Rivalries for posts and power have begun to rend the ruling class alliance that came together three years ago to successfully overturn Haiti’s constitutional government.

On one side is Haiti’s traditional bourgeoisie, the owners of retail stores, car dealerships, gas stations and assembly plants. On the other are the grandons, Haiti’s arch-reactionary big landowning class, whose power has been waning since their glory days during the Duvalier dictatorships (1957-1986). The Duvaliers’ dreaded Tonton Macoutes, an armed corps of spies, extortionists, enforcers and executioners, were the armed expression of grandon power.

These two sectors of Haiti’s ruling class have struggled between each other for state power throughout most of Haiti’s 200 year history, which largely explains the frequency of coups and foreign interventions. But when the Haitian people elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1990 and again in 2000, these two ruling groups set aside their differences and came together to oust him. The National Popular Party (PPN) called it a “Macouto-bourgeois alliance.”

Following President Aristide’s Feb. 29 kidnapping by U.S. Marines, Washington parachuted in a crew of Haitian “technocrats,” most of whom had been living abroad, to take the reins of government.

Now, recriminations are filling Haiti’s airwaves as neo-Duvalierist politicians gripe that the lead “technocrat,” de facto Prime Minister Gérard Latortue, and his mentors in Washington favor the bourgeoisie ( they do) and have largely iced the Macoutes out of power (they have).

But the Macoute sector played a key role in Aristide’s ouster. Neo-Duvalierist soldiers like Guy Philippe and FRAPH death-squad leader Jodel Chamblain led a small number of U.S. and Dominican-backed “rebels” to occupy the northern cities of Gonaïves and Cap Haïtien and create the semblance that the capital was “encircled” (it wasn’t) and that civil war loomed (it didn’t). This gave Washington the pretext to kidnap Aristide.

The “rebels” assumed they would quickly resurrect the Armed Forces of Haiti (FAdH), to which most of them had belonged and which Aristide disbanded in 1995. A new Army would provide the Macoute sector a decisive counter-weight to the bourgeoisie’s economic clout.

However, times have changed since the U.S. relied the Duvalierist military and Macoutes to keep the Haitian people in line. Now Washington and Paris prefer to use economic blackmail, debt leverage, diplomatic bluster, media demonization, and, in a worst case scenario, foreign “peace-keeping” troops to make sure that neo-colonies follow their dictates.

The neo-Duvalierist “rebels” now grouse that Washington and Paris double-crossed them and are starting to posture as super-nationalists. For example, in Gonaïves on May 18, Haiti’s flag day, the Resistance Front of Gonaïves, headed by FRAPH leader Jean “Tatoune” Pierre, transformed itself into a political party called the National Reconstruction Front (FRN), with Guy Philippe as secretary-general. Resistant Front leaders Butter Métayer and Winter Etienne are president and coordinator respectively.

Butteur Métayer called the French Foreign Legion’s occupation of Gonaïves, where Haitian independence from France was declared 200 years ago, “humiliating” and ended his speech with: “Down with the French occupation! Down with France! The foreigners must go!”

Guy Philippe was more nuanced in his protest. “We do not have a problem with the French themselves or the Americans,” he said. “It’s a question of principle. Two hundred years after Independence, it is not right that there are foreign soldiers based here on Haitian soil... Three months after Aristide’s departure, I would hope to see things changing. When we had fought and risked our life, we thought that the situation could get better. Unfortunately, we saw people who have controlled the country for 200 years call the foreigners to come defend their interests.” Philippe was talking to the bourgeoisie.

Nonetheless, Washington is doing its best to not alienate the “rebels.” U.S. helicopters flew Latortue to Gonaïves last March where he called the Philippe’s neo-Duvalierist corps “freedom fighters.” Indeed, the U.S. would like to keep Philippe and his men as a terror army in reserve should indigenous troops ever be needed. Washington is now offering to integrate former soldiers into a “reformed” National Police force after “studying their files.” But the former soldiers shun this arrangement and continue to clamor for the army’s return.

Now tensions are growing, as illustrated by an episode on May 18 in downtown Port-au-Prince. Tens of thousands marched through the capital that day to call for the return of President Aristide. A group of eight heavily-armed and camouflage-uniformed former Haitian soldiers, including the self-appointed army chief of Hinche, Joseph Jean-Baptiste, arrived in th capital to take on the demonstrators. But a patrol of U.S. Marines stopped and arrested them. They were then turned over to the Haitian Police and jailed. The following day they were ordered released, but the ex-soldiers demanded their guns back before leaving jail. “They cannot release us without our weapons,” Jean-Baptiste said.

De facto Justice Minister Bernard Gousse agreed to give some handguns back, but even this did not satisfy the ex-soldiers. Neo-Duvalierist politician Osner Févry, head of the Haitian Christian Democratic Party (PDCH), was the ex-soldiers’ lawyer. “With the complicity of the technocrats who work for them and who were set in place beforehand to be a front for their authority, the American soldiers violated all the provisions of our procedural laws protecting and guaranteeing the basic rights and the personal freedoms of these eight FAdH soldiers and of military institution itself which they have tried to dismantle,” Févry said. “Haiti and the FAdH soldiers should have the monopoly on using weapons of war, but the American soldiers of the occupation forces circulate, creating disorder and insecurity throughout the country, with their weapons of war, their armored tanks, going this time as far as arresting and disarming Haitian soldiers.”

Last week, Févry, who has already had bitter public disputes with bourgeois leader André Apaid, Jr., came out warned that the bourgeoisie would dominate and control the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) and any future elections. Latortue decreed the CEP be formed, even though Aristide’s Lavalas Family party refused to name their representative to the 9-member body.

In another example of their dismay, on May 5, the Macoute sector organized violent demonstrations to thwart the seating of technocrat-appointed Pierre Sully as the new director of the revenue-and-bribe-rich National Port Authority in Cap Haïtien, also a “rebel” stronghold.

New York:
Demonstrators Denounce
“Human Rights” Group

About 30 Haitians and their supporters gathered outside the headquarters of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights (NCHR) in Manhattan for three hours on May 21 chanting: “National Coalition: U.S. puppet ”

The demonstrators were denouncing the fact that the NCHR issued no protest over the May 10 midnight raid by U.S. Marines on the home of folksinger Annette “So Ann” Auguste (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 22, No. 9, 5/12/04). On the contrary, the organization approved of the illegal arrest and accused So Ann of being the mastermind of a violent clash between anti-Aristide university students and pro-Aristide popular organizations on Dec. 5, 2003 (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 21, No. 40, 12/17/03). She now is being held in the National Penitentiary by Haiti’s de facto authorities on the charge of fomenting violence that day and of planning an attack on U.S. occupation forces.

“NCHR is supposed to be an organization to defend human rights, but, on the contrary, it opposes peoples’ rights in Haiti,” said Gina Guerrier, a member of the Coalition to Resist the Feb. 29th Coup d’état in Haiti (CRF29) , which organized the picket. “We are here today to accuse Johnny McCalla [NCHR’s executive director] as a little brown-noser who denounces people so the coup and occupation authorities arrest them, people like So Ann.” Demonstrators also denounced the NCHR’s silence about the May 20 police harassment and intimidation of Lavalas Family senator Yvon Feuillé, who was repeatedly stopped and searched by police and accused of drug dealing.

The demonstration took place in front of 275 7th Avenue, which is owned by and houses the union Unite. Many Unite employees stopped to speak to the demonstrators and learn more about the Haitian community’s grievances against the NCHR.

There is deep resentment among the pro-Lavalas masses in Haiti and its diaspora against the NCHR, founded by a North American lawyer, Mike Hooper, in 1982 as the National Coalition for Haitian Refugees. For years it has taken positions hostile to Haiti’s popularly elected governments, particularly those of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. “The NCHR has worked for and been paid by the U.S. State Department,” said Serge Lilavois, a CRF29 leader, referring to the $250,000 which NCHR received from USAID last year. “They are always on the side of Washington against the Haitian people, using human rights violations as the excuse.”

“It’s as if they are a branch of the U.S. Marines, a branch of the French Foreign Legion,” said another demonstrator, Fito Antoine. “They never in reality defend people. They always have the same position as other lackeys and flatterers. They have a laboratory for creating lies.”

Haitians are particularly vexed about the charges the NCHR has made against the Aristide government over the years. After the 1991 coup in Haiti, the organization put out a report, used by the Bush I administration, that branded Aristide as a human rights violator. More recently, back in February, the group’s director in Haiti, Pierre Lespérance, said on a radio show that Lavalas militants and police killed 50 people in the town of St. Marc, a far-fetched charge which has never been substantiated.

But NCHR’s support for the brutal arrest and flimsy charges against So Ann have pushed community outrage to new levels. “It is a conspirator in the [Feb. 29] coup d’état, it participated in the coup d’état,” said Benito Charlemagne, another CRF29 member. “It has its hand in the kidnapping [of President Aristide]. Their position has always been to be tools of the empire. That’s why we chant ‘NCHR: Puppets.’ They are U.S. tools. They work for Washington. It is a phony human rights group which has nothing to do with the Haitian people.”