From all the reports we're hearing right now, these FRAPH
paramilitaries are now basically running around doing anything
they want, anywhere they want, in Haiti. The same people who were
guilty of all these crimes against humanity from 1991-1994; these
right-wing paramilitary death squads are now traveling around, armed,
and not being interfered with in the least by French, Canadian, or American
troops, and basically taking over town after town after town, and basically
imposing themselves as local governments. In fact there's a contingent
of French foreign legions in Cap Haitien right now. The last we heard
Chamblain was with all his guys was drinking beer in the Mt. Jolie
hotel, with their uniforms on. That's kind of the situation.
This is a situation that nobody really understands right now. It was a
coup that had been planned and facilitated for the last four and a half
years by the United States government, clearly, and explicity, and
demonstrably done by the US government, if you look at the millions
of dollars that's been funneled by the NED and IRI to this fake political
opposition that created the "political crisis". It was the
United States that also compounded that with an economic crisis by withholding
almost a half a billion dollars in loans and entitlements to the Haitian
government in order to make sure that Aristide's government could not
deliver on any of its political promises.
And then [they] followed up by a security crisis that was created by this
invasion of Haitian paramilitaries coming directly from the Dominican
Republic, and with the knowledge and probably the complicity of the US
Embassy there as well. Because it's important to understand that the
Dominican government does not do anything militarily that the United States
does not allow it to do. The Dominican government is a colonial government,
and nothing else, because they would suffer incredible and punitive economic
sanctions of they bucked the Washington Consensus. This is a context that a
lot of people don't understand when looking at what's going on over there.
None of this could have happened without the complicity of the United
States, without the facilitation by the United States, without the
funding and support of the United States, and the icing on the cake is
the fact that at the last minute, American military personnel, with weapons,
enter the Presidential residence and tell the President - the
democraticaslly elected President of Haiti, elected with 92% of the vote,
that he has to leave. Not that 'we're here top proptect you because there's
paramilitaries marching here coming to get you right now', but that 'the
paramilitaries are on their way: they're going to kill you and your family.
Your option is to stay here and die, or to leave with us on an airplane,
to god knows where'. For Colin Powell and some of the other Administration
Servants to sit there and say that this constitutes a voluntary departure or
not coercion….it defies belief. That's sort of the nutshell version.
Fenton: Describe the current political climate
Most of the country has just been abandoned to the Macoutes (dödsskvadroner
skapade av Papa Doc, min anm,ärkning). This is one anecdote of hundreds.
Completely off of everybody's radar screen there's an incredible atrocity
that is taking place in Haiti right now. People are being killed every single
day, and not just a few. This is really very similar to what happened under
the Cedras-Francois de facto government, except now thaere's not even any
direction to it, it's all over the place. There's no government there at all,
Latortue is a buffoon, he has no control over anything, and in fact he is
caught in a very unenviable position right now of being caught between these
two ruling facitons. These two ruling factions will draw blood against one
another in the not too distant future. People are going to scratch their heads
and say "oh, those crazy Haitians, what are they doing?"
It's the fact [these factions] have antithetical economic interests. When push comes to shove…The thing that put them together, this "coalition" that was developed and supported by the United States Embassy down there, was the intense fear of Haitian popular sovereignty, a fear of the Haitian masses; not because Aristide did establish that kind of popular sovereignty, but the fact that he had the capacity to. The fact that Aristide had established a rapport with the Haitian masses, with the poor, the peasants, the slum dwellers. That's what made him a threat, and that's what made Aristide, regardless of how many times he capitulated to the demands of the Washington Consensus, the IMF, or anyone else, he would never outlive that because he still maintained the capacity to rise these masses. It was the fact that he could do this, that he couldn't escape. Aristide's own government offered elections to the opposition, which I think was a craven act of cowardice. Still, they offered, and the reason the opposition rejected that, even as the US press was reporting that Aristide was so unpopular, is because they knew damn well that Aristide would have won in a landslide, again.
