Belen
Fernandez, Al Jazeera
In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake
that devastated Haiti, certain media outlets painted a picture of a country
overrun by looters and at the mercy of gang members and other criminals,
including thousands of prisoners jolted free by the quake.
Relevant details were ignored, such as the contention
by prominent Haitian human rights attorney Mario Joseph that 80 per cent of
said prisoners had never been charged. The media effort perhaps
aided in rendering less incongruous in the eyes of the international public the
deployment of a sizeable US military force to deal with quake-affected people
who did not seemingly require military attention.
A Reuters dispatch from
one week after the disaster - which reported "marauding looters",
"scavengers and looters swarm[ing] over damaged stores", "increasingly
lawless streets" and "[h]eavily armed gang members" - offered
the following plea from policeman Dorsainvil Robenson:
"Haiti
needs help ... the Americans are welcome here. But where are they? We need them
here on the street with us."
The whereabouts of the ever-elusive Americans are of
course hinted at two paragraphs later, when we learn that "the White House
said more than 11,000 US military personnel are on the ground, on ships
offshore or en route". Elsewhere, French Co-operation Minister Alain Joyandet
was quoted as
commenting in reference to seemingly skewed US priorities: "This is about
helping Haiti, not about occupying Haiti". As foreign military monopolised
the Port-au-Prince airport, teams of paramedics and first responders were
delayed in the critical hours immediately following the earthquake.
Subscribers to the fantasy that the US is somehow
qualified to counteract violence and install order in the Caribbean nation
would do well to peruse a new book entitledParamilitarism and the Assault on
Democracy in Haiti, in which author Jeb Sprague masterfully
documents - among other topics - the detrimental role of US and fellow
international actors in Haitian history.
Offering new evidence obtained through
interviews and a massive amount of formerly classified US government documents,
the book clarifies how Haiti's post-quake reconstruction rests on a foundation
of total impunity achieved by the country's most brutal paramilitaries and
their financiers.
Legacy of violence
As Sprague notes, the US occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934 under "the pretext of possible German encroachment during the First World War… caused the deaths of an estimated 15,000 Haitians and saw the imposition of slave labour". It also imposed "a modern army, one that would continue the US occupation long after US troops were gone", functioning on behalf of the Haitian elite and their American counterparts. Observes Sprague: "The US occupation wedded the country’s future to North American business interests."
Later, during the reign ofFrancois "Papa Doc" Duvalier
in the 1960s, US Marines trained the dictator’s Tonton Macoutes paramilitary
force, known for "leaving
bodies of their victims hanging in public, a clear warning to anyone stepping
out of line, most especially leftists, socialists and pro-democracy
activists". Linked to the business elite and the military itself, the
Macoutes were "vital for upholding a system based on severe inequality and
class privilege".
Following the transfer of power to Jean-Claude
"Baby Doc" Duvalier, a brutal counter-insurgency force known as the
Leopards was trained and equipped "by former US marine instructors who
were working through a company (Aerotrade, Inc and Aerotrade International,
Inc) under contract with the CIA and signed off by the US Department of
State".
Prior to becoming Haiti's first democratically elected
president in early 1991, the young liberation theologian, Jean-Bertrand
Aristide "denounced the historic role of the United States in founding,
arming and training Haiti's military, which had been responsible for so much of
the violence in Haitian history".
Sprague quotes Aristide: "They [the United
States] set up the Haitian Army, they trained it to work against the
people". Indeed, it would be difficult to argue that the army was working for the
people by massacring citizens attempting to vote in 1987, or by overthrowing
the newly elected Aristide in September 1991 and slaughtering his
supporters.
Aristide's coup-inducing crimes included inviting
street children and homeless persons to breakfast at the National Palace and
endeavouring to raise the daily minimum wage from $1.76 to $2.94. As Joanne
Landy wrote in the New York Times in
1994, the latter effort was "vigorously opposed by the US Agency for International
Development because of the threat such an increase would pose to the 'business
climate', particularly to American companies paying rock-bottom wages to
workers in Haiti".
Aside from USAID, another relevant euphemism from the
coup period was the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH), a
paramilitary organisation intimately linked to the Haitian military that
assumed the task of terrorising the non-elite masses under the military junta.
"Internal US government documents reveal that FRAPH was founded in part at
the behest of the US Defence Intelligence Agency," Sprague notes.
Recycling brutality
After years of brutality and corruption, the military
dictatorship faced growing resistance at home and abroad. Aristide was
thus reinserted in his lawful post in 1994 in exchange for, inter alia,
committing to be more attentive to the needs of the US agriculture industry and
drastically slashing tariffs on imported rice.
Upon reinstatement, he logically moved - with
overwhelming public support - to disband the armed forces and the section
chiefs (the hated rural constabulary). His government, and the elected
governments that followed him, also gathered testimonials from thousands of
victims of paramilitary violence and undertook judicial proceedings to prosecute
military and paramilitary criminals.
However, as researcher Eirin Mobekk has critically
pointed out and Sprague has underscored, "only the army as an institution
was dissolved… In a country where the army had run political life for decades it
was an illusion to think that its networks would disappear with the removal of
uniforms and the use of its buildings for other purposes".
US contributions to the dissolution of the army
included maneouvering to insert allied Haitian ex-military officials into what
was supposed to be a civilian police force and eliminating officers seen as
overly loyal to Aristide or less than enthusiastic about the coup. Some Haitian
police officers were trained in the United States, where they were susceptible
to overtures by the CIA, which also funded various FRAPH leaders and other
paramilitaries.
Given the high level of impunity enjoyed by military
and paramilitary members who had committed atrocities - not to mention US
insistence on a full amnesty for the coup perpetrators - it is somewhat less
than astonishing that Aristide's re-election in 2000 also culminated in a coup
d'état. Instrumental in the overthrow was the Revolutionary Front for the
Liberation of Haiti (FLRN), which as Sprague explains was "led by renegade
police officials who were from among the same ex-FAd'H [Haitian Armed Forces]
pushed into the country’s new security force by the United States in the late
1990s".
Backed by some wealthy Haitians, neo-Duvalierists,
sweatshop owners, and government and army officials from the neighbouring
Dominican Republic (who didn't want Aristide's anti-military, pro-human rights
rhetoric rubbing off on their own citizenry), the FLRN staged incursions into
Haiti from Dominican territory with the ultimate goal of forcing the
re-establishment of the Haitian army.
Of course, the sign of any good army is its ability to
safeguard the domestic population, and these incursions provided the FLRN with
an opportunity to showcase its skills - which it did by massacring and assaulting
supporters of Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas party, often with sickening tactics.
Citing formerly classified US embassy cables, Sprague uncovers how a small but
powerful fifth column within the government was also working to undermine
Aristide.
According to Sprague, it is likely that French and US
intelligence facilitated the paramilitary insurgency in some way, while
"the International Republican Institute (an organisation funded by the US
government that promotes 'democratisation programmes' around the world)
provided a forum through which the [Haitian] political opposition strengthened
its ties with the paramilitaries".
As journalist Max Blumenthal has documented, the IRI benefitted in its underhanded
dealings from the diplomacy of Roger Noriega, an Iran-Contra-era figure recycled into
the Bush II administration along with his Cold War Manichean fantasies
according to which Aristide and anyone else with less than extreme right-wing
political convictions is a communist demon.
Sprague aptly comments that US' "knowledge that
[sectors of] Haiti's 'business community' [were] strongly backing paramilitary
terror underscores the cynicism of Washington’s constant demands that Aristide
seek 'compromise' with his 'peaceful opponents'". In the end, the
compromise consisted of Aristide's
removal on a US military plane to the
Central African Republic in 2004 and the installation of Gerard Latortue as
head of state. The ensuing peace is recalled by historian Greg Grandin:
"During
Latortue's brief stint in office, 2004 - 2006, Haiti experienced some 4,000
political murders, according to The Lancet - while hundreds of Fanmi Lavalas
members, Aristide supporters, and social movement leaders were locked up -
usually on bogus charges. Latortue's friends in Washington looked the other
way."
Sprague, meanwhile, observes that "Bill Clinton's
[former] policy of inserting a handful of ex-FAd’H criminals into Haiti's
police force… was now put on steroids" and that "in 2004 -5 the
United States and the UN oversaw the recycling of 400 ex-army paramilitaries
into a revamped police force" - paving the way for yet more repetitions of
history.
Media coups
Why is it that Haiti's brutal paramilitary campaigns
received scant international press attention while quantitatively and
qualitatively inferior political violence by a small number of Fanmi Lavalas
supporters (which occurred in the context of clashes with the opposition) was
decried at length?
Obviously, media coverage is shaped by geopolitical
and financial interests, with the terms of events defined by the powerful. This
is how, for example, terrorism conducted by the US and Israel becomes
"counter-terrorism", "self-defence" and "democracy
promotion" in the Western mainstream media.
Sprague documents how, in the case of Haiti, the press
in the US, France, Canada and other locales undertook to demonise Aristide and
rebrand the violent and unpopular uprising against him as non-violent and
popular. As US-trained FLRN commander Guy Philippe remarked to journalist Isabel McDonald
following the coup: "[The]
international media, the media leaders helped us a lot. And thanks to them we
were able to overthrow the dictator. And without them I don't think that we
could have".
In an essay for the London Review of Books, Paul Farmer describes how Aristide was
made the scapegoat for crimes committed by the very people who overthrew him.
Summarising Philippe's pre-coup history, which involved reincarnation as a
police chief following the demobilisation of the military, Farmer writes:
"During
his tenure, the UN International Civilian Mission learned, dozens of suspected
gang members were summarily executed, most of them by police under the command
of Philippe's deputy. The US embassy has also implicated Philippe in drug
smuggling during his police career. Crimes committed in large part by
ex-military policemen are often pinned on Aristide, even though he sought to prevent
coup-happy human rights abusers from ending up in these posts."
Farmer also noted that "Philippe has been quoted as saying that
the man he most admires is Pinochet". The bloody legacy of the Chilean
dictator offers a reminder of how helpful US-backed coups and violence can be
when it comes to introducing neoliberal reforms.
After the second overthrow of Aristide, Sprague
writes, the temporary regime set about "securing [Haiti] as a platform
through which global capital could flow freely", in accordance with
instructions from the IMF and other interested parties:
"The interim government laid off between
eight and ten thousand civil sector workers, many from the poorest slums of
Port-au-Prince. Other programmes under the Aristide government, such as
subsidised rice for the poor, literacy centres and water supply projects, came
to a halt following the coup d'état."
The long-fantasised-about mass privatisation of
Haitian state assets, however, appeared more difficult to pull off - until,
that is, the country was shattered by the 2010 earthquake and control over
Haiti's energy, water and other sectors was divvied up between international
players like the World Bank and USAID. The 2011 debut of singer-turned-head of
state Michel Martelly, elected with the support of a mere 16.7
per cent of the electorate and described by former
Financial Times journalist
Matt Kennard as a "shock president" prepared to enforce economic
shock therapy, seems to have set the stage for the conversion of
Haiti into a neoliberal fairytale kingdom.
It is fitting that Martelly, whose presidential
objectives include a resurrection of the Haitian armed forces rather than the
pursuit of projects benefitting the majority of the nation's citizens, is
himself a longtime close associate of Duvalier's paramilitary Tonton Macoutes.