Lee Sustar
The media have a standard story line to explain the uprising in Haiti — one-time populist leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide has become a corrupt authoritarian who is relying on armed gangs to crush a popular uprising. In reality, the anti-Aristide opposition that is behind the uprising shaking Haiti today is a Washington-connected collection of Haitian businessmen and a scattering of former leftists.
If they succeed in ousting Aristide, they'll try to turn back the clock to the days when military officers and paramilitary gangs ruled Haiti through sheer terror. Any doubts as to the nature of the rebellion in the city of Gonaieves, which was siezed by rebel gangs on February 5, should be put to rest by the role played by leaders of the military dictatorship of the 1980s.
While the media has described the rebellion as led by former Aristide supporters, a key player is Jean "Tatoune" Pierre, who backed the 1991 coup that overthrew Aristide. Others involved include members of the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH), a paramilitary organization that terrorised and assassinated Aristide supporters during the military regime that lasted until US troops restored Aristide into office in 1994.
Louis-Jodel Chamblain, a former FRAPH leader, is centrally involved in Gonaieves, as is Guy Philippe, a former police chief in the city of Cap-Haitien who was accused of plotting a coup in 2000. By seizing Gonaieves, they've essentially cut Haiti in two.
Washington's stated attitude to the uprising has been contradictory. On February 12, State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher declared that "reaching a political settlement will require some fairly thorough changes in the way Haiti is governed, and how the security situation is maintained". The New York Times interpreted this to mean that "the Bush administration has placed itself in the unusual position of saying it may accept the ouster of a democratic government".
The following day, US Secretary of State Colin Powell rounded up ministers from CARICOM, the organisation linking the government of Caribbean countries, the US and Canada, to declare, "We will accept no outcome that in any way illegally attempts to remove the elected president of Haiti". But deeds matter more than words — and there's no doubt that Washington set the stage for the uprising.
The top FRAPH leader, Emmanuel Constant, who claims he was a CIA employee, remains at large in New York City. Major funding for Haiti's umbrella opposition group, Democratic Convergence, comes from the National Endowment for Democracy, a US foundation notorious for funnelling US aid to counterrevolutionary forces in Central America during the Cold War.
While the Haitian opposition's high-sounding democratic rhetoric is repeated by Western reporters, their right-wing supporters have carried out a systematic campaign of violence against Haitian journalists and pro-Aristide activists. If Aristide's supporters are armed, it's because they face armed opponents.
If Powell backtracked on supporting the opposition, it isn't because the US is reluctant to intervene in Haiti. The US invaded and occupied Haiti in 1915 and stayed for 19 years — an early example of regime change. Washington then bankrolled a succession of Haitian dictators, including the 30-year rule of the Duvalier family until an uprising, led in part by Aristide, drove it from power in 1988.
On January 31, the US pressured Aristide into signing an accord with the opposition, mediated by CARICOM, in which Aristide agreed to disarm his supporters, "reform" the police force, appoint a new prime minister acceptable to the opposition and call new elections to replace the legislature, whose term expired January 13. This deal was in keeping with a pattern established when 20,000 US troops invaded Haiti to return Aristide to office nearly a decade ago.
Aristide, who as a Catholic priest became a mass leader of Haiti's poor in the overthrow of the military dictatorship in the 1980s, became a collaborator with free-market, "neoliberal" reforms dictated by Washington. This included opening up a big free-trade zone on the border with the Dominican Republic, funded by a World Bank loan that will benefit sweatshop owners — and paying back debts to the International Monetary Fund that date from the dictatorship.
All this has meant that Aristide has been unable to deliver promised reforms to the poor — and his popular support has eroded as a result. Aristide increasingly relies on a small network tied to his party.
The uprising was likely initiated by far-right paramilitaries who are unwilling to settle for the negotiated solution. They gambled that Aristide's popular support had been so weakened that they could grab power quickly — and that the more respectable right-wing front men would go along.
Instead, the poor rallied behind Aristide once more, with a mass turnout forcing the cancellation of an opposition protest in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince on February 15. While Aristide no longer commands the following he once did, much of Haiti's poor seem to recognise that the opposition's uprising would bring the return of the right-wing butchers.
It's difficult to predict how the crisis in Haiti will play out. But it's already clear that the popular forces who are resisting the opposition will have to chart a path that rejects not only the old right wing, but the free-market policies of Aristide, which have only added to Haiti's misery.
[Abridged from Socialist Worker, weekly paper of the US International Socialist Organization. Visit <http://www.socialistworker.org>.]
From Green Left Weekly, February 25, 2004.
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