Last week, the head of the Organization of American States (OAS) Special Mission to Strengthen Democracy in Haiti, David Lee, publicly complained that President Jean-Bertrand Aristide did not seek his approval when appointing Jean-Claude Jean-Baptiste as the new Director General of the Haitian National Police (PNH) in March.

During a May 25 program on the conservative Radio Métropole, Lee said that a high-level OAS/CARICOM delegation last March (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 21, No. 2, 3/26/03) had requested Aristide to check with him when appointing a new police chief and other top brass.

In fact, Lee was just reiterating the displeasure expressed in a May 20 report to the Permanent Council of OAS Secretary General Cesar Gaviria, who stated: "The Government named new senior management [of the PNH], notably the Director General, on Mar. 26, 2003 but opted to inform, rather than consult with the Mission on its choice." Vaguely citing criticism "domestically and internationally," Gaviria argued that Jean-Baptiste's appointment "did not contribute to creation of a climate of confidence."

In a May 29 press conference, Ben Dupuy, secretary general of the National Popular Party (PPN), condemned Lee's and Gaviria's statements as yet another instance of OAS meddling in Haiti's internal affairs and subservience to Washington's political machinations.

Nomination of the police high command is a constitutional prerogative of Haiti's president, Dupuy reminded Lee. "David Lee takes himself for a proconsul, for a [colonial] governor," Dupuy said. "He says he was not consulted about the choice of police director. According to him, this was his decision. However, he knows that no country in the world allows a foreigner to decide who will occupy the top post to direct the police or the army. In the United States, for example, the nomination of the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is a privilege of the president, who can also decide on his removal.»

The PPN leader also said that Washington was using functionaries like Lee and Gaviria to carry out its own agenda for Haiti, steam-rolling misgivings and objections of the majority of OAS states. He noted that March's "high level" OAS delegation was de facto led by Otto Reich, who has no standing in the OAS or even the State Department, but is only President Bush's "Special Representative for Hemispheric Initiatives."

"Otto Reich was the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, but he couldn't even stay in that post because the U.S. Congress would not ratify him due to all the illegal and dubious activities in his past government service" under the Reagan administration (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 21, No. 1, 3/19/03), Dupuy said. "So what was he doing in the delegation? The U.S. State Department stuck him in there. This shows how the OAS demands are in fact engineered by the U.S. State Department which has become a veritable colonial power and wants all countries to bow to its approach."

The U.S. agenda for Haiti seeks to invoke the new OAS Democratic Charter ratified last Sep. 11 (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 20, No. 26, 9/11/02) to justify more economic pressure and possibly military intervention to unseat Aristide. News reports in Haiti have speculated all week about what decision the OAS Permanent Council will take during its general assembly in Chile from Jun. 8-10. Other observers question whether May's surge in "insecurity" (criminal and political violence often carried out by shadowy networks of former soldiers and paramilitaries) is linked to the meeting, so that the intellectual authors of such violence can argue that elections cannot be held in Haiti and consequently justify invoking the Democratic Charter.

"The United States is putting pressure on certain small member nations of the OAS to force them to vote for application of the so-called Democratic Charter against Haïti," Dupuy explained. "Washington wants to prove to the other countries of Africa and Caribbean, especially during our bicentennial, that this former colony has failed. This has been a plot for a long time. Remember that at the first Inter-American summit held in Panama in 1825, the U.S. vetoed Haiti's participation."

"Unfortunately for the United States," Dupuy continued, "the vast majority of the OAS member nations, including those of the CARICOM, have become aware of this game and are refusing to follow the logic whereby the OAS acts as a Œministry of U.S. Neocolonial Affairs.'"

Dupuy dismissed the notion that the OAS could legally invoke the Democratic Charter, which contains language only to justify foreign sanctions and intervention against a military coup d'état, not against a democratically elected government.

The PPN leader also pointed out to David Lee various articles of the OAS Charter (regularly violated by Washington) which guarantee any member state the right to choose without external interference its political, economic and social system and organize itself in the way that it deems best for the good of its people and which require the mutual respect for the sovereignty and independence of States.

In the press conference, Dupuy also criticized Father Max Dominique for using the funeral of long-time democracy activist Father Antoine Adrien, who died May 12, to lambast the Haitian government officials, including Aristide, who attended. Dominique, who has close ties to the opposition Struggling People's Party (OPL), charged that Haitians today lives under a dictatorship as bad as that of the Duvaliers (1957-1986). "Father Max Dominique wouldn't have the courage to open his mouth to say the slightest thing under the Duvalier dictatorship because he knows they wouldn't even have sent him into exile," Dupuy said. "They would have sent him six feet underground."

Dupuy also chided Guyler C. Delva, head of the Association of Haitian Journalists (AJH) for going out of his way to condemn Cuba for supposedly arresting 26 journalists. Dupuy noted that those arrested had been actively involved with U.S. diplomats in working to destabilize and overthrow the Cuban government and that only three of them could be classified as journalists. "Why doesn't the AJH concern itself with the more than 2000 people which the U.S. has taken from Afghanistan and imprisoned in Guantanamo where they are reportedly being tortured, without being able to see lawyers or their family, all in violation of international law?" he asked. "Why don't they make a scandal out of that?"

Dupuy said the AJH would be better off getting worked up about the 2 million people (90% of them black) jailed in the U.S., the country with the largest percentage of its population imprisoned. He also suggested the AJH champion the case of Borgela Philistin, a Haitian victim of police brutality now on death-row in Pennsylvania (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 19, No. 28, 9/26/01), or the case of the celebrated political prisoner on Pennsylvania's death-row, Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is a journalist.

On May 30, some 130 demonstrators rallied in front of Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) on 79th Street in Miami to protest the Bush administration's policy of imprisoning Haitian refugees. In April, Attorney General John Ashcroft defied a court order for their release, citing "national security" and claiming that Haïti is serving as a "staging point" for Middle Eastern terrorists intent on attacking the United States.

On Oct. 29, 2002, a boat carrying 219 refugees landed at Key Biscayne (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 20, No. 33, 10/30/02). In an operation that was televised worldwide, authorities rounded up the refugees, sometimes at gunpoint, and jailed them in prisons like the infamous Krome Detention Facility. Children were locked up in Boy's Town, a Catholic institution, or, if with their mother, in local hotels.

Since then, 89 of the refugees have been repatriated to Haïti while 52 have been granted political asylum, Greg Gagne of the Executive Office of Immigration Review told the AP. Washington has appealed 49 of the 52 asylum decisions, the report said.

"Brothers and sisters, we are here ounce again to decry the racist policies of the Bush administration," said Marlène Bastien of Haitian Women in Miami, a spokeswoman of the demonstration which was organized by the Haitian-American Grassroots Coalition and co-sponsored by the ACLU, NAACP, SEIU1199 in Florida, and other groups.

"For 8 months now they have kept our children, women, pregnant women, and men locked down in detention," she said. "These people have not committed any crime. Like everybody else, they came here in search of a better life." Other migrants are released on bail to friends and relatives while awaiting asylum decisions.

Ashcroft's court-defying decision in April to keep Haitians locked up without bail scandalized the Haitian community and their defenders. Even State Department officials said that they saw no evidence to support Ashcroft's charge that terrorists were transiting through Haiti.

Yolette Jean Baptiste, a recently released refugee from Acul de Nord, attended the demonstration with her two sons, Bral Nelson, 12, and Bensley, 6. "I spent 6 months detained in a hotel with my two children,"she said. "My husband was in Miami, but they would not let me see him. I couldn't even talk to him. The children cried a lot. They wanted to go outside but couldn't. They had to stay inside all day."

"These are the terrorists John Ashcroft is talking about," said Bastien. "They are imprisoning innocent children. Shame on Ashcroft! Shame on President Bush!"

On June 4, the organizers plan to take to Washington a delegation of some 30 politicians, among them Miami-Dade mayor Alex Penelas, to lobby for a reversal of Ashcroft's decision.