A Case for not interfering ...

A while back, I had a brief debate with Michael Deibert (and friend), about Haiti. [link] For what it's worth, Deibert is a very articulate man, who may or may not have a more correct analysis of Haitian politics than the sources I usually turn to. My impression though, is that his writings on Haiti that criticize deposed president Aristide appear to give a back-handed justification for the entirely unjustified Canadian, French, US political meddling that led to his overthrow. As well, as I told Deibert in our discussion, he appears to rely too much using his many years in Haiti, and the mountain of details gleaned from this presence and his facility with the language, to overawe his opponents, when a clearly structured and stated argument would be more effective and appropriate.


I'm a busy guy, and I read some of the things that Deibert sent my way, which, if nothing else, gave me a sense of what the anti-Aristide opposition was thinking. This morning, on a whim, I went to Deibert's blog and looked for some of his more recent writings on Haiti.


I found a reference to a letter from a victim of a massacre committed by pro-Aristide forces during the last days of his government, at the town of Saint Marc, when those forces had temporarily retaken the town from rebel forces.

Readers of this blog will remember the Saint Marc killings as one of the most odious human rights abuses to take place in Haiti as the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide sputtered to an end that month. Following the lead of street gangs formerly loyal to the president in Gonaives (who rose up to avenge the murder of their leader, Amiot “Cubain” Metayer and drove government forces from the town on February 5), the anti-Aristide group Rassemblement des militants conséquents de Saint-Marc (Ramicos), based in the neighborhood of La Scierie, two days later took advantage of the chaos to use the weapons at their disposal—mostly light sidearms and pistols—to overrun the Saint Marc police station, where they freed all the prisoners before setting the structure on fire.

On February 11, however, pro-government forces recaptured the town, and members of the Unite de Securite de la Garde du Palais National d’Haiti and the local pro-Aristide Bale Wouze paramilitary gang set about on a multi-day mass killing of Aristide opponents, as well as politically unaffiliated civilians, during which authoritative accounts list at least 27 people as having been slain and a number of women raped. One of the leaders of Bale Wouze, former Fanmi Lavalas party Deputy Amanus Mayette, a man who witnesses in Saint Marc have charged actively participated in the killings, was freed from prison without trial last month.

Now, my memory works in a funny way. This account of the Saint Marc massacre immediately made me think of former Haitian prime minister Yvon Neptune. Neptune was (as you can see from the link) held without charges for over a year, before being released for health and humanitarian reasons following a lenghty hunger-strike. Neptune had been linked to the Saint Marc massacre, and I thought that I recalled a source saying that there hadn't even been a massacre.


So I did a little searching, and lo' and behold, it was at Znet that I'd first read this report about Neptune and the (apparently) bogus charges of complicity in a massacre:

The authorities allege that Neptune was the mastermind of a "massacre" in the town of St. Marc during February. The sole basis for this allegation seems to be a report issued by the National Coalition for Haitian Rights (NCHR), a "human rights" organization with close ties to Lavalas opponents and Washington. The NCHR is notorious for its overt political bias and its troubling tendency to tell outright lies. NCHR director Pierre Espérance alleged that fifty people were killed in the "massacre." Subsequent investigations only turned up five bodies, and the circumstances of their deaths were unclear. When asked by AHP about the absence of bodies, Espérance claimed they had been devoured by hungry dogs. "As for the bones, they suffered the same fate", he said.

While there has undoubtedly been violence in St. Marc over the past few months, most of it has actually been the doing of Lavalas opponents. It is also likely that there were reprisals by Aristide supporters and people caught in the crossfire. However, if the whole story of what has happened in St. Marc were being told, it would be easier to understand why these deaths have taken place.

Starting in January, a rebel-aligned organization called RAMICOS began violent demonstrations and attacks against supporters of the Aristide government. RAMICOS is also a member of the Democratic Convergence, a U.S.-backed political organization dominated by Haitian elites. On January 15th RAMICOS set fire to the offices of Radio Pyramide and the homes of several Lavalas activists. They also attempted to free criminals who were being held in the St. Marc prison.

Violence intensified in February when RAMICOS attacked the St. Marc police station and looted and burned the customs house. The police, apparently in concert with the rebels, fled without putting up a fight and left behind all of their guns and ammunition. The charges of police complicity are bolstered by the fact that one of the stations commanders was a former member of the Haitian army and is close to Dany Toussaint, a notorious gang leader now aligned with Lavalas' opponents. Once RAMICOS had control of the town they tortured and killed several members of Fanmi Lavalas, according to the Committee for the Defense of Haitian People's Rights.

The government quickly launched a counteroffensive and were able to retake the town with the support of the local population. Yvon Neptune flew to the town by helicopter and was greeted by
cheering crowds. This is when the alleged "massacre" was supposed to have taken place, but media reports from the time vaguely describe "clashes" between government supporters and rebels, with small numbers of deaths on both sides as well as a few people caught in the crossfire. Given the available evidence, it would seem the "massacre" of fifty people is a figment of Pierre Espérance's imagination.

However, if the government were really interested in cracking down on impunity and human rights violations, they may want to look in to the activities of RAMICOS after Aristide was forced
from power. Refugees forced to flee the town gave the following account to journalist Kim Ives: "Seven young people, including two pairs of young brothers, were macheted or shot to death by pro-coup forces. The mutilated bodies were then paraded around the town and dragged by a rope behind a truck to terrorize the rest of the town's population. They were then burned." After these
atrocities the townspeople were effectively terrorized in to submission, allowing RAMICOS members to take over the telephone company, tax authority, and port authority in an attempt to control the local government for themselves.

I also found this:

The government has already arrested former officials implicated in serious abuses, including the previous government's interior minister and a former parliamentary deputy. It has also announced plans to investigate former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whom it condemns as the architect of efforts to repress the country's political opposition.

...

Yet, up to now, there has been a worrying one-sidedness to the new government's efforts. Its eagerness to prosecute officials of the previous government stands in stark contrast to its apparent indifference to the record of other known perpetrators of grave human rights crimes.

...

During almost all of February, Saint Marc was terrorized by a violent pro-government death squad known as Bale Wouze, or Clean Sweep. Bale Wouze was led by Amanus Mayette, a former
parliamentary deputy belonging to Aristide's party whose term had expired in January.

On February 7, two days after the rebel take-over of Gonaives, a lightly-armed anti-government group known as Ramicos overran the Saint Marc police station. The government soon sent in police SWAT team reinforcements, known as CIMO, and retook control of the town. Within days, the Bale Wouze and CIMO, working together, attacked the neighborhood of La Scierie, known as a Ramicos stronghold. They were heavily armed, carrying M-14s and M-1s, and wore black masks. They poured diesel fuel on houses associated with Ramicos members and burned down close to a dozen of them. They also burned several people to death.

One victim was a young carpenter named Kenol St. Gilles. On February 11, when Bale Wouze attacked la Scierie, Kenol was on his way home for lunch. His mother was visiting the home of a local pastor when news came that Kenol had been shot in the leg. Kenol's mother went to find Kenol and carried him back to the pastor's house. The pastor's wife was a nurse, and was going to try to treat Kenol's bullet wounds.

The men who had shot Kenol searched the neighborhood house-by-house looking for him. They found Kenol in the pastor's house and dragged him down the road to a depot that they had set on fire. Kenol's mother ran after them, hiding, and saw two men throw Kenol into the burning building. "One was holding his hands and one his feet," she later described. "They just tossed him into the fire."

...

But whereas the government has vowed to investigate the Saint Marc killings and prosecute them fairly, it has treated abuses from the military era very differently. Indeed, in late March, Haiti's interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue publicly lauded the rebel forces -- whose leaders include both Chamblain and Tatoune -- calling them "freedom fighters." Haiti's interim Justice Minister has even raised the possibility of granting pardons to Chamblain and Tatoune, though in other statements to the press he has suggested that the government is simply waiting for the right
moment to deal with them.

Given the de facto power of the rebel forces, and the interim government's relative weakness, there is no doubt that it would take real political courage to attempt to arrest Chamblain and Tatoune now. But every day that those two notorious killers are allowed to walk around free, armed, and dangerous, is another day in which the failings of Haitian justice are on display.

It all seems very bloody, and very murky, and very sad. Now, I'm not going to be able to even pretend to go through these varying accounts of massacres and compromised justice. What I will do, and I will attempt to spell this out as clearly as I can, is to argue why, given the murkiness of these conflicting accounts, given the deep histories of all of these actors, and given the compromised morality and democractic values of our political leaders, it is best if we resolve to keep our governments from interfering in the affairs of other countries, and to hold them to improving and respecting international law.



If this seems lazy and apathetic, irresponsible, consider this: The agonies of Haiti are very much largely the responsibility of the United States; creating, training, arming, and funding the Haitian national guard that was used (as it was intended) to protect the Haitian government from the Haitian people, who it was correctly anticipated, would not happily starve while their country's resources were shipped overseas and they were reduced to slave labour.



The current turmoil in Haiti is the responsibility of the United States, Canada, and France, discussing amongst themselves how best to destabilize Aristide, financing a rebellion led by convicted death-squad murderers and supported by sweat-shop owners. The vicousness of any Famni Lavalas activists might have to due with the mass tortures and slaughters they suffered the last time under regimes that overthrew Aristide the first time, and who were back, leading the recent coup.



Which is not to say, as I told Mr. Deibert last time, that there can be no such thing as a legitimate opponent to Aristide in Haiti. Aristide didn't have to be perfect. We just shouldn't have done everything in our power to turn him into a paranoid, and then have expected him to be perfect.



At the very least, for all the blood we have spilled in Haiti, we have NOT made conditions there any better than they were under Aristide. However, our failures don't appear to warrant an armed intervention against the leaders we selected. Instead the world's political body, the United Nations, is helping to prop-up this order, via MINUSTAH, in a seriously questionable enterprise.



International Law is slow, frustrating, and built by compromised state governments and institutional law-makers. But insofar as it frustrates the individual madness of idiots such as george w. bush, or the pea-brained whims and delusions of a Paul Martin Jr., or the totalitarian hypocrisies of the Soviets, or the tinpot fantasies of poor country despots, and is instead the product of serious, public deliberations, to that extent is it preferable to lies and cynicisims like "the responsibility to protect." It will therefore, in the long-run, be a more effective means of achieving our values, than these occasionaly cries for us to "do something" orchestrated by political and media elites.


Such caution about our limitations to sensibly pick sides would have kept us on the sidelines of our disastrous intervention in Afghanistan.