NCHR and Human Rights Watch Join In Haiti Destabilization CampaignHaïti Progrès
3 au 9 Mai 2000
"One of the most cynical, sophisticated and long-running campaigns to destroy a genuine attempt at participatory democracy is nearing its successful completion in the Caribbean republic of Haiti" began an Apr. 30th dispatch from the Alternative News Wire. The story thumbnails how reactionary forces in Haiti and the U.S. "have conspired to block popular efforts to create a real and meaningful democracy in Haiti" since the 1986 overthrow of Duvalier and the 1990 election triumph of Jean Bertrand Aristide and the Lavalas movement.
One will forgive the article's pessimistic tone, especially given the ferocity of the campaign by U.S. and European diplomats and the mainstream media to lay blame for the present crisis, and for the growing numbers of refugees leaving Haiti, at the feet of the President René Préval and his predecessor. In the face of growing murders, kidnapings, and violent street demonstrations, journalists like Don Bohning in the May 1 Miami Herald have sought to portray the Préval government as "under fire for not acting more aggressively to halt the violence."
Thus, Bohning and others were surely delighted on Apr. 25 to receive an "Open Statement on the Human Rights Situation in Haiti" signed by six human rights groups: the National Coalition for Haitian Rights (NCHR), Human Rights Watch, Center for International Policy (CIP), Washington Office on Latin America, Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, and the International Human Rights Law Group.
Nowhere in the statement is there mention of the central role played by U.S. government meddling in Haiti's elections through the State Department's Agency for International Development (USAID) or the USAID-funded International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), which is the shadow architect and manager of Haitian elections behind Haiti's supposedly sovereign Provisional Electoral Council (CEP). Nowhere is the probable role of the CIA (whose FRAPH death-squads still operate in Haiti) in inciting or orchestrating the violence raised. Nowhere is the pressure of the Pentagon (which has deployed troops along the Dominican border) ever mentioned. All this despite the clear signs that Haiti is suffering from a classic destabilization campaign à la Allende in Chile, Manley in Jamaica, or Aristide in 1991. Instead, the statement blames the victim.
"We reiterate that the responsibility for ending this violence and bringing the perpetrators to justice rests with President Préval and the Haitian government," the groups say.
They go on to pursue the real target of the destabilization campaign. "We particularly call upon former president Aristide to speak publicly on this issue, since most of the groups engaged in violence in the streets - including those that burned the opposition coalition headquarters on the day of the Dominique funeral - claim to be acting in his name," the statement reads. "We are disturbed that Mr. Aristide personally has not used the considerable moral force and political goodwill that he still enjoys in Haiti to condemn the violence."
This dishonest assertion - both Aristide and his party's spokesmen have repeatedly condemned the violence - is typical of previous reports produced by the NCHR in collaboration with its affiliate Humans Rights Watch, an anti-communist human rights conglomerate generously funded by billionaire financier George Soros and considered to be well to the right of its London-based counterpart, Amnesty International.
In a spooky parallel, the NCHR and Americas Watch also issued a report in Nov. 1991, one month after the bloody military coup d'état against Aristide, which targeted "the Aristide government's human rights record." In chapters with titles like "Aristide's Responsibility for Popular Violence," the report recycled the charges compiled by another human rights expert, Jean-Jacques Honorat, who became the first prime minister of the illegal military regime.
Like today, in 1991, Washington fomented parliamentary subterfuge, violence, and agitation against Aristide which was met by irate crowds trying to protect the government from being toppled. Like today, the NCHR/Watch analysis was the same. "Aristide deserves blame for not choosing to use his exceptional moral authority to speak out forcefully against this violence," the 1991 report reads. "In our view, much of the violence could have been avoided had Aristide personally condemned it publicly and unequivocally."
Not ironically, this was the same position being adopted at the time by the Bush Administration, which was looking for any excuse to legitimate the coup and discredit Aristide. They welcomed the 1991 NCHR/Watch report with undisguised glee.
Today, Washington must be equally pleased. The NCHR-led groups blame Haiti's trouble on "the inability of those leaders who opposed the Duvalier tyranny to work together for Haiti's future," parrot the misleading mantra that "Préval shut the parliament in January 1999," and champion Washington's call to "hold elections as soon as possible" even while noting that "election officials [have] proved unable to manage the technical and logistical challenges." They also apparently see nothing inappropriate in noting "the strength of US demands for early Haiti elections," as if the US had any right to make demands of that kind on a sovereign nation.
Meanwhile, a very different report was issued by another human rights consortium composed of the Bay Area Haitian American Council, Haiti Reborn/Quixote Center, Global Exchange, and Jennifer Harbury, the well-known human rights attorney. "The Haitian people are now facing exclusionary elections, a situation which negates the key concept of `one person, one vote,'" the report said referring to the parliamentary and municipal elections now scheduled for May 21 and Jun. 25. "According to numerous reports, up to 25% of the eligible voters have been prevented or deterred from registering. Although official agencies responsible for organizing the electoral process, such as the [CEP], insist that the majority of the population have in fact been registered, this claim is not consistent with what we heard again and again from religious, civic, labor, and peasant leaders. Given that this electoral process was conceived of and executed with the technical assistance and financial support of various U.S.-based agencies, this problem raises special concerns."
The report lays bare the role of USAID and IFES in meddling in and messing up Haiti's elections. "[T]he recent voter registration campaign, as planned and executed by the CEP with the guidance of IFES, has shut out a significant percentage of the Haitian population" due to the limited distribution of voter cards and registration stations favoring upper class Haitians, the report states. "If the official reports of almost total voter registration go without criticism, the potential consequences are very serious."
But last week it became clear that the elections as now scheduled are once again a long shot. The CEP called a meeting on Apr. 27 at the Christopher Hotel of all the political parties and the "civil society." Inexplicably, the diplomatic corps was also invited, and one party, Eskamp, refused to attend in protest of this violation of national sovereignty.
The whole affair was a fiasco, ending in shouting matches and confusion. CEP president Léon Manus tried to calm the disgruntled audience in the hot and crowded room by acknowledging "a certain lack of experience and hence a certain slowness and hesitations in the electoral process" on the part of the CEP. Clearly however, he was only trying to prepare his audience for the probability that the elections will be postponed for a fifth time. The real reason is because nothing has been done to remedy the lack of electoral cards and registration stations for unregistered voters. However, Manus tried to put the blame on the lack of security in the country. "If in the coming days popular organizations continue to promote violence, to destroy the cars of honest citizens, if fires continue to destroy property... the elections to change the economic and social situation of the nation will not take place," he said.
Some CEP members were not present due to internal differences, according to some reports. One CEP member declared that the numerous statements made by other members were all unofficial, because only the CEP spokesman could speak on behalf of the body. Another CEP member threw insults at some audience members. Most of the room ended up walking out of the meeting in disgust.
"The CEP just demonstrated that it can't even organize a meeting," said Ben Dupuy, secretary general of the National Popular Party (PPN), in a Apr. 28 press conference, "I don't need to tell you about its organizing elections throughout the country. Elections can't be held on May 21 without they're being a sham and anarchic. The CEP itself realizes that it can't meet the date because all the problems which led to the elections being postponed in the first place have never been resolved."
Dupuy went on to outline three principal features of the destabilization campaign: 1) "selective assassinations" of journalists like Jean Dominique and opposition political leaders "to create trouble between the political parties." 2) the sending of agents provocateurs "to infiltrate demonstrations and create disorder by burning things, breaking car windows, and then blaming it on the people" which also creates an excuse for highly unpopular opposition politicians to say that "they can't take part in elections even though they want elections, but everybody knows that those politicians really want the `zero option'" which calls for Préval and the CEP to resign and new presidential elections to be held without Artistide. 3) "They are massing Dominican troops on the border and creating tensions between the two peoples so that if their electoral coup d'état doesn't work, then they can have the Dominican Army invade, and then invite the international community to take over Haiti" again.
Dupuy also took not that certain U.S. Republicans have dubbed Haiti a "narco-state," to justify their aggressive deployments, but said that "if the US has a drug problem it should do what it has to patrol its own borders, but it is not Haiti, the Dominican Republic or any other country which should become its border patrol."
He emphasized that the U.S. was trying to demonize Aristide and his party, the Lavalas Family (FL) so as to prepare U.S. public opinion for intervention.
Yvon Neptune of the FL also firmly dismissed the charges that his party was part of kidnappings or murders. "We have noticed a policy whereby they create a scenario and then they point the finger at the Lavalas Family," he said when questioned if the FL had kidnapped Claudy Myrthil, a candidate of the Espace de Concertation for Martissant. "They are not embarrassed to do anything at all, whether it be acts of violence, aggression, or kidnapings, and then make theatre with it."
Indeed, this week Mythil mysteriously reappeared at his home, all bandaged up. But in his rather confused accounts of his alleged abduction, he clearly refrained from saying that he was kidnaped by the FL, as his party had loudly asserted.
Perhaps the NCHR and the human rights groups in its train can learn something from that episode. Certainly, some of such groups will refuse to look for the hidden hand of the U.S.. But others might avoid in the future lending their services to the "cynical, sophisticated and long-running" campaign to destabilize Haiti's government.
Haiti and the IMF
by Stan GoffHaiti was the world's first independent Black republic. It won that independence in a bloody revolt of slaves, who prevailed against the three dominant European militaries. This shattered the myth of white supremacy at a time when slave labor was still the economic foundation of every surrounding country, to include the new United States. As punishment, Haiti has been attacked, exploited, and vilified every since.
That vilification is continuing apace. Unfortunately, the US press has been led to uncritically collaborate in the distortion and stereotyping of Haiti. The US foreign policy establishment's agenda for Haiti is largely determined by the orthodoxy of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The IMF and World Bank just became the target of massive protests in Washington DC on the 15th and 16th of April. So it may be timely to begin demystifying Haiti's current situation with that in mind.
Elections for parliament in Haiti have been postponed. This postponement is being portrayed by an uncritical press as President Rene Préval ruling by decree, after having sacked Parliament, and trying to hang onto power for his former colleague Aristide. Aristide, who is again running for president and quite likely to win, is running in November. The rumor is that Préval is helping Aristide by postponing the parliamentary elections until the presidential elections, so Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas Party will sweep the parliamentary elections on Aristide's popular coat-tails.
The truth is that parliament's tenure was finished in 1999, and the majority of major political parties agreed to postponement of elections until they could be run properly. The remaining government is not dominated by Fanmi Lavalas or any other party, the ministers coming from a polyglot of political parties. Moreover, the separation of parliamentary elections from presidential elections is not mandated in the Haitian Constitution. That separation was the brainchild of the United States Embassy, who had put pressure on the Haitian government to separate them, precisely because they do not want to see Aristide and his party win. We certainly hold our presidential and congressional elections at the same time of the year.
The United States foreign policy establishment demanded that Haiti not only separate the elections, they demanded the use of photo identification cards for every voter in a country where many are not literate, accessible by vehicle, or in possession of birth certificates. The cards were selectively issued, with massive shortages just before the scheduled elections in March, which caused a near nationwide rebellion by a populace who rightly believed that they were being disfranchised. That was the cause of the latest delay.
In conjunction with these demands, the US aggressively funded-through National Endowment for Democracy grants-the development of a faux opposition party, called Espace de Concertation. The whole purpose of Espace was to whittle away at Fanmi Lavalas' parliamentary seats. By Haitian law, a President Aristide must have a parliamentary majority to appoint the Prime Minister from his own party. The Prime Minister is the person who has the real executive authority.
The purpose of this dual strategy, then, is to ensure that if Aristide gets into office, he can't exercise any power.
Still the press continues to give superficial and distorted accounts of Haiti that leave the impression of general Haitian deviancy, corruption, and ineptitude. It seems they should look more closely at the long-standing relationship between the most specifically deviant, corrupt, and inept leaders in Haiti past and present, and note how often these very people were underwritten by the US State Department and the CIA.
So what does all this have to do with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank? And why should the United States establishment be so dead set against Aristide?
The International Monetary Find and the World Bank are dominated by the United States, and the dominant stakeholders in those institutions are American finance capitalists. In simple terms, the IMF and the World Bank have much in common with loan sharks. They do not come to countries' rescue. They hold out loans to desperate countries to restructure their debts, and take on more debt-which they can ill afford-in exchange for acceptance of draconian adjustments to economic structures that are beneficial only to a small local elite who are working with transnational corporations (TNCs). These are called structural adjustment programs (SAPs). Their purpose is to pry developing economies open for domination by the TNCs and international speculators.
That's what all the hoopla was about in Washington DC April 16th.
These SAPs are the lowering of tariffs, which in Haiti means subsidized foreign goods run local producers out of their own market; suppression of labor unions, which in Haiti means people continuing to work for $3 a day in sweatshops; privatization of state owned enterprises, which in Haiti means transferring the proceeds to a private foreign corporation instead of into social services and infrastructure; downsizing of the public sector, which in Haiti would mean around 45,000 additional jobs lost in a country with over 70 percent unemployment; imposition of taxes on basic commodities, which in Haiti is the continuation of a regressive tax system that has let the rich off the hook and will further immiserate the poor; and the cancellation of what few social services still exist there.
What's the US objection to Aristide? He might not support this sterling program.
The vast majority of Haitians already object to it, but that doesn't fit with Uncle Sam's notion of "manageable" democracy. Their fear is not that Haiti will fail in the absence of "structural adjustment." The fear is that they will progress. That's a very bad example. It's Haiti being independent again, and it won't be tolerated. The irony is that, while they are trying so desperately to keep the lid on in Haiti, it's just come off in Washington DC.