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25572: Hermantin (letters to the editor)Don't blame Aristide for violence in Haiti (fwd)




From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Miami Herald

Posted on Tue, Jul. 05, 2005



Don't blame Aristide for violence in Haiti


Re the June 24 article Aristide accused of fostering violence: The claim by Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega that former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide is behind the violence in Haiti is nothing but hyperbole. Gangs in Haiti only have allegiance to the highest bidder. I would suggest that following the money would reveal whose interests they serve. I am no apologist for Aristide. He had an opportunity to change the course of Haiti's tragic history and failed. But to say that he is ''singularly responsible'' for the violence is simplistic and reflects Noriega's black-and-white view of Haiti and his unhealthy fixation on Aristide. Interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue recently said that the violence is mainly caused by criminals deported to Haiti from the United States.

Noriega's obsession with Aristide has distorted U.S. policy toward Haiti for years, even before he became the official architect of it. As a staffer for Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., in the late 1990s, Noriega held up desperately needed assistance for human-rights observers, the police and the judiciary. Now his hatred for Aristide is blinding him to the reality that Haiti is well on its way to becoming a failed state -- if it is not one already.

Noriega should forget about Aristide and work to help millions of other Haitians struggling to survive before the situation deteriorates into chaos and bloodshed of unimaginable proportions. Or else he should get out of the way.

REP. WILLIAM D. DELAHUNT, Washington, D.C.

(William Delahunt, a Democrat from Massachusetts, serves on the House International Relations Committee -- Ed.)

In her June 27 Other Views column, Country consumed by violence despite U.N. forces, Nancy Roc's selective memory about the dynamics of today's violence in Haiti is stunning.

The vigor and thoroughness with which the international media, including Roc, have covered recent kidnappings of middle- and upper-class Haitians and foreigners is an insult to the hundreds of poor Haitians killed by Haitian state-security forces while the media slept.

It was not President Aristide who triggered a class war. France introduced that more than 200 years ago in Haiti, and it has been used quite effectively by its elite to keep the majority of Haitians in grinding poverty and perpetual hunger. Labels invented by rich Haitians to slander the poor -- such as ''Rwanda,'' ''Somalization'' and ''Operation Baghdad'' -- cannot mask the truth about what Haiti has become -- a hell created by Haiti's elite and their international backers. It is a place where the security apparatus is used to silence the demand of the poor for the only thing that they believe will bring them out of this hell -- the return of the democratically elected Aristide.

SHIRLEY PATE, Washington, D.C.