Haiti wants Aristide: let him go

[Judi Lynn]

Haiti wants Aristide: let him go
Even now, to prop up a fatally flawed election, Washington is trying to sabotage the return of Haiti's ousted former president
Kim Ives guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 15 March 2011 20.30 GMT

The arrogance of Washington's renewed efforts to thwart former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's return to Haiti from a seven-year exile in South Africa is mind-boggling.

During the 29 February 2004 coup d'état, in the middle of the night, a US Navy Seal team, under the direction of American deputy ambassador Luis Moreno, kidnapped President Aristide and his wife Mildred from their home in Tabarre and flew them, under guard in an unmarked US jet, into a first stint of exile in the Central African Republic. Since then, tens of thousands from all over Haiti have taken to the streets several times each year to demand his return.

During the US-appointed post-coup de facto government of Prime Minister Gérard Latortue (2004-2006), Haitian police and United Nations occupation troops regularly gunned down the demonstrators and carried out murderous assaults on Aristide strongholds in popular neighborhoods like Cité Soleil and Belair, killing dozens of residents, including women and children. When in late March 2004, US Congresswoman Maxine Waters and a team of other VIPs rescued the Aristides from virtual house arrest in CAR and flew them in a private jet to Jamaica, the Bush administration was livid. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice spent an hour on the phone threatening then Prime Minister PJ Patterson to get Aristide out of there.

"We think it's a bad idea," she later told the press, while Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that "the hope is that he will not come back into the hemisphere and complicate situation." Three months later, Aristide was flown to South Africa.

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/mar/15/haiti-jean-bertrand-aristide