[News] Why they had to crush Aristide

[News at freedomarchives.org]

Why they had to crush Aristide

Haiti's elected leader was regarded as a threat by France and the US

Peter Hallward

Tuesday   March     2, 2004

The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk>

Jean-Bertrand Aristide was re-elected president of Haiti in November 2000
with more than 90% of the vote. He was elected by people who approved his
courageous dissolution, in 1995, of the armed forces that had long
terrorised Haiti and had overthrown his first administration. He was elected
by people who supported his tentative efforts, made with virtually no
resources or revenue, to invest in education and health. He was elected by
people who shared his determination, in the face of crippling US opposition,
to improve the conditions of the most poorly paid workers in the western
hemisphere.

Aristide was forced from office on Sunday by people who have little in
common except their opposition to his progressive policies and their refusal
of the democratic process. With the enthusiastic backing of Haiti's former
colonial master, a leader elected with overwhelming popular support has been
driven from office by a loose association of convicted human rights abusers,
seditious former army officers and pro-American business leaders.

It's obvious that Aristide's expulsion offered Jacques Chirac a long-awaited
chance to restore relations with an American administration he dared to
oppose over the attack on Iraq. It's even more obvious that the
characterisation of Aristide as yet another crazed idealist corrupted by
absolute power sits perfectly with the political vision championed by George
Bush, and that the Haitian leader's downfall should open the door to a yet
more ruthless exploitation of Latin American labour.

If you've been reading the mainstream press over the past few weeks, you'll
know that this peculiar version of events has been carefully prepared by
repeated accusations that Aristide rigged fraudulent elections in 2000;
unleashed violent militias against his political opponents; and brought
Haiti's economy to the point of collapse and its people to the brink of
humanitarian catastrophe.

But look a little harder at those elections. An exhaustive and convincing
report by the International Coalition of Independent Observers concluded
that "fair and peaceful elections were held" in
2000, and by the standard of the presidential elections held in the US that
same year they were positively exemplary.

Why then were they characterised as "flawed" by the Organisation of American
States (OAS)? It was because, after Aristide's Lavalas party had won 16 out
of 17 senate seats, the OAS contested the methodology used to calculate the
voting percentages. Curiously, neither the US nor the OAS judged this
methodology problematic in the run-up to the elections.

However, in the wake of the Lavalas victories, it was suddenly important
enough to justify driving the country towards economic collapse. Bill
Clinton invoked the OAS accusation to justify the crippling economic embargo
against Haiti that persists to this day, and which effectively blocks the
payment of about $500m in international aid.

But what about the gangs of Aristide supporters running riot in
Port-au-Prince? No doubt Aristide bears some responsibility for the dozen
reported deaths over the last 48 hours. But given that his supporters have
no army to protect them, and given that the police force serving the entire
country is just a tenth of the force that patrols New York city, it's worth
remembering that this figure is a small fraction of the number killed by the
rebels in recent weeks.

One of the reasons why Aristide has been consistently vilified in the press
is that the Reuters and AP wire services, on which most coverage depends,
rely on local media, which are all owned by Aristide's opponents. Another,
more important, reason for the vilification is that Aristide never learned
to pander unreservedly to foreign commercial interests. He reluctantly
accepted a series of severe IMF structural adjustment plans, to the dismay
of the working poor, but he refused to acquiesce in the indiscriminate
privatisation of state resources, and stuck to his guns over wages,
education and health.

What happened in Haiti is not that a leader who was once reasonable went mad
with power; the truth is that a broadly consistent Aristide was never quite
prepared to abandon all his principles.

Worst of all, he remained indelibly associated with what's left of a genuine
popular movement for political and economic empowerment. For this reason
alone, it was essential that he not only be forced from office but utterly
discredited in the eyes of his people and the world. As Noam Chomsky has
said, the "threat of a good example" solicits measures of retaliation that
bear no relation to the strategic or economic importance of the country in
question. This is why the leaders of the world have joined together to crush
a democracy in the name of democracy.

· Peter Hallward teaches French at King's College London and is the author
of Absolutely Postcolonial

peter.hallward at kcl.ac.uk



The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20040303/af67220b/attachment.htm>