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The Roots of Liberty: Repression and Resistance in Haiti
by Ben Terrall
07.15.2005

While US activists remain focused on Washington’s disastrous occupation of Iraq, another ill-advised “regime change” the Bush administration engineered in our own hemisphere remains largely overlooked. Though in no way justifying the idiotic decision to invade Iraq, the government toppled there was, unmistakably, an authoritarian regime. In the case of Haiti, however, the “regime” Washington terminated was one of the world’s two demilitarized democracies, headed by an anti-militarist, democratically elected proponent of liberation theology.

Though driven from office on February 29, 2004, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide remains the leader of Fanmi Lavalas, the party with by far the largest popular base in Haiti. As was true the first time Aristide was exiled by US-backed forces in 1991, his supporters are now paying a stiff price for continuing to organize demonstrations and other non-violent resistance projects. Lavalas activists are systematically targeted by paramilitary and military forces let loose by the current Washington-backed coup government.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the Lavalas (which means “flood” in Haitian Creole) movement came to prominence in the 1980s as part of the opposition to the intolerable rule of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, marked by massive unemployment (due partly to USAID agro-export policies) and extreme repression of workers. The slogan of Lavalas, “from misery to poverty with dignity,” proved too much for wealthy elites in Haiti and the US. After being overwhelmingly elected President in 1990, Aristide was forced from office by a coup carried out by US-backed Haitian officers; US intelligence agencies helped create death squads which proceeded to kill thousands of Lavalas activists before Aristide was able to return in 1994.

In 2000, the current Bush Administration and elites in Haiti began to orchestrate a systematic propaganda campaign to paint opposition to Aristide as broad-based—which it wasn’t. An Economist Intelligence Unit report describes a November 2000 anti-Aristide protest held by the ‘Group of 184’, which is led by millionaire factory owner Andre Apaid (who also founded Haiti’s main television station, Tele-Haiti, and led a 2003 campaign to block Aristide’s efforts to double the minimum wage):

“On the morning of the rally, a few hundred Group of 184 supporters had assembled at the designated site but found themselves heavily outnumbered by as many as 8,000 Aristide loyalists… The turnout for the rally was lower than might have been suggested by the Group’s claim to have more than 300 member organizations. It was scarcely able to assemble more than this number of demonstrators. The presence at the rally of many members of the more affluent sector of society reinforced a perception that the Group of 184, despite its claims to represent civil society, is an organization with little popular appeal.”

But the opposition did have plenty of Washington funding, through the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The International Republican Institute, a branch of the NED, funneled money to The Group of 184. Paramilitaries trained in the Dominican Republic by U.S. Special Forces—called “freedom fighters” by “interim” prime minister Gerald Latortue—crossed into Haiti in February 2004 to kill and terrorize Aristide supporters.

According to human rights workers in Port-au-Prince, survivors of the last coup feel this one is even worse. As one activist, Denise Furlong (not her real name, due to heightened attacks on dissidents), told me : “in the early 1990s, the junta was not recognized by any foreign government [except the Vatican]. Economic sanctions were imposed and diplomatic actions taken against the Cedras regime. This time, the interim government has international recognition, the aid embargo has been lifted, and claims of human rights abuses are ignored … human rights organizations and national and international media exposed and denounced violations during the first coup; this is no longer the case.” In the view of this long-time human rights activist, “There is a concerted effort by the government to criminalize a whole sector of the population. As it wages a highly sophisticated campaign preparing the national mindset for mass crimes against the civilian population, the interim government and its allies are speaking the language of genocide. Violence carried out by groups identifying as supporters of Lavalas or groups whose actions are imputed to Lavalas is beneficial to the government, which exploits it to justify further violence against the poor.”

Immigration lawyer Tom Griffin, author of a University of Miami Law Center report documenting horrific atrocities committed against Lavalas members by the Haitian police, told me, “Everything is so much worse since the coup. Three of the main problems repeatedly pointed to as excuses to force out Aristide were gang violence, an economy in tatters and judicial corruption. On the premise that Aristide had to go for those reasons, putting aside the fact that forcing out a democratically elected leader is illegal, look at what Haiti has now: The majority of the population is threatened with starvation, there’s official and paramilitary violence, and the judiciary is entirely corrupted.”

Hundreds of poor people have been jailed for expressing support for Lavalas, even for wearing Aristide t-shirts in peaceful demonstrations. Their continued imprisonment underscores the US government’s disregard for Haiti’s people and its constitution, and is evidence of the complete dissolution of free speech, association and press in Haiti. This situation has kept Prime Minister Yvon Neptune, Minister of Interior Jocelerme Privert, and Lavalas activist Annette Auguste, jailed in miserable conditions along with hundreds of other grassroots activists, labor leaders and residents of poor neighborhoods. Neptune’s life has been threatened three times during his year-long incarceration. Though prisoners are constitutionally entitled to see a judge within 24 hours, Neptune, like most other political prisoners, has been denied this right. Regarding the dubious case against Privert, international human rights attorney Brian Concannon said, “The fact that it took over a year to charge Privert makes you doubt the evidence. I haven’t seen the files yet.”

The plight of the prisoners, dramatized by Prime Minister Neptune and Minister Privert’s recent hunger strikes, is urgent, and is a campaign focus for the Haiti Action Committee and other solidarity groups in the US. Both Neptune and Privert have been hospitalized due to complications from their fasting.

The magistrate in charge of Neptune’s case has reportedly ordered a dismissal of charges, but there is no sign that the coup government will release the Prime Minister. The “massacre” he is accused of responsibility for was trumpeted by the USAID-funded group the National Coalition for Haitian Rights—but Louis Joinet, the UN Human Rights Commission Independent Expert on Haiti, has concluded that it never took place.

The only trial of any supporters of the current regime took place in early August, when notorious death squad leaders Jackson Joanis and Jodel Chamblain were cleared of involvement in the 1993 murder of Aristide backer Antoine Izmery. Condemned by Amnesty International as “shameful”, the trial lasted 14 hours, with only one of eight witnesses for the prosecution appearing. More recently, the convictions of at least 15 former soldiers and paramilitaries, jailed in November 2000 for a 1994 killing spree of Aristide supporters, were overturned. Human rights lawyer Brian Concannon, who helped prepare the prosecution’s case in the 2000 trial, called this setback “the latest step in dismantling the justice system.”

In mid-March, Gerard Latortue and other representatives of the coup regime attended a ceremony in the northern city of Cap-Haitien marking the disarmament of 300 former soldiers. "The country will always remember you," Latortue told the paramilitaries. "[Your] names should be written in the country's history as the first Haitians who took up weapons against a dictatorship and who are now re-integrating into society." The ex-soldiers—part of a force widely hated for its terrorizing, raping, torturing, and murdering of Haiti’s civilians—turned over a grand total of seven weapons: six aging assault rifles and one Uzi submachine gun.

Meanwhile, Washington officials admitted that the U.S. government transferred 2,657 weapons to Haiti last year, including more than nearly two thousand revolvers, nearly five hundred 9mm pistols, 8 submachine-guns and 13 M-14 rifles for use by the Haitian police force. And on August 12, 2004, Washington committed to send $6 million in new aid to the Haitian police.

As ambassador James Foley explained, “There can’t be democracy without security.”

The “security” model now being advanced in Haiti was also used by Central American death squads of the 1980s. As Iran-Contra veterans Otto Reich and Roger Noriega—both Bush-appointed Assistant Secretaries of State for Western Hemispheric Affairs—provided key support for the destabilization of Aristide’s government, the similarity is hardly coincidental. Paramilitary leaders like Guy Phillipe, who received U.S. military training in Ecuador in 1994, are part of a long line of proxy killers and torturers cultivated by Washington for use in suppressing the Haitians. In the winter of 2004, Philippe’s men bragged to US reporters of executing Aristide supporters in Cap-Hatian and Port-au-Prince. “I am the chief, the military chief. The country is in my hands,” boasted Philippe. He has more recently changed his tune, telling a reporter, “I have no weapons. I'm a politician now.”

Both the US embassy and the DEA have implicated Phillipe in drug smuggling. But while Foley told the Haitian press, “All drug traffickers, no matter what their political or social membership is and no matter where they are hiding, will answer for their acts one day,” few are expecting that day to come for Philippe as long as Washington’s favored sons retain power.

Philippe—whose new coup-sanctioned political party, The Front for National Reconstruction, is preparing for the Fall 2005 parliamentary and legislative elections—has pontificated at length to international media about the need for further crackdowns on the dissent.

Philippe is only echoing U.S. establishment consensus. The Washington Post editorialized on April 5, 2005: “Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld discussed the peacekeeping mission during visits to Argentina and Brazil, perhaps inspiring its belated show of muscle. Yet the Bush administration still resists accepting the obvious: that deeper U.S. involvement in Haiti is inevitable. Better that it happen sooner -- when there is an international force that can be bolstered, and political solutions that can be brokered -- than later, when the only recourse, as so often before in Haiti's history, may be the Marines.”

But it’s not as if international forces have exactly been upholding pacifist principles of conflict resolution. The Brazilian-led United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) took over from the Multinational Interim Force (consisting of US, French, Canadian, and Chilean troops) in June 2004. The vast majority of victims of UN-backed Haitian police attacks have been unarmed dissidents and other civilians.

A recent Harvard Law School Report on the UN presence in Haiti, while not questioning its legitimacy, concluded, “MINUSTAH has provided cover for abuses committed by the HNP [Haitian police] during operations in poor, historically tense Port-au-Prince neighborhoods such as Bel-Air, La Saline, and lower Delmas. Rather than advising and instructing the police in best practices, and monitoring their missteps, MINUSTAH has been the midwife of their abuses. In essence, MINUSTAH has provided to the HNP the very implements of repression.”

UN collusion with the betrayal of Haiti was clear when a delegation from the UN Security Council visited Haiti for four days in April 2005. Attorney Brian Concannon noted, “The Security Council's agenda was filled by meetings with officials of the unconstitutional Interim Government, groups that called for the overthrow of the elected government a year ago, and officials of foreign governments that supported the February 29 overthrow of President Aristide, or officials of programs financed by these governments.’’

Concannon commented, “All of these groups have a vested interest in the current illegal regime, and cannot effectively represent the vast majority of Haitians who are opposing the February 2004 coup d'etat, and are suffering the consequences. The Security Council representatives did not give poor women, grassroots groups and victims of military and paramilitary atrocities the opportunity to be heard.”

Ronaldo Sardenberg, Brazil's United Nations ambassador and head of the UN Security Council's delegation to Haiti, called fall elections “a necessary first step”—but ignored the brutal repression of Lavalas and the continued illegal imprisonment of hundreds of political prisoners. His countryman Juan Gabriel Valdés, commander of MINUSTAH and Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General, told a reporter that “If you have had elections in Iraq and in Afghanistan, I don't see why you can't have elections in this country. Elections are not only positive but indispensable.” Valdes avoided the fact that Haitians already had an election and overwhelmingly elected Aristide, but called the opening day of voter registration, "a moment of joy for Haiti and the international community." A real moment of joy for the majority of Haitians would come if Lavalas demands for participation in the elections were met: a return of constitutional democracy, including the return of their democratically-elected President, freeing of all political prisoners, and an end to the terror campaigns that have killed thousands of Haitians since the beginning of the coup. A return of social services cut by the coup government, which will be receiving $41 million from Washington, Canada and France for the fall elections, would also be a an overdue concession to the needs of the majority of Haitians.

That won’t happen without sustained international solidarity from people all over the world. Given how much worse daily life has become for the overwhelming majority of non-elite Haitians, what Dr. Paul Farmer (author of the seminal history “The Uses of Haiti”) calls “pragmatic solidarity” is needed: fundraising for schools, bare-bones community centers, and independent media projects. Initiatives like these are essential to help Haitians being subjected to repression by Washington’s proxies.

In spite of horrific repression, Haitians remain conscious of their country’s heritage as the first free black republic, and, despite repeated police shootings of non-violent protestors, regularly march in the thousands to demand Aristide’s return. It is entirely apt that soon after being forced into exile, Aristide referred to the “tree of liberty”: As the slave general and hero of Haitian independence Toussaint l’Overture declared upon his forced removal two hundred years earlier, “In overthrowing me, you have cut down in San Domingo only the trunk of the tree of black liberty. It will spring up again by the roots, for they are numerous and deep.”

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