U.S. Government Channels Millions
Through National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to Fund Anti-Lavalas
Groups in Haiti
Amy Goodman interviews independent
Canadian journalist Anthony Fenton
www.democracynow.org/, January
23, 2006
and co-author of the book "Canada
in Haiti: Waging War On The Poor Majority."
Anthony Fenton, independent Canadian journalist
and co-author of the book "Canada in Haiti: Waging War On
The Poor Majority." He will be posting leaked NED documents
on Haiti at www.inthenameofdemocracy.org -- a new group dedicated
to monitoring government-funded "democracy-enhancement"
projects.
We take a look at Haiti, which is preparing
for upcoming national elections. Independent Canadian journalist,
Anthony Fenton, joins us to discuss the National Endowment for
Democracy - the US government-funded group - that is pouring millions
of dollars into trying to influence Haiti's political future.
[includes rush transcript]
Nearly two years after the overthrow
of President Jean Bertrand Aristide, Haiti will be holding national
elections next month. Former President Rene Preval, a Aristide
ally, is leading in the polls. Meanwhile, a judge has dropped
the most serious charges against jailed priest Gerard Jean Juste.
Jean Juste was imprisoned in July over the murder of journalist
Jacques Roche - killed while Jean Juste was in Miami. After Jean
Juste's arrest, Haitian officials prevented Lavalas - the political
movement aligned with Aristide - from registering him as their
presidential candidate, on the grounds he was imprisoned. Although
he has been cleared in Roche's murder, authorities say Jean Juste
will remain in prison over weapons charges. Amnesty International
calls him a prisoner of conscience. Calls for his release have
intensified with the recent announcement he's been diagnosed with
leukemia.
Meanwhile, violence continues to affect
Haiti's poorest areas. Last week, two Jordanian troops with the
UN mission were killed in a gun-battle in the poor neighborhood
of Cite Soleil. Local residents later reported UN troops had shot
at a hospital in the area. UN troops have stepped up armed raids
on Cite Soleil amid pressure from business leaders and foreign
officials.
We want to continue our Haiti coverage
leading up to the election by looking at the activities of a government-funded
organization that is pouring millions of dollars into trying to
influence the country's political future. The National Endowment
for Democracy is one of a handful of state-funded groups that
have played a pivotal role in the internal politics of several
Latin American and Caribbean countries in the service of the US
government.
The NED operates with an annual budget
of $80 million dollars from U.S. Congress and the State Department.
In Venezuela, it's given money to several political opponents
of President Hugo Chavez. With elections underway in Haiti, it's
reportedly doing the same to groups linked to the country's tiny
elite and former military.
Last week Democracy Now! interviewed Anthony
Fenton about NED's activities in Haiti and across the Caribbean
and Latin America. Fenton is an independent journalist and co-author
of the book "Canada in Haiti: Waging War On The Poor Majority."
He has interviewed several top governmental and non-governmental
officials dealing with Haiti as well as leading members of Haiti's
business community. Last month, he helped expose an NED-funded
journalist who was filing stories for the Associated Press from
Haiti. The Associated Press subsequently terminated its relationship
with the journalist.
************
AMY GOODMAN: Last week, I interviewed
Anthony Fenton, about N.E.D.'s activities in Haiti and across
the Caribbean and Latin America. Fenton is an independent Canadian
journalist and co-author of the book, Canada in Haiti: Waging
War on the Poor Majority. He has interviewed several top governmental
and non-governmental officials dealing with Haiti, as well as
leading members of Haiti's business community. Last month, he
helped expose an N.E.D.-funded journalist who was filing stories
for the Associated Press from Haiti. The Associated Press subsequently
terminated its relationship with her. We go now to an excerpt
from that interview. Anthony Fenton was in a studio in Vancouver.
I began by asking him to talk about the current situation in Haiti.
ANTHONY FENTON: Well, indeed, obviously,
there is an ongoing military occupation there ever since the forced
ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February of 2004
in a coup d'etat that was assisted and planned by the Canadian
government, along with the U.S. government and the French government.
Of course, speaking from Canada, Canada played an integral role
in the overthrow of Aristide and continues to play an integral
role in the post-invasion occupation of Haiti.
They're leading up to what are now the
fourth scheduled period of elections. There have been several
postponements. This is due in part -- the original intention of
the invasion, of course, was to subvert the young process of popular
democracy that existed in Haiti prior to the coup, and of course,
if Aristide hadn't been overthrown, Haiti would have already carried
out their democratic election, their presidential elections.
And, of course, the fear of the United
States and of organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy
and the State Department, of course, was that popular democracy
would take root in Haiti under another Lavalas government, and
they have set about to undermine the popular movement that existed
in support of Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the Lavalas Party. And
we're seeing today the consolidation of the elite rule that they
have long envisioned for Haiti ever since the fall of "Baby
Doc" Duvalier in the mid-80s.
AMY GOODMAN: Anthony, can you just lay
out what the National Endowment for Democracy is?
ANTHONY FENTON: Well, yeah, they were
formed in the early 1980s under the Reagan administration. Ostensibly,
they purport to promote pro-democracy organizations and democratic
values across the world. Just last October, President Bush spoke
at a National Endowment for Democracy gathering, reiterating the
vision of Reagan as he set about to, as they say, "promote
democracy throughout the world," and they were given - they've
been given various budgets allocated by Congress every year, as
you said at the onset. Now their budget stands at $80 million
a year. But they are, of course, just one organization among many
that are linked to the U.S. Agency for International Development,
as I said, the State Department. Hundreds of millions of dollars
now, in fact, more money is now being spent than ever before on
what they call democracy promotion.
Now, the historical record on the National
Endowment for Democracy is very clear, when we look at the work
of people like Philip Agee and William Robinson and William Blum,
Noam Chomsky and others, and most recently, if we look at the
work of attorney and independent journalist, Eva Golinger, who
exposed, through Freedom of Information Act requests, the role
that the N.E.D. played in attempting to subvert democracy and
the revolutionary process that's unfolding in Venezuela in 2002.
The N.E.D. played a crucial role in fomenting the opposition to
Hugo Chavez, and they did play a role in the attempted coup against
him in April of 2002, and very much the same patterns we have
seen develop in Haiti.
On your show, in 2004, you interviewed
Max Blumenthal, who wrote an article, an important article for
Salon that outlined the role of the International Republican Institute,
and when we talk about the N.E.D., we can't talk about them without
also talking about the International Republican Institute and
the other affiliated organizations. There's a virtual labyrinth
of these organizations that receive funding that's specifically
earmarked for the undermining of any widespread social movements,
any rudiments of popular democracy that should manifest, either
in Latin America or anywhere in the world.
So, again, this is sort of the premise
of what the National Endowment for Democracy really does, and
as we look at what they're doing in Haiti - and how I was able
to learn about what they're currently doing in Haiti came about
through the process of a first documentary reporting trip to Haiti
in September and October of 2005, where we spoke to a number of
N.E.D. grantees, Haitian organizations that received funding from
the National Endowment for Democracy. I returned to Canada and
set about to conduct a series of interviews with N.E.D. and any
program officer, in particular, with I.R.I. officials, with in-country
officials who are managing several million dollars in U.S.-funded
democracy promotion activities, as you said also, that are linked
closely to the Haitian elite, to the opposition organizations,
such as the Group of 184, the Democratic Convergence. These are
the organizations that agitated most strongly for the overthrow
of Aristide and that were working with the N.E.D. and the I.R.I.
in the years preceding the 2004 coup.
AMY GOODMAN: The I.R.I. being the International
Republican Institute.
ANTHONY FENTON: Yes. We know that - for
example, just the other day, I spoke to a woman who is the leader
of an organization called COFEL. It's an umbrella organization
of women political leaders. In the years before the coup against
Aristide in 2004, the I.R.I. would bring in, they would bus in
or fly in groups of anywhere between 60 and 80 of these women.
And, of course, they're busing in other men and other political
figures in Haiti. But they would bus them into the Dominican Republic,
because in 1999, at the time, Ambassador Timothy Carney - he was
the U.S. ambassador at the time. That's very important, because
Ambassador Carney is the current interim ambassador to Haiti,
and he was also a member of the lobby - the think tank in Washington
called the Haiti Democracy Project that played an integral role
in fomenting this demonization campaign against Aristide.
In any case, in 1999, the I.R.I. was closed
down. Their operations were shut down. They were forced to leave
Haiti, and until the coup in 2004, the I.R.I. did not have an
in-country presence, so they were doing most of their work in
the Dominican Republic with people like Stanley Lucas, who is
well known as a card-carrying Republican Haitian American who
was hired by the International Republican Institute during the
first coup period against Aristide in the early 1990s, and he's
the one who sort of helped to build the political opposition from
the Dominican Republic and enable the coup to take place. But
that process has just followed through since the coup. Well, of
course, the International Republican Institute now has an in-country
office in Haiti, and through that office they're able to penetrate
all sectors of Haitian civil society in their attempt to undermine
the popular movement.
Now, I would like to mention that in my
interview, and this is a rare interview with an N.E.D. program
officer, and this is the program officer in Washington who is
responsible for Haiti currently, a woman named Fabiola Cordoba.
She took over in, I believe in, November, as the program officer,
and she revealed to me, not only an extensive list of documents
that show the N.E.D.'s approved grants for 2005. These are, in
a sense, declassified, because these are documents that are not
supposed to be published until May of 2006, at least according
to another N.E.D. spokesperson. But what's clear in these documents
is that the N.E.D. went from, for example, a zero dollar budget
in Haiti in 2003 to a $540,000 budget in Haiti in 2005.
What they've also done -- and many Haitian
people that I speak to have told me that Haiti is considered the
laboratory for these sort of subversive activities on the part
of the United States government. And in the context of this experimental
process, they've hired, for the first time, an in-country program
officer, as you mentioned, Régine Alexandre, who was a
stringer for the Associated Press and the New York Times, was
doubling, moonlighting as an N.E.D. program officer, and the Associated
Press severed ties with her as a result.
Now, Fabiola Cordoba also told me that
when she was in Haiti in 2002, working for one of the N.E.D.'s
affiliated organizations, the National Democratic Institute, she
said a lot of lines were being drawn between Haiti and Venezuela,
where although 70% of the population supported Aristide, there
was a very fragmented opposition. The rest of the 30% was divided
between 120 different opposition groups, so the objective of the
I.R.I. and the N.E.D. was to consolidate this opposition to build
a viable opposition to somehow break the grip that the popular
movement in Haiti had on the political environment there. And
she said that Chavez - something very similar was happening in
Venezuela, and of course, in 2002, the coup d'état happened
there on the basis of this sort of analysis, the basis, this fear
that the United States has of popular democracy and the need to
subvert any attempts at consolidating popular rule and implementing
policies that are in the interests of the majority poor in places
like Venezuela and Haiti.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Anthony
Fenton, independent author and journalist who has exposed a A.P.
stringer in Haiti, Régine Alexandre, as also being on the
payroll of the National Endowment for Democracy. And now talking
about those parallels between Haiti and Venezuela, of course,
2002, the attempted coup against Hugo Chavez, what is your understanding
of the U.S. involvement in terms of the, you know, dollar amount
in Venezuela, putting money into the opposition?
ANTHONY FENTON: Well, it is very interesting,
because since the activities of the N.E.D. have been so thoroughly
exposed by the likes of Eva Golinger and Jeremy Bigwood through
The Chavez Code, they're very concerned with their perception
in the area. So what they're doing, in a way, they've continued
to funnel large amounts of money into Venezuela, but they're doing
it also by outsourcing, if you will. For example, they have given
a grant to a Canadian think tank called the Canadian Foundation
of the Americas, and through that, they're attempting to go through
the back door, if you will, riding the perception of Canada as
being a benign counterweight to the U.S. in the hemisphere, in
order to penetrate Venezuelan civil society.
This is an important year, of course,
not only in Venezuela, but throughout the hemisphere, in the sense
that there are many presidential elections taking place. Now the
N.E.D. program officer told me that Venezuela, Haiti, Ecuador,
and Bolivia are the four top priority countries for the N.E.D.
in 2006, looking ahead to 2006 and, of course, Cuba is the perennial
top of that list. They're a special exception, because the Department
of State earmarks a certain amount of funds for the N.E.D.'s work
in Cuba. In fact, they doubled the amount of money being used
to subvert revolutionary Cuba in 2005.
Now, what they're doing with the Foundation
of the Americas is, in fact, on the board of directors there you
have a former coup plotter in the form of Beatrice Rangel, who
not only played an active role, when she was an advisor to former
Venezuelan president Perez in the late 1980s, literally carrying
bags of money, according to William Robinson, to Nicaraguan Contras
operating out of Venezuela, but she is the person, Rangel, who
facilitated this N.E.D. program with this Canadian think tank,
and she herself said that, you know, Canada enjoys this perception,
and N.E.D.'s outsourcing to Canada is just another way for the
N.E.D. to penetrate Venezuelan civil society.
But in the case of Haiti, getting back
to that point, what we're seeing is the N.E.D. works very closely
with the International Republican Institute. One of the N.E.D.'s
primary grantees in Haiti is a key member of the Group of 184
political opposition to Aristide, named Hans Tippenhauer. He heads
up an organization that works with Haitian youth. Typically we
see the N.E.D. working with Haitian youth, with Haitian women,
but what they're doing - Mr. Tippenhauer, he was one of the first
people to call the rebels, the paramilitaries that entered from
the Dominican Republic in 2004, he referred to them as "freedom
fighters," and he get grants from, not only the N.E.D., but
also the I.R.I., and he also happens to be on the campaign of
an independent presidential candidate named Charles Henri Baker,
who was also one of the leaders of the Group of 184. He's a sweatshop
owner there and a brother-in-law of Andy Apaid, another leader
of the Group of 184, who recently has been pressuring, with other
members of the elite, such as Reginald Boulos, for the United
Nations [inaudible] to force to enter the poor neighborhoods and
commit more atrocities, so as to enable this process of consolidating
elite rule in Haiti to take root.
And so, Hans Tippenhauer, as he doubles
as a campaign manager for the Group 184 political candidate, the
business candidate, basically a candidate that the U.S. is supporting,
he is also working to penetrate Haitian civil society on a level
that will allow, in the long term, this neo-liberal vision, this
corporate vision of Haiti to take root, the so-called democracy,
because the National Endowment for Democracy does promote some
form of democracy. It's a very narrow institutional form, kind
of like we see in Canada.
It is ironic that we have elections going
on here in Canada right now, but we don't see the National Endowment
for Democracy or the International Republican Institute here trying
to manipulate the political environment, because we're already
on page with the State Department. We're already on page with
the N.E.D., so we don't need their guidance, but a place like
Haiti, where there were -- where popular democracy was beginning
to take root, even though in the face of a massive economic embargo
and in the face of destabilization by these very organizations,
it is very necessary that these organizations are in Haiti right
now playing this fundamental role, behind the scenes, I should
say, because the mainstream media has not written a single story
about what these organizations are doing behind the scenes to
effect political change in Haiti today.
AMY GOODMAN: Independent journalist, Anthony
Fenton. We will return with him in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We return to our interview
on Haiti with independent journalist Anthony Fenton, co-author
of the book, Canada in Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority.
AMY GOODMAN: Anthony Fenton, one of the
people that you have written and talked about is Ira Lowenthal.
I remember him from, well, more than a decade ago in the midst
of the first coup against President Aristide in 1991 to '94, working
for USAID in-country in Haiti. What is his role today?
ANTHONY FENTON: Well, after the coup,
Ira Lowenthal reentered Haiti. Now, he had had to leave, I believe,
in 2002, because he was getting too hot. He was up to some activities
that were being scrutinized by the Haitian government. Now, he
joined and helped create the Haiti Democracy Project in 2002,
in late 2002, and then he supported the emergence of the Group
of 184 shortly thereafter, which is basically the Haitian version
of the Haiti Democracy Project. I mentioned the Boulos family.
Rudolph Boulos is a board member, founding board member of the
Haiti Democracy Project, as well, and he's actually running for
Senate in the area of Haiti where they plan to develop free-trade
zones and open up a whole swath of sweatshops.
But Ira Lowenthal, he was working for
the Americas Development Foundation, which is one of the key organizations
implementing these so-called Democracy Enhancement projects prior
to the coup. After the coup, he had a brief stint with them, and
then he moved on to this other organization called the United
Nations Office for Project Services. Now, it's a very interesting
organization that does reconstruction work, and they're working
-- they're called the self-financing arm or management services
arm of the United Nations, very obscure and little known, but
Ira Lowenthal became the director of this organization in Haiti
just after the coup, and he helped set up registration centers
for the elections, and he's played an integral role in the sort
of infrastructure of carrying out this election process.
Now, he stepped down as director of UNOPS,
and UNOPS currently gets a $3 million contract from USAID to work
and funnel money to the political parties -- the "approved"
political parties, most of which happen to comprise the former
political opposition to Aristide, the Democratic Convergence.
Now Ira Lowenthal is a key consultant for UNOPS today, and in
fact, there's a Canadian by the name of Jean-Francois Laurent,
who directs the UNOPS activities in Haiti. But Ira Lowenthal,
anyone I speak to, everyone speaks glowingly of him in the democracy
promotion community. He's an old hand there, as you've said. He
had links to the Boulos family back in the previous coup period,
and, of course, the Boulos family is said to have had relations
with FRAP, the paramilitary organization set up by the C.I.A.
in order to destroy the popular movement at that time.
Now the Boulos family again, it has been
widely reported that they may be linked along with the Apaids
to death squad activity in Cite Soleil, anti-Lavalas gangs that
are designed to destroy the popular support for the calls of demanding
the return of Aristide or demanding the right to vote for the
candidate of choice, now Rene Preval. But Ira Lowenthal has played
an instrumental role. In fact, every week this organization, UNOPS,
to give you an example of the sort of familial relations there,
they meet with the I.R.I., the N.D.I., with USAID, and with I.F.E.S,
which is linked to the I.R.I. The chairman of I.F.E.S. is a former
Reagan advisor and a Bush appointee as U.N. ambassador just before
the 9/11 attacks in 2001, William Hybl.
So you see this family meeting on a weekly
basis, coordinating their activities. They're funneling millions
of dollars to the political parties, by way of giving them credits
for TV advertising, for pamphlets, for t-shirts and all sorts
of other activities. And, of course, this is all geared towards
-- they're hoping, I think, right now, that there will be a run-off
election, sort of like there was in Liberia, where the International
Republican Institute and these other organizations played a central
role, as well, because if there's a run-off election -- and it's
possible that one of their rightwing candidates, perhaps such
as Marc Bazin, who's running under the Lavalas name today, but
of course was a World Bank candidate that Aristide beat in a landslide
in 1990 -- they're hoping that one of these candidates, maybe
it'll be Henri Baker, will be able to win in a run-off.
But there's also the terror card that
they're holding over their heads. The paramilitaries that entered
in 2004 like Guy Philippe. Other well known NARCO traffickers,
the nephew of the current Prime Minister, Gerard Latortue, his
name is Youri Latortue, the mere mention of his name in Haiti,
strikes the fear in the people's eyes when you speak to them,
and this person is running for senate in the Artibonite region.
And the possibility of a violent intervention in this election
process is in the background, and it looms, and people like Ira
Lowenthal and these other organizations, the N.E.D., they are
well aware of this, and so it will be interesting to see how it
plays out.
AMY GOODMAN: And the role, Anthony Fenton
-- you're speaking to us from Vancouver, Canada, in the midst
of your own elections -- of Canada and the current candidates
in the coup of 2004, as well as what you understand is the U.S.
role that forced Aristide out?
ANTHONY FENTON: Well, indeed, Canada in
September hosted a meeting with members of Haiti's private sector
with that think tank that I mentioned earlier that's getting N.E.D.
funding, FOCAL, the Foundation for the Americas. Reginald Boulos,
one of the long-time elites who supported this U.S. vision for
Haiti and has long-standing ties to Washington, he was invited
to this meeting. And what you were seeing is Canada supporting
whole-heartedly. In fact, Roger Noriega, former Secretary of State
for the western hemisphere, came to Canada just after the coup
with Adolfo Franco from USAID. Franco, incidentally, has refused
to be interviewed on the question of USAID's activities on the
democracy promotion side in Haiti recently. But they came to Canada
just after the coup with the intention of asking Canada to play
a leadership role in Haiti, and Canada quickly acquiesced.
In fact, when I was in Haiti in September
with a couple of other Canadian journalists, we interviewed a
top-level Canadian diplomat, and he was boasting how finally in
Haiti there's a government that's being ruled by the transnational
elite in the private sector and civil society. And Canada's job
is to stand on the frontlines diplomatically, politically, and
they're also helping out militarily, and on the intelligence side,
to prop up this illegitimate regime that was installed by the
United States, that was imported from Florida and installed --
imposed on the Haitian people. And so Canada is playing an increasing
role and they are expecting to play -- in fact, this high level
diplomat told us Canada is sort of like earning its stripes in
Haiti, because there is going to be a coming transition, and he
mentioned Cuba specifically, and of course, strategically where
Haiti is situated -- the State Department in 2005 listed Haiti
and Colombia as the two primary strategic states -- so it's very
important that they take control of Haiti.
There is a Dominican Republic interest
there, as well. They are possibly establishing military bases
there. The U.S. has for a long time dictated the Dominican military's
policies for the region, and the Canadian government here, what
we're seeing, is under the liberal government that is about, it
appears, to lose power to a neo-conservative electoral coup, if
you will, led by Canada's Conservative Party and Stephen Harper,
who is a well-known admirer of George Bush. Canada, the liberal
government, initiated a rightwing shift over the past decade,
that we've seen a new role for Canada in the Americas. In fact,
this high-level diplomat referred to the destiny of Canada and
the Americas being fulfilled through their role in Haiti today.
AMY GOODMAN: Anthony Fenton is our guest.
He's speaking to us from Vancouver, Canada. And the proof of the
involvement of the U.S. government in the coup that forced out
President Aristide February 29th, 2004?
ANTHONY FENTON: Well, in 2003 there was
a meeting held in Ottawa called the Ottawa Initiative on Haiti.
At the time, it was a secret high level round table that did not
involve any Haitians, although it was a meeting that was designed
to discuss the future of Haiti. It was leaked by the host of that
meeting, a Canadian Member of Parliament named Denis Paradis,
to a Quebec magazine, that the possibility of removing Aristide
and installing a U.N.-style trusteeship was discussed. This was
quickly glossed over, and the Canadian government retracted that
this was discussed, but after the coup I submitted a Freedom of
Information Act request and did receive some of the documents,
which seem to corroborate what was leaked at the time, that there
were high-level meetings being held not only in Ottawa, but other
follow-up meetings, I understand, in Washington and in El Salvador
that planned the overthrow of Aristide on the diplomatic side.
The Organization of American States was
involved. And the then Assistant Secretary General of the O.A.S.,
Luigi Einaudi, who famously said on the eve of Haiti's independence,
'The problem with Haiti is that the international community is
so screwed up and divided that we're actually allowing Haitians
to run Haiti.' It's people like this and sentiments like this
that informed these sorts of meetings that took place before the
coup, and, you know, the writing was on the wall for Aristide
when he was elected in November of 2000. We saw the opposition
boycott the elections. The Gallup polls indicated a landslide
victory for Aristide, and again we return to the point made by
the N.E.D. program officer, it was simply the case that, from
the perspective of the United States, Canada, and France, and
the European Union, the primary backers of this coup d'etat, that
Aristide was consolidating power, that the Lavalas Party, in particular,
and that the popular movement was emerging and was taking root,
and that is what had to be overthrown and stopped in its tracks,
and that's what we're seeing happen today.
AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, Anthony Fenton,
on the issue of what is happening in the Cite Soleil with the
killings of innocent residents there, also the killings of U.N.
forces there, recently you had Reginald Boulos and Andy Apaid,
well known anti-Lavalas leaders, holding a major protest, calling
for a crackdown on Cite Soleil. Can you talk about that?
ANTHONY FENTON: Yeah, again, this -- I
read that as a provocation. They've been -- if you go back to
summer of 2005, there was a kidnapping spree, as the The New York
Times and the L.A. Times reported it, that was used as a pretext
to demand that the U.N. go into Cite Soleil and root out the so-called
chimeres, the so-called bandits, the so-called terrorists. Now,
I learned through sources inside the prime minister's office in
Haiti and through other sources that, again, Youri Latortue, the
nephew of Gerard Latortue, was involved in this kidnapping spree,
that he was carrying out and overseeing a kidnapping ring of his
own that was used as a pretext to go into these neighborhoods
and commit massacres. And on July 6th, it's been well reported
and well documented that a massacre did take place, and it was
carried out by the United Nations. It buckled to the pressure
that was being exerted on it by the likes of Reginald Boulos and
other members of the elite, like Andy Apaid.
And so I see, I think, from what I can
tell, this is being replayed, and the kidnapping spree -- it's
possible that these assaults on the so-called peacekeepers, the
Jordanians who have played one of the more repressive roles in
Cite Soleil, that that is another provocation that is intended
to pressure the U.N. forces to go into Cite Soleil and fire arbitrarily,
as they've been doing repeatedly. You know, within the past few
days a number of people have been killed in Cite Soleil, even
since that demonstration. Canadian journalists who are there right
now, Aaron Lakoff and Leslie Bagg, reported on how four people
in Cite Soleil have been killed.
And the U.N. knows that they can't go
into Cite Soleil and conduct these operations without killing
civilians, and yet people like Reginald Boulos don't seem to mind
if civilians get killed. It's just collateral damage, and he's
said that he is willing to create a fund to assist the victims
of Cite Soleil. When we interviewed Mr. Boulos in September, he
referred to himself as Mr. Cite Soleil. So, he has a vested interest
in putting down this popular movement that's calling for Aristide's
return or calling for free and fair elections that would see Rene
Preval win in a likely landslide.
AMY GOODMAN: Independent journalist Anthony
Fenton, co-author of the book Canada in Haiti: Waging War on the
Poor Majority. Haitian elections are February 7. Canadian elections
are today.
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