We present this week and next large extracts of an analysis by Jessica Leight, a research fellow with the Washington, DC-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs, that was issued June 15. It lays out the farcical yet dangerous nature of the de facto Haitian government, the criminal past of the formerly Dominican Republic-based “rebels,” and Washington’s failed efforts to legitimize and conceal its role in the Feb. 29 overthrow of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Kidnapping by Any Other Name. . .
On June 20, a U.N. peacekeeping force will take over day-to-day command authority in a battered Haiti, which continues to limp from crisis to crisis four months after February’s abrupt and violent “regime change.” Yet ever since the sudden replacement of former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in the early morning hours of Feb. 29 and the simultaneous arrival of a contingent of U.S. Marines in this war-torn country for the second time in ten years, Western political leaders, veteran journalists, and most members of Congress and opinion-makers in Washington and across the hemisphere have demonstrated a notable lack of curiosity about the real story behind how Aristide lost his presidency, an event that there is good reason to believe represented the thirty-third coup in Haiti’s bitter history. While the U.S.-backed politicians now running Haiti — a mix of unsuitable technocrats like Prime Minister Gerard Latortue and lethal ideologues like Minister of Justice Bernard Gousse — promise an era of disciplined, apolitical technocracy, they in fact spend perhaps most of their time attempting to besmirch Aristide... Yet the situation changed on June 8, when the Organization of American States — a normally rather moribund organization that under outgoing Secretary-General Cesar Gaviria has become little better than a regional policy-making appendage of the State Department — approved a resolution calling for an investigation into the circumstances of former President Aristide’s departure. This initiative was passed despite the Bush administration’s incessant admonitions that political recriminations should be avoided in order to prioritize rebuilding Haiti’s democratic institutions, a declaration that blatantly ignores the fact that it is exactly those institutions that the recent coup had helped to destroy. Thus it seems that the last word about this year’s events in Haiti have yet to be written. On the contrary, Washington’s overweening role in the uprising that ousted Aristide, as well as its obvious bias in favor of the Haitian political opposition movements Democratic Convergence and Group 184 (which had long heatedly called for such an ouster) may yet emerge as one of the more shocking examples of U.S. interference in the internal politics of a hemispheric nation over the last half-century.

Rebels With a Shady Past
Questions about the deplorable human rights record of the rebels who helped overthrow Aristide, many of whom have been enthusiastically embraced by the current government as “freedom fighters,” have been swept aside as unnecessary “dwelling on the past,” and there has been shockingly little investigation of repeated reports of political murders and massacres of mainly pro-Aristide militants and members of his Lavalas party under the aegis of the present U.S.-installed government led by business consultant and Boca Raton resident Latortue. At the same time, it seemed that no representative of the international community, save the CARICOM nations (led by Jamaica) and several African nations led by South Africa, dared to suggest that the transfer of power to a prime minister essentially handpicked by the U.S. embassy and the State Department is a demonstrably less than democratic process...

Aristide Cries Foul
Having found permanent asylum in South Africa after brief sojourns in the Central African Republic and Jamaica — a trip that engendered stern criticism from the U.S. and led to the new Haitian government suspending relations with Kingston in a fit of pique — deposed president Aristide continues to assert that U.S. military personnel and embassy officials played an improper, if not overtly coercive, role in his abrupt departure from Haiti in the early hours of Feb. 29. Aristide has claimed that on that morning he expected to be escorted either to the National Palace or to the U.S. Embassy to meet with journalists following discussions with U.S. Ambassador James Foley, who had become notorious for his manipulative tactics towards the Haitian president over the months preceding his ouster. Instead, he was brought to the airport and herded aboard a U.S.-chartered aircraft, allegedly without his knowledge or consent. The plane was presumably reserved by the embassy hours, if not days, before as part of the pre-planning to get Aristide out of the country on the pretext that Washington could not ensure his safety.

Upon arriving at the airport, Aristide found himself surrounded by U.S. soldiers and without his private security force, contracted from an American company, which had been instructed to withdraw by U.S. officials in no uncertain terms. Though the former president admits that he did not physically resist boarding the plane, the destination of which remained unknown to him until he landed in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, he maintains that an overwhelming presence of armed U.S. personnel amounted to a clear effort on the part of the Bush administration to intimidate him into resignation and flight. Aristide continues to assert that he would not have yielded his office without a struggle had it not been for Washington’s plenary role in scripting what was to happen in Haiti on an almost hourly basis. Most recently, he has filed lawsuits against unnamed French and U.S. officials for “threats, death threats, abduction and illegal detention.”

U.S. Denies Aristide’s Charges
The White House, needless to say, has scoffed at these accusations, with an unnamed senior administration official telling the press that “In his letter of resignation, Mr. Aristide noted that his departure was based on a desire to avoid bloodshed in Haiti . . .Continuing false claims about his resignation and departure embolden the armed gangs that Aristide himself armed and unleashed in Haiti.” Needless to say, the State Department has not commented on the subsequent statement by the renowned Creole linguist [and the State Department’s official Creole translator- Ed.] that translated Aristide’s statement, suggesting that he did not in fact officially resign, and the question still remains whether the former president’s “resignation” was drafted by the U.S. embassy or the State Department or if it was his own words.

It is clear that the administration has attempted to avoid any damaging revelations on its own role in Aristide’s demise by engaging in the same campaign of “character assassination” that it has waged against the domestic critics of its foreign policies. But these diversionary tactics should not be allowed to obscure the explosive nature of Aristide’s accusations: namely, that the U.S. government joined with Haiti’s richest businessmen in the Group 184 in an alliance to oust the elected government, as well as silently watched several hundred unsavory thugs and former paramilitaries rampage through the Haitian countryside as they headed for Port-au-Prince without attempting in any way to prevent the ouster of the third democratically elected president in Haiti’s history...

There remains a pressing need for a comprehensive and aggressive investigation into U.S. involvement in Haiti over the past four years, modeled after the Iran-contra hearings in the late 1980s, which could call for punitive action against State Department officials, either in Washington or in Port-au-Prince, found to have played an improper role in the forced removal of Aristide from office. Congressional advocates of a less aggressive and more nuanced U.S. policy towards Latin America and especially Haiti — which has suffered under a lengthy stream of U.S.-backed dictators and periodic occupations over the past two hundred years — should step up the volume of their calls for a full accounting of Aristide’s alleged kidnapping.

In addition, presumed Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry would do well to return to his earlier sharp criticisms of the Bush administration’s Haiti policy (which was followed with a later dismissive attack on Aristide) with a similar call for an investigation, both in his capacity as the presumptive presidential candidate and as a long-standing member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...

In League with Murderers
While Aristide crosses the globe to his new home in South Africa, his supporters remaining in Haiti — which likely would constitute a majority in any fair election, especially among the poor, both rural and urban — continue to be targets of widespread political murders and arrests at the hands of the erstwhile rebels. Many of the rebels are former members of the Haitian army and the CIA-created paramilitary group FRAPH (Revolutionary Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti) that terrorized Aristide’s supporters in the slums in the aftermath of the first coup against him, which then installed a military regime that ruled from 1991 to 1994. Other allegations regarding the victimization of Aristide supporters — including arbitrary arrests and political assassinations in the capital, and the reported imprisonment of some 20 Aristide supporters in a container in Cap-Haïtien before they were allegedly dumped in the sea — cannot be confirmed, due to the absence of an independent media, a functioning justice system or international human rights observers in a country now ruled by technocrats gone sour.

It is obvious, however, that the prevention of human rights abuses and the prosecution of their perpetrators is far from being a priority of the current government, a fact made abundantly clear on Mar. 20, when newly installed Prime Minister Latortue made a visit to Gonaïves, his home town and the city where the recent anti-Aristide rebellion began. There, he hailed the rebels (who had earlier been described by Secretary of State Powell as a gang of thugs) as “freedom fighters” and called for a moment of silence for all those who “fell fighting against the dictatorship” — while standing on the stage with two convicted criminals. The first was Jean-Pierre Baptiste, also known as Jean Tatoune, who was freed from prison in a jailbreak last year after being sentenced to a life term for his participation in the 1994 Raboteau massacre, in which a number of Aristide supporters in a Gonaïves slum were killed by FRAPH and military thugs.

The second was Louis-Jodel Chamblain, who was convicted in absentia of the 1993 murder of a beloved pro-Aristide businessman and philanthropist, Antoine Izméry. Izméry was attending a memorial service in a Port-au-Prince church [...], when he was dragged out of the church by soldiers and shot execution-style in the street outside the church. Chamblain subsequently went into exile in the neighboring Dominican Republic, from which he returned early this year to help lead the rebellion against the Aristide government.

On April 22, Chamblain turned himself in to the police in Port-au-Prince in an elaborate charade of heroism and sacrifice [see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 22, No. 7, 4/27/2004]; before walking to the prison, he stated at a press conference that he was sacrificing himself “so that Haiti can have a chance for the real democracy I have been fighting for,” and he was escorted by the omnipresent Justice Minister Bernard Gousse, who bizarrely called the decision “a good and noble one” — perhaps not the phrase that would immediately spring to mind to describe a convicted murderer who agreed to return to jail. It is virtually impossible to imagine any U.S. parallel to such a script. However, Baptiste, rebel leader Guy Philippe, who fled to the Dominican Republic in 2000 after helping to plan an attack on the National Palace in an attempted coup, and scores of other known human rights violators or convicted criminals remain at large, having been earlier freed by their rebel confederates, who resorted to massive jailbreaks to spring them.

Gousse: Haiti’s John Ashcroft
Gousse’s deplorable behavior in the case of Chamblain’s elaborate self-confession is but one of many attacks on habeas corpus and the rule of law that reveal him to be more of a John Ashcroft-type justice minister than a prudent figure of public rectitude. Gousse has long been known as a nasty far-right ideologue, and his selection to his post as an anti-Aristide gun-slinger by Latortue reflects poorly on the reckless and amateur nature of the prime minister’s rule. While he has asserted that, “There is a plan to bring to justice everyone who has broken the law,” there has as yet been no evidence of the existence of any such plan, at least as it regards rebel leaders and other visceral opponents of the Aristide government. On the contrary, he has indicated in other interviews with the international press that his office does not intend to pursue criminal prosecutions against rebel leaders, a rather alarming assertion that he immediately attempted to soften by offering as an afterthought the assurance that all human rights charges lodged by citizens would be investigated. (As a side note, he noted that since no complaints had been filed against Philippe, there could be no criminal charges brought against him.)

Yet despite his sympathetic treatment of known criminals, Gousse is happy to trumpet his personal vendetta against those who were allied with the democratically-elected president of Haiti and his relentless diligence in pursuing charges against the former president on grounds of the latter’s alleged embezzlement, corruption and misuse of power. He has asserted more than once that, “It’s too early to say that tomorrow I will ask for his extradition, but we will build a case.” Accusations have circulated widely among Haitian governmental officials that the former Aristide government looted Haiti’s already meager public treasury. The interim finance minister, prominent Haitian economist Henri Bazin, stated that upon assuming his position, he found less than a month’s foreign reserves in the Central Bank and an immediate government deficit of $100 million. In fact, this figure was more than the U.S.-coddled military junta left in the treasury when it was forced to out by a belated U.S. intervention in 1994. Other officials of the Aristide government have been prevented from leaving the country as the current administration pursues criminal cases against them, and former interior minister Jocelerme Privert already has been jailed on accusations of corruption and political violence, on the basis of questionable supporting evidence.

Given increasing evidence of serious misconduct and corruption at some levels of the former government, it is essential that investigations of possible criminal actions should be pursued and those responsible prosecuted (though it is important to note that as of yet, the Latortue government has not presented any evidence directly implicating Aristide in any wrongdoing.) At the same time, the blatant partisanship obvious in the skewed version of justice being propounded by Latortue and Gousse, in which already convicted criminals and other figures notorious for past human rights abusers freely walk the streets while the Justice Ministry pours its scarce funds and manpower into investigating supposed crimes of officials of the Aristide administration, adds up to a serious blow to the credibility and ostensible neutrality of the interim government...

“Technocracy” a Mask for Partisan Bias
Any reasonably well-informed observer of Haitian affairs must by now have rejected the claim often repeated by U.S. and U.N. officials that the Latortue government is simply an assemblage of nonpartisan technocrats, working to provide competent administration and good governance in this period of transition until new elections are held. According to U.N. Special Envoy Reginald Dumas, whose own bias against Aristide is one of the real scandals of the Haitian intervention, this period is likely to be at least 18 months. While the appointment of Alix Baptiste, who held an administrative post in the Foreign Ministry under Aristide, as secretary of state for Haitians living abroad, has been noted as an exception to Latortue’s nonpartisanship, far less attention has been paid to several other glaring violations of the government’s supposed neutrality: Foreign Affairs Minister Yvon Siméon previously had served as the Democratic Convergence representative in Europe and Minister of Justice Bernard Gousse has been described by Radio Metropole as an active member of Group 184. The obviously anti-Aristide affiliations of these key government officials suggest that far from being merely a caretaker government of administrators, the Latortue administration is the dream team of the Haitian opposition parties, endorsed (and virtually hand-picked) by Washington to sweep away all vestiges of the Aristide-ism and turn the country in a more conservative, and decidedly more pro-U.S., direction — even though there is no constitutional sanction whatsoever for this project. Washington has used the expulsion of the Haitian president as an excuse to hijack the country’s political system...

Occupation Troops Attack Home of Lavalas Mayor

French troops led an attack by U.N. “peace-keeping” forces this week on the home of Jean Charles Moïse, the elected mayor of the northern town of Milot, according to the Haiti Action Committee (HAC) and Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN).

According to a press release put out by the two groups, the foreign troops raided Moïse’s home at about 4:00 a.m. on June 14. Not finding the mayor, the troops arrested his wife and possibly other adults.

Moïse’s home was “ransacked and damaged,” according to the groups, and his children left without either parent. The raid violated Haiti’s constitution, which says that arrests must be performed between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. and in the presence of a justice of the peace.

Moïse is a prominent and outspoken leader of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s Lavalas Family party, who led efforts in Haiti’s north to thwart the Washington-backed opposition’s destabilization campaign leading up to the Feb. 29 “coup-napping” of Aristide.

He is the second prominent Lavalas leader to be targetted by occupation troops in an illegal night-time raid. On May 10, U.S. Marines arrested Lavalas popular organizer and singer Annette “So Ann” Auguste with family members, including a 5-year-old grandson, and trashed her home (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 22, No. 9, 5/12/2004).

“We have people like myself, mayors and other members of the municipal government who have had to flee and are now sleeping in the woods, and have gone to the mountains,” Moïse explained in an interview with Pacific News Service, published March 14. “We have church members and priests who have been beaten and whose cars have been destroyed. These people are also in hiding. We could never have imagined that we would be going back to this situation that existed before. It is intolerable.” “Since this whole thing started, I haven’t seen my wife and my children,” he continued. “I have been in hiding. This cannot continue. This is a catastrophe for the north of Haiti and all the people of Haiti.”

The HAC and HLLN are calling on people to “demand the release of the Mayor’s wife, due compensation for the ransacked and destroyed home, and a stop to this seemingly systematic witch-hunt for only Lavalas officials in Haiti and abroad.” Readers can protest the illegal June 14 raid and arrest by calling, writing or sending email to the following people: Kofi Annan
Secretary General
United Nations
New York, NY USA
inquiries@un.org

Ambassador James B. Foley
U.S. Embassy, Port-au-Prince, Haiti
phone: 509.223.7011 or 509.222.0200
fax: 509.223.9665
email: acspap@state.gov

Colin Powell, U.S. Secretary of State
fax: 202.647.2283 or 202.647.5169
phone: 202.647.5291 or 202.647.7098
email via: http://contact-us.state.gov/ask_form_cat/ask_form_secretary.html

Haiti Desk, U.S. State Department:
phone: 202.647.5088
fax: 202.647.2901

Officers:
Joseph Tilghman
email: tilghmanjf@state.gov

Lawrence Connell
email: ConnellLF@state.gov

Vincent Mayer
email: MayerVf@state.gov