Poor Haitians cannot understand all this.

--New York Times¹

Banm yon ti limye, mèt,
Banm yon ti limye pou m we sa k ap pase . . .
(Give me a little light, boss,
Give me a little light so I can see what's happening)

--Manno Charlemagne

MANY PEOPLE ARE ASKING WHAT APPEARS TO BE A SIMPLE QUESTION: Why is the United States in Haiti? The answers may be clearer if we divide the question in two: Why did the U.S. intervene in Haiti in September 1994? And what is the goal of the U.S. occupation?

On the question of intervention, we should first remember that the U.S. has never really stopped intervening in Haiti. In this century, we occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, and set up a military designed to repress its own citizens -- a military which we support to this day. U.S. dollars, of course, have gone to both Duvalier regimes and to the military dictatorships that followed them. The U.S. funded opposition to Jean-Bertrand Aristide's candidacy in 1990, and funded opposition to his policies after he was elected. The goals of the current involvement in Haiti are part of this pattern.

Still, the stage of intervention that began on September 19, 1994 is obviously on a larger and more overt scale. Why? The answer looks like a political one: that Clinton simply backed himself into a corner. His problem began with the refugee issue. During his campaign, Clinton said he would give Haitian refugees the chance to apply for political asylum, which is their legal right. As President, he continued Bush's policy of returning fleeing Haitians directly to the authorities in Haiti. Then, with both political pressure and media coverage of the atrocities in Haiti increasing, Clinton stopped returning the Haitians. But he continued to violate international law by refusing to screen for political refugees. Instead, the plan was to detain them indefinitely at the Guantanamo Naval Base. Meanwhile, Clinton kept speaking about restoring Aristide. It seems he finally decided that his credibility was at stake.

So while Clinton's own rhetoric brought him dilemmas different from Bush's, the goals of the two administrations are not so different. The U.S. not only worked against Aristide before he was elected and while he was in office, but also during "negotiations" to restore him. He was pressured overtly and covertly to open his government to supporters of the military coup that overthrew him in September 1991. While the CIA funded the neo-Duvalierist paramilitary organization called FRAPH, which was executing and mutilating Aristide supporters in Haiti, Washington told Aristide that since FRAPH was the dominant power in Haiti, the way for him to survive politically was to move to the right.² That happened while Lawrence Pezzullo was Washington's special adviser on Haiti, and while Haitian refugees were still being called economic refugees. When Clinton replaced Pezzullo with William Gray in May, 1994, the administration took a new line: suddenly the Haitians were, in fact, fleeing political repression. The point of this change was not a just refugee policy, but a justification for possible U.S. military action -- an action which would show how closely the U.S. was working with FRAPH.

If the U.S. decided to restore Aristide to office for domestic political reasons, in spite of its opposition to him, then it makes sense that it would also use the opportunity to consolidate its opposition to him -- or, more precisely, opposition to the movement that brought him to power. In its public statements, Washington hardly bothers to disguise the fact that it is working toward the next elections in Haiti. Parliamentary elections may take place in January 1995; new presidential elections are scheduled for December 1995. Haitian law forbids a president from running for consecutive terms, so Aristide's presidency ends in February 1996, when a new president should be inaugurated. Not coincidentally, U.S. troops are scheduled to remain in Haiti (under a UN flag) until February 1996. Meanwhile, U.S. military personnel in Haiti are being told at briefings that the terrorist group FRAPH is a legitimate political party; and U.S. military personnel repeated this through bullhorns to pro-democracy, anti-occupation demonstrators as they broke up their march in the town of Grand Goave in late October, reports journalist Amy Goodman.

The goal of the occupation, then, is apparently to continue the repression of democracy without leaving mutilated bodies on public display. In low-intensity conflict, buying off the opposition is also part of the strategy. That is why the goal of the U.S. Agency for International Development's (USAID) Human Rights Fund in Haiti is not so much to improve human rights there as to use the issue of human rights to improve U.S. government credibility among pro-democracy organizations -- that is, those that have survived the last three years of U.S.-sponsored repression -- while continuing to work with Duvalierist sectors as well. This is spelled out clearly in USAID documents.³ Current U.S. policy in Haiti, as summarized by Allan Nairn, is to preserve the repressive, terrorist structure and to impose radical economic readjustments which the World Bank admits will hurt the poor. Nothing in the World Bank/IMF economic package, to which Aristide agreed before his return, is aimed at land reform or grassroots development, notes anthropologist Josh Dewind. In fact, little of the plan has anything to do with Haitians outside Port-au-Prince, i.e. the majority of the population. Assembly factories will be able to re-open quickly, and Haitians will again be able to provide cheap labor for U.S. companies.

Meanwhile, the killings continue, mostly in the rural areas. Again, this is not a failure of the U.S. occupation, but an element of it. Aristide was returned only after endless speeches to his supporters about "reconciliation" -- that is, no violence and no vengeance against those who have killed with impunity for three years. U.S.-sponsored radio broadcasts and billboards in Haiti now advertise "reconciliation." But this reconciliation means not only no violent revenge, but continued impunity. The idea of accountability for the atrocities against Aristide supporters is essentially absent from the U.S. agenda. Disarmament -- which Aristide said was essential for justice -- is going "slowly." Why? Because, as Allan Nairn explains, U.S. policy is to preserve the armed sectors (the pro-democracy sectors are unarmed); local U.S. military commanders openly acknowledge this, telling the Haitian paramilitary members that they can keep their guns as long as they don't parade them around.

There was much well-intentioned disagreement over the question of U.S. military intervention in Haiti. It should be clear now what U.S. intentions are -- not that they ever changed. Yet, there is still much confusion. It is worth taking a detailed look at recent mainstream media coverage of Haiti to see how even these confusions are quickly brushed aside by the more familiar blind faith in U.S. benevolence, and by well-worn prejudices about Haiti and Haitians.

Visible Contradictions

" ‘I THINK WE'RE WORKING WITH THE WRONG SIDE HERE,' said 19-year-old Thomas Hasdorff, a private with the 10th Mountain Division."⁴ These words of one of the U.S. citizens sent to occupy Haiti encapsulate the contradictions between the rhetoric and reality of U.S. policy in Haiti. They also represent a potential opening for change that is one result of the visibility of those contradictions.

In the first days of Operation Uphold Democracy, collaboration between the U.S. and Haitian militaries was suddenly out in the open. It had been possible for the media to ignore things like the training of Haitian officers in the U.S. since the 1991 coup.⁵ But on September 19, "Lieut. Gen. Henry H. Shelton, commander of the military force ... went straight from the [Port-au-Prince] airport to military headquarters downtown, where he conferred with Lieut. Gen. Raoul Cedras." The generals proceeded to have a "cordial" meeting in which Shelton "said he intended to ‘clear the rules with General Cedras' on such crucial questions as where American troops should be deployed and how Haitian paramilitary forces should be disarmed." People such as Private Hasdorff, who simply kept their eyes open, could see that something was wrong. Lt. Robert Booze of the 10th Mountain Division told reporters, "A few days ago, we were ready for war against the ... [Haitian] police and the military . . . Right now we're in a sort of limbo as to whether we're allied with the police or not ..." The gap between official policy and individuals' sense of right and wrong was apparent in actions as well as words. While the Pentagon continued to insist that the "rules of engagement" had not been settled, a U.S. patrol linked arms and stood between Haitian military and pro-Aristide demonstrators, and a lone U.S. soldier waved off a truck of Haitian police near another pro-Aristide group.⁶

"The only institution in Haiti that works is the military," an unnamed Pentagon officer said in explaining U.S. cooperation with the killers we had claimed to oppose.⁷ This refrain had been used before to justify plans to retrain or "professionalize" the Haitian military, instead of dissolving it, as President Aristide had suggested. Of course, the training and professionalizing had never really stopped -- at the School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, and elsewhere. But something else was left out of the anonymous justification. There had been other working institutions in Haiti -- the very ones upon which democracy had been based -- but they have been largely wiped out by the U.S.-backed Haitian military over the last three years. The "abundance of peasant associations, grass-roots development projects, trade unions, student organizations, church groups and independent radio stations" which blossomed since the fall of Duvalier in 1986, writes Americas Watch, "were as much the target of the army's repression as was the elected Aristide government."⁸

In contrast to the straightforward expressions of puzzlement by soldiers whose orders required them to stand by while Haitians were beaten (and, in at least one reported case, killed), journalists wrote astonishing sentences. "After two days of bloodshed in which armed paramilitary groups attacked demonstrators here, the United States finds its mission to install democracy in Haiti jeopardized by its reluctance to begin disarming the paramilitary gunmen known as attachés," writes the Times's Larry Rohter.⁹ This sentence is so "objectively" removed that it takes an extra effort just to realize that the "armed paramilitary groups" doing the attacking in the first clause are the same "paramilitary gunmen" which the U.S. refuses to disarm. This is the first sign that Rohter is organizing information in a way that obscures something at its center, something which simply does not make sense to him. In fact, it is so far from making sense to him, that he can only acknowledge a contradiction at a sort of vague, strategic level. It is the "mission to install democracy," of course, which is the trapdoor at the center. Note how responsibility for the mission's possible failure is diffused by the passive voice (the U.S. "finds it ... jeopardized"). "Its" mission is jeopardized by "its" reluctance; what this really means is that the U.S.'s own actions contradict its (stated) mission. But to put it that way is to question the sincerity of the "mission to install democracy." The sentence is so cumbersome precisely because even asking that question is not a possibility, though more than enough groundwork for it has been laid.

The point of this close reading is that in recent coverage of Haiti, the lines of what Chomsky (without whom I would not know how to read the newspaper) calls permissible debate have become practically visible. After all, Cedras's role as a CIA informant was reported by the Times itself ¹⁰ -- one might think that information would resurface in the current context, even if it did not lead to more fundamental questions about U.S. policy. It is time to stop being surprised that information which doesn't fit the theory, even when acknowledged, is then dropped. Allan Nairn's recent articles in The Nation make this more than clear. Among other points, Nairn reports the following. A Maj. Louis Kernisan thinks Aristide made a mistake in abolishing the infamous section chiefs, who preside over repression in the Haitian countryside. They were "an uncomfortable but working legal arrangement," he says; this is the man behind the U.S. plan to retrain Haiti's new police force. Kernisan also acknowledges that the U.S. is "going to end up dealing with the same folks as before, the five families that run the country, the military and the bourgeoisie ... It's not going to be the slum guy from Cité Soleil." Another U.S. official revealed that U.S. intelligence "encouraged" Emmanuel Constant to set up what became FRAPH, the brutal paramilitary front; Constant said that Gen. Patrick Collins, his "handler," pushed him "to organize a front ‘that could balance the Aristide movement' and do ‘intelligence' work against it." Constant also revealed that Collins and the CIA station chief in Haiti were inside the military headquarters during the 1991 coup -- but that they were always there. Finally, the current CIA station chief met with Constant the day before his October 4 press conference, for which U.S. troops provided security.¹¹ Some of this news was impossible for the mainstream press to ignore, but what was picked up was quickly dropped, and of course none of it changed the working assumptions about Operation Uphold Democracy.

Those Haitian Conspiracy Theories

Once some analysis is labeled "a conspiracy theory" it can be relegated to the domain of flat-earth enthusiasts and other cranks, and the actual system of power, decision-making, and global planning is safely protected from scrutiny.

--Noam Chomsky ¹²

IN THE MONTHS LEADING UP TO THE OCCUPATION, many people had mixed feelings about U.S. military action in Haiti. In June, a group of refugees here in Miami signed a statement about intervention: "We believe that the American State Department, especially under Clinton, knows all the people who are committing crimes in Haiti, and they can go get them. In addition, we know that the American government has participated in the violations against democracy in Haiti. We support an intervention, but with much precaution, because the American government knows which people to get." For all the mixed feelings, though, the author of this statement (who had been held in the HIV camp at Guantanamo) registered a clear reaction when former President Carter returned from his negotiations in Port-au-Prince and American troops went in. This is an occupation, the author told me, apparently surprised. What seemed to make him especially distrustful was that Carter was involved.

For North Americans, Jimmy Carter may be Mr. Human Rights. But many Haitians remember Carter for his role in Haiti during the 1990 elections. "Carter was behind a letter he and former U.N. representative Andrew Young presented to Jean-Bertrand Aristide on Dec. 15, 1990, on the eve of the presidential elections," according to the Haitian Information Bureau. "The letter said that Aristide accepted Marc L. Bazin -- the candidate that the U.S. favored and funded -- as president, despite the fact that nobody had even voted. Young reportedly said that they wanted the letter as a guarantee because the U.S. feared Aristide would not cede if Bazin won. (By this time, it was clear that Aristide would win.) Aristide refused to sign and the event has always been interpreted as yet one more pressure from the U.S. to influence local politics and undermine Aristide."¹³ This other view of Carter was perhaps my first exposure to what is often dismissed as Haitian conspiracy theory. I was pretty skeptical myself -- I heard it from someone I didn't really know, in the hallway of Miami's Haitian Refugee Center, and Carter was off somewhere building houses for poor people. Later I found out that the man in the hall had been a member of the Provisional Electoral Council (for the 1987 presidential elections, which were halted by a military massacre of voters). That doesn't guarantee his authority, but what authority did I have for my other "beliefs" about the ex-president? In October, as Nairn's reporting was causing a brief stir in the mainstream press, I met a Haitian man who had been in the coastal town of Port-de-Paix since the coup. He told me that Haitians already knew of the U.S.-FRAPH connection, because when FRAPH emerged in late 1993, its leaders were driving around in new, U.S.-made jeeps. This, too, would be mere conspiracy thinking if it weren't for the recent revelations.

Paul Farmer suggests that if we actually listen to these Haitian "conspiracy theories," and study history, we might learn something. A motivating force in both of Farmer's books is to give voice to Haitians' own views of their lives. In AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame (California, 1992), he looks at some of these AIDS-related theories as "a sort of Haitian reply to North American discrimination." He then documents how they "contain considerable amounts of truth when examined not as isolated anecdotes, but as lessons drawn from the last five hundred years of Caribbean history." (p.247) The Miami Herald's Don Bohning can cavalierly state, "Haiti is the victim of its own internal turmoil and history."¹⁴ In The Uses Of Haiti (Common Courage Press, 1994), Farmer tries to dispel this myth of Haiti's "isolation," a myth which makes possible the widespread claim that only Haiti is to blame for Haiti's problems:

Rarely, in fact, have two countries been as closely linked as the United States and Haiti. Haitians are, by and large, fully aware of this historical fact. But citizens of the United States are, by and large, oblivious to these links -- ignorant, even, of the two-decade U.S. military occupation of Haiti earlier in this century.

This disparity of awareness has led Haitians to adopt a moral and analytic explanatory framework that differs substantially from that of Americans. U.S. journalists and even certain scholarly investigators, manifestly uninformed about the history of U.S.-Haitian relations, have mistaken this awareness as a Haitian tendency to paranoia. (pp.46-67)

In the months before the new occupation, a couple of perfect illustrations of Farmer's argument appeared. On August 10, 1994, The New York Times ran another front page story by Larry Rohter, "Invasion That Never Comes Has Many Haitians Skeptical." Many Haitians do "welcome the prospect of military intervention," we are told; fair enough, considering how desperate they are to survive the current repression. But according to Rohter, the reason they support intervention is because they see it "as deliverance from privation and uncertainty"; "it is the only certain way to end the wild swings of emotion they have endured" since the coup, he writes. On top of this misguided "analysis" -- since, if Rohter did observe swings of emotion, they may have had something to do with three years of false U.S. promises to pressure the Haitian military -- he more predictably reinforces the lie that all Haitians are economic refugees. He dwells on the "privation," and opens with a description of an economy "in a shambles with half the work force said to be unemployed, [a] lack of gasoline and electricity," -- and, returning to the bizarre, that (as a result of the economy) there is "nothing to do." Now there is little doubt that the sanctions have caused suffering. But Rohter's article does not make a single reference to the political killings then occurring daily in Haiti. Rohter also makes no mention of anti-intervention statements issued by popular organizations in Haiti (though I don't mean to say these represented a majority). Instead, he gives us this patronizing analysis: "Acceptance of intervention is probably most widespread among the poor, who are accustomed to having their fates decided by others."

In his lead sentence, Rohter reminds readers that "economic sanctions are at last fully in place." His own paper reported 19 days later that UN observers still had not arrived "to monitor the enforcement of sanctions along the porous border with the Dominican Republic"; and two days after that, that "an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 gallons of gasoline [are smuggled] across the border daily.^"15 By ignoring observations of how sanctions were applied in such a way that the military control of the black market economy solidified, Rohter is able to see the ridiculous Haitian paranoia for what it is: "Viewing American policy, some people here detect evidence of a sinister conspiracy. Last month, for instance, five left-wing groups that support Father Aristide issued statements accusing the United States of seeking the failure of economic sanctions in order to weaken Haiti and prepare the way for an American takeover. ‘Don't be fooled,' warned the Haitian Clerical Conference, one of the groups. ‘This intervention will be against the people of Haiti, since it arises from the same logic as the coup d'etat.'"

In fact, the July 1994 document from which Rohter is presumably quoting states clearly: "We should not believe that absolutely everything which is happening was anticipated to the last detail and that this is a matter of rigorously applying a monstrous preestablished plan." And the Conference Haitienne des Religeux, labeled simply "five left-wing groups" by Rohter, is described differently by more sympathetic (and precise) writers as "an association which groups together the 1,400 priests, nuns and brothers in Catholic orders working in Haiti."¹⁶

Again, Rohter simply avoids evidence showing that sanctions were never really intended to crush the military and elites. It should be common knowledge by now that back in February 1992, for example, the Bush Administration exempted U.S. assembly factories in Haiti from the Organization of American States-sponsored embargo, responding to "complaints from American companies that relied on Haiti as a source of cheap labor." Attempts to justify this move with professed concern for Haitian workers ring hollow, since this "unilateral move was opposed by President Aristide, by [UN Special Envoy] Dante Caputo and by Haiti's unions," according to the National Labor Committee Education Fund in Support of Worker and Human Rights in Central America. The National Labor Committee also reported in February 1994, that "[n]ew Commerce Department figures show 1993 U.S. imports from Haiti up almost 50 percent over 1992"; and, in April, that the Clinton Administration itself "is purchasing baseballs and softballs assembled in Haiti by U.S. companies," one of which pays its workers as little as five cents an hour. These are only highlights; one might think they would have a place in an analysis of the U.S. goals with regard to economic sanctions. The Miami Herald managed to discover such long-available evidence once the sanctions had been lifted -- but their special "Miami Herald inquiry" [sic] led to no questions about U.S. intentions in Haiti. After all, President Clinton himself said last year, "I want to lift the embargo very badly. I want to do more than lift the embargo; I want to help rebuild the economy of Haiti. That would be good for America. They could be good partners for us." Earlier, President Bush's Treasury Secretary reportedly told the director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control, which is responsible for enforcing economic sanctions, "to go slow" on intervening against Texaco, which was "pump[ing] gasoline from 26 tanker ships and pay[ing] the Haitian military junta millions of dollars after the U.S. embargo took effect."¹⁷ Business is business: after the U.S. convinced Cedras to leave Haiti, special adviser William Gray said at a White House briefing that the U.S.'s renting three Cedras houses is "not objectionable. They're at fair market rent." (10/14/94)

Details about the U.S. economic policy toward Haiti are similarly ignored in a sarcastic story by Tim Johnson in the Miami Herald, "Conspiracy theories abound in Haiti." (8/18/94) Johnson quotes a Haitian lawyer "with close ties to military rulers" who believes the U.S. has "‘other interests besides democracy in Haiti' ... Perhaps it is a desire to turn Haiti ‘into a big factory,' she said, or greed by investors eager to dominate the country." To Johnson this is "farfetched." But to some Haitian union members who worked in U.S. assembly factories, Aristide's proposal to raise the minimum wage was one of the main reasons for his ouster. And before the coup, USAID worked with Haiti's private sector to oppose Aristide's proposal; it set up a front group for this, since it wouldn't look right for the U.S. to do so. The goal was to duplicate the stable "investment climate" which prevailed under the murderous dictatorship of General Henri Namphy in 1987. And when U.S. companies returned to Haiti after the coup, the first thing they did was to fire union members at their plants, according to the National Labor Committee. Amy Wilentz has written that U.S. goals in Haiti are "a restructured and dependent agriculture that exports to U.S. markets and is open to American exploitation, and ... a displaced rural population that not only can be employed in offshore U.S. industries in the towns, but is more susceptible to Army control." (The Rainy Season, p. 282) But Johnson's more sophisticated reply to the Haitian lawyer's crazy ideas is that "U.S. diplomats flatly deny such assertions, saying those who make them are misreading Clinton's resolve to see democracy -- and exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide -- restored."

Johnson's article also says that for Haitians "no proof is needed" for the theory that "the Pentagon craves a deep-water harbor, Mole St. Nicolas, in the far northwest of Haiti." Even if there were no proof, a look at a map might make an honest person wonder: Mole St. Nicolas is just 60 miles across the Windward Passage from the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But there is proof. In The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934 (Rutgers, 1971), Hans Schmidt describes the continual pressure on Haiti by the U.S. to gain control of Mole St. Nicolas in the second half of the 19th century; pressure was increased on the eve of the occupation itself, when "[President] Wilson approved a plan by which the U.S. would procure the Mole and a strip of land 20 miles long and 10 miles wide extending into the interior, with Haitian residents being given the option of either selling their land to the United States or becoming American citizens if they wished to remain." (p. 56) As recently as 1985, the Reagan State Department was reportedly offering Jean-Claude Duvalier $780 million for the Mole.¹⁸

The Murky, Violent, Patois-Speaking Masses

WHILE THE MEDIA OBSCURES THE TRUTH WITH ITS ARROGANT LANGUAGE, it also goes out of its way to demean the language of the Haitian people. Haitians speak Haitian Creole, often called simply "Creole," though as anthropologist Robert Lawless points out, their language would more accurately be called "Haitian." Farmer uses both "Haitian" and "Creole" in AIDS and Accusation; when I was in Port-au-Prince last year, a Haitian woman asked me in her language if I spoke "Haitian." The mix which produced the Haitian language may be comparatively recent, but English is not exactly "pure." This is important because demeaning a people's language is an element in dehumanizing the speakers. Prejudices about the Haitians' language -- that it is not a "real" language in its own right -- are part of the fabric of scarcely-concealed prejudices that characterize writing on Haiti. In fact, the prejudices are often not concealed at all; rather, they go unnoticed because they are so ingrained in our culture. Lawless provides an extensive catalog of examples, showing the consistency of these biases from 16th century travel writing (on Africa) to contemporary journalism on Haiti, most of which "has been simply an elaboration of the denigrating folk model of evil and darkness, the negative of the clean, white modern western world." The topics in his table of contents include: boat people, AIDS, dark Africa/black Haiti, cannibals and zombies, sex and rhythm, indolent natives, voodoo, and "a people without a language."¹⁹

Recent coverage has provided some striking examples of the way these categories combine to form a basis for political "analysis." In the Miami Herald: "Haiti's economy is a ruin, its psyche a mess and its future a dark riddle"; and this headline: "World's oldest black nation ‘ruthlessly self-destructive'" (we see the isolation theme again, too). The "progressive" press is not immune: the Village Voice called a story "Voodoo Politics" (10/19/93), complete with drawings of skeletons, though the article had nothing to do with skeletons or the Haitian religion. And there are the insidious references to language: "French or whatever," as a Ft. Worth Star-Telegram columnist puts it. The New York Times refers to language to remind readers what aliens Aristide and the Haitians who elected him are: "The slight, left-wing Roman Catholic cleric with the Creole accent and exotic metaphors ... an unpredictable, emotional leader with poor English, vague mannerisms and an odd circle of activists, spiritualists and political leftists"; "the impoverished black masses mobilized by Father Aristide, who speak Creole, an African-tinged patois, and live in miserable shantytowns." The latter example also reinforces that the poverty is as integral a part of who these people are as their language is; and is the majority of the electorate in the United States called "the masses?"²⁰

The Times also gives us this: "Haitian Patois: "Where ‘justice' can mean ‘revenge.'" (10/16/94) This is a crucial example because it brings together the substandard language bias with the well-orchestrated disinformation campaign about Aristide's human rights record. Equating the killers with their victims has roots in the stereotypical portrayal of Haiti as a society where violence is indigenous. In a more immediate context, it is the direct extension of falsely balancing Aristide's human rights record with the post-coup military's record -- a balancing act based on lies, and making possible the charade of negotiations since the coup, the pressure on Aristide by our government to include more coup supporters in his government, and, not least of all, the opposition to invasion on the basis that Aristide is no different than those killers. "Backers of President Aristide, followers of General Cedras and the former Tontons Macoute retain their homicidal tendencies, to say nothing of their weapons," writes R.W. Apple (my emphasis).²¹ Aside from what I can only see as racism, there is the simple lie here that both sides are armed.

The false equation which began weeks after the coup thus found new form in the warnings early in the occupation about the dangers of "Haitian-on-Haitian" violence -- dangers to the occupiers and their mission, that is. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Shalikashvili's own language gets pretty murky as he raises the specter of the dark enemy: he said he is "‘very much concerned about getting our military men and women caught up in this Haitian-on-Haitian violence, that murky sort of a threat out there that's always there.'"²² The problem in Haiti, in other words, is not that the (U.S.-trained and funded) military has tortured and killed thousands of unarmed supporters of Aristide and democracy. The problem is that Haitians kill each other. That is why "justice" can mean "revenge." (Of course, even court-administered "justice" in the U.S. is often nothing but revenge, but that's not what this code is about.) Forget that there is no functioning justice system in Haiti which ordinary people can count on; forget that Aristide's justice minister, Guy Malary, who was to preside over the separation of the army and the police, was gunned down on October 14, 1993, by paramilitary troops set up at the suggestion (and possibly with the funding) of the CIA. After all, Secretary of State Warren Christopher assured us as recently as September 18, answering a question after the Carter deal about amnesty for the coup leaders, "there's a sound legal structure" in Haiti.

In the days between the (non)invasion and Aristide's return, the media were so primed for a necklacing incident by Aristide supporters that any collective expression of anger or relief was seen as "vengeance." Thus, after a gunfight between Marines and Haitian security forces in Cap-Haitien, a New York Times headline screamed, "Haitian Crowds Loot Police Buildings." (9/26/94) Eric Schmitt goes on to rant about "the looting and pillaging of the police headquarters," and, in the next paragraph, "[t]he plundering and the pillaging in this city of 65,000 [which] marked the most serious outbreak of violence since the United States military" came in. It is not the armed battle between Haitian and American soldiers, but the mob action -- from which no deaths or even injuries are reported -- which marks the worst outbreak of violence. Suspected paramilitary attaches were captured by civilians and turned over to U.S. military forces, who then handed them over to the Haitian military. Cap-Haitien residents who "pillaged" weapons from the abandoned police and military barracks, says a photo caption in the next day's Times, "turned [them] in" to U.S. forces; but if they turned the weapons in, they weren't pillaging. The caption does not say what the U.S. would do with the weapons.

Schmitt's hysteria is almost funny when he interprets the most wonderful, spontaneous expression of joy by Cap-Haitien residents as a dangerous result of the new "vacuum of authority": "At the main military barracks, Haitians took everything they could get their hands on, even tubas and trombones. They played the instruments in the streets as crowds gathered outside. Marine officers said the disorder was largely a result of the lack of control of the Haitian commanders ..." Note once again how quickly the ground is laid for the rationalization that some military is better than none at all -- never mind that Aristide himself has urged much more drastic cuts in the Haitian military than his American sponsors will agree to. Gen. Shelton, commander of the U.S. forces, U.S. Ambassador William Swing, and Haitian Gen. Cedras quickly flew into town "to discuss ... [the] shootings and the growing tensions."

Reconciliation and Occupation

WHEN ARISTIDE WAS INAUGURATED ON FEBRUARY 7, 1991, a peasant woman put the red and blue presidential sash on him. On October 15, 1994, when he returned to Haiti after three years in exile, Aristide put on the sash aboard the U.S. Air Force plane that brought him back.

It was difficult not to see Aristide's return as defeat, though survival. His speech from behind layers of cloudy, bullet-proof shields was like the video testimony of a hostage: under duress, he assured his loved ones that he is alive, but the theater hardly bothers to disguise who is in control. If this seems melodramatic, I can only say that it is what I felt watching Aristide's October 15 speech from the National Palace on CNN. And on television, only the applause of the dignitaries on stage was audible -- it wasn't clear how the "masses" were reacting. Hopefully they would be insulated from any reaction at all, since, as The New York Times pointed out weeks later, "When the poor and hungry of this country see his face and hear his voice, they go a little wild." If only they could understand, as the "business class" does, that he can "excite crowds but not provide a plan to help them." (One might wonder, then, why the business classes felt a need to get rid of him. But even as their attack on Aristide is repeated, their role in deposing him is revised, all in consecutive paragraphs. The wealthy Fritz Mevs, owner of the Haitian American Sugar Company, who, according to other sources, was a key coup supporter, "now so aggressively supports the President that he printed 30,000 color photographs of him to distribute around Port-au-Prince." No reason to suspect the motives of someone who allegedly made money smuggling cement during the embargo, of course, but let's keep an eye on that "once-defiant populist" Aristide.)²³ If there was a bright spot in Aristide's speech, it was when the voice-over interpreter stumbled and fell silent, unable to keep up with the changes between French, Spanish, English, and exotic Creole.

Back in August, Manno Charlemagne gave me his assessment of resistance in Haiti at the time. Haiti's best-known singer/activist for many years, Charlemagne was arrested twice in the aftermath of the 1991 coup. "The Lavalas movement is destroying resistance," he said. "Every time you say Aristide will be back tomorrow, you stop the movement... . If you make people sit and wait, you make them weak." A member of the United Nations Civilian Mission in Haiti gave a similar assessment: "There could have been some popular response to the coup, but they were told by their leaders ... ‘don't do anything, because the UN is going to help us and restore democracy.' This has had a very negative effect on the popular movements in Haiti. They've been entirely passive since the coup, because they've been told ‘there's no need for you to do anything; there's going to be a solution from the outside.' That is probably the most worrying aspect of the UN involvement in Haiti.'"²⁴ I cannot say whether this assessment is accurate; certainly some believe that the presence of the Civilian Mission helped lessen atrocities.

But the UN's own analysis of its Civilian Mission had predicted in early 1993 that short-term success might actually create a new kind of danger:

We predict the rapid emergence of serious problems for the Mission if many months elapse before a legitimate government enjoying public confidence returns to power. If the Mission is indeed initially successful in raising the confidence of the population, it will lead rapidly to increasingly assertive attempts to exercise freedom of expression. The overwhelming preponderance of freely expressed political, popular and journalistic activity can be expected to challenge the de facto authorities and the human rights record of the military and to demand the early return of President Aristide. On the other hand, we found little indication that the military and de facto authorities are prepared to tolerate such activity in practice.²⁵

With this analysis in mind, it is at least conceivable that the benefits of the UN presence were intentionally sabotaged, given what we know about U.S. contact with the Haitian military. Martin writes that at this "key moment," "U.S. officials, who had been in direct discussion with the military, concluded that the army needed further reassurance of its future." What form did this reassurance to the Haitian military take? "[A] mostly American military component was added to the negotiators' proposals" for an "international police presence during the transition and for a period after Aristide's return... . The [Haitian] generals trusted the framework of bilateral U.S. aid. They mistrusted the UN and the proposal for the Canadians and French, both more committed supporters of Aristide than the United States, to take the lead in the police contingent." Over a year later, U.S. forces would make up over 15,000 of the approximately 20,000-member occupying, multinational force; in the second phase, U.S. troops will reportedly be half of the 6000-person total.

Chester Arthur, the UN monitor quoted above, also expressed concern about the cooperation between UN police and the Haitian police, and that UN-collected information on human rights abuses was shared with the perpetrators. Again, this is back in 1993, over a year before the reports of the CIA's connections to FRAPH, and the more obvious cooperation between U.S. and Haitian militaries during the occupation. "There's no hard evidence," says Arthur, "but it's pretty likely that the civilian mission had quite a few, if not CIA people, people who were very sympathetic and who had very good relations with people who worked at the [U.S.] embassy... . It comes down to this phrase about the ‘professionalisation of the Haitian army' which was the intent of the UN deployment... . it sounds like making the army into a much more clean and efficient machine in order to carry out its work; to adopt U.S. methods of counter-insurgency and keeping control of unruly elements in society. It would become a professionalized army ... [r]ather than the Haitian army, which is dirty and leaves too many clues, too many bodies, and doesn't look good in the papers.'"

Note how different the "news" can be just across our borders. A Montreal Gazette columnist reported at some length on the views of pro-Aristide Haitian legislator Samuel Madistin. Madistin says that the United States was pressuring the Aristide government to make sure that Washington monopolized the recruiting and training of Haiti's new police force. In fact, "the U.S. government body that has trained police forces elsewhere in Latin America" announced its unilateral decision to begin recruitment for a new police school to be set up in Haiti in mid-December, according to Madistin, and "Aristide's government was never consulted, or even informed." Moreover:

One source close to Aristide said U.S. forces have failed so badly in removing brutal officers from the Haitian army that several known human-rights abusers were among the small contingent of soldiers at the presidential palace who were allowed by U.S. troops to guard Aristide when he returned from exile on Saturday.

...Now, Madistin said he fears Washington is trying to set up a new "indigenous occupation army" to serve U.S. interests here -- one that would replace the old discredited institution it has been shamed into dislodging from power and partially dismantling.²⁶

"Every time you say Aristide will be back tomorrow, you stop the movement." In some ways, the actual return of Aristide seemed like the dire fulfillment of Charlemagne's logic. It seemed like an ending. Over and over, in the days leading up to his return, Aristide urged "reconciliation" (and discouraged "violence" and "vengeance"), and Clinton nodded his approval. One need not have any romantic illusions about what is called popular justice to balk at this hostage-president's repeated warnings to the victims of violence against using violence, while the question of amnesty for the killers remains vague, and the suggestion of accountability practically non-existent. Aristide even spoke, as he had at the White House the day before, of the "new world order." Meanwhile, Haitians were able to show their appreciation to the cameras with American flags distributed (according to CNN) by U.S. Army Psychological Operations units. And correspondent Christiane Amanpour welcomed Aristide back to the civilized world, saying that although his followers consider him almost mystical, he has come to appear "almost European" in his dealings with Washington.

"There Will Be Positive Change"

IT WAS DIFFICULT TO TAKE THE HAITIANS' CELEBRATIONS at face value with the murkiness of CNN and New York Times commentary laid over them. But a few days after Aristide's return, I had a chance to watch a friend's videotape of celebrations in the streets of Port-au-Prince. My friend said that people would dance for hours, then lie down and sleep, then get up and just start dancing again where they stood. When I visited Haiti in October 1993, I took a cassette from a Haitian friend in Miami, a musician, to his family in the Carrefour Feuille section of Port-au-Prince. The musician had told me repeatedly to warn his family not to play the cassette loudly or when others were around. It included a song about Bwa Kayman, where the 1791 slave uprising that led to Haitian independence began. In October 1994, our friend's video showed the musician's family and neighbors openly singing his song in the alleys of their neighborhood. The refrain is "dechouke, dechouke!" -- the word for uprooting the old regime.

We should not have illusions about U.S. intentions in Haiti; but we also should not ignore the very real relief which so many victims feel. On October 15, Aristide spoke repeatedly of the newfound "security" -- that is, being able to walk the streets without fear -- because for the last three years people have been denied this basic freedom. As a peasant organizer hiding in the capital had put it, "To go out in the street, you live like it's your last day."²⁷ The U.S. and Haitian militaries can allow people to sing about dechoukaj, because the forces are in place to prevent any real uprooting. U.S. Major Louis Kernisan, the one who designed the plan to retrain Haiti's police, has this to say about the possibility of "popular uprising": "‘This is only the kind of shit they've been able to get away with when there is nobody watching... . They tried that before and it brought them two years of embargo and their little guy in golden exile in the States'" (Nairn). This is especially frightening when you stop to realize that what Kernisan refers to as a popular uprising is the internationally-monitored 1990 election that brought Aristide to office.

But it is too easy to keep returning to pessimism. Singing about dechoukaj may only be singing -- but it is a freedom that was denied for a long time. Maybe it can serve as an opening, there and here. We should look to those breathing the sighs of relief (as well as to those still being victimized) for direction on how to help them now, in the face of what we know about our own government. And we should work on an information dechoukaj at home -- answering the questions that people would not have even been asking before the occupation, about the U.S.'s real role in Haiti. This will be especially important as new elections approach. When Manno Charlemagne was talking about the U.S. role in the coup against Aristide, and simultaneously looking forward to changes that will come with the next elections, I asked him if he thought there was any room for positive change. "Positive change?" he said. "We survived Duvalier; there will be positive change... . We have to begin again to work like we did for the twenty-nine years of Duvalier... . [People] have to know, Aristide was their man, there can be others, there can be, there will be someone else, some other person, clean person, to help guide the movement. There will be."

Notes

1. Rick Bragg,"Behind the Ouster of Aristide: Haiti's Tiny Elite," New York Times (NYT), 8/28/94. Here's the context: "But as the elite wait in their mansions, General Cedras and other high-ranking military army and police officials are becoming more powerful, amassing their own fortunes. Two members of the elite, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the growing powers of the military, which they once controlled, frightened them. Poor Haitians cannot understand all this." return

2. This and other details in this section are based on remarks by journalist Allan Nairn and others at a conference on Haiti sponsored by the Campaign for Peace and Democracy, Hunter College, N.Y., 11/5/94. return

3. US AID/Haiti, "Human Rights Fund," (Port-au-Prince: May 20, 1994). For more information, see Washington Office on Haiti, "Fundwatch Report" (Sept. 1994), and "Democracy Intervention in Haiti" (March 1994). return

4. Rick Bragg, "G.I.'s Voice Disgust at Orders Not to Interfere With Beatings," NYT, 9/22/94. return

5. Human Rights Watch/Americas and National Coalition for Haitian Refugees, Terror Prevails in Haiti: Human Rights Violations and Failed Diplomacy (New York, April 1994), 36. return

6. Larry Rohter, "2000 U.S. Troops Land Without Opposition And Take Over Haiti's Ports and Airfields," NYT, 9/20/94; Susan Benesch and Yves Colon, "Pent-up anger spills forth: Police citizens in violent clashes," Miami Herald (MH), 9/21/94. return

7. John H. Cushman, "Haitian Police Crush Rally As American Troops Watch," NYT, 9/21/94. return

8. Americas Watch and National Coalition for Haitian Refugees, Silencing a People: The Destruction of Civil Society in Haiti (N.Y., Feb. 1993), 4. return

9. "Pressure on U.S. to Disarm Haiti's Paramilitary Groups," NYT, 10/1/94. return

10. Tim Weiner, "CIA Formed Haitian Unit Later Tied to Narcotics Trade," NYT, 11/14/93 return

11. Nairn, "Occupation Haiti: The Eagle is Landing," 10/3/94; "Our Man in FRAPH: Behind Haiti's Paramilitaries," 10/24/94; "He's Our S.O.B.," 10/31/94. return

12. "Foreign Policy and the Intelligentsia," in Towards a New Cold War (N.Y.: Pantheon, 1982), 94. return

13. Haiti Info, 9/23/94. return

14. "Haiti action unlike others by U.S. forces," MH, 9/25/94. return

15. Eric Schmitt, "U.S. Delays Decision on Invading Haiti as It Faces Cuba Crisis," NYT 8/29/94; Schmitt, "U.S. Gets Caribbean Backing For Possible Invasion of Haiti," 8/31/94. return

16. Haiti Info, 9/10/94. return

17. Lee Hockstader, "For Haiti's Rulers, a Key Signal," Washington Post, 2/5/92; National Labor Committee (NLC), Press Release 2/22/94; NLC, "America's Pasttime Has Become Haiti's Torment," April 1994; Sydney P. Freedberg and Rachel L. Swarns, "How U.S. botched embargo: Haiti sanctions poorly enforced," MH, 10/23/94; "President won't rule out tax rise," MH, 2/11/93; John Solomon, "Bush officials didn't stop Texaco from shipping oil to Haiti, aide says," Associated Press, 10/2/94. return

18. James Ferguson, Papa Doc, Baby Doc: Haiti and the Duvaliers (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 74-5. return

19. Haiti's Bad Press (Rochester, VT: Schenkman Books, 1992). return

20. Peter Slevin and Susan Benesch, "Troops bring Haiti a ration of hope," MH, 9/25/94; Peter Slevin, MH, 10/16/94; Pat Truly, "Invade Haiti? Just hold on a minute," MH, 5/31/94; Maureen Dowd, "The Mouse That Roared Squeaks Back," NYT, 9/22/94; John Kifner, "From Fear to Joy In Haiti's Streets," NYT, 9/25/94. return

21. "The G.I.'s Are in Haiti: Now for the Hard Part," NYT, 9/20/94. return

22. Michael R. Gordon, "The Decision Not to be the Police Backfires," NYT, 10/1/94. return

23. Catherine S. Manegold, "Behind U.S. Shield, Aristide Copes With a Stripped Nation," NYT, 10/23/94; on Mevs and the coup, see James Ridgeway, "Haiti's Family Affairs," in Ridgeway, ed., The Haiti Files: Decoding the Crisis (Washington, D.C.: Essential Books, 1994). return

24. Charles Arthur, "What was the UN doing in Haiti anyway?" Haiti: a lesson in democracy (London: Campaign Against Militarism, April 1994). return

25. Quoted in Ian Martin, "Haiti: Mangled Multilateralism," Foreign Policy, Summer 1994. return

26. Alexander Norris, "Widen role in Haiti, Canada urged," Montreal Gazette, 10/19/94. return

27. Quoted in Human Rights Watch/Americas and Jesuit Refugee Service/U.S.A, Fugitives from Injustice: The Crisis of Internal Displacement in Haiti (N.Y., August 1994), 13. return

Contents of No. 18

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