Haitian tragedy and imperial farce

Haitians taunt U.S. Marines patrolling the streets of Port au Prince on March 5. -

The latest intervention by the United States in Haiti brings to the fore a centuries-old confrontation: between the imperial savagery of the `civilisation mongers' and the powerlessness of the colonised.

A NEW chapter in active U.S. interventionism has been opened, this time close to American shores, in the Caribbean and Central America. Haiti has been swiftly occupied. Venezuela is in the sight of the guns.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Catholic priest deeply committed to liberation theology whom The New York Times contemptuously called a "left-leaning nationalist", was the first elected President in 200 years of Haitian history. He had been re-elected in 2000 with over 90 per cent of the vote in a voter turnout estimated at around 65 per cent in the countryside and close to 100 per cent in the capital Port au Prince. Haiti itself is a tiny country comprised of half the island of Hispaniola (the Dominican Republic accounts for the other half), the poorest in the Western hemisphere and the fourth poorest in the world, with a literacy rate of 50 per cent. (While three-fourths of its population lives on less than a dollar a day, 1 per cent owns half the country's wealth.) Aristide was the President elected by the vast impoverished majority, against the Opposition, powerful in wealth and means of violence, but with no roots among the people. (A poll taken at the time of the elections of 2000 showed that only 8 per cent of the people of Haiti supported the Opposition.) Under the circumstances, President Aristide could hardly be accused of manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, sponsorship of terrorism, links with Al Qaeda, Islamic belief or dictatorial tyranny.

None of it has deterred the U.S. Since at least the advent of the George W. Bush administration, which came to power thanks to a dubious ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court just about the time of Aristide's landslide electoral victory in Haiti, the U.S. has been nurturing armed squads comprised of former military and police officers, professional assassins and their criminal gangs that had fled Haiti at the time of Aristide's return to power in 1994 and had re-assembled, with U.S. assistance, in the neighbouring Dominican Republic and on U.S. soil itself, in Miami, very much on the pattern of the terrorist "contras" which the U.S. had assembled, trained and assisted in El Salvador for counter-revolutionary warfare in Nicaragua against the socialist Sandanista government. These were the terrorist squads, armed with sophisticated U.S. weapons, that entered Haiti in early February and got dubbed in the Western media as "rebels" and "insurgents", as if there was a genuine home-grown insurgency. Meanwhile, the media - CNN, BBC, The New York Times and others - also busied themselves in manufacturing a picture of Haiti as a country ruled by a rather deranged megalomaniac against whom much of the population had risen in revolt. Meanwhile, a racist discourse portrayed the people of Haiti as simply lawless and given to killing one another. None of these media bothered to ask who the so-called "rebels" were, who led them and where they had come from.

As these terror squads, entering from the Dominican Republic next door, started terrorising town after town, the U.S. stationed 2,000 Marines in three ships off the shores of Haiti and sent in fresh squads of Marines on the pretext of providing "security". France, the old colonial power in Haiti, which had offended the U.S. by opposing the invasion of Iraq, now re-built its bridges to the supreme imperial power and emerged as a firm and vocal ally of the U.S. in the occupation of Haiti, sending a contingent of its own troops, again on the pretext of providing "security". Canada, which too had stayed out of the Iraq invasion but has economic interests of its own in the sweatshops of Haiti, moved swiftly to occupy the position of the "most allied ally" that Blair had occupied in the case of Iraq. It too sent in a contingent of troops. The United Nations Security Council, which had already provided legal cover for the lawless U.S. occupation of Iraq and was now preparing for a sizable role for the U.N. in that occupied country, swiftly authorised the formation of an international security force for Haiti. All this in a matter of three weeks!

ONE should have thought that in a country where a democratically elected President was under siege by terror squads led by assassins and drug-merchants well-known to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other Western agencies, "security" would mean, above all, security for a President commanding a massive mandate. The reason why Aristide was so defenceless against these terror-squads was itself ironic. He had been first elected with a huge margin in 1990 and was then overthrown within seven months, in 1991, through a coup d'etat carried out by officers of the Haitian Army who had been loyal to the preceding, murderous dictatorships of Duvalier and his son, Papa Doc. Upon returning to power in 1994, Aristide had simply disbanded that Army, dismissed the police officers allied with the Army and had built a new police force for law and order purposes. This was as much to prevent the possibility of further military takeovers as it was in keeping with Aristide's own deep, spiritually motivated commitment to re-build Haiti's fractured civil society with as few means of violence as possible. Those disgruntled ex-officers of the Army and police, along with leaders of the assassination squads that dated back to the years of the military dictatorship (1991-94), were now leading the armed squads which were portrayed in the media as "rebels". The police force at the disposal of President Aristide was no match for these former officers and their gangs with their newly acquired U.S. weapons and other supplies. In turn, when the U.S. authorities spoke of "security" they hardly meant security for a President whom they despised and mistrusted as a nationalist firebrand, against the "rebels" the U.S. itself had nurtured. The "rebellion" itself had been unleashed in order to promote a social collapse that could then be portrayed in the media as a prelude to a "bloodbath" and could be used, then, as justification for a "humanitarian intervention", a concept made popular in the Western imagination by the Human Rights industry.

Thus it is that with troops from the U.S., France and Canada already in Haiti, and the rampaging terror squads closing in on the capital, the U.S. Embassy turned down Aristide's request to provide security for the Presidential Palace, forbade him to expand the number of his own guards, and then dismissed him on the night of February 28, amidst a chorus emanating from Washington, Paris, Ottawa and other Western capitals that, for the "security" of Haiti, its democratically elected President must simply "go". The whole process of this ouster, from the beginning of the reign of terror to the departure of Aristide, took barely three weeks.

What happened on that fateful night of February 28 and the morning of the next day? The American version is that Aristide called the U.S. Ambassador in Haiti, James Foley, and asked for more security. In turn, Foley told him that "rebels" were going to enter the capital within hours and a "bloodbath" would ensue in which thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, shall be killed, unless Aristide resigned immediately and agreed to leave the country. U.S. authorities say that Aristide eventually agreed, that a civilian group from the U.S. Embassy was then sent to his residence which took him to the airport where Aristide handed in his resignation and he, along with his wife and three aides, was put on a plane for safe passage to the Republic of Central Africa across the Atlantic. The State Department also claimed that Aristide had wanted to seek asylum in South Africa but the latter refused; the South African government has denied that it received any such request. It is quite clear even from this account that Aristide resigned under U.S. pressure, that his own Prime Minster was not part of any such negotiations and that the resignation was submitted directly to the U.S. Embassy and not to any Haitian authority, such as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who was constitutionally the successor in case the President were to suddenly die or otherwise relinquish office. It is also known that when that Chief Justice was sworn in as provisional head of state by the Americans the popularly elected President had already been put on a plane by them and the Prime Minister was not even invited to the ceremony. Thus, even by U.S. account, the coup was carried out not by any Haitian force but by the U.S. Embassy itself.

The problem for the U.S., by hindsight, is that it did not kill Aristide and its African clients have been unable to shut him up. It is a problem for the U.S. because, unlike Saddam Hussein, Aristide has not been charged even by the U.S. of any crimes, sponsorship of terrorism and so on. Its self-proclaimed right to oust him rests solely on the claim that it - and the so-called "international community, that is, Western powers - has the right to decide whether or not a popularly elected Third World leader has the right to rule his country in accordance with the mandate given to him by his people. This claim has no basis in international law and no moral authority outside the discourses of Western racism. This problem is compounded for the U.S. by the fact that Aristide is a man of unusual courage and eloquence, and has been able to speak on his own behalf.

President Aristide's account is of course quite different from that of the U.S. authorities. He says that a large number of armed men - "white" as well as Haitian - came to the Presidential Palace in the dark of the night, kidnapped him, extracted a resignation from him with threats of death and bloodbath, whisked him off to the airport and put him on the plane without disclosing his destination, and that when he arrived on African soil he had no idea where he was, whether in a hotel, a prison or a palace. His account has been confirmed, in the meanwhile, by the security guards of the Presidential Palace who witnessed the event, spoke to trusted foreign journalists and are now in hiding, fearful of the terror squads.

Somehow - and one does not really know how - he managed to have a mobile telephone, spoke to some of his friends in the U.S. and eventually issued an eloquent address, "To the Haitian People and the World", delivered in Creole, through a Haitian radio operator. The address begins and ends with references to Toussaint L' Ouverture, the legendary black slave who organised the revolutionary movement that overthrew colonial rule and established a republic in Haiti 200 years ago:

"In the shadow of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the genius of the race, I declare that in overthrowing me they have uprooted the trunk of the tree of peace, but it will grow back because its roots are L'Ouverturian... during the night of the 28th of February 2004, there was a coup d'etat. One could equally say that it was a geopolitical kidnapping. I can clearly say that it was terrorism disguised as diplomacy... 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 that... the foreigners and Haitian terrorists alike, who are loaded with heavy weapons, were already in position to open fire on Port au Prince. And right then, the Americans precisely stated that they will kill thousands of people and it will be a bloodbath; the attack is ready to start, and when the first bullet is fired nothing will stop them and nothing will make them wait until they take over, therefore the mission is to take me dead or alive...

"It was more serious than a bluff. The National Palace was surrounded by white men armed to their teeth... The airport of Port au Prince was already under the control of these men... we were already under an illegal foreign occupation ready to drop bodies on the ground, to spill blood, and then to kidnap me dead or alive...

"It was not until 20 minutes before we landed in the Republic of Central Africa that I was given the official word that this is where we would be landing...

"I ask that everyone who loves life to come together to protect the lives of others. If we stand in solidarity we will stop the spread of death and we will help life flourish. The same thing that happened to a President who was democratically elected can happen any time, in any other country too. So, therefore, that's why, solidarity is indispensable to protect a democracy that works together with life...

"The Constitution is the source of [Haiti's] life. It's the guarantee of life. Let's stand under the Constitution in solidarity so that it is life that unfolds... we have not forgotten what Toussaint L'Ouverture has said, and that's why we saluted all of Africa... and we are saluting all Haitians everywhere with the conviction that the roots of the tree of peace, with the spirit of Toussaint L'Ouverture inside, are alive."

So we have yet again, in a nutshell, that centuries-old confrontation: between the imperial savagery of the "civilisation-mongers" (a phrase that Friedrich Engels coined for colonisers) and the powerlessness, but also a certain moral authority, of the colonised.

BUT why Haiti, and why so direct an intervention prepared through elements so disreputable? To answer this question, we have to take into account several factors. The first is the historical one. Two hundred years ago, when colonialism and slavery were overthrown and a republic established in Haiti, Thomas Jefferson, in whose name the U.S. calls itself a "Jeffersonian democracy", refused to recognise the Republic - and so it remained, unrecognised, until 1862 - like the Cuba of today. The history of U.S. military interventions in Haiti dates back to mid-19th century, and the U.S. Navy entered Haitian waters 24 times between 1849 and 1913 to save "American lives and property". In 1914, the liberal U.S. President Woodrow Wilson deployed the Marines to Haiti "to maintain order during a period of chronic and threatened insurrection", almost exactly the excuse under which the Bush administration has now sent in the Marines about a century later. Then the U.S. directly occupied Haiti in 1915 and ruled it for 19 years, leaving only when it was able to hand power over to the murderous National Guards which it had created, and only after it had imposed upon it a Constitution that gave the U.S. corporations unrestricted access to its resources, markets and labour force. In 1956, Francois Duvalier (Papa Doc) took over with firm U.S. backing and the dictator, in turn, granted to the U.S. corporations such "incentives" as no customs duties, a minimum wage by far the lowest in the western hemisphere, the suppression of labour unions, and the right to repatriate their profits. This dictatorship was then continued by the son, `Baby Doc' Duvalier, who was to be overthrown in 1986 by a massive grassroots uprising and was flown out of Haiti to Florida on a U.S. Air Force plane, with all his dollars. In the elections that ensued, Aristide represented the spirit of that popular craving for liberty, democracy and development, sweeping the polls with 67.5 per cent of the vote, against 14.2 per cent for Marc Bazin, a former World Bank official who was backed by the U.S. There has been no love lost between the U.S. and Aristide since then.

The coup which overthrew Aristide in 1991 and the military dictatorship of the next three years were then used to suppress unions and other democratic forces as well as to assassinate some 3,000 progressive people and thus to emasculate the newly flourishing civil society in Haiti. Emmanuel Constant and Jodel Chamblain, who have emerged as two of the three key leaders of the current "rebel" army, were CIA employees and leaders of the paramilitary forces during that dictatorship. They, together with Guy Philippe, who has emerged as the main leader of this new "rebel" force and was a notorious police officer during the military dictatorship, had been previously trained by the American Special Forces in Honduras. Ironically, however, economic refugees and other Haitians fleeing from the reign of terror then started arriving on U.S. shores in a huge flux - the famous phenomenon of the Haitian "boat people" - since the two countries are geographically close. It was to stem this tide of refugees, and only after extracting from him the promise that he would implement the IMF "conditionalities", that President Bill Clinton helped Aristide return to Haiti in 1994 while stationing U.S. Marines on Haitian soil for the well-known purpose of "protecting American lives and property". The U.S. authorities at the time also removed thousands of documents from Haitian Army and paramilitary headquarters to the U.S., thus taking away evidence against the coup makers as well as the paramilitary personnel who had carried out assassination campaigns during those three years. Leading lights of that terror regime were likewise given safe havens in the U.S. and its dependencies in the Caribbean, notably the Dominican Republic.

The backbone of the Haitian economy consists of plantations, sweatshops and export processing plants owned largely by U.S., French and Canadian firms and a handful of their Haitian friends - the 1 per cent who own 50 per cent of the country's wealth. As pointed out earlier, Haiti has by far the lowest paid work force in the Western hemisphere, and every U.S. intervention since early 19th century, including the present one, is designed to keep it that way. The main anti-Aristide group in Haiti, `Convergence for Democracy', is, for example, financed and otherwise supported by the ruling Republican Party of the U.S. through the National Endowment for Democracy and the International Republican Institute, two well-funded U.S.-based organisations that openly fund and assist a variety of rightwing forces around the world. When the Republicans took control of the U.S. Congress in 1995 they forced the Clinton administration to discontinue the little development aid that had been going to Haiti and re-channeled it to the anti-Aristide non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and business groups. Overthrow of the Aristide government has been a prime objective of the Bush administration ever since it came into office, just about the time Aristide was re-elected. While the U.S. successfully pressured the Inter-American Development Bank to cancel the more than $650 million that had been contracted already in development assistance and approved loans, it got the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to tighten the screws of their "structural adjustment" diktats. All this led to much suffering in Haiti, just as the sanctions did in Iraq. However, there was no appreciable decline in support for Aristide. The present intervention has taken so blatant and murderous a form, transparently organised abroad and executed directly by the U.S. Embassy in Haiti, mainly because the U.S. had been unable to put together any viable electoral alternative to Aristide and also lacked any social base for inciting a mass insurrection.

THE first set of factors that account for the current U.S. crimes in Haiti, for the form all this has taken, and the support it has received from France and Canada are thus historical, economic and social in nature. Then there is the key geo-political factor. Haiti is geographically not only close to the U.S. but also midway between Cuba and Venezuela. In fact, as deliveries of large quantities of weapons and munitions began arriving from the U.S. to the Dominican Republic, many observers concluded that they were intended for intimidation, and perhaps even invasion, of Cuba. In Venezuela, the U.S. had sought to engineer a similar coup-through-social-collapse in 2002 and Hugo Chavez was indeed out of power for two days, though he did return to power triumphantly when the coup collapsed. Now, the swift seizure of Haiti is designed to be a warning, serving as a `demonstration effect', for Venezuela: This is how blatantly we can do it - just as the occupation of Iraq has served as a very effective warning to Iran and Syria!

Aside from this `demonstration effect', the U.S. is now unlikely to vacate its aggression in Haiti and has been already anointed by the so-called `international community', that is, France, the U.N. and so on. Rather, it is quite possible that Haiti shall now be used as a major military and intelligence base - again on the model of Iraq which already has more than 100,000 troops stationed there indefinitely and the largest CIA station in the world comprised of 500 or more operatives already, larger than any CIA station since Saigon at the height of the Vietnam War. All this will then intersect with the drug mafias. Fifty tonnes of Colombian heroin is said to have been transiting illegally through Haiti annually even during the hapless Aristide regime. This is likely to increase several fold, drawing Haiti into the web of drug wars and covert counter-revolutionary operations of the kind we have been witnessing in Colombia.

It is unlikely that the terror squads that were unleashed as a prelude to the coup and kidnapping of the popular President shall be assigned governmental power. We are likely to see two quite different, but parallel movements. Those squads shall be made to spread through the cities and the countryside to suppress unions, assassinate progressive leaders and break up the organised movement loyal to the departed President. All this shall have U.S. backing and supervision, but shall be portrayed in the bourgeois media as regretful manifestation of the violent nature of Haitian society, which can be controlled only in the long run, patiently, through the civilising mission of the occupiers. Alongside this, a democratic facade shall also be devised, as it has been devised for Afghanistan and is being farcically rehearsed in Iraq at present. The vast majority of the Haitians shall not believe in it, vast majority of people in the Third World who pay attention to Haiti shall not believe in it, but the European Union, the U.N. and so on will - and that is what matters for the U.S. Behind that democratic facade - capped by the panacea of controlled elections - all the fundamental structures of the brutal Duvalier dictatorship of yesteryear shall be resurrected.

Such are the hopes the U.S. seems to nurse. Will they succeed? It is too soon to tell. Too much truth is known already. Inside the U.S., Secretary of State Colin Powell, himself a Black man of Jamaican origins, had assured the Black Democratic Caucus (comprised 23 Afro-American Congresspersons) only a week before the coup that the U.S. was not going to undermine Aristide's regime. Since the coup, Aristide himself has spelled out the truth. This truth is likely to solidify the black vote behind the Democratic Party candidate in the forthcoming elections. While 1,600 foreign troops - all from the West - occupy Haiti and many more may soon arrive, the 15-nation Caribbean Community, Caricom, has refused to contribute troops. Instead it demanded an independent international inquiry into the circumstances of Aristide's ouster even before the details of Aristide's current location became available. South Africa has endorsed this demand and pressure is now mounting within the U.S. for precisely such an inquiry by the U.S. Congress and by independent commissions. The leading Democratic Party candidate for the next Presidential elections, John Kerry, has already denounced Bush's Haitian adventure. Will those who ousted Aristide themselves be ousted?

The moral claims of empire collapse day by day. Lie after lie after lie that was told about Iraq has been nailed and more get nailed as the heap of lies rises. The same shall happen about Haiti. The emperor has his guns, but is fast losing his clothes.