The policy is to aggressively police petty crimes in order to create an environment that discourages more serious law breaking. Noam Chomsky has used the Mafia analogy to explain the less sophisticated, older imperialist version of this policy.
Aristide was overthrown precisely because Haiti is so unimportant to the world economic system and because cracking down on it is the international economic equivalent of the New York City police cracking down on graffiti writers. For more information go to www.
New from CounterPunch. Jeffrey St. Clair Roaming Charges: General of Deception. Richard Moser Workers are Walking Out. Just before the slaves' final victory in , L'Overture was kidnapped by Napoleon and imprisoned in France where he died of exposure.
Randall Robinson, the author of An Unbroken Agony, makes an explicit comparison: "Aristide, the ethical democrat Robinson, a close friend of the former president, has written a sympathetic, occasionally hagiographic, version of Aristide's life. In his account of the church burning, he writes that "the assailants directed a fusillade of rounds at the priest as he stood looking calmly into their faces. None of the shots fired at close range struck him.
So why was Aristide overthrown? After Bill Clinton restored Aristide to power, there was a cooling of relations between the two countries. This was seen by many in the George W Bush administration as political posturing. Robinson quotes a Democratic Senator who said that Aristide was threatening the US's "very strong financial interests" in Haiti.
He did not fully privatise the phone and electricity industries, which he had promised the US he would do in exchange for his restoration. Robinson claims the president was kidnapped by these rebels; the US government claims he volunteered to leave. We knew that there was a lot of unhappiness but not just in the military.
I was always confused by this. His supporters in the congress and elsewhere said that this was a coup instigated by the wealthy, the morally repugnant elite, the MREs as they called them, against Aristide because he was trying to help the poor.
He was an incompetent, as simple as that. It was a horrible way to kill people, but it was done on more than one occasion. You have the instrument; you have the tool that you need to see the record straight, do the right thing. This was alarming to a lot of people, and it was done on more than one occasion. I think the fear was exaggerated. I have no doubts that had Aristide been able to get rid of the military, he would have done it in a flash, but there was little that I could see; this is just that he was in a position to do that.
Washington was becoming increasingly concerned, because we found that his voice was not one of moderation, and certain things were going on in the shadows that made us very uncomfortable. He had killed these kids essentially because he wanted the girlfriend.
So at the end of September they run him out of the palace and take over the country and the generals, the senior military, find themselves in a rather tenuous position. They have a revolt on their hands, among their own troops who are saying the president has to go. The head of the army, ironically, was the man who headed up all the security for the election that Aristide won and made it possible for Aristide to become president.
Aristide eventually winds up in Washington, where he starts stirring up the Congressional Black Caucus. He convinces them that this is a black thing; that this is the black masses against the light-skinned elites of Haiti, which again is absolutely nonsense, but it was something that Aristide, being the clever man that he was, understood what buttons to push in the Black Congressional Caucus, and he used this race thing.
You could be Japanese, you could be Asian, you could be black, but if you a foreigner you were a blanche, you were a white. Haitians never developed this attitude that whites are better than me, and you might not admit such a thing but this deep ingrained belief in the superiority of Europeans or white people.
They killed them and threw them out very early on in the game. Moreover, what army was it that they beat? That was the best army in the world at the time. This was like the Vietnamese beating the U. On occasion they saw them as being inferior. Hey, we kicked your butts, but at best they saw them as just other people with a different skin color, no more, no less.
Aristide, of course, knew this. He had certain fixations about the way he looked. There is a correlation in Haiti, often, that the lighter skinned you are the more likely you are to be higher up on the totem pole. Aristide, in exile in Washington, used his race card with the Congressional Black Caucus to convince them to convince the administration that he had been wronged and we had to do something about it.
Yet on the other hand we had others, and I think legitimately so, saying, be that as it may, this man was democratically elected and we have to support the principle of democracy. Who is the antithesis of the democratic leader?
While Washington was debating this, we in the embassy were sort of stuck trying to figure out what do we do? It has been suggested, I have no evidence to support this other than comments that were made by people, as I never saw any intel that actually supported the notion that Aristide himself provoked the boat people exodus. The contrast was stark. I would have done the same thing. Again, my life was made miserable.
I was dealing with this issue at the same time that we were in evacuation status. We had a skeletal staff…. We were under an economic embargo. For the embassy what that was meant was that we no longer had supermarkets that could feed our staffs, where we could go and buy food and things of that sort. There was also the fear of violence.
Again, you had a military regime in power and they killed people and we were concerned that if they got upset with us they could turn their guns on us. One of the consequences of being under this embargo was that we were not allowed to make payments to the de facto government for anything ,which also made things difficult because there was the state electricity monopoly and a state telephone monopoly.
If you wanted to have phone service, if you wanted to have electricity, you had to deal with the government, because they owned these services. I was sitting in my office one day and I get a phone call from someone in the Treasury Department, the head of the embargo office, who says to me, basically, that I had to stop paying the bills, the light bills, since I was supposedly directing this.
0コメント