Cover Story: Time for Kerry to Step Up on Haiti

“Substantial Negro support is not necessary to national Republican victory,” said Kevin Phillips, the mastermind behind Nixon’s Southern Strategy, at the time. “The GOP can build a winning coalition without Negro Votes. Indeed, Negro-Democratic mutual identification was a major source of Democratic loss, and Republican Party or (George Wallace’s) American Independent Party profit, in many sections of the country.”

The unspoken centrality of white supremacy for the Republican Party since Nixon cannot be overstated. Foreign policy is not solely determined by foreign priorities, either economic or strategic. It is also significantly influenced by its impact on popular domestic political bases; in this case the racist white majority in the United States.

This matters for the issue of Haiti. The Haitian Revolution that culminated in the first Black Republic on January 1, 1804, was led against three imperial powers, including Napoleon’s armed forces, by rebel slaves. These slaves out-generaled, out-administered, and out-fought the European giants, smashing the myth of white supremacy. This struck terror into the American South, where the fear of Black rebellion was a constant.

The turmoil in Haiti is always portrayed by the white American press in ways that explain nothing and convey the impression of irrational chaos. Haiti has been consistently debilitated from the outside since its inception for several reasons, one of which has been the ideological need in the US to support white notions of Black irrational deviance and incapacity for self-governance.

Ever since Nixon managed the Republican Party’s displacement of the Democrats as the party of white supremacy, Republicans have taken a special responsibility for putting Haiti in its place. Just after Aristide’s kidnapping, Florida Republican Mark Foley, in a CNN exchange with Maxine Waters, said the US will help Haitians learn how to run a government and “how to grow crops.” A rich, white man from Florida is talking about teaching Haitians how to grow crops!

White supremacy has been and remains a pillar of Euro-American power, and not in some merely discursive way that “divides and conquers” workers, though that’s certainly part of it. Imperialism, to this day, is rationalized through notions of the “white man’s burden.” I would simply point to how many Americans who opposed the war in Iraq now say that the US has to stay there to “rebuild” Iraq. This is racism, pure and simple.

Flash forward now to the 1992 election, when Bill Clinton excoriated George W. Bush for his incarceration of Haitian refugees in the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Playing to his Black audience, whom Clinton would betray in his later policies at every turn, Clinton also pointed quite justifiably to the hypocrisy of allowing white Cubans automatic entry into the US, while indefinitely detaining black Haitians.

The coup of a year earlier was proceeding apace with its slaughter of Aristide loyalists and grassroots organizers, and CIA complicity in the coup was becoming gradually more visible with a leak here and a whisper there.

The economy tanked after George H. W. Bush had made his famed “read my lips” remark, and Clinton was elected.

Faced with the reality of Haiti’s desperation and the volume of refugees fleeing the Cedras-Francois regime, and faced with the reality of Florida politics and the possibility of 100,000 or more penniless people crashing onto its shores, Bill Clinton’s first foreign policy embarrassment was being forced by his circumstances to treat the Haitians even more harshly than the Bush regime had.

Clinton knew very well that a US invasion would not be accepted by the people of Haiti without Aristide – who they now saw as a symbol of their aspiration for genuine independence – and he engineered the 1994 invasion to return a compliant Aristide in order to stop a nascent Haitian rebellion against the Cedras-Francois regime that might have taken on revolutionary overtones.

The hit squads for that regime were the FRAPH, the very same people who just provided the paramilitary push to complete the latest coup against Aristide.

Members of both parties have desired Aristide’s ouster ever since he won the 2000 election, and while the Democrats incline toward the comprador-technocrats of the Haitian elite, the Republicans incline toward the FRAPH-macoutes. This is based on past CIA relations with the FRAPH, and the CIA is packed full of Republican loyalists. In my time working around embassies and CIA spooks, I can honestly say that I have never seen a single African American CIA agent. There are some Black folks working as secretaries at Langley, but the operations side is monolithically white.

Until we become clear that the US state is a white state, we will not become clear at all.

The Bush administration and its FRAPH allies just helped the phony Haitian “opposition” to complete its four-year coup.

Both white capitalist parties in the US are run by elites who want to see the removal of Aristide and others who have the capacity to mobilize their population. But where Democrats would prefer something that looks like a success story – along with managed elections and other trappings of “progress” – Republicans, as the party that still employs its latter day version of the Southern Strategy, want to see Haiti in chaos. They will put on a mask of paternalistic sympathy while they continue to impose dysfunction, because they need Haiti to continue to serve as an example of Black incapacity for self-governance – to reinforce their white supremacist appeal to the Helms wing of the party, which is still substantial.

Both parties see popular sovereignty as a threat to Washington, which rules through wealthy colonial surrogates (not altogether unlike those jackleg leaders in the US mentioned earlier), and they have no intention of letting another independent nation (besides Cuba) flourish outside the Washington Consensus in this region. It’s a bad example that might infect the imagination of popular forces throughout the region. Another example must be made.

Right now, it’s the Republicans’ example, and so it is color-coded for all the foregoing reasons. Color crosses these class lines in Haiti itself when it is seen as necessary, and it is mobilized against popular challenges to entrenched power when that is seen as necessary.

In the run-up to the coup against Aristide’s government, there was a persistent effort by both the press and US State Department spokespersons to imply that Aristide was somehow “autocratic.” This charge is repeated without any factual antecedents, but that leaves the impression on the public that something specific did happen, that they, the public, merely failed to pick up – and white Americans having no deep interest in the details of anything except television series, Janet’s titty, and Oscar nominations, they merely exercise a sheep-like acceptance of the characterization of these unspecified acts, as undemocratic, autocratic, etc. This allowed the maneuvering of the NED and whatever armed forces (the FRAPH in this case) to coordinate their actions with the press blitz to first destabilize the country, then launch the coup.

Once the coup was enacted, the US claimed Aristide resigned, setting up a situation that appeared to the American public as the (credible) US word against the (not credible) word of the irrational, autocratic Black leader. The white US press has refused to follow up on the revelations of Maxine Waters and Charles Rangel, implying by this inaction that they too are just more paranoid brown people.

The Convergence Democratique (now the political arm of the coup d’etat) and its US-sponsor, the National Endowment for Democracy, are about anything but democracy. Convergence has been trying to overturn the result of a legitimate election ever since Aristide was elected again in 2000 with 92% of the vote.

In the United States, and more and more in other societies, the population has been trained to see politics as a combination of personality and policy. This focus on the personalities of individual leaders exposes only part of the reality, and it renders a key dimension of political reality invisible: the historically developed social forces that underwrite their power. This socially-constructed intellectual astigmatism makes it possible to successfully portray entire societies as reflections of certain individuals, be they Khaddafi or Bush or Chavez or Saddam or Aristide. What is rendered invisible in this process is the fact that these leaders are more the reflection and product of their history and society than their society is a reflection of them. That’s not to say these leaders don’t have individual agency, but that a huge dimension of politics is concealed by this way of knowing and therefore its distortion of social reality.

This is very important in the United States as a mechanism for gaining the acquiescence of the public for various foreign conspiracies and adventures. The class interests of these ruling elites represented by these conspiracies and adventures are concealed by the politics of personality. People don’t talk about the connection between Wall Street and the CIA because they don’t understand the connection. People don’t know about the social revolution that brought Khaddafi to power, or the relation of the Bush administration to the Southern Strategy, or the history of Ba’athism, or the origins of the Lavalas movement in Haiti. They don’t understand that there is a connection between levels of technological development and the ability to command accountability within governments. They don’t recognize the international “division of labor” within the American Imperium. So they are reduced to making judgments – very simplistic judgments – about individual leaders based on faulty and incomplete information and moral criteria that are intellectually undemanding.

The ability, then, to use disinformation to simply portray Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the individual, as a bad man and a bad leader, translates into the ability to shape the American majority’s perception to suit the agenda of the political establishment – of which the corporate media is an integral part.

This perception management capacity is a force multiplier in the effort to economically, politically, and militarily destabilize a nation. I detailed some of the mechanisms for this perception management in my Counterpunch article of October, 2003, Piss on My Leg – Perception Control and the Stage Management of War.

That said, let me return to the economic dimension of the coup in Haiti.

Schematic leftists are trying to see Haiti through the lens of economics. They want to believe that Haiti re-conquest is a prelude to developing massive sweatshops or some other form of profit-taking in Haiti. But it is a mistake to believe that only one reason ever exists for a foreign policy. Haiti has very few assembly platforms in operation, and the infrastructure is a shambles. Moreover, the amount of arable land is declining at an alarming rate. In short, there is only marginal space for foreign economic exploitation.

US foreign policy is determined for multiple reasons, and economics is not always the first concern for a specific policy, even if keeping the overall system stable for capital accumulation remains the overarching determinant. Venezuela is a key country in a key region, where there is already rebellion afoot. In play are Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia, all of which are experiencing serious social upheavals that include strong opposition to the Washington Consensus. Again, the imperial obligation to make an example of the “rebellious child” is a factor. And US international power no longer comes primarily from exploitative economic production, but from a monetary regime that extracts interest from the external debts of other nations based on rules it enforces, at the end of the day, with the power of the dollar backed by the military. Any attempt to develop any form of national self-sufficiency that could add weight to a regional or global default movement is a very real threat – perhaps the most real of all threats – to US global power.

Haiti is under attack for geo-political reasons, but there is an economic component to the attack – to destroy the Haitian economy.

Any time an economic crisis is provoked, tempers get shorter, jobs are lost, social services collapse, and the people become discontented with whomever they perceive to be their leaders. This is the first step in the agitation process of a coup. In Haiti, the Bush administration merely held back over $500 million in approved disbursements and loans to the Haitian government to break it, and – less widely known – embargoed certain products to Haiti, significantly new equipment, weapons, and ammunition to keep the police up to date. (See , “When Major Powers Stage a Coup,” Randall Robinson, April 24, 2003.)

These economic attacks are combined with a media blitz designed to “explain” the economic crisis in a way that places the blame on the seated government. This happened in Haiti.

The economic attack is also combined with the organization of a political opposition. I alluded to this being the role of the National Endowment for Democracy, the Reagan-era break-off from CIA covert operations, whose sole function is to interfere in the elections of other governments. The NED has funded and organized political “opposition” groups to destabilize Nicaragua, the Balkans, Haiti, and Venezuela. In the latter two cases, they did not have elections after they destabilized them, because in both cases it was rightly feared that the electoral outcomes would not result in their targeted leader being unseated. Both Chavez and Aristide would win today if elections were held in those nations. The NED mobilized these “oppositions” as fake popular fronts against the governments for the purpose of overthrowing them. In the case of Haiti, the opposition refused to hold elections because they knew they’d lose – badly.

Once the economic and political crises are created, a security crisis is fomented. In Haiti, they even resorted to setting up attacks against other “opposition” members in an attempt to lay the charge against the government that it had attacked them. This is the juncture at which the military is required, and that was the ex-FRAPH paramilitary.

After his return to the Haitian presidency in 1994, Aristide rightly feared and distrusted the standing Haitian military. So he disbanded them and replaced them with a 6,000-person constabulary, trained in very basic police skills. To understand what this means, one has to understand the actual physical condition of Haiti.

The majority of the country is inaccessible by road, and the existing roads are all in ill repair. Some are passable year-round but take a terrible toll on vehicles, and some are impassable when it rains. Cell phones work in some places and don’t work in others, and the police were equipped with land lines and FM radios, the latter having very limited range in mountainous Haiti. Police, like everyone else, spend a great deal of time with plain day-today activities, that we take for granted, but which are very time consuming there – hauling water, cooking, laundering, shopping for bare necessities in a plethora of markets where supplies of every commodity are iffy, etc. There is often little to no electricity. There is certainly not a great deal of close oversight and supervision, and there is little wherewithal to ensure the kind of professional development we might expect of law enforcement officers here.

They were making do, some better than others, many only marginally literate, often with mixed loyalties and personal problems, and some were certainly involved in corruption. The actually existing option was not between a perfect police force and this one, but between this one or no police force at all. It had one helicopter in the capital.

They were not trained to engage in military actions. In Port-au-Prince, there was a riot control group called CIMO and a SWAT contingent, the latter of which having some semblance of military capacity. When the February attacks came, they were against plain police, who couldn’t withstand a dedicated attack using large supplies of military weapons to include rocket-propelled grenades and machineguns. The roads and the communications prevented any timely reinforcements, and the command structure as well as the political leadership – shocked at the ease with which these attacks succeeded – wrung their hands until it was over.

Given that Louis-Jodel Chamblain – the paramilitary leader of this phase – is a convicted criminal, an unconvicted one was used to give the “rebels” a public face: Guy Philippe. The Guardian ran a background piece on March 7th that pointed out: