Haiti: Both Church and State Must Answer

By Neil Elliott

One bright morning in March, only days after heavily armed U.S. forces whisked Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide onto to a waiting jet, Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) broadcast a brief interview with a reporter in Port-au-Prince. The news that day included discoveries of mutilated bodies in the streets and violence in the slums of La Saline and Site Soley, where the deposed president's support had been greatest. The grim punchline of the report was that whatever change the poor of Haiti had once expected from Aristide's government now seemed more remote than ever.

End of story. As Christopher Lydon, MPR's Mid-Morning host, put it later in the week, “Haiti has subsided to the level of misery and danger where U.S. governments and media routinely ignore it.”

“A Catastrophe for All the People of Haiti”

Not quite. Desperate reports from the slums of Port-au-Prince and from communities in the north, where U.S. and allied “peacekeeping” forces and most U.S. journalists have not yet ventured, indicate that the violence had escalated to levels not seen since the 1991-94 coup regime led by former CIA “assets” Raoul Cedras and Emmanuel “Toto” Constant. (Cedras is the man the CIA presented to Senator Jesse Helms' Foreign Relations Committee as the “best hope for democracy” in Haiti, the same man Jimmy Carter later invited to his Sunday School in Plains, Georgia, after whisking him to safe haven and a golden parachute in Panama. Constant, who later told The Nation  that he organized the death-squad organization FRAPH at the suggestion of a CIA agent in the U.S. Embassy, now lives comfortably in Queens, New York.)

Now, as then, armed gangs – some in the uniform of the disbanded Haitian army – go door to door, shooting and hacking down anyone identifiable as an Aristide supporter. As Jean Charles Moise, the mayor of Milo (a town of 50,000 near Cap Haitien in the North), reported from hiding, “They come into your home. They take you, they beat you up, they kill you. They burn down homes. They do anything they want, because they are the only law in town. . .   Those they don't kill, they lock up in [shipping] containers, because they burned down the jails.” Moise reported that “the old army is doing what they used to do before, except with more powerful weapons and with helicopters. They are drowning people in the sea. That is what is going on.” Moise described the situation as “intolerable . . . a catastrophe for all the people of Haiti.”

Human Rights Watch reported (March 22) that “a large number of journalists and government officials,” including “nearly all of the local mayors” in the north of Haiti, “have gone into hiding out of fear for their safety.” Meanwhile, the Kansas City Star carried a story that trucks had removed “more than 700 bodies” from a morgue in the capital.

One part of radio journalist Lydon's summary is accurate: while Mayor Moise's story was carried by Pacific News Service on March 14 , the violence has not figured prominently in the major news media in the United States. It turns out the “level of misery and danger where U.S. governments and media routinely ignore it” is remarkably high. U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher made the point bluntly enough the day after the coup, dismissing reporters' questions about the U.S. role in Aristide's departure: “It's time to look forward.”

Though the lead players in the Bush administration – U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega, Undersecretary for Latin America Otto Reich, U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Negroponte – were all architects of Ronald Reagan's terrorist contra army in Nicaragua in the 1980s, the American press are stunningly uninterested in their recent roles in Haiti.

A Cooperative Media

In an eerie replay of 1994, the media, following the State Department's lead, have suddenly discovered that there were human rights abuses during Aristide's administration, focusing attention that violence by “rebel” forces has never attracted. Though the lead players in the Bush administration – U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega, Undersecretary for Latin America Otto Reich, U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Negroponte – were all architects of Ronald Reagan's terrorist contra army in Nicaragua in the 1980s, the American press are stunningly uninterested in their recent roles in Haiti. According to reports in the international press, over the last three years Noriega and Reich met regularly with former Duvalierist and FRAPH thugs in the neighboring Dominican Republic.

Even when the brutality of the Cedras regime merits a story, strict silence is maintained regarding the U.S. role. DeNeen Brown reports in the Washington Post on how victims of the orchestrated rape campaign of 1991-94 are faring (“‘Political Rapes' of 1991 Still Haunt Haitian Democracy Activists,” March 20). The only impediments to prosecution of the assailants that Brown mentions are recent (and apparently inexplicable) “political turmoil,” the lack of international precedent for such prosecutions, and the corruption of Haitian courts. Not a word about the specific actions of the U.S. State Department to sweep Cedras to a safe house in Panama City, where he lives off the $5,000 monthly rent the U.S. pays him for the loss of his Pétionville home; nothing about the U.S. Justice Department's refusal to extradite Constant from Queens to face trial in Haiti, on the pretext that such a trial would be “destabilizing”; nothing of the U.S. State Department's steadfast refusal to turn over more than 60,000 pages of direct evidence confiscated by the U.S. Army from FRAPH offices across Haiti.

I was in Haiti in the summer of 1995 with a human rights delegation, asking government ministers, activists, and victims of the terror regime about what was being done to bring the perpetrators of the most grisly attacks and murders to justice. Our delegation met with 40 women who had been raped and mutilated, or forced to watch their husbands and children tortured and murdered before their eyes, women like those Brown spoke with almost a decade later. We listened to the chief investigator with the U.N. Civilian Mission in Haiti tell us that his team had pulled together enough evidence to convict a number of assailants, and that he expected prosecutions of higher-ranking officials as well–what local activists called “the intellectual authors” of the violence. “You read these files, and you can almost hear the commanding officer's voice,” the investigator told us.

We asked why much publicized “truth commission” investigations, to be conducted by the Haitian government under U.S. supervision, hadn't yet begun. We were told the U.S. had reneged on its promise of $1 million to finance the investigation. Later, back in the States, we read that the U.S. had refused to allow the publication of a preliminary draft report unless the names of all perpetrators were removed. The implicit rationale was neatly articulated by the State Department attaché for human rights, who mused, “that's the perennial question of the hemisphere, isn't it – whether to try to get vengeance against the ‘bad guys,' or to let bygones be bygones.”

The Episcopal Church's Involvement

Already the Episcopal Relief and Development agency (ERD) has moved into action, calling for sustained relief contributions to be channeled to the Episcopal Diocese of Haiti. The appeal is irreproachable and I heartily endorse it.

But we must go beyond offering relief to the victims of a coup d'état orchestrated and supported by agents of our own government.

Weeks ago the Episcopal News Service (ENS) announced, “ Haitian Episcopal Priest Helps Form New Government ” (March 9). According to the report, the Rev. MacDonald Jean had been named “to the council of seven ‘Sages' who will be forming a new government for Haiti.” The ENS story describes the very laudable credentials and commitment of a renowned priest and theological educator who served in the Haitian Senate from 1995 to 1999.

. . .the “council of Sages” is a structural end-run around the Haitian Constitution, originally dreamed up by the U.S. months ago as a way to pressure Aristide – whom even the State Department admits was elected in a “free and fair” election – to share power with the unelected pressure groups that the U.S. has funded under its so-called “Democracy Enhancement Project.”

It fails to explain, however, that the “Council of Sages (or 'Wise Ones')” is a structural end-run around the Haitian Constitution, originally dreamed up by the U.S. months ago as a way to pressure Aristide – whom even the State Department admits was elected in a “free and fair” election – to share power with the unelected pressure groups that the U.S. has funded under its so-called “Democracy Enhancement Project.” Those same groups, representing the tiny business elite in Haiti, are now well represented in Gerard Latortue, the neoliberal economist whom the U.S.-built “Council of Sages” imported from Florida to serve as Prime Minister.

Despite the air of cheerfulness in the ENS story, I submit that Episcopalians have no room for a sort of team pride that "one of ours” has made good. I hasten to add that I don't know the Rev. MacDonald Jean personally (although a press release from the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota, in which I serve as a priest, indicates he worked most recently in a Twin Cities suburban church). In an interview with Nan Cobbey published by ENS (March 23), Jean speaks convincingly of the terrible disappointment he shared with many Haitians when Aristide, in whom so many had put their hopes, failed to accomplish anything of significance for the poor. Not surprisingly, given his background, Jean voices a profound hope that education will empower the next generation of Haitians to form an effective democracy, and he urges the Episcopal Church USA to support that laudable endeavor.

But a sense of historical gravity forces us to confront the usual fate of the poor, in Haiti and elsewhere, at the hands of the United States, the World Bank and the IMF. Where Jean seeks to explain the failure of Haitian democracy on account of the “tribal mentality” Haitians share with their African ancestors, other historians – Haitian historians – speak of the legacy of five centuries of brutal oppression: the extermination of the island's native population by the Spanish, the brutal enslavement of Africans by the French, and the crushing imperialism of the United States from the early 20th century. Asked specifically whether he, as one of the instruments through which the U.S. has secured a more malleable prime minister in Haiti, has received any assurance that international funding for Haiti would now be forthcoming, Jean says he doesn't know but hopes for the best – as Haitians have been hoping through a decade of U.S. obstruction of World Bank and IMF funding.

Nor does Jean know whether the U.S. will now allow funds to flow directly to the Haitian government. For ten years, the Clinton, then Bush administrations withheld more than $650 million in promised support that would have allowed the governments of Aristide and his successor, René Préval, to carry out sweeping economic reforms. The only “reforms” the U.S. would countenance were the onerous “austerity” measures required by the World Bank – nicknamed Plan Grangou,  “the Starvation Plan,” because of the apparent effect the measures would have on the Haitian poor. (See Lisa McGowan's analysis in Democracy Undermined, Economic Justice Denied: Structural Adjustment and the Aid Juggernaut in Haiti [Washington, D.C.: Development Group for Alternative Policies, 1997].)

In the ENS interview, Jean offered not a breath of criticism of the World Bank's measures, or the U.S. government's policy of holding aid for political ransom – what Aristide called “economic terrorism.” He had no comment on the U.S. policy of working only through cooperative NGOs, which have included its own instrument, U.S. AID (now deeply implicated in supporting the anti-Aristide opposition and, very plausibly, the rebel forces themselves). Jean expressed hope that Episcopal Migration Ministries might be able to channel aid to help refugees resettle after being turned back from the United States; meanwhile, Human Rights Watch protests that the repatriation of 867 Haitians by the U.S. Coast Guard is a gross violation of their rights to seek asylum under international law. “With people being shot dead in [the streets of Port-au-Prince] by gangs of criminal thugs, it was unconscionable for the U.S. to dump entire families into this danger zone,” exclaimed Joanne Mariner, Deputy Director of HRW's Americas Division.

And as for those rebel forces: Prime Minister Gerard Latortue recently visited Gonaïves, in the central Artibonite valley. In 1994, one year before Jean was elected to represent Gonaïves in the Haitian senate, one of the city's slums, Raboteau, was the site of an infamous massacre. Much vilified now for his human rights record, Aristide was at least able to successfully prosecute and jail one of the perpetrators of the Raboteau massacre, Jean Tatoune. Weeks ago, the rebel army sprang Tatoune from jail so he could take his place alongside Guy Philippe and other former murderers, now rearmed. In his visit, Prime Minister Latortue – handpicked by the “Council of Sages” – hailed the rebel army as his nation's “freedom fighters.”

U.S. policy continues to serve the purposes of the elite rather than the stark needs of the cruelly impoverished masses. Despite worthy credentials and the best of intentions, it is not clear from the stories and interviews published by ENS that the Rev. Macdonald Jean or any member of the Council of Sages will be able, or willing, to challenge that policy.

The Hope of the Haitian Poor

We must face the harsh truth reflected in the deployment of U.S. forces around upscale mansions and “free enterprise” (sweatshop) zones in Port-au-Prince: U.S. policy continues to serve the purposes of the elite rather than the stark needs of the cruelly impoverished masses. Despite worthy credentials and the best of intentions, it is not clear from the stories and interviews published by ENS that the Rev. MacDonald Jean or any member of the Council of Sages will be able, or willing, to challenge that policy.

That task falls to us. Our Baptismal Covenant calls us to another way. The suffrages of Morning Prayer implore: “Let not the hope of the poor be taken away.”

If our prayer for the hope of the poor is to take flesh, we must resist the cynical and brutal policies of the U.S. government. We must expose the lies and hypocrisy of an administration that engineers coups d'état in the name of democracy. We must support national and international investigations into the years-long covert machinations that led up to Aristide's removal. We must join with organizations that continue to demand that our government surrender death-squad organizer “Toto” Constant to extradition, release the thousands of pages of FRAPH records needed to prosecute uniformed rapists and murderers, and bring to an end the climate of impunity in which the grossest violence has flourished – and now springs to new life – in Haiti.

We may hope that an international peacekeeping force – under U.N. authority – might effectively disarm the thugs rampaging through the streets and villages of Haiti; and then, that a just development policy, benefiting the working poor of Haiti, might be set in place.

All this will require a tremendous investment in the social infrastructure of Haiti: just reparations for centuries of exploitation and abuse, as Aristide rightly insisted. It falls to us who claim the name of Jesus to name the justice of these actions – and to devote sustained and diligent attention to Haiti, not only with hearts opened in prayer, but with open eyes and strong voices.

Let not the hope of the poor be taken away.

The Rev. Neil Elliott served as associate director of a nonprofit organization in Haiti in 2000-01, and as a member of the Haiti Justice Committee of the Twin Cities from 1991 to 1994. He now serves as Episcopal chaplain at the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis). He may be reached by email at chaplain@uec-mn.org .