and placing Clinton as envoy is certainly a cruel joke is it not?
Haitian tragedy and imperial farce
AIJAZ AHMAD
The latest intervention by the United States in Haiti brings to the fore a centuries-old confrontation: between the imperial savagery of the `civilisation mongers' and the powerlessness of the colonised.<snip>
So we have yet again, in a nutshell, that centuries-old confrontation: between the imperial savagery of the "civilisation-mongers" (a phrase that Friedrich Engels coined for colonisers) and the powerlessness, but also a certain moral authority, of the colonised.
BUT why Haiti, and why so direct an intervention prepared through elements so disreputable? To answer this question, we have to take into account several factors. The first is the historical one. Two hundred years ago, when colonialism and slavery were overthrown and a republic established in Haiti, Thomas Jefferson, in whose name the U.S. calls itself a "Jeffersonian democracy", refused to recognise the Republic - and so it remained, unrecognised, until 1862 - like the Cuba of today. The history of U.S. military interventions in Haiti dates back to mid-19th century, and the U.S. Navy entered Haitian waters 24 times between 1849 and 1913 to save "American lives and property". In 1914, the liberal U.S. President Woodrow Wilson deployed the Marines to Haiti "to maintain order during a period of chronic and threatened insurrection", almost exactly the excuse under which the Bush administration has now sent in the Marines about a century later. Then the U.S. directly occupied Haiti in 1915 and ruled it for 19 years, leaving only when it was able to hand power over to the murderous National Guards which it had created, and only after it had imposed upon it a Constitution that gave the U.S. corporations unrestricted access to its resources, markets and labour force. In 1956, Francois Duvalier (Papa Doc) took over with firm U.S. backing and the dictator, in turn, granted to the U.S. corporations such "incentives" as no customs duties, a minimum wage by far the lowest in the western hemisphere, the suppression of labour unions, and the right to repatriate their profits. This dictatorship was then continued by the son, `Baby Doc' Duvalier, who was to be overthrown in 1986 by a massive grassroots uprising and was flown out of Haiti to Florida on a U.S. Air Force plane, with all his dollars. In the elections that ensued, Aristide represented the spirit of that popular craving for liberty, democracy and development, sweeping the polls with 67.5 per cent of the vote, against 14.2 per cent for Marc Bazin, a former World Bank official who was backed by the U.S. There has been no love lost between the U.S. and Aristide since then.
The coup which overthrew Aristide in 1991 and the military dictatorship of the next three years were then used to suppress unions and other democratic forces as well as to assassinate some 3,000 progressive people and thus to emasculate the newly flourishing civil society in Haiti. Emmanuel Constant and Jodel Chamblain, who have emerged as two of the three key leaders of the current "rebel" army, were CIA employees and leaders of the paramilitary forces during that dictatorship. They, together with Guy Philippe, who has emerged as the main leader of this new "rebel" force and was a notorious police officer during the military dictatorship, had been previously trained by the American Special Forces in Honduras. Ironically, however, economic refugees and other Haitians fleeing from the reign of terror then started arriving on U.S. shores in a huge flux - the famous phenomenon of the Haitian "boat people" - since the two countries are geographically close. It was to stem this tide of refugees, and only after extracting from him the promise that he would implement the IMF "conditionalities", that President Bill Clinton helped Aristide return to Haiti in 1994 while stationing U.S. Marines on Haitian soil for the well-known purpose of "protecting American lives and property". The U.S. authorities at the time also removed thousands of documents from Haitian Army and paramilitary headquarters to the U.S., thus taking away evidence against the coup makers as well as the paramilitary personnel who had carried out assassination campaigns during those three years. Leading lights of that terror regime were likewise given safe havens in the U.S. and its dependencies in the Caribbean, notably the Dominican Republic.
<snip>
The backbone of the Haitian economy consists of plantations, sweatshops and export processing plants owned largely by U.S., French and Canadian firms and a handful of their Haitian friends - the 1 per cent who own 50 per cent of the country's wealth. As pointed out earlier, Haiti has by far the lowest paid work force in the Western hemisphere, and every U.S. intervention since early 19th century, including the present one, is designed to keep it that way. The main anti-Aristide group in Haiti, `Convergence for Democracy', is, for example, financed and otherwise supported by the ruling Republican Party of the U.S. through the National Endowment for Democracy and the International Republican Institute, two well-funded U.S.-based organisations that openly fund and assist a variety of rightwing forces around the world. When the Republicans took control of the U.S. Congress in 1995 they forced the Clinton administration to discontinue the little development aid that had been going to Haiti and re-channeled it to the anti-Aristide non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and business groups. Overthrow of the Aristide government has been a prime objective of the Bush administration ever since it came into office, just about the time Aristide was re-elected. While the U.S. successfully pressured the Inter-American Development Bank to cancel the more than $650 million that had been contracted already in development assistance and approved loans, it got the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to tighten the screws of their "structural adjustment" diktats. All this led to much suffering in Haiti, just as the sanctions did in Iraq. However, there was no appreciable decline in support for Aristide. The present intervention has taken so blatant and murderous a form, transparently organised abroad and executed directly by the U.S. Embassy in Haiti, mainly because the U.S. had been unable to put together any viable electoral alternative to Aristide and also lacked any social base for inciting a mass insurrection.
<snip>
http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl2106/stories/20040326005613000.htm
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