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<font size=2>March 14, 2012 <br><br>
Washington Continues to Trample on Haitians Democratic Rights<br><br>
</font><h1><font size=4><b>The Impediment to Democracy in
Haiti</b></font></h1><font size=2>by MARK WEISBROT<br>
<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/03/14/the-impediment-to-democracy-in-haiti/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/03/14/the-impediment-to-democracy-in-haiti/<br>
<br>
</a>When the “international community” blames Haiti for its political
troubles, the underlying concept is usually that Haitians are not ready
for democracy. But it is Washington that is not ready for democracy
in Haiti.<br><br>
Haitians have been ready for democracy for many decades. They were ready
when they got massacred at polling stations, trying to vote in 1987 after
the fall of the murderous Duvalier dictatorship. They were ready again in
1990, when they voted by a two-thirds majority for the leftist Catholic
priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, only to see him overthrown seven months
later in a military coup. The coup was later found to be organized
by people paid by the United States Central Intelligence Agency.<br><br>
Haitians were ready again in 2000 when they elected Aristide a second
time with 90 percent of the vote. But Washington would not accept the
results of that election either, so it organized a cut-off of
international aid to the government and poured millions into the
opposition. As Paul Farmer (Bill Clinton’s Deputy Special Envoy of
the UN to Haiti) testified to the U.S. Congress in 2010:<br><br>
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<dd>“Choking off assistance for development and for the provision of
basic services also choked off oxygen to the government, which was the
intention all along: to dislodge the Aristide administration.”<br><br>
</dl><font size=3>In 2004 Aristide was whisked away in one of those
planes that the U.S. government has used for “extraordinary rendition,”
and taken involuntarily to the Central African Republic.<br><br>
Eight years later, the U.S. government is still not ready for democracy
in Haiti. On March 3rd the<i> Miami Herald</i> reported that
“Former Haiti President Jean-Bertrand Aristide is once again in the cross
hairs of the U.S. government, this time for allegedly pocketing millions
of dollars in bribes from Miami businesses . . .”<br><br>
Everything about these latest allegations smells foul, like the outhouses
that haven’t been cleaned for months in some of the camps where hundreds
of thousands of Haitians displaced by the earthquake still
languish.<br><br>
First, the source: Patrick Joseph was the head of Haiti’s national
telecommunications company (Teleco) until he was fired by then President
Aristide for corruption in 2003. Fast forward nine years: last
month Joseph negotiates a guilty plea with U.S. federal prosecutors for
accepting $2.3 million in bribes from U.S. companies. Facing a long
prison sentence, he tells them that about half the money was for
President Aristide. How convenient. That should knock a few years
off his prison time.<br><br>
Then there is the timing of the new charges. The first indictment
in this case, in 2009, doesn’t mention Aristide or anyone who could be
him. The same is true for the second indictment, in July 2011,
which added Patrick Joseph. But the January 2012 indictment
mentions an unidentified “Official B” of the Haitian government;
and now we are told that “Official B,” according to one of the
defense attorneys in the case, is Aristide. How does he know?
Obviously the U.S. Justice Department, which has no comment on the
matter, told him that, so he could tell the press.<br><br>
Why now? Aristide has been very quiet and has stayed out of
politics since his return to Haiti a year ago. He has focused on the
University of the Aristide Foundation; closed since the 2004 coup, the
medical school was able to reopen this past fall. But he still has the
biggest base of any political figure in the country, the only really
popular, democratically elected leader that Haiti has ever had. His
party, Fanmi Lavalas, is still the most popular political party, and
although it was wracked by political divisions while Aristide was in
exile, it has reportedly become more unified since he has returned.
Demonstrations on the eight-year anniversary of the 2004 coup – two weeks
ago – drew thousands into the streets.<br><br>
“The display of popular support for Aristide is very worrisome to the
U.S., so indicting Titid [Aristide] before a potential comeback makes
perfect sense,” Robert Fatton, a Haiti expert at the University of
Virginia, told the <i>Miami Herald</i>.<br><br>
It makes even more sense if you look at what the U.S. government – in
collaboration with UN officials and other allies has been doing to
Aristide since they organized the 2004 coup against him. A
classified U.S. document, unearthed by Wikileaks, reports on a meeting
between the then top-ranking State Department official for the hemisphere
(Thomas Shannon), and the head of the UN military mission in Haiti
(Edumnd Mulet), in 2006. It describes their efforts to keep Aristide in
exile in South Africa. Mulet also “urged U.S. legal action against
Aristide to prevent the former president from gaining more traction with
the Haitian population and returning to Haiti.”<br><br>
This latest episode is part of the “legal action” referred to in the
document. So, too, were Washington’s attempts to go after Aristide
with trumped-up charges of involvement in drug trafficking in 2004. These
were also reliant on a convicted felon, a drug dealer facing a long
prison sentence. That case went nowhere, for the same reasons that
this one will go nowhere: no evidence.<br><br>
In a last-ditch, illegal effort to prevent Aristide from returning to his
home country last year, President Obama called South African President
Jacob Zuma to persuade him to keep Aristide there. He also lobbied
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, but to no avail.<br><br>
The U.S. government has spent millions and possibly tens of millions of
dollars trying to railroad Haiti’s former president. On behalf of
U.S. taxpayers, we could use a Congressional inquiry into this abuse of
our tax dollars. It also erodes what we have left of an independent
judiciary to have federal courts in Florida used as an instrument of
foreign policy skullduggery.<br><br>
In Haiti, these attempts to deny people democratic rights tend to lead to
instability. Imagine trying to tell Brazilians that former
president Lula da Silva could not participate in politics in Brazil, and
threatening to prosecute him in U.S. courts. Or doing the same to
Evo Morales in Bolivia, or Rafael Correa, in Ecuador. It would
never be tolerated.<br><br>
Yet because Haitians are poor and black, Washington thinks it can get
away trampling on their democratic rights. But too many Haitians
have fought and died for these rights, and they will not give them up so
easily.<br><br>
<b><i>Mark Weisbrot</b> is an economist and co-director of the Center for
Economic and Policy Research. He is co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social
Security: the Phony Crisis.<br><br>
This article originally appeared in The Guardian. <br><br>
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