[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 130 (Monday, October 11, 2004)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1948-E1950]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
HAITI SMOLDERING ON THE EDGE OF CHAOS
______
HON. MAXINE WATERS
of california
in the house of representatives
Friday, October 8, 2004
Ms. WATERS. Mr. Speaker, on February 29 of this year, President Jean-
Bertrand Aristide, the first democratically elected President of Haiti,
was overthrown in a coup d'etat. This coup d'etat was led by heavily
armed thugs and killers, many of whom are former members of the Haitian
Armed Forces which were disbanded in 1995 and are notorious for their
history of human rights violations. These thugs and killers have
refused to disarm and now control several Haitian towns and cities,
where they terrorize the local population. They are demanding the
reestablishment of the Haitian Armed Forces, and they even had the gall
to claim that the Haitian Government owes them more than 10 years of
back pay.
The following research paper, entitled ``Haiti: Smoldering on the
Edge of Chaos,'' is an insightful analysis of the crisis in Haiti
brought about by these thugs and killers. The paper was written by
Jessica Leight, a research fellow at the Washington-based Council on
Hemispheric Affairs, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research organization. I
hope my colleagues find Ms. Leight's analysis informative.
Haiti: Smoldering on the Edge of Chaos
Six months after the abrupt and violence-laced departure of
constitutionally-elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide,
and over three months after the deployment of U.N.
peacekeeping units which were hailed as an instrument for
order and stability for this long-troubled Caribbean island,
Haiti remains poised on the edge of chaos. Just as nature in
the form of a tropical storm that has managed to kill as many
as 3,000 Haitians, thousands more have died over the past
decade, victims of right-wing military and paramilitary
forces. Today, ruled by a bumptious, ineffectual and
illegitimate cabal whose only validity is supplied by U.S.
fiat, Haiti now faces the imminent de facto reconstitution of
its brutal Haitian Armed Forces (FADH), dissolved by Aristide
in 1995. Across the island, bands of former soldiers are
seizing police stations and establishing themselves as the de
facto local power, at times displacing the remnants of the
national police and placing large swaths of the country under
what is effectively outlaw rebel jurisdiction. Meanwhile
these soldiers demand the restitution of unpaid wages over
the past ten years for such services as torturing and
murdering civilian victims.
These soldiers of ill-fortune have met little, if any,
resistance from the rump Washington-imposed interim
government of Prime Minister Gerard Latortue, and at times
they have received open encouragement from Latortue's
``cabinet members,'' most notably Interior Minister (and
former general) Herard Abraham and the island's notorious
justice minister Bernard Gousse, both of whom have suggested
that former soldiers--some of the most prominent among whom
have already been convicted in absentia for human rights
violations committed during the military government of 1991-
1994--could simply be integrated into the police force.
An Army Reborn
In the face of these developments, FADH leaders are
gathering strength in a bid to retake political power and
restore the repression for which the army could always be
counted to provide throughout most of Haiti's turbulent
twentieth-century history, the U.N. stabilization force
and the international community alike have remained almost
deafeningly silent. At the present time, the U.N. presence
in Haiti is more myth than fact, while a handful of
renegades with a military background, in conjunction with
the tiny opposition business and professional Group of
184, have the clearest access to the Latortue regime and
its ability to obtrusively impact on the daily lives of
the population. Within Haiti, international troops drawn
principally from the former rogue armed forces of Brazil,
Argentina and Chile, which were better known for the
repression of their own citizens during previous eras of
military rule than for their nation-building skills, are
seemingly paralyzed by inaction. These U.N. forces have
made only the paltriest of efforts to preserve order in
the face of paramilitary power-grabs by ex-FADH and police
figures like Louis-Jodel Chamblain and Guy Philippe. They
have proven better at stalking pro-Aristide Lavalas
party's political forces than well-armed renegade former
soldiers.
In Washington, a State Department preoccupied by Iraq and
North Korea appears to have all but overlooked the island's
existence; and in New York, a craven lack of political will
is in evidence, accompanied by the kind of Machiavellian
plotting by the U.S. and French U.N. Security Council
delegations that was witnessed when that body refused to
provide an international police force to defend Arisitide
earlier this year. Nor is U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan
any more sensitive to the plight of the Haitian populace than
he was just before Aristide's downfall, when he provided
cover for the U.S. insistence that the former president
deserved to be forced into exile because he was a failed
leader.
There has yet to be any kind of clear acknowledgment of the
magnitude of the threat that Haiti's already battered
democratic institutions face from the military resurgence on
the island, much less the strategy which will be used to
disarm these illegal militias as well as clearly establish
the authority of a trained, professional police force, and
bring to justice the same former soldiers accused of human
rights abuses who are now making outrageous demands for
compensation. Quite to the contrary, as the exoneration of
mass murderer Louis Chamblain by Justice Minister Gousse and
the island's tainted courts graphically exemplifies, Haiti is
still a very sick country.
Thus as the clock continues to tick on a peacekeeping
mission originally authorized for only six months, it seems
increasingly likely that the United Nations will exit Haiti
much as the United States and Canada precipitously did in
1996: leaving behind a profoundly unstable political
situation dominated by heavily armed factions, as thousands
of weapons remain in the possession of right-wing vigilantes
as well as some in the hands of pro-Aristide supporters. The
situation is made even more volatile today by the former
military leadership's aspirations to restore both the army
and the same reign of terror it applied during the decades-
long Duvalier and post-Duvalier military dictatorships, as
well as under the brutal 1991-1994 military junta led by the
brute General Roaul Cedras.
The Haitian Military: Rising from the Ashes?
Among the most alarming signs of military resurgence within
the last sixty days was the acquittal on August 17, in a show
trial, of former army captain and paramilitary leader Louis-
Jodel Chamblain, previously convicted in absentia for the
1993 murder of prominent Aristide supporter Antoine Izmery.
This outrageous verdict, achieved under the aegis of
Latortue's disreputable justice minister, Bernard Gousse, was
reached after a ludicrously brief overnight trial in which
the prosecution called only one witness who proved to be
entirely irrelevant to the case. This earned for the interim
government opprobrious remarks on the editorial pages of the
New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as widespread
denunciations from human rights organizations, and even from
the State Department, which bears much of the blame for the
current dysfunctional rule of the island. However, the
subsequent rash of self-serving individual power plays on the
part of the ex-soldiers, and the government's utter
unwillingness to confront or even denounce such challenges to
state authority, has received virtually no attention outside
of Haiti. This development has to be rightfully considered
part of the same dangerous phenomenon which includes the
growing power of former military figures like Chamblain, as
well as sly ideologues like the grinning Justice Minister
Gousse, who was clearly complicit in
orchestrating Chamblain's acquittal.
For example, only six days after the conclusion of the
Chamblain trial, the Haitian Times reported on August 18 that
the interim government had appointed Winter Etienne--a leader
of the bloody armed uprising in Gonaives that preceded
Aristide's exile, who is also the coordinator of the National
Reconstruction Front, a party headed by former army officers,
including rebel leader Guy Philippe. The last named became
the director of the National Port Authority in Gonaives, the
very city he earlier had helped sack. At the Ministry of
Interior, former ranking military figure Minister Herard
Abraham continues to add former high-ranking military cronies
to his staff; among the recent arrivals is former colonel
Williams Regala, a particularly sinister aide to former
dictator General Henri Namphy and undoubtedly a main plotter
of the massacre of voters during Haiti's aborted November 29,
1987 election. Regala joins another former colleague, Colonel
Henri-Robert Marc-Charles, a member of the Cedras-led
military junta that overthrew democratically-elected
President Aristide 1991, who currently is the target of a (as
yet un-enforced) judicial order requiring his imprisonment
prior to trial for alleged involvement in a peasant massacre
in Piatre in March 1990.
Erosion of Authority of the most pathetic Government in the Caribbean
Given these pro-military signals on the part of the
Latortue government, which consistently has demonstrated its
sympathy for former military leaders at the same time it
officially rejects the idea of reconstituting the armed
forces on the grounds that such a momentous step should be
taken only by the
[[Page E1949]]
next elected government, it is hardly surprising that bands
of former soldiers are making ever more far-fetched bids for
power in municipalities across Haiti. On August 17, five
officers of the national police's riot squad (CIMO) returned
to their Port-au-Prince headquarters asserting that a group
wearing the garb of the disbanded military had attacked them
and seized their weapons and uniforms. Subsequently, Radio
Kiskeya reported that other CIMO officers have accused the
government-appointed director of the National Police
Administration and former military figure, Destorel Germain,
of organizing the attack along with a number of demobilized
soldiers seeking reinstatement, an accusation that raises
the specter of collaboration between some of the more
predatory elements of the police force and bands of ex-
soldiers, in the latter's fight for legal status.
Former military elements already have begun to establish
their control over a series of small urban areas,
particularly in the desperately poor Central Plateau region.
On September 1, a large force of 150 former soldiers took
control of Petit-Goave, southwest of the capital, and seized
ten police officers as hostages the following day in
neighboring Grand-Gove. This was in retaliation for the
arrest of four soldiers by police officials. The two sides
subsequently agreed to an exchange of prisoners. Also on
September 2, more than fifty heavily armed ex-soldiers
demonstrated in Gonaives, calling for the reconstitution of
the army and the restoration of their back pay. Once there,
they were met with open arms by the fiercely anti-Aristide
rebel group, the Gonaives Resistance Front--itself largely
constituted by former soldiers--which expressed its support
for the immediate formation of a legally reorganized and
retrained army.
Even more alarming was the response of the official
government authorities to the Gonaives march. Rather than
denouncing this clear threat to public order on the part of a
``gang of thugs'' (as they earlier had been characterized by
Secretary of State Colin Powell), departmental delegate Elie
Cantave declared that the former soldiers had no aim other
than to help the people of that city as he prepared to
negotiate with them over their taking over as their
headquarters a state school located within the city. Further
south in Jacmel and on the same day, yet another contingent
of former soldiers arrived to reinforce with arms and
ammunition a group of their colleagues occupying the office
of Radio Ti Moun. And in perhaps the most symbolically
important incident, former soldiers occupied the police
station in Belladere on the Dominican border on September 5
and immediately repainted the facility in yellow, the
traditional color of FADH barracks. Simultaneously, the band
of ex-soldiers in control of Petit-Goave was swelled by new
arrivals, and coast guard installations in Les Cayes remained
under the control of ex-soldiers.
The first evidence of a response on the part of the
government and the U.N. peacekeeping force came on September
7, when Haitian police, backed by Argentine troops,
regained control of Saint-Marc a day after former soldiers
took control of the city sixty miles north of Port-au-
Prince. In response, rebel leader Sergeant Remissanthe
Ravix declared on behalf of the ex-soldiers, ``We'll fight
to the last man. We'd rather die in combat instead of
dying on our knees. They [government authorities] came to
power thanks to our weapons they now declare illegal. If
they think they can deny us our rights, they will know the
same fate as Aristide. The fact that we left Saint-Marc
does not mean we gave up. We'll teach a lesson to those
who want to destroy the military.'' Ravix, once implicated
in a brutal 2002 massacre committed by former FADH
personnel in Belladere, is now the most visible and
rambunctious spokesman for the ex-soldiers' movement,
which is on the brink of maintaining de facto control over
large swaths of Haiti.
Escalating Violence, Ineffective Response
The government's show of resolve in Saint-Marc on September
7 hardly deterred the ex-soldiers in their attempts to
establish themselves as a rival security force. Also, on
September 7 in Port-au-Prince, two ex-soldiers, reportedly
from Petit-Goave, were shot and killed by riot police near
the Prime Minister's office in Musseau after firing at a
police station. According to Police Commissioner Fritz Gerald
Appolon, the two were riding in a seized police car that had
been reconfigured as an army vehicle, and were fatally
wounded after one of them shot at an officer who had called
upon him to lay down his weapon. Ravix denounced the incident
as an ``assassination'' and called for retaliation across the
country. The following day, in response, a group of ex-
soldiers attacked the police station in Hinche and hundreds
of former FADH and its supporters from other anti-Aristide
factions paraded in Cap-Haitien demanding ten years of back-
pay. These former soldiers already had begun arrogating
police functions to themselves inside of Cap-Haitien,
including going out on surveillance patrols. In Petit-Goave,
rebels took four police officers hostage and seized their
weapons, though they were released later that day.
In the face of this wave of new challenges, the government
and U.N. peacekeepers alike appear virtually helpless. Prime
Minister Latortue and his self-caricaturing government
have made bold declarations that peacekeepers will
``imminently'' retake control of all government buildings,
but the prospect of any such action occurring any time
soon appears to be nothing more than a mixture of bluff
and fantasy. The government has set up a committee to
negotiate with the soldiers and offered as an initial
concession, the integration into the police force of up to
1,000 former soldiers of a body that once numbered over
6,000 in strength. However, Ravix refused to meet with the
commission, declaring in Petit-Goave, ``The government
doesn't need to reconstitute us. We are here. We have
always been here. The only thing the government has to do
is pay us the 10 years, seven months they owe us and let
us do our jobs.'' On September 12, the government did
succeed in obtaining the commitment of a group of
representatives of former military personnel (of which
Ravix was not a member) to a vaguely worded declaration
asserting that ``The matter of the military will be dealt
with through dialogue; the authority of the Government
must be respected; [and] the voluntary and peaceful
evacuation of public buildings actually under the control
of demobilized soldiers must be done . . . within the
framework of an agreement between the two parties.''
Whether this vague rhetoric will produce any concessions in
practice on the part of the ex-soldiers remains to be seen,
but subsequent demonstrations in their support in St.-Marc
and Petit-Goave, on September 13 and a march of ex-soldiers
wearing military uniforms in the capital on September 15 sent
a clear signal that the militant remnants of the FADH are far
from ready to yield their arms to civil authority.
Stabilization Mission is Too Weak to Stabilize
At the same time that the government has shown itself
utterly incapable of (or uninterested in) controlling the
rebel bands, the U.N. Stabilization Mission (MINUSTAH) has
disavowed itself of any responsibility in dealing with the
ex-soldiers. Spokesman Toussaint Kongo-Doudou declared, ``We
have no comment on the subject because it is a government
problem. It is not a problem of the MINUSTAH. This is a
Haitian affair.'' As astounding as this statement appears,
given that among the principal points of MINUSTAH's mandate
are the disarmament of armed factions--of which the ex-
soldiers are currently the most powerful--the
establishment of a climate of security in advance of
national elections on the island is a must. The
acknowledgement of a stalemate when it comes to security
issues is an all too accurate description of the current
limitations of the undersized U.N. force now in Haiti. To
date, only 2,755 of an authorized 6,700 U.N. troops have
arrived in Haiti, making deployments in the north and east
of the country impossible, and only a few hundred of the
3,000 civilian police officers authorized have been
trained and deployed. Thus the U.N. is unable to maintain
a security presence in many of the more remote regions of
the countryside, and has yet to launch the disarmament
program that is a fundamental prerequisite for the
reestablishment of some measure of political stability.
Moreover, the U.N. force's Brazilian commanders have openly
warned that they do not have enough troops to stop renewed
conflict. Likewise, Argentine Defense Minister Jos Pampuro
highlighted the particularly troubling prospect that renewed
skirmishes could have taken place on September 18, the
anniversary of the dissolution of the army by Aristide. While
additional troops from Sri Lanka, Nepal, Spain and Morocco,
among others, are expected to bring the total MINUSTAH force
to 5,000 members by the end of October, for the moment, the
U.N. peacekeepers have been rendered completely incapable of
fulfilling their most basic function: preserving order and a
measure of governmental authority.
The Sound of Silence: Washington, New York Turn Their Eyes Away from
Port-au-Prince
Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the rapidly
deteriorating security situation in Haiti is the
extraordinary indifference, aside from some storm-related
humanitarian aid in response to the natural catastrophe that
just hit Haiti, that has been exhibited by the international
community in the face of this creeping coup being executed by
the former FADH. The Security Council issued only an anemic
statement on September 10 in which it stressed ``the urgency
of disbanding and disarming all illegal armed groups,'' but
offered not even the whisper of a commitment to ensure that
this task is in fact achieved. The Organization of American
States has remained silent, as has the State Department, and
much of the Caribbean Community, which over the past six
months had taken the most courageous stands on unfolding
events in Haiti. CARICOM is now riven by internal
divisions over whether to readmit the Latortue government
into CARICOM.
Also strangely absent is the recently appointed U.N.
Special Representative to Haiti, Chilean diplomat Juan
Gabriel Valdes. His selection was widely hailed at the time
as evidence of a new Latin American commitment to inter-
hemispheric cooperation, but he has since all but disappeared
from carrying out his admittedly difficult mission. While his
capacity for action may be constrained, Valdes should at the
very least be actively attempting to convey to the Security
Council, the Bush administration and the leaders of other
hemispheric bodies the gravity of the unfolding military
takeover in Haiti. Unfortunately, up to now, Haiti's
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plight has been overshadowed by the persistent bloodshed in
Darfur, Iraq, and Afghanistan, or has been patronizingly
dismissed as yet another round of violence in a perennially
unstable country. Additionally, the natural disaster that
occurred to the island landed a devastating blow to its
ability to function.
Haiti has reached a point of crisis, and decisive
intervention is required if any shred of, or hope for,
Haitian democracy is to be preserved. However shorthanded and
overburdened its staff may be, the task of convincing the
international community of the necessity of such intervention
falls first to the U.N. Stabilization Mission and to Valdes.
Hopefully, in the coming months they will decisively
demonstrate their commitment to ensuring that Haiti is not
being abandoned by the international community yet again, or
that leading U.N. authorities, including Valdes, will at
least have the dignity of resigning from their assignment in
protest of the cruel hoax now being unleashed on the island
and its population.
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