Defying Washington: Aristide arrives in Jamaica

Compiled by Eamon Martin

Mar. 16 (AGR)— On Mar. 14, Haitian President Jean Betrand Aristide defied the Bush administration and returned to the Caribbean, two weeks after being taken by force to the Central African Republic in what he insists was a US-orchestrated coup d’etat.

Aristide’s arrival in Jamaica enraged the new US-backed Haitian government, which fears the former priest’s presence 115 miles from Haiti’s shores might galvanize his supporters, many of whom see Aristide as a champion of the poor and have little doubt he was kidnapped.

Jamaican officials said Aristide will visit for 8 to 10 weeks to be reunited with his two young daughters.

In Washington, the White House blasted Jamaica’s decision while Aristide indicated he hadn’t abandoned his desire to return to Haiti. “For the time being, I’m listening to my people,’’ Aristide said before boarding his plane out of Africa.

He was referring to hundreds of thousands of supporters in Port-au-Prince who have protested almost daily to demand his return.

As news came of Aristide’s controversial arrival in Jamaica, Haiti’s new prime minister, Gerard Latortue, selected a government that excludes Aristide’s Lavalas Family party. Latortue had just last week pledged to include members of Lavalas — which still enjoys wide support — in a “unity government”.

The day previously, Aristide repeated his insistence that he was still president and that he was kidnapped in a coup engineered by the US, saying, “They broke the constitutional order by using force to get me out of the country.”

So far, the Bush administration denies this, saying Aristide resigned and left his country voluntarily. But US officials have already admitted that Aristide was told that if he remained in Haiti, US forces would not protect him from the Haitian ex-military death squad forces that were threatening to take the capitol.

The 53-nation African Union and the 15-member Caribbean Community (CARICOM) — which comprise nearly a third of UN member states — have condemned the circumstances of Aristide’s flight and called for the United Nations to investigate.

Two days after the Haitian president’s sudden departure, Latortue was selected by a US-backed council of un-named Haitian “leaders”, alternately referred to as a “council of wise men” and “sages”. To date, none of these “leaders” responsible for Latortue’s installment have been named in the news media.

But even before Latortue formed his government this week, Jamaica’s foreign ministry refused to recognize it saying recognition had not yet been extended by CARICOM.

As Aristide arrived in Jamaica, Latortue quickly responded by recalling Haiti’s ambassador to Jamaica and putting relations on hold over Aristide’s return. He also suspended Haiti’s participation in CARICOM.

Jamaica says it will not recognize the new Haitian government at least until after a regional CARICOM summit scheduled for next week, which Latortue has threatened to boycott.

Venezuela also refused to recognize Latortue’s government. This week, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez offered Aristide asylum.

“We don’t recognize Haiti’s new government. The president of Haiti is named Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and he was elected by his people,” said Chavez, who also accused the United States of removing Aristide.

The mission to return Aristide to the region was organized by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and other supporters. Waters said Latortue’s gestures were “meaningless.’’ “This is another effort directed at trying to make this government more legitimate,’’ she said. “But the fact of the matter is that Aristide was democratically elected by the people and this new government wasn’t.’’

This is not Kosovo

This week Aristide charged that the new Haitian government would resurrect a strong, repressive military and prop up a light-skinned, wealthy minority. “It is, in essence, racist,” Aristide asserted.

Aristide complained his private foundation’s University of Peace had been made into a US military base in Port-au-Prince, and that teachers at the state hospital’s medical school had been threatened and were afraid to go to work.

US troops have shot and killed at least six Haitians in the past week. In addition, large numbers of arrests of Aristide’s supporters were reported over the weekend. In Belair, a predominantly pro-Aristide neighborhood, Marines shot and killed two residents on Mar. 11. Two days later, a Marine was shot in the arm. Residents said the Marines fired wildly after they came under attack. Several people were wounded.

“Aristide is the king of the poor. That is why we want him back,” said Rafael Pierre, a 28-year-old unemployed mechanic. Pierre was among thousands who marched that day in Haiti’s capital to demand Aristide’s return. The march erupted in gunfire after police used tear gas to disperse it.

“Aristide has to come back! We don’t want Bush as president!” the protesters yelled.

“This is not Kosovo. This is not Iraq. This is not Chechnya. They have to withdraw their war tanks because we are not terrorists,” Belair resident Wilgo Supreme Edouard said a few days later outside a church where huge bullet holes poked through the walls of buildings.

‘No one is reporting what’s going on’

Aristide came to prominence in the slums around Port-au-Prince in the 1980s, when as a priest he opposed the family dictatorship of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, who controlled Haiti for 29 years with US backing. Aristide became Haiti’s first democratically elected president in 1990. When he was ousted in a 1991 coup, paramilitary death squads sprayed Aristide’s slum strongholds with gunfire, killing and displacing thousands of his supporters.

Now those same forces are back with designs on becoming Haiti’s reconstituted army after a widespread media makeover in which the feared commandos are now typically referred to as “rebels”.

In Haiti, all but gone is the diverse, if polarized media environment of just a few months ago where every issue was debated. The US-supported opposition to Aristide now literally owns most of the airwaves. In the past several weeks, at least five influential, independent radio stations have been silenced. In Port-au Prince Radio Solidarite’s reporters have been attacked and beaten on several occasions in recent weeks, and a minibus used for reporting was destroyed. In Cap-Haitien, Radio Afrika and Radio Verite were destroyed some three weeks ago. In St. Marc, Radio Pyramide and Radio America were attacked by the RAMICOS opposition paramilitary group and have fallen silent. Staff from Aristide government media continue to be attacked and beaten, and Radio and Tele Ti-Moun have also been forced off the air.

But on Mar. 12, Jean Charles Moise, the mayor of Milo, a district of about 50,000 people near Cap Haitian, spoke with Pacific News reporters via cell phone. Moise, who is currently in hiding, said that the Haitian army is back in force, shooting people and burning homes.

“Those they don’t kill, they lock up in containers, because they burned down the jails,” he said.

Moise said the situation in his region is different from Port-au-Prince, where there is a visible presence of multinational forces.

“In Cap Haitian you have the former Haitian military. There are no police any more, so they are the ones who are law. They come into your home. They take you, they beat you up, they kill you. They burn down homes. They do anything they want, because they are the only law in town,” Moise said, adding that since Aristide’s overthrow, he has yet to see his wife and child.

“The journalists are in Port-au-Prince, but here in the north no one is reporting what’s going on, that the former Haitian military is killing people,” he pleaded. “They are killing about 50 people a day in Cap Haitian.” Moises said the killings were “happening not just in the northern department but also in the central plateau, in the Artibone region.”

“Can you imagine that on Monday at 2pm the former military declared a curfew that would start at 4pm? The peasants, many of them are poor and do not have a radio, so how could they hear of this curfew? So what happened at 4pm? The former military took to the streets and anyone they saw on the streets they shot. This is the kind of stuff that is going on,” explained Moises.

The mayor said “the old army is doing what they used to do before,” except “with more powerful weapons and with helicopters…I cannot understand how a group of disbanded military has access to such sophisticated equipment and heavy weaponry.”

Sources: Agence France-Presse, Associated Press, Democracy Now, Guardian (UK), Haitiaction.net, Pacific News Service, Reuters, Washington Post

‘I cannot stop crying’

Johnny (last name withheld for his safety), 18, is a former youth reporter with Radyo Timoun (Children’s Radio) 90.9 FM in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Last week, Haitian anti-government paramilitary “rebels” looted and burned it along with the Aristide Foundation For Democracy in which the station was located. On Mar. 10, 2004, Johnny told his story to Pacific News Service contributor Lyn Duff via telephone from Port-au-Prince. The following are excerpts from that interview…

“I was living in the gutter, dressing in old clothes and begging at the airport when President Aristide took office in 1990. One of the first things [Aristide] did when he moved into the National Palace was invite a group of children who sleep in the streets to visit the palace and speak out about the conditions of the street children.

“I heard on the radio the voice of Little Sony, one of the street children, speaking from the National Palace about the rights of children and I knew that the lives of the children in Haiti would change.

When [Aristide] became president he told the world that we street children were people, we had value, that we were human beings.

“[Aristide] loved us and when I met him, he kissed me and put his hand on my face and told me he loved me. And they were not the empty words of a politician…

“We went to [Aristide] and told him that we wanted to have a voice in democracy, to have a voice for children and he gave us Radyo Timoun. We were the first children’s radio station in the world, run by children and promoting the human rights of all Haitians. We spoke on the air about the news, about our hopes and opinions. Adults all over the country heard our voices and were forced to accept that we children are people too…

“Yesterday at the Foundation I saw gangsters and criminals in army uniforms destroy the hopes and dreams of the Haitian people. They destroyed the building, burned books and killed many people.

“I do not believe that President Aristide has abandoned us to this misery…

“The US Marines stood by and did nothing while the library at the Aristide Foundation was burned. With my own eyes I saw the American Marines stand and watch while rebels cut a woman and shot her. I yelled at them, ‘Do something!’ and they swung their guns around toward me and yelled, ‘Get back!’

“While I hid in a field the American Marines put their hats on the bodies of dead people and posed for pictures with them. It made me sick because in Haiti we respect the dead. The Americans scare me; I don’t believe that they want anything good for the Haitian people because they support the criminals who oppose democracy.

“We are fearful of the old army because they are those who killed the street children of Lafanmi Selavi. They killed the peasants in the North who wanted to have democracy and supported Aristide.

“A new government has no hope for the children of Haiti. I am scared, I think the criminals will try to kill me too because I am one of [Aristide’s] boys. But I am not just scared for myself. I am scared for all the children of Haiti. And today I cannot stop crying.”

—Johnny

Source: Pacific News Service

Army desertions complicate Afghan election plans

By Thalif Deen

United Nations, Mar. 11 (IPS)— The US-backed government in Kabul is facing large-scale desertions by Western-trained local security forces as it tries to establish a safe environment in the run-up to scheduled June elections.

The success of the upcoming vote has been predicated primarily on the creation of a 10,000-strong Afghan National Army (ANA) and a 20,000-strong police force, both of which are expected to provide security during the polls.

But more than 3,000 soldiers from the ANA have already abandoned their posts after training by instructors from the United States, France, and Britain. The same is feared of a police force currently under training.

On Mar. 11 an official with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), whose troops are now serving in Afghanistan, suggested the vote could be delayed until August because of the security situation, reported London’s Financial Times newspaper.

A day earlier, Afghan President Hamid Karzai appealed to NATO to provide more troops to safeguard the election process.

“Clearly, training more police, training more army will be part of creating a more secure environment for these elections,’’ says Jean Arnault, the UN Special Representative in Afghanistan.

The election target is to have 20,000 trained police officers, UN Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) Spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva, told reporters in Kabul last week. “That is the hope — let’s see if reality will prove that this hope is true.’’

The army and the police are expected to provide protection to 8,400 registration sites, one-half of them for men, the other half for women.

To date, only about one million of Afghanistan’s estimated 10.5 million eligible voters have registered, according to UNAMA.

One expert blames the desertions on Washington’s influence on the nation that US forces invaded after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

“The fledgling Afghan military is losing its morale both because of the successes of the [former ruling] Taliban and because the real power in the country continues to be held by the unaccountable warlords, not the central government,’’ said James Ingalls of the California Institute of Technology and founding director of the Afghan Women’s Mission.

“The ANA is currently nothing more than another US-backed armed faction, albeit a weak one,’’ added Ingalls, author of Buying Hearts and Minds in Afghanistan.

The army’s nominal head, he said, is Afghan President Hamid Karzai, “widely recognized as a US puppet.’’ But the army answers primarily to Minister of Defense General Mohammed Fahim, who is a warlord, according to Ingalls.

With US-backed warlord armies distributed throughout the country, the US military itself conducting major military operations on the border with Pakistan, and the Taliban re-grouping and renewing their support base, “it is little wonder that the fledgling ANA is experiencing huge desertions,’’ he added.

The ANA is not expected to be a major military player, Ingalls said, “and I don’t see its formation as much more than a token gesture to prove the nation-building abilities of Washington.’’

“Without a large international peacekeeping force, it is unclear how the US strategy of supporting warlord militias to ‘keep the peace’ throughout the country will give way to the takeover of security obligations by the ANA,’’ he added.

Mark Sedra, a research associate at the Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC), told IPS the ANA training program overseen by the United States has been “marred by an exceedingly high desertion rate.’’

Desertions reached a high of 10 percent of trainees per month in the summer of 2003, but has since been brought down to about three percent, he added.

Sedra, whose current research project involves monitoring security in Afghanistan, said there are several reasons for the ongoing desertions.

Washington has not only encountered problems attracting qualified recruits but also maintaining an ethnic balance in the composition of the army.

“There is a disproportionately large number of Tajiks and a disproportionately low number of Pashtuns [the country’s largest ethnic minority], particularly at the officer level,’’ said Sedra.

This, he added, has led to increased suspicion of the Afghan force in Pashtun communities. “There have been reports that ethnic Tajik officers have abused, verbally and physically, recruits and soldiers from rival ethnic groups, although US officials will not confirm this.’’

The salary has been one of the biggest problems affecting the process, added Sedra. The $50 monthly pay was increased to $70 in late 2003. But the US army has estimated that a salary of $150 will be needed to keep recruits in the ranks, he said.

Compounding the problem of low salaries is the lack of a system to deliver money. There is no banking system in Afghanistan, so soldiers stationed away from their families have no way of sending their pay home. “Many have merely taken their first salaries [home] and never returned.’’

The United States says that the first ANA battalions performed well in military operations in the country’s south. But ANA soldiers have expressed displeasure at being used as US proxies, Sedra said.

“The use of largely ethnic Tajik units in the Pashtun belt has also been a source of tension that has prompted many to leave the service,’’ he added.

The process for recruiting police officers, on the other hand, has been hindered by endemic corruption within the ministry of interior, a lack of funds to pay salaries, the absence of a payment system, and a lack of equipment.

Washington has tried to accelerate the program by establishing seven regional police training centers to complement the central office. “They hope to complete the training of 60,000 rank-and-file officers by 2005, but this is far from certain,’’ Sedra said.