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Aristide’s Lawyer: Bush is getting even in Haiti
By: Hazel Trice Edney
Washington Correspondent
Originally posted 3/9/2004
WASHINGTON (NNPA) – An attorney for former Haitian
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, now in exile, says he
believes President George W. Bush sought to finish the
agenda of his father by removing rather than protecting
the embattled president last week.
“Dick Cheney was the secretary of defense, Colin Powell
was the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and George
Bush, the father, was president at the time of the first
military coup against President Aristide,” recalls the
attorney, Ira Kurzban of Miami. “Is there a settling of
scores in some sense? They thought they got rid of him the
first time, but Clinton brought him back. And now they
want to make sure, before the November election, that they
get rid of him a second time.”
Kurzban, who says the deposed leader may bring criminal
charges against the U. S. for what he calls Aristide’s
involuntary resignation on Feb. 29.
In 1991, the newly-elected President Aristide, a parish
priest, was first deposed by the Haitian military during
the presidency of George H. W. Bush. He remained out of
office until he was reinstated with the help of President
Clinton in 1994.
Most members of the Congressional Black Caucus have been
outspoken in their criticism of George W. Bush.
“We have undertaken a coup against a
democratically-elected government in Haiti,” Congressman
Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said on CNN last week. Rangel said
he had spoken with Aristide by phone. “He was kidnapped.
He resigned under pressure. He and his wife had no idea
where he was going. He was very apprehensive for his
life,” Rangel charged.
As armed rebel forces closed in on Aristide’s
Port-Au-Prince palace last week, Aristide abruptly
resigned and was whisked away by U. S. Marines. He and his
American-born wife, Mildred Trouillot, are being housed in
Bangui, Central African Republic, reportedly with no phone
privileges after he told the Cable News Network that
he’d been kidnapped.
Secretary of State Colin Powell has called the allegations
“baseless, absurd.”
But Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who has also spoken
recently to Aristide, dismissed Powell’s response.
“He’s really not in charge in this issue. He’s a
mouthpiece that they’ve run out there,” Waters says.
She notes that this isn’t the first time rebels, with
U.S. complicity, tried to oust Aristide..
“There were those who tried to pull a coup d'état on
him when he had been in for seven months (in 1991),”
Waters says. “There are those who say they pulled a coup
d'état on him now because he didn’t govern well and he
was corrupt and all of that. What was their excuse when he
had only been in for seven months?”
Waters, who participated in a hearing of the House
International Relations sub-committee on the Western
Hemisphere last week, notes that it was the U. S. that
funded and trained the Haitian military during the former
Bush administration. Though disbanded under Clinton, that
same army never disarmed. It became part of the Front For
the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH). For
protection, Aristide formed gangs of his own, according to
some Haiti observers.
Ron Daniels, founder of the Haiti Support Project and
executive director for the Center for Constitutional
Rights in New York, said of Aristide: “He’s made some
errors and some major mistakes. But that notwithstanding,
the United States had no business coercing and forcing a
democratically elected president out.”
Haiti is a nation of 7.5 million people who are the
poorest in the Western Hemisphere, with 80 percent living
in poverty.
Bush has asked Haiti to “Reject violence, to give this
break from the past a chance to work.”
More than 500 U. S. Marines are part of a United Nations
Multinational Interim Force that has been sent to Haiti to
curb violence. With no army of its own, the Haitian police
is too poorly armed to maintain law and order. Meanwhile,
Boniface Alexandrre, chief justice of the Haiti Supreme
Court, has been sworn in as leader of a transitional
government until elections in 2005.
Caricom, the Caribbean Community and Common Market -
representatives from the 15 leading Caribbean nations -
has proposed that the next president shares power with the
opposition. Caricom has also called for an investigation
into the removal of Aristide.
Amnesty International, a leading human rights
organization, worries that criminals could seize power in
Haiti.
“Amnesty International urges the international
community, as a matter of priority, to ensure that under
no circumstances are those convicted of or implicated in
serious human rights abuses given any position of
authority, whether in a transitional government or among
the security forces, where they might commit further
violations,” the organization says in a 14-page report
titled “Perpetrators of Past Abuses Threaten Human
Rights and the Reestablishment of Rule of Law.”
American television has been filed with images of bloody
bodies lying in the streets. Unlike the decision to not
show dead U.S. soldiers on TV, there is no such restraint
shown toward Haiti’s deceased.
''How can we send in people and just allow the killings to
go on?” Rep. Donald Payne, D-N.J., asked in the Western
Hemisphere Sub-committee meeting.
There are unspoken issues, as well.
“There is one issue that is at the core of the problems
in Haiti that few people are talking about,” says
retired Congressman Walter Fauntroy (D-D.C.), who served
for 15 years as chairman of a Bi-partisan, Bicameral
Congressional Task Force on Haiti. “In the last 10
years, Haiti has become a major illegal drug transshipment
for the Cali, Medellin and Baranquilla drug cartels in
South America.”
Therefore, Fauntroy says, among other actions, the Bush
administration must immediately deliver humanitarian aid
and work to prosecute drug lords.
Eugenia Charles, the Haitian co-director of the Haiti
Reborn Program of the Quixote Center, a non-profit social
justice advocate in Brentwood, Md., sees hope among all
the bloodshed.
“The hope lies in the process of democracy,” Charles
says. “The hope lies when America would stop mingling in
Haiti’s politics. “When you have American hands behind
it, tweaking every angle of it, it is impossible for that
process to go forward.”
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