Lyrics :
Lucky you were born that far away so
We could both make fun of distance
Lucky that I love a foreign land for
The lucky fact of your existence

Baby I would climb the Andes solely
To count the freckles on your body
Never could imagine there were only
Ten Million ways to love somebody

Le ro lo le lo le, Le ro lo le lo le
Can’t you see
I’m at your feet

Whenever, wherever
We’re meant to be together
I’ll be there and you’ll be near
And that’s the deal my dear

Thereover, hereunder
You’ll never have to wonder
We can always play by ear
But that’s the deal my dear

Lucky that my lips not only mumble
They spill kisses like a fountain
Lucky that my breasts are small and humble
So you don’t confuse them with mountains
Lucky I have strong legs like my mother
To run for cover when I need it
And these two eyes that for no other
The day you leave will cry a river

Le ro le le lo le, Le ro le le lo le
At your feet
I’m at your feet

Whenever, wherever
We’re meant to be together
I’ll be there and you’ll be near
And that’s the deal my dear

Thereover, hereunder
You’ll never have to wonder
We can always play by ear
But that’s the deal my dear

Le ro le le lo le, Le ro le le lo le
Think out loud
Say it again

Le ro lo le lo le lo le
Tell me one more time
That you’ll live
Lost in my eyes

Whenever, wherever
We’re meant to be together
I’ll be there and you’ll be near
And that’s the deal my dear

Thereover, hereunder
You’ve got me head over heels
There’s nothing left to fear
If you really feel the way I feel

Where Past is Present

by Paul Farmer, March 12, 2004

from the book

Getting Haiti Right This Time

The U.S. and the Coup

Noam Chomsky, Paul Farmer, Amy
Goodman

Common Courage Press, 2004, paper

On the night of February 28, 2004, Haitian
president Jean Bertrand Aristide was forced from power, in part
by an armed uprising of former members of the military, disbanded
in 1995. Aristide claimed he was kidnapped and did not know where
he was being taken until the very end of a 20-hour flight, when
he was informed that he and his wife would be landing “in
a French military base in the middle of Africa.” He found
himself in the Central African Republic.

Whenever Haiti does intrude into America’s
consciousness, people like me-old Haiti hands who have lived and
worked here and written about the place over the years-are consulted
on “the current crisis.” The current crisis isn’t something
that started in January 2004: it has been going on for the past
couple of decades and longer. I’ve found, however, that if you
try to discuss the roots of the problem, journalists and policymakers
are likely to cut you off, saying: “Let’s not dwell on the
past. What should be done about Haiti’s future?”

Nonetheless, a quick review of Haiti’s
history is indispensable to understanding the current muddle.
We begin the eighteenth century, when a slave colony on Haiti,
then called Santo Domingo, became France’s most valuable colonial
possession. According to historians, Santo Domingo stands out
as perhaps the most brutal slave colony in human history. It was
the leading port of call for slave ships during the latter half
of the eighteenth century, and a third of new arrivals died within
a few years of reaching the colony. On the eve of the French Revolution,
the bit of real estate now dismissed as a failed state was producing
two-thirds of Europe’s tropical produce. Many of France’s beautiful
coastal cities, including Bordeaux, are monuments to the slave
trade. These facts are already forgotten outside Haiti.

Haitians remember: they consider themselves
living legacies of the slave trade and the bloody revolt, starting
in 1791, that finally removed the French. Over a decade of war
followed, during which France’s largest expeditionary force was
sent to quell the rebellion. As the French containment operation
flagged, the Haitian slave general Toussaint Louverture, victorious
in battle, was invited to a parley. No parley ensued: Toussaint
was kidnapped and taken away to a prison in the mountains of France;
he died there of exposure and tuberculosis. Every Haitian schoolchild
knows by heart his last words: “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. Among those whose imaginations were fired by these events
was William Wordsworth, who addressed Toussaint:

Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,

Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind

Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;

There’s not a breathing of the common wind

That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;

Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.

Wordsworth was wrong about allies. The
slaves in revolt had few friends, and the war continued in Haiti,
with Europe’s chief colonial powers-France, England and Spain-caught
up in the fray. November 1803, the former slaves won what proved
to be the war’s final battle and on January 1, 1804 declared the
independent republic of Haiti. It was Latin America’s first independent
country and the only nation ever born of a slave revolt. Virtually
all of the world’s powers sided with France against the self-proclaimed
Black Republic, which declared itself a haven not only for all
runaway slaves but also for indigenous people (the true natives
of Haiti had succumbed to infectious disease and Spanish slavery
well before the arrival of the French). Hemmed in by slave colonies,
Haiti had only one non-colonized neighbor, the slaveholding United
States, which refused to recognize Haiti’s independence. As one
US senator from South Carolina put it, speaking from the Senate
floor in 1824, “Our policy with regard to Hayti [sic] is
plain. We never can acknowledge her independence …. The peace
and safety of a large portion of our union forbids us even to
discuss it.”

Haiti’s leaders were desperate for recognition,
since the only goods the island had to sell were sugar, coffee,
cotton, and other tropical produce. In 1825, under threat of another
French invasion and the restoration of slavery, Haitian officials
signed what was to prove the beginning of the end of any hope
of autonomy: King Charles X agreed to recognize Haiti’s independence
only if the new republic paid an indemnity of 150 million francs
and consented to the reduction of import and export taxes for
French goods.

It may be impossible to put a price on
the toll taken by slavery-the destruction not only of lives and
families, but of cultures and languages-but the same cannot be
said about “the French debt.” One hundred fifty million
gold francs amounts to about half a billion US dollars in the
most conservative estimate, without attempting to calculate 175
years of interest and inflation. Unusually, reintroducing slavery
was not legal at the time, even under French law. The “debt”
that Haiti recognized was incurred by the slaves’ having deprived
the French owners not only of land and equipment but of their
human “property.” The threat of force made it more akin
to extortion than compensation.

By any account, the impact of the debt
repayments which continued until after World War II was devastating.
Assessments by Haitians are severe: anthropologist Jean Price
Mars, referring to the Haitian leaders who yielded to French threats,
complained in 1953 that their “incompetence and frivolity…
made a country whose revenues and outflows had been balanced up
to then into a nation burdened with debt and j trapped in financial
obligations that could never be satisfied.”

French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher
argued that “imposing an indemnity on the victorious slaves
was equivalent to making them pay with money that which they had
already paid with their blood.” Even those who profited from
the deal knew that Haiti’s economy was being dealt a lethal blow.

When capital moves up a steep grade of
inequality-from a war-devastated colony of former slaves to one
of the world’s most powerful nations-the greater happiness of
the greatest number is not being served; rather, those who have
little to spare are forced to give up essentials so that others
can add to their luxuries. Such transfers from the poor to the
rich continue to this day, with some of the international financial
institutions serving as cheerleaders for analogous-albeit more
subtly practiced-processes.

In the late nineteenth century, the United
States eclipsed France as a prevailing force in Haitian affairs.
A US military occupation (1915-1934) brought back corvée
labor and introduced aerial bombing, two symptoms of the vast
disparity in power between occupier and occupied. Officials sitting
at desks in Washington, D.C. created institutions that Haitians
would have to live with. For example, the Haitian army that today
claims to have the country “in its hands” and seeks
to be reestablished was created not by Haitians but by an act
of the U.S. Congress. From its founding during the US occupation
until it was demobilized by Aristide in 1995, the Haitian army
has never known a non-Haitian enemy. Internal enemies, however,
it had aplenty.

This state of affairs-military-backed
governments, dictatorships, chronic instability, repression, the
heavy hand of Washington over all-continued throughout the 20th
century. When I first traveled to Haiti in 1983, the Duvalier
family dictatorship had been in place for a quarter of a century.
There was no free press-and no dissent, to be sure, from radios
or newspapers; no politicians declaring themselves the heads of
parallel governments. The Duvaliers and their military dealt with
all such threats ruthlessly, while the judiciary and the rest
of the world looked the other way. Haiti was already the poorest
country in the Western world, and those who ran it argued, with
a certain sociological confidence, that force is required to police
deep poverty.

By the mid-1980s, however, the hunger,
despair, and disease that are the lot of most Haitians was beyond
management, even by force. Baby Doc Duvalier, named “President
for Life” at age 19, fled the country in 1986. A first attempt
at democratic elections, in 1987, led to a massacre at the polling
station. An army general declared himself in charge. In September
1988, the mayor of Port-au-Prince-himself a former military officer-paid
a gang to burn down a downtown Roman Catholic church while it
was packed with people attending mass. At the altar was none other
than Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, nemesis of the dictatorship
and the army and a proponent of liberation theology. This stream
of Catholic thought had been sweeping Latin America with its injunctions
that the Church proclaim “a preferential option for the poor.”
It had its adversaries: Pope John Paul II, for one, and President
Ronald Reagan. Members of Reagan’s brain trust, participating
in a 1980 meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico, declared liberation
theology less Christian than Communist and recommended that “U.S.
policy must begin to counter (not react against).., the ‘liberation
theology’ clergy.”

Aristide’s rise from slum priest to presidential
candidate took place against a backdrop of right-wing death squad
activity and threatened military coups. He rose quickly in the
eyes of the Haitians, but his stock plummeted with the United
States and its press. The New York Times, which relies heavily
on informants who speak English or French instead of only Haitian
Creole, had few kind words for the priest: “Among the business
community, pessimistic reactions run stronger,” ran a news
story published three days prior to Haiti’s first elections. “He
is a cross between Ayatollah and Fidel,’ one downtown businessman
said in a typical assessment of Father Aristide from those in
the entrepreneurial class. ‘If it comes to a choice between the
ultraleft and the ultra-right, I am ready to form an alliance
with the ultra-right.” Such coverage gave the impression
that it might be a tight race. But Haitians knew that Aristide
would easily win any democratic election, and on December 16,
1990, the priest won 67% of the popular vote in a field of 12
candidates.

The United States might not have been
able to prevent Aristide’s landslide victory, but there was much
they could do to undermine him. The most effective method, adopted
by the first Bush administration, was to fund the opposition-its
poor showing at the polls was no reason, it appears, to cut off
aid to them-and the military. Declassified records now make it
clear that the CIA and other US organizations helped to create
and fund a paramilitary group called FRAPH, which rose to prominence
after the September 1991 military coup that ousted Aristide. Thousands
of civilians were killed outright and hundred of thousands fled
onto the high seas and across the border to the Dominican Republic.

Whether it was the refugee question or
a change of heart in foreign policy-Bill Clinton mentioned the
Haitian refugees in many of his campaign speeches-Aristide became,
in October 1994, the first exiled Latin American president to
return to office, with a little over a year left in his term.
Although the 1994 US military intervention was authorized by the
United Nations and indisputably stopped bloodshed and restored
constitutional rule, other forces were at play: the restoration
of Aristide was basically a United States show. Then, seven weeks
after Aristide’s return, Republicans took control of the US Congress.
From that day forth, influential Republicans worked to block or
burden with conditions aid to impoverished, strife-torn Haiti.

The aid through official channels was
never very substantial. Counted per capita, the US was giving
Haiti one-tenth what it was distributing in Kosovo. Claims heard
recently from the mouths of former ambassadors and the second
Bush administration-that hundreds of millions of dollars flowed
to Haiti are correct, though misleading. Aid did flow, just not
to the elected government. A great deal of it went to non-governmental
organizations and to the anti-Aristide opposition. A lot went
to pay for the UN occupation and Halliburton support services.
US organizations like the International Republican Institute and
even the US Agency for International Development funneled hundreds
of thousands, perhaps millions, of dollars to the opposition.
The cuts in bilateral aid and the diversion of monies to the opposition
meant there could be, in a country as poor as Haiti, little effort
to build schools, health care infrastructure, roads, ports, telecommunications,
or airports.

When the anti-Aristide opposition cried
foul over a handful of contested parliamentary seats in the 2000
election, the US quickly acted to freeze international aid as
well. Take, for example the case of the Inter-American Development
Bank (IDB) loans. These loans-one for health care, another for
education, one for potable water, and one for road improvement:
areas of greatest need in Haiti, the timeliness of which would
seem obvious to anyone-had been approved by the Haitian government
and by the Bank’s board of directors. The loans were then delayed
for “political reasons.” Haiti held local and parliamentary
elections in May 2000, and eight parliamentary seats-out of approximately
7,500 posts filled that day-were disputed, even though all went
to those with the greatest number of votes (those unhappy with
the results demanded a run-off). Sources both Haitian and American
confirmed to me that it was the United States that asked the Inter-American
Development Bank to block the loans until these electoral disputes
had been resolved. Since seven of the Senators in question resigned
in 2001, and the other’s term expired shortly thereafter, that
should’ve been the end of the aid freeze. Instead, it continued
throughout Aristide’s tenure.

The IDB later claimed that this funding
freeze occurred as the result of a consensus reached by the Organization
of American States in something called “the Declaration of
Quebec City.” Interestingly enough, the Declaration is dated
April 22, 2001, and the letter from the United States representative
to the IDB asking that the loans not be disbursed was dated April
8, 2001. To quote the conclusion of one of the rare journalists
to find this scandal worthy of inquiry, “it would seem that
the effort became concerted after it was made.”

International financial institutions have
time and again engaged in discriminatory and probably illegal
practices towards Haiti. According to the Haiti Support Group,
“Haiti’s debt to international financial institutions and
foreign governments has grown from US$302 million in 1980 to US$1.134
billion today. About 40% of this debt stems from loans to the
brutal Duvalier dictators who invested precious little of it in
the country. This is known as ‘odious debt’ because it was used
to oppress the people, and, according to international law, this
debt need not be repaid.” There has been relative silence
in the press and among human rights groups on this score.

The story gets worse. In order to meet
the renewed demands of the IDB, the cash-strapped Haitian Government
was required to pay ever-expanding arrears, many of them linked
to loans paid out to the Duvalier dictatorship and to the brutal
military regimes of 1986-1990. In July 2003, Haiti sent over 90%
of all its foreign reserves to Washington to pay these arrears.
Yet as of today, less than US$4 million of the four blocked loans
mentioned above has flowed to Haiti in spite of many assurances
to the contrary from the IDB.

This startling echo of illegal practices
in the nineteenth century-for the IDB payments will strike both
lawyers and the Haitian poor as reminiscent of France’s indemnity
shakedown-is of a piece with many other discriminatory practices
towards Haiti and its people. You’d think this might be newsworthy:
the world’s most powerful nations joining forces to block aid
and humanitarian assistance to one of the poorest. But for three
years this story was almost impossible to place in a mainstream
journal of opinion. It was not until March 2004 that one could
read in a US daily the news that the aid freeze might have contributed
to the overthrow of the penniless Haitian government. In its one
and only investigative piece about the three-year-long aid embargo,
the Boston Globe finally stumbled upon the facts:

WASHINGTON-For three years, the US government,
the European Union, and international banks have blocked $500
million in aid to Haiti’s government, ravaging the economy of
a nation already twice as poor as any in the Western Hemisphere.

The cutoff, intended to pressure the government
to adopt political reforms, left Haiti struggling to meet even
basic needs and weakened the authority of President Jean Bertrand
Aristide, who went into exile one week ago. Today, Haiti’s government,
which serves 8 million people, has an annual budget of about $300
million-less than that of Cambridge, [Massachusetts] a city of
just over 100,000. And as Haitians attempt to form a new government,
many say its success will largely depend on how much and how soon
aid will flow to the country… Many of Aristide’s supporters,
in Haiti and abroad, angrily contend that the international community,
particularly the \ United States, abandoned the fledgling democracy
when / it needed aid the most. Many believe that Aristide himself
( was the target of the de facto economic sanctions, just as L
Haiti was beginning to put its finances back in order.

The Aristide Question

The view that the United States and France
undermined Aristide is not a fringe opinion. Nobel Laureate and
former president of Costa Rica Oscar Arias wrote in the Washington
Post that, “in the case of Haiti, not only was the struggling
democracy cut off from outside aid but an armed insurrection of
former military and death-squad leaders was in the end endorsed
by the US and French governments.” The Caribbean nations
grouped under CARICOM and the African Union have called for a
formal investigation of Aristide’s removal, and Gayle Smith, an
Africa specialist on the National Security Council staff under
President Bill Clinton, observed that “most people around
the world believe that Aristide’s departure was at best facilitated;
at worst, coerced by the US and France.”

Why such animus towards Haiti’s leader
from American and French officialdom? Answering this question
helps reframe the one that is always asked by the press. Journalists
never ask, for example, how much 150 million gold francs are worth
today or what their loss might have meant for a struggling tropical
economy. They ask, rather, “Is Aristide a good guy or a bad
guy?” Certainly, Aristide is the sort of person who would
and did say, “France extorted this money from Haiti by force
and you should give it back to us so that we can build primary
schools, primary health care, water systems, and roads.”
Aristide is also the sort of person who will do the math on the
French debt, adding in interest and adjusting for inflation. He
came up with a startling figure: France owes Haiti US$21,685,135,571.48
and counting, at five percent annual interest.

This figure was scoffed at by some French,
the whole affair seen as some sort of comical farce mounted by
their disgruntled former subjects; others in France, it’s increasingly
clear, were insulted or angered when the point was pressed in
diplomatic and legal circles.

Aristide pressed the point. The figure
of $21 billion was repeated again and again. The number 21 appeared
all over the place in Haiti, along with the word “restitution.”
On January 1, 2004, during Haiti’s bicentennial celebrations,
Aristide announced he would replace a 21-gun salute with a litany
of 21 points about what had been achieved in spite of the embargo
and what would be done when restitution was made. The crowd went
wild. The US and French press by and large dismissed his comments
as silly, even though lawyers saw the case as not without legal
merit.

It’s hard to have even a brief conversation
about Haiti without Aristide’s personality coming up. What’s more,
it’s usually easy to tell within minutes how one’s interlocutor
feels about him. Haiti is almost always referred to as polarized,
but this is not true in every sense. Most Haitians have a lot
in common: poverty, disease, mistrust of the great powers. Haiti’s
elections and polls, even recent ones, show that the poor majority
still support Aristide. What’s polarized are the middle classes
and the traditional political elites-which together seem to constitute
what human rights groups and political analysts term “civil
society,” a grouping that for some ineffable reason does
not include the poor majority. Equally polarized are people like
me: non-Haitians who concern themselves with that country’s affairs
for a whole host of reasons. Among those who can read and write,
among the chattering classes, there is no more divisive figure
than Aristide.

Given all the coups and assassination
attempts and spectacular crimes mentioned above-given all the
complexity what is the standard storyline in the mainstream press?
That Aristide had the chance to be “Haiti’s Mandela,”
but instead “cruelly disappointed” his supporters who
then defected in droves. Nothing could be further from the truth,
as even a superficial review of the facts will show. First, Haiti
is not South Africa. There can be no lofty figure who survives
terrible mistreatment in order to lead his nation into the sunlit
uplands of democracy because in order to preside over such transitions,
or even to survive them, leaders have to be able to deliver on
campaign promises. Haiti’s legendary poverty makes this impossible
without repatriated resources or access to credits and assistance.
Aristide knew this, hence his attempts to free up development
assistance for health, roads, water, and primary education. When
outside assistance was blocked by Washington and Aristide’s first
strategy failed, the restitution of the French debt was moved
to the fore.

This broader background helps explain
why the two superpowers in the Caribbean region-the United States
and France-are united on Haiti, if not on Iraq.

None of this is new, as even a cursory
review of the past decade or so shows. On the eve of his 1990
election, under the banner headline “Front-Running Priest
a Shock to Haiti,” we read in the New York Times that “the
former Salesian priest, long known for his strident brand of liberation
theology, has sent profound shock waves through many of the sectors
of this society that have traditionally made or broken presidents
since Haiti’s independence in 1804. From the business community,
the army, and the Catholic and Protestant churches to Voodoo priests
and rural landowners, sentiment is strongly, if not uniformly,
set against him.” In other words, everyone was always against
Aristide-except the poor majority.

Between the coup that followed Aristide’s
inauguration and his return to Haiti, the coverage and debates
were the same. Our nation’s “paper of record” is especially
revealing. On September 22, 1994, the New York Times ran a front-page
piece about Aristide entitled “The Mouse That Roared.”
From it, we get a keen sense of Aristide as irritant: “The
Clinton crowd has had to work hard to justify him to lawmakers
who were unnerved by the October 1993 closed-door CIA briefing
to Congress, in which the intelligence agency offered information-later
proven false-that Father Aristide had received psychiatric treatment
at a Montreal hospital in 1980. Senator Jesse Helms, Republican
of North Carolina, left the briefing and branded him a ‘psychopath’-a
slur it has been hard for Father Aristide to get over.”

It would be convenient for the traditional
elite and other allies and overseas funders if Aristide, who has
indeed been forced to preside over unimaginable penury, were to
be abandoned by his own people. But what of suppressed Gallup
polls, conducted with the hope of showing that Aristide is no
longer popular? In fact, these 2002 polls indicate that Aristide
is far and away Haiti’s most popular and trusted politician. What
is to be done about the Haitian voters who, to the horror of their
elites and to the Republican right, keep voting for Aristide?

In truth, the protégés of
Senator Jesse Helms have had more say in Aristide’s fate than
have the Haitian electorate. Aristide claims he had no idea where
he was being taken on the night of February 28, 2004 until minutes
before landing at, he was told, “a French military base.”
He found himself in the Central African Republic, a place he’d
never visited before. Although US officials stated initially that
he had been “taken to the country of his choice,” Aristide’s
version of events surely seems more plausible. The Central African
Republic is a country in not much more than name. About the size
of Texas and with a population of only three million, it is subject
to French military and economic interests. It is also, in spite
of natural resources (diamonds, gold, oil, timber, and uranium)
that any Haitian might envy, one of the world’s poorest countries
and highly unstable. A March 2003 BBC story reported that the
capital, Bangui, was the world’s most dangerous city. The United
States has issued a travel advisory banning its citizens from
traveling to the Central African Republic; our embassy there was
closed two years ago. The Central African Republic “government”
seized power in a military coup a little over a year ago.

When the poorly-briefed Aristide walked
off the plane and across the tarmac, he found a single journalist
waiting. What did he have to say after a 20-hour flight during
which he did not know where he was bound? First, he thanked the
Africans for their hospitality, and then he said only the following:
“I declare in overthrowing me they have uprooted the trunk
of the tree of peace, but it will grow back because the roots
are Louverturian.”

It’s no surprise that Aristide would echo
Toussaint Louverture, who is one of his heroes. In one of the
few measured and informed pieces written about the current Haitian
crisis, Madison Smartt Bell, writing in Harper’s Magazine, linked
the past to the present, as Haitians readily do:

Toussaint did not live to see the result
of his struggle: the emergence of Haiti as an independent black
state, founded by slaves who had broken their own chains and driven
off their masters. After his deportation to France, the torch
he’d carried was passed to Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a man of more
ferocious spirit, whose watchword was Koupe tet, boule kay- “Cut
off heads and burn down houses.” Papa Doc Duvalier had systematically
associated himself and his regime with the spirit of Dessalines,
as he deployed Dessalinien tactics on his own people: ruthless
application of overwhelming force. Aristide seemed more attracted
to the spirit of Toussaint, who had a real distaste for useless
bloodshed, political and diplomatic skills to match or surpass
his remarkable military talent, a delicately evolved sense of
Haiti’s relationship with the surrounding colonial powers, a devout
Catholicism able to coexist with the Vodou [sic] he also practiced,
and a social vision, based on harmonious cooperation among the
races, a good two hundred years ahead of his time.

Bell observes that, in the end, “Toussaint
was undone by foreign powers, and Aristide also had suffered plenty
of vexation from outside interference.” Since Bell’s essay
was published, Aristide is, like Toussaint, in something of a
French prison.

The Who’s Who

Who are the other players in these high-stakes
games, games in which history weighs so heavily? For many years
it’s been the same cast of characters on both sides of the sea.
Starting with the US dramatis personae helps to make things clearer
on the Haitian side. The current Bush administration has put in
charge of Latin American diplomacy two men who have been at it
for a long time; their views are well-documented. As the “Special
Presidential Envoy to the Western Hemisphere,” Otto Reich
is the United States’ top diplomat in the region even though he
has never survived a House or Senate hearing; he was appointed
by Bush during a Congressional recess. In the 1990s, Reich was
a lobbyist for industry (among his current deals: selling Lockheed-Martin
fighter planes to Chile), but prior to that he had a long record
of government service. In a recent New Yorker profile of Reich,
William Finnegan gives us more background on his curriculum vitae:

Reich first went to work for the Reagan
Administration at the Agency for International Development, in
1981. As the civil war in Nicaragua heated up, he moved to the
State Department, where, from 1983 to 1986, he headed a Contra-support
program that operated out of an outfit called the Office of Public
Diplomacy. The office arranged speeches and recommended books
to public libraries, but it also leaked false stories to the press-that,
for instance, the Sandinista government was receiving Soviet MiG
fighters, or was involved in drug trafficking. A declassified
memo from one of Reich’s aides to Patrick Buchanan, the White
House communications director, boasted about the office’s “White
Propaganda” operations, including op-ed pieces prepared by
its staff, signed by Contra leaders or academics, and placed in
major newspapers. (Reich’s spokesman denied this.) The office
employed Army psychological-warfare specialists, and worked closely
with Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, at the National Security
Council.

During the course of the Iran-Contra investigation,
the US Comptroller General concluded that Reich’s office had “engaged
in prohibited, covert propaganda activities.” But by then
Otto Reich had been named US Ambassador to Venezuela, where he
laid the groundwork for future efforts to destabilize President
Hugo Chavez. Mind you, these are not all covert efforts: less
than a year ago, Reich was on record hailing a coup against the
left-leaning Chavez, urging the State department and opinion-makers-including
the New York Times-to support “the new government.”
The Times complied. There was only one problem with this plan:
the Venezuelan majority failed to fall into step. There was not
adequate public support, in Venezuela or elsewhere in Latin America,
for the coup, and so Chavez remained in his seat, Following Aristide’s
ouster, Chavez has promised that, should the US government try
anything similar in Venezuela again, they will meet with two responses:
an interruption in Venezuelan oil and another “hundred years’
war” from all Latin Americans who respect self-determination
and sovereignty.

When the Bush administration sent a certain
Roger Noriega as its envoy to “work out” the Haitian
crisis in February 2004, not everyone knew who he was, for Noriega’s
career has flourished in the back of Senate committees. For the
better part of a decade, Noriega worked for Jesse Helms and his
allies. Although it is no secret that Noriega has had Aristide
in his sights for years, none of this history made it into the
mainstream media until recently. Then things became clearer. On
CNN on March 1, after Aristide’s departure from Haiti, Congresswoman
Maxine Waters “accused Undersecretary of State for Latin
America Roger Noriega-whom she called ‘a Haiti hater’-of being
behind the troubles there.” The CNN report continued: “Noriega
was a senior aide to former Senator Jesse Helms, who as chairman
of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee was a backer of longtime
dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier and an opponent of Aristide.”

When I share these biographical details
and the names of other people who are driving these policies-I
refer to Otto Reich, Jesse Helms, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Elliot Abrams,
John Poindexter, Bush père and fits- and then mention Iran-Contra,
Honduras, Venezuela, the Declaration of Quebec City, liberation
theology, and the International Republican Institute, the Haiti
story starts to hang together. Haiti policy is determined by a
small number of people who were prominent in either Reagan’s or
George H.W. Bush’s cabinets. Most are back in government today
after an eight-year vacation in conservative think tanks, lobbying
firms, and the like. Elliot Abrams, convicted of felony during
the Iran-Contra hearings, serves on the National Security Council;
Reagan’s national-security advisor John Poindexter is now heading
the Pentagon’s counterterrorism office; John Negroponte, former
Ambassador to Honduras, is now Ambassador to the United Nations.
Jeane Kirkpatrick is on the board of the International Republican
Institute, a prime source of funds for the political opposition
to Aristide and, credible sources suggest, for the demobilized
army personnel who provided the muscle for the Haitian opposition
in early 2004. The far right of the US Republican party has been
the key determinant of Haiti policy.

What about US Secretary of State Colin
Powell? The Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs, writing
of events in Haiti, offers the following summary: “Powell’s
vision for Latin America is now indistinguishable from that of
his junior hemispheric policymaking ideologues, Noriega and Reich.
The battle for the Secretary of State’s soul has ended in a rout
for those who had highly regarded the man they thought he was,
in contrast to the man he turned out to be.”

On the Haitian side, naming the players
is again a relatively easy exercise because they fall into a small
set of categories. To sum up the opposition, you have Haiti’s
business elite, including those who own the Haitian media, and
the former military and paramilitary- the very persons who were
involved in the 1991-94 coup. Many were in jail for murder, drug
trafficking, and crimes against humanity, and now every single
one of them is free.

Among those released by the rebels is
former General Prosper Avril, a leader of the notorious Presidential
Guard under both François and Jean-Claude Duvalier. Avril
seized power by a coup d’etat in September 1988; he was deposed
by another coup in March 1990. A US District Court found that
Avril’s regime had engaged in “a systematic pattern of egregious
human rights abuses.” It found him personally responsible
for enough “torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment”
to award six of his victims US$41 million in compensation. His
victims included opposition politicians, union leaders, scholars,
and even a doctor trying to practice community rural medicine.
Avril’s repression was not subtle: three torture victims were
paraded on national television with faces grotesquely swollen,
limbs bruised, and clothing covered with blood. He also suspended
thirty-seven articles of the Constitution and declared a state
of siege.

The US started protecting Avril shortly
after the 1994 restitution of Haiti’s elected leaders. In November,
Secretary of State Warren Christopher relayed to the US Ambassador
intelligence reports that the “Red Star Organization,”
under Mr. Avril’s leadership, was “planning [al harassment
and assassination campaign directed at the Lavalas Party and Aristide
supporters. The campaign is scheduled to commence in early December
1995″-right before the election that would allow Aristide
to become the first president in Haitian history to peacefully
hand over power to another elected civilian. This information
was not passed on to the Haitian authorities, and that same month
an assassination attempt was made against prominent Lavalas legislators.
In December the Haitian police team investigating the case sought
to arrest Mr. Avril at his home. A US Embassy official admitted
that he had visited Avril the day before the arrest; immediately
after the Haitian police arrived at Avril’s house, US soldiers
arrived. They tried to dissuade the Haitian police from making
the arrest, and it was only after Haiti’s president intervened
personally on the police radio that the police were able to enter
Avril’s house. By the time they entered the premises he had fled
to the neighboring residence of the Colombian ambassador. Police
searching Avril’s house found military uniforms, illegal police
radios, and a cache of weapons.

Avril escaped to Israel but later returned
to Haiti, where his international support and feared military
capacity deterred further arrest attempts. He founded a political
party, which has never fielded candidates for elections but was
nevertheless invited by the International Republican Institute
to participate in developing an opposition to Aristide. In May
2001, after US troops had withdrawn from Haiti and while Avril
was at a book signing away from his home and his guns, the Haitian
police finally seized the opportunity to execute Avril’s arrest
warrant. The successful arrest was greeted with applause by the
vast majority of Haitians and by human rights and justice groups
in Haiti, the United States, and Europe. Amnesty International
asserted that the arrest “could mark a step forward by the
Haitian justice system in its struggle against impunity,”
and that “the gravity of the human rights violations committed
during General Avril’s period in power, from his 1988 coup d’etat
to his departure in March 1990, cannot be ignored.” France’s
Committee to Prosecute Duvalier concluded that “the General
must be tried.”

On December 9, 2003, the investigating
magistrate in the case of the Piatre Massacre, a March 1990 attack
in which several peasants lost their lives, formally charged Avril
in the case. He was in prison awaiting the termination of pre-trial
proceedings when freed on March 2, 2004-the day after Aristide
was deposed.

The list goes on. Rebel leader Guy Philippe
is also a former soldier who received, during the last coup, training
at a US military facility in Ecuador. When the army was demobilized,
Philippe was incorporated into the new police force, serving as
police chief in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Delmas and in the
second-largest city, Cap-HaItien. During his tenure, the United
Nations International Civilian Mission learned that dozens of
suspected gang members were summarily executed, mainly by police
under the command of Philippe’s deputy. The US Embassy has implicated
Philippe in drug smuggling during his police career. These crimes,
committed in large part by former military incorporated into the
police force, are often pinned on Aristide even though he sought
to prevent coup-happy human rights abusers from ending up in these
posts in the first place.

Philippe fled Haiti in October 2000 when
Haitian authorities discovered him plotting a coup, together with
a clique of fellow police chiefs. Since that time, the Haitian
government has accused Philippe of masterminding terrorist attacks
on the Haitian Police Academy and the National Palace in July
and December 2001, as well as lethal hit-and-run raids against
police stations in Haiti’s Central Plateau over the past two years.

In February 2004, Philippe’s men bragged
to the US press that they had executed Aristide supporters in
Cap-HaItien and Port-au-Prince, and many have indeed been reported
missing. Philippe’s declaration-”I am the chief, the military
chief. The country is in my hands”-triggered the following
response from Oscar Arias: “Nothing could more clearly prove
why Haiti does not need an army than the boasting of rebel leader
Guy Philippe last week in Port-au-Prince, The Haitian army was
abolished nine years ago during a period of democratic transition,
precisely to prevent the country from falling back into the hands
of military men.” On March 2, 2004, Philippe told the Associated
Press that he would use his new powers to arrest constitutional
Haiti’s prime minister, Yvon Neptune, and he proceeded to lead
a mob in an attack on Neptune’s residence. Philippe has been quoted
as saying that the man he most admires is Augusto Pinochet.

Louis-Jodel Chamblain was a sergeant in
the Haitian army until 1989 or 1990. He reappeared on the scene
in 1993 as one of the founders of the paramilitary group FRAPH.
Formed during the 1991-94 military regime, FRAPH was responsible
for numerous human rights violations before the 1994 restoration
of democratic governance. Chamblain organized attacks against
democracy supporters, issued FRAPH identity cards, and obtained
official recognition for FRAPH from the dictatorship. Among the
victims of FRAPH under Chamblain’s leadership was Haitian Minister
of Justice Guy Malary, ambushed and machine-gunned to death with
his bodyguard and a driver on October 14, 1993. According to an
October 28, 1993 CIA intelligence memorandum, “FRAPH members
Jodel Chamblain, Emmanuel Constant, and Gabriel Douzable met with
an unidentified military officer on the morning of 14 October
to discuss plans to kill Malary.” (Emmanuel “Toto”
Constant, the leader of FRAPH, is now living as a free man in
Queens, New York.)

In September 1995, Chamblain was among
seven senior military and FRAPH leaders convicted in absentia
and sentenced to forced labor for life for their involvement in
the September 1993 extrajudicial execution of Antoine Izmery,
a well-known pro-democracy activist. In November 2000, Chamblain
was convicted in absentia in the Raboteau massacre trial. In late
1994 or early 1995, Chamblain went into exile to the Dominican
Republic in order to avoid prosecution. He was regularly spotted
in public by Haitian expatriates and international journalists.

All of these biographies have been a matter
of public record for years, but one could mark the day-1 marked
it as February 28, as the coup was unfolding-that the New York

Times and other newspapers began offering
a bit more background on the men who now control Latin America’s
oldest and most volatile nation. These sketches give an idea,
too, of why the Haitian people were enthusiastic about demobilizing
the army. Writing in the Washington Post, Oscar Arias underlined
the degree of popular support for demilitarization: “Since
Aristide said that he could not abolish the army without the support
of the Haitian people, the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human
Progress commissioned an independent polling firm to gauge popular
support for the idea. The results were stunning: 62 percent of
Haitians were strongly in favor of abolition and only 12 percent
were against.”

As for the traditional political elite,
surely they’re a mixed bag? Some have wanted to live in the National
Palace, Haiti’s executive mansion, since the time it was occupied
by Papa Doc. Some are more marginal but just as destructive. When
recently you saw one man destroying artwork on display in Port-au-Prince,
you could read that he was a “pastor from the Party of God.”
In fact this man, a perennial presidential candidate, is delighted
to burn, in full view of international cameras, precious objects
linked with voodoo and other aspects of Haitian culture.

Who are these people? What unites them
beyond their hatred of Aristide? They’ve all been around a long
time but were not permitted to speak out or form political parties
during the Duvalier or military dictatorships. One penetrating
analysis, by an academic named Robert Maguire, noted that “we
should remember that from the first day of Aristide’s term, the
opposition set up a provisional government. My own observation
then was that things in Haiti had changed. This never would have
been permitted before. It was a sign that Haiti seemed to be becoming
a more tolerant place.” Again, this is another social fact
missed by the mainstream human rights groups.

The leaders of the Haitian “civil
society” groups include U.S.-born André Apaid, the
founder of a television station and owner of Alpha Corp., a garment
manufacturer that was prominently featured in news reports about
Disney’s sweatshop suppliers. Aristide’s relentless push to raise
the minimum wage above 72 gourdes a day-about $1.60-cut into the
massive profits of the offshore assembly industry, since its principal
resource is the desperate joblessness of the Haitian population.
The US Congress has passed a measure to build new garment factories
in Haiti and encourage American companies to contract out more
sweatshop labor-an answered prayer for Apaid.

As for the owners of the media in Haiti,
they behave as owners often do when surrounded by the poor, the
famished, and by chimères, described in the foreign press
as armed thugs working for the Aristide government. But who are
the chimères? Again, Madison Smartt Bell provides a better
answer to this question than what we read in journalistic accounts
or human rights reports:

Before that term was coined, Haitian delinquent
youths were called maleleve (“ill brought up”) or, still
more tellingly, sansmaman (“the motherless ones”). They
were people who’d somehow reached adulthood without the nurture
of the traditional lakou-communities that the combined forces
of poverty and globalization had been shattering here for the
last few decades. That was what made them so dangerous. The Chime
were indeed chimeras; ill fortune left them as unrealized shadows.
With better luck they might have been human beings, but they weren’t.
These were the people Aristide had originally been out to salvage;
“Tout moun se moun” was his earliest motto (“Every
man is a man”).

Coup d’Etat as a Source of Amusement

This human salvage operation exploded
in February 2004 as “rebels” continued to “take
cities.” I work in these towns and know the rebels’ modus
operandi. They came in, shot the there acknowledge that no Haitian
authorities were involved in the choice of Aristide’s destination.

Many more questions remain unanswered.
We know that US funds overtly financed the opposition. But did
they also fund, even indirectly, the rebellion that so prominently
featured high-powered US weapons only a year after 20,000 such
weapons were promised to the Dominican Republic army? Senator
Christopher Dodd is urging an investigation of US training sessions
of 600 “rebels” in the Dominican Republic and also wants
to investigate “how the International Republican Institute
spent $1.2 million of tax payer money” in Haiti. Answering
these and related questions will require an intrepid investigative
reporter willing to take on hard questions about US policies in
Latin America.

Oscar Arias concludes that, “were
the international community now to stand by as the rebels reinstated
the army, it would surely destroy the seeds of peace and self-rule
that have been planted with great sacrifice by the Haitian people.”
But about the return of the military, there can be little doubt.
The man sworn as Haiti’s new prime minister announced in his first
public statement that Aristide’s order to replace the military
with a civilian police force violated Haiti’s constitution; he
promised to name a commission to examine the issues surrounding
its restoration. The de facto prime minister also named a former
general to his new government.

More guns and more military may well be
the time-honored prescription for policing poverty, but violence
and chaos will not go away if the Haitian people’s hunger, illness,
poverty, and disenfranchisement are not addressed.

Trends among the world’s poorest countries

Since 1990, there has been encouraging news emerging from developing countries. According to the UN’s 2005 Human Development Report, life expectancy in developing countries has increased by two years. There are three million fewer child deaths annually and 30 million fewer children out of school. More than 130 million have escaped extreme poverty. In 2003, however, 18 countries with a combined population of 460 million registered lower on the human development index (HDI) than in 1990, an unprecedented reversal.

Child mortality rates are directly related to a country’s human development opportunity. Death rates among the world’s children are falling, but the trend is slowing and the gap between rich and poor countries is widening. Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for a rising share of child deaths: in 2005, the region represented 20% of births worldwide and 44% of child deaths.

To illustrate the income inequality between rich and poor countries, consider these facts: the world’s richest individuals have a combined income greater than that of the poorest 416 million; 982 million people out of the developing world’s 4.8 billion people live on $1 per day, and another 2.5 billion (40% of the world’s population) live on less than $2 per day. In addition, the poorest 40% of the world population accounted for 5% of global income in 2005, the richest 20% accounted for 75% of world income, and the richest 10% for 54%.

About 60% of the poorest countries experienced civil conflict of varying intensity and duration in the period 1990–2001 that, in most cases, erupted after a period of economic stagnation and regression. In Rwanda, for example, average private consumption per capita fell by more than 12% between 1980 and 1993, the year before the genocide occurred.

1. The UN classifies countries as “least developed” based on three criteria: (1) annual gross domestic product (GDP) below $900 per capita; (2) quality of life, based on life expectancy at birth, per capita calorie intake, primary and secondary school enrollment rates, and adult literacy; and (3) economic vulnerability, based on instability of agricultural productions and exports, inadequate diversification, and economic smallness. Half or more of the population in the 50 least developed countries listed above are estimated to live at or below the absolute poverty line of U.S. $1 per day.

As of 2009, among 59 Miss World titleholders, there are 26 winners come from United Kingdom, British overseas territories or former colonies (about 44.06%): India – 5 times (1966, 1994, 1997, 1999, 2000); United Kingdom – 4 times (1961, 1964, 1965, 1983); Jamaica – 3 times (1963, 1976, 1993); United States – 2 times (1973, 1990); South Africa – 2 times (1958, 1974); Australia – 2 times (1968, 1972); Egypt (1954); Grenada (1970); Bermuda (1979); Trinidad & Tobago (1986); Israel (1998); Nigeria (2001); Ireland (2003) and Gibraltar (2009).

Kaiane Aldorino becomes the first Gibraltarian woman won Miss World crown since its first debut in 1959. This victory thus making Gibraltar becomes the smallest (only 6.8 km2) and least populous (28 thousand people) country ever won a tittle in any Grand Slam pageant. Congratulations to all the people of Gibraltar!

Watch out though, it often hurts when falling in love, as seen in this picture…

Source: XKCD.com