The forceful removal of President Jean-Bertand Aristide of Haiti
Monday, April 23, 2007 at 04:23PM This is an excerpt of and interview conducted by Peter Hallward, July 2005 from South Africa, for the London Review of Books:
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide
Peter Hallward: Dany Toussaint wasn’t willing to talk to me when I was in Port-au-Prince a couple of months ago. It’s intriguing that the people who were clamouring for his arrest while you were still in power were then suddenly quite happy to leave him in peace once he had come out against you in December 2003, and once they themselves were in power. But can you prove that he was working for or with them all along?
Jean-Bertrand Aristide: It won’t be easy to document, I accept that. There’s a proverb in Creole that says twou manti pa fon: ‘lies don’t run very deep.’ Sooner or later the truth will out. There are plenty of things that were happening at the time that only recently have started to come to light.
PH: You mean things like the eventual public admissions, made over the past year or so by the rebel leaders Remissainthe Ravix and Guy Philippe, about the extent of their long-standing collaboration with the Convergence Démocratique, with the Americans?
JBA: Exactly.
PH: Let’s turn now to what happened in February 2004. There are wildly different versions of what happened in the run-up to your expulsion from the country. How much support did Guy Philippe’s rebels really have? And surely there was little chance that they could take the capital itself, in the face of the many thousands of people who were ready to defend it?
JBA: There had been recent attempts at a coup, one in July 2001, with an attack on the police academy, and another a few months later, in December 2001, with an incursion into the national palace. They didn’t succeed, and on both occasions the rebels were forced to flee the city. They only just managed to escape. It wasn’t the police alone who chased them away, it was a combination of the police and the people. So the rebels knew they couldn’t take Port-au-Prince. So they hesitated, on the outskirts, some 40 kilometres away. We had nothing to fear. The balance of forces was in our favour. There are occasions when large groups of people are more powerful than heavy machine-guns and automatic weapons. And Port-au-Prince, a city with so many national and international interests, was different from more isolated places like Saint-Marc or Gonaïves. There was no great insurrection: there was a small group of soldiers, heavily armed, who were able to overwhelm some police stations, kill some policemen and create a certain amount of havoc. The police had run out of ammunition, and were no match for the rebels’ M16s. But the city was a different story. The people were ready, and I wasn’t worried.
Meanwhile, on 29 February a shipment of police munitions that we had bought from South Africa, perfectly legally, was due to arrive in Port-au-Prince. This decided the matter. Already the balance of forces was against the rebels; on top of that, if the police were restored to something like their full operational capacity, then the rebels stood no chance.
PH: So at that point the Americans had no option but to go in and get you themselves, on the night of 28 February?
JBA: That’s right. They knew that in a few more hours, they would lose their opportunity to ‘resolve’ the situation. They grabbed their chance while they had it, and bundled us onto a plane in the middle of the night.
PH: The Americans – Ambassador Foley, Luis Moreno and so on – insist that you begged for their help, that they had to arrange a flight to safety at the last minute. Several reporters backed up their account. On the other hand, speaking on condition of anonymity, one of the American security guards who was on your plane that night told the Washington Post soon after the event that the US story was ‘just bogus’. Your personal security director, Frantz Gabriel, also confirms that you were kidnapped that night by US military personnel. Who are we supposed to believe?
JBA: You’re dealing with a country that was willing and able, in front of the UN and in front of the world at large, to fabricate claims about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They were willing to lie about issues of global importance. It’s hardly surprising that they were able to find a few people to say the things that needed to be said in Haiti, in a small country of no great strategic significance.
PH: They said they couldn’t send peacekeepers to help stabilise the situation, but as soon as you were gone, the troops arrived straightaway.
JBA: The plan was perfectly clear.
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Drugs and Politics in Haiti
HIP - The US Drug Enforcement Agency's recent attempt to hunt down former policeman, paramilitary commander and presidential candidate Guy Philippe on drug charges can be traced back to a recent arrest in the town of Gonaives, Haiti.
Haitian police and Argentinean units of the UN arrested Wilfort Ferdinand, alias Ti Wil; on May 26 after he gave a lengthy interview on local radio station Radio Gonaives FM. Although news of Ferdinand's arrest received scant attention in the international press it was one of the top stories throughout Haiti the following day. Much of the reporting in the Haitian press focused on the shared history of Wilfort Ferdinand and Guy Philippe in leading paramilitary forces that helped to oust the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
In early February 2004, Wilfort Ferdinand along with Butteur Metayer, Winter Etienne and Dieujuste Jeanty, led armed gangs to attack police stations in the Artibonite region in a bid to oust Aristide's government. They left a bloody trail in their wake including the summary execution of Aristide supporters in the streets of several cities. Their group, called the Artibonite Resistance Front, later joined with the small but well-armed paramilitary groups that invaded Haiti from the Dominican Republic under the leadership of Guy Philippe and former death squad commander Jodel Chamblain. Ferdinand and the others quickly claimed allegiance to Philippe and publicly referred to him as their "commander-in-chief" in press interviews.
Ferdinand appointed himself Chief of Police of Gonaives and Winter Etienne became the Chief of the Gonaives Port Authority, ruling Haiti's fourth largest city as a personal fiefdom following the ouster of Aristide on Feb. 29, 2004. Philippe shared the podium with Ferdinand in late March 2004 when US-installed prime minister Gerard Latortue was flown into Gonaives by US military helicopters accompanied by Davi d Lee, Canadian ambassador to the Organization of American States. During a mock celebration of Aristide's ouster, Latortue publicly praised the men as misunderstood "freedom fighters" while ambassador Lee nodded his head in approval.
During Ferdinand's interview on Radio Gonaives FM and just before his arrest on May 26, he repeated assertions he had made days earlier on another radio station in the capital. He claimed that he was being pressured by "certain members of the business community" to take up arms against the current government of President Rene Preval. He explained that these were some of the same business leaders that had financed their paramilitary operations against Aristide and ended with "I would rather commit suicide than raise arms against this government."
http://www.montereyherald.com/johnyewell/ci_6466968?nclick_check=1
Real reason for Haiti raid
by John Yewell
Monterey County Herald - There were new suggestions this week that a raid 10 days ago by Haiti's police and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration may have been an attempt to silence one of the leaders of a 2004 coup that toppled Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide - a coup many believe was orchestrated by the United States.
Guy Philippe, the target of the raid, avoided capture and is now in hiding. He has since been heard on Haitian radio claiming his attempted arrest was for political reasons.
Between his alleged drug affiliations and human rights abuses, Philippe has few friends in the government of current Haitian President Rene Preval or in the United States. But according to a report this week by Kevin Pina, writing for the Haiti Information Project, there may be another explanation for the DEA grab.
According to Pina, on May 27, after the arrest of Wilfort Ferdinand, another coup participant, Philippe went on Haitian radio and "began to name names of business and political leaders who backed the paramilitary insurgency against Aristide's government by providing arms, ammunition and logistical support."
"High on (Philippe's) list," Pina continued, "was Andy Apaid, the leader of the civil society organization called the Group 184."
Seven weeks after Philippe's radio broadcast, the DEA went after him.
In July 2004, Salon reported that Group 184