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[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

The overthrow of Haiti’s Aristide: a coup made in the USA

Statement of the World Socialist Web Site Editorial Board
http://www.wsws.org

1 March 2004

The violent overthrow and forced exile of Haiti’s President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide has ripped aside the democratic pretensions of
Washington and the other major powers to expose the brutal and
predatory character of resurgent imperialism. The actions taken by
the US government in Haiti demonstrate the farcical character of its
claims that the aim of the US invasion of Iraq was to inaugurate an
era of democratization and freedom in the Middle East and around the
world.

Aristide’s overthrow is the outcome of a bloody coup orchestrated by
the Bush administration and aided by the Chirac government in Paris.
It was executed by a band of killers drawn from the disbanded and
discredited Haitian army and the CIA-backed death squads that
terrorized the population under the former military dictatorship that
ruled the country in the early 1990s.

Among those leading the armed bands that overran the country are
Louis-Jodel Chamblain, a former Haitian army officer sentenced to
life at hard labor in connection with the 1993 assassination of
political activist Antoine Izmérym, and Jean-Pierre Baptiste,
likewise sentenced to life for his role in a 1994 massacre. Both were
leaders of the FRAPH, or Haitian Front for Advancement and Progress,
a CIA-backed organization that carried out state terror against
opponents of the military regime that ruled the country from 1991 to
1993.

Another leader of the armed bands is Guy Philippe, a former member of
the Haitian military who received training from US Special Forces in
Ecuador in the 1990s and was then sent back to Haiti, where he became
a brutal police chief and sought to organize a coup in 2000. He is
suspected of involvement in cocaine trafficking.

These heavily armed terrorists invaded Haiti from across the border
with the Dominican Republic. There is convincing evidence that they
were trained, financed and armed by Washington, provided with M-16
rifles, grenade launchers and other weapons out of stockpiles
originally sent to the Dominican army.

Hundreds of Haitians have died as a result of this made-in-the-USA
coup. In cities that fell to the gunmen—Gonaives and Cap Haitien—they
have reportedly carried out a house-to-house manhunt for government
supporters, executing those who failed to escape.

Port-au-Prince itself is threatened with a bloodbath. Residents have
erected barricades and armed themselves to repulse an assault on the
capital. Leaders of the armed thugs have vowed to march into the
city, despite Aristide’s flight into exile, for the purpose of
restoring “order.”

Having systematically blocked any intervention to defend Aristide’s
constitutional government from violent overthrow, Washington’s
attitude toward this threat appears ambivalent. “The wild card is the
rebels. Are they with the program?” a State Department official told
the Reuters news agency. “We want to make sure we neutralize them.
Not necessarily by going after them, but the timely insertion of some
kind of deterrent is important.”

What constitutes “timely” is the key question. The change that is
being effected in Haiti by means of armed violence and an
extra-constitutional coup d’etat cannot be consolidated without a
reign of terror against the country’s workers and poor. Allowing the
death squad leaders free reign in Port-au-Prince, even if only for a
limited period, may be seen as a desirable outcome by both the
so-called “political opposition” and its patrons in Washington.

The “political opposition,” organized in the Group of 184 and the
Democratic Platform, is dominated and controlled by the privileged
classes of Haiti, which harbor a pathological hatred for Aristide.
This stems from Aristide’s identification during the waning days of
the Duvalier dictatorship with the strivings of the workers and poor
people of the Western Hemisphere’s most impoverished country, where
the richest one percent of the population controls nearly half the
wealth.

Whatever Aristide’s subsequent corruption and capitulation to
international finance capital, Haiti’s wealthy elite has always seen
his presidency as tainted by this association. They are seeking not
merely Aristide’s ouster, but a settling of accounts with Haiti’s
oppressed masses.

Whether this takes place imminently or in a more protracted process
in the months ahead remains to be seen. One of the principal demands
of the death squad leaders is that the Haitian Army be reestablished,
presumably with them at its head. Historically, this institution,
disbanded by Aristide in 1995, has served as a brutal instrument of
internal repression, dedicated to defending the wealth and power of
the country’s ruling families.

There were reports Sunday that a 2,200-strong US Marine expeditionary
force could land in Haiti within hours. Whether this will take place,
and what precise mission the force will carry out, has yet to be
clarified. That Washington is prepared to carry out such an
intervention, however, conclusively exposes the duplicity of the Bush
administration’s earlier attempts to pose as an arbiter between
Aristide, Haiti’s ruling elite, and the right-wing terrorists.

Less than two weeks ago, Secretary of State Colin Powell declared:
“There is, frankly, no enthusiasm right now for sending in military
or police forces to put down the violence that we are seeing.”
Instead, he insisted, a “political solution” was necessary, based on
a deal between Aristide and the opposition that would have turned the
elected president into little more than a figurehead of a regime
largely controlled by Washington.

While Aristide accepted this arrangement, the opposition rejected it,
demanding the unconditional removal of the president. The Bush
administration’s reaction to this defiance was to side with the
opposition and demand that Aristide leave. Thus, on Saturday, White
House press secretary Scott McClellan issued a statement demanding
that Aristide “examine his position carefully, to accept
responsibility and to act in the best interests of the people of
Haiti.”

The statement declared that chaos in Haiti—the result of a CIA-backed
rebellion—was “largely of Mr. Aristide’s making.” It amounted to an
endorsement of the death squads’ campaign and a stinging rebuff to
Aristide’s vain hopes that the US would intervene to prevent his
overthrow. Now that the desired “political solution” has been
achieved—the toppling of an elected president—US military forces are
bound for the island nation.

This was made clear by the US Ambassador to Haiti, James Foley, who
officiated at the swearing in of Aristide’s interim successor,
Supreme Court Justice Boniface Alexandre. Foley declared,
“International military forces, including US forces, will be rapidly
arriving in Haiti to begin to restore a sense of security.”

Earlier, Foley had said Aristide supporters would “burn, pillage and
kill”—this after watching placidly as the CIA-backed force massacred
hundreds. The comment left little doubt as to which forces the
Marines are being sent to repress.

Fully complicit in this conspiracy is the French government. Foreign
Minister Dominique de Villepin repeatedly insisted that Aristide
surrender power as the only solution to Haiti’s crisis. Paris had
played a direct role in fomenting this crisis, lavishly financing the
activities of Aristide’s political opponents among Haiti’s ruling
elite.

For those persuaded by France’s opposition to Washington’s unilateral
invasion of Iraq that French imperialism represented some kind of
benign alternative to its American counterpart, the events in Haiti
serve as a sobering experience.

France, Haiti’s former colonial master, surrendered control over the
country only after being defeated militarily at the dawn of the
nineteenth century by a slave revolt led by Toussaint L’Ouverture. It
then financially blackmailed the fledgling black republic, imposing
crushing indemnity payments, and lured Ouverture to France, where he
was cast into a dungeon to starve.

The French ruling class ensured that an independent Haiti was born in
ruins, incapable of freeing itself from poverty and oppression and
leaving it prey to the rising imperialist power in the Western
Hemisphere, the United States. Washington sent Marines into Haiti in
1915 and militarily occupied the country for nearly 20 years. The US
left behind as the legacy of its occupation the Haitian army, a
bulwark of repressive violence, and subsequently backed the murderous
30-year dictatorship of the Duvalier dynasty.

The ouster of Aristide and the proposed foreign military intervention
constitute a clear demonstration of resurgent imperialism on a world
scale. Haiti has been relegated to the status of a “failed state,” a
category that includes those countries whose economy and social
fabric have been destroyed by the predatory policies of international
finance capital. Washington—and Paris as well—arrogates to itself the
right to dispose of the existing regimes in such states—elected or
not—as it sees fit, in order to defend strategic economic, political
and military interests. The result is a revival of the kind of
arrogant colonialism that existed in the early twentieth century.

A US-led military intervention in Haiti will only deepen the
oppression of the country’s eight million people and lay the
foundations for another US-backed dictatorship. It is part and parcel
of an eruption of American imperialism that has seen two wars in less
than two-and-a-half years and the deployment of US military forces in
over 100 countries.

The flight of Aristide into exile has also exposed the collapse not
only of his own populist political movement in Haiti, but of the
entire perspective of opposing imperialism on the basis of
petty-bourgeois nationalism. It is a testament to the bankruptcy of
this political outlook that a few hundred well-armed thugs were
capable of conquering virtually an entire country and forcing its
president into exile.

Incapable of achieving or defending any significant social gains on
the basis of a nationalist policy, Aristide saw his base of support
melt away. While masses of Haitians remained hostile to the
well-heeled political opposition, they lacked any confidence that the
Aristide government would lead any more of a struggle against the
privileged elite and its armed thugs than it had against the
draconian policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the
foreign banks.

His anti-imperialist rhetoric notwithstanding, Aristide never sought
to overthrow the state structure that was the product of two
centuries of foreign oppression. He never sought to create any
alternative foundations of popular rule, based upon the working class.

Haiti’s workers and poor already had the experience of 1991, when the
newly elected Aristide was overthrown by a US-backed military coup
and fled to the US itself, leaving his supporters to face the
consequences. An estimated 5,000 were murdered.

He was restored to power through a US military intervention, carried
out with the understanding that he would execute the demands of the
IMF and contain the social struggles of the Haitian people. The
result was a corrupt and politically impotent regime that presided
over the continuing deterioration of conditions of life in the
impoverished country.

The tragic results of the two decades of struggle since the upheavals
that toppled the Duvalier dictatorship have exposed the blind alley
of the type “left” nationalist demagogy that Aristide espoused in
Haiti. The attempts by Washington and its clients in the Haitian
business class to re-impose a colonial-style dictatorship will
inevitably deepen social tensions and class antagonisms.

Among the most politically advanced layers of the Haitian working
people, there must be a critical evaluation of this bitter strategic
experience and its fundamental lesson: imperialist oppression cannot
be overcome on a nationalist basis. It requires a unified struggle by
the working class and impoverished masses of Haiti, the Caribbean and
the United States itself against the global capitalist order.
.