[Marxism] Aristide's removal from office -- the "WMD" of Haiti occupation

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jeffrey Sachs was the economist who hired on to oversee economic "shock
treatment" in Russia after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Apparently he learned something or other from that horror show
(including the danger of becoming a scapegoat when the rulers' policies
fail) has kept him at odds with his former imperialist employers ever
since.  He writes better than average liberal critiques of imperialist
"globalization."
Fred Feldman



Los Angeles Times     Thursday, March 4, 2004

>From his first day in office, Bush was ousting Aristide

by Jeffrey D. Sachs

If the circumstances were not so calamitous, the American- orchestrated
removal of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from Haiti would be
farcical.

According to Aristide, American officials in Port-au-Prince told him
that rebels were on the way to the presidential residence and that he
and his family were unlikely to survive unless they immediately boarded
an American-chartered plane standing by to take them to exile. The
United States made it clear, he said, that it would provide no
protection for him at the official residence, despite the ease with
which this could have been arranged.

Indeed, according to Aristide's lawyer, the U.S. blocked reinforcement
of Aristide's own security detail. At the airport, Aristide said, U.S.
officials refused him entry to the airplane until he handed over a
signed letter of resignation.

After being hustled aboard, Aristide was denied access to a phone for
nearly 24 hours, and he knew nothing of his destination until he and his
family were summarily deposited in the Central African Republic. He has
since been kept hidden from view. Yet this Keystone Kops coup has
apparently not worked entirely according to plan: Aristide has used a
cellphone to notify the world that he was forcibly removed from Haiti at
risk of death and to describe the way his resignation was staged by
American forces.

The U.S. government dismisses Aristide's charges as ridiculous.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has offered an official version of
the events, a blanket denial based on the government's word alone. In
essence, Washington is telling us not to look back, only forward. The
U.S. government's stonewalling brings to mind Groucho Marx's old line,
"Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?"

There are several tragedies in this surrealistic episode. The first is
the apparent incapacity of the U.S. government to speak honestly about
such matters as toppling governments. Instead, it brushes aside crucial
questions: Did the U.S. summarily deny military protection to Aristide,
and if so, why and when? Did the U.S. supply weapons to the rebels, who
showed up in Haiti last month with sophisticated equipment that last
year reportedly had been taken by the U.S. military to the Dominican
Republic, next door to Haiti? Why did the U.S. cynically abandon the
call of European and Caribbean leaders for a political compromise, a
compromise that Aristide had already accepted? Most important, did the
U.S. in fact bankroll a coup in Haiti, a scenario that seems likely
based on present evidence?

Only someone ignorant of U.S. history and of the administrations of
George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush would dismiss these questions. The
United States has repeatedly sponsored coups and uprisings in Haiti and
in neighboring Caribbean countries.

Ominously, before this week, the most recent such episode in Haiti came
in 1991, during the first Bush administration, when thugs on the CIA
payroll were among the leaders of paramilitary groups that toppled
Aristide after his 1990 election.

Some of the players in this round are familiar from the previous Bush
administration, including of course Powell and Vice President Dick
Cheney. Also key is U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega - a
longtime aide to Jesse Helms and a notorious Aristide-hater - widely
thought to have been central to the departure of Aristide. He is going
to find it much harder to engineer the departure of gun-toting rebels
who entered Port-au-Prince on Wednesday.

Rarely has an episode so brilliantly exposed Santayana's famous aphorism
that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

In 1991, when Congressional Black Caucus members demanded an
investigation into the U.S. role in Aristide's overthrow, the first Bush
administration laughed them off, just as this administration is doing
today in facing new queries from Congressional Black Caucus members.

Indeed, those who are questioning the administration about Haiti are
being smeared as naive and unpatriotic. Aristide himself is being
smeared with ludicrous propaganda and, most cynically of all, is being
accused of dereliction in the failure to lift his country out of
poverty.

In point of fact, this U.S. administration froze all multilateral
development assistance to Haiti from the day that George W. Bush came
into office, squeezing Haiti's economy dry and causing untold suffering
for its citizens. U.S. officials surely knew that the aid embargo would
mean a balance-of-payments crisis, a rise in inflation and a collapse of
living standards, all of which fed the rebellion.

Another tragedy in this episode is the silence of the media when it
comes to asking all the questions that need answers. Just as in the war
on Iraq's phony WMD, wherein the mainstream media initially failed to
ask questions about the administration's claims, major news
organizations have refused to go to the mat over the administration's
accounts on Haiti. The media haven't had the gumption to find Aristide
and, in failing to do so, to point out that he is being held away from
such contact.

With a violence-prone U.S. government operating with impunity in many
parts of the world, only the public's perseverance in getting at the
truth can save us, and others, from our own worst behavior.


Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia
University, is a former economic advisor to governments in Latin America
and around the world.


http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-sachs4mar04,1,41843
44.s tory?coll=la-news-comment-opinions


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