7-12-05,8:45am
This past week, the Washington Post reported that United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan asked the Bush administration to send troops to Haiti to “reinforce” the 6500-member U.N. Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH).
Annan made the request for American “boots on the ground” to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice at U.N. headquarters in Manhattan on Jun. 28, the Post reported.
Many in the Haitian bourgeoisie have accused the U.N. troops - led and dominated by Brazilian, Argentinian, and Chilean contingents - of being ineffective and not repressive enough against rebellious slums in the capital like Belair and Cité Soleil, where resistance to last year’s coup d’état against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide runs deep.
“We want scarier troops,” one senior U.N. official told the Post.
But Rice had said prior to the meeting with Annan that it would be a “mistake” for the U.S. to buttress its U.N. proxies occupying Haiti, although she offered to encourage Canada and France to do so. Washington is reluctant to commit troops to Haiti because the Pentagon is already facing severe troop shortages for its campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Despite being coy about a U.S. troop deployment, Washington has stepped up its rhetoric against Aristide, whom U.S. Special Forces kidnapped from his home and sent into exile on Feb. 29, 2004. In a Jun. 24 article in the Miami Herald, Roger Noriega, a former aid to arch-conservative senator Jesse Helms and now U.S. assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs, blamed Aristide for “personally stirring the violence” in Haiti.
“We believe that his people are receiving instructions directly from his voice and indirectly through his acolytes that communicate with him personally in South Africa,” Noriega told the Herald. “Aristide and his camp are singularly responsible for most of the violence and for the concerted nature of the violence.”
Noriega also asked the U.N. occupying force to take a more “proactive role” in repressing anti-coup resistance. He asserted that it was “extraordinarily apparent that Aristide and his gangs are playing a central role in generating violence, and trying to sow insecurity.”
He claimed that Aristide had a 15-year “pattern” of using political violence and that this was just “one last stand to terrorize the Haitian people and deny them good government.”
U.S. Ambassador to Haiti James Foley reiterated these themes in his traditional July 4 speech in Haiti. He said that the wave of kidnappings, arson, and other crimes gripping Haiti was the work of “terrorists” who had a “silent political partner participating in an even more illegitimate political project, but basically we know what, and who, it involves.” This was a thinly-veiled allusion to Aristide and his Lavalas Family party (FL).
Foley’s remarks caused certain FL opportunists who have been wheeling and dealing with the putschist government of Prime Minister Gérard Latortue to jump. Former FL Sen. Yvon Feuillé felt compelled to declare that the Lavalas Family is “a political party which does not recognize anybody who uses violence to attain their goal, no matter what sector they belong to.” He called on Haitians to “cohabit and reconcile ourselves so that we can lay the conditions to have elections in the country.” Noting that in the past two months eligible voters have shunned getting electoral cards (less than 4% of eligible voters have registered), he then called on Lavalas members to procure their electoral cards “between the Jul. 15 and Aug. 30' so as to “show the whole world that you have electoral cards.”
Mario Dupuy of the FL’s Communications Commission, the party’s leading council, denounced the call, saying that “Yvon Feuillé has confirmed once again, although I had no doubt about it, that he is an integral part of the of the Feb. 29 coup d’état and that he carries responsibility for the population’s blood that is spilled each day.” Dupuy said that “Feuillé and company” - a reference to confederates like former legislators Gérard Gilles and Rudy Hériveaux - were “magouilleurs” (opportunists) and that “the population already knows that it is the majority; it has demonstrated that by staying home and not participating in the mascarade of accepting the false and poisonous electoral card.”
In recent weeks, the National Popular Party (PPN) and several FL-affiliated popular organizations have been circulating a flyer urging Haitians to shun the “electoral card trap” so as “not to play into the hands of the Feb. 29 kidnappers” (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 23, No. 13, 6/8/2005).
