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Council On Hemispheric Affairs
Monitoring Political, Economic and Diplomatic Issues Affecting the Western Hemisphere
Memorandum to the Press 05.12
Word Count: 3200
Wednesday, 2 February 2005
Haiti’s Upcoming Elections: Fanmi Lavalas opts out unless Latortue halts State-sponsored Terrorism
• On 1 February 2005, nearly one year after the de-facto coup against Haiti’s democratically elected president, Jean
Bertrand Aristide, the AP reported that the Lavalas party will not participate in the local and municipal elections
scheduled for October, or the legislative and presidential elections scheduled for November.
• Lavalas’ decision to not participate is a direct result of the suppression carried out against party supporters by
paramilitary factions and gang leaders who get their marching orders from the Latortue government. New evidence reveals
interim Haitian Prime Minister Gerard Latortue’s de-facto policy of restoring “Duvalierism without Duvalier.”
• Since the first day Washington installed him in power, Latortue has taken a fiercely adversarial position towards
Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas political party. By working with the anti-Aristide opposition to extinguish Lavalas, he
repudiates his claim that he is for free, fair and open elections.
• Where did Latortue obtain the funds to buy off the ex-military, and how can U.S. and Canadian taxpayers know that the
funds their governments donated to the Haitian Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) will not be used as payments for
military renegades?
• The ex-military and former death squads are engaging in terrorist tactics similar to those that were used by Iraqi
insurgents to keep the majority from the polls. But unlike the situation in Iraq, the anti-democracy forces in Haiti
have the tacit backing of the state.
Haiti’s Latortue: Washington’s Chief Chimere in Port -au-Prince
The Fanmi Lavalas party, which Aristide founded as the Lavalas movement against the U.S. backed Duvalier dictatorship,
has decided not to participate in Haiti’s upcoming elections. Its grave decision yesterday is understandable since, in
contrast to Interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue’s declaration that in the upcoming elections, “this government will
not act in favor of anybody or any political candidate [nor will it] work against any candidate who will run,” evidence
abounds of state-sponsored terror that has been launched against residents of pro-Aristide slums, such as Cite Soleil
and Bel Air, by the ex-military and rebel gangs.
The Council on Hemispheric Affairs repeatedly has called attention to the Latortue government’s brutal suppression and
illegal imprisonment of Lavalas supporters. We already knew that, according to the Catholic Church’s Justice and Peace
Commission, there are an estimated 700 political prisoners languishing in Haitian jails, including former Prime Minister
Yvon Neptune and former Minister of the Interior Jocelerme Privert. The interim government even had the audacity to
imprison the country’s most revered Catholic priest, Father Jean-Juste, though he was recently released. We also knew
that hundreds of Haitians, mostly from Lavalas neighborhoods, have been killed since the coup. For these reasons and
many others, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) has refused to recognize the Latortue regime. But now, new evidence
mounts in support of the claim that Latortue and his rogue justice minister, Bernard Gousse, are engaged in an
all-out-war against Haiti’s poor, who make up the vast majority of the population and who overwhelmingly support
Aristide.
It’s worse than we thought
The University of Miami School of Law Center for the Study of Human Rights has recently published findings from the
investigation it carried out in Haiti last November. The inquiry, led by attorney and former law enforcement official,
Thomas M. Griffin, included interviews with government leaders, U.S. embassy personnel in Port-au-Prince, U.N.
peacekeepers, political prisoners, human rights organizations, and both pro and anti-Aristide groups, among others (for
the full report go to http://www.law.miami.edu/news/368.html). In graphic detail, the document presents some of the
strongest evidence yet against Latortue’s mendacious claims that he is a neutral leader with no political agenda and
that most of the violence is the fault of Lavalas-inspired groups and individuals. While it does not present any
evidence that Latortue himself has directly ordered the almost systematic execution-style killings of pro-Aristide
loyalists across the country, the report does paint a blood soaked picture of the interim prime minister as Washington’s
ultra right wing servitor and the behind-the-scenes architect of the ongoing suppression of the poor. It documents the
Latortue government’s complicity in summary executions in urban poor neighborhoods by the ex-military (Forces Armees d’
Haiti, or “FADH”), which often works in conjunction with the Haitian National Police force (HNP). According to the
University of Miami report, “even well-meaning officers treat poor neighborhoods seeking a democratic voice as enemy
territory where they must kill or be killed.” It goes on to state that “As voices for non-violent change are silenced by
arrest, assassination, or fear, violent defense becomes a credible option.”
Griffin’s team learned from local residents that, far from the state serving as an impartial arbiter in the country’s
bitter political dispute, the Latortue government looks the other way while “members of Haiti’s elite, including
political power broker Andy Apaid, pay gangs to kill Lavalas supporters and finance the illegal army.” Even if Latortue
wanted to get serious about the security situation which, as reported by The New York Times reporter Michael Kamber, he
apparently does not, sources told the Miami investigators that sweatshop king Andy Apaid, not Latortue or Gousse, is
“the real government in Haiti.” In an interview with the Miami researchers, Apaid even admitted to telling the HNP to
“work with” gang leader Thomas Robinson, a.k.a. ‘Labanye,’ who is reported to have received payment from Apaid in order
“to destroy the Lavalas movement in Cite Soleil through violence.” Latortue’s tacit approval of this state-sponsored
terrorism foreshadowed the interim government’s plan to make it all but impossible for Lavalas supporters to exercise
any kind of meaningful participation in the elections. Justifying Lavalas’ recent decision to not participate,
Marguerite Laurent, founder of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership network, stated in an interview with COHA, “the whole
purpose of bringing back the soldiers is to prevent the people from going to the polls, to prevent a freely elected
president from taking office.”
Latortue: certainly “not another Castro”
Former U.S. Ambassador to Haiti, Brian Dean Curran, in his final address to the island before returning to the U.S. –
one eerily reminiscent in tone to Eisenhower’s portentous farewell address of 1961 – warned the Haitian people: “I have
always talked straight about US policy and what might and might not be new policy directions. But there were many in
Haiti who preferred not to listen to me, the president’s representative, but to their own friends in Washington, sirens
of extremism or revanchism on the one hand or apologists on the other. They don’t hold official positions. I call them
the chimeres of Washington.”
Invoking the ambassador’s warning in his congressional testimony in the days following last year’s coup, Professor
Robert Maguire, Director of International Affairs and the Haiti Program at Trinity University in Washington, D.C.,
counseled the House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere that, “it is of great necessity that the chimeres of
Washington be removed from any real or perceived role in the future of U.S. policy toward Haiti.” To the grave detriment
of the Haitian people, the Bush administration has embraced the counsel of just those chimeres, loosely defined as
anyone with sufficiently virulent anti-Aristide boda fides.
That Latortue and Gousse are fervently anti-Lavalas is beyond dispute. Before the ouster of Aristide last February, they
had been consultants to the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), which worked with the U.S. Agency for
International Development (USAID) in Haiti. The chairman of IFES, William J. Hybl, is also a board member of the
International Republican Institute (IRI) which, in turn, is funded by the congressionally-mandated National Endowment
for Democracy (NED). The NED, an organization initiated during the Reagan era, is known for providing back-door funding
to notorious right wing causes throughout the hemisphere. Not surprisingly, according to a footnote in Griffin’s report,
witnesses in Haiti reported Hybl as “extremely close with Vice President Cheney.” The IRI and NED’s longstanding odium
for Aristide is established, and it should only be expected that Latortue, with his intimate knowledge of and sympathy
for these organizations’ revanchistic worldview, would be selected by the Bush administration to head the post-Aristide
government.
Silence is Golden
What is surprising, however, is the extent to which the Bush administration has failed to criticize Latortue’s
culpability in the explosion of human rights abuses perpetrated against Lavalas supporters since last February’s
de-facto coup. One glaring example was its failure to admonish Latortue for agreeing to the extortionist demands of
former members of the army, who had been disbanded by Aristide in 1995, for a payoff. The public silence the State
Department has maintained on the issue is all but deafening. When a State Department official was asked about the
administration’s position regarding the payoffs to these notorious ex-military personnel, he said that the reimbursement
question “is a legitimate issue that must be resolved, but in the larger context of the demobilization and disarmament
program.” He went on to say, “The Haitian government should follow the list of those who were deserving of a pension and
various savings accounts.” The U.S. official maintained that in any event Aristide’s disbanding of the ex-military in
1995 was illegal since the Haitian legislature never ratified the decision. Of course, the point could be argued whether
the granting of payoffs were legal since Latortue’s unilateral decision did not have the consent of the legislature
either, perhaps because the U.S. had the legislature shut down.
Even if the soldiers had been legally entitled to a pension pay, the five to six thousand innocent Haitian civilians,
whom many of those same soldiers murdered under the military dictatorship of Raoul Cedras, should be factored into this
equation. Many of these former members of the FADH are guilty not only of overthrowing the democratically elected
Lavalas government in 1991, but also of the thousands of war crimes and egregious human rights violations carried out
during the Cedras dictatorship, of which the Raboteau massacre in April of 1994 was only one of many. When the highly
regarded Brian Concannon, Director of the US-based Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, was asked why the US
has been so reticent to condemn the military payoffs and the violence carried out against pro-Lavalas neighborhoods, he
replied, “Their plan [IRI, NED, USAID], going back to 1987, has always been to make sure another Aristide is not
elected. They will employ any means necessary to achieve this.” He continued, “it’s all part of the same policy. The
Bush administration supported these guys [the ex-soldiers] when they were in the Dominican Republic and it still
supports them now.”
When Past is Prologue
What is being seen in Haiti today is the re-establishment of the symbiotic relationship between the ex-military,
national police and their joint death squads. Indeed, one of the main reasons Aristide dismissed the army, whose raison
d’etre throughout Haitian history has been to foment coups and squash dissent, was to break up that trinity of terror.
By, in effect, bribing the ex-soldiers to come back into the fold of Haitian civil society and hinting that he might
incorporate many of these gangsters, whom he outrageously had earlier referred to as “freedom fighters,” into the HNP,
Latortue is setting the stage for another round of violence against ordinary Haitian civilians. But although he has now
accomplished his Washington-backed goal of extirpating Haiti’s majority party from the polls, he will still likely seek
their participation – in some form – in order to stamp an imprimatur of legitimacy over the elections which, barring a
spectacular change in the security situation and Lavalas’ participation, will be a complete fraud.
Some, such as James Morrell, executive director of the anti-Aristide Haiti Democracy Project in Washington, argue that
Lavalas supporters should still go to the polls: “If a decent election can be held, their [Lavalas’] political stock
will fall greatly by nonparticipation. Nonparticipation makes sense only if Lavalas is no more than a personal vehicle
for Aristide.” However, Professor Maguire noted that although the elections present Lavalas with the unique opportunity
“to maintain its cohesion independently of Aristide, the current insecurity that is found throughout the country makes
this challenge even more difficult.” Regarding the security issue, Concannon takes Maguire’s point a step further and,
in defense of Lavalas’ decision, argues that, “in this situation it would be suicidal for Lavalas to participate in the
elections. The reason they are threatening to not participate is because that’s the only bargaining chip they have.”
Is there no Exit?
In order for free elections to occur, Latortue and Gousse must halt the state-sanctioned violence carried out against
the poor and cease any further payments to the ex-soldiers. Reimbursing the ex-military, which DeWayne Wickham of USA
Today described as a “thinly veiled blackmail payment” that effectively shored up the ex-army as the island’s “shadow
government,” only fuels Haiti’s seemingly endemic cycle of political violence. Speculating on how the Bush
administration may view Latortue’s payments to the former FADH, Maguire said, “Perhaps they view it as a way of putting
the army out of business once and for all. After all, once they hand out the pensions, there’s nothing left to pay.”
This could be true, given that the soldiers are being paid what amounts to a gold mine by Haitian standards ($5,000 U.S.
per soldier), but the problem is that there is no specific quid pro quo for the payments; the FADH’s hidden guns are not
being collected in exchange for the checks. What this amounts to, then, is not just the de-facto re-introduction of the
dreaded FADH but a refurbished, enriched and still armed FADH, free to use its newfound wealth to consolidate its
potential role in post-Aristide Haitian civil society.
Where does all the Money go?
Of particular interest to U.S. taxpayers should be the $15 million the Bush administration has delegated to the Haitian
Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) in order to, in the words of a U.S. State Department press release, “organize,
conduct, and monitor elections.” But the following queries need to be pressed regarding this issue. Who will be
monitoring these elections? Will the monitors answer to the Latortue government or to a separate, independent council?
How much control – if any – will Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti, Juan Gabriel Valdes, have
over these funds? What steps will be taken to ensure that the global total of $41 million donated to the CEP under the
leadership of its president, Max Maturin, will not wind up in the hands of the ex-military or any of the rapacious
political factions, particularly the Latortue-backed anti-Aristide groups like the Democratic Convergence and Group of
184? So far, only fourteen U.S. Congresspersons, led by Rep. Maxine Waters, have requested that the administration make
sure that “no U.S. foreign assistance funds or other U.S. government funds are diverted as use as payments to [the
ex-military].” In Rep. Waters’ request to the administration, she was only referring to the funds Latortue has doled out
to the former FADH, but these inquiries must be extended to demanding how all the funds collected by the CEP will be
disbursed and accounted for.
The Canada Connection
Regarding funds given to the interim government, Canadian citizens should also be asking these same questions. Along
with France – perhaps also motivated by some desire to make amends with Washington over Iraq – Canada almost
mechanically has followed the U.S. lead in supporting Aristide’s removal from the beginning. A year before the coup in
January 2003, at what became termed “the Ottawa initiative on Haiti,” then Canadian Secretary of State for Latin
America, Africa, and the French-speaking World, Denis Paradis, met with French and U.S. State Department officials to
discuss how to go about removing Aristide. In an interview with CBC’s, “The Current,” Michael Vastel, who first wrote
about the Ottawa meeting in the March 15, 2003 issue of the Canadian magazine L'Actualité, stated: “[The meeting] lasted
three days over an extended weekend. Once again, all information that I'm giving you is coming from Paradis and from the
French government. There was a consensus that 'Aristide should go.' But, how do you do that? This is the French
government...who suggested there should be a trusteeship like there was in Kosovo.” Now that the agenda set forth at
Ottawa (which should be called ‘destroying democracy in order to save it’) has succeeded, Canadians should be asking
their government, which has donated $14 million to the upcoming elections, what the foreign office is doing to make sure
Canadian funds don’t end up paying the ex-military and others paid to murder Lavalas supporters.
Of utmost importance to the three architects of Aristide’s ouster – the U.S., Canada and France – is the moral
imperative to not allow Latortue to disburse these funds willy nilly. For what is needed in Haiti today is not a
primarily Anglo-funded and re-constituted FADH, nor an HNP beholden to any faction – as it clearly is now – but a fully
professional police force led by a civilian chain-of-command. Oscar Arias, former president of Costa Rica and 1987 Nobel
Peace laureate, couldn’t have phrased the issue better when he stated, “The abolition of the army makes as much sense
today as it did in 1995. The Haitian people still need their government to spend its precious few resources on fighting
poverty, not buying arms. They need a professional, depoliticized police force to maintain order, not an army that
attacks its own people with impunity.”
Washington’s Chimeres are back to Work
Unfortunately the UN peacekeeping force, MINUSTAH, seems determined to ignore this advice. It has rarely confronted gang
leaders and has even performed the bidding of Latortue by aiding and abetting the HNP and rebel gangs in their raids
against pro-Lavalas slums. MINUSTAH’s lack of will has been manifest in the words of its commander, Brazilian General
Augusto Heleno, who has said, in words that echo the UN’s impotence in Rwanda, “I command a peacekeeping force, not an
occupation force.” Of course, one could retort, since there is no peace to keep, why not force an occupation upon the
Haitian ex-military strongholds? But this is, surely, too much to ask, as MINUSTAH has virtually no control in the
coastal slums or the countryside, which is run mainly by members of the ex-military and former death squad leaders.
Most of these brigands, such as the convicted FRAPH death squad leader Jodel Chamblain – recently released from prison
by the Latortue regime as a direct result of Justice Minister Gousse’s intercession – flooded back into the country from
the Dominican Republic and elsewhere following Aristide’s ouster, or were broken out of prison during the coup by
anti-Aristide partisans. Acting as the frontline of “Washington’s chimeres,” they are now chirpily back to their old
business of making life miserable for the Haitian people. While comparisons to the situation in Iraq are irresistibly
tempting, one crucial difference should be observed: in Iraq, at least the insurgent uprising against the majority,
which really did want to have the election, does not have the support of the state. In Haiti, one could only wish such
were the case.
This analysis was authored by COHA Senior Research Fellow, Seth R. DeLong, Ph.D.
February 2, 2005
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