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NEWS & LETTERS, November 2004Haiti descends into police-military rule
All signs point to a renewal of police-military
dictatorship. Masked police have been carrying out assassinations and arbitrary
arrests of supporters of the deposed leftist government of Jean-Bertrand
Aristide. Father Gérard Jean-Juste, a longtime campaigner for the poor and the
oppressed, has been arrested on murky charges. Jean-Juste is a well-known figure
in both Haiti and Miami, where he headed the Haitian Refugee Center. His arrest
was surely meant to send a signal that anyone, no matter how prominent, was
vulnerable. On Oct. 13, masked police burst into Jean-Juste’s
church in Port-au-Prince, right in front of 600 neighborhood children gathered
for their twice-weekly meal. "When we saw the police start to hit the
priest with their guns, we started to yell for help," 14-year-old Erseline
Louis told THE NEW YORK TIMES. For speaking out, Louis was shot in the leg. The latest wave of violence began on Sept. 30, when
Aristide supporters marched in Port-au-Prince to demand his return. Although
their march was banned by the U.S. and French-installed interim government,
several thousand Aristide supporters showed up anyway. Gunfire erupted between
police and marchers, with three police killed. On the same day, a pro-Aristide
march in Cap-Haitien also resulted in a confrontation. Since then, rather than negotiate with the opposition,
police and UN occupation troops have continued to arrest hundreds of Aristide
supporters. Armed former military men swagger through the streets and have taken
control of many neighborhoods and towns, with the tacit support of the
government and the international peacekeepers. Human rights groups have noted that interim Prime
Minister Gerard Latortue has called the former military thugs who helped
overthrow Aristide "freedom fighters." Among them is Louis-Jodel
Chamblain, second in command of those forces, a major figure in the murderous
repression during the military regime of 1991-94. After Aristide was restored to
power in 1994, Chamblain was convicted in absentia of the 1993 murder of Justice
Minister Antoine Izmery. This August, Chamblain was acquitted after a new trial
that lasted less than 24 hours. In September, Tropical Storm Jeanne devastated Gonaives.
Decades-long cycles of poverty, corruption, ecological damage and exploitation
made the local people vulnerable to a storm that would hardly have damaged a
more developed country. A few days before Jeanne, the much more serious
Hurricane Ivan had swept through Florida, Cuba and several other Caribbean
islands. Ivan’s death toll was 119. Jeanne, the much lesser storm, killed
1,900 Haitians, left 900 more missing and presumed dead, and uprooted 250,000.
Such are the results of centuries of neglect, capitalist exploitation and
oppressive local rulers. It would be easy to lay the blame for these events at
the feet of Haitian reactionaries or U.S. and French imperialism, and leave it
at that, as most progressives have done. Tragically, however, Aristide and those
around him share some responsibility for Haiti’s present situation. After his
return to power in 1994, it was none other than Aristide who squandered
Haiti’s best chance in 200 years to create a new, human society. He did not renew the grassroots movement, aptly named
Lavalas (flood), which had brought him to power. Instead he fell into
demagoguery and elitism. He used armed thugs to intimidate even Lavalas members
who dared to make criticisms. Eventually, this opened the way for his overthrow
by reactionaries, which occurred last February. --Kevin Anderson |
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