28240: Sprague (News) Canadian officials planned military intervention weeks before Haitian coup (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Jeb Sprague


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From    http://dominionpaper.ca/foreign_policy/2006/04/07/declassify.html

Declassifying Canada in Haiti: Part I:
Canadian officials planned military intervention weeks before Haitian coup

by Anthony Fenton and Dru Oja Jay

Classified memos obtained by The Dominion through Access to Information Act 
request raise new questions about the extent of Canadian participation in the 
2004 coup against Haiti's democratically elected President Jean Bertrand 
Aristide.

Nine days before the February 29 coup that removed Aristide and thousands of 
elected officials, then-minister Denis Coderre told the Canadian Press that "it 
is clear that we don't want Aristide's head; we believe that Aristide should 
stay."

In the same report, then-Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham claimed that 
Canada was seeking to pressure Aristide to adopt a series of measures to give 
the opposition more power in government.

Nine days earlier, on February 11th, Canadian Ambassador Kenneth Cook sent a 
memo marked "Confidential" to the Privy Council Office and Department of 
Foreign Affairs and International Trade, with a subject heading "Meeting with 
US Ambassador." Its contents suggest that Canada was planning for the removal 
of the Aristide-led government while officials publicly claimed to be 
attempting to reach a peaceful agreement.

Cook wrote:

    The situation we face is not only one of a struggle for power, it involves 
a humanitarian crisis and the potential to permanently change the course of 
Haitian history. President Aristide is clearly a serious aggravating factor in 
the current crisis and unless he gives dramatic early signs that he is 
implementing the CARICOM road map then the OAS, CARICOM and possibly UN will 
have to consider the options including whether a case can be made for the duty 
to protect.

Large portions of the memo, which discusses specific plans for military 
intervention, are blacked out. Of the period requested, February 5 to March 15 
2004, Feb 20 to March 15 were omitted without explanation.

The "duty to protect" is another term for the controversial Canadian-sponsored 
"responsibility to protect" (R2P) doctrine, which was adopted as international 
doctrine without a vote by the UN General Assembly at the UN World Summit in 
September 2005. Countries like Cuba and Venezuela have strongly opposed the 
doctrine, saying that it gives powerful countries freedom to intervene when 
they determine a state to have "failed."

Notable Canadians involved in the drafting of the R2P doctrine were Michael 
Ignatieff and Lloyd Axworthy. In his writings, academic-turned-politician 
Ignatieff has praised the US as an "Empire Lite," and supported the US-led war 
on Iraq. Axworthy was Canada's foreign affairs Minister in 2000 when economic 
sanctions were levied against Haiti's democratically elected government.

The R2P doctrine developed a framework for "threshold criteria for military 
intervention," under the guise of "humanitarian intervention for human 
protection." Under the core principles devised in this doctrine, "the principle 
of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect."

Two "precautionary principles" of R2P stand out. First, that "the primary 
purpose of the intervention...must be to halt or avert human suffering," and 
second, that military intervention must only be used as a last resort, 
"Military intervention can only be justified when every non-military option... 
has been explored."

In this case, substantial evidence suggests that the crisis that Ambassador 
Cook used to invoke the R2P was itself instigated by the US State Department 
and other US and Canadian agencies. The US, Canadian, and European Union-funded 
"civil society organizations" though lacking in popular support, continually 
demanded that Aristide step down and that their representatives be granted key 
positions in government. US, Canadian and French diplomats insisted on 
opposition support for any power-sharing agreement. Some critics claim that the 
three governments knew that the opposition would not accept any agreement other 
than one that gave them control.

According to many reports, the intervention itself, justified in memos by the 
R2P doctrine, had the effect of multiplying and aggravating the humanitarian 
crisis. An April 2004 human rights report prepared by the National Lawyers 
Guild (NLG) found that "the multinational force of 3,600 soldiers... was not 
functioning to protect supporters of President Aristide or prevent killings, 
kidnappings, and arsons directed at this supporters."

The NLG met with the Director of the State Morgue in Port au Prince, and 
reported that "The Director admitted that 800 bodies were 'dumped and buried' 
by morgue on Sunday, March 7, 2004, and another 200 bodies dumped on Sunday, 
March 28, 2004. The 'usual' amount dumped is less than 100 per month."

A March 2005 Harvard University Law School report, "Keeping the Peace in 
Haiti?" contended that the UN military force, MINUSTAH, "has effectively 
provided cover for the police to wage a campaign of terror in Port au Prince's 
slums." Having discovered evidence of a mass grave, the human rights delegation 
found MINUSTAH officials aware but unwilling to investigate the "clandestine 
gravesite." Canadian UN police (UNPOL) Commissioner David Beer, while 
ackowledging such that grave sites were "a point of contention" said that the 
grave found by "was not an active case being investigated."

According to other government documents acquired by The Dominion, Denis Paradis 
organized a January 2003 meeting "in the spirit of the responsibility to 
protect." The secret, high level roundtable was dubbed the Ottawa Initiative on 
Haiti. Details of this meeting were leaked in a March 15, 2003 edition of 
l'Actualité, by reporter Michel Vastel. Vastel wrote then that the theme of 
"Aristide must go," along with the possibility of a "Kosovo-model" trusteeship 
over Haiti, were discussed by members of the Canadian, French, and US 
governments, along with representatives from the Organization of American 
States (OAS).

In an effort to control the damage of the media leak, the Canadian government 
issued a release denying that regime change or a trusteeship were discussed at 
this meeting.