U.S. Haitian Puppet
Targets Jean-Bertrand Aristide Yet Again
by Joe Emersberger
No evidence of
corruption has ever been found to incriminate the former
Haitian leader, who was overthrown by a U.S.-led coup.
Former Haitian President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide is once again
being hounded with
bogus corruption allegations by the government of Michel
Martelly – a government that owes its existence to
U.S. bullying.
I don’t dismiss corruption allegations
against any politician lightly – even one the U.S. despises.
Reasonable, but uniformed, readers may ask why we can be
sure the allegations against Aristide are baseless.
If the facts were widely known about
what the U.S. has done in Haiti in recent years, nobody
would ask that question. They’d be too busy working for the
prosecution of U.S. officials for crimes perpetrated in
Haiti. In fact, Canadian, French and United Nations
officials would also be struggling to stay out of jail for
aiding and abetting those crimes,
as I’ve mentioned before.
On Feb. 29, 2004, the U.S. perpetrated
a coup against Haiti’s democratically elected government
which was headed by Aristide. That’s worth repeating. The
U.S. directly perpetrated the coup. It did not simply
provide decisive support for a coup carried out by local
allies as it has done so many times in Latin America. In
this case, U.S. troops physically removed Aristide from
Haiti in the middle of the night and flew him off to the
Central African Republic. Canadian troops assisted the U.S.
by securing the airport in Port-Au-Prince. The U.S.
government claims that Aristide begged rescue from a small
group of “rebels” even though his own security team could
have led him to safety, if that was his priority, in various
countries within the Caribbean. The U.S. and its allies,
after its alleged “rescue” of Aristide, took over Haiti and
promptly set up a dictatorship under Gérard Latortue. The
rebels – essentially led by the death squad leader Jodel
Chamblain – were immediately made completely subordinate to
the U.S. and its allies. Rebels who objected too strongly to
their subordinate role were simply told to get lost and, in
a few very isolated cases, hunted down. Hundreds of the more
obedient “rebels” were
incorporated into a revamped Haitian police force
under the close direction of U.S. and UN officials. Yes,
criminals were made police under the direction of even
bigger criminals in Washington. That’s how our upside down
world functions.
It should be stressed that even those
who insist that U.S. troops “rescued” (as opposed to
“kidnapped”) Aristide have absolutely no basis for denying
that the Washington perpetrated a coup. The U.S. and its
allies used the “rebels” as a pretext to forcibly restore
its traditional far right allies to dominance in Haiti.
Aside from the widely ignored murder of thousands of
Aristide’s supporters that took place under Gérard
Latortue’s dictatorship, Aristide’s political party (Fanmi
Lavalas) has also been banned from participating in
elections held since the coup. Latortue stacked the
judiciary with people keen to facilitate the persecution of
Aristide’s supporters – people with the same mentality as
the Martelly-appointed judge who recently issued the arrest
warrant against Aristide for allegedly ignoring a summons.
And that examining magistrate, Lamarre Bélizaire, is
disbarred from acting as a lawyer
when he steps down as a judge. So a judge who has been
renounced and cast out by the Haitian Bar issued the arrest
warrant. That’s perfectly consistent with what the U.S. has
established in Haiti.
Part of the U.S.“rescue” of Aristide in
2004 supposedly included a promise to protect his property
in Haiti. Colin Powell – the man tasked with lying
extravagantly to the world about Iraqi fictitious weapons of
mass destruction (WMD) – claimed that the
U.S. had made this promise
to Aristide. Immediately after the “rescue”, Aristide’s
house was ransacked for days thereby exposing Powell, yet
again, as a liar.
But there is another consideration that
is relevant to the allegations against Aristide. Since 2004,
the U.S. and its allies had every opportunity and incentive
to build a devastating case against Aristide for corruption
or anything else they wanted. They had access to any number
of personal and official documents combined with the ability
to lean on heavily (bribe and coerce, that is) countless
former Aristide associates. The Latortue dictatorship spent
a lot of time and money in U.S. courts, and predictably
received a great deal of help from U.S. Treasury officials
trying to build some kind of case. It speaks volumes that
all they’ve been able to charge Aristide with after all
these years is what this disbarred judge came up with –
allegedly ignoring a summons.
In 2005, Ira Kurzban, Aristides’s
attorney in the U.S.,
has pointed out: “If
you recall, a lot of the venom was spewed against President
Aristide both before and following the coup - wild
accusations that he had $280 million in a bank account
somewhere in Europe and so forth. To my understanding, the
United States sent seven people from the Treasury Department
immediately after the coup to investigate financial
wrongdoing, and a number of Haitians have been working day
and night to find the money that President supposedly took.
But, it’s now obvious, there is none. There are no Swiss
bank accounts, no yachts, no Trump Tower apartments, all of
which there were with Duvalier. There are none of the things
that one classically identifies with the claim that a
president has abused his authority and stolen money for his
own benefit.”
Lack of evidence never stopped the U.S.
from aggressively peddling its claims that Iraqi WMD
existed. The case for war depended on it. Evidence and logic
were therefore dismissed by both the U.S. government and the
corporate media. Similarly in Haiti, the ongoing crushing of
democracy requires the relentless demonization of the
popular Haitian president whom the U.S. government deposed.
This article was first published, in
a slightly different version, by Telesur. |