Of all the illegal and dishonest misadventures
that the Bush Administration got away with, the least criticized
of all might be the 2004 overthrow of Haiti's democratically
elected government. Even human rights groups and left-leaning
press that stood up against the Iraq war gave, and still give,
Bush a pass on the horror he unleashed on Haiti by kidnapping
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
(Editor's
note: No pass was ever issued by BlackCommentator.com e.g. Return
Aristide to Haiti - Try Bush as a Global Pirate (Issue
81 - March 11, 2004) - Republished in this issue)
Peter Hallward's new book Damming
the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment
(Verso 2008) is a welcome corrective to the false impressions
and historical amnesia about Haiti afflicting most of the English-speaking
world. Jonathan Kozol called it, "A brilliant politically
sophisticated and morally infuriating work on a shameful piece
of very recent history that the United States press has either
distorted or ignored. The most important and devastating book
I've read on American betrayal of democracy in one of the most
tormented nations in the world."
Hallward, a United Kingdom-based philosophy professor,
was teaching a course in 2003 that involved daily reading of
Le Monde and other French newspapers when he noted a systematic
demonization of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his Lavalas
movement. He subsequently wrote one of the best long articles
about the 2004 coup (New Left Review 27, May-June 2004) shortly
after it happened. Ever since, he seems to have been collecting
information for a bill of indictment against the US, France
and Canada, the coup's principle backers, ever since. In the
process he has also put together a damning critique of liberals
and self-described radicals who through either intellectual
laziness or lack of cross-class solidarity accepted Bush-approved
PR on Haiti.
In his research Hallward used mostly public sources.
He appears to have read everything written about Haiti in the
past 10 years, as well as much earlier work. Interviews with
principles ranging from Aristide to
several key coup players, and both pro- and anti-Aristide figures,
buttress his scholarship. Hallward puts the country's recent
violence in the context of 200 years of "great power"
hostility toward Haitian sovereignty, beginning with the 1804
revolution, the only successful slave revolt in world history.
Hallward excels at showing the means by which
Haiti's ultra-rich minority worked hand in glove with right-wingers
in Washington and Paris to create a case for "regime change"
that even Iraq war opponents could embrace. After the first
US-backed coup against Aristide in 1991, when public opinion
in the US was still largely sympathetic to Lavalas, Hallward
notes, "Jesse Helms spoke for much of the US political
establishment when on 20 October 1993 he denounced Aristide
as a 'psychopath and grave human rights abuser.'" But "neither
Helms nor anyone else could pin a single political killing on
the 1991 [Aristide] administration. In the run up to the second
coup, incomparably more insistent versions of the same charge
would resurface at every turn."
As Hallward painstakingly shows, left of center
and liberal NGOs were all too willing to accept Washington's
destabilization program for Haiti. The smears and propaganda
were well funded and carried out in concert with "Democracy
Enhancement" and similar programs of the United States
Agency for International Development (USAID) and other US government
agencies. The project recalled what the US did to Nicaragua
in the 1980s, as documented by political scientist William Robinson
in his excellent study A Faustian Bargain.
Hallward notes that when it comes to "the
supervision of human rights in the most heavily exploited parts
of the planet … most of the 'neutral,' affluent and well-connected
supervisors live at an immeasurable distance from the world
endured by the people they supervise, and at a still greater
distance from the sort of militant, unabashedly political mobilization
that can alone offer any meaningful protection for truly universal
rights." The helps explain the ease with which Human Rights
Watch took anti-Aristide propaganda at face value, then dragged
their feet interminably (as did Amnesty International) when
Aristide's government was ousted and the rightist bloodbath
began in earnest.
Hallward carefully wades through the accusations
of human rights violations leveled at Aristide's government.
After an exhaustive examination, he can find no evidence that
holds up. In many cases, he finds that the supposed abuses themselves
were greatly exaggerated, if not entirely fabricated.
Damming the Flood ("lavalas" means
"flood" in Haitian Kreyol) is brilliantly written
and extremely thorough in examining the players behind the 2004
assault on Haitian popular democracy and its horrific aftermath.
In the wake of the thousands killed and countless
more tortured and raped, it is inevitable that many readers
not versed in Haiti's past would ask: Why? Hallward does a fine
job of answering that question, addressing fundamental structural
injustices enforced by U.S. foreign policy.
Aristide emerged as a priest in the tradition
of liberation theology, which promotes a "preferential
option for the poor." In Hallward's words: "All through
the 1980s and early 90s [US army intelligence officers] recognized
that 'the most serious threat to U.S. interests was not secular
Marxist-Leninism or organized labor but liberation theology.'
Nowhere did the counter-insurgency measures that the US and
its allies devised in order to deal with liberation theology
in the 1980s and early 90s fall more heavily than they did on
the Haiti of Lavalas and the ti legliz ["little church"
movement]. It's no coincidence that the most notorious assassin
hired to terrorize Lavalas from 1990 to 1994, Emmanuel "Toto"
Constant, first began working for the CIA on a course designed
to explain and contain the 'extreme leftwing' implications of
'The Theology of Liberation,' which Constant understood as an
attempt 'to convince the people that in the name of God everything
is possible" and that, therefore, it was right for the
people to kill soldiers and the rich.'"
Hallward continues, "Haiti is the only country
in Latin America that had the temerity to choose a liberation
theologian as its president -- twice. If Aristide still remains
the defining political figure in Haiti to this day it's not
because he represents a utopian alternative to the economic
status quo, or because he embodies a demagogic charisma that
threatens to stifle the development of democracy, or because
his followers believe that he made no strategic mistakes. It's
because in the eyes of most people he is not a politician, precisely,
but an organizer and an activist who remains dedicated to working
within what he famously affirmed as 'the parish of the poor.'
It was as such an activist that Aristide disbanded the army
in 1995, and it was as such an organizer that he dedicated the
rest of his political life to helping the popular mobilization
deal with the new threats and the old antagonisms that soon
emerged as a result."
The
priest turned president threatened to help Haiti's poor enough
to earn the eternal enmity of the World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund, and both Republicans and Democrats. His government
was denied much-needed international funds (which in a more
sane world would be reparations for past injustices, not loans
or aid-with-strings-attached), and his poor followers demonized
as "chimeras," or "devils." Instead of looking
at the structural roots of the exploitation and ecological devastation
to which the country has been subjected, foreign journalists
took their sound bites from English or French speaking elites
at odds with Lavalas's commendable, and only moderately leftist,
goal to raise the poor "from misery to poverty with dignity."
The scant media coverage of Haiti that exists
tends to continue centuries-old patterns of ignoring the perspectives
of the poor majority. In Hallward's words, what most English
speakers get instead is repetition of "perhaps the most
consistent theme of the profoundly racist first-world commentary
on the island: that poor non-white people remain incapable of
governing themselves."
Though the United Nations "peacekeeping"
mission, put in place in 2004 to legitimize the most recent
coup, remains in Haiti, Hallward points to ongoing resistance
from the poorest neighborhoods as evidence that the story is
not over. While coup forces continue to dominate most ministries
of the current government, the 2006 presidential election resulting
in Haiti's rulers conceding victory to Aristide's former Prime
Minster Rene Preval shows the unavoidability of some concessions
to pressure from the poor majority.
For those who feel a debt to the people of Haiti
for inspiring resistance to US slavery, and for setting an example
of the true potential of declarations of liberty espoused by
the French Revolution, this book is an essential resource. Damming
the Flood will inspire international activists to support the
struggles of those Haitians who continue to stand up for their
fundamental human rights. It should be widely read.
Other
articles by Benjamin Terrall
Benjamin Terrall is a freelance writer
whose work has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, In These
Times, Counterpunch, Lip Magazine, and other publications. Click
here to contact Mr. Terrall.