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Don't
Fall for Washington's Spin on Haiti
By
Jeffrey Sachs
The crisis in Haiti is another case of brazen US
manipulation of a small, impoverished country. Much of the media
portrayed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide 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 on
Sunday at the insistence of the US and France. Unfortunately,
this is a very distorted view.
President George Bush's foreign policy team came into office
intent on toppling Mr Aristide, and their efforts were
apparently consummated on Sunday. Mr Aristide was 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
forcing the withdrawal of US troops from Haiti soon afterwards,
well before the situation in the country could be stabilised. In
terms of help to rebuild Haiti, the US Marines left behind about
8 miles of paved roads in Port-au-Prince and essentially little
else.
In the meantime, the so-called "opposition," a
coterie of rich Haitians linked to the preceding Duvalier
regime, former (and perhaps current) CIA operatives and
decommissioned officers of the brutal Duvalier army disbanded by
Mr Aristide, worked Washington political circles to lobby
against him.
In 2000, Haiti ran parliamentary and then presidential
elections, unprecedented in their scope. The parliamentary
elections went off adequately, although not perfectly. 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.
The US media now reports that those elections were
"boycotted by the opposition," and hence not
legitimate, but this is a cruel joke to those who know Haiti. In
fact, Haiti's voters elected Mr Aristide in late 2000 with an
overwhelming mandate and the opposition, such as it was, ducked
the elections. Duvalier thugs hardly constituted a winning
ticket and as a result, they did not even try. Nor did they have
to.
Mr Aristide's foes in Haiti benefited from tight links with
the incoming Bush team; and thereby followed one of the great
recent scandals of US foreign policy. The Bush team told Mr
Aristide it would freeze all aid unless he agreed with the
opposition over new elections for the contested Senate seats,
among other political demands. The wrangling led to the freezing
of $500m in emergency humanitarian aid from the US, the World
Bank and other multilateral organisations.
The tragedy, or joke, is that Mr Aristide had agreed to
compromise, but the opposition simply came up with one excuse
after another - it was never the right time to hold new
elections, as proposed by Mr Aristide, because of
"security" problems, they said. Whatever the pretext,
the US maintained its aid freeze and Haiti's economy, cut off
from bilateral and multilateral financing, went into a tailspin.
All this is now 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 and the opposition
balked, saying instead that the president had to leave. US
Secretary of State Colin Powell reportedly pressed opposition
leaders to accept a compromise but they refused again. But
rather than defending Mr Aristide and dealing with opposition
intransigence, the White House announced the president should
step down.
The ease with which another Latin American democracy
crumbled is stunning. What, though, has been the role of US
intelligence agencies among the anti-Aristide rebels? How much
money went from US-funded institutions and government agencies
to help the opposition. And why did the White House abandon the
Caribbean compromise proposal it had 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 pretenses, with
few questions asked in the aftermath.
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 Sunday's events
were an illegal power grab. Second, the US should call on the
opposition, which is largely a US construct, to stop all
violence, immediately and unconditionally. Third, after years of
literally starving the people of Haiti, the long-promised and
long-frozen aid flows of $500m should start immediately. These
steps would rescue a dying democracy and at least help avert a
possible bloodbath.
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The writer is director of the Earth Institute at Columbia
University
Source:
Financial
Times, 29 February 2004
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The Impact of the
Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World
Reviewed by Mimi Sheller
The slave revolution
that two hundred years ago created the state of Haiti
alarmed and excited public opinion on both sides of the
Atlantic. Its repercussions ranged from the world commodity
markets to the imagination of poets, from the council
chambers of the great powers to slave quarters in Virginia
and Brazil and most points in between. Sharing attention
with such tumultuous events as the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic War, Haiti's fifteen-year struggle for racial
equality, slave emancipation, and colonial independence
challenged notions about racial hierarchy that were gaining
legitimacy in an Atlantic world dominated by Europeans and
the slave trade. The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the
Atlantic World explores the multifarious influence—from
economic to ideological to psychological—that a revolt on a
small Caribbean island had on the continents surrounding it.
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Fifteen international scholars,
including eminent historians David Brion Davis, Seymour Drescher, and
Robin Blackburn, explicate such diverse ramifications as the spawning of
slave resistance and the stimulation of slavery's expansion, the opening
of economic frontiers, and the formation of black and white diasporas.
Seeking to disentangle the effects of the Haitian Revolutionfrom those
of the French Revolution, they demonstrate that its impact was
ambiguous, complex, and contradictory.—Publisher,
University of South Carolina
Press
David P. Geggus is a
professor of history at the University of Florida in Gainesville and a
former Guggenheim and National Humanities Center fellow. He has
published extensively on the history of slavery and the Caribbean, with
a particular focus on the Haitian Revolution. He is the author of
Slavery, War and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue,
1793–1798 and an editor of
A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean.
Geggus lives in Gainesville.
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Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804
A Brief History with Documents
By Laurent
Dubois and John D. Garrigus
This is the
most succinct, convenient and accurate history of
the Haitian Revolution currently available. It fills
a significant gap in the historiography between
monographs and general histories on one side and
novels and creative literature on the other. The
authors have produced an intelligent and highly
useful collection of documents, many virtually
inaccessible, and conveniently translated them for
the English-speaking audience. Their ability to
contextualize the events of the revolution briefly
is simply exemplary.' - Franklin Knight, Johns
Hopkins University, USA 'This is the most amazing
document collection I have ever read. It is
emotionally gripping, intellectually stimulating,
morally provocative, action-packed and full of
points of comparison to histories of slavery and
freedom everywhere. It has a terrific narrative flow
and inherent pathos. . . .This is a wonderful
achievement for which all sorts of teachers will be
most grateful.—Evan
Haefeli, Tufts University |
This volume details the
first slave rebellion to have a successful outcome, leading to
the establishment of Haiti as a free black republic and paving
the way for the emancipation of slaves in the rest of the French
Empire and the world. Incited by the French Revolution, the
enslaved inhabitants of the French Caribbean began a series of
revolts, and in 1791 plantation workers in Haiti, then known as
Saint-Domingue, overwhelmed their planter owners and began to
take control of the island. They achieved emancipation in 1794,
and after successfully opposing Napoleonic forces eight years
later, emerged as part of an independent nation in 1804. A broad
selection of documents, all newly translated by the authors, is
contextualized by a thorough introduction considering the very
latest scholarship. Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus clarify
for students the complex political, economic, and racial issues
surrounding the revolution and its reverberations worldwide.
Useful pedagogical tools include maps, illustrations, a
chronology, and a selected bibliography.—Publisher,
Bedford/St. Martin's
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update 6 May 2010 |
