By: Judith Scherr - HaitiAnalysis.com

Haiti-the-poorest-country-in-the-Western-Hemisphere is a descriptor so often used by State Department spokespeople and most the world’s news media, so that what many of us in North America have come to know about Haiti is limited to the tiny nation’s abject poverty, illiteracy, criminality and inability to govern herself.

In this context, the media told us – when it bothered to report the event at all – that in 2004 a Haitian president faced with a fierce armed revolt took advantage of a waiting U.S. jet and benevolent American diplomats to fly away to safety.

Most North Americans believed the story widely disseminated by the Associated Press and others.

That’s why Randall Robinson’s new book, “An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President,” [Basic Civitas Books, New York, 280 pages, $26 U.S.] that tells the truth of the abduction of President Jean Bertrand Aristide, is so important.

Founder and past president of TransAfrica and personal friend of Jean Bertrand and Mildred Aristide, Robinson sheds fresh light on the Feb. 29, 2004 kidnapping of the president, whose name one finds today scrawled large on the walls of Porte-au-Prince’s impoverished slums and whose photograph is still held high when protesters march through Haiti’s streets.

The author does not restrict his manuscript to the details of the kidnapping – which he recounts through extensive interviews with Aristide, his Haitian-American wife and another eye witness to the event – but places the Feb. 29 coup within the context of the nation’s 200-year struggle for sovereignty.

That struggle begins with slavery. “French slavery in Haiti was not only the most profitable worldwide for the French but also the most cruel,” Robinson writes.

Those who would become free Haitians began their revolt in 1791 and won independence in 1804. The independent nation of former black slaves, however, was not well received in Thomas Jefferson’s United States where slavery wouldn’t be abolished for another six decades.

“Most everyone everywhere – enslaved and enslaver alike – recognized that the countdown to slavery’s end (which would finally exhaust itself in the final stages of the American Civil War) had been set ticking by the Haitian, Toussaint L’Ouverture and his triumphant army of ex-slaves,” Robinson writes.

The U.S. and Europe greeted the black nation’s birth with an economic boycott. And, strange as it may seem, in 1825 France imposed a debt on its former colony equal to $21 billion in 2004 U.S. dollars “as compensation from the newly freed slaves for denying France the further benefit of owning them,” Robinson writes.

The ravaging of Haiti included a brutal U.S. occupation from 1915 to 1934 resulting in the deaths of some 15,000 Haitians. During that time the U.S. repaid Haiti’s debt to France, imposing in turn its own $16 million obligation on the Haitian people, which Haiti did not pay off until 1947.

The U.S.-supported dictatorial rule of father then son Duvalier (1956-1986) would further impoverish the exploited masses.

“Haiti on an operational level could be likened to racialist South Africa. In exchange for the trappings of state power, the dictator Francois Duvalier and his black successors gave to the white and mulatto upper class a free hand to exploit the huge black, largely illiterate labor force in any way it saw fit,” Robinson writes.

A priest who would later gave up the priesthood, Aristide became known and loved among the masses for preaching of the dignity and rights of the poorest of the poor. He was elected president in 1990, despite the hostility of the upper classes which had been given free reign by the Duvaliers and the post-Duvalier regimes. Aristide was toppled by a military coup after only nine months in office.

Ending a brutal military rule, President Bill Clinton supported Aristide’s return to Haiti in 1994 with conditions including a demand to privatize Haitian industries.

Among Aristide’s first acts on his return to office was to abolish the military, some of whose former members would become rebel leaders in 2003-2004.

After the five-year presidency of Rene Préval – president again today – Aristide was reelected in 2001. His attempts to ease the burden of the poor, such as doubling the minimum wage to $2/day, provoked the anger of the upper classes and their American friends.

Destabilizing the second presidency

Robinson explains how the U.S. undermined Aristide’s second presidency through propaganda and support for the political and military opposition.

He quotes Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., on the efforts of the International Republican Institute: “’The fix was in: The U.S. Agency for International Development and the International Republican Institute (the international arm of the Republican Party) had spent tens of millions of dollars to create and organize an opposition – however small in numbers – and to make Haiti under Aristide ungovernable.’”

To elucidate the U.S. role in training and arming the rebels, Robinson quotes from a report of the Investigation Commission on Haiti that included attorney Brian Concannon, Fr. Luis Barrios and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark.

“There is no doubt that the territory of the Dominican Republic was used for training and arming the Haitian rebels with the knowledge of the [Dominican] authorities, and that their attack was launched from Dominican soil,” the report said. “U.S. military officials have confirmed that 20,000 M16 rifles were given by the U.S. to the Dominican Republic after November 2002 and admitted that many of those rifles were now in the hands of the Haitian rebels….”

Further destabilizing the poor nation, Washington blocked $146 million Inter-American Development Bank aid that was to fund projects such as clean drinking water, health, education and roads.

Feb. 29

In the buildup to the February 29 coup, the rebel band took over a number of small Haitian towns by capturing local police stations. Secretary of State Collin Powell reportedly said – and the media erroneously reported – that the rebels were set to march on Port-au-Prince, a city of some 3 million persons and kill the president.

“The few police brave enough to contest [the rebels] then had no way to answer their firepower. The rebels, outfitted smartly in baggy camouflage with bulletproof vests and steel helmets, had good reason to expect that the mere sight of them would scare the bejesus out of lightly armed policemen defending a lightly staffed police post, miles and mountains distant from Port-au-Prince…,” Robinson writes.

The military activity was a “smokescreen” to pressure Aristide to resign, “not a serious army,” Robinson says.

A truck carrying television crews followed the rebels, whose task, according to Robinson, “was to terrorize the countryside outside of Port-au-Prince – to hack, murder, burn, loot, raze – to tear a fiery swath of destruction across the northern half of Haiti…and maximize the news media’s coverage of what appeared to be the inexorable fall of the democratic government, village by defenseless village.”

Voluntary flight

Did the Aristides leave voluntarily?

Robinson says they would have prepared. They had not packed bags, didn’t tell friends they would leave and the day before the kidnapping, had been making preparations for interviews in Port-au-Prince with Tavis Smiley and George Stephanopoulous.

The U.S. media was complicit in making it appear that Aristide left voluntarily, Robinson says. “The American television networks had been airing old footage shot in natural light at the Port-au-Prince airport showing President Aristide without his wife, shaking hands and making his way along a line of government ministers before boarding a nearby commercial aircraft. The networks represented the footage to be pictures of the president’s voluntary departure from Haiti.”

The reality, according to Robinson, was that the president and his wife were put on an airplane by U.S. officials before dawn Feb. 29; the aircraft was not a commercial plane; no members of the Aristide government and no media were at the airport. The Aristides were taken to the Central African Republic against their will.

Robinson tells how he, along with Rep. Maxine Waters and others, flew to CAR and secured the Aristides’ release. But despite having an elected president in Haiti today – after two years of U.S. appointed interim rule – the country has not regained its sovereignty and Aristide remains in forced exile in South Africa.

Haiti continues to be controlled by foreigners, which includes a military occupation of some 8,800 United Nations troops.

“Sadly, real democracy remains a long way off for Haiti,” Robinson writes. “For how can any reasonable observer contend to the contrary as long as foreign powers, directly or indirectly, remain bent on preventing Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s most widely respected humanist and democrat, from returning home to his own country.”