New Randall Robinson Book Reveals Truth on Aristide Kidnapping

Bill Quigley

12 Sep 2007

New Randall Robinson Book Reveals Truth on Aristide Kidnapping

by Judith
Scherr

"Despite having an elected president in Haiti today the country
has not regained its sovereignty and Aristide remains in forced exile in South
Africa."

This article originally appeared in HaitiAnalysis.com.

Haiti-the-poorest-country-in-the-Western-Hemisphere is a descriptor
so often used by State Department spokespeople and most the world's news media
that what many of us in North America have come to know about Haiti is limited
to the tiny nation's abject poverty, illiteracy, criminality and inability to
govern herself.

In this context, the media told us - when it bothered to
report the event at all - that in 2004 a Haitian president faced with a fierce
armed revolt took advantage of a waiting U.S. jet and benevolent American
diplomats to fly away to safety. Most North Americans believed the story widely
disseminated by the Associated Press and others.

That's why Randall Robinson's new book, An Unbroken
Agony: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President, (Basic
Civitas Books, New York, 280 pages, $26 U.S.) that tells the truth of the
abduction of President Jean Bertrand Aristide, is so important. Founder and
past president of TransAfrica and personal friend of Jean Bertrand and Mildred
Aristide, Robinson sheds fresh light on the Feb. 29, 2004 kidnapping of the
president, whose name one finds today scrawled large on the walls of
Porte-au-Prince's impoverished slums and whose photograph is still held
high when protesters march through Haiti's streets.

The author does not restrict his manuscript to the details
of the kidnapping - which he recounts through extensive interviews with
Aristide, his Haitian-American wife and another eye witness to the event - but
places the Feb. 29 coup within the context of the nation's 200-year struggle
for sovereignty. That struggle begins with slavery. "French slavery in Haiti
was not only the most profitable worldwide for the French but also the most
cruel," Robinson writes.

"Aristide's name is found today scrawled large on the
walls of Porte-au-Prince's impoverished slums"

Those who would become free Haitians began their revolt in
1791 and won independence in 1804. The independent nation of former black
slaves, however, was not well received in Thomas Jefferson's United States
where slavery wouldn't be abolished for another six decades. "Most everyone
everywhere - enslaved and enslaver alike - recognized that the countdown to
slavery's end (which would finally exhaust itself in the final stages of the
American Civil War) had been set ticking by the Haitian, Toussaint L'Ouverture
and his triumphant army of ex-slaves," Robinson writes.

The U.S. and Europe greeted the black nation's birth with an
economic boycott. And, strange as it may seem, in 1825 France imposed a debt on
its former colony equal to $21 billion in 2004 U.S. dollars "as compensation
from the newly freed slaves for denying France the further benefit of owning
them," Robinson writes.

The ravaging of Haiti included a brutal U.S. occupation from
1915 to 1934 resulting in the deaths of some 15,000 Haitians. During that time
the U.S. repaid Haiti's debt to France, imposing in turn its own $16 million
obligation on the Haitian people, which Haiti did not pay off until 1947.

The U.S.-supported dictatorial rule of father, then son,
Duvalier (1956-1986) would further impoverish the exploited masses.

"Haiti on an operational level could be likened to racialist
South Africa. In exchange for the trappings of state power, the dictator
Francois Duvalier and his black successors gave to the white and mulatto upper
class a free hand to exploit the huge black, largely illiterate labor force in
any way it saw fit," Robinson writes.

A priest who would later gave up the priesthood, Aristide
became known and loved among the masses for preaching of the dignity and rights
of the poorest of the poor. He was elected president in 1990, despite the
hostility of the upper classes which had been given free reign by the Duvaliers
and the post-Duvalier regimes. Aristide was toppled by a military coup after
only nine months in office. Ending a brutal military rule, President Bill
Clinton supported Aristide's return to Haiti in 1994 with conditions including
a demand to privatize Haitian industries.

Among Aristide's first acts on his return to office was to
abolish the military, some of whose former members would become rebel leaders
in 2003-2004. After the five-year presidency of Rene Préval - president again
today - Aristide was reelected in 2001. His attempts to ease the burden of the
poor, such as doubling the minimum wage to $2/day, provoked the anger of the
upper classes and their American friends.

Destabilizing the second presidency

"The U.S. Agency for International Development and the
International Republican Institute spent tens of millions of dollars to create
and organize an opposition."

Robinson explains how the U.S. undermined Aristide's
second presidency through propaganda and support for the political and military
opposition. He quotes Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and
Policy Research in Washington, D.C., on the efforts of the International
Republican Institute: "'The fix was in: The U.S. Agency for International
Development and the International Republican Institute (the international arm
of the Republican Party) had spent tens of millions of dollars to create and
organize an opposition - however small in numbers - and to make Haiti under
Aristide ungovernable.'"

To elucidate the U.S. role in training and arming the
rebels, Robinson quotes from a report of the Investigation Commission on Haiti that
included attorney Brian Concannon, Fr. Luis Barrios and former U.S. Attorney
General Ramsey Clark:

"There is no doubt that the territory of the Dominican
Republic was used for training and arming the Haitian rebels with the knowledge
of the [Dominican] authorities, and that their attack was launched from
Dominican soil," the report said. "U.S. military officials have confirmed that
20,000 M16 rifles were given by the U.S. to the Dominican Republic after
November 2002 and admitted that many of those rifles were now in the hands of
the Haitian rebels...."

Further destabilizing the poor nation, Washington blocked
$146 million Inter-American Development Bank aid that was to fund projects such
as clean drinking water, health, education and roads.

Feb. 29

In the buildup to the February 29 coup, the rebel band took
over a number of small Haitian towns by capturing local police stations.
Secretary of State Collin Powell reportedly said - and the media erroneously
reported - that the rebels were set to march on Port-au-Prince, a city of some
3 million persons and kill the president. "The few police brave enough to
contest [the rebels] then had no way to answer their firepower. The rebels,
outfitted smartly in baggy camouflage with bulletproof vests and steel helmets,
had good reason to expect that the mere sight of them would scare the bejesus
out of lightly armed policemen defending a lightly staffed police post, miles
and mountains distant from Port-au-Prince...," Robinson writes.

The military activity was a "smokescreen" to pressure
Aristide to resign, "not a serious army," Robinson says.

"Secretary of State Collin Powell reportedly said - and
the media erroneously reported - that the rebels were set to march on
Port-au-Prince, a city of some 3 million persons and kill the president."

A truck carrying television crews followed the rebels, whose
task, according to Robinson, "was to terrorize the countryside outside of
Port-au-Prince - to hack, murder, burn, loot, raze - to tear a fiery swath of
destruction across the northern half of Haiti...and maximize the news media's
coverage of what appeared to be the inexorable fall of the democratic
government, village by defenseless village."

Voluntary flight

Did the Aristides leave voluntarily? Robinson says they would
have prepared. They had not packed bags, didn't tell friends they would leave
and the day before the kidnapping, had been making preparations for interviews
in Port-au-Prince with Tavis Smiley and George Stephanopoulous.

The U.S. media was complicit in making it appear that
Aristide left voluntarily, Robinson says. "The American television networks had
been airing old footage shot in natural light at the Port-au-Prince airport
showing President Aristide without his wife, shaking hands and making his way
along a line of government ministers before boarding a nearby commercial
aircraft. The networks represented the footage to be pictures of the
president's voluntary departure from Haiti."

The reality, according to Robinson, was that the president
and his wife were put on an airplane by U.S. officials before dawn Feb. 29; the
aircraft was not a commercial plane; no members of the Aristide government and
no media were at the airport. The Aristides were taken to the Central African
Republic (CAR) against their will.

Robinson tells how he, along with Rep. Maxine Waters and
others, flew to CAR and secured the Aristides' release. But despite having an
elected president in Haiti today - after two years of U.S. appointed interim
rule - the country has not regained its sovereignty and Aristide remains in
forced exile in South Africa. Haiti continues to be controlled by foreigners,
which includes a military occupation of some 8,800 United Nations troops.

"Sadly, real democracy remains a long way off
for Haiti," Robinson writes. "For how can any reasonable observer contend to
the contrary as long as foreign powers, directly or indirectly, remain bent on
preventing Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti's most widely respected humanist and
democrat, from returning home to his own country."

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