The date was October 15, 1994, 60 years after the
end of the first U.S. occupation of Haiti.
Exiled President Aristide was finally back in Haiti but
surrounded, in every sense, by the putschist Haitian
military and the occupying U.S. forces.
he spectacle was surreal, especially in this corner of
the Caribbean which has
remained so resistant to American-
ization over the past century.
Thousands of Haitians, taut with
anticipation, thronged the streets
outside the green iron fence in
front of the National Palace. Inside
the fence and across the broad
lawn studded with a mix of Haitian
and U.S. soldiers, scores of hand-
shaking dignitaries, ear-touching
security personnel, and eye-roam-
ing journalists swarmed around the
Palace’s wide steps. With Black
Hawk helicopters thumping over-
head, hundreds of heavily armed
U.S. troops snaked through the
crowds with walkie talkies or sur-
veyed the scene with binoculars
from towering armored vehicles,
windows or rooftops.
In the middle of it all sat Haitian
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a
small figure on a regal chair in a
bullet-proof glass cage, exhibited
for the crowds like an animal in a
zoo. The date was October 15,
1994. After three years and 15
Kim Ives is a journalist at the weekly newspaper Haiti Progres. This article will appear in the forthcoming NACLA book Haiti: Dangerous Crossroads, to be pub- lished by South End Press.
days in exile, President Aristide
was finally back in Haiti but sur-
rounded, in every sense, by the
putschist Haitian military and the
occupying U.S. forces.
One year earlier, Aristide’s first
projected homecoming had been
foiled. After a surge of Duvalierist
violence and a well-orchestrated
U.S./UN retreat, the return date of
October 30, 1993 fixed by the July
1993 Governors Island Accord
came and went. By early 1994, the
coup leaders, emboldened by U.S.
pressure on Aristide, launched a
savage new wave of repression and
took over the parliament’s leader-
ship offices from the elected law-
makers.
On March 18, Aristide
relaunched his refugee offensive,
calling Clinton’s refugee policy
“racist and criminal” at a meeting
of the Congressional Black Caucus
in Miami. On March 30, Ha’ti Pro-
gras broke a story about Yvon
Desanges, a refugee returned to
Haiti from the Guantinamo deten-
tion center who had been hacked to
death by a military death squad.
Five days later, Aristide gave six-
months notice that Haiti was abro-
gating (belatedly, according to
refugee advocates) the interdiction
agreement signed between presi-
dents Duvalier and Reagan in 1981,
which supposedly permitted the
United States to intercept fleeing
Haitian refugees on the high seas.
On April 12, TransAfrica’s Randall
Robinson, after strategizing with
Aristide and the Black Caucus,
launched a 27-day media-intensive
hunger strike urging Clinton to
change his repatriation policy.
In response, on April 26, Clinton
scuttled his Haiti envoy Lawrence
Pezzulo, with his blatant style of
arm-twisting, and replaced him on
May 8 with the suave head of the
United Negro College Fund, for-
mer Congressman William Gray
III. The same day, Clinton retreat-
ed from automatic repatriation to
the Reagan era’s policy of inter-
viewing refugees aboard U.S. cut-
ters, with the difference that the “screened in” would be taken to “safe havens” in any country in the
hemisphere other than the United
States. The refugee issue was now
pushing the Clinton Administration
to resolve the Haiti question once
and for all.
From May through August,
1994, events quickly accelerated
toward invasion. Clinton began to “carry out a series of diplomatic,
public, and other steps that would
allow him to assert all other
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avenues had been exhausted,”
according to the September 25
Washington Post. In short, the
United States needed to justify
the invasion.
This made for a series of
almost humorous about-faces.
The U.S. Embassy, for instance,
early in 1994 reported in a secret
memo, that “the Haitian Left,
including President Aristide and
his supporters in Washington
and here, consistently manipu-
late and fabricate human rights
abuses as a propaganda tool” and
that “FRAPH has essentially the
same modus operandi [of terror]
as the Lavalas’ ‘Comitis de
quartiers’ [neighborhood com-
mittees].” But by June, the U.S.
government was itself using
human rights abuses “as a propa-
ganda tool,” issuing strongly-
worded daily statements to decry
putschist violence. U.S.AID
began searching for Haitian and H’ cc U.S. human rights groups to give
more than $1 million from a new
“Human Rights Fund.”
Most important to the justifica-
tion process, however, was the UN
Security Council. On May 6, 1994,
the United States pushed through
Security Council Resolution #917,
which stiffened the embargo
against Haiti on paper, but not real-
ly on its borders. The 1993 sanc-
tions targeted oil and weapons,
while the new ones cut all trade
(except for food and medicine) and
non-commercial air traffic with
Haiti. The measures did little to
pressure the putschists from power.
Instead, they just increased the
flow of Haitian commerce across
the Dominican border, which
remained wide open throughout the
crisis despite regular announce-
ments of resolve issued from
Washington and Santo Domingo.
“These [UN] sanctions are being
drafted in a way that sets them up
for failure,” said Berton Wides,
one of Aristide’s lawyers, on May
4. “They are so half-hearted that
aitians in Port-au-Prince watch U.S. Army h
)pters arrive in October, 1994.
they almost seem designed to fail
so that the Administration can say
‘I told you so.”‘
During June and July, the United
States, followed by Canada, the
Netherlands, the Dominican
Republic, and France, stopped its
commercial flights to Haiti. The
United States also went after coup
participants and supporters, ban-
ning their international financial
transactions (which were long
since completed) and freezing their
assets and bank accounts (which
were long since emptied). Money
transfers from Haitians in the Unit-
ed States to their families in
Haiti-which account for the vast
bulk of the country’s foreign rev-
enue-were slashed to $50 per per-
son per month, helping to fuel
escalating desperation.
n July 31, the Security
Council passed Resolution
#940, which gave the Unit-
ed States authority to carry out a
military intervention in Haiti on
the UN’s behalf, an arrange-
ment now being dubbed
“sphere-of-influence” peace-
keeping.
The Haitian putschists issued
ridiculously defiant, transpar-
ently phony, nationalist calls
for resistance, thereby playing
their role in intervention the-
atrics. To further provoke reac-
tion, on May 11 the military
installed a second de facto
president, Duvalierist chief jus-
tice Emile Jonassaint, and
cranked up repression a few
more notches. By late May,
record numbers of refugees
were again fleeing Haiti.
As intervention approached,
Aristide’s ambiguity increased.
On June 3, he began to call for
the United States to carry out a
“swift and determined action”
in Haiti, and even asked for a “surgical strike,” alluding eli- specifically to the 1989 Pana-
ma invasion as a model.
Haitian popular organizations
and U.S. solidarity groups were
aghast, prompting Aristide to back-
track and issue an open letter on
June 22 saying “I have never asked
for military intervention, nor will I.
We have no illusion that a military
intervention would serve the pur-
pose of restoring democracy, or
justice to Haiti.” When asked in a
National Public Radio interview on
June 25 if he would agree to be
restored to power through foreign
military intervention, Aristide
replied “Never! Never! And never
again!”
But it was obvious by now that
despite his denials, Aristide had
placed all his hopes on the United
States. On July 29, Aristide clearly
endorsed intervention in a letter to
the UN Security Council urging
passage of the resolution authoriz-
ing U.S. military intervention.
Support for intervention was by
now the hallmark of the “Lavalas
bourgeoisie.” This portion of
Haiti’s import-export bourgeoisie
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and their fringe of doctors, lawyers began on August 19, 1994. But
and engineers had rallied to the now came the trickiest part of all.
anti-imperialist platform of Haiti’s How to transfer the apparatus of
popular organizations to form the repression from the “bad cop” to
1990 Lavalas alliance that brought the “good cop” without creating an
Aristide to power. At that time, the opening for insurrection? If C6dras
Lavalas bourgeoisie was looking and other putschists were to flee
to stop the political and economic before the U.S. force was in place, march of the “technocrat” sector the people might take to the streets
of the bourgeoisie, which was and “get the idea that they can do
more tied to U.S. capital and the whatever they want,” as one U.S.
expansion of assem-
bly industries and
agribusiness. But due
to the coup, the
Lavalas bourgeoisie
now felt that a pact
with the technocrats
and the United States
was more in order.
Central to the deal
was intervention,
which violated a key
commandment of the
old alliance.
Faced with ques-
tions or criticism
about intervention, the
Lavalas bourgeoisie
would respond that On the day of his return from exile, Aristide-behind a Aristide had no alterna- shield-is presented to the crowd at the National Palace.
tive. It was a choice,
they argued, between continuing
the reign of terror under C6dras or
inviting U.S. military intervention.
Aristide had to choose the lesser of
two evils.
But the two evils were, in fact,
one. The U.S. government, in
cahoots with the putschists, was
carrying out a classic good
cop/bad cop routine: the bad cop
to abuse and terrorize; the good
cop to offer comfort, escape, and a
solution. The “bad cop” death
squads of FRAPH were conceived,
recruited and funded by the CIA
and the Defense Intelligence
Agency (DIA), The Nation
revealed in October, and C6dras
and most of the Haitian high com-
mand had been on the CIA pay-
roll.
The countdown for the inevitable
intervention of the “good cop”
Army Psychological Operations
official put it.
Clinton made his nationally tele-
vised address on September 15 to
set the stage. “C6dras and his
armed thugs have conducted a
reign of terror, executing children,
raping women, killing priests,”
Clinton said. “We must act.”
But Clinton still had a plan to
converse more with the thugs to
create a “permissive entry”-in
Pentagon parlance-for U.S.
troops. That way, the U.S. military
could take over smoothly and
avoid casualties in an intervention
that was widely unpopular in the
U.S. Congress and among the U.S.
population at large. Former Presi-
dent Jimmy Carter, with former
Joint Chiefs of Staff head Gen.
Colin Powell and Aristide-critic
Sen. Sam Nunn (D-GA), held two
days of talks with C6dras in Port-
au-Prince which resulted on Sep-
tember 18 in a deal for “a peaceful,
cooperative entry of international
forces into Haiti, with a mutual
respect between American com-
manders and the Haitian military
commanders,” as Carter reported
in his September 19 press confer-
ence. (Carter also invited C6dras
and his wife, whom he found “slim
and very attractive,” to
visit his church in
Georgia.)
The essence of the
deal, signed by ex-
President Carter and de
facto President Jonas-
saint, was two-fold: 1)
to keep Gen. Raoul
C6dras in power until
October 15, while the
U.S. occupation force
was “inserted,” as Sec-
retary of State Warren
Christopher character-
ized it; and 2) to ensure
that “a general amnesty
will be voted into law
bullet-proof by the Haitian Parlia-
ment.”
To soothe Aristide’s
initial misgivings about Carter’s
“Port-au-Prince accord,” the Penta-
gon gave him a 21-gun salute in
Washington on September 21.
“The ceremony of the Pentagon
showed us very clearly that our
president was recognized, that he
had been returned his legitimacy,”
said close Aristide advisor and for-
mer Planning Minister Renaud
Bernadin, who had severely criti-
cized the Carter deal only days
before. In the ceremony, Aristide
profusely thanked Clinton, Carter
and the Pentagon.
U.S. troops entered Haiti on
September 19, and quickly
“interfaced”-in military-
speak-with their Haitian counter-
parts. The three designated coup
villains-C6dras, Brig. Gen.
Philippe Biamby, and Col. Michel
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Franqois-were all spirited out of
Haiti, away from justice, to com-
fortable exiles, thanks to U.S. gov-
ernment largesse. While under-the-
table payoffs are also likely, the
U.S. government has openly admit-
ted that it will use U.S. taxpayers’
money to pay C6dras $5,000 a
month for rental of his three luxuri-
ous homes in Haiti.
Members of the Haitian parlia-
ment who had been living in exile
were flown in on U.S. planes.
Overseen by U.S. guns, the legisla-
tors passed a law on October 8
which granted amnesty for “politi-
cal matters.”
Thirteen other Haitian officers
instrumental in the coup were
transferred to tranquil embassy
duties overseas by “interim com-
mander-in-chief’ Lt. Gen. Jean-
Claude Duperval, himself implicat-
ed in the September 1991 coup, the
January 1991 attempted coup, and
in drug-trafficking.
The U.S. government also
unfroze $79 million of assets of the
coup-makers and their wealthy
supporters, and will provide $5
million for stipends and civilian
retraining of Haitian soldiers who
have been so infamous for repres-
sion that they cannot be recycled
into the “new” Haitian military.
In Grand Goave, Cap Haitien,
and J&r6mie, large demonstrations
took place to demand that those
members of the military and
attaches responsible for human
rights abuses during the dictator-
ship be brought to justice. Crowds
captured dozens of Haitian sol-
diers and paramilitary gunmen
around Haiti and brought them to
U.S. soldiers, as they had been
instructed to do by U.S. military
sound systems on Humvees and
helicopters, and by President Aris-
tide himself in his October 15
Palace address.
“The American soldiers then
handed them over to the remnants
of the very Haitian police with
whom the gunmen had collaborat-
ed in terrorizing the population
during the three years of military
rule,” reported John Kifner in the
October 18 New York Times. “No
one seems able to say exactly what
will happen to the gunmen, called
attaches, who murdered, robbed
and raped with impunity. One
strong possibility is that their
friends in the Haitian police will
simply let them go.”
The de facto
protection by the
U.S. high command of
the former repressive
forces is becoming
clearer daily to
ordinary Haitians.
The de facto protection by the
U.S. high command of the former
repressive forces is becoming
clearer daily to ordinary Haitians, and also to the American GIs, who
often sympathize with the Haitian
people’s struggle. “These people
are really believing in us now,” a
U.S. police monitor/retrainer told
Kifner. “But if these guys just walk
free, it’s all going to turn sour. It
will be like Somalia.”
With the watchword of “recon-
ciliation,” the United States is
remodeling and shoring up the
entire Duvalierist apparatus, in
both its military and civilian incar-
nations. The “separation of the
police and the armed forces” is the
magic formula offered by U.S.
reforms. Its goal is as cosmetic as
the repainting of the infamous
Cafeteria police station of Col.
Michel Francois from mustard-yel-
low to white. The Cafeteria police
used to best symbolize the union of
Haiti’s police and army, wearing
blue police shirts and green army
helmets. Now they and the rest of
the police will wear new uniforms
with inoffensive yellow and
maroon baseball caps.
Although the figures keep chang-
ing, as of mid-November the army
was slated to be reduced to 1,500,
while the police-who will handle
internal “law and order”-would
number about 6,000. Thus the old
“unseparated” armed forces of
about 7,000 and the new “separat-
ed” ones will barely differ in size,
contrary to the message sent by the
mainstream media.
On the “civilian” demilitariza-
tion front, despite a much vaunted
“buy-back” program, the U.S.
occupying force retrieved only a
small percentage of the tens of
thousands of firearms in the hands
of attaches and has even returned
arms to rural section chiefs and
their thugs, prompting popular
demonstrations which have been
in turn repressed.
Aristide wanted to fire the entire
army high command and manage
the formation of the new army and
police with his government. The
U.S. military, however, vetoed the
move. For “retraining” the Haitian
armed forces, the U.S. government
wants to employ exclusively its
own International Criminal Investi-
gations Training and Assistance
Program (ICITAP), which is
staffed by current and former
agents of the FBI, the Drug
Enforcement Administration
(DEA), Secret Service, and U.S.
police departments. The new “pro-
fessionalized” police and army will
be-if all goes according to plan-
more responsive to central (and
U.S.-guided) control, not as prone
to arbitrary and indiscreet violence, and better versed in focused sur-
veillance and repression of democ-
ratic and popular organizations.
For good measure, the new forces
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will be supervised indefinitely by
the yellow-capped International
Police Monitors, the most multina-
tional component of the United
States’ “multinational” occupation.
Candidates for “professionaliza-
tion” are to be drawn largely from
the “previous” Haitian armed
forces, many officers and special-
ists of which had
already been trained in
the United States, most-
ly at the School of the
Americas in Ft. Ben-
ning, Georgia.
With the United
States in com-
plete military
control, Aristide has jet-
tisoned his nationalist
program for the revital-
ization of Haiti’s state
industries, which had
begun to show profits
after just a few months
of non-corrupt adminis-
tration in 1991. Today,
A worn
those industries are to
be sold to private capitalists, both
Haitian and U.S., who backed the
September 1991 coup with their
heads, hearts and wallets.
“You have to remember that the
coalition that brought [Aristide] to
power is not the same coalition that
brought him back now,” said a
prominent Haitian intellectual in the
October 23 New York Times. The
new coalition is between the
Lavalas bourgeoisie and the techno-
crat bourgeoisie along with U.S.
capital. The new program is to bring
about neoliberal “structural read-
justment” of the Haitian economy.
Allan Nairn summarized the plan
entitled “Strategy of Social and
Economic Reconstruction” in the
July/August Multinational Monitor:
“Haiti commits to eliminate the
jobs of half of its civil servants,
massively privatize public services,
‘drastic[ally]’ slash tariffs and
import restrictions, eschew price
and foreign exchange controls,
grant ’emergency’ aid to the export
sector, enforce an ‘open foreign
investment policy,’ create special
corporate business courts ‘where
the judges are more aware of the
implications of their decisions for
economic efficiency,’ rewrite its
corporate laws, ‘limit the scope of
state activity’ and regulation, and
ian walks by a U.S. Army tank on a Port-au-Prin
diminish the power of Aristide’s
executive branch in favor of the
more conservative Parliament. In
return, Haiti is to receive $770 mil-
lion in financing, $80 million of
which goes immediately to pay the
debt accrued to foreign banks over
the past three years since the coup.”
Just as they justified foreign
intervention, ideologues of the
Lavalas bourgeoisie are now justi-
fying neoliberalism. “You have to
understand, the world has changed
in these three years,” said Father
Antoine Adrien, former head of
Aristide’s Presidential Commis-
sion, to James Ridgeway of the Vil-
lage Voice. “What was good in
1991 is not necessarily good in
1994. First of all, no country can
survive without capitalism.” Of
course, Aristide’s 1991 program
was not anti-capitalist. It simply
proposed “Justice, Openness, and
Participation” in the running of the
government and state industries,
sweeping out corruption and ineffi-
ciency. But for Adrien, it is “better
to privatize them. It would ulti-
mately be to the benefit of the state
because we can collect taxes from
them and have money to do other
work.”
However, Antoine Izm6ry-one
of Haiti’s largest merchant capital-
ists and the principal
funder of Aristide’s
1990 campaign, who
became a martyr for
democracy when exe-
cuted by attaches on
September 11, 1993
-would have strong-
ly disagreed. “This
mafioso private sector
[in Haiti] has robbed
the Haitian people
through smuggling,
drug-dealing, govern-
ment subsidies, non-
payment of their
taxes, and all that, so
that now they have
ce street. the capital to buy up the state industries
with the money they have stolen,”
he explained to Hai’ti Progrds after
the Haiti Government/Business
Partnership Conference in July,
1993 in Miami. As for foreign
buyers of Haitian industries, he
said “Haiti is virgin territory and
very cheap right now. So there are
several [foreign] companies inter-
ested in controlling the Haitian
economy…. Now we are going to
have the Americans controlling us
completely and imposing their
financial system which, in fact, has
never had good results.”
Ironically, Aristide was elected
to fight against the very two
processes he has now been
returned to legitimate: reconcilia-
tion with Duvalierism and neolib-
eral reforms. Whether he is a pris-
oner or player, or something in
between, is not totally clear. Nor
does it really matter. His govern-
ment is only a portrait; the real
regime is American.
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