{"id":108893,"date":"2014-03-01T21:07:47","date_gmt":"2014-03-01T21:07:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=108893"},"modified":"2014-03-01T21:07:47","modified_gmt":"2014-03-01T21:07:47","slug":"ten-years-coup-haiti-democracy-still-siege","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/ten-years-coup-haiti-democracy-still-siege\/","title":{"rendered":"Ten Years After the Coup in Haiti, Democracy is Still Under Siege"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dan Beeton\u00a0<\/strong>
\nRINF Alternative News<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

It has been 10 years since the February 29, 2004 coup d\u2019etat that ousted the democratically-elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti. Paramilitary groups \u2014 including many former members of Haiti\u2019s disbanded army and\/or CIA-funded death squads \u2014 had engaged in a campaign of violence directed against supporters of the government, and the Haitian National Police (HNP), for years before. Supported by the Dominican government and\u00a0advised by groups<\/a>\u00a0based in Washington, they unleashed a wave of terror, killing innocent civilians including children and women, assaulting and brutalizing others, and burning down police stations and other government buildings. In the end, however, these groups seem to have realized they could not mount a successful incursion into Port-au-Prince, and it was a U.S. plane that flew Aristide out of the country.<\/p>\n

As CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot wrote\u00a0after the coup<\/a>, Washington also directed international financial institutions to withhold funds from the Aristide government (some of which were\u00a0designated for potable water<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 their being withheld helping to create the conditions for the cholera epidemic several years later):<\/p>\n

[T]he Administration has been working on toppling Aristide for the past three years, plunging the country into chaos in the process.<\/p>\n

The major international financial institutions (IFI’s) — including the IMF, World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, supported the administration’s destabilization efforts by cutting off hundreds of millions of dollars in credit to one of the most desperately poor countries in the world.<\/p>\n

The pretext was a dispute over the election of seven senators of Aristide’s party in 2001. Aristide offered every possible solution but it didn’t matter. With Washington and the IFI’s backing them, the opposition refused any agreement short of Aristide’s resignation.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the end, Aristide did not resign \u2014 although the Bush administration claimed he did. Aristide himself\u00a0claimed instead<\/a>\u00a0that he was the victim of a \u201ckidnapping in the service of a coup d\u2019etat.\u201d His account is verified by witnesses, as Randall Robinson has pointed out in\u00a0his account of events<\/a>\u00a0related to the coup. Bundled onto a plane, he and First Lady Mildred Aristide were flown to an unknown destination, what turned out to be the Central African Republic.<\/p>\n

The coup took place amidst what can only be seen as a massive disinformation campaign against Haiti\u2019s popular and democratic government. Scholars such as\u00a0Jeb Sprague<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Peter Hallward<\/a>\u00a0have combed through previously classified U.S. government documents and conducted countless interviews with people involved. Often the perpetrators of the destabilization of the Aristide government have been open in discussing their activities and who supported them. Accounts of grave human rights abuses by the Aristide government \u2014 often promoted by Haitian organizations that had essentially\u00a0been bought off<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 have now beenshown to be false<\/a>, but at the time they were carried in the domestic and international media and did much to harm Aristide\u2019s reputation. They also served as a pretext for the\u00a0political persecution<\/a>\u00a0of members of Aristide\u2019s government, including Prime Minister\u00a0Yvon Neptune<\/a>, Interior Minister\u00a0Jocelerme Privert<\/a>, \u00a0and leaders and prominent supporters of the Fanmi Lavalas party such as\u00a0Annette Auguste<\/a>\u00a0and the late Father\u00a0Gerard Jean-Juste<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the coup\u2019s wake, the people of Haiti experienced one of the country\u2019s worst human rights disasters in recent times. Human rights researchers estimate that some\u00a04,000 people were killed<\/a>\u00a0for political reasons, with killings targeting members of Fanmi Lavalas and opponents of the coup and of the interim government imposed on the country; some massacres carried out in broad daylight. Others were falsely imprisoned, or forcibly disappeared. Some 35,000 women and girls reported having been the victim of sexual assault; of these \u201cofficers from the Haitian National Police accounted for 13\u00b78% and armed anti-Lavalas groups accounted for 10\u00b76% of identified perpetrators\u201d according to\u00a0a study in\u00a0The Lancet<\/i><\/a>. Some of the same paramilitaries who had rampaged through Haiti from 2000 up to the coup carried out the violence while the interim government and international community stood by. (Many of them would be integrated into the HNP, as Sprague explains in detail.) Other atrocities were committed by the HNP, sometimes with the\u00a0involvement or tacit support<\/a>\u00a0of MINUSTAH (U.N. mission) troops. At the\u00a0urging of Haiti\u2019s powerful elite<\/a>, HNP officers and MINUSTAH troops carried out\u00a0deadly raids<\/a>\u00a0into slums in order to eliminate \u201cgang\u201d leaders, often killing bystanders in the process.<\/p>\n

International human rights organizations paid little attention to what was almost certainly the largest human rights crisis in the hemisphere at the time, and the international media\u00a0even less<\/a>. A few brave journalists \u2014 usually independent \u2014\u00a0documented<\/a>\u00a0some of these events.<\/p>\n

While the intensity of the post-coup human rights crisis may have been greater, this period of political persecution and repression never really ended. Fanmi Lavalas leaders and supporters have continued to find themselves targeted. In 2007, when Ren\u00c3\u00a9 Pr\u00c3\u00a9val was president, human rights activist and Fanmi Lavalas supporter\u00a0Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine<\/a>\u00a0was kidnapped and disappeared. International cries of alarm were met with rumors that it was a \u201cfake\u201d kidnapping, and that Lovinsky was trying to get attention. He has never been found. More recently, leading human rights activist Daniel Dorsainvil and his wife Girldy Lareche\u00a0were murdered<\/a>, and a new round of bogus accusations have been leveled against Annette Auguste, Mirlande Lib\u00c3\u00a9rus Pavert and others relating to the still-unsolved murder of journalist Jean Dominique in 2000, while some of the individuals that evidence links most closely to the crime are ignored. More well-known is that Fanmi Lavalas as a party has been\u00a0arbitrarily excluded<\/a>\u00a0from elections since the coup.<\/p>\n

Aristide\u2019s return to Haiti from forced exile in 2011 \u2014 against the U.S. government\u2019s wishes andefforts to convince the South African government<\/a>\u00a0to stop him \u2014 has undermined the various false accusations leveled at him and Fanmi Lavalas. For years, we heard that Aristide would likely face charges of corruption and human rights crimes if he ever returned to Haiti. Nearly three years later, he has yet to be charged with anything. As Aristide\u2019s attorney Ira Kurzbanwrote<\/a>\u00a0before Aristide\u2019s return to Haiti \u2014 and as still holds true, he is \u201ccharged with no crime\u201d and \u201cThe New York Times noted during his first exile (1991-1994), [Aristide] \u2018won Haiti\u2019s first and only democratic election overwhelmingly,\u2019 followed by a \u201cseven-month tenure [that] was marked by fewer human-rights violations and fewer boat people than any comparable period in modern Haitian history.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The coup and the events after also are part of a pattern of foreign intervention in Haiti going back centuries, and such interference continues today as well, as the U.S. government seeks to \u201cmanage Haiti<\/a>\u201d through the ongoing MINUSTAH presence and other means. Along with the U.S. government, France and Canada also overtly supported the undermining and removal of the Aristide government (France motivated in part by Aristide\u2019s call for it to pay back the ransom it demanded Haiti hand over as a price for its independence). This intervention has continued, notably \u2014 as\u00a0recently recounted<\/a>\u00a0by former Organization of American States (OAS) Special Representative to Haiti Ricardo Seitenfus — in the 2010 threatened removal of then-President Pr\u00c3\u00a9val (via airplane, a la Aristide) and the blatant intervention by the OAS \u2014 led by the U.S., Canada and France \u2014 in Haiti\u2019s elections, resulting in the\u00a0arbitrary replacement<\/a>\u00a0of governing party candidate Jude C\u00c3\u00a9lestin with Michel Martelly in the run-off. Martelly would go on to win the presidency despite receiving votes from\u00a0less than 17 percent<\/a>\u00a0of the electorate in the second round.<\/p>\n

In order for Haiti to be able to move beyond the 2004 coup and the subsequent political and human rights crisis, this foreign intervention must end. Fanmi Lavalas and other political parties must be allowed to participate in elections, and the Haitian people\u2019s will freely expressed in choosing its government and its own path forward. This is called national sovereignty and democracy, and it is unfortunately what powerful outside interests have been trying to impede in Haiti for over 210 years.<\/p>\n

Dan Beeton is International Communications Director at the\u00a0Center for Economic and Policy Research<\/a>\u00a0in Washington, D.C.<\/em><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dan Beeton\u00a0 RINF Alternative News It has been 10 years since the February 29, 2004 coup d\u2019etat that ousted the democratically-elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti. Paramilitary groups \u2014 including many former members of Haiti\u2019s disbanded army and\/or CIA-funded death squads \u2014 had engaged in a campaign of violence directed against supporters of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":108894,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-108893","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108893\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}