Haiti Is Being Murdered. posted by Richard Seymour

It Started With A Chad

The coup in Haiti is a joint accomplishment of President Bush and President Chirac - together at last. Having kidnapped Aristide and shuffled him off to Africa where he resides in apparent captivity, the US forces are now allowing the death squads they helped to murder thousands of Haitians retake the country. You wouldn't know this if you were not, like me, a fanatic. The BBC tells us that Kofi Annan is rather chipper about the whole exercise, while Hugo Chavez is wondering if he'll be next in line for the coup machine. There is, says the Beeb, "unease" over the "fall" of Aristide. Replace those words with "terror" and "coup", and you have the picture. It also mentions that the rebels are being employed to "fill in the political gap" and quotes "rebel leader" Guy Phillipe as saying "I am not interested in politics... the president is the legal president, so we follow his orders". That's about as close to serious analysis as we're going to get, I'm afraid. The racist imagery on the television news of yet another country where black people are marauding with machetes and weaponry (not a wisp of context, not a scrap of informative comment) is oddly reminiscent of the images of Mogadishu circa 1992, replicated in the awful Black Hawk Down. It is hardly surprising, in the middle of all this disorder and rage, that we now see the white Superman step in to save the day and smack the locals across the mouth for getting uppity. Imperialism and racism have always been brothers under the sheets.

Over a series of months, the opponents of Jean-Bertrand Aristide have been organising street battles and calling for strikes to oust the elected leader. They accuse him of rigging the 2000 vote in which he won massively, and of corruption. On the elections, the International Coalition of Independent Observers noted:

"[T]he Haitian people have mobilized in large numbers to express their political will through participation in the local and legislative elections of May 21, 2000. We were pleased to observe employees at voter bureaus working with each other to promote a secure environment and privacy for voting. Although late distribution of voting materials in several locations may have discouraged people from voting, we did witness lines of patient voters. It is not yet possible to gauge the number of voters who were unable to find their appropriate bureau, and we will await reports from the countryside. We were greatly encouraged by encountering a diverse group of national observers representing all segments of Haitian society, and we eagerly await reports from their observations."

In fact, the claims that the elections were rigged emerged from the Organisation of American States (2000), which claimed the methodology of some of the voting procedures was "flawed". But they had also noted with respect to the first round of elections in June :

"Based on preliminary reports from the 21 observers who were deployed throughout the department of the Grand’Anse for the June 11 partial elections, the OAS Electoral Observation Mission (EOM) considers that, despite certain irregularities observed, overall the polling was carried out in an adequate and professional manner."

The irony of this talk of Aristide's corruption and alleged vote-rigging was not missed on Kofi Annan, who cruelly compared the elections to those of the US:

"The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, accused Mr Aristide's dominant political party, Fanmi Lavalas, of violating democracy by refusing to recount the results from the disputed May 2000 parliamentary elections." At least, I assume the absurdity is intentional.

Whatever irregularities the OAS claimed to have identified in the electoral procedures subsequently in the November elections, they were jumped on by the Clinton administration :

"Bill Clinton invoked the OAS accusation to justify the crippling economic embargo against Haiti that persists to this day, and which effectively blocks the payment of about $500m in international aid."

Naturally, this has brought near ruin to a country already in the grip of woeful poverty. As Gary Younge notes in The Guardian, "Haitians have a life expecancy of 53, with the highest rate of HIV/Aids infection outside Africa and an estimated 80% of its population living below the poverty line." And in an excellent series of articles on Haiti, Medialens editors David Edwards and David Cromwell point out:

"The United States is Haiti's main commercial 'partner' accounting for about
60% of the flows of exports and imports. Along with the manufacture of
baseballs, textiles, cheap electronics, and toys, Haiti's sugar, bauxite and
sisal are all controlled by American corporations. Disney, for example, has
used Haitian sweatshops to produce Pocahontas pyjamas, among other items, at
the rate of 11 cents per hour. Most Haitians are willing to work for almost
nothing."

So, any discontent that ordinary Haitians had with Aristide imposing the agenda of his opponent in the 1990 elections (who won only 14% of the vote), under pressure from Washington, would have been instantly intensified by that single murderous gesture. And that is the key to this coup.

The IMF-CIA Dictatorship

The United States has backed every Haitian dictator, every grubby little thug to have emerged from the woodwork to do the bidding of international capitalism. More crucially, domestic landlords and capitalists have always required an iron fist to keep the poor from demanding tacky luxuries like clean water and blankets. The one thing they didn't need was Aristide, with his mass support, deriding capitalism as a mortal sin. So, when he won the elections in 1990, the CIA got in touch with some boys, and in very short order they were working with the FRAPH (according to a 1996 UN Human Rights report). Emmanuel Constant of the FRAPH worked as a paid CIA agent while that notorious group were carrying out some of their worst crimes .

Unsurprisingly, even when Aristide had been returned to power, the United States insist that the main organisers of the outlandish bloodletting that ripped through Haiti in the early 1990s remained untouched. They freed Emmanuel "Toto" Constant , and when there were attempts to prosecute the worst war criminals, the US orchestrated a stunt in which they stole crucial documentary evidence from the offices of the FRAPH and subsequently refused to allow human rights lawyers to have access to them .

Aristide was unable to implement the programme upon which he had been elected, and consequently lost the support of the working poor of Haiti. As one of the opposition groups, the National Coordination for the Advance of Women's Rights, says, "After coming to power in 1994, the regime did everything to take things out of the hands of the popular masses and decapitate the social movements. From this resulted the terrible war which the regime wages without pity against the population from 2001 onwards." (Quoted, Chris Harman, Socialist Worker ).

As Gary Younge pointed out in The Guardian :

"Before Aristide had even considered fixing the elections, the west had already rigged the markets. Take rice. Forced by the agreement to lower its import tariffs, Haiti suddenly found itself flooded with subsidised rice from the US, which drove Haitian rice growers out of business and the country to import a product that it once produced. When the country fined American rice merchants $1.4m for allegedly evading customs duties, the US responded by withholding $30m in aid." This had been entirely predictable from the legacy of the 'free market reforms' under the World Bank-Marc Bazin junta, namely that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) declined by 30 percent (1992-1994).

Even when Aristide tried to recover his popularity and offered some concessions, he found his hands tied. While he had promised to increase the minimum wage, embark on school construction and literacy programs, the hands of the new government were tied. All major decisions regarding the State budget, the management of the public sector, public investment, privatization, trade and monetary policy had already been taken. They were part of the agreement reached with the IMF on November 6, 2000. "In 2003, the IMF imposed the application of a so-called "flexible price system in fuel", which immediately triggered an inflationary spiral. The currency was devalued. Petroleum prices increased by about 130 percent in January-February 2003, which served to fuel popular resentment against the Aristide government, which had supported the implementation of the economic reforms."

All Guns, No Butter

The forces emerging to fight Aristide are of an interesting pedigree. There are, indeed, the voices of the poor, of women, of small farmers who rightly feel they have been squeezed dry. But the other forces involved are precisely those who would crush the popular movements even more ruthlessly than Aristide's party. Andy Apaid , for example, of the Democracy Platform, is the owner of most of the sweatshops in Haiti, and has been oddly eager to decry Aristide's "economic mismanagement". The Group of 184, like the Democracy Platform, is an organ of Haiti's privileged classes who would like nothing better than to show the labouring masses once and for all who is in charge.
The so-called "rebel leader" Louis-Jodel Chamblain is a former death-squad leader as is his comrade, Jean-Pierre Baptiste. One of the adventures that Baptiste (also known as Jean Tatoune) got himself involved in was a spree of ultra-violence between 18th and 22nd April 1994, in which the death squads charged into Raboteau, an area known for its resistance against the dictatorship, and began to terrorise the residents. First, they organised a "rehearsal" in which they stormed the town, fired on those known to have formed the backbone of resistance, watched as crowds fled to the harbour (where they could hide under water when the army attacked, then sacked the house of a prominent local resistance leader and brutally beat an elderly blind man. The man was so badly wounded that he died in hospital the next day. After some days of planning, the attack was mounted. Approaching Raboteau from various directions, the paramilitaries opened fire on the town. They charged into houses, trailed the residents out by their hair if they weren't already dead, forced them to lie down in open sewers, tortured and beat them. They ensured this time that there were gunmen waiting in boats to shoot as people fled to the harbour, and many were chopped down in terror and rage. This became known as the Raboteau Massacre .

Any more signs that the future isn't sunny? Well, the former dictator of Haiti has indicated he's anxious to return to his homeland and has applied for a diplomatic passport. And funny enough, I think he might just get one.