Haitian People Forced to Pay Ten Years Back Pay to the Brutal Military

by Marguerite Laurent

Global Research, January 6, 2004

http://globalresearch.ca/

Debt Breeds Dependency Equals Foreign & Corporate Domination by Marguerite Laurent

Why is war-torn Iraq giving $190,000 to Toys R Us? For the same reason the Haitian people are being forced to pay the bloody Haitian military ten years back pay. It's what Naomi Klein calls "the upside-down morality." (See Naomi Klein's "Why is war-torn Iraq giving $190,000 to Toys R Us? Iraqis are still being forced to pay for crimes committed by Saddam" by Naomi Klein, Saturday October 16, 2004, The Guardian)

If justice, and not power, prevailed in international affairs then the Coup d'etat corporatocracy in Haiti, that is, the governments (U.S/France/Canada), international banks and rich multinational corporations and their Haitian minions, who funded the overthrow of Haiti's elected government, would be paying reparations to the people of Haiti who lost and continue to lose loved ones, property, and limbs. Reparations would also be paid to the millions of Haitians overseas whose decades of investment, almost one billion dollars per year, to Haiti, was lost because of the U.S.-supported 2004 Coup d'etat.

But power and not justice prevails in this world. That's why the poor and dispossessed people of Iraq are paying reparations to the richest corporations and governments in the world and the poor and dispossessed in Haiti will now have to foot ten years back-pay to the bloody Haitian military, the terrorists, who worked on behalf of the world's rich corporatocracy to overthrow Haiti's popularly elected and Constitutional government.

In his book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins writes:

"Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign "aid" organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization. I should know; I was an EHM."

In Haiti, we know their tool is also kidnapping. Kidnapping of President Aristide just as they tried and failed with President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela earlier.

At the beginning of his book, Perkins writes,

".Jaime Roldòs, president of Ecuador, and Omar Torrijos, president of Panama. Both died in fiery crashes. Their deaths were not accidental. They were assassinated because they opposed that fraternity of corporate, government, and banking heads whose goal is global empire. We EHMs (Economic Hit Men) failed to bring Roldòs and Torrijos around, and the other type of hit men, the CIA-sanctioned jackals who were always right behind us, stepped in."

We know in Haiti, that when all the years of U.S. humanitarian and financial embargo, funding of the non-democratic opposition, U.S-sponsored asylums, refuge, visas and rebel training of ex-Haitian soldiers who then attempted and failed three time before the successful 2004 Coup d'etat, when all that failed, under the pretext of "safeguarding the U.S. Embassy," President Bush sent U.S. Marines who escorted Haiti's constitutionally elected President Aristide out of Port-au-Prince and, the terrorist, Guy Philippe into Port-au-Prince.

Today, Guy Philippe and his Haitian army are being rewarded ten years back pay for services rendered to the U.S./Euros and their commercial interests. Meanwhile the populace is under dictatorship once more.

What most mainstream journalists reporting on this reward payment to the terrorists who overthrew Haiti's duly elected government usually fail to point out is that it is U.S. Ambassador Foley's plan that the Latorture regime are executing in Haiti.

Latorture and his illegal and imported replacement government are U.S. assets. Nothing they do is separate and apart from U.S. bidings. Mainstream journalist currently reporting on Latorture's "bad decision-making" fail to point out that Latorture has no power separate and apart from U.S. power.

If there are "bad-decisions" going on in Haiti today, Latorture doesn't have the power to make them. His bosses are responsible. Latorture is no more than a U.S. puppet. That's a key fact. When the corporate mainstream media ignore this essential fact, their reporting are simply media spins that result in making Haitians, Africans, look stupid and as foolish incompetents.

The salient point is that if there are "bad-decision" going on with the U.S.-installed puppet government in Haiti, it is a Bush "bad-desicion."

Still, the real question long time Haiti observers would ask is: why exactly is it a "bad-decision" for U.S. Ambassador Foley to reward his own CIA-assets and operatives with ten years back-pay? Whatever the fallout is these diplomatic and economic hit men will manage it as usual: with a wink and a conspiratorial nod to their terrorist assets, they shall publicly encourage the corporate media to place blame on the more visible Haitian stooges, while continuing to mostly touts the insecurity in Haiti on "pro-Aristide gangs." Having a racist world reference to eternally tap into, not many will question these pronouncements and the blame placed on the Haitian people's "historical intransigence" and "inability to work together" or capability to find "national reconciliation." That game is an old dog that still hunts well for empire and white supremacists. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand the deviousness of U.S. policy in Haiti. Only unwillingness.

For, as long as the mainstream media continues, now that the human rights abuses in Haiti under the Latorture regime may no longer be dismissed, denied or coverered-up, as long as the corporate media continues to denounce only Latorture's "bad decisions" - code meaning incompetents incapable of self-rule - then the truth in Haiti shall remain obfuscated.

No doubt it is not in the interest of the corporatocracy and their mainstream media to highlight the connections. Point out that Guy Philippe, the renegade ex-Haitian soldier who led the overthrow, was trained by U.S. Special forces. That he and his bloody cohorts, Louis-Jodel Chamblain and Jean Pierre Baptiste, both members of the bloody FRAPH paramilitary group that carried out the massacres in support of the first U.S.-supported Coup d'Etat in 1991 are all U.S. assets.

It doesn't fit well into racists doctrines and La La lands mythology for the corporate media to point out that it is U.S. Ambassador to Haiti and Jesse Helms' protégé, Roger Noreiga, and their radical neocon Bush comrades who are the chief architects of not only the current uses of the former Haitian military, but their current reconstitution into the national police.

Since the ex-Haitian soldiers crossed into Haiti, from the Dominican Republic border, unimpeded by either the Dominican army nor the 900 U.S. soldiers who were at the Dominican border, since these terrorist entered Haiti to take over Haitian towns and overthrow the elected government of Haiti, they have been carrying out targeted political assassinations of Lavalas supporters and killing over 4,000 Haitian civilians, raping women and girls while pillaging and looting whatever property they could get their hands on. Their purpose is to destroy the Lavalas party that supports democratic rule in Haiti.

In his February 29, 2004 article, entitled "US Sponsored Coup d'Etat - The Destabilization of Haiti," recalling Ambassador Foley's involvement in support of the brutal Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in 1999, Michel Chossudovsky explains how U.S. Ambassador Foley had been sent to Port au Prince in advance of the CIA sponsored operation to oust President Aristide for a second time. He outlines the use and patterns of drug monies to finance the CIA operations in Haiti and the disbanded Haitian military just as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was financed by drug money and supported by the CIA. (See, www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO402D.html )

Chossudovsky writes "The armed insurrection which contributed to unseating President Aristide on February 29th 2004 was the result of a carefully staged military-intelligence operation." A U.S. military-intelligence operation that is.

U.S. AMBASSADOR FOLEY'S ROLE IN HAITI

Chossudovsky outlines U.S. Ambassador Foley's unique qualifications to reintegrate the Haitian ex-soldiers into the local police force, to launder and re-image the brutal image of the Haitian military and paramilitary. This Foley plan today has culminated in perhaps more than a 29 million reward payment to these U.S. assets. The implementation of this plan is precisely the reason the Bush/Noreiga government posted Foley to Haiti as U.S. Ambassador.

"The KLA had been involved in similar targeted political assassinations and killings of civilians, in the months leading up to the 1999 NATO invasion as well as in its aftermath. Following the NATO led invasion and occupation of Kosovo, the KLA was transformed into the Kosovo Protection Force (KPF) under UN auspices. Rather than being disarmed to prevent the massacres of civilians, a terrorist organization with links to organized crime and the Balkans drug trade, was granted a legitimate political status.

At the time of the Kosovo war, the current ambassador to Haiti James Foley was in charge of State Department briefings, working closely with his NATO counterpart in Brussels, Jamie Shea. Barely two months before the onslaught of the NATO led war on 24 March 1999, James Foley had called for the "transformation" of the KLA into a respectable political organization" ( globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO402D.html )

Today, although what is happening in Haiti is being portrayed in the mainstream press as the "bad-decisions" of the "incompetent" Latorture, another Black man who can't govern and what must the enlightened world do that it hasn't done for poor Haiti other than to now put it under "international protectorate." Although that is the official spin, Haitians know different. The evidence and simple common sense and knowledge of U.S. traditional policies in Haiti reveals otherwise.

What is happening in Haiti is exactly what was planned and orchestrated to happen by the U.S. and Ambassador Foley.

"In other words, Washington's design is "regime change": topple the Lavalas administration and install a compliant US puppet regime, integrated by the Democratic Platform and the self-proclaimed Front pour la libération et la reconstruction nationale (FLRN), whose leaders are former FRAPH and Tonton Macoute terrorists. The latter are slated to integrate a "national unity government" alongside the leaders of the Democratic Convergence and The Group of 184 Civil Society Organizations led by Andy Apaid. More specifically, the FLRN led by Guy Philippe is slated to rebuild the Haitian Armed forces, which were disbanded in 1995."

None of this is "bad-decision-making" by Gerard Latorture. Matters are going on as planned. Latorture along with even the disbanded Haitian military are simply pawns, tools of empire, planted to help bring the Haitian people into more DEBT.

For, webs of debt insures loyalty, promotes U.S. "narco-democracy" and the corporatocracy's commercial and global empire interests. The lives, civil liberties, tribulations and dreams of Black Haitians are irrelevant in this equation. Simply something that must be managed by obfuscating the realities, obfuscating the upside down morality of the economic hit men who work for the world's richest consulting firms, international institutions and their governmental umbrellas, UN/USAID programs and National Endowment for Democracy programs.

WHY IS THE U.S., THE RICHEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD DOING THESE FOUL THINGS TO IMPOVERISHED HAITI?

I often get the question "WHY?" "Haiti has nothing to offer", people say. "Its the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. It doesn't have oil reserves like Iraq."

Again I say Haiti's problem is not that its Black people can't solve their social issues and rule themselves. Haiti's problem is and has always been DEBT. Foreign debt, dependency and domination.

As Perkins states, his job as a three-piece-suited thug, (my characterization) was to, and I quote: "encourage world leaders to become part of a vast network that promotes U.S. commercial interests. In the end, those leaders become ensnared in a web of debt that ensures their loyalty. We can draw on them whenever we desire - to satisfy our political, economic, or military needs. In turn, they bolster their political positions by bringing industrial parks, power plants, and airports to their people. The owners of U.S. engineering/construction companies become fabulously wealthy."

But in Haiti, if you are a democratically elected government, the first ones in almost two hundred years, and have a destitute population looking for you to create jobs, build schools, provide subsidized health care, a living-wage, clean and potable water, looking for you to navigate a traditionally predatory state apparatus towards democracy, compassion and social justice for all Haitian citizens, then, you want resident Haitian architects, Haitian engineers, Haitian computer experts coming up with the plans, Haitian workers building the airports, the health clinics and power plants and parks. You want a domestic economy - that is to use state funds not to pay FOREIGN DEBT but to build a public transportation system, new roads, sewage facilities, public parks, to provide access to electricity everywhere, phone service, communication networks. You want to use state funds to plant trees, subsidize gas prices, food prices, health care cost, national education, literacy programs, domestic investments. The people expect this. They fought against dictatorship and the morally repugnant economic elites and their brutal military for decades to get due representation, to stop taxation without representation.

But if you are the Aristide/Neptune government and you try and accommodate your people's interests, that very attempt is going against the giant U.S. commercial interests and must not succeed.

Naomi Klein's article below also explains how the world's richest countries break the backs of the impoverished in Iraq with unjust debt.

For those in the U.S. who keep asking WHY would the richest country in the world destabilize Haiti's duly elected government and then arm ex-Haitian military to take over Haitian towns, and now agree to pay them ten years back pay, the answer is MONEY. Or, DEBT.

In Haiti, the coup d'Etat government is being loaned billions. Even when the promised billions to Haiti are not actually paid out, Haiti owes and has, particularly under the Aristide/Neptune government, been forced to pay interests on loans promised by the richest international institutions but never disbursed!

The imported regime is undertaking to mortgage Haiti's future as evidence by the recent agreement to pay ten years back pay to the brutal Haitian military. Everyday they remain in office, is another day free and fair elections are put off.

Meanwhile the Latorture regime's first order of business when it came to power back in March, 2004 was to tell France not to worry about the 21 billion dollars in restitution it owes to the people of Haiti. France had, even after centuries of enjoying the free labor of the Africans under slavery, forced the free Haitians to make payments, for close to 100 years after Haiti's independence for the lost of France's human chattels, "property" as a result of the successful Haitian revolution.

Defenseless Haiti couldn't say no to these payments because all the European tribes - the U.S., Britain, Spain, France, et al, who had slavery in the Caribbean, insisted on these payments and all benefited. This was the beginning of DEBT in Haiti. It proved a good substitute. The slave-owning European tribes would quickly learn that debt was a better plan of entrapment than having to deal with the tricky moral and military mess of outright chattel slavery. The debt model, that is financial colonialism, would, by the 2Oth century be the preferred colonial form. It began in Haiti.

These funds blackmailed and ransomed from Haiti are today worth in excess of 21 billion. Haitians were forced at gunpoint to make these payments simply in order that France would not come back and keep trying to reinstate slavery.

Today with the Bush regime change that ousted a democratic government and replaced it with dictatorship, Haitians are virtually enslaved with talk of a permanent dictatorship through a UN or "international" protectorate gaining steam.

Now that Haiti's democracy has been beheaded by the Bush Administration, thousands of innocent Haitians are internal refugees, Maroons being hunted down for their affiliation to the constitutional government while tens of thousands were forced into exile, over 4,000 murdered since February 29, 2004 and over 1,000 Haitians, including Haiti's legitimate Prime Minister, rotting in the U.S.-backed regime's jails.

It is simply unconscionable this upside down morality. What today's richest countries and corporations, what darkness global empire have brought to humankind!

In the meantime, the New York Times and other mainstream media simply ignore the truth, continuing to blame or make blanket statements about how Haiti's problems are caused by the destitute ghetto gangs who were "armed with M-16s" before the Coup d'etat by the exiled president.

Away from mainstream media scrutiny the Economic Hit Men in Haiti at the U.S. Embassy, USAID, European Union, France, and Canada go about their morally reprehensible tasks - implementing financial colonialism, setting policies to ensure more debt for their multinational corporations and commercial interests to be serviced.

To further mask their crimes and not make it apparently racist in Black Haiti, especially during Haiti's celebration of its 200th year bicentennial, the Bush Administration outsourced their military biddings to nonwhites and armies of color, like the Brazilians, Chinese, Lebanese, Jordanians, Turkish, Pakistan, El Salvadorians, Filipinos and, of course, the reconstituted Haitian army - all in their efforts to silence the Haitian people, crush and destroy their resistance to tyranny while fooling the world about the nature of U.S./Euro involvement in Haiti. (See, the other U.S. client states who are in Haiti at: www.un.org/Depts/dpko/missions/minustah/facts.html )

The death counts for 2004 are horrible. But, sipping tropical cocktails at Haiti's upscale restaurant, these three-piece-suited guys and corporate gals, graduates from the worlds best schools, training programs and citizens of the richest countries, will simply tell you "it's just a job " Besides they've got "mortgages to fund and children in private schools" in the U.S., France and Canada whose tuition they must pay. That's what two lawyers from USAID once told me when I pointed out their policies were killing Haitian children and that gluttonous greed was not a pretty thing.

That was back in 1995 when I first returned to Haiti to lend my skills to help with the institutionalization of democracy and the rule of law. Their antics just got worst until finally today, the economic hit men and women, have duly accomplished their commercial clients' goals and attained for the most conducive investment environment: unchecked dictatorship and debt for Haiti.

But read the New York Times recent article on January 2, 2005, by Michael Kamber, for instance, and it's the poor ghetto gangs who, in the end, are uniformly blamed for Haiti instability today. (See. "A Troubled Haiti Struggles to Gain Its Political Balance" by Michael Kamber ).

Haiti's insecurity, chaos, instability and even disenfranchisement is readily blamed on " members of the gangs who control city's slums. "

New York Times, AP and Reuters journalists rarely point out how these city slums came to be; why Haiti is contained-in-poverty and has been since the French indemnity back in 1825; or, the reason for Cite Soleil and other such Port-au-Prince slums; the failed USAID policies and how Cite Soleil and Port-au-Princes other overpopulated ghettos were created by the failed free trade zone, sweatshop policies and the dumping of U.S. subsidized agricultural goods that destroyed the rural farmers and forced them into the cities looking for work.

In the Destabilization of Haiti, Michel Chossudovsky, explains that:

"With the adoption of the IMF-World Bank sponsored trade reforms, the agricultural system, which previously produced food for the local market, had been destabilized. With the lifting of trade barriers, the local market was opened up to the dumping of US agricultural surpluses including rice, sugar and corn, leading to the destruction of the entire peasant economy. Gonaives, which used to be Haiti's rice basket region, with extensive paddy fields had been precipitated into bankruptcy ' (See, US Sponsored Coup d'Etat: The Destabilization of Haiti by Michel Chossudovsky at: www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO402D.html )

No context is given. No analysis is made of the Cold War politics that supported Haitian oppression for over 30-years and the 19-years of U.S. occupation that ended up making Haiti a thousand times poorer than before the U.S. got there; leaving the Haitian people with a legacy they never owned before the U.S. occupation, that is - "the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere."

Rarely are any comments made or comparisons seen between this second U.S.-backed Coup D'etat against the Haitian people and the first U.S.-backed coup d'etat. Mainstream journalists parroting Bush State Department bulletins rarely connect, in print, the refusal of the 20,000 U.S. troops back in 1994 to disarm the disbanded Haitian military as a continuum that logically ended with the remobilization in 2004 of said brutal military for the second U.S.-backed Coup D'etat against President Aristide.

No, virtually without context and historical perspective, all ills in Haiti are today blamed on the Haitian poor and the ghetto gangs - the "chimeres."

As if they had the resources, training, arms and authority to overthrow Haiti's government, could force thousands of Haitians into exile and into prisons or fill Haiti's morgues with dead bodies. As if they are the ones who just massacred over 100 political prisoners in Haiti the very December 1st day Colin Powell went to Haiti to reiterate, one more time, Bush's support for the U.S.-imported Latorture. As if they have the resources and power to imprison duly elected government officials, fly Haiti's President to the Central African Republic, refuse to ship arms, equipment and tear gas that could have helped the Constitutional government stop the Coup d'etat.

The corporate press speak of the role of the ghetto gangs in Port-au-Prince as if Haiti IS only Port-au-Prince.

As if these few and powerless street gangs, some of whom are Haitian deportees from the U.S. prisons, could have, before Feb. 29, 2004, convinced the U.N. Security Counsel to back up the Constitutional government of Haiti not the FRAPH thugs and killers, the brutal Haitian military and the wealthy Ninjas - those brutal murderers who are mostly the children of the wealthy economic elites in Haiti who kill the poor and dispossessed with total and absolute impunity.

No, the mainstream media offers, parroting Bush State Department bulletins. It's the poor, the bandits, the "pro-Aristide gangs", who are, the only Haitians fighting for the return of President Aristide and Constitutional rule to Haiti.

They, not the Latorture death regime, not the Ninjas, not the former Haitian military and FRAPH paramilitary, are mostly categorized as "the criminals," the bandits responsible for the "random killings" in Haiti before, during and since the Coup d'etat. Whereas, the decent, the beautiful, the good, the practical, the rational Haitians are supposedly all AGAINST the return of President Aristide and Constitutional rule to Haiti and are not responsible or complicit for any of the mayhem in Haiti.

It's the chimeres, these urban gangs in the Port-au-Prince's overpopulated neighborhoods, not the the coup d'etat governments of France, U.S. or Canada; not the paid Haitian mercenaries who murdered Haitian policemen and took over Haitian towns; not the EHM and their NED-CIA cohorts who trained, funded and provided them with arms; not the Haitian-journalists andso-called Haitian "civil society" NGOs, trained and paid, through USAID programs and who, before the coup d'etat, had spread blatant lies, fabrications and half truths about the "the Haitian population's total loss of support for President Aristide's government."

Yes, its the poor, black and illiterate who are responsible for Haiti's instability. The economic hit men and their cleanup men and women go unscrutinized.

No New York Times article is analyzing the U.S destabilization programs that were put in place to destroy Haiti and profit the richest Haitians, the richest countries and corporations in the world.

The simple truth is, right now, it's not the poor majority in Haiti clamoring for a return to democracy, nor the opportunistic criminal elements in the ghettos using politics for their own selfish ends, but the imported Latorture regime and its US/UN allies and economic hit men who have the monopoly on violence in Haiti.

They are the main purveyors of Haiti's instability and insecurity. The replacements to Haiti's duly elected government are committing genocide in Haiti and fostering more DEBT and absolutely no development that meets the Haitian peoples' long or short term needs and interests. Those facts are irrevocable.

Marguerite Laurent, Esq. Founder and Chair, Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network January 4, 2005 www.margueritelaurent.com/pressclips/newsessaysreflections.html

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