Haiti: Class Hatred and the Hijacking of Aristide

Published on Tuesday, March 16, 2004 by Inter Press Service

Haiti: Class Hatred and the Hijacking of Aristide

by Marty Logan



MONTREAL - Some observers have described the Feb.
29 putsch against Haitian President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide as a Bush administration plot while many
others label Washington's policy as an indirect
one, such as "malign" or "willful" neglect or
"estranged engagement".

But almost all Haiti-watchers agree that various
anti-Aristide forces have been at work in the
U.S. capital for as long as the former Catholic
priest has been leading his campaign on behalf of
the poor in the western hemisphere's most
impoverished nation.

Those opposition elements include the
International Republican Institute on
International Affairs, linked to the National
Endowment for Democracy, which has worked closely
with the civil opposition in Haiti.


Exiled Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide
is pictured with Jamaican MP Sharon Hay-Webster
(L) and U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) in
Barbados, while en route to Jamaica, March 15,
2004. The White House said the presence of
Aristide in neighboring Jamaica was
counterproductive. ( Photo/Amy Goodman, Democracy
Now!)
Politicians from Bush's Republican Party like
former Senator Jesse Helms demonized the former
president, who was forced to flee the country
Feb. 29 as armed rebels seized control of major
cities in Haiti's north and descended toward the
capital Port-au-Prince.

Helms in turn influenced such right-wing
officials as Roger Noriega, a member of his staff
for several years and now assistant secretary of
state for western hemisphere affairs, and Otto
Reich, the presidential envoy for western
hemisphere affairs, who worked with Helms on
anti-Cuba legislation as a lobbyist in the 1990s.

With the Bush administration intent on waging its
"war on terrorism", these lower-tier officials
were able to apply heat to Haiti's political
tinderbox.

But while the players in the shadow drama against
Aristide, Haiti's first democratically elected
president, are well known, their motivations are
less clear. Their enmity might be personal,
suggests Robert Fatton Jr, chairman of the
government and foreign affairs department at the
University of Virginia.

"There was something about Aristide that really
generated profound hatred on the part of members
of the Haitian elite and some right-wing
Republicans. You can even sense that (now),
because Noriega said (after Aristide's ouster),
'we're certainly not going to spend any money or
American lives on Aristide'," Fatton told IPS.

"I think Aristide from the very beginning --
we're talking about 1990 when he was elected --
always was perceived by the right wing in the
Republican Party as an enemy of the United
States, as someone who was trouble, a wild card,
and a dangerous man -- when they (Republicans)
came back in power with Bush the son, I think
that antagonism was reactivated".

Fatton's assessment is backed by Shannon Field,
deputy director of the Institute for Global
Dialogue in Johannesburg, South Africa, in a
recent interview with Radio Netherlands.

"There has been a number of attacks by
Republicans as soon as Bush entered office. I
think many of them saw (Aristide) not only as a
socialist, a populist, perhaps the next Fidel
Castro, someone who throughout the 1980s had
preached liberation theology, and I think that
they were very much against the nature of his
governance."

But while Fatton believes Aristide was a stronger
symbolic than actual threat, Field argues that
the forces galvanized against the populist
president in Washington, and Haiti's former
colonial power France, feared reverberations from
his rule.

"I think France was quite concerned that the
islands that it controls -- Martinique and
Guadeloupe -- that if you have quite a strong
independent leader in Haiti, that he might export
his ideas of revolution and socialism to those
islands."

"And similarly the U.S. also was enjoying quite a
strong domination over the Virgin Islands and
Puerto Rico, and I think that it felt that a
leader that didn't toe the U.S. line in Haiti
would also probably be a threat to its dominance
over those two islands," Field added.

Fatton acknowledges, "Haiti and Aristide had good
relations with Cuba -- you have about 500 Cuban
doctors in Haiti -- so that might have just been
perceived as something they shouldn't do, and I'm
sure that Noriega and Otto Reich have that
conviction."

"But there are other countries in Latin America
that have good relations with Cuba so I'm not
sure why they would 'pick' Haiti in that sense."

He also argues that while Aristide, whose
administration eventually sunk into corruption
and wielded violence against its opponents, rose
to power on the back of his anti-elite, anti-U.S.
rhetoric, he was "clearly following the
instructions of the IMF (International Monetary
Fund) and World Bank".

"So while he was talking in a very radical way,
the economic policies themselves were not that
radical," Fatton says.

Other commentators have suggested economic
interests motivated the backroom plotting that
gnawed away at the foundation of Aristide's rule.

"The troops of this intervention, called
democracy enhancement by AID (the U.S. Agency for
International Development) and low intensity
democracy by others, are technicians and experts.
Their weapons are development projects and lots
of money," wrote Jane Regan -- now an IPS
contributor -- in 1995, just months after 20,000
U.S. Marines had restored Aristide to power.

"Their goal is to impose a neo-liberal economic
agenda, to undermine grassroots participatory
democracy, to create political stability
conducive to a good business climate, and to
bring Haiti into the new world order appendaged
to the U.S. as a source for markets and cheap
labor."

But Fatton, a Haitian, does not completely buy the economic arguments.

"Haiti really does not have any strategic
significance. And we have very little to offer --
people talk about cheap labor. but there are
plenty of other countries with it."

"There is no oil, there is no uranium, there are
no real natural resources; so in terms of an
overall economic strategic interest, I don't see
it," he added.

Even the illegal drug business, often cited as a
motivating interest in U.S.-Haiti relations and
certainly a major concern of recent
administrations, declined in the last two years,
as cocaine shipped via Haiti fell from 15-20
percent of the U.S. supply to about eight percent
according to the State Department, says Fatton.

While all observers stress the administration's
fear of a second wave of Haitian boat people
landing on U.S. shores -- the first group,
escaping the regime that overthrew Aristide in
1991, counted 70,000 people, most intercepted by
U.S. ships and returned to Haiti -- for
Washington's decision to not prop up Aristide
last month, Fatton stresses animosity toward the
ruler as a prime reason for his long-time low
standing in Washington's Republican circles.

"Among the Haitian elite the hatred for Aristide
was absolutely incredible; it was an obsession.
And it's still an obsession."

"It's the way he talked -- he had that very calm,
cold way of putting it: 'we've waited very long,
we the poor; it's our time to take over'."

In 1987, 16 months after dictator Jean-Claude
Duvalier fled Haiti, then-parish priest Aristide
told a New York Times reporter, ''You must
understand the 'American Plan', the plan of
Delatour (then minister of finance) and the rich.
First, they want to destroy our agriculture: to
destroy our rice and all the crops Haiti
produces. Why? So the people will come here from
the land to work in those American factories for
almost nothing''.

"Vive la guerre! (Long live the war!) So that we
will all have bread," Aristide told the
congregation jammed into the Church of St. Jean
Bosco days later. "Vive la guerre! So that we
will all have houses. Vive la guerre! So that we
will all have land".

"He was threatening," says Fatton, "and (the
elite) just couldn't put up with it. Not only did
he come from the lower classes but he was talking
a language that to them was really
confrontational, threatening, and therefore
(they) could not tolerate the guy".

"I think those people in the Bush administration
feel much more comfortable with members of the
Haitian elite, so you have kind of an affinity --
you could call it a level of comfort."

In a Sep. 14, 1994 speech to the Senate, which
was debating a U.S. attack on the military regime
that overthrew Aristide less than one year after
his ballot-box victory in 1990, Helms described
the deposed president:

"In his autobiography, Aristide identifies his
role models as being Chè Guevara, the
(Argentine-)Cuban communist revolutionary;
Salvador Allende, the Marxist president of Chile;
and Robespierre, the 18th century French
revolutionary who was an architect of the bloody
reign of terror in France," said Helms.

"Aristide speaks of 'beauty, dignity, respect and
love', but his heroes are history's synonyms of
brutality and violent revolution -- Aristide has
no relationship whatsoever with democracy; he is
neither a peace-lover nor a peacemaker. He is a
mean-spirited revolutionary and an anti-American
demagogue," he added.

Washington restored Aristide to power soon
afterwards but by then he had already signaled --
by following the economic agenda of the World
Bank and IMF, for instance -- that, "his rhetoric
was much more radical than anything", says Fatton.

Aristide's impotence could explain the Bush
administration's ambivalent, inconsistent
approach to Haiti, and why the powers in
Washington behind the scenes -- fixated on the
former priest as the symbol of the rising poor --
never relented in their opposition.

© Copyright 2004 IPS - Inter Press Service