Whitewashing Haiti

excerpted from the book

Static

Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders and the People Who Fight Back

by Amy Goodman and David Goodman

Hyperion, 2006, hardcover

Whitewashing Haiti

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Rep. Maxine Waters, the California congresswoman told Democracy Now [March 1, 2004] that the day before Aristide had told her that he had been forcibly taken by US. soldiers to the Central African Republic.

"He's surrounded by military. It's like he is in jail. He says he was kidnapped. He said that he was forced to leave Haiti."

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Randall Robinson, the founder and former director of TransAfrica, a group that advocates the interests of the Caribbean and Africa called Democracy Now on March 1, 2004

"He did not resign. He was abducted by the United States in the corn(mission of a coup."

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Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and one of the poorest in the world. About half the population is illiterate, nearly half of children are not in school, 6 percent of the population has HIV/AIDS, and life expectancy is 52 years. Most Haitians are involved in subsistence agriculture; sweatshops are one of the country's few export industries.

One would think Haiti's challenges were daunting enough, but for over two centuries, the United States has been intent on keeping Haiti under political and economic control, no matter the price.

Haiti, the oldest black republic in the world, was born of a slave uprising against French colonists in 1804. This fateful act of defiance against slaveowners has been punished in perpetuity. For decades after its establishment, the US. Congress wouldn't recognize the black republic, afraid it would inspire slaves in the United States to rise up. Shortly after independence, under threat of invasion by France, Haiti agreed to pay a crushing indemnity of about $500 million to the French government, in part to compensate the former colonial power for losing access to slave labor. The burden was devastating: It took Haiti until after World War II to pay off the debt.'

In 1915, with other nations distracted by World War I, the US. Marines, led by Maj. Smedley Butler, invaded Haiti, claiming to restore order. In reality the United States was worried about French and German influence and determined to protect the Panama Canal. The US. occupation continued until 1934. One of its major legacies was the creation of the Haitian Army, accomplished by an act of the U.S. Congress. As the human rights activist and physician Paul Farmer writes, "From its founding during the US. occupation until it was demobilized by Aristide in 1995, the Haitian Army has never known a non-Haitian enemy. Internal enemies, however, it had aplenty."'

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... Jean-Bertrand Aristide emerged as the hope of Haiti's long-suffering population. Aristide was a fiery Catholic priest who won a landslide victory in Haiti's first internationally supervised democratic election in December 1990. Following his inauguration in February 1991, many thought that the wide grassroots support that he and his party; Lavalas ("the flood"), enjoyed-he won with 67 percent of the vote against eleven other candidates-would help immunize him against coups. Aristide moved quickly to purge the military of human rights abusers, democratize the government, and raise people's wages. He never got the chance.

The first coup against Aristide occurred in September 1991. The coup plotters were military leaders who had enjoyed unchecked power during the reign of the Duvaliers. When Aristide was elected president four years after Baby Doc Duvalier fled, Haiti's generals were restive. They and their henchmen had much to lose under a new president who was intent on delivering to Haiti some long-awaited civilian rule.

It turned out that the United States, despite publicly protesting 'the 1991 coup against Aristide, was funding it in private. Journalist Allan Nairn reported in The Nation that US. intelligence agencies had at least one of the coup leaders on its payroll. Emmanuel "Toto" Constant, head of the notorious right-wing paramilitary death squad FRAPH, the Haitian Front for Advancement and Progress, was on the payroll of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Other FRAPH members were trained by US. intelligence. The coup leader, Gen. Raoul Cedras, was trained by the US. military at the notorious School of the Americas, located at Fort Benning, Georgia.

In the three years that Aristide was in forced exile, the Haitian Armed Forces and FRAPH led a reign of terror against unarmed civilians. The toll of this rampage included at least 5,000 murders, 300,000 internal refugees, 40,000 boat people, and countless tortures, rapes, thefts, and beatings.

In 1994, Constant told Nairn that he was contacted by a US. military officer named Col. Patrick Collins, who served as defense attaché at the United States Embassy in Port-au-Prince. Constant says Collins pressed him to set up a group to "balance the Aristide movement" and do "intelligence" work against it. Constant admitted that, at the time, he was working with CIA operatives in Haiti. Constant is now residing freely in the United States. He is reportedly living in Queens, New York.

Shortly after Nairn revealed that Constant was on the US. government payroll, CIA director James Woolsey was forced out. The embarrassment wasn't that the United States was backing a death squad leader, just that this connection had been exposed.

Aristide's Return

Jean-Bertrand Aristide was reelected president in November 2000, following elections earlier in the year that had given his Lavalas party a majority of seats in the Haitian legislature. But Aristide's new term was once again cut short.

Throughout February 2004, Democracy Now! aired reports from Haiti about the growing violence and the threat of a coup. Armed gangs had been attacking poorly armed police stations and other government outposts around the country. At least forty people were killed in the battles. Aristide's official government forces, starved of funds and resources, were ill-equipped to defend against the violence. Aristide had dismantled the army in 1995, and the national police constituted an estimated three thousand men. Aristide supporters clashed regularly with the insurgents and other government opponents.

On February 16, 2004, Rep. Maxine Waters told us, "You have this opposition that is supported, I believe, by [Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger P.] Noriega in the State Department, and others who have always had their hands in the politics of Haiti, who are trying to oust the president." Noriega had been a senior staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when it was chaired by former senator Jesse Helms. Noriega and Helms were among a group of hardliners who, says Waters, "hated Haiti, and they have always worked against Haiti."

Waters said that the New York Times had quoted an anonymous State Department official as saying that "something was going to have to be done in Haiti, and it was possible that the State Department could support the ouster" of President Aristide. In this and other not-so-subtle statements, US. officials hinted that they wanted Aristide gone. Secretary of State Colin Powell officially renounced this, but for anyone who has followed Haiti over the years, it came as no surprise that Washington was telegraphing its intentions.

On February 17, Haitian prime minister Yvon Neptune said, "We are witnessing the coup d'etat machine in motion." The next day, Democracy Now! interviewed Kim Ives, the editor of the newspaper Haiti Progres, who described the situation on the ground in Haiti: "We see wealthy businessmen leading the rebellion against the government.

What was particularly troubling to veteran Haiti observers was the fact that many of the leaders of the armed gangs also led the campaign of terror in the early 1990s that resulted in the overthrow of Aristide. According to Haiti Progres, Louis Jodel Chamblain, former vice president of the FRAPH paramilitary death squad, arrived in February 2004 in the Haitian city of Gonaives, where the armed gangs were largely based.

Attorney Ira Kurzban, general counsel to the Haitian government, urged the United States had secretly armed the rebels. "These people came through the Dominican border after the United States had provided twenty thousand M- 16s to the Dominican army," he said. "It is a military operation. It's not a ragtag group of liberatorsas has often been put in the press in the last week or two.

"The question is," said Kurzban, "will the international community stand by and allow a democracy in this hemisphere to be terminated by a brutal military coup of persons who have a very; very sordid history of gross violations of human rights?"

Kurzban would soon have his answer. On February 27, 2004, White House press secretary Scott McClellan declared, "This longsimmering crisis is largely of Mr. Aristide's making."

The Coup

Early Sunday morning, February 29, 2004, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced from power and taken out of the country on an American plane.

The Bush administration claimed, and the U.S. media parroted, that Aristide fled the country of his own will. The New York Times article on the "Aristide resignation" was a blow-by-blow insider account comprised entirely of quotes from unnamed U.S. officials. It described the events in Haiti this way:

[Aristide] made the decision to give up power on Saturday evening, hours after the 'White House in a statement questioned his fitness to rule.

Mr. Aristide, signaling a disconnection from the violence engulfing his country and the appeals from world leaders to step aside, meekly asked the American ambassador [James B. Foley] in Haiti through an aide whether his resignation would help the country.

"It was as if he was the last guy in the world to figure out that the country would be better off were he to relinquish power," the official said.

Mr. Aristide wanted to know.. . what were the choices of places that Mr. Aristide could go to in exile, the official said .... The American reply was: "Pick your destination; it's up to you."'

As Maxine Waters and Randall Robinson insisted in their calls to Democracy Now! on March 1, the official Bush administration/New York Times version of events in Haiti bore no resemblance to reality.

We put the transcripts of our conversations with Waters and Robinson on our Web site, and reporters took them to the White House and the Pentagon. A reporter asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld if our report was true that the United States was par' of a coup that removed Aristide. Rumsfeld just laughed: "The idea that someone was abducted is just totally inconsistent with everything I heard or saw or am aware of. So I think that-that I do not believe he is saying what you are saying he is saying."

I've learned in my years as a reporter that when you get laughed at, you are probably on to something.

Secretary of State Colin Powell also spoke that day: "He was not kidnapped. We did not force him onto the airplane. He went onto the airplane willingly, and that's the truth."

And finally, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan: "Conspiracy theories like that do nothing to help the Haitian people realize the future that they aspire to, which is a better future, a more free future and a more prosperous future. We took steps to protect Mr. Aristide. We took steps to protect his family as they departed Haiti. It was Mr. Aristide's decision to resign, and he spelled out his reasons why"

The Bush administration alibi had a basic flaw: Why would Aristide have willingly chosen to go to a place he'd never been - the Central African Republic-a remote African dictatorship with poor communications and minimal access to the outside world? Aristide said he was virtually banned from giving interviews, and the few that he did give were largely unintelligible.

A CNN reporter asked Rep. Maxine Waters about Aristide, "How can you believe him?"

That's a fair question. How can you believe anything the government says? That should be the attitude that journalists have about all government officials, beginning here at home.

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The story that most American media overlooked was how the United States has had a nearly unbroken record of sabotaging Haitian democracy. From backing Haitian death squads that overthrew Aristide in the 1990s, to blocking lifesaving development aid when Aristide was reelected in 2001, the United States has been obsessed with keeping Haiti in virtual serfdom. "You'd think this might be newsworthy: the world's most powerful nations joining forces to block aid and humanitarian assistance to one of the poorest," wrote longtime Haiti advocate Paul Farmer. "But for three years this story was almost impossible to place in a mainstream journal of opinion. It was not until March 2004 that one could have read in a U.S. daily the news that the aid freeze might have contributed to the overthrow of the penniless Haitian government."' It was the Boston Globe that finally reported on March 7:

For three years, the US. government, the European Union, and international banks have blocked $500 million in aid to Haiti's government, ravaging the economy of a nation already twice as poor as any in the Western Hemisphere.

The cutoff, intended to pressure the government to adopt political reforms, left Haiti struggling to meet even basic needs and weakened the authority of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who went into exile one week ago. Today, Haiti's government, which serves 8 million people, has an annual budget of about $300 million-less than that of Cambridge [Massachusetts], a city of just over 100,000.

Many of Aristide's supporters, in Haiti and abroad, angrily contend that the international community, particularly the United States, abandoned the fledgling democracy when it needed aid the most. Many believe that Aristide himself was the target of the de facto economic sanctions, just as Haiti was beginning to put its finances back in order.

"This is a case where the United States turned off the tap," said Jeffrey Sachs, an economist at Columbia University. "I believe they did that deliberately to bring down Aristide."

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Aristide was forced to pay off the American loans to the Duvalier dictatorship and the subsequent military regimes. The result: In 2003, Haiti sent 90 percent of its foreign reserves to Washington to pay off these debts.

... From before Aristide took office in 2001, the National Endowment for Democracy and one of its four core grantees, the International Republican Institute (which is led by powerful Republicans close to President George W. Bush), spent millions of dollars to create, arm, and organize an opposition. This was not about strengthening civil society. This was about making Haiti under Aristide ungovernable.

Since 1998, reported Max Blumenthal in Salon.com, "IRI, whose stated mission is to 'promote the practice of democracy' abroad, conducted a $3 million 'party-building' program in Haiti, training Aristide's political opponents, uniting them into a single bloc and, according to a former US. ambassador there, encouraging them to reject internationally sanctioned power-sharing agreements in order to heighten Haiti's political crisis." The IRI point person in Haiti was Stanley Lucas, a former judo master who is closely associated with FRAPH and many of Haiti's most notorious human rights violators (Lucas is now working for the IRI's Afghanistan program"). Under the guise of party-building, Lucas brought together these ex-coup leaders into a sham grassroots opposition called the Democratic Convergence. Blumenthal explained on Democracy Now? that "the Democratic Convergence is not a traditional political party. It's more like the political wing of a coup, because the strategy that it took was to forgo the democratic process entirely."

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Amy Goodman interviewing Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell on Democracy Now, November 22, 2005

AMY GOODMAN: Why say that the president Aristide had an obsession with power? This was a man who was the democratically elected president of Haiti, certainly got a higher percentage of the vote than President Bush got in this country.

WILKERSON: Please, don't refer to the percentage of vote as equatable to democracy, as equatable to the kinds of institutions we f have reflecting democracy in America. Hitler was elected by popular vote.

Democracy Now! listeners and viewers inundated us with e-mail to correct the colonel: Hitler, of course, did not come to power by popular vote. He was appointed chancellor in a deal made with the elderly German president Hindenburg in January 1933. But the slip was telling. For the top State Department official, being elected with overwhelming support from Haiti's poor masses makes one a dictator. A president installed at gunpoint by the United States is the real champion of democracy.

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Regine Alexandre was a freelance correspondent in Haiti for the Associated Press and the New York Times. From May 2004, her byline appeared on at least a dozen AP stories and on two stories in the Times. In December 2005 independent journalist Anthony Fenton revealed on Pacifica Radio's Flashpoints that Alexandre was wearing two hats: While working as a journalist, she also worked for the National Endowment for Democracy."

The NED has played a controversial role in foreign elections.' The organization is funded by the US. Congress and the State Department. While claiming a mission of "promoting democracy," the NED was involved in backing opposition groups in Venezuela, including funding leaders of the failed 2002 coup against President Hugo Chavez. The NED funds the International Republican Institute, which in turn backed anti-Aristide forces.

Indeed, the NED's Haiti operation bears remarkable similarities to its efforts to back the overthrow of Hugo Chavez. In both cases, US.-backed opposition groups staged violent protests against the elected government, which pro-U.S. media depicted as grassroots uprisings. Coup leaders then declared that the elected president had voluntarily resigned-claims that were trumpeted by State Department officials and that later turned out to be false. The main difference, of course, is that these U.S. efforts at subversion failed in Venezuela but succeeded in Haiti.

The NED acknowledged that Alexandre was working as a field representative for them in Haiti. When Flashpoints confronted Alexandre about this, she denied working for the NED. A day later, the AP announced it had severed ties to Alexandre; the Times followed suit a few days later.

In Haiti, the American media has been nothing if not reliable: It has done its master's bidding. For decades, it has championed so some of the most repressive elements of Haitian society. With such compromised reporting appearing in the top American media outlets, it's going to take more than firing one stringer for the news out of Haiti to be fair and accurate anytime soon.

In February 2006, after months of delay and four postponements, Haiti held its first presidential elections since Aristide's victory in 2000. René Préval, a former president and an ally of Aristide, was declared the winner. Like Aristide, Préval was seen as a champion of the poor. He pledged to create jobs, improve education, and battle social inequalities in Haiti.

The American media-both those on and off the U.S. government payroll-chimed in with a chorus of skepticism. Shortly before Préval's victory was announced-and when it was already dear he had won roughly half the vote, out of thirty-two candidates-NPR ran a story, "Haitians Unsettled by the Prospect of a Préval Win." No doubt the coup plotters-and their backers in the Bush administration-were unsettled. Especially when Jean-Bertrand Aristide announced shortly after the election that he would return home.

Father Gerard Jean-Juste captured the sentiments of the majority of Haitians about the election when he said on Democracy Now!: "I am happy, and I hope that from now on, nobody should stop the Haitian people from enjoying the right to vote. Also now, I hope that no one should try once more to go against the will of the people because that's created so much turmoil, such a chaotic situation that we have lived since February 29, 2004. So we hope that everyone from now on will have great respect for everyone. Particularly those poorest people who are trying hard to get off misery and to organize themselves. We have one more chance in history to regain our place as a nation and to contribute as our ancestors have contributed to freedom."

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