The SF Chronicle reports today that Aristide agrees to peace plan, sharing power with political opponents.
The United States blames Aristide's government for the crisis, saying it ignored mounting problems and did not halt police corruption, act on promises to negotiate with the opposition and end growing civil disorder.
Haiti's government and opposition leaders have been unable to agree on a prime minister since flawed legislative elections in 2000 were swept by Aristide's Lavalas Party.
Aristide, who won Haiti's first free elections in a landslide in 1990, has lost support since his re-election. Haiti's chronic misery has deepened since international donors froze aid.
The president, a former priest, has responded to growing opposition by using police and armed gangs to stifle dissent.
The Miami Herald reports:
Haiti's prime minister warned Tuesday of an impending coup and appealed for international help to contend with a bloody uprising that has claimed 57 lives. But the United States and France expressed reluctance to send troops to put down the rebellion.
Aristide, as you might remember was one of the Clinton administration's darlings, and represented the truimph of democracy and humanitarianism in the Western Hemisphere. A column written by Jane Chastain in 2000 mocked that assertion, saying:
When ticking off his foreign policy accomplishments, President Clinton always has listed "restored democracy to Haiti," at or near the top. However, in this year's State of the Union address, which was his longest ever, he failed to mention Haiti for the very first time since he invaded that tiny country on Sept. 19, 1994, to force defrocked priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide back on his people. Was it an oversight?
Thirteen months ago, in the middle of the night, Aristide's handpicked successor, President Rene Preval, dismissed Haiti's legislature. If Mr. Clinton wasn't looking the other way, he certainly did not call attention to the matter. Was the omission of any mention of Haiti in this State of the Union address a Clintonesque way of acknowledging that democracy has died there? If it has, we certainly haven't mourned for this neighbor or conducted a proper burial.
A check of the White House website reveals that "Restored democracy to Haiti" is right up there with:
Achieved victory and ended ethnic cleansing in Kosovo
Building a self-sustaining peace in Bosnia
Pressing for human rights, core labor standards, religious freedom, and the elimination of child labor worldwide
While each of these "achievements" is a subject for debate, this is perhaps the biggest cruelty joke of them all.
Free and fair elections are essential elements for any democracy. This is an election year here in the United States, likewise for the country of Haiti. The election to fill the vacancies in Haiti's legislature is scheduled for March 19, 2000, and another must be held in November or December to replace President Preval, whose term expires Feb. 7, 2001.
It is doubtful Haitians will go to the polls next month. If they do, this election will look a lot like the election of April 6, 1997, which essentially ended Haiti's electoral process. In that election, allies of Aristide intimidated voters and stuffed the ballot boxes while members of the United Nations peacekeeping force looked on in bewilderment. The results were contested, the run-off never held and for nearly three years democracy has been on hold.
The wonders of multilateralism never cease! And Michael Radu, Senior Fellow and Co-Chair, Center on Terrorism and Counterterrorism, at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia reminds us that,
Ten years ago, in September 1994, U.S. troops invaded Haiti under the auspices of restoring democracy, human rights and the rule of law. At the time, the Clinton-conceived operation was hailed by leftists as a model of liberal interventionism, as former Catholic priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide was restored to power and an oppressive military regime was ousted. There was only one problem with this scenario: not only was Aristide vehemently anti-capitalist and (ironically) anti-American, he was every bit as brutal a despot as his predecessors. To make matters worse, the Clinton administration knew beforehand of Aristide's radical pedigree but chose to prop him into the dictator's chair anyway, in one of foreign policy's all-time worst liberal bungles. Today, the disastrous results of Clinton's experiment in Caribbean colonialism are painfully evident.
The undeniable truth is that Aristide is merely the latest incarnation of an uninterrupted chain of murderous tyrants who have ruled Haiti over the centuries. In fact, the country still glorifies the racist Jean-Jacques Dessalines (Emperor Jacques I) as its “founding father.” That a genocidal murderer is the national hero makes perfect sense in Haiti, where Dessalines's assassin, Henri Christophe (King Henry I, 1806-20), is also glorified as a founding father. Although many Haitians excuse Christophe's act as a part of Haiti's independence struggle, it is obvious that Haiti's history of bloodshed, from the lines of succession to the lush fields of the countryside, underpins its current political and social culture.
Even a cursory understanding of Haitian history should have taught the Clinton administration that to speak of “Restoring Freedom” in a country that never had it -- or wanted it -- is ridiculous. The real reason for Clinton's intervention was the invasion of Florida by Haitians, an invasion that has not abated and never will, because of the very fact that, by per capita income, Haitians today have only 60 percent of what they did in 1800. “Restore Freedom”? Freedom has not yet dawned upon Haiti's bloodstained shores. To insist Bill Clinton restored freedom insults the meaning of the word itself.
Ouch.
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