[News] Looking Back on the Overthrow of Jean-Bertrand Aristide

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Weekend Edition Feb 28-Mar 02, 2014

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/28/63893/


  Looking Back on the Overthrow of Jean-Bertrand Aristide

by YVES ENGLER

/This is the third in a series leading up to the 10th anniversary of the 
February 29 2004 overthrow of Jean-Bertrand Aristide's government in 
Haiti.// Read Part One here 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/01/31/remembering-the-overthrow-of-haitis-jean-bertrand-aristide/>, Part 
Two here 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/07/the-haiti-occupation-continues/> and 
Part Three here 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/21/remembering-the-overthrow-of-jean-bertrand-aristide/>. 
-- YE/

Why did Canada help overthrow Haiti's elected government? That's a 
question I heard over and over when speaking about /Canada in Haiti: 
Waging War on the Poor Majority/ 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1552661687/counterpunchmaga>, a 
book I co-authored with Anthony Fenton. Most people had difficulty 
understanding why their country --- and the U.S. to some extent --- 
would intervene in a country so poor, so seemingly marginal to world 
affairs. Why would they bother?

I would answer that Canada participated in the coup as a way to make 
good with Washington, especially after (officially) declining the Bush 
administration's invitation (order) to join the "coalition of the 
willing" that invaded Iraq in 2003. Former Foreign Affairs Minister Bill 
Graham explained: "Foreign Affairs view was there is a limit to how much 
we can constantly say no to the political masters in Washington. All we 
had was Afghanistan to wave. On every other file we were offside. 
Eventually we came on side on Haiti, so we got another arrow in our quiver."

It is also worth noting that at the start of 2003 the Haitian minimum 
wage was 36 gourdes ($1) a day, which was nearly doubled to 70 gourdes 
by the Aristide government. Of course, this was opposed by domestic and 
international capital, which used Haiti's lowest wages in the hemisphere 
as a way to beat back workers' demands in other countries. Canadian 
capital was especially hostile to raising the minimum wage. One of the 
largest blank T-shirt maker in the world, Montréal-based Gildan 
Activewear was the country's largest employer after the state, employing 
up to 8,000 Haitians (directly and indirectly) in Port-au-Prince's 
assembly sector by 2007. Most of Gildan's work was subcontracted to Andy 
Apaid, who led the Group 184 domestic "civil society" that opposed 
Aristide's government. Coincidentally, two days after the coup, Foreign 
Affairs stated "some Canadian companies are looking to shift garment 
production to Haiti."

It is also clear that some Canadian mining companies saw better 
opportunities with a post-Aristide government. In 2007, reported the 
/Toronto Star/, "Another Canadian-backed company recently resumed 
prospecting in Haiti after abandoning its claims a decade ago. Steve 
Lachapelle --- a Québec lawyer who is now chair of the board of the 
company, called St. Genevieve Haiti --- says employees were threatened 
at gunpoint by partisans of ex-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide."

Another reason for the intervention came out of the contempt, heightened 
during the country's 200-year anniversary of independence, directed at 
Haiti ever since the country's 1791-1804 revolution dealt a crushing 
blow to slavery, colonialism and white supremacy. The threat of a good 
example --- particularly worrisome for the powers that be, since Haiti 
is so poor --- contributed to the motivation for the coup. Aristide was 
perceived as a barrier to a thorough implementation of the free market 
agenda, particularly because of his opposition to the privatization of 
the country's five remaining state-owned companies. The attitude seems 
to have been, "if we can't force our way in Haiti, where can we?"

But one must look at the history of Canadian foreign policy to fully 
understand why Canada helped overthrow the elected Haitian government.

The Canadian government, from its beginning, was part of the command and 
control apparatus of the world economic system. At first Canada served 
as an arm of the British Empire, but given the country's location as 
well as racial and economic makeup, it quickly became intertwined with 
the USA. Canada's role over the past six decades, as assigned by the 
dominant power, has typically been some sort of "policing" operation, 
usually called peacekeeping. Since Canada has primarily been a 
"policing" rather than "military" power one must look to the language of 
policing to discover the motivations for our Haitian policy.

Over the past decade there has been much discussion of something called 
"pulling our weight" in external affairs. In laymen's terms this means 
spending more of the country's resources on defending and expanding the 
ability of Canadian capitalists in particular, but also for the system 
in general, to make a profit around the world. While the less 
sophisticated neoconservatives simply call for more military spending 
and a pro-U.S. foreign policy, the more liberal Canadian supporters of 
capitalism have been busy creating an ideological mask, called the 
"responsibility to protect" that will accomplish the same end.

The "responsibility to protect" is essentially a justification for 
imperialism using the dialect of policing instead of the old language of 
empire and militarism. It says there are "failed states" that must be 
overthrown because they do not provide adequately for their own citizens 
and because they threaten world order. This is the international 
equivalent of the "zero tolerance" (also called the "broken window") 
strategy of the New York City police department. The policy is to 
aggressively police petty crimes in order to create an environment that 
discourages more serious law breaking. In the same fashion, the 
international community should go after "failed states" not because they 
threaten other countries with invasion but since they create an 
environment where "crime" may thrive. (Noam Chomsky has used the Mafia 
analogy to explain the less sophisticated, older imperialist version of 
this policy. Any and all challenges, even minor ones, must be met with 
violence until "order" is established. The "responsibility to protect" 
differs in form but not in substance.)

The coup in Haiti was a Canadian-managed experiment in the use of the 
"responsibility to protect" doctrine. Aristide was overthrown precisely 
because Haiti is so unimportant to the world economic system and because 
cracking down on it is the international economic equivalent of the New 
York City police cracking down on graffiti writers. Once again Haiti was 
an example to the rest of the world, a message from the world's rich and 
powerful: "We, the 0.01%, run the world in our interests and you better 
listen to what we say."

/*Yves Engler's* the author of Canada and Israel: building apartheid. 
His latest //co-authored //book //is the New Commune-ist Manifesto --- 
Workers of the World It Really is Time to Unite. For more information go 
towww.newcommuneist.com <http://www.newcommuneist.com/>/

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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