Four Years Ago

[bcholmes]

On the evening of February 28th/early morning of February 29th, 2004, twelve or thirteen Chevy Suburbans from the US Embassy in Haiti arrived at the residence of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Tabarre, north of Pòtoprenz.

Included in the convoy was Luis Moreno. According to Aristide's personal guard, Frantz Gabriel, Moreno said, "Mr. President, I'm from the U.S. embassy. Ten years ago, I was there when you came in. I was there to greet you. It's too bad that ten years later, I'm the one that has to announce to you that you've got to go."

Peter Hallward makes the argument (and I am persuaded by it) that this moment didn't really go according to plan. Certainly, a lot of events had been orchestrated leading up to this moment.

Over a period of several years, Aristide was consistently cast in a bad light by foreign media. These reports tended to make three points:

1. That Aristide's election was tainted. Most sources accept that approximately 60% of the electorate voted in the 2000 election and that Aristide won 92% of the popular vote. Randall Robinson suggests, with merit, that if Aristide were running in any election in Haiti today, he would win overwhelmingly. And yet the foreign media consistently portrays him as someone who stole an election. (Don't get me wrong: I think there was a stolen election in 2000. But it happened in a different country than Haiti).
2. That the Aristide government is linked to human rights abuses. Both the US and Canada funded groups that repeated claims of human rights abuses. For example, Canada has a group called International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development (or, more informally, "Rights and Democracy"). Their funding is in the order of about $35 million directly from parliament, and they're sort of a Canadian equivalent to the US International Republican Institute. Prior to the coup, Rights and Democracy consistently claimed that the Aristide government was engaged in human rights abuses. After the coup, they fell silent on human rights abuses that were perpetrated by the interim government.
3. That the Aristide government was engaging in "bad governance". These reports claimed that Aristide's policies were responsible for worsening economic conditions for Haitians. The fact that countries like Canada and the U.S. cut significant sources of aid to Haiti (and contributed to the impoverishment of Haiti) was seldom mentioned.

The role of aid in Haiti is incredibly demoralizing. While the U.S. and Canada lambasted Aristide for the state of the Haitian economy, our aid was being used to foment discord. For example, the Canadian International Development Agency (the Canadian equivalent of USAID) was giving money directly to opposition groups such as the Group of 184, lead by André Apaid. The opposition was mostly composed of wealthy Haitian business elites (who were least in need of the aid money that we were giving them). Hallwell writes:

In Canada, federally-funded NGOs Alternatives and Rights & Democracy performed a similar [PR] function; in September 2003, for instance, the latter issued a report on Haiti which characterized G184 as a "grassroots" coalition and "promising civil society movement."

On February 5th, 2004, a group of well-armed rebels led by former police captain, Guy Philippe began attacking cities in the northern part of Haiti. (I've seen buildings that were burnt down by these rebels). Randall Robinson said, to Democracy Now:

No one disputes that the United States provided weapons, uniforms, steel pots, recoil-less rifles, rocket-powered grenades, all of that, to some 200 paramilitary forces that were trained in the Dominican Republic. The US armed and trained them. No one disputes that they crossed the border, went north, away from the capital, and stopped at Gonaive, at least a hundred kilometers north of Port-au-Prince, which was where they were spotted, verifiably, on the evening of the 28th and the morning of the 29th. They never came near Port-au-Prince. No one in Haiti would dispute that they ever posed a threat to the government. No 200 armed men could overrun a city of a million people that were hostile to them and supportive of the president.

Several years after the coup, Guy Philippe would talk a bit too much about his backers.

According to Pina, on May 27, after the arrest of Wilfort Ferdinand, another coup participant, Philippe went on Haitian radio and "began to name names of business and political leaders who backed the paramilitary insurgency against Aristide's government by providing arms, ammunition and logistical support."

"High on (Philippe's) list," Pina continued, "was Andy Apaid, the leader of the civil society organization called the Group 184."

Nonetheless, given the foreign stories of Aristide as a corrupt, human rights abusing dictator, the foreign media had no trouble portraying the insurgency as a case of Haitian people rising up against their unpopular leader. (To this day, Wikipedia editors get into edit wars about wether the entry on the 2004 uprising should be called the "2004 Haitian coup" or the "2004 Haitian rebellion". It's currently the latter).

And it is against this backdrop that the February 28th/29th action has to be seen. Hallward writes:

The truth is that Aristide was in no immediate danger from the rebels in late February, and it is perfectly plausible to assume that if he had been able to remain in office for just another week or so his government might well have been able to regain control of the situation. There was no popular revolution and there was no crisis of leadership. [...]

[U.S. ambassador] Foley, Noriega and the other hawks in the US knew that they couldn't afford to wait a week, or even for a few days. This is the second point. No doubt Foley understood, as he later admitted, that by choosing to escort Haiti's president out of the country in a US plane in the middle of the night "we gave him an alibi for the scenario he's been using ever since. We clearly walked into a trap." [...] After hours of threatening phonecalls, however, by 2 a.m. or so it seems that Aristide still wouldn't budge, and Foley himself had run out of options. Port-au-Prince was once again on the brink of a revolution, and Foley knew as well as anyone that the prospect of a quick and easy and thus media-friendly victory for Philippe was far from guaranteed. Open conflict between Philippe's group and pro-Aristide militants in Port-au-Prince could have led to utter chaos, and utter chaos isn't something that Haiti's ruling class has any reason to relish. Meanwhile a long-awaited planeload of police munitions was due to arrive from South Africa within hours, and Haiti's allies in CARICOM were growing more restive by the day; it's possible that Venezuela too was getting ready to send unilateral help. Time was now desperately short. It was growing more difficult to conceal the obvious links between the political and the military wings of the US-backed opposition, in an awkward contradition of Powell's repeated refusal to condone any sort of cooperation with "murderers and thugs."

Hallward argues that the US had two options. Option one: let the rebels try to fight it out in Port-au-Prince, resulting in a bloodbath, but the rebels would probably lose and the event might draw undesirable media attention. Or option two: directly remove Aristide from Haiti (ensuring the political victory), but losing some element of plausible deniability.

For Aristide, these options were the same. Either he had to watch a bloodbath among his people or he could leave in a way that forced the US to show its hand behind the political crisis. His position was a bit more tenuous as it was likely that some of his police and guards were waiting for Philippe's arrival to change sides; political assassination was not out of the question.

Throughout the crisis, Aristide had consistently called for a non-violent solution, and had rejected suggestions that he call the Haitian people to arms to fight off the rebels. (I suspect that if he'd encouraged the people to fight to protect the government, the foreign press would have used that to paint him as a warmonger).

Aristide ultimately signed a statement saying that if his resignation was what it took to avoid a bloodbath then he chose to leave the country. He was taken to the airport, which Canadian special forces had secured. Aristide was put on a plane and flown to the Central African Republic.

It was the second time that Aristide had been forced out of power, and in both cases, foreign actors were involved.

The real problem in Haiti is that the international community is so screwed up and divided that they are letting Haitians run Haiti.

— Luigi Einaudi of the Organization of American States (OAS), December 31, 2003 as quoted by Kevin Pina