Home > Don’t fall for Washington’s spin on Haiti
March 1, 2004
By Jeffrey Sachs
The crisis in Haiti is another case of brazen US
manipulation of a small, impoverished country with the
truth unexplored by journalists. In the nearly
universal media line on the Haitian revolt, President
Jean- Bertrand Aristide was portrayed as an
undemocratic leader who betrayed Haiti’s democratic
hopes and thereby lost the support of his erstwhile
backers. He "stole" elections and intransigently
refused to address opposition concerns. As a result he
had to leave office, which he did at the insistence of
the US and France. Unfortunately, this is a gravely
distorted view.
President George Bush’s foreign policy team came into
office intent on toppling Mr Aristide, long reviled by
powerful US conservatives such as former senator Jesse
Helms who obsessively saw him as another Fidel Castro
in the Caribbean. Such critics fulminated when
President Bill Clinton restored Mr Aristide to power in
1994, and they succeeded in getting US troops withdrawn
soon afterwards, well before the country could be
stabilised. In terms of help to rebuild Haiti, the US
Marines left behind about eight miles of paved roads
and essentially nothing else. In the meantime, the
so-called "opposition", a coterie of rich Haitians
linked to the preceding Duvalier regime and former (and
perhaps current) CIA operatives, worked Washington to
lobby against Mr Aristide.
In 2000, Haiti held parliamentary and then presidential
elections, unprecedented in their scope. Mr Aristide’s
party, Fanmi Lavalas, clearly won the election,
although candidates who won a plurality rather than a
majority, and who should have faced a second-round
election, also gained seats. Objective observers
declared the elections broadly successful, albeit
flawed.
Mr Aristide won the presidential election later that
year, in a contest the US media now reports was
"boycotted by the opposition" and hence, not
legitimate. This is a cruel joke to those who know
Haiti, where Mr Aristide was swept in with an
overwhelming mandate and the opposition, such as it
was, ducked the elections. Duvalier thugs hardly
constituted a winning ticket and as such, did not even
try. Nor did they have to. Mr Aristide’s foes in Haiti
benefited from tight links with the incoming Bush team,
which told Mr Aristide it would freeze all aid unless
he agreed with the opposition over new elections for
the contested Senate seats, among other demands. The
wrangling led to the freezing of Dollars 500m in
emergency humanitarian aid from the US, the World Bank,
the Inter- American Development Bank and the
International Monetary Fund.
The tragedy, or joke, is that Mr Aristide agreed to
compromise, but the opposition simply balked; it was
never the right time to hold elections, for example,
because of "security" problems, they said. Whatever the
pretext, the US maintained its aid freeze and the
opposition maintained a veto over international aid.
Cut off from bilateral and multilateral financing,
Haiti’s economy went into a tailspin.
All this is being replayed before our eyes. As Haiti
slipped into deeper turmoil last month, Caribbean
leaders called for a power-sharing compromise between
Mr Aristide and the opposition. Once again, Mr Aristide
agreed but the opposition merely demanded the president
step down - reportedly rejecting even US Secretary of
State Colin Powell’s requests to compromise. But rather
than defending Mr Aristide and dealing with opposition
intransigence, the White House announced the president
should step down.
The ease with which the US thereby brought down another
Latin American democracy is stunning. What has been the
CIA’s role among the anti-Aristide rebels? How much US
money went from US institutions and government agencies
to help foment this uprising? Why did the White House
abandon the Caribbean compromise proposal it endorsed
just days before? These questions have not been asked.
Then again, we live in an age when entire wars can be
launched on phony pretences with few questions asked.
What should happen now is unlikely to pass. The United
Nations should help restore Mr Aristide to power for
his remaining two years in office, making clear that
yesterday’s events were an illegal power grab. Second,
the US should call on the opposition, which is largely
a US construct, to stop the violence immediately and
unconditionally. Third, after years of literally
starving the people of Haiti, the long-promised and
long-frozen aid flows of Dollars 500m should start
immediately. These steps would rescue a dying democracy
and avert a possible bloodbath.
The writer is director of the Earth Institute at
Columbia University
Copyright 2004