by Kim Ives

Opposition demonstrators stole a coffin containing the body of Maxime Déselmour from a funeral last week to use as political ram to penetrate the security zone around the National Palace.

Brushing aside the protests of priests and the deceased’s family, the protestors whisked the coffin from the Sacré Coeur church in the Turgeau neighborhood of the capital on Jan. 16 and tried to bust through the police perimeter in front of the Palace. The police, pelted with rocks and bottles (the local police chief was hit), responded with tear-gas, scattering the demonstrators.

The horrified family pursued the hijacked coffin through the city until, eventually, with the aid of the Red Cross and the police, it was able to negotiate the return of the body and its transportation to Jacmel.

Déselmour, 33, was killed during clashes between pro- and anti-government demonstrators on Jan. 7. Opposition demonstrators beat a man they believed to be a government supporter to death (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 21, No. 44, 1/14/2004) and police fatally shot two others.

The Haitian opposition is financed by the U.S. and European Union and led by assembly-industry businessmen. But it is trying to cast itself as a “student uprising” and spread the rumor that Déselmour was a college student. In fact, he graduated from the State University in 1994.

Four days earlier, one of the opposition march’s leaders, Dany Toussaint, a former soldier and defector from President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s Lavalas Family (FL) party, warned that the “students” might storm the presidential seat. “Any day now you might hear that 150,000 or 200,000 people have overrun the National Palace,” Toussaint told Konpè Mòlòskòt, a Miami-based Haitian journalist, in a long threat-filled Jan. 13 interview. “We won’t even know what happened to the [remains of the] president of the republic because there is such determination in these people, that they don’t hear, they don’t see” in their rage.

During negotiations for return of Déselmour’s body at the Faculty of Social Sciences, opposition demonstrators beat up Evens Sanon, a photographer and reporter for the state newspaper L’Union.

Another journalist from L’Union as well as reporters for Télé Timoun and Radio Solidarité were threatened outside the university.

Opposition demonstrators also have threatened the curé of Sacré Coeur with arson for his role in opposing the hijacking of Déselmour’s remains.

Such threats are serious. On Jan. 19, opposition demonstrators set fire to four schools and attacked five others with stoning for not closing their doors. Opposition protestors also assaulted the Haitian National Television (TNH) with rocks, bottles and gunfire, breaking many windows. The police fired shots in the air to repel the attack.

Right next door, the demonstrators trashed the marketplace at Delmas 32, burning the stalls and destroying the wares of the small merchants trying to eke out a living there.

Ironically, the TNH attack came after armed men on Jan. 14 destroyed of the transmitters and antennae of nine radio stations and one television on the crest of Boutillier, the mountain dominating the capital. Although opposition spokesmen tried to blame the sabotage on the government, half of the transmitters belonged to unaligned or pro-government stations. The nearby transmitter of the most powerful opposition-aligned station, Radio Métropole, was not touched.

Aristide strongly condemned the attack as he left to the hemispheric summit in Monterrey, Mexico. There, U.S. President George Bush and his Secretary of State Colin Powell threatened Aristide to not miss his “last chance” to make a deal with the opposition. The warning is preposterous since the opposition has a single non-negotiable demand: Aristide’s resignation.

Meanwhile, leaders from the Washington-backed Democratic Convergence opposition front began meetings in Santo Domingo on Jan. 18 with the National Endowment for Democracy’s International Republican Institute (IRI) aimed at fusing its 14 tiny parties into one or two.

“Today there is a process underway to form what one calls a center-right party,” Convergence spokesman Paul Denis told a reporter on Jan. 20. “There is another process to assemble and fuse the parties of a social-democrat tendency.”

Even if they consolidate, the opposition parties still will not participate in elections until Aristide steps down, Denis said.

The Haitian parliament expired on Jan. 13 due to the opposition’s refusal to take part in elections. Aristide announced in Monterrey that Haiti will hold elections for a new parliament within the next six months.

On Jan. 17, Aristide publicly declared that he feared a coup was being plotted. “Once we have coup d’état then we have death,” he said. “Once we say no to coup d’état, then we say yes to life.”

Unfair and Indecent Diplomacy:
Washington’s Vendetta against Haiti’s President Aristide

by Jessica Leight
Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA)

(The first of two installments)

The following is an abridged version of a COHA memorandum issued Jan. 15

As thousands of desperate and impoverished Haitians weigh whether they should undertake the dangerous 700-mile voyage to Florida in order to flee starvation, critics of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide—most pointedly U.S. regional policy-makers—accuse him of tolerating a worrisome drift to authoritarian rule. Certainly violence and corruption have increased and the tide of public opinion against Aristide is rising as the outbreak of gang warfare between rival government and opposition hoodlums worsens and increased numbers of disaffected Haitians join opposition rallies. But there is compelling evidence to charge that Aristide’s slide is not due to any dramatic charge in the nature of the Haitian president, but is the result of a calculated campaign that is now being brainstormed by André Apaid Jr., who is one of the island’s richest individuals. This effort has the tacit if not overt support of the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince. This policy, which has long been in place, is now being guided by Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega, along with like minded radicalized rightist colleagues such as Special Presidential Envoy to the Western Hemisphere Otto Reich. What is fully apparent is that Washington wants to be rid of Aristide, who has been able to survive, but only barely, in spite of every affliction and economic cut-off that the Bush administration could visit upon him. The danger is that Washington is succeeding and will soon have to confront a self-fulfilling prophecy of its own making. It may be successful in convincing the world that Aristide should be deposed, which could be a catastrophic occurrence.

The bicentennial of Haiti’s independence on January 1, 2004 marked the two hundredth anniversary of the second oldest independent republic in the Western Hemisphere and the celebration of the victory of the only nation in the world to independently overthrow slavery. Yet the occasion could equally well be deemed the 200th anniversary of a belligerent, unjust and mindless U.S. policy towards Haiti, a policy that began with Washington’s initial refusal to recognize the newly independent country until 1862, nearly six decades after its independence, continued through the often brutal U.S. military occupation of 1915-34, and culminated in the U.S.’s enthusiastic support of the corrupt dictatorships of the Duvaliers, both father and son, and their military successors. Historically, the State Department has always felt that second best was good enough for this Black republic.

Today, Washington’s openly patronizing policy towards the island is at its peak, as the Bush administration continues to thwart all attempts by the current government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to move Haiti towards a more stable democracy, a stronger economy and a more equitable society. As political violence in the country intensifies, there have been proliferating denunciations of the Aristide government by several prejudiced foreign reporters that periodically lapse into skewed journalism, functionaries at the U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince who automatically assume the right of dabbling in Haiti’s pond, and a small group of State Department appointees led by Noriega and Reich who “boffo-like”, see Aristide as little more than a beardless Castro. These sources repeatedly have accused the president and his Lavalas Family political movement of facilitating and even fomenting political violence by promoting attacks by their street gangs and failing to engage in good-faith negotiations between the opposition and government officials.

However, these strident accusations against the government bear little or no relation to Haiti’s political realities, where the functioning of a democratically-elected government that possessed overwhelming popular support at the time of the 2000 election persistently has been sabotaged by an unprincipled and intransigent opposition. This opposition was founded and continues to operate with the full, if not always open, support of the United States, channeled through such controversial Cold War institutions as the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the former office of Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), a long-time chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee prior to his 2002 retirement and who was the prevailing Gauleiter in the “get” Aristide crusade.

President Aristide has been shaped by his environment but he also is stunningly self-disciplined. He is a brave man, having skirted assassination on several occasions. He is stubborn and calculating, and is also self-contained and enormously intelligent. He is seized by the notion of his importance, both to his people and as a symbol to the world. Although he always calls for pacification and conflict resolution, he is not above lapsing into an Old Testament, “eye for an eye,” mode. He was the island’s most precious national democratic asset, but years of being hounded by U.S. political manipulation and a non-democratic opposition, the quality of his rule has diminished and the atmosphere in which he has been made to live, and in turn to which he has contributed, has become increasingly ugly.

On January 12, the terms of one-third of the members of Haiti’s two-chamber parliament expired, leaving the legislative branch of the Haitian government without a sufficient quorum to officially function. As of now, no elections had been held for the seats, which remain empty, and no parliamentary elections have been scheduled, although Aristide hopes to hold them this year. Responsibility for this onset of political paralysis has been pinned on a President Aristide who is entering the second-to-last year of his second term in the presidency. He now has been placed in the uncomfortable position of choosing between unilaterally lengthening the expired terms of the now redundant legislators, or effectively ruling by decree due to the lack of a Parliament to pass legislation. Either choice would no doubt be immediately seized upon by opposition groups, such as Democratic Convergence (DC) and the newly formed Group 184, as evidence of the government’s undemocratic nature. This malevolent rhetoric is energetically echoed by the State Department, which regards President Aristide and his Lavalas party (whose members overwhelming come from the nation’s poor) as being too radical and too “populist” to merit Washington’s support, or even tolerance.

In fact, however, blame for the delay and turmoil surrounding the parliamentary election issues falls almost entirely on the ill-will of the opposition groups, which persistently have refused to nominate representatives to the provisional electoral council (CEP) that must be formed before elections can proceed. The issue of the CEP, still unsettled, can be expected to be the stumbling point for President Aristide’s recently announced intention to hold legislative elections within six months. The underlying motives of the opposition in thwarting any progress towards new elections, which is a strategy that goes back four years and has long been abetted by the IRI, are not difficult to discern. Both the Democratic Convergence—the first highly visible (although of minute membership) anti-Aristide opposition group to appear—and the more recently formed Group 184 (headed by André Apaid, Jr.) are primarily parties of the tiny Haitian elite, the same strata that controlled the country for decades under the repressive Duvalier regimes prior to the 1990 election of Aristide in the country’s first democratic ballot. The ironically named Democratic Convergence in particular has had a distinct history of being a coalition of micro-factions looking for a constituency; through most of its history it has represented no more than 8% of registered voters, according to a poll commissioned by the U.S. four years ago. The opposition’s only policy goal seems to be reconstituting the army (a notorious instrument of oppression that terrorized the nation and especially the poor for decades before it was finally dismantled by President Aristide in 1995). They also back the implementation of rigorous structural adjustment programs in line with the now widely discredited Washington consensus, which would slash already meager government services, drive real wages down and further impoverish the vast majority of Haitians.

Not surprisingly, this platform has won the opposition little popular support even at this late date. A U.S.-commissioned poll in 2000 found that the Democratic Convergence leadership had only a 4% credibility rating, while a mere 8% of the local population named Convergence as the party with which they most sympathized. Clearly, the opposition’s prospects for a victory at the ballot box are slim if not nonexistent; hence they have embraced a strategy of perpetual delays, hoping that the resulting volatile political stalemate together with Washington’s policy of isolation and the economic asphyxiation will sufficiently debilitate Aristide’s rule that he will be brought down by growing defections among his one-time supporters.

(To be continued)