HAITI: A new phase of struggle
The recent Haitian elections, in which the poor majority of Haitians overcame massive fraud and repression to elect a President of their choosing - Rene Preval - open a new phase of Haitians’ 200-year old struggle against racist imperialism.
Haiti won its independence from France in 1804 in a successful slave revolution, and managed to stave off powerful imperial armies of the day. However, France extorted 22 billion dollars from Haiti for the former colonial masters’ loss of their property (which included the freed black slaves), and the US enforced a sixty-year-long embargo against the fledgling nation which helped to establish Haiti as the most impoverished country in the western hemisphere. Haiti remains the most singled out region for US intervention – the most notorious of which was the 1915-1942 occupation which restored a system of virtual slavery and left behind a brutal proxy army employed for years to come by a host of foreign supported dictators.
Haitians rose up again to expel the Nixon-financed dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986, in a grassroots political movement called Lavalas. This movement subsequently swept Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, to power on December 16,1990. However, within nine months, the populist Aristide government was overthrown by a CIAbacked military coup headed by General Raoul Cedras. Over the next few years, brutal oppression and rampant human rights violations by the Haitian army and a CIA-backed death squad resulted in the death of 4000-5000 Haitians.
The military junta also brought in large profits for nearly 60 multinationals, including Canadian businesses that increased their imports from Haiti during the ruthless Cedras years. International outrage and the flood of Haitian refugees seeking asylum in the US put enough pressure on the Clinton and Chretien administrations to reinstate Aristide on September 19, 1994. However, the grassroots movements had been crushed, with many of Aristide’s supporters killed or “disappeared.” The President’s hands were now tightly bound by the neo-liberal regulations that the US imposed as a condition of his return. Nevertheless, Aristide completed his term, disbanding the notorious Haitian army and doubling the minimum wage. In early 1996, the first democratic transfer of power in Haiti’s history took place with the election of Rene Garcia Preval, Aristide’s former Prime Minister.
DESTABILIZATION OF HAITIAN DEMOCRACY
Constitutional law permitted Arisitide to run again in the 2000 elections, and he won with a 91% majority. Almost immediately the Haitian elite, working with the elite in the US, France and Canada, conspired to undermine the elected government. An economic embargo was immediately placed against the newly formed government, which withheld crucial funds for education, housing and water sanitation and resulted in untold suffering.
At the same time, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) funneled aid to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) – the very same NGOs that were tied to companies and wealthy individuals working in Haiti to destabilize the Aristide government. The role of this destabilization was to remove Aristide from power and systematically eliminate his huge political support to pave the way for the elite in the next election.
On January 31, 2003, the Canadian government hosted a round table secret meeting at Meech Lake code-named “the Ottawa initiative on Haiti”. As Anthony Fenton pointed out recently in an article in Znet, invitees included high-level North American, European and Latin American diplomats such as OAS assistant secretary of state Luigi Einaudi, who had stated only weeks before that: “the real problem with Haiti is that the international community is so screwed up that they’re actually letting Haitians run the place.” Not a single Haitian representative was present. The conclusion was that Aristide had to go, the notorious Haitian army was to be re-banded and Haiti was to become a Kosovo-like protectorate of the United Nations. Furthermore, it was the Canadian Responsibility to Protect Document (the racist doctrine that legitimizes and legalizes imperial interventions under the guise of humanitarian assistance to “failed states”) that was used to sanction the entire operation.
CANADA AND THE 2004 COUP
As Haitians celebrated the bi-centennial of their freedom from colonial domination, another terror group with links to the US government, stationed in the Dominican Republic, began a slow and murderous march towards Port-au-Prince—armed with M-16s loaded with Canadian bullets. The armed group failed to capture the capital, however US Marines completed the coup by kidnapping Aristide and depositing him in the Central Republic of Africa while the Canadian Joint Task Force 2 secured the Haitian airport.
What followed was the dismantling of the entire government structure (some 7000 elected officials) and the foreign installation of the illegal government of Gerard LaTortue - a government that CARICOM, 52 nations of the African Union, the Black Caucus of the American Congress, Cuba and Venezuela all refused to recognize. Canada, however, helped draft the World Bank’s neo-liberal plan for the LaTortue administration which included a reduction of the minimum wage and privatization of state owned companies and institutions. The document, known as the Interim Cooperation Framework, for which Canada donated 147 million dollar, stated that: “The transition period… provide[s] a window of opportunity for implementing economic governance reforms…that may be hard for a future government to undo.”
Canada also helped to re-integrate the much-reviled former death squad soldiers from the disbanded Haitian Armed Forces into the Haitian National Police (HNP), and with the assistance of 100 RCMP officers, 25 police experts continue to train the HNP. In the aftermath of the coup, masked HNP officers conducted almost daily raids in the slums, assassinating and illegally arresting Aristide supporters.
The coup has meant huge profits for Canada’s business elite. Canadian corporations have doubled imports from Haiti under the coup government. Gildan Activewear has recorded record profits; as its CEO, Glen Chamandy, proudly declared “…(Gildan’s) labor costs in countries such as Haiti are actually cheaper than in China….” The ubiquitous SNC Lavalin is involved in numerous projects in Haiti. Canadian mining companies, including KWG and St. Genevieve Resources have negotiated and expanded contracts worth millions of dollars with the interim government. Tecsult Inc., a Canadian engineering firm, obtained $ 3.5 million in contracts and Canadian engineering and construction firm Genivar provided support structures for Haiti’s corrupt justice system for a cost of 5 million dollars. For Haiti’s poor majority, the coup has meant 10,000 dead, 20,000 in exile, 100,000 internal refugees, over 1000 political prisoners, and a suffering that cannot be quantified.
THE 2006 HAITIAN ELECTIONS
While heralded as the best Haitian election ever by Canada’s Chief Elections Officer Jean Pierre Kingsley, the 2006 elections were held as over 1000 political prisoners languished in jail (over 90 percent of them without charges), Haiti’s elected President remained in exile, and repression continued in the slums. In addition, the election’s design made voting inaccessible for many Haitians in rural areas and in urban slums. The number of voting stations had been reduced from almost 12, 000 in the last Haitian election in 2000 to just over 800, and voting stations were completely eliminated in Haiti’s largest slum, Cite Soleil.
Despite these abysmal conditions, a massive popular mobilization led to over 60 percent of registered voters turning out to cast ballots in the first round of the elections on February 7. From the time of the first announcement of election results, it was clear that Preval had won over fifty percent of the vote. However, blatant fraud by the Haitian provisional electoral council (CEP), an institution created by the illegal LaTortue regime, sought to thwart Preval’s victory.
Tens of thousands of unmarked ballots mysteriously turned up in the CEP’s figures, inflating the total figure of votes, and the CEP counted them against Preval’s percentage of the total vote. Thousands of burned ballots, many of them marked for Preval, were discovered in a dump in a Port-au-Prince shantytown. It was only as a result of massive popular protests that the CEP finally recognized Preval’s victory as being 51.15 percent in what it termed a “political compromise.”
The run-off election on April 21, which determined the composition of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, saw a much smaller turnout, arguably as a consequence of ongoing political repression that made it more difficult for candidates to campaign. European Union observers estimated that no more than 15 percent of the population participated. In addition, Preval’s party Lespwa (which means “Hope” in Creole) did not secure a majority in either the Senate or the Chamber of Deputies, which means that Preval will have to form a coalition government.
In light of the US and Canadian governments’ unrelenting push to straightjacket Haiti into a neoliberal model, longtime Haiti democracy activist Patrick Elie, in a recent interview in the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center, argues that there will be a great need for grassroots organizations in Haiti to pressure Preval to represent the interests of the poor who elected him. Also critical will be the additional questions of whether grassroots mobilization in Haiti will succeed, and whether the main actors that undermined Haiti’s last elected government—such as the Canadian government—will heed the calls of Haitian activists such as Elie to “work with the Haitian people and its elected leadership, rather than try, once again, to disrupt the country’s progress.”
With files from Znet, Counterpunch, The Independent and the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center.
Kabir Joshi is an activist with Toronto Haiti Action Committee and the Students Against Imperialist Network as well as community radio talk show host. Isabel Macdonald is a member of the Toronto Haiti Action Committee and a graduate student at York University.
