Damming the flood: Haiti, Aristide and the policy of containment.

'Damming the Flood'
Powerful
[Book Review] Welcome examination of Haiti's criminally overlooked recent history

Benjamin Terrall (bterrall)



Of all the illegal and dishonest misadventures that the Bush Administration got away with, the least criticized of all might be the 2004 overthrow of Haiti's democratically elected government. Even human rights groups and left-leaning press that stood up against the Iraq war gave, and still give, Bush a pass on the horror he unleashed on Haiti by kidnapping President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Peter Hallward's new book Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment (Verso 2008) is a welcome corrective to the false impressions and historical amnesia about Haiti afflicting most of the English-speaking world. Jonathan Kozol called it, "A brilliant politically sophisticated and morally infuriating work on a shameful piece of very recent history that the United States press has either distorted or ignored. The most important and devastating book I've read on American betrayal of democracy in one of the most tormented nations in the world."

Hallward, a United Kingdom-based philosophy professor, was teaching a course in 2003 that involved daily reading of Le Monde and other French newspapers when he noted a systematic demonization of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his Lavalas movement.

He subsequently wrote one of the best long articles about the 2004 coup (New Left Review 27, May-June 2004) shortly after it happened. Ever since, he seems to have been collecting information for a bill of indictment against the US, France and Canada, the coup's principle backers, ever since.

In the process he has also put together a damning critique of liberals and self-described radicals who through either intellectual laziness or lack of cross-class solidarity accepted Bush-approved PR on Haiti.

In his research Hallward used mostly public sources. He appears to have read everything written about Haiti in the past 10 years, as well as much earlier work. Interviews with principles ranging from Aristide to several key coup players, and both pro- and anti-Aristide figures, buttress his scholarship. Hallward puts the country's recent violence in the context of 200 years of "great power" hostility toward Haitian sovereignty, beginning with the 1804 revolution, the only successful slave revolt in world history.

Hallward excels at showing the means by which Haiti's ultra-rich minority worked hand in glove with right-wingers in Washington and Paris to create a case for "regime change" that even Iraq war opponents could embrace. After the first US-backed coup against Aristide in 1991, when public opinion in the US was still largely sympathetic to Lavalas, Hallward notes, "Jesse Helms spoke for much of the US political establishment when on 20 October 1993 he denounced Aristide as a 'psychopath and grave human rights abuser.'"

But "neither Helms nor anyone else could pin a single political killing on the 1991 [Aristide] administration. In the run up to the second coup, incomparably more insistent versions of the same charge would resurface at every turn."

As Hallward painstakingly shows, left of center and liberal NGOs were all too willing to accept Washington's destabilization program for Haiti. The smears and propaganda were well funded and carried out in concert with "Democracy Enhancement" and similar programs of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and other US government agencies. The project recalled what the US did to Nicaragua in the 1980s, as documented by political scientist William Robinson in his excellent study A Faustian Bargain.

Hallward notes that when it comes to "the supervision of human rights in the most heavily exploited parts of the planet … most of the 'neutral,' affluent and well-connected supervisors live at an immeasurable distance from the world endured by the people they supervise, and at a still greater distance from the sort of militant, unabashedly political mobilization that can alone offer any meaningful protection for truly universal rights."

The helps explain the ease with which Human Rights Watch took anti-Aristide propaganda at face value, then dragged their feet interminably (as did Amnesty International) when Aristide's government was ousted and the rightist bloodbath began in earnest.

Hallward carefully wades through the accusations of human rights violations leveled at Aristide's government. After an exhaustive examination, he can find no evidence that holds up. In many cases, he finds that the supposed abuses themselves were greatly exaggerated, if not entirely fabricated.

Damming the Flood ("lavalas" means "flood" in Haitian Kreyol) is brilliantly written and extremely thorough in examining the players behind the 2004 assault on Haitian popular democracy and its horrific aftermath.

In the wake of the thousands killed and countless more tortured and raped, it is inevitable that many readers not versed in Haiti's past would ask: Why? Hallward does a fine job of answering that question, addressing fundamental structural injustices enforced by U.S. foreign policy.

Aristide emerged as a priest in the tradition of liberation theology, which promotes a "preferential option for the poor." In Hallward's words: "All through the 1980s and early 90s [US army intelligence officers] recognized that 'the most serious threat to U.S. interests was not secular Marxist-Leninism or organized labor but liberation theology.'

Nowhere did the counter-insurgency measures that the US and its allies devised in order to deal with liberation theology in the 1980s and early 90s fall more heavily than they did on the Haiti of Lavalas and the ti legliz ["little church" movement]. It's no coincidence that the most notorious assassin hired to terrorize Lavalas from 1990 to 1994, Emmanuel "Toto" Constant, first began working for the CIA on a course designed to explain and contain the 'extreme leftwing' implications of 'The Theology of Liberation,' which Constant understood as an attempt 'to convince the people that in the name of God everything is possible" and that, therefore, it was right for the people to kill soldiers and the rich.'"

Hallward continues, "Haiti is the only country in Latin America that had the temerity to choose a liberation theologian as its president -- twice. If Aristide still remains the defining political figure in Haiti to this day it's not because he represents a utopian alternative to the economic status quo, or because he embodies a demagogic charisma that threatens to stifle the development of democracy, or because his followers believe that he made no strategic mistakes. It's because in the eyes of most people he is not a politician, precisely, but an organizer and an activist who remains dedicated to working within what he famously affirmed as 'the parish of the poor.'

It was as such an activist that Aristide disbanded the army in 1995, and it was as such an organizer that he dedicated the rest of his political life to helping the popular mobilization deal with the new threats and the old antagonisms that soon emerged as a result."

The priest turned president threatened to help Haiti's poor enough to earn the eternal enmity of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and both Republicans and Democrats.

His government was denied much-needed international funds (which in a more sane world would be reparations for past injustices, not loans or aid-with-strings-attached), and his poor followers demonized as "chimeras," or "devils." Instead of looking at the structural roots of the exploitation and ecological devastation to which the country has been subjected, foreign journalists took their sound bites from English or French speaking elites at odds with Lavalas's commendable, and only moderately leftist, goal to raise the poor "from misery to poverty with dignity."

The scant media coverage of Haiti that exists tends to continue centuries-old patterns of ignoring the perspectives of the poor majority.

In Hallward's words, what most English speakers get instead is repetition of "perhaps the most consistent theme of the profoundly racist first-world commentary on the island: that poor non-white people remain incapable of governing themselves."

Though the United Nations "peacekeeping" mission, put in place in 2004 to legitimize the most recent coup, remains in Haiti, Hallward points to ongoing resistance from the poorest neighborhoods as evidence that the story is not over.

While coup forces continue to dominate most ministries of the current government, the 2006 presidential election resulting in Haiti's rulers conceding victory to Aristide's former Prime Minster Rene Preval shows the unavoidability of some concessions to pressure from the poor majority.

For those who feel a debt to the people of Haiti for inspiring resistance to US slavery, and for setting an example of the true potential of declarations of liberty espoused by the French Revolution, this book is an essential resource.

Damming the Flood will inspire international activists to support the struggles of those Haitians who continue to stand up for their fundamental human rights. It should be widely read.
2008/03/31 오전 11:51
© 2008 Ohmynews

Thank you.Let the truth be known.

LI TEX ALTERPRESSE LA.sE YON WONT

*
Dr. Peter Hallward's very recently released new book, Damming the Flood:
Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment, is a book I very highly
recommend. The book is only recently released, and I just finished reading it.
I will add my kudos to the reviews on Amazon.com (only one review thus far).

The book deserves far more. I am quite certain it will get the kudos it
deserves (and brickbats from those who would rather his heavily documented work
not be seen favorably.) Noam Chomsky, on the cover of the book, says it is
"very convincing, a marvelous book", which will guarantee both kudos and
condemnations....

Periodically I kid Paul Miller for "ruining my life" when he convinced me
to travel with his group to Haiti in late 2003. There is, indeed, some truth
to the old saying "ignorance is bliss".

Having said that, my twin decisions: 1) to go to Haiti in the first place;
and 2) to take an active interest in learning more about how the U.S. related
to Haiti on my return, opened my eyes, and not just to U.S. manipulation of
Haiti internal affairs. There is, I feel, a really simple "playbook" for U.S.
manipulation of other countries. Only the specifics need to be changed from
place to place.

The coup d'etat in 2004 in Haiti, a country comparably invisible to the
body politic in the U.S., might have slipped below the radar and hardly been
noticed in the shadow of our adventure in Iraq and the Middle East. But
noticed it was, and Hallward fleshes it out, professionally. He and some
others keep a light turned on to our continuing sordid history with Haiti,
going back to its first day as an independent country, January 1, 1804 - a
slave state that broke its chains, and became a threat to our own slaveowning
founding fathers.

Hallward's book concentrates on the post-Duvalier (or Aristide) years from
1986 to the present. He does a tremendous service.

My first full day in Haiti, Sunday, December 7, 2003, we attended Mass at
Ste. Claire Catholic Church, officiated by Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste, a truly
charismatic pastor, later to be proposed as a post-coup candidate for President
of Haiti. This led to two tours in Haitian prison for him, on what seem to
have been specious grounds, before serious illness got him released to the
United States, where he was free as a bird (I know, I saw him in Miami in
March, 2006. He was a danger to no one.) He likely wasn't guilty of anything
except supporting the wrong friends, the poor, Aristide, the Lavalas party. He
was also a charismatic (leader) personality, and thus a threat to the elite
establishment.

After Mass that beautiful Haitian day, the six in our party gathered at the
corner of a soccer field in Delmas 33 area, gripped for over two hours by a
discussion of Haiti's "Stations of the Cross"*, led by our American host (who
less than two months later was hauled off to a Haitian jail, publicly
humiliated in the U.S. media, then removed from Haiti where he presumably could
and would do no more damage supporting Aristide and Lavalas.)

Then the following day we met in person with Fr. Jean-Juste. We had two
hours with this charismatic parish priest.

By the end of a packed week we met with many people who a year later or
less would for the most part have been jailed, fled the country, gone into
hiding, or, in two cases been killed, one assassinated two days after we met
him; the other dead in his home under very suspicious circumstances less than a
year later.

The ones I wonder about the most are the 30 or so poor people we met with
who either had been victims of atrocities during the first coup, or were
helping represent those victims. They had names, but I wonder how many of them
fell during the assorted post-coup atrocities particularly in the slums. I'll
likely never know.

Peter Hallward's Damming the Flood is the thoroughly researched account of
the people I met, and many others; it is the story either not told at all, or
completely butchered (as I have learned first-hand) by the gatekeepers of
information within our own country and our own government. It covers basically
the approximately 20 years from the fall of Baby Doc Duvalier to the present.

Damming the Flood is a must read, and heavily footnoted (61 pages of them,
1,240 in all**). It is an excellent reference book on the recipe book of
'regime change' as practiced by the United States Government, particularly the
Bush administration. The last chapter, 28 pages, is devoted to a long
in-person interview with Jean-Bertrand Aristide in South Africa in 2006 - a
portion of his side of the untold story.

Damming the Flood is an academic book, but very readable.

Damming the Flood does not lead one to swell with pride about our country.
By understanding how regime change was done by our government in Haiti, it is
possible to understand how regime change is done everywhere. It really isn't
all that complicated: "lie, cheat and steal" come to mind, not to mention
out-gun (literally) the opposition; and buy-out willing surrogates, including
too many non-government organizations (NGO's), of which Haiti has a huge
abundance, all doing 'good works', 'saving souls' while raking in the loot from
U.S. agencies like AID at the same time, but unfortunately in too many cases
keeping Haitians in their proper, lowly, place. With free wealthy country
money comes real or implied 'strings'....

I came home from that inaugural trip to Haiti with a real interest in how
geopolitics worked between the U.S. and that small nation one and one-half air
hours from Miami. It has been a troubling study.

In the course of the subsequent four and one-half years, I have been able
to conclude that the folks I met with in Port-au-Prince that watershed week of
Dec 6-13, 2003, were not dispensing fiction or propaganda about what was
happening on the ground in their country. Whether they were native Haitian or
adopted made no difference. Their sense of reality was far more credible than
what I early on began to learn about my own countries mis and dis-information
chains. Everybody is lied to, from our congressional representatives all the
way down the line.

Do read the book for much, much more.

I share only one tiny piece of information from the book, a piece important
to me.

I have, for whatever reason, always had some affection and admiration for
President Clinton and his efforts during eight mostly difficult years as U.S.
President, six of which were 'under the gun' of a radical right wing
Repusblican Congress.

That Sunday, December 7, 2003, in Port-au-Prince, our host told our group
that the first two years of the Clinton administration were a time of hope and
optimism for the Aristide Government, even though for most of that time,
Aristide was in the U.S., having been overthrown by a coup in his first year as
President, Sep 30, 1991.

As some of you know, since my return I have searched for some affirmation
of my belief that the Clinton administration was somehow a little different
than those administrations which preceded and followed him, and I did in fact
find some tangible though sketchy evidence of that positive difference. (Bill
Clinton became President in late January, 2003; a right-wing dominated
Congress took control of Congress in January, 1995, and still in some ways even
today retains substantial control of both houses.)

Hallward administers a body blow to my positive view of Clinton fairly
early in Damming the Flood when he makes an unflattering distinction between
the Clinton years and the George W. Bush years. I do not have the specific
quote at hand, but in essence he says the Clinton years were years of hostility
to Haiti; followed by years of hatred of Haiti exhibited by the administration
of George W. Bush. A difference, yes; a positive difference - didn't seem so.

I'll give Aristide the last word on this: on page 343 of Damming the
Flood, three pages from the end of the book, Aristide is quoted by Hallward
thusly: "From 1992 to 1994...there were people in the US government who were
willing to listen at least a little, and this helped the democratic process to
move forward. Since 2000 we've had to deal with a US administration that is
diametrically opposed to its predecessor, and everything slowed down
dramatically, or went into reverse...."

Do read the book. It is a troubling education.

piporiko a écrit:LI TEX ALTERPRESSE LA.sE YON WONT

Piporiko,

Tèks sou Alterpresse lan se MICHAEL DEIBERT ki ekri l.Se misye ki te ekri liv ki rele "Notes from the last Testament" an ki se yon "hatchet job" kont Aristide ak mesye lavalas.
Se menm plim,menm plimaj ak mesye Alterpresse yo.Se misye ki te rapòte zafè "bebe nan pilon" an e ki te di se vre paske se Radyo Kiskeya ki rapòte l e Radyo Kiskeya se yon ògàn près kredib.

Se bagay sa a ki te fòse yon jounalis kanadyen al fè rechèch sou ki kote bagay "bebe nan pilon" an sòti e misye dekouvri ke se de yon apèl telefonik ,ki sanble plante,ke Radyo Kiskeya te "resevwa" de yon moun Miyami an 2003.
Moun ki te rele an se yon anonim ki di li te la lè Sò Anne t ap fè yon seremoni malefik pou Aristide te kapab rete sou pouvwa a.
Alòs ou wè se menm kabrit Tomazo an ke DEIBERT ye ak mesyedam ALTERPRESSE yo!