Now
Available from
CounterPunch for Only $11.50 (S/H Included)
Today's
Stories
February 27, 2004
Laura Carlsen
Americans
Abroad: Bush is Persona Non Grata
John B. Anderson
Nader's Campaign Brings Back Memories: Creating an Open Electoral
Process
Jason Leopold
Spying
on Kofi Annan
John Chuckman
Nader,
Risk and Hope
Standard Schaefer
An
Interview with Michael Hudson on Putin's Russia
Ray McGovern
Punished
for Honest Intelligence
Saul Landau
The
Haiti Redux
Website of the Day
Bush: Why I'm Running for Re-election
February 26, 2004
Brandy Baker
Is Nader
on to Something?
Jacques Kinau
AEI
to Colombia: "Can't Give You Anything But Guns, Baby"
Norman Solomon
Bugging Kofi Annan: UN Spying
and the Evasions of US Journalism
Greg Weiher
A Purloined Letter: the Zarqawi Gambit
Walt Brasch
Janet Jackson, Bush & No. 542: There are No Halftime Shows
in War
Shadi Hamid
The Music World Explodes in Anger
Norman Madarasz
As Canadian as Corruption
Chris Floyd
Bullets and Ballots
Virginia Tilly
The
Deeper Meaning of the Wall
Amy Goodman / Jeremy
Scahill
Haiti's
Lawyer Says US is Arming Haiti's Anti-Aristide Paramilitaries
Website of the Day
Clear Channel Sucks
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
February 19, 2004
Cecilie Surasky
Anti-Semitism
at the World Social Forum? That's Not What I Saw
Ray McGovern
Iraq
Hawks and Deceptive Intelligence: Did They Really Think They'd
Get Away With It?
Tariq Ali
How Far
Will Bush Go in Iraq?
Ralph Nader
Whither
the Nation?
Wayne Madsen
Would Kerry Purge the Neo-Cons?
Norman Solomon
The Collapse of Dean's Cyber-Bubble
Christopher Brauchli
Cheney, Halliburton and the NYT
Mike Whitney
Bush's Iraq Strategy: "I Hope They Kill Each Other"
Lewis Carroll
Bush the Mighty Helmsman from Yale
Website of the Day
Sex Toy Horoscope
February 18, 2004
William Wilgus
Bush:
AWOL and Dereliction of Duty
William Blum
Mush-Minded
Liberals
Dave Lindorff
Bush's China Syndrome
Greg Weiher
Why
is Kerry Getting a Pass?
Mike Griffin
Killing the Messenger: the AFL-CIO's Attack on Harry Kelber
Mark Hand
Kerry Tells Peace Movement to "Move On"
February 17, 2004
Mike Ferner
The
Countryside Murders in Iraq
Mokhiber / Weissman
Corporation
as Psychopath
Marjorie Cohn
DrakeGate:
a Victory for Free Speech
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's
Endgame: a Review of Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire"
Greg Bates
Nader Ambush: a New Low for The
Nation
Ximena Ortiz
A Bush
Doctrine, of Sorts
Gary Leupp
Whatever Happened to Gen. Khazraji?
Sen. John Kerry
"The Cause of Israel is the Cause of America"
Steve Perry
Kerry
1, Drudge 0
February 16, 2004
James Johnston
Huddling
with the Cheeseheads in a NASCAR World
Sara Eltantawi
To
Wear the Hijab or Not
Bruce Anderson
Kevin
Cooper and the Midnight Needle
Elaine Cassel
Feds
on Campus: the Drake Subpoenas
Rahul Mahajan
Bush,
Is the Tide Finally Turning?
Kevin Cooper
The Ritual of Death
Stan Cox
Goodbye, Howard Dean
Larry David
My War
Steve Perry
Bush and the Guard: the Cover-Up's the Thing
Website of the Day
Prison Patriots: Help This Vital Film Get Made
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
February
27, 2004
Return of the Thugs
The
Haiti Redux
By SAUL LANDAU
One of my students asked me about the
current unrest in Haiti. "Reading the news accounts,"
she offered, "I can't figure out who stands for what. And
what role is US policy playing in the ongoing events?"
I, too, find it difficult to extract
meaning from the news accounts. Newspapers and wire service reports
ran headlines about "Rebels Occupying Haiti's Second and
Third Largest Cities," without identifying the rebels or
explaining what they stood for.
Other than their expressed hatred for
and desire to overthrow the elected government of President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide, I found in the news reports not the barest trace of
Haitian history that would help people get a context for the
current conflict.
For example, 200 years ago, President
Thomas Jefferson refused to recognize the first black and second
oldest republic in the Hemisphere. In the early 1790s, inspired
by the French Revolution, Toussaint L'Ouverture, a former slave,
led an uprising and overthrew the French masters.
In 1862, almost sixty years later, Abraham
Lincoln finally recognized Haiti. In 1888, the United States
began its habit of intervention when US forces responded to the
Haitian authorities' seizure of a US ship that had landed illegally.
In 1891, US troops landed "to protect American lives and
property ...when Negro laborers got out of control."
Woodrow Wilson deployed the Marines in
1914 and again in 1915 "to maintain order during a period
of chronic and
threatened insurrection." They remained
as an occupation force under Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge
and Franklin Roosevelt.
In 1934, FDR ended the two decades of
occupation by turning the reins of government over to a clique
who looted the country until in 1956 Francois Duvalier (Papa
Doc), staged a military coup and declared himself president for
life.
Papa Doc created a brutal dictatorship
backed by the Tontons Macoute, a Haitian Praetorian Guard. Upon
his death, Jean Claude or Baby Doc Duvalier replaced his father
until his overthrow in 1986. Both mouthed the anti-communist
line, brutalized their own people and received US support.
In 1990, Haitians overwhelmingly elected
as President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a populist Catholic priest.
He served nine months before a military coup, led by General
Raoul Cedras, backed by the CIA, ousted him and instituted three
years of military rule: political violence against all opponents
and looting.
President Clinton procrastinated. Finally,
in 1994, he dispatched troops to reseat Aristide as president.
But Clinton limited the military's goals. He did not order the
troops to disarm members of the illegal military gangs or train
new security forces to protect Haitians in the countryside, where
paramilitary thugs harassed the farmers.
Aristide's most prominent enemies and
flagrant human rights abusers -- fled to the United States or
the Dominican Republic. But they had stashed weapons on the island
and waited for the opportune moment. Human rights violators like
Col. Emanual Constant, a former CIA agent, walked confidently
through the streets of Queens, New York. Some former army and
Tonton Macoute officials have returned and "joined"
the "opposition."
The media has identified Louis-Jodel
Chamblain, a former army officer and member of FRAPH, Front for
the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, during the post-1991 military
coup. But little has been reported about the nature of the atrocities
committed by this "leader" of the rebels.
Although such hooligans more than cloud
the political "opposition's" legitimacy, large numbers
of Haitians do feel disappointed with Aristide. The three year
wait before Aristide resumed his legitimate place as president,
seemed to have changed him and the inchoate, populist Lavalas
Party he leads. By 1994, following the Pope's order, he had shed
his collar. The secular Aristide no longer showed the same assurance.
The exile years had taken their toll.
By the late 1990s, those democratic and
progressive minded people around the world who saw him as "the
deliverer" also felt disheartened. Aristide's religious
charisma seemed to dissolve in frustration. First, the man who
had vowed to build a new, developing Haiti, free of corruption,
got IMF'd.
He refused to privatize the public's
wealth as The IMF and World Bank -- and US loan agencies demanded.
Aristide had seen what these policies had done to the desperately
poor in the third world. His refusal to obey led the dictates
of the imperial financiers led to his punishment and to his inability
to accomplish even minimal reforms.
The cynical "expectations"
went side by side with a double standard on which to judge Aristide.
While the Colombian government on the western side of the Caribbean
received increased US aid for bad behavior, Aristide was held
to standards that no third world country could have maintained.
Washington offered meager resources and then deemed his effort
to improve police training inadequate. When violence occurred,
the details somehow became obscured, the perpetrators unnamed
and the blame fell on Aristide.
Neither news stories nor editorials asked
the obvious question: What resource-starved, infra-structurally
underdeveloped and politically chaotic third world country could
accomplish economic development, social order and political stability
in a few years?
In 1989, I interviewed Jamaican Prime
Minister Michael Manley. I asked him what reforms he would make
now that he had regained political power (he won as a Democratic
Socialist in 1972 and 76, was defeated in 1980 and won a third
term in 1989, no longer a socialist, but a supporter of IMF policies).
He laughed scornfully. "My budget
has no flexibility," he said. "The DEA offers a $29
million grant to burn ganja [marijuana] fields. I have a choice:
use the money to open the roads blocked by Hurricane Andrew or
raise teachers' pay and keep the schools open. I can't do both.
No agrarian reform. No health care." He shook his head.
"Political power without money in the budget is an illusion."
He invited me to accompany a joint Jamaican
Defense Force-DEA who planned to raid a ganja plantation on the
island's western side. The helicopters landed, the troops and
DEA agents jumped out and, as if in real combat, unleashed their
flame throwers on the ample crop. Within twenty minutes the soldiers
and agents began to giggle uncontrollably as they inhaled the
fumes of their labor.
Watching the event, the extended family
whose livelihood had just gone up in smoke, did not share the
celebration. The Member of Parliament who had also accompanied
the strike force lectured them: "This is what happens when
you grow illegal crops."
"What else can we grow?" asked
the grandfather of the clan. "With the roads destroyed we
cannot get crops to market. With ganja, the airplane comes,"
he pointed to the landing strip in the middle of the burning
field, "takes the crop and gives us cash. Now what?"
The MP lost his pot-induced ebullience.
"Well, maybe you could start up
a small factory or something," he responded weakly.
"Dis imperialism, mon," a dread
locked young man opined.
"Huh?" I said.
"California ganja growers take over
Jamaican market," he said. "America balance of trade
improve."
Back in Kingston, the DEA agents and
JDF officers invited me for a drink. I declined. Manley would
have his $29 million and raise teacher pay to keep schools open.
What a price he was paying! He resigned shortly afterwards a
tacit admission of political impotence.
Place the current rioting in Haiti in
this political and economic context, one missing from mainstream
reporting. Add the explicit or implicit twisting of news reporting
to make Haitian civil strife appear to be Aristide's fault.
The media should have smelled the proverbial
"destabilizing rat" when reporting that on December
5, 2003 50 armed men broke into the university in Port au Prince
and began to provoke students and professors. Aristide backers
responded by demonstrating. The armed unit attacked. One pro-Aristide
man let loose a sling shot and connected with the head of an
anti-Aristide militant. But onlookers, mostly students, bore
the brunt of the ensuing violence.
On January 12, the anti-Aristide gang
organized a protest march in the capital Port-au-Prince. Reports
from non-US sources maintain that some students joined this demonstration
after receiving cash incentives or promises to get tickets for
foreign travel.
US dailies did not mention this information.
Instead, the media focused on Aristide's inability to answer
"security concerns," while anti-Aristide officials
in the Bush Administration like Assistant Secretary of Western
Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega and Otto Reich, Presidential
envoy to the Americas, promoted a policy of embargo against the
Aristide government. Noriega carried an old vendetta from his
former boss, retired North Carolina Senator (R) Jess Helms, who
despised Aristide's disobedience.
The chaos that reins in Haiti, is far
from spontaneous. Thugs who illegally seized power and raped
Haiti from 1991-94 have returned to the island to join with people
who have legitimate grievances.
Aristide may have overestimated his own
support, relied on a weak police force and underestimated the
treachery of his foes. But Aristide's mistakes or even character
flaws do not invalidate his legitimacy as an elected president
of Haiti, the poorest country in the Hemisphere.
Reasonable political sense, I told my
student, dictates that we should support Aristide's offer to
compromise with the political opposition and put down the ruffians
who want full dictatorial power reminiscent of their illegal
rule 1991-4.
Saul Landau
is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. He teaches at
Cal Poly Pomona University. For Landau's writing in Spanish visit:
www.rprogreso.com.
His new book, PRE-EMPTIVE
EMPIRE: A GUIDE TO BUSH S KINGDOM, has just been published
by Pluto Press. His new film is Syria: Between Iraq and a Hard
Place. He can be reached at: landau@counterpunch.org
Weekend
Edition Features for February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|