Rebels rolled into the capital Monday and were met by hundreds of residents dancing in the streets and cheering the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The United States denied allegations Aristide was kidnapped by U.S. forces eager for him to resign and be spirited into exile. Most of the 150 U.S. Marines who arrived Sunday night were at the capital's airport, some doing overflights in a helicopter. Some of the 50 Marines who arrived last week drove cautiously along the waterfront road, and pedestrians raised their hands in fright and surprise upon seeing them.
As a matter of purest curiosity: what on earth do they expect a force that small to do? Port-au-Prince isn't that small, and there's an entire country in outright rebellion and reprisal mode.
.... Randall Robinson, former president of TransAfrica monitoring group, said the former Haitian president told him in a phone call that he was abducted from Haiti by U.S. troops who accompanied him on a flight to the Central African Republic. "He asked that I tell the word that it is a coup," Robinson said in a statement. "That he was abducted by American soldiers and put aboard a plan, told to make no phone calls to anyone, put aboard a plane with his sister's husband and his wife."
Secretary of State Colin Powell called those allegations "absolutely baseless, absurd." "He was not kidnapped," Powell told a news conference.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld added that "the idea that someone was abducted is inconsistent with everything I saw."
Everything he saw. From Washington. Well. Yes. Quite.
Aristide and his wife arrived in the Central African Republic for what will be at least temporary asylum, said Communications Minister Parfait Mbaye. Aristide's departure was secured by U.S. forces at his request, U.S. officials said. Haiti's first democratically elected president, who was pressured to leave by the United States and the rebels, would travel next to South Africa, according to state radio and a senior Caribbean Community official.
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that Aristide didn't want to leave ... having one's retreat involuntarily "secured" would seem to be indistinguishable in any substantive way from "kidnapping".
Haiti Destabilization by the Book: George W. Bush just got another scalp, this time that of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the democratically elected leader of Haiti whom Bush helped topple over the weekend.
Aristide was no angel, but this has all the earmarks of a successful U.S. destabilization campaign.
First, the Bush Administration strangled Haiti's economy by blocking U.S. foreign aid and pressuring other countries and the World Bank not to give aid. For this poorest country in the hemisphere, such an aid embargo proved devastating.
Second, it is likely that rightwing members of the Administration, perhaps along with CIA officers, gave support to the rebels.
Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., told ABC that some of the rebels have had ties with U.S. intelligence agencies.
According to The New York Times, several of the rebels had been part of the Haitian death squad FRAPH, which was funded by the CIA in the early 1990s.
Hmph. Not that I am loathe to believe ill of this administration, but I will note that because someone had ties with the CIA a decade ago does not necessarily mean that they have current ties.
What I frankly would like to know is: what the hell are we going to do with the country now? We already have one desperately underfunded, undermanned occupation running on the other side of the world. We surely do not need yet another one. We surely have neither the fiscal nor military resources to run another one. Unfortunately, this one can't be done right, any more than the occupation of Iraq (which could have been). The administration will likely decline to send sufficient troops -- not that there are all that many available to send anyway. The OAS may well feel that, since it seems that Washington has had a finger in deposing yet another democratically elected leader, dealing with the resulting mess should be Washington's problem. The UN may well feel the same. The UN has also had dramatic illustrations recently of how unwise it can be to send humanitarian aid into a country that's still in full fledged rebellion; aid to Haiti may well be a long time in coming.
(It would be nice if, in some miraculous way, it were be possible for one president to actually get through his term of office -- be it four years or eight -- without having to intervene in that country's affairs. Haiti has been the Sick Man of the Western Hemisphere for well over a century. The puzzling thing is that whatever happens in Haiti, it's not reflected in the Dominican Republic. The island of Hispaniola isn't all that big; you'd think that sort of chaos would frequently slop over into the neighboring country -- in persistent refugee crises, if nothing else -- and it never seems to do so.)
Posted by iain at March 01, 2004 05:34 PM
