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03/02/2004

RALL 3/2/04

Bush Colonizes Haiti

BOSTON--The Bush White House is once again up to its hips in regime change, this time as the architect of the 33^rd coup d'état in Haiti's tortured history. Backgrounds of the perpetrators and their relationship with the United States and the regime of ousted dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier have been hard to come by in the increasingly incurious U.S. media, yet historical parallels abound when comparing tactics used against Haiti and those applied to Afghanistan, Venezuela, even Florida. The Bushies' top dogs, after all, got their start serving Presidents Ford and Nixon. Successful pit bulls like Rumsfeld and Cheney have little reason to update their repertoire of dirty tricks.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled to exile in the Central African Republic on February 29 as an alliance of fired right-wing army officers and shadowy former officials of the Duvalier dictatorship led their guerilla militias into the capital of Port-au-Prince. It was the second time that the democratically elected president, who promised to enforce civilian rule over the military, end corruption, and reduce the nation's vast disparity of wealth, had been deposed under a President Bush. Aristide, a former priest whose support among the vast slums had led him to a landslide win at the polls, was forced out by a similar bunch of army officers back in 1991. After U.S. troops restored him to power in 1994, President Clinton called his return "a victory for freedom around the world."

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Indeed, Aristide rewarded our faith in him by voluntarily stepping aside when he lost the 1996 election. The charismatic ex-priest won his second election in November 2000. Democracy finally seemed to be taking root.

But when the official count showed him winning 92 percent of the vote, events began to eerily echo the 2000 election crisis here in the United States. A new rightist opposition alliance, the Democratic Convergence, claimed that the Haitian Senate elections had been rigged with a view towards creating a one-party state. (International observers called the elections fair.) The DC and former army officers refused to recognize the Aristide government.

After assuming power in February 2001, Aristide found that his posse of political goons, les chimères, were powerless against his most formidable political foe: the Bush Administration. "Many administration officials," reports the New York Times, "saw him as little more than a leftist leader of a country whose principal exports were refugees in rickety boats and transshipments of Colombian cocaine." At the same time, the International Monetary Fund was trying to subject Haiti to a "structural adjustment" plan that would have radically curtailed social services in order to redirect government revenues towards paying off its foreign debts and increased the viability of its existing free trade zones for American transnational corporations hoping to use the nation as a tax shelter. The U.S. and IMF asked international aid agencies to impose a virtual economic embargo upon Haiti, crippling the economy and leading to the crisis that sparked the coup. It was time to take out the leftist ally of the last Democratic president.

Tearing a page from the playbook of the U.S. Supreme Court--Republican justices ran out the clock in Bush v. Gore, deliberating four days so that there wouldn't be sufficient time to complete the Florida ballot recount--the Bush Administration refused Aristide's frantic requests to send U.S. troops to restore order to Haiti. "There is, frankly, no enthusiasm right now for sending in military or police forces to put down the violence that we are seeing," said Colin Powell. But hours after Aristide left for Africa--"kidnapped," according to Congresswoman Maxine Waters, by American commandos--the marines were on their way.

Bush, editorialized the Times, "withheld the Marines until Mr. Aristide yielded power, leaving Haitians at the mercy of some of the country's most vicious criminal gangs."

The Bushies have learned from their failed attempt to overthrow President Hugo Chávez. Rather than rely on a pathetic grab bag of businessmen and fringe political hacks to pull off a civilian putsch as they did in Venezuela, the CIA directly funded and armed Duvalier-affiliated thugs to seize control militarily. U.S. Special Forces-trained ex-coup leader Guy Philippe and leaders of the CIA-backed paramilitary FRAPH death squad, supplied with thousands of U.S.-made M-16 and M-60 rifles as well as rocket-propelled grenades and tank-busting artillery shells (most likely at U.S. taxpayer expense), invaded Haiti from bases in the Dominican Republic. "Congress needs to seriously look at what the involvement of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency has been in this operation," says Ira Kurzban, a Miami lawyer representing the Aristide government. "Because it is a military operation. It's not a rag-tag group of liberators, as has often been put in the press in the last week or two."

Amazingly, Bush's spokesman argues that there's nothing undemocratic about deposing a popularly elected president. "There are times when people lose faith...in the ability of their leaders to govern effectively, and this is what happened," says Scott McClellan. He called the coup "a democratic and constitutional solution that we achieved working with our international partners."

Bold words from a guy whose boss, an illegitimate coup leader, has himself lost the faith of the American people.

Few deny that Aristide fell short of his self-styled image as the patron saint of Caribbean democracy. He relied on cocaine trafficking to prop up the economy and violence to silence political opponents. But there are historical parallels here that give pause. In Afghanistan, Bush traded in the world's worst government, the Taliban, for something still worse--anarchy and civil war. Chaos and rape gangs replaced Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Haitians, it seems, may be in for a similarly bad bargain.

(Ted Rall is the editor of the new anthology of alternative cartoons "Attitude 2: The New Subversive Social Commentary Cartoonists," containing interviews with and cartoons by 21 of America's best cartoonists. Ordering information is available at amazon.com.)