Thousands of protesters demand trial for Aristide; Marines guard against..

[Mika]

.. bloodshed

Thousands of protesters demand trial for Aristide; Marines guard against bloodshed
http://9news.com/storyfull.aspx?storyid=25207

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) - Thousands of Haitians marched through downtown Port-au-Prince on Sunday, celebrating the exile of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and demanding he be put on trial. A pro-Aristide march also was planned.
Dozens of U.S. and French troops and Haitian police -- armed with machine guns and a tear gas launcher -- guarded the demonstration route, ready for threatened clashes between the rival camps. The two sides have clashed in the past, and Sunday set the stage for renewed violence.
Rebel leader Guy Philippe joined the demonstration, and some in the crowd hoisted him onto their shoulders, chanting "Guy Philippe -- hero! Aristide -- zero!" People ran alongside, stretching to grab his hand or just touch him.
"Philippe, the country is with you!" protesters shouted. There also were cheers for Louis-Jodel Chamblain, an ex-soldier convicted in the killings of Aristide supporters. The two signed autographs for people in the crowd.
The air in the capital was full of the sound of hymns and clapping from Sunday church services but also the stench of the state morgue, not refrigerated from a lack of electricity and overcrowded with more than 200 bodies from the rebel insurgency that drove Aristide to flee exactly a week ago.
A morgue worker said the latest bodies -- two men with gunshot wounds -- were brought in Friday, more evidence that the death toll is rising and latest round of bloodshed in this troubled Caribbean nation is not over.

Notice that we guard a demonstration of murderous thugs and coupsters in Haiti, while in Miami USA we busted up demonstrations by unions at the FTAA by cracking heads.

Welcome to Booshworld.

[Frances]

1. Yes, we are guarding thugs and killers

and if you lived in Haiti wouldn't you be afraid to support Aristide? It would be like painting a target on yourself.

[Mika]

4. It would be hard to be as brave as the supporters of democracy in Haiti

Over 20,000 pro democracy Aristide supporters who marched on the palace the other day were willing to have targets painted on themselves. They are that brave.

[Tinoire]

2. "Thousands"? As opposed to 20,000 who marched for him.

Things that make you go hmmmm.... So I keep reading the news. Looking for names of people I knew and finding them.

Tide rises against Haiti's elite class

PETIONVILLE, Haiti — From the palm-shaded swimming pools and marble terraces of this wealthy suburb's hillside villas, the distant squalor of Port-au-Prince resembles a tranquil, opalescent coastal vista. The lavish comforts enjoyed here by Haiti's small class of industrial kingpins inspired former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to label them "rocks washed by cooling waters," while his people, the impoverished masses in the slums below, were "the rocks in the sun, taking the heat."

In a populist drive to show the rich what poverty feels like, Aristide long urged his followers to drag the rocks from the river into the inferno, an allegorical appeal that lives on after his departure as armed supporters continue to loot and burn the businesses of the upper class in a frenzy of revenge and comeuppance.

Shipping containers ransacked


Two days before Aristide left the country last Sunday, gunmen armed by his Lavalas party broke into Madsen's port-freight yard, he said, ransacking the offices in an orchestrated effort to punish him for supporting the political opposition. It wasn't long before desperate slum dwellers began looting the shipping containers in the yard, which were filled with food, clothing and electronics.

In the torrent of reprisals unleashed against his perceived enemies in ideology, class and color as his power vanished, Aristide succeeded in sharing the pain of the poor with some of the elite that had never felt it.

<snip>

Haves and have-nots


The roots of the mob rampage run deep in Haitian history.

The minuscule population of whites and mulattos, thought to be no more than 1 percent of the populace of 8.5 million, has long occupied a disproportionate position in the equally tiny echelon of the wealthy. That is a consequence of land ownership dating to Haiti's 1804 independence, when some mulatto offspring of French colonial masters and African slaves acquired property amid the panicked exodus of the Europeans after the slave revolt triumphed. The haves and have-nots formed along racial lines. Color was so obsessively tied to status then that Haitians put names to 64 racial mixtures and assigned each a place on the social hierarchy.

<snip>

"The bourgeoisie are the reason Aristide couldn't do anything," said Katho Laguerre, 21, a Cite Soleil slum dweller, gesturing toward the hills of Petionville above the capital. "The bourgeoisie have everything, and we have nothing. That's why Aristide said we could build houses here, that this was the living room of the people."

<snip>

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2001873573_haitielite07.html

[peacetalksforall]

3. The entire world recognizes that the U.S. created a coup...

ask anyone in the imperialistic team to deny that they were preparing this months in advance and that they didn't have the plan, policies, and people planted.

So we divided a nation.

Uniter, not a divider. False.

They did it in their suits with ties. True.

[Tinoire]

5. WSWJ got it right. Analysis

Haiti: Thousands march in Port-au-Prince against US-backed coup
By Keith Jones
6 March 2004


<snip>

According to Reuters, one demonstrator shouted, “The bourgeoisie joined with the international community to occupy Haiti and get rid of President Aristide. The bourgeoisie never did anything for us, the masses. Now they took away our president.”

The demonstration erupted one day after the disappearance of gun-touting rebel commandos from the downtown streets of Port-au-Prince. From Sunday through Wednesday, the rebels had run amuck in Haiti’s capital, terrorizing and killing Aristide supporters, under the watchful eyes of the US Marines, who had begun arriving in force on Sunday once Aristide had been hustled out of the country.

<snip>

If by mid-week, Bush administration officials were issuing ever-sharper warnings to the rebels, urging them to—in the words of Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega—make themselves “scarce,” it was because they were disrupting Washington’s efforts to hide a bloody coup behind a ramshackle democratic façade.

It wasn’t the killings so much. A pliant international press could be counted upon to explain them away as a settling of accounts with the chimères, the armed gangs on whose support Aristide had increasingly relied. No what disturbed Washington was the rebels’ swaggering before the international press. After all, rebel commander Guy Philippe had gone before the world’s cameras, the notorious FRAPH death-squad leader Louis-Jodel Chamblain at his side, to proclaim himself in charge of security in Haiti and for all intents and purposes the country’s next political strongman. Then when asked if he would disarm, Philippe refused to recognize the authority of the US-led expeditionary force.

<snip>
So blatant was the US’s support for the rebels—culminating in their entering into Haiti’s capital simultaneously with US and French troops—that the Bush administration is now frantically trying to rewrite history.

<snip>

With the connivance of Washington, Haiti’s elite has for decades ruled all but exclusively through dictatorship and terror. This is the only means to suppress the popular anger that is born of social inequality and mass poverty unequalled in the Americas. Although Aristide’s popular support had crumbled because of his imposition of IMF austerity measures and increasing reliance on racial demagogy and violence to remain in power, the Bush administration and the sweatshop owners and retail merchants represented by Democratic Platform, had ultimately to resort to the rebel thugs to oust Aristide, because they could generate no mass popular support.

<snip>

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/mar2004/hait-m06.shtml