This week in HaitiHaïti Progrès
November 8 - 14 2000
BROOKLYN:
Political Intrigue Surrounds
Weekend Rallies for Lavalas and Hillary
On Sunday, Nov. 5 at 2:30 p.m., Marie Point du Jour showed up at the door of Erasmus High School on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to set up for a 5 p.m. rally that the local chapter of the Lavalas Family party planned to hold there. However, she and hundreds of other Haitians who turned out for the program weren't able to enter the school until four and a half hours later, which just happened to be when a rally for Senate candidate Hillary Clinton down the street at Brooklyn College was ending.
"I am pretty sure there was some monkey-business (magouy) involved to sabotage our event so that we wouldn't draw people away from Hillary's rally," said Ms. Point du Jour, a Fanmi Lavalas leader in Brooklyn. "We had our contract, we had paid, we came on time. There was no excuse for the school not to be opened. I said when the lock-out started that the custodian would show up just when the other event finished, and that's just what happened."
Meanwhile, the rally for Hillary Rodham Clinton, the victorious Democratic candidate for New York state's U.S. Senate seat, was hijacked by a small clique of aspiring Haitian-American politicians, according to two community activists involved in organizing the event.
John Alexis, an organizer with Local 1199/SEIU, had worked with colleague Moses St. Louis, both formerly of the Haitian Enforcement Against Racism (HEAR), to pull together a coalition of people representing New York's politically diverse Haitian community. But the Haitian American Alliance (HAA), headed by rightist leader Dr. Jean-Claude Compas, succeeded in taking control of the program.
"When Compas and his people decided to take the thing over, we just pulled out," Alexis told Haïti Progrès. "Our position was that every sector of the community should be included in the activity. They didn't want that because they wanted to get the credit all for themselves. But at the same time, they wanted us to mobilize the community for them." Compas and his HAA associates ended up hosting the Brooklyn College event, which despite being free, drew a relatively small crowd of only 800 people. The Brooklyn College auditorium holds about 2500 people.
The event could have been huge. In general, the Haitian community holds First Lady and Senator-elect Hillary Clinton in high regard since it credits her husband President Bill Clinton with enabling President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's return to Haiti from exile in October 1994.
But when the community learned that the Brooklyn College event was controlled by Compas and the HAA, they stayed away in droves.
"They couldn't mobilize anybody, so they tried to use me and John, scheduling us to go to all the media," explained Moses St. Louis. "They set up about 20 interviews for us. But when John and I pulled out, nobody else went because they knew there would be a backlash. People wouldn't come if they saw those faces inviting them. They were afraid to go themselves, even though they had already paid some of the TV shows to have interviews done."
In recent years, Compas and the HAA have repeatedly sought to present themselves to the U.S. establishment as the "leaders of the Haitian community," seizing on any opportunity to parade in front of microphones and television cameras. Wielding the formidable financial resources of their upper-class and upwardly-mobile membership, the HAA hijacked previous Haitian community mobilizations against the police torture of Abner Louima in 1997 and the police shooting of Patrick Dorismond this past March (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 18 No. 2, 3/29/00). Their self-appointment as "responsible leaders" has angered the larger Haitian community, which views them as reactionary opportunists and charlatans.
Even the crowd which did turn out at Brooklyn College was not very reverential toward the "host" of the event. When Compas took the microphone to introduce Hillary Clinton, he was booed from several quarters of the auditorium and his introduction was interrupted more than once by chants of "Hillary, Hillary."
Ms. Clinton, apparently sensitive to the political dynamics at play, did not thank Compas and the HAA but rather Patrick Gaspard of Local 1199, the labor union which had worked closely with her campaign and which had taken financial responsibility for some of the publicity for the event. The HAA membership had anted up about $3500 for the rental of the auditorium.
Some Lavalas activists went to the Brooklyn College event to distribute pictures of Aristide. One of them, Fito Antoine, said that when he waved a picture Aristide's picture in front of the stage, Hillary expressed appreciation, but the HAA organizers were vexed. "There was Dr. Compas, Pastor Philius Nicolas, and his son Samuel Nicolas," Fito Antoine told Haïti Progrès. "They stood there squarely and said 'When Hillary is done, you don't need to go to Erasmus. It's closed. That event is not going to take place. Therefore, you don't need to waste your time going to Erasmus.' I said: 'How could it not be taking place? Everything was arranged for and paid. I don't see why it would be cancelled.' They said: 'No, go and see if it isn't closed.''"
In fact Erasmus did remain closed until about 7 p.m. But the hundreds of Haitians who turned out for the rally to support Aristide's presidential candidacy and that of Fanmi Lavalas Senate candidates in Nov. 26 Haitian elections refused to leave. They launched a spirited and spontaneous demonstration in front of the school. By 5:00 p.m. there were some 500 people demonstrating in front of the building.. The police arrived and set up blue barricades to contain the angry, chanting crowd.
"It was a real plot," said Fito Antoine. "Compas and Nicolas know just what they are doing. When I arrived at Erasmus, I saw the whole sidewalk was filled with people, enough to fill the Erasmus auditorium both upstairs and down. I saw that they weren't opening the door. I said that since I was at Brooklyn College I knew this was going to happen. It was a monkey-business concocted by Compas, Nicolas, and his son."
Hillary Clinton finished speaking around 6:30 p.m. and shortly after 7:00 p.m. the door to Erasmus was opened. By that time, however, hundreds of the people standing outside had left due to the extreme cold of the evening. Others in the area who were planning to come didn't bother because they heard the rumors that the event was cancelled.
The Erasmus organizers had in hand a contract for a show from 5 p.m. - 11 p.m. for which they had paid $541.11 and an additional $336.96 for security. They also lost a $2500 deposit they gave the Sipriz Band and another sum to Phantom. Their sound system also went home when the school door didn't open on time. The organizers are demanding a reimbursement of the money they lost from the Board of Education.
The Erasmus custodian told Lavalas organizers that he was never notified of the event, said Fritznel Benoit, another Brooklyn Fanmi Lavalas leader. "I told him that, if that is true, the sabotage may have happened at a higher level over his head," Benoit told Haïti Progrès.Several phone calls by Haïti Progrès to the superintendent responsible for dispatching the custodian were not returned.
Despite the late start and lack of sound or entertainment, the Lavalas organizers gamely managed to hold a rally with only speeches until about 11 p.m. using the Erasmus auditorium sound system.
The conflict between the two Sunday events reflects the growing political tension between two currents in the Haitian community. Objectively, the HAA's unspoken agenda is to attack Haiti's nationalist movement surreptitiously and from abroad by attempting to undermine the community's traditional nationalist interest in political events in Haiti. It proposes that Haitians should instead focus on and integrate into U.S. politics and leave Haiti for vacations and folklore.
But grassroots currents, like that which organized the Fanmi Lavalas rally, are trying to keep strong the close links and solidarity between Haiti and its diaspora, which was dubbed by Aristide a decade ago Haiti's Tenth Department (Haiti is composed of nine geographic departments). "We have shown that we are indeed a Lavalas (flood) of people here because of the number of people here in the room and the number of people who came but went home discouraged," Balthazar Fortuné, another Brooklyn Lavalas leader, declared to the crowd of about 300 in Erasmus. "This shows how interested the Haitian community here is in the political battles being waged in the country."
Also on hand for the Lavalas forum were Senators Lons Clonès and Gérard Gilles as well as Deputy James Derosier and New York Consul General Therese Guilloteau.
As for Compas and the HAA, their modus operandi is becoming very clear
to the Haitian community. "I think we learned a lesson, and next time
we will make sure we don't fall into their trap," said Moses St. Louis
of working with the HAA on the Hillary program. "At first they pretend
that they want the inclusion [of everybody] just to mobilize, but when
it gets down to the wire, they make sure that you're not there."
Fugitive
Cops Trained by
U.S.
Special Forces
At least eleven former police chiefs, most of whom have taken refuge in the Dominican Republic and Ecuador after being accused in October of hatching a coup, were trained by the U.S. Special Forces, according to former Pétionville police chief Goodwork Noel.
In an interview accorded Haïti Progrès in 1998, Noel said that the now-disbanded Armed Forces of Haiti (FADH) chose him in 1993, during the three year coup d'état, to receive a scholarship to study military tactics and strategy in Quito, Ecuador. But his trainers were soldiers from the U.S. Special Forces, an elite corps designed to teach militaries around the world anti-insurrectional and anti-guerrilla techniques. Noel, who was 24 when he was sent to Ecuador, said he also received training from the Ecuadorian Special Forces.
The training continued for four years until 1997, when the "Ecuadorian" trained policemen returned to Haiti and were integrated into police leadership posts around the country. At the time, the Haitian National Police (PNH) claimed, as they do today, that they had nobody "qualified" to act as police chiefs and were forced to use former FADH officers and FADH trainees like the "Ecuadorians."
Last year there were revelations that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had infiltrated the U.S. Justice Department's International Criminal Investigation Training Assistance Program (ICITAP) in Haiti, which selected and trained the PNH (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 16 No. 51, 3/10/99). Therefore, it is not unlikely that some of the FADH trainees in Ecuador were also approached to be CIA agents. Furthermore, there is always a very close working relationship between the Special Forces and the CIA, both elite services operating primarily in foreign lands.
Noel said that his own training was mainly in the domain of "maintaining order" and "criminal investigations," and was "very professional." All the Haitian cadets were trained in different disciplines, Noel said, and some of them rather exotic, such as night-time parachuting.
Last month, seven of the "Ecuadorian" police chiefs fled to the Dominican Republic after Haitian authorities uncovered their participation in planning for a coup d'état (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 18 No. 32 10/25/00).
Two of the former officers -- Didier Seide and Fritz Gourdet -- were granted political asylum in Ecuador last week because they had "blood relatives" in the country, Ecuadorian officials said.
The training of the former police chiefs by military trainers highlights once again that the Haitian police force is hardly "civilian" as heralded by Washington, which has been the main architect and overseer of the PNH since its launching five years ago. At least two dozen of the most high-ranking PNH officers, including the police chief of Port-au-Prince, the head of the Company for the Maintenance of Order (CIMO), and of the SWAT team, are former FADH officers.
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