by Tim Pelzer January 10, 2005
....
Despite denials from the Ministry of External Affairs, journalist Michel Vastel reported in the Quebec-based magazine L’Actualite that Canadian officials secretly met with U.S., Latin American and French diplomats to plan Aristide’s overthrow. He also reported that Canadian and French officials discussed placing Haiti under UN guardianship, similar to Kosovo, in January 2003.
....
After the U.S. deposed Aristide, the Canadian government, without uttering a word of criticism of the Bush administration’s actions, sent soldiers and police officers to join the United Nations Stabilization Mission (MINUSTAH) occupying Haiti. This force, led by Brazil, has been supporting the government’s campaign to repress Lavalas supporters, accompanying police raids into pro-Lavalas neighborhoods.
Human rights monitors have complained that MINUSTAH forces have failed to stop police who carry out brutal acts of retribution against Lavalas supporters. The UN Police Commissioner in Haiti is Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer David Beer, who had previously been in Iraq assisting counterinsurgency efforts against Iraqi guerrillas.
The government of Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin is promising $180 million in aid to Haiti over the next two years. In contrast, it provided only $23.9 million from 2002 to 2003 when Aristide was in power.
....
On Dec. 10 and 11, the Canadian government organized a conference in Montreal where Canadian and Haitian officials discussed the rebuilding of Haiti. Haitian Prime Minister Gerard Latortue along with other officials met with Martin, External Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew and other Canadian government leaders. The Lavalas party was not included in the meeting.
more
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=102&ItemID=6995THE HAITIAN INTIFADA
A story of politics from black and white, high and low
by
Stan Goff
Part Two
January 9, 2005, 2200 PDT (FTW) - It's not hard to compare Haiti's internal class structure and its relation to the Northern imperial power and the experience of African Americans. From slavery to sharecropping to land enclosure to urban industrialism to abandonment and deindustrialization, the trajectory has been the same, albeit on a different time line and in different dimensions. One can even make the argument that African America experiences domestic law enforcement more as an occupying army than service and protection - a prominent feature of all colonialism, whether that occupation is carried out directly by the imperial power armed forces or by colonial surrogates from the dominated nation.
And the political containment of African Americans by the US dominant class's Democratic Party wing is in many respects similar to the attempt to control electoral outcomes in the colonies through the funding of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which former CIA agent Ralph McGehee describes as:
NED is the primary overt vehicle for political operations - in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Eastern Europe and in the former states of the USSR. NED subsidizes and influences elections, political parties, think tanks, academia, business groups, book publishers, media, and labor, religious, women's, and youth organizations. NED assumed this role from CIA beginning in 1983, and uses many of the same institutions but operates more openly. While NED is in the open drawing all the attention, it is in part a smoke screen for operations by other organizations. As proof we cite a government study that states the United States through AID and USIA, "and other agencies," is a huge and primary source of funding for democracy promotion programs.
The NED was, in fact, heavily involved in the political destabilization of Haiti as soon as it became apparent by 1999 that the 2000 Haitian elections would be overwhelmingly won by the Fanmi Lavalas Party of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. My own account of NED destabilization was written during Aristide's February 2001 inauguration, which also has a detailed description of the class composition of Haiti, can be found at
http://www.counterpunch.org/goff02142004.html. Haiti gained its independence in 1804 at the peak of the period of European colonial capital accumulation based on slave labor. It was the inter-imperial rivalry to control this rich slave-colony that created the conditions for the Haitian revolution.
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/011005_haitian_intifada_pt2.shtml
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