Aristide accuses America of coup

Oceans11 · Mar 1, 2004

Delusional, but amusing.

All the US is worried about is the place going communist, and the standard of living increasing on the back of that.
(unless the Haitians actually ENJOY living in tin shacks)

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Haiti's exiled president Jean-Bertrand Aristide has accused the US of forcing him out of office in a "coup d'etat".
Mr Aristide was flown out of the country on Sunday as rebels closed in on the capital Port-au-Prince.

His comments came after the US had strongly denied claims that the president was kidnapped and forced to leave Haiti by its forces.

As rebels paraded through the capital, Haiti's neighbours voiced concern at the ousting of an elected leader.

I was told that to avoid bloodshed I'd better leave

Jean-Bertrand Aristide

Mr Aristide, along with his wife and children, arrived in the Central African Republic on Monday and are expected to remain in the country for a few days before attempting to move to another destination - thought to be South Africa - to seek political asylum.

The ousted president told CNN television: "I was told that to avoid bloodshed I'd better leave."

The rebel victory has raised human rights concerns
Crowds numbering thousands in Port-au-Prince greeted the rebels on Monday with cries of "freedom" and the name of their leader, Guy Phillipe, as they moved through the city.

But there were reports, too, of reprisals with one reporter spotting four bodies of people shot in the back of the head with their hands tied behind their backs.

An advance guard of American marines and French soldiers has arrived at Port-au-Prince to try to restore order.

The troops are part of an international force authorised by the United Nations.

'Absurd'

An American friend of the deposed Haitian leader, Randall Robinson, told CNN that Mr Aristide had told him he had been abducted from his home by about 20 US soldiers in full battle gear and put on a plane.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell stressed that Mr Aristide had been accompanied into exile by his own security agents and said such claims were "absurd".

Officials in the CAR have said the deposed leader is a "free man" in their country.

MULTINATIONAL FORCE

US Marines
Canadian special forces
French troops
French police
More countries expected to join later

Q&A: Haiti crisis

Colin Granderson, the secretary-general of the Caribbean community, Caricom, told the BBC that its members were very unhappy about the developments in Haiti - which had come as it tried to negotiate a power-sharing deal.

Speaking ahead of a Caricom summit on Tuesday in Jamaica, Mr Granderson said the removal of Mr Aristide had set a dangerous precedent.

Haiti, he added, had already suffered so many coups and it might have been best to avoid another.

The UN has announced it is sending an assessment team into Haiti within days to plan its future peacekeeping operations there.

Spokesmen for the advance guard of US Marines and French soldiers now on the ground reported no resistance to their deployment.

The US has pledged 1,500 to 2,000 troops to serve in the force, which is expected to number less than 5,000.

Canadian special forces are also at Port-au-Prince airport, where they have been helping Canadian nationals who wish to leave, and Chile is to dispatch 120 special force commandos.

Violent past

The BBC's Stephen Gibbs, in Port-au-Prince, says a carnival atmosphere greeted the rebels' arrival with Mr Philippe, a former army officer, announcing he wanted to work with the local police force and the international troops to restore security.

But mingling with the rebel leaders in their hour of triumph was at least one figure from Haiti's recent violent past, Louis-Jodel Chamblain - a convicted killer who led an army death squad in Haiti in the early 1990s.

The international human rights agency Amnesty International called on Monday for Chamblain to be arrested by peacekeepers.

The US also voiced concern, with Mr Powell remarking that "some of these individuals, [Washington] would not want to see re-enter civil society in Haiti because of their past records".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3524273.stm

PatPatriot · Mar 1, 2004

Obviousley,Aristade inhaled.

xpanda · Mar 2, 2004

Listening to Aristide's vocal address last night on the news, I was positively chilled. Systematically it seems, and one by one, the US is plucking leaders whose 'time has come' out of their roles. If this is true (and I would hardly be surprised) you kinda get the impression that the US leadership thinks of itself as God, if its motivation weren't so self-centred.

xpanda · Mar 2, 2004

From February 26:

Haiti's Lawyer: US Is Arming Anti-Aristide Paramilitaries, Calls For UN Peacekeepers

The US lawyer representing the government of Haiti charged today that the US government is directly involved in a military coup attempt against the country's democratically elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Ira Kurzban, the Miami-based attorney who has served as General Counsel to the Haitian government since 1991, said that the paramilitaries fighting to overthrow Aristide are being backed by Washington.

"I believe that this is a group that is armed by, trained by, and employed by the intelligence services of the United States," Kurzban told the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!. "This is clearly a military operation, and it's a military coup."

"There's enough indications from our point of view, at least from my point of view, that the United States certainly knew what was coming about two weeks before this military operation started," Kurzban said. " The United States made contingency plans for Guantanamo."

If a direct US connection is proven, it will mark the second time in just over a decade that Washington has been involved in a coup in Haiti.

Several of the paramilitary leaders now rampaging Haiti are men who were at the forefront of the US-backed campaign of terror during the 1991-94 coup against Aristide. Among the paramilitary figures now leading the current insurrection is Louis Jodel Chamblain, the former number 2 man in the FRAPH paramilitary death squad.

Chamblain was convicted and sentenced in absentia to hard-labor for life in trials for the April 23, 1994 massacre in the pro-democracy region of Raboteau and the September 11, 1993 assassination of democracy-activist Antoine Izméry. Chamblain recently arrived in Gonaives with about 25 other commandos based in the Dominican Republic, where Chamblain has been living since 1994. They were well equipped with rifles, camouflage uniforms, and all-terrain vehicles.

Among the victims of FRAPH under Chamblain's leadership was Haitian Justice Minister Guy Malary. He was ambushed and machine-gunned to death with his bodyguard and a driver on Oct. 14, 1993. According to an October 28, 1993 CIA Intelligence Memorandum obtained by the Center for Constitutional Rights "FRAPH members Jodel Chamblain, Emmanuel Constant, and Gabriel Douzable met with an unidentified military officer on the morning of 14 October to discuss plans to kill Malary." Emmanuel "Toto" Constant, was the founder of FRAPH.

An October 1994 article by journalist Allan Nairn in The Nation magazine quoted Constant as saying that he was contacted by a US Military officer named Col. Patrick Collins, who served as defense attaché at the United States Embassy in Port-au-Prince. Constant says Collins pressed him to set up a group to "balance the Aristide movement" and do "intelligence" work against it. Constant admitted that, at the time, he was working with CIA operatives in Haiti. Constant is now residing freely in the US. He is reportedly living in Queens, NY. At the time, James Woolsey was head of the CIA.

Another figure to recently reemerge is Guy Philippe, a former Haitian police chief who fled Haiti in October 2000 after authorities discovered him plotting a coup with a group of other police chiefs. All of the men were trained in Ecuador by US Special Forces during the 1991-1994 coup. Since that time, the Haitian government has accused Philippe of master-minding deadly attacks on the Police Academy and the National Palace in July and December 2001, as well as hit-and-run raids against police stations on Haiti's Central Plateau over the following two years.

Kurzban also points to the presence of another FRAPH veteran, Jean Tatun. Along with Chamblain, Tatun was convicted of gross violations of human rights and murder in the Raboteau massacre.

"These people came through the Dominican border after the United States had provided 20,000 M-16's to the Dominican army," says Kurzban. "I believe that the United States clearly knew about it before, and that given the fact of the history of these people, [Washington is] probably very, very deeply involved, and I think Congress needs to seriously look at what the involvement of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency has been in this operation. Because it is a military operation. It's not a rag-tag group of liberators, as has often been put in the press in the last week or two."

Kurzban says he has hired military analysts to review photos of the weapons being used by the paramilitary groups. He says that contrary to reports in the media that the armed groups are using weapons originally distributed by Aristide, the gangs are using highly sophisticated and powerful weapons; weapons that far out-gun Aristide's 3,000 member National Police force.

"I don't think that there's any question about the fact that the weapons that they have did not come from Haiti," says Kurzban. "They're organized as a military commando strike force that's going from city to city."

Kurzban says that among the weapons being used by the paramilitaries are: M-16's, M-60's, armor piercing weapons and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. "They have weapons to shoot down the one helicopter that the government has," he said. "They have acted as a pretty tight-knit commando unit."

Chamblain and other paramilitary leaders have said they will march on the capital, Port-au-Prince within two weeks. The US has put forth a proposal, being referred to as a peace plan, that many viewed as favorable to Aristide's opponents. Aristide accepted the plan, but the opposition rejected it. Washington's point man on the crisis is Roger Noriega, Undersecretary of State for Western Hemispheric Affairs.

"I think Noriega has been an Aristide hater for over a decade," says Kurzban, adding that he believes Noriega allowed the opposition to delay their response to the plan to allow the paramilitaries to capture more territory. "My reaction was they're just giving them more time so they can take over more, that the military wing of the opposition can take over more ground in Haiti and create a fate accompli," Kurzban said. "Indeed, as soon as they said, 'we need an extra day,' I predicted, unfortunately, and correctly, that they would go into Cap Haitian (Haiti's 2nd largest city) and indeed the next morning they did."

The leader of the "opposition" is an American citizen named Andy Apaid. He was born in New York. Haitian law does not allow dual-nationality and he has not renounced his US citizenship. In a recent statement, Congressmember Maxine Waters blasted Apaid and his opposition front, saying she believes "Apaid is attempting to instigate a bloodbath in Haiti and then blame the government for the resulting disaster in the belief that the United States will aid the so-called protestors against President Aristide and his government."

"We have the leader of the opposition, who Mr. Noriega is negotiating with, who Secretary Powell calls and who tells Secretary Powell, you know, 'we need a couple more days' and Secretary Powell says 'that's fine,'" says Kurzban. "I mean, there's some kind of theater of the absurd going on with this opposition where it's led by an American citizen, where they're just clearly stalling for time until they can get more ground covered in Haiti through their military wing, and the United States and Noriega, with a wink and nod, is kind of letting them do that."

Kurzban says that because Aristide's opponents rejected Washington's plan, "the next step clearly is to send in some kind of UN peacekeeping force immediately."

"The question is," says Kurzban. "Will the international community stand by and allow a democracy in this hemisphere to be terminated by a brutal military coup of persons who have a very, very sordid history of gross violations of human rights?"

Democracy Now! (www.democracynow.org) is a nationally-syndicated radio and TV program broadcast on Pacifica Radio, NPR, community TV stations and Free Speech TV Channel 9415 of the DishNetwork. Mike Burke and Sharif Abdel Kouddous contributed to this report. mail@democracynow.org.

-- Jeremy Scahill

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honolulu · Mar 2, 2004

I don't think he is delusional. Us put him there and he failed so they took him out since Haitins were willing to burn the country to the ground rather than stay under his rule. JMO

~Falco~ · Mar 2, 2004

So we invaded another country, big deal, Hopefully we can get something good out of this one. We screwed up the oil spoils with Irac the politicians arent sharing any with us and the price of gas is way up.

What does Haiti have that we could use? Yo Ho, Yo Ho, a Pirates life for me. Pillage and Plunder. U.S. kicks ass. I'm signing up at the recruting office as we speak. Hear you can have all the free pussy you want when you invade a country.