Yves Engler, CounterPunch
On February 29, 2004 the US, France and Canada overthrew
Haiti’s elected government.
As my first two articles in this series outlined, Ottawa
helped plan the coup and was heavily implicated in the human rights disaster
that followed.
But the most shocking aspect of the intervention was the
role played by purportedly progressive non-governmental organizations. A slew
of NGOs received tens of millions of dollars from the Canadian International
Development Agency (CIDA) to advance Ottawa’s anti-democratic policy in Haiti.
A few months prior to the February 29, 2004 coup that
overthrew Aristide for the second time, Montreal-based Rights & Democracy
(R&D), which was widely viewed as an NGO even though it was created by an
act of Parliament, released a report that described Haiti’s pro-coup Group of
184 as “grassroots” and a “promising civil society movement.” The truth is that
the Group of 184 was spawned and funded by the International Republican
Institute (funded by the U.S. government) and headed by Haiti’s leading
sweatshop owner, Andy Apaid. Apaid had been active in right-wing Haitian
politics for many years and, like former Group of 184 spokesperson Charles
Henry Baker, is white.
In October 2005 R&D began a $415,000 CIDA-financed
project to “foster greater civil society participation in Haiti’s national
political process.” The Haitian coordinator of the project, who later became
director of R&D’s Haiti office, was Danielle Magloire, a member of the
“Council of the Wise” that appointed Gérard Latortue as interim prime minister
after the coup ousted the elected president. Magloire’s status as a “wise”
person, moreover, arose largely out of her positions at EnfoFanm (Women’s info)
and the National Coordination for Advocacy on Women’s Rights (CONAP). Both were
CIDA-funded feminist organizations that would not have grown to prominence
without international funding. They were virulently anti-Lavalas (Aristide’s
party) groups that shunned the language of class struggle in a country where a
tiny percentage of the population owns nearly everything. Interestingly,
EnfoFanm and CONAP expressed little concern about the dramatic rise in rapes
targeting Lavalas sympathizers after the coup. In mid-July 2005 Magloire issued
a statement on behalf of the seven-member “Council of the Wise” saying that any
media that gives voice to “bandits” (code for Aristide supporters) should be
shut down. She also asserted that the Lavalas Family should be banned from
upcoming elections.
The Concertation Pour Haiti (CPH), an informal group of half
a dozen Québec NGOs including Development and Peace, Entraide Missionaire and
AQOCI (Québec’s NGO umbrella group), also called for Aristide’s overthrow. They
branded the elected President a “tyrant,” his government a “dictatorship,” and
a “regime of terror” and in mid-February 2004 called for Aristide’s removal.
This demand was made at the same time CIA-trained thugs swept across the
country to oust the government.
Throughout the coup period from March 2004 to May 2006 the
CPH organized numerous events in Ottawa and Montréal that effectively justified
Canada’s intervention into Haiti. They even backed the post-coup repression. In
a January 27, 2006 letter — also signed by R&D — to Canada’s ambassador to
the U.N., Allan Rock, the two groups echoed the extreme right’s demand for
increased repression in the country’s largest poor neighbourhood, Cité Soleil. A
couple of weeks after a business-sector “strike” demanding that U.N. troops
aggressively attack “gangsters” in Cité Soleil, the CPH/R&D questioned the
“true motives of the U.N. mission.” The letter questioned whether U.N. forces
were “protecting armed bandits more than restoring order and ending violence.”
Criticizing the U.N. for softness in Cité Soleil flew in the face of evidence
suggesting the opposite. In fact, just prior to the CPH/R&D letter,
Canadian solidarity activists documented a murderous U.N. attack on a hospital
in the slum neighbourhood.
Documents obtained from CIDA reveal that, without exception,
Haitians organizations ideologically opposed to the elected government were the
sole recipients of Canadian government funding in the lead up to the coup.
Civil society groups supportive of Aristide’s Lavalas simply did not receive
development money. (Ironic, since as a movement of the country’s poor, Lavalas
supporters should qualify as prime recipients of anti-poverty funding.)
Montréal-based Alternatives, one of Québec’s most
left-leaning NGOs, also parroted the neoconservative narrative about Haiti.
Sixteen months after the coup an Alternatives article accused, without a shred
of evidence, prominent Bel-Air activist Samba Boukman and human rights worker
Ronald St. Jean of being “notorious criminals.” This was exceedingly dangerous
in an environment where the victims of police operations were routinely labeled
“bandits” and “criminals” after they were killed.
Alternatives’ “progressive” credibility was also put to work
countering opposition to Brazil’s leadership of the U.N. occupation of Haiti.
“With the support of the Canadian government” in March 2005 Alternatives
established a “trialogue” in Brazil between “the governments and organizations
of civil society of Brazil, Haiti and Canada” on how to support the
“transition” government. “Several ministers of the interim [coup] government of
Haiti” assisted Alternatives in this task.
At the start of 2008 Alternatives co-published a report that
clearly articulated its colonial attitude vis-a-vis Haiti. The most disturbing
statement in the report titled “Haiti: Voices of the Actors” reads: “In a
country like Haiti, in which democratic culture has never taken hold, the
concept of the common good and the meaning of elections and representation are
limited to the educated elites, and in particular to those who have received
citizen education within the social movements.
According to Alternatives, Haitians were too stupid to know
what’s good for them, unless, that is, they had been educated by a foreign NGO.
The report, which was financed by the federal government, was full of other
attacks against Haitians and the country’s popular movement.
After a great deal of criticism Alternatives’ director,
Pierre Beaudet, eventually backed away from his organization’s disastrous
position on Haiti. A week after the January 12, 2010 earthquake, he wrote an
article (in French) stating that “the overthrow of Aristide organized by the
United States, with the support of France and Canada, reflects a trend of
‘heavy’ interventionism and interference that’s generally at the expense of
Haitians.”
