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

by Jessica Leight
Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA)

(The second of two installments)

In last week’s installment, Leight thumbnailed how “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.” She enumerated examples of the Haitian opposition’s “obstructionism” and “lack of good faith,” concluding that “the opposition’s prospects for a victory at the ballot box are slim if not nonexistent,” hence their “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.” This is an abridged version of a COHA memorandum issued Jan. 15.

At this point the opposition’s hope is that the country can be destabilized to where the current government will be unable to serve out its mandated term through 2005.

This script does not markedly differ from the events of 1991, when President Aristide was ousted only nine months after his first inauguration in a coup that ushered in three years of brutal military rule, including some of the worst political violence in the country’s history. The opposition’s adamant refusal to enter into a new round of elections raises, for the majority of the population, the specter of a return to a cycle of coup d’états and brutal political repression in the aftermath of a prospective Aristide downfall, a fear that heightens the level of political tension now seizing the country and creates a situation ripe for violence. The opposition’s demand that Aristide must resign if elections are to take place represents pure bluff on its part, as well as a recognition that, even under the current grim circumstances of Haiti’s poor conditions and Aristide’s fading popularity, it does not have a prayer of a chance to win a free and fair election.

The Security Bugaboo

Needless to say, opposition leaders present a very different story line to justify their continuing refusal to go through the procedures and allow elections to take place, arguing that the current climate of “insecurity” is not conducive to free and fair voting, even though the Haitian president has agreed to every conceivable reform that was possible to undo the perceived flaws of the disputed legislative election of May 2000. The opposition’s argument, which in general has been unaccountably well-received by the foreign press and U.S. backers of the opposition, can be traced back to the provisions of OAS resolution 822. That resolution, passed after the presidential elections of November 2000, called on the Aristide government to restore a climate of security as a condition for breaking the political stalemate. Obviously, such a condition is hardly a quantifiable concept, and the OAS initiative offered no more concrete guidelines on how this might be met.

It also should be noted that “security” depends upon a professional police force and a credible judiciary, which in fact were supposed to result from the training provided by U.S. and Canadian specialists after U.S.-led forces had intervened in 1994 and restored Aristide to office in Haiti, after his bitter three-year exile in Washington. During that period, the Clinton administration, through the efforts of special envoy Larry Pezzullo, attempted to push Aristide into coalition with the Haitian ruling military junta because it feared the Haitian leader’s radical political credo. Eventually, the Congressional Black Caucus was instrumental in persuading President Clinton to dismiss Pezzullo for his hounding of the Haitian president.

The fact that these specialists and trainers were prematurely withdrawn by their governments from Haiti provides much of the explanation for many of the problems that the island faces today. Moreover, it should be recalled that the Clinton White House deliberately defined a narrow role for the U.S. forces occupying Haiti in 1994, which prevented them from disarming the forces of the former military junta or taking significant steps to improve security in rural Haiti. Thus, the newly installed Haitian government lead by Aristide was left to face a difficult security situation with thousands of weapons hidden by his opponents throughout the island and with very limited resources, along with disaffected former military leaders lurking in the Dominican Republic waiting for the opportunity to return and seek revenge.

What has ensued has been an endless political game with perpetually shifting goalposts: no step taken by the Aristide government to improve policing has been judged sufficient, and every incident of violence, regardless of the identity of the perpetrators or the particulars of the case, is cited as further evidence of the persistence of a climate of insecurity authored by the Aristide camp that justifies the postponement of elections. This postponement has heightened political tensions and makes violence ever more likely, thus underscoring the bankruptcy of current U.S. policy towards the island.

Moreover, details surrounding civil unrest in Haiti are routinely distorted so as to place the Aristide government, the national police and pro-Lavalas supporters in the worst possible light. For example, much was made in the foreign press of events surrounding a violent incident on December 5, when pro-Lavalas supporters purportedly attacked pro-opposition university students holding a demonstration inside their university. However, members of the Haitian Student Collective, a highly regarded pro-Aristide student organization, has asserted that the demonstration in question began when 50 armed men—not students—entered university facilities and then began to taunt Lavalas supporters standing outside, seriously injuring one with a rock fired by a slingshot. In the subsequent melee, student bystanders tragically paid a heavy price for the opposition’s provocations. Moreover, it is widely believed in Haiti that at least some of the students who have participated in anti-Aristide protests, such as in the march in Port-au-Prince on January 12, had been openly bribed by the opposition with money or promises of trips abroad. Yet evidence of complicity of the opposition in the violence, as well as the meager following of Group 184 (reputedly in the low hundreds) has received little to no attention from either the U.S. media or State Department policymakers, who prefer to repeat the patent cop out of “security concerns” as the justification for their policies of promoting a cordon sanitaire around Aristide and his supporters.

The Bush administration’s failure to openly condemn the unyielding intransigency of the opposition—which has closely aligned itself since its founding with such questionable U.S. rightwing institutions as the International Republican Institute—forms only part of a long-running campaign, funded by U.S. taxpayers via the National Endowment for Democracy (which in turn funds the IRI) to undermine the legitimacy of Aristide’s leadership at every turn. This policy has culminated in the imposition of a de facto embargo on aid to the Haitian government which now has been in place since 2000, and which is defended by repeated, if vague, accusations of government corruption and mismanagement. These charges seem less than credible given that Haiti has received substantial funding from multilateral organizations with extremely rigorous management criteria, most notably the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. However, the U.S. unilaterally-imposed a block on $193 million in loans to Haiti that had been approved by the Inter-American Development Bank for education, health, roads and water, which finally may be disbursed this year, four years late. In addition, the U.S. continues to refuse to give bilateral aid to the Aristide government—an interesting contrast to Washington’s long-standing and generous support of the previous Duvalier dictatorship — while insisting on funneling its relatively meager aid contributions through non-governmental organizations.

A Troubling Record

This U.S. policy has had the predictable effect of further weakening cash-strapped Port-au-Prince and limiting its ability to provide desperately needed public services to its population, including basic education, a public health care system, and improved access to potable water. This also has meant one disappointment after another for the long-suffering Haitian population. As well, it also has prevented the Aristide government from further expanding the training and professionalization of its 4,000-member police force, on which the heavy burden falls of maintaining a much-vaunted “climate of security.” The supposed politicization of the police has been a frequent target of State Department criticism, and, Washington’s criticism’s aside, it certainly cannot be doubted that improvements are needed here. Yet, given that Haiti’s entire governmental budget amounts to less than three hundred million dollars a year for a population of nearly eight million, it is far from surprising that Haitian authorities have been unable to make significant progress in the professionalization of the police force while at the same time facing a host of other competing and equally urgent priorities.

Washington’s Inglorious History

In addition, it is worth comparing the series of U.S. accusations of police brutality and human rights’ abuses tolerated by the Aristide government to the history of Washington’s relations with some of the country’s most notorious murderers, as well as its current use of such concerns to manipulate Haiti’s political environment. For example, in 2001, the Aristide government detained former dictator General Prosper Avril, who had been guilty of a number of appalling human rights abuses during his regime from 1988-90. At the time, this move was viewed as a significant advance in dealing with the human rights situation in Haiti. Astonishingly enough, the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince — which for years, and through a succession of ambassadors, has seen itself as the island’s pro-consul, with the right to bark out orders to the national palace — continues to deem Avril a “political prisoner” and has issued calls for his release, despite the fact that it has been reliably established that Avril had served as a CIA asset while in the Haitian military.

At the same time, Emmanuel Constant, head of the notorious FRAPH militia during the period of military rule, and to whom President Clinton once referred to as “a thug,” remains a resident of Queens, New York, where he freely walks the streets. He is protected from prosecution back in Haiti by his former employer, the CIA (which he acknowledged during an interview on CBS “Sixty Minutes”), despite his conviction in Haitian courts and a deportation order from the INS, and the fact that he was responsible, as FRAPH’s commander, for the murder of at least 3,000 Haitians. And Washington’s lame excuse for not extraditing him? U.S. authorities maintain that the U.S.-trained Haitian court system is not equipped to afford him a fair trial. Set against this tawdry script, the abuses of the police force under President Aristide seem minor indeed. It is brazen hypocrisy on the part of the Bush administration to call for improvements in the security forces in Haiti at the same time that it systematically freezes the aid needed to make such reforms possible.

U.S. Policy: The Undoing of a Democratic Society

Ultimately, Washington’s current policy towards the Aristide government amounts to an elaborately contrived and admittedly lethal, but patently self-destructive, snare. Institutionally and financially bereft of even minimal resources, Haitian authorities struggle to achieve a semblance of security in the face of increasing public unrest and political violence, which is then used by Washington to justify a continued cutoff of desperately needed aid. At the same time, the U.S. does nothing to discourage the opposition’s blatant political obstructionism and continues to blame the government for not being willing to “compromise.” The obvious conclusion is that the true goal of U.S. policy in Haiti is nothing less than the destabilization of a democratically-elected popular government, the result of a confused, illogical and destructive game plan to favor a group of Haitian in part composed of cutpurses and villainous brigands who are driven by a pathological hatred of Aristide. The irony is that many of these sociopaths are technically not even eligible to travel to the U.S. under the administration’s new policy of excluding from this country corrupt government officials. It is precisely such blatantly anti-democratic and belligerent policy that has so tarnished the U.S.’s reputation in the hemisphere in the past, and which continues to attempt to, at every turn, thwart Haiti’s struggle to survive and prosper.