Report exposes U.S. attacks on Haiti

By G. Dunkel

The Bush regime is hypocritically extolling the Jan. 30 Iraqi elections, conducted under the "protection" of 150,000 U.S. troops, as a shining example of democracy. At the same time, it's hiding the substantial U.S. role in organizing and implementing the overthrow of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the democratically elected president of Haiti--not once, but twice.

However, the Bush regime's cover-up is unraveling, thanks to the tenacious and stubborn resistance of the Haitian people. Though faced with vicious repression, they are determined to win their president's return.

The University of Miami law school has released a report by Thomas Griffin, an immigration and civil-rights lawyer from Philadelphia, of an investigation he conducted in Haiti in November. (See full report at www.ijdh.org/CSHRhaitireport.pdf.)

Using very graphic photos, Griffin amply documents the brutal tactics used by the Haitian National Police to suppress dissent. Dead bodies are left in the street. Neighbors and loved ones of the dead are afraid that if they move them the police will kill them, too. People injured by the cops die or suffer at home untreated rather than risk arrest at the hospital.

Police enter poor neighborhoods, where support for Aristide is high, shooting. And they leave shooting.

U.S. diplomats try to blame the human-rights crisis on armed gangs in poor neighborhoods, not on "official abuses and atrocities," according to Griffin's report. This isn't surprising, since the de facto minister of justice, Bernard Gousse, worked for a U.S. government project that inspired and financed groups conspiring to overthrow Aristide.

The tool Washington used in the run-up to the Feb. 29, 2004, "coup-napping" of Aristide was the International Foundation for Electoral Systems. This entity implemented a series of multi-million-dollar projects as a subcontractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The chairperson of IFES is a member of the board of the International Republican Institute, which receives its funding from the National Endowment for Democracy. The NED is infamous for its involvement in military coups and death-squad rampages through the Western Hemisphere.

Beginning in 2001, IFES started pumping money to people like Gousse, whom they called an expert in the Haitian justice system, and Philippe Vixamar, a former law student. The current de facto prime minister and president, Gerard Latortue and Boniface Alexandre, also received grants for their work on "sensitizing" the international community to alleged civil-rights violations under Aristide.

IFES established a formal association of business-sector groups to "provide economic force" to the opposition movement, which became the Group of 184, under the Haitian bourgeois Andy Apaid.

This movement also drew in the student movement at the state university in the capital, Port-au-Prince. Some of the "sensitization" meetings at the university became anti-Aristide rallies. At one rally, anti-Aristide demonstrators broke the legs of the university rector.

In early 2004, armed groups began moving on Port-au-Prince. They first gained control of Gonaives. Gousse went to that city in an ambulance with the markings of the U.S. Agency for Inter na tional Development for "protection." This allowed him to provide aid to the contras.

The political agitation and defamation organized by IFES was one wing of the campaign against Aristide's government. Sometimes it had direct contact with the mercenaries, Macoutes and ex-army officers who supplied the muscle.

IFES began shutting down its programs in the summer of 2004. Its job was done.

The Feb. 29 coup-napping of Aristide was not the first coup the United States organized against him.

The first successful coup against him was staged on Sept. 30, 1991, by the Haitian Army. The army needed a terror agent, so it called upon Toto Constant, a CIA operative in Haiti, to organize one. He called his group FRAPH--the Revolu tionary Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti. It rapidly became one of the more vicious and violent paramilitary groups in Haitian history. In particular, FRAPH led a campaign of terror against women, involving mass rapes.

Constant slipped out of Haiti after Aristide's return to power and managed to enter the United States legally. When he was threatened with deportation, he responded by threatening to go on the TV show "60 Minutes" and expose the CIA's role in Aristide's overthrow. Constant got parole, has lived comfortably in southeast Queens, N.Y., and has had a variety of businesses since the mid-1990s.

On Jan. 14, a process server handed Con stant papers ordering him to appear in court. Three brave Haitian women are suing him for rape and assault done under his direction. Their lawyers, from the Center for Justice and Accountability, hope not only to impoverish Constant but to gain access to documentation of his connection with the U.S. intelligence apparatus.

The women are remaining anonymous for the time being to protect their families still in Haiti. But one of them told Haiti-Progres newspaper, "We hope that the suit will deter at least some of the violence, by sending a message that anyone who commits atrocities will no longer be able to visit or live in the U.S. with impunity."

Reprinted from the Feb. 10, 2005, issue of Workers World newspaper

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