August 14, 2004

CBC's "The Current" Discusses Canada's Coup-Plotting in Haiti

What do you get when you combine "public" radio, a mainstream reporter, a former ambassador, a political activist, and a modern day imperialist?

An interesting cocktail of reality [see Michel Vastel, Jean Saint-Vil, and Lionel Hurst], versus neo-imperial doublespeak [see James Morrell]. Notice how Morrell, of the Haiti Democracy[as in, apartheid] Project confronted with the reality of Canadian coup-plotting against Haiti, attempts to squirm his way out of questions, ducking and deflecting the whole way, peppering his answers with well-worn lies and disinformation.

Why did CBC have a Washington-based organization on the show instead of a Canadian one anyway?

Word has it that the show was supposed to have Saint-Vil and Morrell debating one another. When Morrell realised that *reality* was going to be discussed, he demanded that they structure the show differently, so that he wouldn't have to confront Saint-Vil, following the typical modus operandi [see: cowardice] of coup planners and their apologists.

CBC’s "The Current", Broadcast August 6, 2004.

Adrian Harewood: Last March Canada and other countries sent peacekeepers to Haiti, after President Jean Bertrand Aristide was forced into exile. Now, as some call for Aristide’s return, Canada is leaving Haiti…By this time next week Canada’s peacekeepers will be home from Haiti. The past five months, Canadian peacekeepers have been trying to restore stability to the troubled Caribbean nation. They’ve been part of a United States led contingent that went to Haiti after former Pres. JBA was forced out of the country in February amid mounting violence and opposition. This was the second time Canada has sent its armed forces to help Haiti. In fact, Ottawa prides itself on what it sees as a long history of support for the poorest nation in the hemisphere.

But there are some people who paint a slightly different picture of Canada’s involvement. Michel Vastel is a Quebec journalist who rights for Le Soleil and L’Actualite. Last year he reported on a meeting convened by Quebec MP Denis Paradis, just a year before Aristide left Haiti. We asked him to tell us about that story…

Michel Vastel: Denis Paradis was Secretary of State for Latin America [Africa, and La Francophonie] at the time and had been in Haiti in the year 2000. And he was shocked by the state of the people over there, and he decided, he almost made it a personal goal about the problem of Haiti. Denis Paradis wanted to have a brainstorming session with the players in Haiti: France, La Francophonie, the European Union, the [U.S.] Secretary of State sent two what they call “high ranking officials”.

And, for Latin America there was the Minister of Foreign Affairs for El Salvador, and the idea was to just search for new ideas. So the meeting took place at the Meech Lake resort - you know the place - the last week of January 2003. It lasted three days over an extended weekend. Once again, all information that I’m giving you is coming from Paradis and from the French government. There was a consensus that ‘Aristide should go.’ But, how do you do that? This is the French government…who suggested there should be a “trusteeship” like there was in Kosovo. That was not an intervention, they said, that was their responsibility – all these countries – to protect. When the story was published, the government of Haiti, Aristide actually, used it to say, ‘you see, these colonialists, once again they want to intervene, and then Haiti kept on protesting because they were not invited. You know, that was a meeting on Haiti, most everybody was there but not Haiti. The contribution of Canada to this, if I may say, was that it broadened the interest of the world over Haiti.

Harewood: That was Quebec journalist Michel Vastel who writes for Le Soleil and L’Actualite. To talk about what role exactly Canada has played in Haiti, I’m now joined by Jean Saint-Vil. He’s a Haitian community activist based in Ottawa. Good morning.

Jean Saint-Vil: Good morning, sir.

Harewood: What do you think about Michel Vastel’s account?

Saint-Vil: I think it’s one hundred per cent accurate, but for Canadian taxpayers it’s actually outrageous.

Harewood: Why is it outrageous?

Saint-Vil: Because it means that our government was meeting with the US, France, to overthrow a democratically elected government under the guise of some moral responsibility to choose for the people of Haiti when they should change regimes.

Harewood: Denis Paradis in his defense, might suggest that he was looking out for the interests of the Haitian people.

Saint-Vil: Yes, and I would ask Denis Paradis would he like, for example, the government of South Africa to decide when Canadians should change Prime Ministers? As you know there’s a lot of corruption that has been seen in the current Canadian government. Is that a reason to have a foreign government to decide for us that the current Liberal government should go?

Harewood: You seem to be suggesting that this meeting was about a planned coup. Is that what it was, about planning a coup in Haiti?

Saint-Vil: Well, the title of Mr. Vastel’s article was that ‘Aristide must go, and its not the Haitian opposition asking for it but foreign ministers of a number of countries at the invitation of Canada’. I don’t see how much clearer it should be; you heard Mr. Vastel exactly telling you that the consensus at that meeting was that Aristide must go. That is, the President elected by the overwhelming majority of the people of Haiti. So to me the conclusion was that the adults, that is the people who had met, had decided for the children of Haiti that they should change their government. For instance, Mr. Vastel said that ‘the meeting brought the world to think more about Haiti’. I would make a correction to that. It was not ‘the world’; the countries that were there were identified. As you know within the OAS, there has been a specific cleavage that took place between such countries as Canada and the US, the EU….and the countries (such as Venezuela and other Caribbean countries) that were all against this regime change that had been in the planning, as indicated by Mr. Vastel for many years now .

Harewood: What role exactly do you think Canada played in leading up to Aristide’s leaving Haiti.

Saint-Vil: Well, Canada actually was the head of the OAS mission in Haiti. Mr. David Lee, who is Canadian, was the head of the OAS mission in Haiti, and the OAS was the key organization that was leading the charge on the diplomatic front. And what I mean by the charge is that Haiti was under strict pressure from the US since even before the election of Jean Bertrand Aristide, to comply with certain things giving more and more power to the so-called Haitian opposition. David Lee, as part of the OAS, made many statements that clearly showed that the preference was that the government of Haiti would share the power that the Haitian people had entrusted into the Aristide government with the opposition. The problem was that within the opposition it wasn’t clear where the leadership would come from…Even months after the overthrow of Aristide, there is no emergence of any political leader that seems credible, because the population has been totally evicted from the discussion.

Harewood: Who are these opposition forces. Who are they? We heard much about them before the coup…leading up to Aristide’s removal…Who is backing them?

Saint-Vil: Ok. They’re the guys who are playing politics like former Aristide allies who now want to become President, like Evans Paul. But these are minor players. The real players are the people who control Haiti’s economy, for the last 200 years…such as Andy Apaid. The founder of Tele-Haiti, and the owner of up to 15 sweatshops in Haiti. OK, where companies from Canada, the US, make clothing in Haiti paying people a dollar a day. Apaid is one of the people that owns so many of these…he became all of the sudden a leader of the opposition group called Group of 184. there are other people around him that were less visible, but it’s really this minority of business owners in Haiti that are mostly involved in either sweatshops or in the import of goods from outside of Haiti, specifically from the Deominican Republic and the United States.

Harewood: Why was Aristide considered to be such an obstacle to these people? And what kind of support were Canada and the US giving to these groups before Aristide left the country?

Saint-Vil: In terms of Aristide, he was at odds with these people from the time he was elected. Don’t forget that this is the second coup against him. When he was elected in 1991, he made the same kind of mistakes: he decided that he wanted to raise the minimum wage, he wanted asked the small business elite in Haiti to pay taxes. He wanted also to keep the national enterprises as State enterprises, such as the telephone company, electricity , the ports, etc. When the first coup took place in 1991, as part of the negotiation for his return, the US, France, and Canada, insisted that as conditions to his return, he had to agree to this neoliberal plan. As you can see right now, Haiti is completely dependent on US rice, and rice is a main staple. A lot of the policies that have been in application in the last 10 years have made Haiti completely dependent on foreign aid that is funneled through the small elite in Haiti that controls the import-export as well as the sweatshops. So this is basically what the economy of Haiti is dependent on now.

Harewood: What do you think about Ottawa’s decision to send peacekeepers to Haiti?

Saint-Vil: That’s the odd thing. People see that Canada has decided to send peacekeepers. According to RDI, the night of Feb. 29th there was a report on RDI that Canadian soldiers had occupied the airport in Port au Prince. And minutes later there was a report saying ‘No, no, no, Canadian soldiers did not occupy the airport, but we have sent Canadian soldiers to help the Canadian citizens who want to leave Haiti. Later on we would learn it was that same evening that President Aristide was being taken to the airport, taken out. There are a lot of people and I am one of them who don’t believe that Canada only went in there after the coup, but rather went in there as part of the effort to 1] to remove Jean Bertrand Aristide, who was identified as ‘the problem’ by the people who met here in Ottawa at the invitation of Denis Paradis. And 2] to protect that small elite because they knew that population would have retribution against that elite, who were financing the coup.

Harewood: Jean Saint-Vil, thank you very much…

Not everyone shares these concerns, I’m joined by the Executive Director of the HDP; he’s in Washington, D.C.

Harewood: Some people are making a lot of this meeting that took place in Ottawa…

Morrell: “US policy which Canada followed was to cling to Aristide virtually to the end, because he seemed to promise stability, and that’s the goal of US policy in Haiti. At that meeting at Meech Lake, no real change was made in that perspective, but I think one Canadian official mused about the eventual need to have UN peacekeeping in Haiti. It didn’t change the fact that the policy was to go with Aristide. In the very last days before his, um, departure, they were still trying to get the Haitian democratic sector to agree to have Aristide finish out his term.

Harewood: how do you explain a group of countries getting together to talk about Haiti’s future without inviting Haiti to the meeting?

Morrell: Um, I, I don’t know the particular protocol in that case, but countries meet all the time.

Harewood: Well, how would you describe Canada’s interests in Haiti then?

Morrell: Canada had supported the last peacekeeping mission in Haiti, with francophone police, and this time they went in with the US. The effect of the military side this time was basically to keep the rebels – former army men and the like –from taking over the palace after Aristide left.

Harewood: What about the US? What are its interests in Haiti?

Morrell: Its basic interest is stability, to keep the lid on the place, to keep the refugees from coming.

Harewood: So what do you think were Canadian and American policies toward Aristide before he fled the country?

Morrell: In the beginning he was elected in 1990 by the vast majority and so they hoped that this would bring stability. So they restored him with 22,000 American troops and Canadian troops, in 1994, in hopes that we’ll have a constitutional regime supported by the people.

Harewood:: So you’re saying he was democratically-elected?

Morrell: He was the first time, but unfortunately, Haiti has a long history of presidential despotism and Aristide was not the man to break from this, and in the late 90’s he went back to the pattern of human rights violations and corruption. The second time around he was not democratically elected; those elections were fraudulent.

Harewood: But some of his supporters say that there observers who witnessed the elections and that 60% of the total population participated.

Morrell: I was one of those observers for the OAS, and I saw those 60 per cent in our area voting; that was very impressive. But then there was cheating in the counting of the votes, and a million votes that went to the non-Aristiders were thrown out so that he could get the whole legislature.

Harewood: Did Jean Bertrand Aristide leave from Haiti voluntarily or was he pushed out?

Morrell: He was pushed out by the Haitians, not by the foreigners. As I say, US policy was to stick with him almost until the last day. But there was an uprising of the civil society which was later joined by some of his own former thugs and rather than stay in the Palace and be shot, which they would have done, he asked the United States to fly him out of there, which it did.

Harewood: How successful do you think the MNF mission has been done to stabilize Haiti?

Morrell: Its too early to tell because we waited so long to do this, the problems of Haiti have only grown worse: guns in many peoples hands, the society has deteriorated, you’ve got drug trafficking, you have many problems, so its too early to tell.

Harewood: What do you think the international community will do next when it come to Haiti?

Morrell: Well, the most important thing is to have a free and fair election that can produce a regime that is halfway accepted by the Haitians themselves. And under this aegis you can begin, um, economic development, including by the private sector, that our previous, um, speaker questioned, I don’t see any other basis for it unfortunately.

Harewood: Are you suggesting that the Haitian people are better off with the peacekeeping forces that have been sent there?

Morrell: Well, definitely, otherwise I’m afraid that if you had the other group take over, which they would have without these peacekeepers, the whole cycle would begin again.

Harewood:Thank you

Morrell:It’s been a pleasure.

Harewood:In 1989 US invaded Panama, 1983 Grenada. It’s the latest intervention in Haiti that has Caribbean countries talking about sovereignty issues…to talk about regional alliances, I’m talking to Lionel Hurst, former ambassador to Antigua and Barbuda...We’ve just heard about pros and cons for Canada’s intervention in Haiti. How do the other Caribbean countries respond to the intervention?

Hurst:Well, as you know, we are of the firm view that Haiti will not and cannot make economic progress if it has a government that is imposed on it. And therefore it is only through the system of democratic elections of a government can Haiti progress. Our interest is in ensuring that Haiti does progress. As a consequence, we stand firmly opposed to having a government imposed upon Haiti that arrived there by way of violent means. It is in direct contravention to the InterAmerican Democratic Charter that was worked pout in Peru on 9/11, 2001. And it stands in direct contravention to the Quebec Summit and all of the pronouncement that we made that no country should be seated at the table whose head of government was not democratically elected. And we find that what is taking place in Haiti is a complete abrogation of all of those agreements, which the countries of the hemisphere made and we believe that Canada will stand with the Caribbean in opposing categorically the continued leadership of Haiti by a group of people who arrived there by armed rebellion.

[…]

But in the case of Haiti, Haiti has had a continuous history, beginning in 1804, when the Haitians overthrew the French and established their independent state, the first independent black state in the entire world, or certainly in the Western hemisphere. And it was an extraordinary event in 1804. I might tell you though that what happened in 1826 is reminiscent of what has taken place in Canada and in other places. In 1826 when the first meeting of the presidents of the Americas, was being held in Panama. The Haitian President, who was also invited, was not allowed to be seated. That’s because the United States president, George Washington, objected to having a former slave sit at his table with him in 1826, and so the Haitian President was dis-invited after he had arrived in Panama. We see the same kind of behavior toward Haiti, even in the year 2004.

[End].