Haiti – Colin Powell’s Crime-in-Progress

History will record that the first Black U.S. Secretary of State personally engineered the theft of the national sovereignty of Haiti, the world’s first Black republic and the second nation in the western hemisphere to free itself from European rule. Such is Colin Powell’s horrific legacy – an historic shame and blight on the collective honor of Black America.

Powell returned to the scene of his crime last week to assure Gerard Latortue, the evilly buffoonish U.S.-installed interim Prime Minister, “We are with you all the way” – words of encouragement to a man who is said to have estimated it will be necessary to kill 25,000 people in the capital alone to stop calls for the return of exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide (see , “A Clandestine Interview from Haiti: Resistance in the Slums of Port-au-Prince,” October 14, 2004).

As if to honor the Secretary, Haitian police killed four men from Aristide’s Lavalas party who they claimed started a gun battle while Powell visited the National Palace. But who knows the real circumstances? Haiti is drenched in blood. “The background is that they’re massacring Lavalas supporters on a daily basis now in most of the Port-au-Prince port areas. People are afraid to come out of their homes,” said Ira Kurzban, an Aristide attorney. “What’s happening in Haiti is what’s happening in Iraq: It’s just total chaos, except there are no U.S. troops on the ground.”

Brazilian-led United Nations troops provide a veneer of legitimacy to Latortue’s gangster regime, operating joint patrols with ski mask-wearing “policemen” who carry out summary executions in the capital’s sprawling slums. Mass murder is official policy in Haiti. “Shoot them and ask questions later,” Jean Philippe Sassine, the assistant mayor of Port-au-Prince told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Right now, our country needs security. Unless you clean up the bad people, the gangs, there will be no progress. Let us do it, or it will be worse.”

Perhaps thousands have been killed or “disappeared” – no one can provide even a ballpark figure – since February 28, when U.S. troops sent President Aristide on an odyssey to the Central African Republic, Jamaica and, now, South Africa, a crime against nationhood endorsed after the fact by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. Yet even the timid international civil servant recoils at the sheer lawlessness into which Haiti has descended. “I should like to remind the transitional government that the arbitrary detention of people solely for their political affiliation is in contravention of fundamental human rights principles,” said Annan, last month, calling on Latortue to release Lavalas and former Aristide government officials, or put them on trial. “Armed groups have made arbitrary arrests and run illegal detention centers in some localities. The justice system remained dysfunctional and the National Police continued to operate outside the purview of the rule of law.”

Then, true to form, Annan duly requested that the Security Council extend the UN’s “peacekeeping” mandate for another 18 months.

For some political prisoners, jail is a way-station to a secret grave, according to Marguerite Laurent, chairperson of Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network. “Haitian ‘police’ simply assassinated at least 10 of the helpless and unarmed prisoners they are holding as hostages in the National Penitentiary,” said the New York-based attorney. “Reports also indicate bodies are taken from the jail and dumped in mass graves at night so that the world would not know how many are being murdered.”

Godfather to Thugs

In a December 3 letter soaked in sarcasm and timed to coincide with Powell’s trip to Haiti, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) urged the lame duck Secretary, “as your last official acts of mercy and compassion for the Haitian people, to call for the immediate release of all remaining political prisoners and other Haitians who are being illegally detained in Haitian prisons, and to do whatever is required to expedite desperately needed humanitarian assistance.”

Waters was among the Congressional Black Caucus members who virtually stormed the White House last February 26 demanding the administration defend constitutional democracy in Haiti, two days before the U.S. kidnapped President Aristide. Knowing full well that Aristide would be either deposed or dead that weekend, Powell, Condoleezza Rice and George Bush assured the alarmed lawmakers that the U.S. would respect Haiti’s sovereignty and the rule of law. As it turned out, less than 48 hours later Powell committed the predicate criminal act in the abduction and ouster of a foreign head of state, as reported in our March 4, 2004 Cover Story, “Godfather Colin Powell, the Gangster of Haiti”:

”Ron Dellums, the distinguished former Congressman from the San Francisco Bay area who worked as a lobbyist for Aristide’s government, got a call from the Head-Negro-In-Charge [Powell] on Saturday, warning in no uncertain terms that gunmen were coming to kill Aristide on Sunday morning. The U.S., said Powell, would not lift a finger to stop them. When the Americans come to call, Aristide must leave with them.

”It is a mind-boggling measure of the Bush Pirates’ ferocious lawlessness that Powell would personally initiate the overt, criminally culpable act in the kidnapping of a head of state. This aspect of the crime alone should send him to The Hague.”

Rep. Waters remembers well those events. Her December 3 letter lays the current chaos in Haiti directly on the U.S. – and Powell’s – doorstep:

”History will record that this crisis is a direct result of the failed policies of the United States, France and Canada, which worked with the Group of 184, the former members of the Haitian Army and known thugs to carry out last February’s coup d’etat. While I am certain that you would be the last to agree, I believe that the only way to stabilize Haiti is to do so with the return of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the democratically-elected President of Haiti, until the end of his term in office, with a restoration of assistance for the rebuilding of Haiti’s infrastructure and, at the end of his term, assistance for free and fair elections.

”I remain deeply disappointed by the lack of leadership from the international community, including the United States, France, Canada and the United Nations peacekeeping forces. While international officials claim to be committed to democracy in Haiti, they have made no serious effort to disarm the thugs and killers who were involved in the coup d’etat or to demand that the interim government respect the human rights of the Haitian people.”

Of course, Latortue and the rampaging ex-military thugs, drug dealers and criminals tormenting Haiti are creatures of the country’s tiny elite (formerly arrayed under the banner of Group 184), the International Republican Institute – which provided finances, legitimacy and political cover to the “rebels” in their Dominican Republic sanctuaries – and Colin Powell, himself.

Invitation to Murder

When it is understood that, in Latortue’s Haiti, “bandits” refers to Aristide supporters defending their lives from death squads, Colin Powell’s words become invitations to murder:

What double-speak! The Bush administration, with Colin Powell on point, destroyed Haitian democracy and sovereignty, employing death squads and criminals as its favored instruments. Far from exerting pressure to stop the massacres, the U.S. has leaned heavily on the UN force’s Brazilian commanders to act more aggressively against the population. “We are under extreme pressure from the international community to use violence,” said General Augusto Heleno Ribeiro Pereira, speaking to a congressional commission in Brazil. “I command a peacekeeping force, not an occupation force … we are not there to carry out violence, this will not happen for as long as I’m in charge of the force.”

The general specifically cited the U.S., France and Canada as the countries demanding greater use of violence by the UN force. “To do this would require a force of 100,000 men prepared to seek and kill in large numbers and this is not our role, nor do we want it,” he said.

Apparently, the Brazilian general is unwillingly to help meet Latortue’s 25,000-body quota – although, in an interview with a Haitian radio station, he sought to clarify his mission: “We must kill the bandits, but it will have to be the bandits only, not everybody.” Clearly, somebody with superpower clout is pressuring UN soldiers to get with the program to kill “everybody” associated with Lavalas. No one fits that description better than Colin Powell, the man who threatened President Aristide’s life on the Saturday before his ouster – a gangster playing soldier-diplomat.