February 2005
Wednesday, 2 February 2005
Latortue
• On 1 February 2005, nearly one year after the de-facto coup against Haiti’s democratically elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, the AP reported that the Lavalas party will not participate in the local and municipal elections scheduled for October, or the legislative and presidential elections scheduled for November.
• Lavalas’ decision to not participate is a direct result of the suppression carried out against party supporters by paramilitary factions and gang leaders who get their marching orders from the Latortue government. New evidence reveals interim Haitian Prime Minister Gerard Latortue’s de-facto policy of restoring “Duvalierism without Duvalier.”
• Since the first day Washington installed him in power, Latortue has taken a fiercely adversarial position towards Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas political party. By working with the anti-Aristide opposition to extinguish Lavalas, he repudiates his claim that he is for free, fair and open elections.
• Where did Latortue obtain the funds to buy off the ex-military, and how can U.S. and Canadian taxpayers know that the funds their governments donated to the Haitian Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) will not be used as payments for military renegades?
• The ex-military and former death squads are engaging in terrorist tactics similar to those that were used by Iraqi insurgents to keep the majority from the polls. But unlike the situation in Iraq, the anti-democracy forces in Haiti have the tacit backing of the state.
Haiti’s
Latortue: Washington’s Chief Chimere
in Port -au-Prince
The Fanmi Lavalas party, which Aristide founded
as the Lavalas movement against the U.S. backed Duvalier
dictatorship, has decided not to participate in
Haiti’s upcoming elections. Its grave decision
yesterday is understandable since, in contrast to Interim
Prime Minister Gerard Latortue’s declaration that in
the upcoming elections, “this government will not
act in favor of anybody or any political candidate [nor
will it] work against any candidate who will run,”
evidence abounds of state-sponsored terror that has been
launched against residents of pro-Aristide slums, such as
Cite Soleil and Bel Air, by the ex-military and rebel
gangs.
The Council on Hemispheric Affairs repeatedly has called
attention to the Latortue government’s brutal
suppression and illegal imprisonment of Lavalas
supporters. We already knew that, according to the
Catholic Church’s Justice and Peace Commission,
there are an estimated 700 political prisoners
languishing in Haitian jails, including former Prime
Minister Yvon Neptune and former Minister of the Interior
Jocelerme Privert. The interim government even had the
audacity to imprison the country’s most revered
Catholic priest, Father Jean-Juste, though he was
recently released. We also knew that hundreds of
Haitians, mostly from Lavalas neighborhoods, have been
killed since the coup. For these reasons and many others,
the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) has refused to
recognize the Latortue regime. But now, new evidence
mounts in support of the claim that Latortue and his
rogue justice minister, Bernard Gousse, are engaged in an
all-out-war against Haiti’s poor, who make up the
vast majority of the population and who overwhelmingly
support Aristide.
It’s
worse than we thought
The University of Miami School of Law Center for
the Study of Human Rights has recently published findings
from the investigation it carried out in Haiti last
November. The inquiry, led by attorney and former law
enforcement official, Thomas M. Griffin, included
interviews with government leaders, U.S. embassy
personnel in Port-au-Prince, U.N. peacekeepers, political
prisoners, human rights organizations, and both pro and
anti-Aristide groups, among others (for the full report
go to http://www.law.miami.edu/news/368.html). In graphic
detail, the document presents some of the strongest
evidence yet against Latortue’s mendacious claims
that he is a neutral leader with no political agenda and
that most of the violence is the fault of
Lavalas-inspired groups and individuals. While it does
not present any evidence that Latortue himself has
directly ordered the almost systematic execution-style
killings of pro-Aristide loyalists across the country,
the report does paint a blood soaked picture of the
interim prime minister as Washington’s ultra right
wing servitor and the behind-the-scenes architect of the
ongoing suppression of the poor. It documents the
Latortue government’s complicity in summary
executions in urban poor neighborhoods by the ex-military
(Forces Armees d’ Haiti, or
“FADH”), which often works in conjunction with
the Haitian National Police force (HNP). According to the
University of Miami report, “even well-meaning
officers treat poor neighborhoods seeking a democratic
voice as enemy territory where they must kill or be
killed.” It goes on to state that “As voices
for non-violent change are silenced by arrest,
assassination, or fear, violent defense becomes a
credible option.”
Griffin’s team learned from local residents that, far from the state serving as an impartial arbiter in the country’s bitter political dispute, the Latortue government looks the other way while “members of Haiti’s elite, including political power broker Andy Apaid, pay gangs to kill Lavalas supporters and finance the illegal army.” Even if Latortue wanted to get serious about the security situation which, as reported by The New York Times reporter Michael Kamber, he apparently does not, sources told the Miami investigators that sweatshop king Andy Apaid, not Latortue or Gousse, is “the real government in Haiti.” In an interview with the Miami researchers, Apaid even admitted to telling the HNP to “work with” gang leader Thomas Robinson, a.k.a. ‘Labanye,’ who is reported to have received payment from Apaid in order “to destroy the Lavalas movement in Cite Soleil through violence.” Latortue’s tacit approval of this state-sponsored terrorism foreshadowed the interim government’s plan to make it all but impossible for Lavalas supporters to exercise any kind of meaningful participation in the elections. Justifying Lavalas’ recent decision to not participate, Marguerite Laurent, founder of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership network, stated in an interview with COHA, “the whole purpose of bringing back the soldiers is to prevent the people from going to the polls, to prevent a freely elected president from taking office.”
Latortue:
certainly “not another Castro”
Former U.S. Ambassador to Haiti, Brian Dean
Curran, in his final address to the island before
returning to the U.S. – one eerily reminiscent in
tone to Eisenhower’s portentous farewell address of
1961 – warned the Haitian people: “I have
always talked straight about US policy and what might and
might not be new policy directions. But there were many
in Haiti who preferred not to listen to me, the
president’s representative, but to their own friends
in Washington, sirens of extremism or revanchism on the
one hand or apologists on the other. They don’t hold
official positions. I call them the chimeres of
Washington.”
Invoking the ambassador’s warning in his congressional testimony in the days following last year’s coup, Professor Robert Maguire, Director of International Affairs and the Haiti Program at Trinity University in Washington, D.C., counseled the House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere that, “it is of great necessity that the chimeres of Washington be removed from any real or perceived role in the future of U.S. policy toward Haiti.” To the grave detriment of the Haitian people, the Bush administration has embraced the counsel of just those chimeres, loosely defined as anyone with sufficiently virulent anti-Aristide boda fides.
That Latortue and Gousse are fervently anti-Lavalas is beyond dispute. Before the ouster of Aristide last February, they had been consultants to the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), which worked with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Haiti. The chairman of IFES, William J. Hybl, is also a board member of the International Republican Institute (IRI) which, in turn, is funded by the congressionally-mandated National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The NED, an organization initiated during the Reagan era, is known for providing back-door funding to notorious right wing causes throughout the hemisphere. Not surprisingly, according to a footnote in Griffin’s report, witnesses in Haiti reported Hybl as “extremely close with Vice President Cheney.” The IRI and NED’s longstanding odium for Aristide is established, and it should only be expected that Latortue, with his intimate knowledge of and sympathy for these organizations’ revanchistic worldview, would be selected by the Bush administration to head the post-Aristide government.
Silence is
Golden
What is surprising, however, is the extent to
which the Bush administration has failed to criticize
Latortue’s culpability in the explosion of human
rights abuses perpetrated against Lavalas supporters
since last February’s de-facto coup. One glaring
example was its failure to admonish Latortue for agreeing
to the extortionist demands of former members of the
army, who had been disbanded by Aristide in 1995, for a
payoff. The public silence the State Department has
maintained on the issue is all but deafening. When a
State Department official was asked about the
administration’s position regarding the payoffs to
these notorious ex-military personnel, he said that the
reimbursement question “is a legitimate issue that
must be resolved, but in the larger context of the
demobilization and disarmament program.” He went on
to say, “The Haitian government should follow the
list of those who were deserving of a pension and various
savings accounts.” The U.S. official maintained that
in any event Aristide’s disbanding of the
ex-military in 1995 was illegal since the Haitian
legislature never ratified the decision. Of course, the
point could be argued whether the granting of payoffs
were legal since Latortue’s unilateral decision did
not have the consent of the legislature either, perhaps
because the U.S. had the legislature shut down.
Even if the soldiers had been legally entitled to a pension pay, the five to six thousand innocent Haitian civilians, whom many of those same soldiers murdered under the military dictatorship of Raoul Cedras, should be factored into this equation. Many of these former members of the FADH are guilty not only of overthrowing the democratically elected Lavalas government in 1991, but also of the thousands of war crimes and egregious human rights violations carried out during the Cedras dictatorship, of which the Raboteau massacre in April of 1994 was only one of many. When the highly regarded Brian Concannon, Director of the US-based Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, was asked why the US has been so reticent to condemn the military payoffs and the violence carried out against pro-Lavalas neighborhoods, he replied, “Their plan [IRI, NED, USAID], going back to 1987, has always been to make sure another Aristide is not elected. They will employ any means necessary to achieve this.” He continued, “it’s all part of the same policy. The Bush administration supported these guys [the ex-soldiers] when they were in the Dominican Republic and it still supports them now.”
When Past is
Prologue
What is being seen in Haiti today is the
re-establishment of the symbiotic relationship between
the ex-military, national police and their joint death
squads. Indeed, one of the main reasons Aristide
dismissed the army, whose raison d’etre
throughout Haitian history has been to foment coups and
squash dissent, was to break up that trinity of terror.
By, in effect, bribing the ex-soldiers to come back into
the fold of Haitian civil society and hinting that he
might incorporate many of these gangsters, whom he
outrageously had earlier referred to as “freedom
fighters,” into the HNP, Latortue is setting the
stage for another round of violence against ordinary
Haitian civilians. But although he has now accomplished
his Washington-backed goal of extirpating Haiti’s
majority party from the polls, he will still likely seek
their participation – in some form – in order
to stamp an imprimatur of legitimacy over the elections
which, barring a spectacular change in the security
situation and Lavalas’ participation, will be a
complete fraud.
Some, such as James Morrell, executive director of the anti-Aristide Haiti Democracy Project in Washington, argue that Lavalas supporters should still go to the polls: “If a decent election can be held, their [Lavalas’] political stock will fall greatly by nonparticipation. Nonparticipation makes sense only if Lavalas is no more than a personal vehicle for Aristide.” However, Professor Maguire noted that although the elections present Lavalas with the unique opportunity “to maintain its cohesion independently of Aristide, the current insecurity that is found throughout the country makes this challenge even more difficult.” Regarding the security issue, Concannon takes Maguire’s point a step further and, in defense of Lavalas’ decision, argues that, “in this situation it would be suicidal for Lavalas to participate in the elections. The reason they are threatening to not participate is because that’s the only bargaining chip they have.”
Is there no
Exit?
In order for free elections to occur, Latortue
and Gousse must halt the state-sanctioned violence
carried out against the poor and cease any further
payments to the ex-soldiers. Reimbursing the ex-military,
which DeWayne Wickham of USA Today described as
a “thinly veiled blackmail payment” that
effectively shored up the ex-army as the island’s
“shadow government,” only fuels Haiti’s
seemingly endemic cycle of political violence.
Speculating on how the Bush administration may view
Latortue’s payments to the former FADH, Maguire
said, “Perhaps they view it as a way of putting the
army out of business once and for all. After all, once
they hand out the pensions, there’s nothing left to
pay.” This could be true, given that the soldiers
are being paid what amounts to a gold mine by Haitian
standards ($5,000 U.S. per soldier), but the problem is
that there is no specific quid pro quo for the payments;
the FADH’s hidden guns are not being collected in
exchange for the checks. What this amounts to, then, is
not just the de-facto re-introduction of the dreaded FADH
but a refurbished, enriched and still armed FADH, free to
use its newfound wealth to consolidate its potential role
in post-Aristide Haitian civil society.
Where does
all the Money go?
Of particular interest to U.S. taxpayers should be the
$15 million the Bush administration has delegated to the
Haitian Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) in order to,
in the words of a U.S. State Department press release,
“organize, conduct, and monitor elections.” But
the following queries need to be pressed regarding this
issue. Who will be monitoring these elections? Will the
monitors answer to the Latortue government or to a
separate, independent council? How much control – if
any – will Special Representative of the UN
Secretary-General for Haiti, Juan Gabriel Valdes, have
over these funds? What steps will be taken to ensure that
the global total of $41 million donated to the CEP under
the leadership of its president, Max Maturin, will not
wind up in the hands of the ex-military or any of the
rapacious political factions, particularly the
Latortue-backed anti-Aristide groups like the Democratic
Convergence and Group of 184? So far, only fourteen U.S.
Congresspersons, led by Rep. Maxine Waters, have
requested that the administration make sure that “no
U.S. foreign assistance funds or other U.S. government
funds are diverted as use as payments to [the
ex-military].” In Rep. Waters’ request to the
administration, she was only referring to the funds
Latortue has doled out to the former FADH, but these
inquiries must be extended to demanding how all the funds
collected by the CEP will be disbursed and accounted for.
The Canada Connection
Regarding funds given to the interim government, Canadian
citizens should also be asking these same questions.
Along with France – perhaps also motivated by some
desire to make amends with Washington over Iraq –
Canada almost mechanically has followed the U.S. lead in
supporting Aristide’s removal from the beginning. A
year before the coup in January 2003, at what became
termed “the Ottawa initiative on Haiti,” then
Canadian Secretary of State for Latin America, Africa,
and the French-speaking World, Denis Paradis, met with
French and U.S. State Department officials to discuss how
to go about removing Aristide. In an interview with
CBC’s, “The Current,” Michael Vastel, who
first wrote about the Ottawa meeting in the March 15,
2003 issue of the Canadian magazine L'Actualité,
stated: “[The meeting] lasted three days over an
extended weekend. Once again, all information that I'm
giving you is coming from Paradis and from the French
government. There was a consensus that 'Aristide should
go.' But, how do you do that? This is the French
government...who suggested there should be a trusteeship
like there was in Kosovo.” Now that the agenda set
forth at Ottawa (which should be called ‘destroying
democracy in order to save it’) has succeeded,
Canadians should be asking their government, which has
donated $14 million to the upcoming elections, what the
foreign office is doing to make sure Canadian funds
don’t end up paying the ex-military and others paid
to murder Lavalas supporters.
Of utmost importance to the three architects of
Aristide’s ouster – the U.S., Canada and France
– is the moral imperative to not allow Latortue to
disburse these funds willy nilly. For what is needed in
Haiti today is not a primarily Anglo-funded and
re-constituted FADH, nor an HNP beholden to any faction
– as it clearly is now – but a fully
professional police force led by a civilian
chain-of-command. Oscar Arias, former president of Costa
Rica and 1987 Nobel Peace laureate, couldn’t have
phrased the issue better when he stated, “The
abolition of the army makes as much sense today as it did
in 1995. The Haitian people still need their government
to spend its precious few resources on fighting poverty,
not buying arms. They need a professional, depoliticized
police force to maintain order, not an army that attacks
its own people with impunity.”
Washington’s
Chimeres are
back to Work
Unfortunately the UN peacekeeping force,
MINUSTAH, seems determined to ignore this advice. It has
rarely confronted gang leaders and has even performed the
bidding of Latortue by aiding and abetting the HNP and
rebel gangs in their raids against pro-Lavalas slums.
MINUSTAH’s lack of will has been manifest in the
words of its commander, Brazilian General Augusto Heleno,
who has said, in words that echo the UN’s impotence
in Rwanda, “I command a peacekeeping force, not an
occupation force.” Of course, one could retort,
since there is no peace to keep, why not force an
occupation upon the Haitian ex-military strongholds? But
this is, surely, too much to ask, as MINUSTAH has
virtually no control in the coastal slums or the
countryside, which is run mainly by members of the
ex-military and former death squad leaders.
Most of these brigands, such as the convicted FRAPH death squad leader Jodel Chamblain – recently released from prison by the Latortue regime as a direct result of Justice Minister Gousse’s intercession – flooded back into the country from the Dominican Republic and elsewhere following Aristide’s ouster, or were broken out of prison during the coup by anti-Aristide partisans. Acting as the frontline of “Washington’s chimeres,” they are now chirpily back to their old business of making life miserable for the Haitian people. While comparisons to the situation in Iraq are irresistibly tempting, one crucial difference should be observed: in Iraq, at least the insurgent uprising against the majority, which really did want to have the election, does not have the support of the state. In Haiti, one could only wish such were the case.
This analysis was authored by COHA Senior Research Fellow, Seth R. DeLong, Ph.D.
February
2, 2005
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