INVASION OF THE HYPOCRITES
Charles Glass says that the United States has never been interested in establishing democracy in Haiti; President Clinton provides no exception THE MILITARY rulers of Haiti, who overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aris- tide in September 1991, must be surprised to see the United States trying to eliminate them as if they were Fidel Castro. They are, after all, officers who trained at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia; and they belong to an army that was created by the United States when it occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934.
They believed they were acting in Amer- ican interests in removing a turbulent priest who threatened to raise wages of 14 cents an hour in American-owned textile factories. They knew they were acting in their own interests when Aristide inter- fered in their trans-shipments of cocaine from Colombia to the United States, a long-time source of revenue in which the Americans had not interfered. Where, General Raoul Cedras and his fellow offi- cers must be asking themselves, did they go wrong?
The generals overplayed their hand. In murdering at least 3,000 people in their first months in office, they disrupted busi- ness and frightened other Haitians onto boats and into American waters. Forcing their people to flee meant the American public could not, as it would normally do, ignore the Haitians' fate. In the 1992 presi- dential campaign, Bill Clinton promised to reverse 'Bush administration policy and oppose repatriation'. Eight days after he took office, Clinton reneged on his promise and prolonged the Bush policy of sending Haitians either back home, where they faced death, or to a wretched camp existence in Guantanamo, all the while negotiating with Cedras.
Like President Bush, Clinton pretended to enforce a United Nations embargo against Haiti while trading there. Ameri- can commerce with Haiti was $265 million in the first nine months of the embargo, and in 1992 the United States imported $68 million from American clothes-makers in Haiti. If the embargo did not work, it was because the United States did not honour it. The failure of the embargo is the pretext for invasion.
Clinton administration officials delayed doing anything else about the junta in Port-au-Prince, perpetuating the Bush administration's fiction that Father Aris- tide is slightly mad. The story of Aristide's insanity is based on a psychiatrist's report that the CIA admitted, six months after its release, was a fabrication — based on the study by 'Dr Herve Martin', a Canadian psychiatrist who turned out not to exist. Americans must have thought Aristide insane to warn in 1987 against accepting American aid because 'the money helps to maintain an armed force against the peo- ple; the food helps to ruin our national economy. And both money and food keep Haiti in a situation of dependence on the former colonisers.' This is not the lan- guage of a president the United States is likely to want to keep in power, despite the fact that Aristide in his nine months as elected president in 1991 actually reversed the flow of Haitians back into the country.
The invasion Clinton is preparing, with insignificant military help from Britain and other allies, will put Aristide back in Port- au-Prince for the remainder of his term — another year. But the United States is like- ly to curtail his powers, force him into some sort of power-sharing with local business and the army, and prepare the way for a more amenable successor. There is a myth that the United States invades countries to impose or to restore democracy. The Spectator, in its leading article of 27 August ('What sort of Ameri- ca?') asserted:
The last time the Marines invaded Haiti (this was the Wilson expedition of 1915), they remained stuck there until 1934, when they were forced to withdraw, having failed to restore democracy and failed to eliminate the root causes of violence.
Leaving aside the fact that the last Marine landing in Haiti was in 1958, when they were sent to support Papa Doc Duvalier and to retrain his army, the Marines did not attempt in the 1915 invasion `to restore democracy' or 'to eliminate the root causes of violence'. They invaded to take over the Haitian customs union, the national trea- sury and 266,000 acres of land on behalf of American corporations. President Woodrow Wilson stated publicly that 'con- trol of the customs houses . . . constituted the essence of this whole affair'.
In December 1914, eight months before the invasion, the US Marines were despatched to Haiti to confiscate $500,000 in gold from the Haitian treasury and deposit it with the National City Bank of New York. After the Marine invasion of July 1915, the National City Bank was awarded ownership of the treasury and forced Haiti to borrow $40 million at high interest. The US government took control of the Customs. The Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franldin Delano Roosevelt, told the New York Times in 1920, The facts are that I wrote Haiti's constitution [of 1918] myself, and if I do say it, I think it is a pret- ty good constitution.'
FDR's constitution altered the basic law of 1804 — which had forbidden foreigners from owning land — thus enabling Ameri- can corporations to confiscate 266,000 acres. The Republican candidate for presi- dent in 1920, Warren G. Harding, running on an anti-imperialist ticket, said, 'If I am elected, I will not empower any assistant secretary of the navy to draft a constitution for helpless neighbours and jam it down their throats at the point of bayonets borne by United States Marines.'
The Marines' occupation of Haiti was, in the words of a sympathetic historian of the corps, J. Robert Moskin in The Marine Corps Story (1982), its 'longest and least effective'. It was also among its most shameful, prompting the other services to call the Marines 'State Department troops'. When the first Marines went ashore, Colonel Littleton W.T. Waller of Virginia announced, 'I know the nigger and how to handle him.'
The Marines reintroduced slavery in the form of forced labour gangs to build the roads, and they killed more than 3,000 rebels. In engagements against men armed usually with machetes, they won as many Congressional Medals of Honor in Haiti, eight, as they did in the first world war. One went to Major Smedley Butler, on the recommendation of Franklin Roosevelt, for an operation that saw 200 Haitians killed, no prisoners taken and one marine casualty — injured by a rock. The Marines also established the gendarmerie that became the national army and, far from eliminating the root causes of violence, intensified it.
The Spectator, among other journals, blames Haiti's predicament on 'voodoo culture' rather than on foreign invasions — beginning with the US support of French slave-owners in 1791 at the beginning of the revolution — and the extortion of $2.5 million by Britain, France, Germany and America between 1879 and 1902. During those years, the imperial powers felt free to sail into Haitian waters and demand payments. Haitians were, after all, black.
It is worth bearing in mind the British connection. Britain was the first country to send a force to the Haitian Republic, in 1865, to support an unpopular president against insurrection, and it later took part in multinational landings with the United States, France and Germany. Winston Churchill, fearing Cuba would become 'another black republic' like Haiti, advised against American support of Cuban revo- lutionaries who wanted independence from Spain in 1896.
The United States, Britain and several smaller states are now preparing to invade Haiti under United Nations resolutions. Once again, the UN has abdicated its own obligation under Articles 46 and 47 of the Charter to conduct all military operations under the command of the UN's Military Staff Committee. It was legally obliged to do this in the war against Iraq over Kuwait, but the US wanted to run its own war with a few UN resolutions as cover. It plans to launch this invasion itself, again with British assistance for additional cover. That much is to be expected in a world where international law does not apply to the United States. That, too, is not new.
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