Now
Available from
CounterPunch for Only $11.50 (S/H Included)
Today's
Stories
March 8, 2004
Kevin Alexander Gray
The Legacy of Strom Thurmond
March 6 / 7, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Understanding the World with
Paul Sweezy
Robert Pollin
Remembering Paul Sweezy
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Politics of Timber Theft
Tom Reeves
Bush's Mass Deportations: 63,000 and Counting
Charles Lewis
Who Mugged Howard Dean in Iowa:
Kerry, Torricelli and a Mysterious Frontgroup
Tom Jackson
My Breakfast with Sen. Judd Gregg
Kurt Nimmo
Is Venezuela Next?
Alan Cisco
A Report from Caracas
Jack Random
Haitian Democracy be Damned
Colin Piquette
Oh, Canada: the Coup Coalition
Lee Sustar
Labor's State of Emergency
William D. Hartung
Iraq and the Costs of War
David Sally
Rebuilding
Amérique
Mark Scaramella
When God Mooned Moses: Test Your Bible Knowledge
Mickey Z.
What We Can Learn from Ashcroft's Gallbladder
Ron Jacobs
Politics and Baseball
Dave Zirin
The Longest Jump: the Blackballing of Phil Shinnick
Poets' Basement
John Holt and Larry Kearney
Website of the Weekend
National Day of Action for Rachel Corrie
March 5, 2004
Chris Floyd
Uncle
Sugar: How the WMD Scam Put Money in Bush Family Pockets
Ron Jacobs
Chaos
Reigns: Haiti and Iraq
Lisa Viscidi
Guatemalan
Refugees: a Difficult Return
Yves Engler
Canada and the Coup in Haiti
Mike Legro
Those Bush Ads: Some Dead Bodies Are Worth More Than Others
Javier Armas
A Night of Inspiration: Oakland Benefit for Grocery Workers Strike
Bennett Hoffman
"Who Cares About Haiti, Anyway?"
Bill Christison
Faltering Neo-Cons Still Dangerous
Website of the Day
Haiti Support Group
March 4, 2004
Diane Christian
Sex
and Ideals
Sen. Robert Byrd
Stop the Stonewalling, Mr. President: Fairy Tales, Bush and the
9/11 Commission
Norman Solomon
Assuming the Right to Intervene: The US Press and Haiti
Jack Brown
A Fragrant Saga of Mexico's Greens
Hal Cranmer
The
John Kerry Experience
David Lindorff
Greenspan's Pension
Sam Smith
The Election is Over, We Lost
Christopher Brauchli
Goin'
to the Chapel: The Gay and the Dead
Brian D. Barry
The "Perfect" World of E-Voting: A Computer Scientist
Reports from the Polling Booth
Richard Oxman
Arsonists for Haiti?
Peter Phillips
Haitian
Fantasies: Mainstream Media Fails Itself, Again
Tariq Ali
Notes on Anti-Semitism, Zionism and
Palestine
Website of the Day
What If Boeing Ads Told the Truth?
March 3, 2004
Heather Williams / Karl
Laraque
Marines
Retake Haiti
Jack McCarthy
Guy's
Our Guy: "I am the Chief. My Hero is Pinochet."
Robert Sandels
The
Purloined Label: The Struggle Over the Havana Club Trademark
Juliana Fredman / James Davis
Israeli Organized Crime
JG
The Yuppie Silence on Haiti
Emilio Sardi
The
Colombia/US Free Trade Deal: It's About More Than Trade
Alan Farago
Swimming in Sewage
Mike Whitney
"Blood
Will Have Blood": 143 Murdered in Liberated Iraq
CounterPunch Wire
Nader's Legislative Record in the 1960s
Steve Perry
Kerry
Advisory: Remember Lena Guerrero
Nelson George/ Marcus Miller
Miles Davis & Hip Hop: a Conversation
Website of the Day
$10,000 Is Yours for the Taking: The USS Liberty Challenge
March 2, 2004
William Blum
If Kerry's
the Answer, What's the Question?
Conn Hallinan
Haiti:
the Dangerous Muddle
JoAnn Wypijewski
The Bravo
H-Bomb Test: One WMD They Couldn't Hide
Mike Whitney
Regime Change in Haiti: the Bush Dominos Keep Falling
Ra Ravishankar
Afghanistan, the Liberation That Isn't: an Interview with Mariam
from RAWA
Dan Bacher
Merle Haggard & the Politics of Salmon: "Clearcutting
is Rape"
Greg Moses
Oscar White
Brandy Baker
Mel Gibson's Minstrelsy Show
Little Tucker Carlson
What I Did on My Vacation
Robert Fisk
All This
Talk of Civil War, Now This
Merle Haggard
Kern River
Website of the Day
Rebel Edit
March 1, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Morris
Thanks War Criminal in Front of Billions
Richard Oxman
Oscar's
Obit: Thanking Bob McNamara
Elaine Cassel
Writing and Reading as "Terrorism"
Mickey Z
Thomas Friedman's Education
Mike Whitney
George Will and Anti-Semitism: a Cul-de-Sac of Prejudice
Heather Williams
Haiti
as Target Practice: How the US Press Missed the Story
Cathy Crosson
Chanson d'amour haïtienne
Website of the Day
God Hates Shrimp
February 28 / 29, 2004
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Team
Gary Leupp
Another Senseless Bush Battle: Defining and Protecting Marriage
William A. Cook
Israel:
America's Albatross
Ron Jacobs
Kucinich: Good Fight; Wrong Battlefield
Ben Tripp
A Nosegay of Posies: Queer Weddings at Last!
Leilla Matsui
Dances with Crucifixes
Mike Whitney
Dismantle
the Military Goliath
Yoel Marcus
Down and Out in the Hague
Uri Avnery
The Dancing Bear
Linda S. Heard
Britons and Americans Condemned to a Hobson's Choice
Al Krebs
Unmasking a Secret American Empire: Land, Water & Cotton
Stan Cox
Life (Pat. Pend.): Genetic Commandeering
JG
The Haiti Boomerang: "After The Looting & Pillaging,
Your Hunger Will Remain"
Rick Giombetti
Censorship at the Seattle P-I on Forced Psychiatry
Keith Hoeller
The Bankruptcy of Mental Health Insurance Parity
Dave Zirin
Colorado Football: Buffalo Swill
NADERAMA
Alan Maass
Nader and the Politics of Lesser
Evils
Michael Donnelly
Regime
Rotation: Anybody But Bush...Again?
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Exeunt Serenaders; Enter Nader
Doug Giebel
So Nader's Running? Get Over It
Bruce Jackson
An Open Letter to Naderites
CounterPunch Wire
Stalinists for Kerry! and Other Roars from the Crowd
Poets' Basement
Davies, Scarr, Kearney & Albert
February 27, 2004
Thomas C. Mountain
A
White Jesus During Black History Month?
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
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.
|
March
8, 2004
"A War Waged
on the Aristide Regime"
An
Interview with Robert Fatton
By ERIC RUDER
Robert Fatton is the Haitian-born author of Haiti's
Predatory Republic: The Unending Transition to Democracy.
He teaches political science at the University of Virginia. Fatton
talked to Eric Ruder after the U.S. government engineered the
toppling of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
THE U.S. media present the crisis
in Haiti as a confusing clash between armed gangs. What's really
going on?
YOU NEED to get some kind of historical
perspective on the whole thing in order to understand how we
got here. When Aristide was first elected in 1990, he had overwhelming
popularity among the very poor and among, essentially, all progressive
groups in Haiti.
Immediately after his election in December
1990, before he had even assumed power, there was an attempted
coup launched by the forces of the old Duvalier dictatorship
and one of the leaders of the Tonton Macout death squads. That
attempted coup failed because people from the slums decided that
they were not going to put up with it, and they came out in front
of the national palace. At that point, they were willing to die
so that the old reactionary forces would not get back to power.
The coup failed, and eventually, Aristide
became president, but in a situation of extreme polarization,
in spite of the fact that he had won the election by an overwhelming
majority. What you had from the very beginning was an attempt
by the traditional ruling groups in Haiti--in particular, the
business community and old Duvalierists--to topple the guy.
He's made a lot of mistakes, too. The
attempted coup before he became president gave him a false sense
of security. He assumed that anything the army would do, the
people in the slums would be able to counteract it. But the army
learned its lesson. When they launched the coup in 1991, the
first thing that they did was not only to get Aristide, but to
cordon off all the slums, so there couldn't be any mobilization
from there.
There was a period of very nasty repression
of what was then real popular organization. Once the military
was installed in power, you had the U.S. embargo against the
military dictatorship, from 1991 to 1994, which created a situation
where an economy that was already in bad shape became really
horrible.
The people who were most affected by
the embargo were clearly not the very wealthy--because there
was a lot of black-market activity that actually made a lot of
millionaires in the Dominican Republic, etc. This is also when
the drug business started in Haiti with a vengeance. But the
vast majority of Haitians lost whatever jobs they may have had.
The economy was doing poor.
IN 1994, the U.S. invaded Haiti and
returned Aristide to power. What happened at that point?
WHEN ARISTIDE comes back to power, he's
a very different fellow. In order to get back, he has to depend
initially on the U.S. Marines. The assumption was that it was
the only way he could get back into power--with American support.
He had to make all kinds of compromises,
and that led to very compromising alliances. He had to accept
the International Monetary Fund's structural adjustment program.
He had to accept integrating all the government people who had
actually participated in the Duvalier regime. He had to make
huge concessions.
So when he got back to Haiti, he no longer
had the capacity to implement even a mildly reformist government,
and he was surrounded by people who are not necessarily committed
to any fundamental transformation of Haitian society.
When Aristide went back, he felt absolutely
impeached by the possibility of another coup. So he disbanded
the army--and created some poorly trained police units. When
they were first created, they were to a large degree groups from
the popular organizations in the slums, and they were given some
weapons so that if there was an attempted coup, they could resist
it.
What happened with the passage of time
is that you have the beginning of fragmentation within the Lavalas
movement that Aristide led. By 1995 and 1996, Lavalas is really
divided over what do you do with power, given the precarious
nature of the government in Haiti.
MEANWHILE, THE U.S. continued to apply
pressure.
YES. HAITI basically was faced with structural
adjustment or nothing. You could try to stop this, but if you
stopped it, you would get no investment whatsoever. You'd essentially
get a strike on the part of the international financial institutions
and all of the businessmen in Haiti.
You have all these limitations that were
reluctantly accepted by Aristide. The result is that the Haitian
economy now is probably the most open economy in the world. This
has had devastating consequences for the vast majority of Haitians.
The very few jobs that we had have been lost. The agricultural
sector is in really horrible shape.
It seems to me that we could more or
less produce enough rice for the country. But, what has happened
is that with the opening of the market, subsidized American rice
has permeated the Haitian market and destroyed rice production
in Haiti--because the American rice is significantly cheaper.
Also, with all of the compromises, you're
talking about the beginning of real corruption within the Lavalas
movement. The government that you had in the last four years
under Aristide is a government increasingly marred by corruption.
If you go to Haiti, the people in the government ride around
in huge SUVs, they have big houses. Clearly you had a very different
reality from the rhetoric that "we are defending the poor."
So that has contributed to the decline
of Aristide's popularity. As we can see, we didn't have the whole
slum, like in 1990, going in front of the national palace and
telling the armed insurgents, "Come and get us."
If you went to Port-au-Prince, you would
see big billboards saying, "Aristide cries Haiti"--that
kind of bizarre messianic assumption that one individual, and
only one, is the embodiment of everything. By the end, the Lavalas
movement was lodged with Aristide himself--with all of the problems
which that entails.
In spite of all of that, I'm convinced
that Aristide is still the most popular individual in Haiti.
And that tells you something about the opposition. If you had
elections--so-called "free and fair" elections--I'm
sure that he would win, in spite of all the corruption and all
of the problems that he has, because the opposition, even though
they used to support Aristide, have essentially merged with very
conservative business groups. I think those are the groups that
will ultimately take over now.
There's a slight difference between those
very conservative groups and the armed insurgents. And I'm not
quite sure who's funding those armed insurgents. I've heard all
kinds of different rumors, and I don't know if any of them are
correct. People say that it's the CIA, which may well be the
case--because some of the key leaders of the armed insurgents
are people from the FRAPH, the death squads from the military
dictatorship. They're back.
But there are also people like Guy Philippe.
Philippe was actually a member of the Aristide group, and then
he fell out of favor and left the country and attempted a coup
two years ago. You have former military people and former police
who were part, to some extent, of the Aristide regime, but who
have now merged against Aristide. And then you have a civil opposition
that is trying, on the one hand, to say that they are not like
the armed opposition, but basically they have the same aims.
What is clear to me is that Aristide
would never have been toppled had it not been for the armed insurgents.
I don't think that the civil opposition, although it became larger
and broader in its appeal, was in any way capable of forcing
Aristide out of power. It's only when you had the armed insurgents
that you have the opportunity for the so-called "civil society"
to force the issue.
Then, you have the United States and
France, which have never liked Aristide to begin with. I think
the disorder in Haiti provided to both French and the Americans
the opportunity to state what was unstated--that Aristide had
to go.
So you have a combination of factors--corruption
and the decay, to some extent, of the Lavalas movement, which
meant that it lost popular support; you have on the other hand
the civil opposition, which was funded by the United States and
was essentially waging a kind of low-intensity attack on the
government; and then you have the armed insurgents, which were
clearly waging a war against the Aristide regime. When you have
that--plus international support for the ousting of Aristide--it's
not surprising that the guy's no longer there.
THE BUSH administration has used charges
that the 2000 election was rigged as a reason to cut off aid
and contribute to the economic strangulation that has eroded
support for Aristide.
THERE'S NO doubt about that. When you
look at the Latin American desk of the State Department, those
guys clearly never liked Aristide--and would have done anything
they could to undermine him. Plus there were people who were
very instrumental in forging links with the civil opposition.
There was a huge amount of money--at
least in the context of Haiti--to fund the opposition. The opposition
was also from the European community. What you have here are
linkages between some of the European social democratic parties,
particularly the Socialist Party in France, and some of the small
political parties in Haiti that were opposed to Aristide.
It's not surprising that the French were
actually even more vocal in the last two weeks about asking for
the departure of Aristide than the Americans. The French have
essentially put their resources and time into the kind of social
democratic groups that are part of the civil opposition.
IS IT true that the armed opposition
was training in the Dominican Republic in preparation for this
kind of uprising?
THIS IS where the CIA link may be, although
I have no proof of it. I'm sure that five or six years from now,
when they start to declassify documents, we'll find that there
were linkages.
Last year, the Dominican army received
a huge number of new M-16s, and it looked like many of those
M-16s found their way into the hands of the armed insurgents
who were training in the Dominican Republic. If you're training
in the Dominican Republic, and you have 200 or 300 people, there's
no way that the Dominican Republic army wouldn't know about the
presence those fellows. There are all kinds of complexities that
are still murky, but one has to assume that the CIA, if it was
not directly involved, knew about it, and didn't do anything
to stop it.
The other question of the day is that
you have a significant number of the military guys in the Dominican
Republic who may have contributed to the funding of that army.
And the final possibility is that many members of the ruling
class in Haiti itself would have contributed financially to those
groups, because many of those people now have businesses in the
Dominican Republic.
You could have a constellation of groups
that wasn't necessarily united by a core political program, but
united as wanting to get Aristide out, and they put their resources
together to oust the guy. All of that is, as I said, pure conjecture,
but when you look at it, it looks very, very, very, very likely.
It would be interesting to tie together
the sources of money, because that will tell you who exactly
is behind what. The other possibility is drug money. All of those
different groups are not mutually exclusive, so you could have
all of them giving resources to insurgents.
WHAT IS your reaction of the U.S.
government's policy of sending refugees back to Haiti?
I FIND the policy absolutely outrageous.
There were people who were in Miami yesterday, and the U.S. returned
them yesterday, when Port-au-Prince was in flames. I found that
utterly outrageous. I can't understand how you can send people
back to a situation where the likelihood is that they might die.
The U.S. has no guarantee that there
wouldn't be a huge eruption, and it put them in the middle of
that. Obviously, that's politically expedient on the part of
the Bush administration, but in my mind, it is morally outrageous.
It's a reflection of the American political
system, which doesn't give a damn about Haitian Americans. They
don't count for very much in the political culture. If they vote,
they typically vote for Democrats, and so they are totally ignored.
And it plays well with the more racist elements in Florida.
So I'm not surprised that they did exactly
what they did. But nonetheless, I found it morally repugnant.
WHAT DO you think the future holds
now?
WHAT WE'VE seen in the last few weeks
is a symptom of a much, much deeper crisis in terms of the economy--in
terms of the huge chasm that exists between the different social
classes. Those questions are not going to be really dealt with
by any of regimes coming out of the crisis that we have now.
What we've seen is symptomatic of a very
poor society. And if you don't deal with that when that's the
real issue, you are going to get crisis after crisis. But in
order to deal with the issue of inequality, you need a government
that can in fact challenge the powers that be.
We have yet to learn how to navigate
the very complex situations both domestically and externally,
and it's not clear that we have anything now in Haiti that could
do the job. But I hope I'm wrong.
Eric Ruder
writes for the Socialist
Worker, where this interview originally appeared.
Weekend
Edition Features for March 6 / 7, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Understanding the World with
Paul Sweezy
Robert Pollin
Remembering Paul Sweezy
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Politics of Timber Theft
Tom Reeves
Bush's Mass Deportations: 63,000 and Counting
Charles Lewis
Who Mugged Howard Dean in Iowa:
Kerry, Torricelli and a Mysterious Frontgroup
Tom Jackson
My Breakfast with Sen. Judd Gregg
Kurt Nimmo
Is Venezuela Next?
Alan Cisco
A Report from Caracas
Jack Random
Haitian Democracy be Damned
Colin Piquette
Oh, Canada: the Coup Coalition
Lee Sustar
Labor's State of Emergency
William D. Hartung
Iraq and the Costs of War
David Sally
Rebuilding
Amérique
Mark Scaramella
When God Mooned Moses: Test Your Bible Knowledge
Mickey Z.
What We Can Learn from Ashcroft's Gallbladder
Ron Jacobs
Politics and Baseball
Dave Zirin
The Longest Jump: the Blackballing of Phil Shinnick
Poets' Basement
John Holt and Larry Kearney
Website of the Weekend
National Day of Action for Rachel Corrie
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|