14954: Simidor: Re: NY Review of Books on Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Daniel Simidor <karioka9@mail.arczip.com>


Peter Dailey of this list has published a devastating article for
Lavalas in the New York Review of Books.  The full text is
available at nybooks.com and at haitipolicy.org.  Anyone remotely
interested in the story of Haiti's current woes ought to read and
ponder this article.  Among other things, Dailey gives a good
account of the orchestrated climate of violence that made such a
mockery of the electoral campaign in the May 2000 elections.  The
story he tells helps to explain why any election organized by
Aristide is bound to be a sham.  I quote a section below.

Daniel Simidor

"I was a fairly regular visitor to Port-au-Prince, and the
resurgence of political violence, particularly in the months
leading up to the May 2000 balloting, was perhaps the most
disturbing aspect of Haiti's changed political climate. As the
campaign intensified, the police withdrew to the sidelines as
gangs of "militants" from La Saline and Cité Soleil, voicing
allegiance to Aristide, regularly broke up opposition rallies and
firebombed the homes and offices of opposition politicians, human
rights activists, and journalists. The former Port-au-Prince mayor
Evans Paul, who had been beaten and tortured by the military in
the early Nineties, warned that the Haitian people were "in the
hands of politically manipulated thugs. Anarchy is overwhelming us."

"The political use of paid thugs is a familiar-enough phenomenon
in other parts of the Caribbean, and elsewhere. In Haiti, as the
former FL activist Edzer Pierre notes, "There's a huge population
of people who will do anything for money." In Haiti, the Chimères,
as these groups came to be known, are "not a political force,
they're a political tool," and under Aristide they were
transformed into a semi-official arm of the government. The
identity of those in charge of these operations was never a
particular secret. Roland Camille, aka Ronald Cadavre, perhaps the
most feared of Lavalas organization populaire chiefs, is a
gangster from La Saline, where he has run a protection racket in
the local market. In 2001, to the dismay of a group of senators
who were involuntary witnesses, Cadavre, whose relations with
Aristide put him beyond the reach of the police, took advantage of
this peculiar immunity to shoot a rival to death on the steps of
the Palais Legislatif. For most of this time, it was clear enough
that these episodes could have been ended by a single (cellular)
phone call from Aristide's private residence in Tabarre, and
equally clear, given Aristide's conspicuous failure to denounce
these acts, that such a call would not be forthcoming."  (from
Peter Dailey's article in the New York Review of Books)