November 6, 2000. "In 2003, the IMF imposed the application of a so-called "flexible price system in fuel", which immediately triggered an inflationary spiral. The currency was devalued. Petroleum prices increased by about 130 percent in January-February 2003, which served to fuel popular resentment against the Aristide government, which had supported the implementation of the economic reforms."
Meanwhile, as Hallward notes:
The attempts of Préval’s prime minister, Rosny Smarth, to legislate the unpopular imf programme would permanently fracture the Lavalas coalition, both inside parliament and in the country as a whole. The politicians most in line with Washington’s priorities, and most critical of what they condemned as Aristide’s top-down style, banded together under his rival Gérard Pierre-Charles to form a more ‘moderate’ faction, which eventually called itself the Organisation du Peuple en Lutte. From late 1996, Aristide began organizing a more cohesive party of his own supporters, the Fanmi [family] Lavalas, drawing on his personal authority among the Haitian poor. The split between the opl and the fl soon became irreversible, paralysing the legislature and blocking the appointment of a new prime minister or a full cabinet after Smarth’s resignation in 1997. Préval finally broke the parliamentary deadlock by dissolving the National Assembly in 1999, and after some delay new elections were held in May 2000.
...
The Lavalas government never yielded, however, to us pressure to privatize Haiti’s public utilities. At the same time, and with drastically limited resources, it oversaw the creation of more schools than in all the previous 190 years. It printed millions of literacy booklets and established hundreds of literacy centres, offering classes to more than 300,000 people; between 1990 and 2002 illiteracy fell from 61 to 48 per cent. With Cuban assistance, a new medical school was built and the rate of hiv infection—a legacy from the sex tourism industry of the 1970s and 80s—was frozen, with clinics and training programmes opened as part of a growing public campaign against aids. Significant steps were taken to limit the widespread exploitation of children. Aristide’s government increased tax contributions from the elite, and in 2003 it announced the doubling of a desperately inadequate minimum wage.
That refusal to yield would prove fateful. For although Aristide maintained the overwhelming support of the rural poor, as one BBC commentator acknowledged, he was reviled by the wealthy elite. (Daniel Lak, "Poverty and pride in Port-au-Prince" , BBC Radio 4, 20 March 2004.) Aristide's opponents accused him of rigging the elections in 2000, which he won massively. But, as Hallward notes:
Between June 2000 and February 2004, the CD [Convergence Democratique] rejected each fl offer of new elections right through to the final attempt at a peaceful resolution to the conflict, a caricom-brokered proposal approved by the oas in mid-February 2004, whereby Aristide would accept one of his opponents as his prime minister, hold new legislative elections and serve out the remainder of his term with severely limited powers. Aristide accepted the deal immediately, as did France and the us. The CD refused it just as immediately and then somehow managed to ‘persuade’ its imperial patrons to follow suit, leaving Aristide with a choice between exile or civil war.
Following the elections, the International Coalition of Independent Observers noted:
"[T]he Haitian people have mobilized in large numbers to express their political will through participation in the local and legislative elections of May 21, 2000. We were pleased to observe employees at voter bureaus working with each other to promote a secure environment and privacy for voting. Although late distribution of voting materials in several locations may have discouraged people from voting, we did witness lines of patient voters. It is not yet possible to gauge the number of voters who were unable to find their appropriate bureau, and we will await reports from the countryside. We were greatly encouraged by encountering a diverse group of national observers representing all segments of Haitian society, and we eagerly await reports from their observations."
The irony of this talk of Aristide's corruption and alleged vote-rigging was not missed on Kofi Annan, who cruelly compared the elections to those of the US:
"The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, accused Mr Aristide's dominant political party, Fanmi Lavalas, of violating democracy by refusing to recount the results from the disputed May 2000 parliamentary elections."
The Organisation of American States (OAS) was cited as the source of doubts about electoral irregularities, but the OAS had actually described the May 2000 elections as ‘a great success for the Haitian population, which turned out in large and orderly numbers to choose both their local and national governments. An estimated 60 per cent of registered voters went to the polls’, and ‘very few’ incidents of either violence or fraud were reported. Even the staunchly anti-FL Centre for International Policy agreed that the May 2000 elections were Haiti’s ‘best so far’ Whatever irregularities the OAS claimed to have identified in the electoral procedures subsequently in the November elections, they were jumped on by the Clinton administration :
"Bill Clinton invoked the OAS accusation to justify the crippling economic embargo against Haiti that persists to this day, and which effectively blocks the payment of about $500m in international aid."
Naturally, this has brought near ruin to a country already in the grip of woeful poverty. As Gary Younge notes in The Guardian, "Haitians have a life expecancy of 53, with the highest rate of HIV/Aids infection outside Africa and an estimated 80% of its population living below the poverty line." And in an excellent series of articles on Haiti, Medialens editors David Edwards and David Cromwell point out:
"The United States is Haiti's main commercial 'partner' accounting for about
60% of the flows of exports and imports. Along with the manufacture of
baseballs, textiles, cheap electronics, and toys, Haiti's sugar, bauxite and
sisal are all controlled by American corporations. Disney, for example, has
used Haitian sweatshops to produce Pocahontas pyjamas, among other items, at
the rate of 11 cents per hour. Most Haitians are willing to work for almost
nothing."
So, any discontent that ordinary Haitians had with Aristide imposing the agenda of his opponent in the 1990 elections (who won only 14% of the vote), under pressure from Washington, would have been instantly intensified by that single murderous gesture. And that is the key to the coup and invasion.
The final blow was struck in accord with the wishes of the CD, as Hallward reports:
Economic constraints paralysed the Lavalas administration and political pressure backed it into a corner; but in the end, only old-fashioned military coercion on the Contra model could dislodge it from power. Leading figures in the Convergence Démocratique made no secret of their intentions at the time of Aristide’s reinauguration as president in February 2001; they openly called for another us invasion, ‘this time to get rid of Aristide and rebuild the disbanded Haitian army’. Failing that, they told the Washington Post, ‘the cia should train and equip Haitian officers exiled in the neighbouring Dominican Republic so they could stage a comeback themselves’.
...
In the autumn of 2003 the guerrillas based over the border (led by Louis Jodel Chamblain and Guy Philippe) were strengthened by a new insurgency inside Haiti itself led by Jean Tatoune. Despite his close us connections and a conviction for his role in the Raboteau massacre of 1994, Tatoune managed to swing the Gonaïves-based gang known as the ‘Cannibal Army’ against Lavalas, after making the implausible but widely reported claim that Aristide was behind the murder, in September 2003, of the gang’s former leader, long-standing Lavalas activist Amiot Métayer — who also happened to be an equally long-standing enemy of Tatoune.
There is good evidence that what transpired next was in large measure a French defensive manoeuvre against the perfectly legitimate demands for compensation for the vast sums of money extracted from Haiti by France, following Toussaint L'Ouverture's astonishing victory over the slave-owners. The last payment was made in 1947, and since that time Haiti has had to suffer atrocious regimes which had the connivance and indulgence of the French and American governments. The French government did not react well to the claims, which amounted to a total of $21bn, and dispatched a commission to visit Haiti and investigate their nature. Chirac fumed: "Before bringing up claims of this nature, I cannot stress enough to the authorities of Haiti the need to be very vigilant about — how should I put it — the nature of their actions and their regime". The commission's report accepted that Haiti had indeed paid every cent of the loan shark money to France, but neverthless derided the demand for compensation as "aggressive propaganda". The report also recommended "more affirmative" French engagement which would be contiguous with an American desire to find "an honourable way out of the crisis". Hallward again summarises:
Without such intervention, as the Report acknowledged, the Lavalas government could not have been dislodged. The stumbling block was Aristide’s continuing popularity. The battering of the last fifteen years had taken its toll on his support, but as the most detailed—and by no means uncritical — study of the recent period concludes, there was no doubt that Aristide still enjoyed ‘undisputed and overwhelming popularity’ among the mass of Haitians. The Gallup poll conducted in October 2000 rated the FL as thirteen times more popular than its closest competitor, and over half of those polled identified Aristide as their most trusted leader. According to the latest reliable measure, a further Gallup poll conducted in March 2002, the FL remained four times more popular than all its significant competitors combined.
Hence, the inflow of US and French troops in tandem - Freedom fries and French fries in glorious union. The seven-member "Council of Sages", which is usually referred to as "US-backed" and is "tilted toward the opposition" , anointed Latortue Prime Minister, and Boniface Alexandre President. The new administration began rounding up Lavalas supporters (Michael Christie, ‘Haiti police begin rounding up Aristide associates’, Reuters, 14 March 2004), while Bush forced the return of all Haitian "boat people" to the country even as violent rebels controlled many areas and fighting continued. As Amnesty notes:
Killings and kidnappings of persons belonging to pro-Aristide grassroots organizations are frequent; many have been linked to escaped prisoners who had been jailed previously for rapes and other crimes. Even more troubling, these escaped prisoners have reportedly been working together with the Haitian police and MIF forces to identify people associated with the Lavalas regime.
Not that this violence is of concern to American Bushites. As the Wall Street Journal opined , the real concern is that Aristide may continue to "instruct his killers from offstage in sotto voce". Imagining what evils Aristide and his ebondark associates ("bloodthirsty gangs", the WSJ calls them, in an obvious reflection of more domestic concerns) may wreak in the "new Haiti" chills the Wall Street spine.
Yes, Haiti is a bloody mess. The old elites, led by sweat-shop owner Andy Apaid, have extracted their revenge on Aristide and his supporters, and the armed "rebels" are busying themselves killing more of them. US and French troops are 'pacifying' the situation, while the new administration gets to work on the economic programmes supplied to it by Washington. And it was all done with the sealed approval of the UN. I'd say that's an object lesson in how crime pays, wouldn't you?