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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
The right-wing campaign to oust Aristide has its roots in the GOP's longstanding support for pro-U.S. dictators in Haiti. In 1971, President Nixon restored U.S. military aid to the brutal regime of dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, whom he considered an anticommunist counterweight to Cuba. The Duvalier regime eventually crumbled beneath a wave of popular opposition in 1986; a procession of GOP-backed puppets and military dictators followed, until the charismatic Aristide won Haiti's first democratic election in 1990. But Aristide was overthrown a year later by FRAPH, a CIA-backed junta led by Raoul Cedras, a Haitian army officer trained by the U.S. Army and openly supported by prominent Washington conservatives like Helms.
When Aristide fled Haiti in 1991, he was given sanctuary in Washington by sympathetic liberal politicians and intellectuals, especially members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who were eager to show solidarity with the first democratically elected leader of the world's oldest black republic. In 1994, under intense pressure from congressional Democrats, President Clinton returned Aristide to power by military force. Though Aristide accepted onerous economic reforms as a condition of his return, his legacy as a liberation-theology preaching slum priest thrust to power by Haiti's poor masses fueled a perception among conservatives that he was the next Fidel Castro.
The GOP secured a majority in Congress in 1994. Soon afterwards Helms, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; his counterpart in the House, Ben Gilman, R-N.Y.; and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss, R-Fla. (now considered a potential successor to former CIA Director George Tenet) passed a stream of bills ordering U.S. troops out of Haiti, terminating a host of infrastructure-building initiatives there and imposing an embargo on lethal and nonlethal weapons to the Haitian national police force. Helms even presented a now-discredited CIA document on the Senate floor in 1995 claiming Aristide was "psychotic."
With conditions deteriorating, Aristide clung to power using a mixture of firebrand rhetoric and repression, surrounding himself with cronies and hiring armed gangs to intimidate his opponents. Meanwhile, confronted with a Clinton White House that preferred to hold its nose to Aristide's corruption and focus on building Haiti's fragile democracy, a coalition of Republicans used IRI as a Trojan horse. From the beginning of its Haiti program, in direct contradiction of many of its own guidelines, IRI embraced reactionary political elements far more antidemocratic than Aristide.
IRI was created by Congress in 1983. It has an approximately $20 million annual budget granted by its bureaucratic parent, the National Endowment for Democracy, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and conservative corporate and philanthropic groups. But past IRI activity highlights an agenda for regime change far from democratic in its methods, from organizing groups that participated in a 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela, to hosting delegates from right-wing European parties at a September 2002 conference in Prague to rally support for war on Iraq. Its Haiti program is the brainchild of its vice president, Georges Fauriol, who is a member of the Republican National Committee and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. At CSIS, a conservative Washington think tank, Fauriol worked closely with Otto Reich, a hawkish Iran-Contra figure who served as the Bush administration's special envoy to the Western Hemisphere until his resignation this June. Fauriol, who rejected an interview request, has worked as a Latin America expert for CSIS since the days when Duvalier ruled Haiti.
By 1992, while the U.S.-friendly Cedras' FRAPH death squads rampaged through Haiti's slums and slaughtered Aristide supporters by the thousands, IRI hired Haitian national Stanley Lucas to head its operations there. Though elections had already been nullified by Cedras, IRI spokesman Scott says the group's work in Haiti at the time consisted of "election monitoring." Lucas himself rejected an interview request.
For IRI's Washington backers, Lucas meant unparalleled access to the key anti-Aristide figures on Haiti's political scene. By 1998, when IRI's "party-building" program officially began, Lucas spearheaded the training of an array of small parties at IRI meetings in Port-au-Prince. IRI's Scott characterized the seminars as benign lessons in "Democracy 101."
Indeed, Lucas and IRI's involvement with some of Aristide's most unsavory enemies suggested an altogether different agenda. Among invitees to IRI's seminars were members of CREDDO, the personal political platform of Gen. Prosper Avril, the former Haitian dictator who ruled with an iron fist from 1988 to 1990, declaring a state of siege and arbitrarily torturing his opponents. Avril wrote about IRI's meetings in his 1999 memoir, "The Truth About a Singular Lawsuit," describing a truce he signed "under the auspices of IRI" with his former torture victim Evans Paul. Thanks in part to the rapprochement, Paul became the de facto spokesman for the coalition of parties trained in 1999 by Lucas and IRI: the Democratic Convergence.
Despite IRI's efforts to create a credible opposition to Aristide, the Convergence proved a lame horse; the party was blown out by Aristide's popular Lavalas party in the 2000 local and parliamentary elections. Yet questionable vote counting prompted the Clinton administration to block over $400 million in multilateral loans to Haiti. As economic conditions deteriorated there, Convergence changed its tactics. In addition to boycotting the 2000 presidential elections, between 2000 and 2002 Convergence rejected 20 proposed power-sharing compromises designed to ease Haiti's political crisis. In 2003 the party formed an ersatz transitional government to challenge Aristide's legitimacy, and its relationship with IRI and Washington Republicans grew even cozier.
According to IRI's Scott, from 1998 to 2002, IRI bolstered Convergence with "less than $2 million." In 2000, $34,994 of that money was granted to IRI from NED to junket Convergence leaders to several meetings in Washington designed "to open channels of communication" with "relevant policy makers and analysts." IRI met Convergence leaders again in February 2002 in the Dominican Republic with a delegation of congressional Republicans including Caleb McCarry, a staunchly anti-Aristide staffer on the House Foreign Relations Committee who, according to a former senior State Department official, "worked hand in glove with Lucas to tie funding to the opposition."
