The Fire This Time in Haiti was US-Fueled

Jeffrey Sachs, who was brilliant on Charley Rose debating Haiti with a former ambassador, a GOP representative and a director at Haitian radio, has a print column on how Bush drove Aristide from power.

Attacks on Aristide began as soon as the Bush administration assumed office. I visited Aristide in Port-au-Prince in early 2001. He impressed me as intelligent and intent on good relations with Haiti's private sector and the US. No firebrand, he sought advice on how to reform his economy and explained his realistic and prescient concerns that the American right would try to wreck his presidency.

"Baby Doc" Duvalier says thanks, got passport several weeks ago!

The government of Haiti, the poorest nation in the Americas, has said the Duvalier regime stole $500 million from the country's treasury.

Aristide interview: 'I call it a coup d'etat'


Why they had to crush Aristide

Jean-Bertrand Aristide was re-elected president of Haiti in November 2000 with more than 90% of the vote. He was elected by people who approved his courageous dissolution, in 1995, of the armed forces that had long terrorised Haiti and had overthrown his first administration. He was elected by people who supported his tentative efforts, made with virtually no resources or revenue, to invest in education and health. He was elected by people who shared his determination, in the face of crippling US opposition, to improve the conditions of the most poorly paid workers in the western hemisphere.

Aristide was forced from office on Sunday by people who have little in common except their opposition to his progressive policies and their refusal of the democratic process. With the enthusiastic backing of Haiti's former colonial master, a leader elected with overwhelming popular support has been driven from office by a loose association of convicted human rights abusers, seditious former army officers and pro-American business leaders.

An exhaustive and convincing report by the International Coalition of Independent Observers concluded that "fair and peaceful elections were held" in 2000, and by the standard of the presidential elections held in the US that same year they were positively exemplary.

Why then were they characterised as "flawed" by the Organisation of American States (OAS)? It was because, after Aristide's Lavalas party had won 16 out of 17 senate seats, the OAS contested the methodology used to calculate the voting percentages.

One of the reasons why Aristide has been consistently vilified in the press is that the Reuters and AP wire services, on which most coverage depends, rely on local media, which are all owned by Aristide's opponents. Another, more important, reason for the vilification is that Aristide never learned to pander unreservedly to foreign commercial interests. He reluctantly accepted a series of severe IMF structural adjustment plans, to the dismay of the working poor, but he refused to acquiesce in the indiscriminate privatisation of state resources, and stuck to his guns over wages, education and health.

U.S.-Sponsored Regime Change in Haiti

France was the first to call for Aristide's resignation as the rebels seized the northern half of the country in late February.

The French hold grudges against Aristide for his demand last April that France pay back the $22 billion (adjusted for inflation and interest) that Haiti had to pay in 1863 for French recognition of the republic, which became independent in 1804 – the second in the hemisphere after the US in 1776, and the first independent black republic in the world. Ironically, the new uprising came weeks after Haiti had celebrated the bicentennial of its independence.

The Haitian political opposition – allied with the armed rebels – was led by André "Andy" Apaid, also head of Alpha Industries, one of the oldest and largest assembly factories in Haiti. As New York's Haiti Progress reported in November, Apaid's father was a close friend to dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier. Apaid was born in New York and claims to be a Haitian citizen, although Haitian law does not allow dual-nationality and he has not renounced his US citizenship. In a recent interview broadcast by the BBC Caribbean Service, Apaid voiced support for rioters in Gonaives who had torched government buildings. He is also known for pulling a gun on demonstrators organized by the Batay Ouvriye trade union who tried to picket in front of his plant. Apaid lead the opposition's "Group of 184," a supposedly broad front of "civil society" organizations modeled on similar anti-government coalitions in Chavez's Venezuela and Allende's Chile.

Reuters reported Feb. 21 that the armed rebel leadership includes Louis Jodel Chamblain, a prominent death-squad leader from the country's 30-year Duvalier dictatorship. In 1993, Chamblain joined with Emmanuel "Toto" Constant – now exiled in New York – to form the Front for the Advancement of Progress of the Haitian People, (FRAPH), which terrorized Haiti following the first coup against Aristide. He recently crossed back into Haiti from exile in the Dominican Republic to lead paramilitary units. Several other exiled figures of the junta that deposed Aristide in 1991 are also among the rebel leadership.

Guy Philippe, a former police chief who has emerged as public voice of the armed rebellion, told CNN he would welcome foreign troops. Philippe, who fled into exile in 2000 after being charged in a coup plot, insists he has no desire to rule Haiti, but does seek to restore the military, which Aristide disbanded.

Whiskey Bar has more from the well-known development economist, Jeffrey Sachs: The ease with which another Latin American democracy crumbled is stunning. What, though, has been the role of US intelligence agencies among the anti-Aristide rebels? How much money went from US-funded institutions and government agencies to help the opposition. And why did the White House abandon the Caribbean compromise proposal it had endorsed just days before? These questions have not been asked. Then again, we live in an age when entire wars can be launched on phony pretenses, with few questions asked in the aftermath.