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"Canada's quiet war"
"My date with Aristide"
Ousted Haitian prez reveals he was tossed because he refused to privatize
By NAOMI KLEIN
NOW | JULY 21 - 27, 2005 | VOL. 24 NO. 47
www.nowtoronto.com/issues...story5.php
When United Nations troops kill residents of the Haitian slum Cité Soleil, friends and family often place photographs of exiled president Jean-Bertrand Aristide on their bodies.
The photographs silently insist that there is a method to the madness raging in Port-au-Prince. Poor Haitians are being slaughtered not for being "violent," as we so often hear, but for being militant, for daring to demand the return of their elected president.
It was only 10 years ago that U.S. president Bill Clinton celebrated Aristide's return to power as "the triumph of freedom over fear." So what changed? Corruption? Violence? Fraud? Aristide is certainly no saint. But even if the worst of the allegations are true, they pale next to the rap sheets of the convicted killers, drug smugglers and arms traders who ousted Aristide and continue to enjoy free rein, with full support from the Bush administration and the UN.
Turning Haiti over to this underworld gang out of concern for Aristide's lack of "good governance" is like escaping an annoying date by accepting a lift home from Charles Manson.
A few weeks ago I visited Aristide in Pretoria, where he lives in forced exile. I asked him what was really behind his dramatic falling-out with Washington. He offered an explanation rarely heard in discussions of Haitian politics. Actually, he offered three: "privatization, privatization and privatization."
The dispute dates back to a series of meetings in early 1994, a pivotal moment in Haiti's history that Aristide has rarely discussed. Haitians were living under the barbaric rule of Raoul Cédras, who overthrew Aristide in a 1991 U.S.-backed coup. Aristide was in Washington, and despite popular calls for his return, there was no way he could face down the junta without military backup.
Increasingly embarrassed by Cédras's abuses, the Clinton administration offered Aristide a deal: U.S. troops would take him back to Haiti – but only after he agreed to a sweeping economic program whose stated goal was to "substantially transform the nature of the Haitian state."
Aristide agreed to pay the debts accumulated under the kleptocratic Duvalier dictatorships, slash the civil service, open up Haiti to "free trade'' and cut import tariffs on rice and corn in half. It was a lousy deal, but Aristide says he had little choice. "I was out of my country, and my country was the poorest in the Western hemisphere, so what kind of power did I have?''
But Washington's negotiators made one demand that Aristide could not accept: the immediate selloff of Haiti's state-owned enterprises, including phones and electricity. Aristide argued that unregulated privatization would transform state monopolies into private oligarchies, increasing the riches of Haiti's elite and stripping the poor of their national wealth. He says the proposal simply didn't add up. "Being honest means saying 2 plus 2 equals 4. They wanted us to sing 2 plus 2 equals 5."
Aristide proposed a compromise: rather than sell off the firms outright, he would "democratize" them. He defined this as writing antitrust legislation, insuring that proceeds from the sales were redistributed to the poor and allowing workers to become shareholders. Washington backed down, and the final text of the agreement – accepted by the United States and by a meeting of donor nations in Paris – called for the "democratization" of state companies.
But when Aristide began to implement the plan, it turned out that the financiers in Washington thought his democratization talk was just public relations. When Aristide announced that no sales could take place until parliament had approved the new laws, Washington cried foul. Aristide says he realized then that what was being attempted was an "economic coup."
"The hidden agenda was to tie my hands once I was back and make me give for nothing all the state public enterprises." He threatened to arrest anyone who went ahead with privatizations. "Washington was very angry at me. They said I didn't respect my word, when they were the ones who didn't respect our common economic policy."
Aristide's relationship with Washington has been deteriorating ever since. While more than $500 million in promised loans and aid were cut off, starving his government, the U.S. Agency for International Development poured millions into the coffers of opposition groups, culminating in the February 2004 armed coup.
And the war continues. On June 23, Roger Noriega, U.S. assistant secretary of state for Western hemisphere affairs, called on UN troops to take a more "proactive role" in going after armed pro-Aristide gangs. In practice, this has meant a wave of Fallujah-like collective punishment inflicted on neighbourhoods known for supporting Aristide. On July 6, 300 UN troops stormed Cité Soleil, blocking off exits and firing from armoured vehicles.
The UN admits that five people were killed, but residents put the number at no fewer than 20. Reuters correspondent Joseph Guyler Delva says he "saw seven bodies in one house alone, including two babies and one older woman in her 60s." Ali Besnaci, head of Médecins Sans Frontières in Haiti, confirmed that on the day of the siege, 27 people came to the MSF clinic with gunshot wounds, three-quarters of them women and children.
Yet despite these attacks, Haitians are still in the streets, rejecting the planned sham elections, opposing privatization and holding up photographs of their president. And just as Washington's experts could not fathom the possibility that Aristide would reject their advice a decade ago, today they cannot accept that his poor supporters could be acting of their own accord. Surely, Aristide must be controlling them through some mysterious voodoo arts. "We believe that his people are receiving instructions directly from his voice and indirectly through his acolytes,'' Noriega said.
Aristide claims no such powers. "The people are bright, the people are intelligent, the people are courageous," he says. They know that 2 plus 2 does not equal 5.
Research assistance by Aaron Maté. This column was first published in The Nation (www.thenation.com).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
( Also see: www.harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html )
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"Canada's quiet war"
Why are our forces helping to raid Aristide strongholds?
By MIKE SMITH
NOW | JULY 21 - 27, 2005 | VOL. 24 NO. 47
www.nowtoronto.com/issues...story6.php
When Jean-Bertrand Aristide took the presidency of Haiti in 2000, Canada, the U.S. and the EU turned off the foreign aid tap, citing irregularities in seven senatorial races.
Now, in the still hemorrhaging aftermath of a coup, Haiti's unelected interim leader, Prime Minister Gerard Latortue, finds himself flush with a World Bank loan of over $60 million and once-witheld dollars and Euros – including a $180 million promise from Canada.
If an irregularly elected president was cause for stinginess, why has a thoroughly unelected one been chosen for a shopping spree? That's a question haunting human rights advocates as they watch the Haitian National Police (HNP) fire on demonstrators, execute suspects and jail members of Aristide's popular Lavalas party without charges. Those willing to look can find almost daily reports of bloody raids by the HNP and the UN peacekeeping force, including a 1,600-strong CivPol contingent under the command of 100 RCMP officers.
"People are puzzled," says Jean Saint-Vil, a Haitian Canadian and member of Haiti Action Committee Canada. "They've never seen Canada act like this before."
Haiti is not a simple internal conflict, he tells me. "The guys who conducted the coup were in training for two years in the Dominican Republic." During that time, in late 2003, reps of the EU, France and the Organization of American States gathered in Canada to assert amongst themselves that Aristide had to go. The meeting was called the Ottawa Initiative.
A few months later, Canadian soldiers secured the Haitian airport from which Aristide departed, escorted by U.S. Marines, amidst street fighting stirred up by U.S.-funded business groups. Canadian police trained the HNP. "Canada has gone too far in to change course," says Saint-Vil. "It's invested in the coup."
And meeting Ottawa more than halfway is Haiti's new ambassador to Canada, Robert Tippenhauer, "part of the small minority who are white and wealthy," Saint-Vil says. Tippenhaeur left the Haitian-Canadian Chamber of Commerce to take the post. His nephew Hans Tippenhaeur, the entrepreneur behind PromoCapital, Haiti's first investment bank, is a member of the so-called Group of 184. Owners of most of Haiti's news media and beneficiaries of massive amounts of Washington funding, the group mounted a considerable pre-coup anti-Lavalas campaign.
The group's Canadian counterparts stand to benefit. Group of 184 leader Andy Apaid is the prime Haitian subcontractor for Montreal T-shirt dynasty Gildan Activewear. Citing a need to compete with the Chinese garment industry, Gildan is racing to the bottom in terms of wages, and has reached new depths in Haiti, where the minimum wage was raised by Aristide to 72 gourdes per day (about $2.11). Latortue plans to roll it back to 36
St. Genevieve Resources and its subsidiary KWG Resources, both Canadian, have begun mining exploration in Haiti. And SNC-Lavalin has secured a contract from the Haitian provisional government to construct roads.
"It's money-laundering," says Anthony Fenton, journalist and co-author of the forthcoming Canada In Haiti: Waging War Against The Poor Majority. "Once you invade a so-called failed state, you need to rebuild it, so contracts are doled out left and right."
The Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade says Canada's involvement will reform corruption, which existed well before Latortue. "There is a clear need to strengthen the capacity of the domestic police force," states a carefully worded response from DFAIT, forwarded by Cloe Rodrigue.
"The training offered by Canadian police aims at instilling the highest standards... in full respect of human rights. Canada's officials use every opportunity to convey to all stakeholders in Haiti our support for a constructive and sustainable solution."
But with most police operations targeting communities opposed to the transitional government, and with the RCMP deeply enmeshed, Canada isn't looking like a consensus-builder.
"After the election [proposed for November], whoever wins, there may be another coup,'' says Saint-Vil. "There needs to be real reconciliation."
"My date with Aristide"
Ousted Haitian prez reveals he was tossed because he refused to privatize
By NAOMI KLEIN
NOW | JULY 21 - 27, 2005 | VOL. 24 NO. 47
www.nowtoronto.com/issues...story5.php
When United Nations troops kill residents of the Haitian slum Cité Soleil, friends and family often place photographs of exiled president Jean-Bertrand Aristide on their bodies.
The photographs silently insist that there is a method to the madness raging in Port-au-Prince. Poor Haitians are being slaughtered not for being "violent," as we so often hear, but for being militant, for daring to demand the return of their elected president.
It was only 10 years ago that U.S. president Bill Clinton celebrated Aristide's return to power as "the triumph of freedom over fear." So what changed? Corruption? Violence? Fraud? Aristide is certainly no saint. But even if the worst of the allegations are true, they pale next to the rap sheets of the convicted killers, drug smugglers and arms traders who ousted Aristide and continue to enjoy free rein, with full support from the Bush administration and the UN.
Turning Haiti over to this underworld gang out of concern for Aristide's lack of "good governance" is like escaping an annoying date by accepting a lift home from Charles Manson.
A few weeks ago I visited Aristide in Pretoria, where he lives in forced exile. I asked him what was really behind his dramatic falling-out with Washington. He offered an explanation rarely heard in discussions of Haitian politics. Actually, he offered three: "privatization, privatization and privatization."
The dispute dates back to a series of meetings in early 1994, a pivotal moment in Haiti's history that Aristide has rarely discussed. Haitians were living under the barbaric rule of Raoul Cédras, who overthrew Aristide in a 1991 U.S.-backed coup. Aristide was in Washington, and despite popular calls for his return, there was no way he could face down the junta without military backup.
Increasingly embarrassed by Cédras's abuses, the Clinton administration offered Aristide a deal: U.S. troops would take him back to Haiti – but only after he agreed to a sweeping economic program whose stated goal was to "substantially transform the nature of the Haitian state."
Aristide agreed to pay the debts accumulated under the kleptocratic Duvalier dictatorships, slash the civil service, open up Haiti to "free trade'' and cut import tariffs on rice and corn in half. It was a lousy deal, but Aristide says he had little choice. "I was out of my country, and my country was the poorest in the Western hemisphere, so what kind of power did I have?''
But Washington's negotiators made one demand that Aristide could not accept: the immediate selloff of Haiti's state-owned enterprises, including phones and electricity. Aristide argued that unregulated privatization would transform state monopolies into private oligarchies, increasing the riches of Haiti's elite and stripping the poor of their national wealth. He says the proposal simply didn't add up. "Being honest means saying 2 plus 2 equals 4. They wanted us to sing 2 plus 2 equals 5."
Aristide proposed a compromise: rather than sell off the firms outright, he would "democratize" them. He defined this as writing antitrust legislation, insuring that proceeds from the sales were redistributed to the poor and allowing workers to become shareholders. Washington backed down, and the final text of the agreement – accepted by the United States and by a meeting of donor nations in Paris – called for the "democratization" of state companies.
But when Aristide began to implement the plan, it turned out that the financiers in Washington thought his democratization talk was just public relations. When Aristide announced that no sales could take place until parliament had approved the new laws, Washington cried foul. Aristide says he realized then that what was being attempted was an "economic coup."
"The hidden agenda was to tie my hands once I was back and make me give for nothing all the state public enterprises." He threatened to arrest anyone who went ahead with privatizations. "Washington was very angry at me. They said I didn't respect my word, when they were the ones who didn't respect our common economic policy."
Aristide's relationship with Washington has been deteriorating ever since. While more than $500 million in promised loans and aid were cut off, starving his government, the U.S. Agency for International Development poured millions into the coffers of opposition groups, culminating in the February 2004 armed coup.
And the war continues. On June 23, Roger Noriega, U.S. assistant secretary of state for Western hemisphere affairs, called on UN troops to take a more "proactive role" in going after armed pro-Aristide gangs. In practice, this has meant a wave of Fallujah-like collective punishment inflicted on neighbourhoods known for supporting Aristide. On July 6, 300 UN troops stormed Cité Soleil, blocking off exits and firing from armoured vehicles.
The UN admits that five people were killed, but residents put the number at no fewer than 20. Reuters correspondent Joseph Guyler Delva says he "saw seven bodies in one house alone, including two babies and one older woman in her 60s." Ali Besnaci, head of Médecins Sans Frontières in Haiti, confirmed that on the day of the siege, 27 people came to the MSF clinic with gunshot wounds, three-quarters of them women and children.
Yet despite these attacks, Haitians are still in the streets, rejecting the planned sham elections, opposing privatization and holding up photographs of their president. And just as Washington's experts could not fathom the possibility that Aristide would reject their advice a decade ago, today they cannot accept that his poor supporters could be acting of their own accord. Surely, Aristide must be controlling them through some mysterious voodoo arts. "We believe that his people are receiving instructions directly from his voice and indirectly through his acolytes,'' Noriega said.
Aristide claims no such powers. "The people are bright, the people are intelligent, the people are courageous," he says. They know that 2 plus 2 does not equal 5.
Research assistance by Aaron Maté. This column was first published in The Nation (www.thenation.com).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
( Also see: www.harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html )
===============================================
===============================================
"Canada's quiet war"
Why are our forces helping to raid Aristide strongholds?
By MIKE SMITH
NOW | JULY 21 - 27, 2005 | VOL. 24 NO. 47
www.nowtoronto.com/issues...story6.php
When Jean-Bertrand Aristide took the presidency of Haiti in 2000, Canada, the U.S. and the EU turned off the foreign aid tap, citing irregularities in seven senatorial races.
Now, in the still hemorrhaging aftermath of a coup, Haiti's unelected interim leader, Prime Minister Gerard Latortue, finds himself flush with a World Bank loan of over $60 million and once-witheld dollars and Euros – including a $180 million promise from Canada.
If an irregularly elected president was cause for stinginess, why has a thoroughly unelected one been chosen for a shopping spree? That's a question haunting human rights advocates as they watch the Haitian National Police (HNP) fire on demonstrators, execute suspects and jail members of Aristide's popular Lavalas party without charges. Those willing to look can find almost daily reports of bloody raids by the HNP and the UN peacekeeping force, including a 1,600-strong CivPol contingent under the command of 100 RCMP officers.
"People are puzzled," says Jean Saint-Vil, a Haitian Canadian and member of Haiti Action Committee Canada. "They've never seen Canada act like this before."
Haiti is not a simple internal conflict, he tells me. "The guys who conducted the coup were in training for two years in the Dominican Republic." During that time, in late 2003, reps of the EU, France and the Organization of American States gathered in Canada to assert amongst themselves that Aristide had to go. The meeting was called the Ottawa Initiative.
A few months later, Canadian soldiers secured the Haitian airport from which Aristide departed, escorted by U.S. Marines, amidst street fighting stirred up by U.S.-funded business groups. Canadian police trained the HNP. "Canada has gone too far in to change course," says Saint-Vil. "It's invested in the coup."
And meeting Ottawa more than halfway is Haiti's new ambassador to Canada, Robert Tippenhauer, "part of the small minority who are white and wealthy," Saint-Vil says. Tippenhaeur left the Haitian-Canadian Chamber of Commerce to take the post. His nephew Hans Tippenhaeur, the entrepreneur behind PromoCapital, Haiti's first investment bank, is a member of the so-called Group of 184. Owners of most of Haiti's news media and beneficiaries of massive amounts of Washington funding, the group mounted a considerable pre-coup anti-Lavalas campaign.
The group's Canadian counterparts stand to benefit. Group of 184 leader Andy Apaid is the prime Haitian subcontractor for Montreal T-shirt dynasty Gildan Activewear. Citing a need to compete with the Chinese garment industry, Gildan is racing to the bottom in terms of wages, and has reached new depths in Haiti, where the minimum wage was raised by Aristide to 72 gourdes per day (about $2.11). Latortue plans to roll it back to 36
St. Genevieve Resources and its subsidiary KWG Resources, both Canadian, have begun mining exploration in Haiti. And SNC-Lavalin has secured a contract from the Haitian provisional government to construct roads.
"It's money-laundering," says Anthony Fenton, journalist and co-author of the forthcoming Canada In Haiti: Waging War Against The Poor Majority. "Once you invade a so-called failed state, you need to rebuild it, so contracts are doled out left and right."
The Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade says Canada's involvement will reform corruption, which existed well before Latortue. "There is a clear need to strengthen the capacity of the domestic police force," states a carefully worded response from DFAIT, forwarded by Cloe Rodrigue.
"The training offered by Canadian police aims at instilling the highest standards... in full respect of human rights. Canada's officials use every opportunity to convey to all stakeholders in Haiti our support for a constructive and sustainable solution."
But with most police operations targeting communities opposed to the transitional government, and with the RCMP deeply enmeshed, Canada isn't looking like a consensus-builder.
"After the election [proposed for November], whoever wins, there may be another coup,'' says Saint-Vil. "There needs to be real reconciliation."