This week in HaitiHaïti Progrès
January 24 - 30, 2001
Destabilization Campaign
Shifts into High Gear
Like opening salvos, four bombs exploded around Port-au-Prince on Jan. 19, wounding five people, one critically. One was detonated in Pétionville's central square, in front of the town's high school.
The timing seems far from coincidental: the weekend of new U.S. President George W. Bush's inauguration. Lacking any popular support, Haiti's opposition front, the Democratic Convergence (CD), is hoping (or perhaps has already been told) that the incoming U.S. Republican administration will help them sabotage the Feb. 7 inauguration of Jean Bertrand Aristide, who was elected with 92% of the vote in nationwide elections on Nov. 26.
Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis claimed that the police had arrested one man, Etzer Cameau, who implicated unnamed opposition figures in the bombings. "The names which have been cited have among them certain names in the opposition," Alexis said. "Someone has to be really desperate to take the initiative to carry out such a crime. They must have no faith in the people and no respect for democracy."
Victor Benoit of the CONACOM, a CD component, called Alexis' remarks "psychological warfare," charging that it was a hallmark of "fascist" and "totalitarian" governments to "manufacture a terrorist action and then afterwards blame it on the opposition."
But most Haitians scoff at the notion that the Haitian government is either dictatorial or destabilizing itself. The more widespread view is that the government has been much too tolerant of the threats and provocations coming from the opposition, despite its tiny size. On Jan. 19, hundreds of people demonstrated in the streets of Jérémie, denouncing the CD and calling on the government to take a less defensive posture.
Last week the government finally did issue an order summoning Sauveur Pierre-Etienne, a vitriolic spokesman for the CD's Organization of People in Struggle (OPL), to appear in court for his incendiary calls to overthrow the government. The summons mirrored that issued the week before to Paul Raymond of the St. Jean Bosco Little Church Community (TKL), who was accused of threatening 130 people named on a list as members of a "consultative body" of a "parallel government" to be established by the CD (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 18, No. 44, 1/17/2001). In court, Raymond claimed that "we were only asking people on the list to rectify it" if they had been named without their consent.
Pierre-Etienne has called his summons "an attempt to gag the opposition." But Haitian radio airwaves are still awash in their declarations. Feeling the Bush administration is with them, the CD is hell-bent on continuing their "parallel government" plans with a meeting on Jan. 27 at the Rex Theatre to define the "body politic" to be set in place on Feb. 7. On Jan. 23, Benoit ominously declared that the opposition might resort to "extra-Constitutional" means to achieve their ends.
The opposition's all-but-official organ, the right-wing Brooklyn-based Haïti Observateur, which has always had close ties with and sources in the U.S. government, reported last week that "the architects of the Bush administration's Haitian policy do not rule out the possibility of events putting in doubt the seating of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, emphasizing that such difficulties could take the form of a 'postponement'" of the inauguration due to "disturbances or violent confrontations."
New U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell may have lulled some in the Lavalas camp by saying in Senate confirmation hearings last week that an 8-point U.S. economic and political plan for Haiti, drafted by the Clinton administration, was "an acceptable road map." Aristide reportedly agreed to the plan in order to unblock $600 million in international aid held hostage by Washington for the past three years. But Powell also added that "we do not rule out that we might have other conditions or other things we might want to add" while admitting that "those are pretty demanding conditions."
All other signs are that a full-scale destabilization campaign is underway in these weeks leading up to Feb. 7. Zenglendo (bandit) attacks were widespread and ferocious. From Jan. 14 to 20, the General Hospital reported 69 people were wounded, 21 of them by gunfire. There were also 4 rapes and 5 people were burned to death, reportedly zenglendos caught red-handed.
But crime did not spike just in the popular quarters, its usual haunt. High profile members of the bourgeoisie were also targeted. Well-known doctor Thony Ratton was shot to death at his home in Petit-Goâve. Denis Balthazar, 75, a former Duvalierist deputy, was shot three times and is in critical condition. Patrice Bayard was fired on by zenglendos while driving his car on National Highway 1 near the airport. He is the son of Marie Claude Bayard, vice president of Haiti's Association of Industrialists (ADIH). With him was Patrick Mangones, the son of famed Citadel restorer Albert Mangones, and also a relative of police chief Pierre Denizé.
Meanwhile, the "civil society" (code for the bourgeoisie) has offered to act as a "mediator" in talks between the Lavalas and the opposition, a proposal which was heartily and inappropriately applauded by U.S. Ambassador Brian Dean Curran, who said that "the United States fully supports this initiative."
But the Lavalas sector was much more circumspect. "We have noticed that this very civil society has been a little bit too partisan," explained Lavalas senator Gérald Gilles. He recalled that Rosny Desroches, Jean-Claude Duvalier's Education Minister, was one of the civil society "leaders" who has publicly condemned the May 21 parliamentary and Nov. 26 elections. "So personally I give him a big fat zero," Gilles said. He said there were many other civil society members who deserve zeros.
Given such offensives, both insidious and frontal, Alexis felt it necessary to sound an alarm. "You the Haitian people, once again I ask you to remain vigilant, to watch out above and below because misfortune cannot continue to plague you," he said. "You know the proverb which says that together we are strong. Well in fact, we are strong and we will show it."
