U.S. Military Occupation of Haiti Pretends to be Disaster Relief
By Arun Gupta
The rapid mobilization of U.S troops in Haiti was not primarily done for humanitarian reasons; we’re likely to see a neoliberal economic plan imposed, at gunpoint if necessary.
Official denials aside, the United States has embarked on a new military occupation of Haiti thinly cloaked as disaster relief. While both the Pentagon and the United Nations claimed more troops were needed to provide
“security and stability” to bring in aid, according to
nearly all independent observers in the field, violence was never an
issue. inInstead, there appears to be cruder motives for the military response. With Haiti’s government “all but invisible” and its repressive security forces collapsed, popular organizations were starting to fill the
void. But the Western powers rushing in envision sweatshops and
tourism as the foundation of a rebuilt Haiti. This is opposed by the
popular organizations, which draw their strength from Haiti’s
overwhelmingly poor majority. Thus, if a neoliberal plan is going to
be imposed on a devastated Haiti it will be done at gunpoint.
The rapid mobilization of thousands of U.S troops was not for humanitarian reasons; in fact it crowded out much of the arriving aid into the Port-au-Prince airport, forcing lengthy delays. Doctors Without Borders said five of
its cargo flights carrying 85 tons of medical and relief supplies
were turned away during the first week while flights from the World
Food Program were delayed up to two days.
One WFP official saidof the 200 flights going in and out of Haiti daily “most … are for the U.S. military.” Nineteen days into the crisis, only 32
percent of Haitians in need had received any food (even if just a
single meal), three-quarters were without clean water, the government
had received only two percent of the tents it had requested and
hospitals in the capital reported they were running “dangerously
low” on basic medical supplies like antibiotics and painkillers.
On Feb. 9, the Washington Post reported that food aid was little more
than rice, and “Every day, tens of thousands of Haitians face a
grueling quest to find food, any food. A nutritious diet is out of
the question.”
At the same time, the
United States had assumed control of Haiti’s airspace, landed 6,500
soldiers on the ground, with another 15,000 troops offshore at one
point, dispatched an armada of naval vessels and nine coast guard
cutters to patrol the waters, and the U.S. embassy was issuing orders
on behalf of the Haitian government. In a telling account, the New
York Times described a press conference in Haiti at which “the
American ambassador and the American general in charge of the United
States troops deployed here” were “seated at center stage,”
while Haitian President René Préval stood in the back
“half-listening” and eventually “wandered away without a word.”
In the first week, the
U.S. commander, Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, said the presence of the Haitian
police was “limited” because they had been “devastated” by
the earthquake. The real powers in Haiti right now are Keen, U.S.
ambassador Louis Lucke, Bill Clinton (who has been tapped by U.N.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to lead recovery efforts) and Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton. When asked at the press conference how long
U.S. forces were planning to stay, Keen said, “I’m not going to
put a time frame on it” while Lucke added, “We’re not really
planning in terms of weeks or months or years. We’re planning
basically to see this job through to the end.”
While much of the
corporate media fixated on “looters,” virtually every
independent observer in Haiti after the earthquake noted the lack of
violence. Even Lt. Gen. Keen described the security situation as
“relatively calm.” One aid worker in Haiti, Leisa Faulkner,
said, “There is no security threat from the Haitian people. Aid
workers do not need to fear them. I would really like for the guys
with the rifles to put them down and pick up shovels to help find
people still buried in the rubble of collapsed buildings and homes.
It just makes me furious to see multiple truckloads of fellows with
automatic rifles.”
Veteran Haiti reporter
Kim Ives concurred, explaining to “Democracy Now!”: “Security
is not the issue. We see throughout Haiti the population themselves
organizing themselves into popular committees to clean up, to pull
out the bodies from the rubble, to build refugee camps, to set up
their security for the refugee camps. This is a population which is
self-sufficient, and it has been self-sufficient for all these
years.”
In one instance, Ives
continued, a truckload of food showed up in a neighborhood in the
middle of the night unannounced. “It could have been a melee. The
local popular organization…was contacted. They immediately
mobilized their members. They came out. They set up a perimeter. They
set up a cordon. They lined up about 600 people who were staying on
the soccer field behind the house, which is also a hospital, and they
distributed the food in an orderly, equitable fashion.… They didn’t
need Marines. They didn’t need the UN.”
Traveling with an
armored UN convoy on the streets of the capital, Al Jazeera reported
that the soldiers “aren’t here to help pull people out of the
rubble. They’re here, they say, to enforce the law.” One Haitian
told the news outlet, “These weapons they bring, they are
instruments of death. We don’t want them. We don’t need them. We
are a traumatized people. What we want from the international
community is technical help. Action, not words.”
A New Invasion
That help, however, is
coming in the form of neoliberal shock. With the collapse of the
Haitian government, popular organizations of the poor, precisely the
ones that propelled Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the presidency twice on
a platform of social and economic justice, know that the detailed
U.S. and UN plans in the works for “recovery” – sweatshops,
land grabs and privatization – are part of the same system of
economic slavery they’ve been fighting against for more than 200
years.
A new occupation of
Haiti — the third in the last 16 years — fits within the U.S.
doctrine of rollback in Latin America: support for the coup in
Honduras, seven new military bases in Colombia, hostility toward
Bolivia and Venezuela. Related to that, the United States wants to
ensure that Haiti not pose the “threat of a good example” by
pursuing an independent path, as it tried to under President Aristide
– which is why he was toppled twice, in 1991 and 2004, in
U.S.-backed coups.
With the government
and its repressive security forces now in shambles, neoliberal
reconstruction will happen at the barrel of the gun. In this light,
the impetus of a new occupation may be to reconstitute the Haitian
Army (or similar entity) as a force “to fight the people.”
This is the crux of
the situation. Despite all the terror inflicted on Haiti by the
United States, particularly in the last 20 years — two coups
followed each time by the slaughter of thousands of activists and
innocents by U.S.-armed death squads — the strongest social and
political force in Haiti today is probably the organisations
populaires (OPs) that are the backbone of the Fanmi Lavalas party of
deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Twice last year, after
legislative elections were scheduled that banned Fanmi Lavalas,
boycotts were organized by the party. In the April and June polls the
abstention rate each time was reported to be at least 89 percent.
It is the OPs, while
devastated and destitute, that are filling the void and remain the
strongest voice against economic colonization. Thus, all the concern
about “security and stability.” With no functioning government,
calm prevailing, and people self-organizing, “security” does not
mean safeguarding the population; it means securing the country
against the population. “Stability” does not mean social harmony;
it means stability for capital: low wages, no unions, no
environmental laws, and the ability to repatriate profits easily.
Sweatshop Solution
In a March 2009 New
York Times op-ed, Ban Ki-moon outlined his development plan for
Haiti, involving lower port fees, “dramatically expanding the
country’s export zones,” and emphasizing “the garment industry
and agriculture.” Ban’s neoliberal plan was drawn up Oxford
University economist Paul Collier. (Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff
admitted, in promoting Collier’s plan, that those garment factories
are “sweatshops.”)
Collier is blunt,
writing (PDF), “Due to its poverty and relatively unregulated labor
market, Haiti has labor costs that are fully competitive with China.”
His scheme calls for agricultural exports, such as mangoes, that
involve pushing farmers off the land so they can be employed in
garment manufacturing in export processing zones. To facilitate these
zones Collier calls on Haiti and donors to provide them with private
ports and electricity, “clear and rapid rights to land,”
outsourced customs, “roads, water and sewage,” and the
involvement of the Clinton Global Initiative to bring in garment
manufacturers.
Revealing the
connection between neoliberalism and military occupation in Haiti,
Collier credits the Brazilian-led United Nations Stabilization
Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) with establishing “credible security,”
but laments that its remaining mandate is “too short for investor
confidence.”
In fact, MINUSTAH has
been involved in numerous massacres in Port-au-Prince slums that are
strongholds for Lavalas and Aristide. But that is probably what
Collier means by “credible security.” He also notes MINUSTAH will
cost some $5 billion overall; compare that to the $379 million the
U.S. government has designated for spending on Haiti in response to
the earthquake. It’s worth noting that one-third of the U.S.
funding is for “military aid” and another 42 percent is for
disaster assistance, such as $23.5 million for “search and
rescue” operations that prioritized combing through luxury
hotels for survivors.
As for the “U.N.
Special Envoy to Haiti,” speaking at an October 2009 investors’
conference in Port-au-Prince that attracted do-gooders like Gap, Levi
Strauss and Citibank, Bill Clinton claimed a revitalized garment
industry could create 100,000 jobs. The reason some 200 companies,
half of them garment manufacturers, attended the conference was
because “Haiti’s extremely low labor costs, comparable to those
in Bangladesh, make it so appealing,” the New York Times reported.
Those costs are often less than the official daily minimum wage of
$1.75. (The Haitian Parliament approved an increase last May 4 to
about $5 an hour, but it was opposed by the business elite and
President René Préval refused to sign the bill, effectively killing
it. The refusal to increase the minimum wage sparked numerous student
protests starting last June, which were repressed by Haitian police
and MINUSTAH.)
Roots of Repression
Some historical
perspective is in order. In his work Haiti State Against Nation: The
Origins & Legacy of Duvalierism, Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes,
“Haiti’s first army saw itself as the offspring of the struggle
against slavery and colonialism.” That changed during the U.S.
occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. Under the tutelage of the U.S.
Marines, “the Haitian Garde was specifically created to fight
against other Haitians. It received its baptism of fire in combat
against its countrymen.” Its brutal legacy led Aristide to
disband the army in 1995.
Yet prior to the
army’s disbandment, in the wake of the U.S. invasion that returned
a politically handcuffed Aristide to the presidency in 1994, “CIA
agents accompanying U.S. troops began a new recruitment drive for the
agency” that included leaders of the death squad known as FRAPH,
according to Peter Hallward, author of Damning the Flood: Haiti,
Aristide and the Politics of Containment.
It’s worth recalling
how the Clinton administration played a double game under the cover
of humanitarian intervention. Investigative reporter Allan Nairn
revealed that in 1993 “five to ten thousand” small arms
were shipped from Florida, past the U.S. naval blockade, to the coup
leaders. These weapons enabled FRAPH to multiply and terrorize the
popular movements. Then, pointing to intensifying FRAPH violence in
1994, the Clinton administration pressured Aristide into acquiescing
to a U.S. invasion because FRAPH was becoming “the only game in
town.”
After 20,000 U.S.
troops landed in Haiti, they set about protecting FRAPH members,
freeing them from jail, and refusing to disarm them or seize their
weapons caches. FRAPH leader Emmanual Constant told Nairn that after
the invasion the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was using
FRAPH to counter “subversive activities.” Meanwhile, the State
Department and CIA went about stacking the Haitian National Police
with former army soldiers, many of whom were on the U.S. payroll. By
1996, according to one report, Haitian Army and “FRAPH forces
remain armed and present in virtually every community across the
country,” and paramilitaries were “inciting street violence in an
effort to undermine social order.”
During the early 1990s,
a separate group of Haitian soldiers, including Guy Philippe who led
the 2004 coup against Aristide, were spirited away to Ecuador where
they allegedly trained at a “U.S. military facility.” Hallward
describes the second coup as beginning in 2001 as a “Contra war”
in the Dominican Republic with Philippe and former FRAPH commander
Jodel Chamblain as leaders. A “Democracy Now!” report from
April 7, 2004 claimed that the U.S.-government funded International
Republican Institute provided arms and technical training to the
anti-Aristide force in the Dominican Republic, while “200 members
of the special forces of the United States were there in the area
training these so-called rebels.”
A key component of the
campaign against Aristide after he was inaugurated in 2001 was
economic destabilization that cut off much of the funding for “road
construction, AIDs programs, water works and health care.” A likely
factor in the coup was Aristide’s highly public campaign demanding
that France repay the money it extorted from Haiti in 1825 for the
former slave colony to buy its freedom, estimated in 2003 at $21
billion, or that Aristide was working with Venezuela, Bolivia and
Cuba to create alternatives to U.S. economic domination of the
region.
When Aristide was
finally ousted in February 2004, another round of slaughter ensued,
with 800 bodies dumped in just one week in March. A 2006 study by the
British medical journal Lancet (PDF) determined that 8,000 people
were murdered in the capital region during the first 22 months of the
U.S.-backed coup government and 35,000 women and girls raped or
sexually assaulted. The OPs and Lavalas militants were decimated, in
part by a UN war against the main Lavalas strongholds in
Port-au-Prince’s neighborhoods of Bel Air and Cite Soleil, the
latter a densely packed slum of some 300,000. (Hallward claims U.S.
Marines were involved in a number of massacres in areas such as Bel
Air in 2004.)
‘More Free Trade’
Less than four months
after the 2004 coup, reporter Jane Regan described a draft economic
plan, the “Interim Cooperation Framework,” that “calls for more
free trade zones (FTZs), stresses tourism and export agriculture, and
hints at the eventual privatization of the country’s state
enterprises.” Regan wrote that the plan was “drawn up by people
nobody elected,” mainly “foreign technicians” and “institutions
like the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the
World Bank.”
Much of this plan was
implemented under Préval, who announced in 2007 plans to privatize
the public telephone company, Téléco, and is being promoted by Bill
Clinton and Ban Ki-moon as Haiti’s path out of poverty. The Wall
Street Journal touted such achievements as “10,000 new garment
industry jobs,” in 2009 a “luxury hotel complex” in the
upper-crust neighborhood of Pétionville, and a $55 million
investment by Royal Caribbean International at its “private Haitian
beach paradise,” surrounded by “a ten-foot-high iron wall,
watched by armed guards,” just north of the capital. (That
“investment,” according to the cruise line operator, included “a
new 800-foot pier, a Barefoot Beach Club with private cabanas, an
alpine roller coaster with individual controls for each car, new
dining facilities and a new, larger Artisan’s Market.”)
Haiti, of course, has
been here before when the U.S. Agency for International Development
spoke of turning it into the “Taiwan of the Caribbean.” In the
1980s, under Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, it shifted one
third of cultivated land to export crops while “there were some 240
multinational corporations, employing between 40,000 and 60,000
predominantly female workers,” sewing garments, baseballs for Major
League Baseball and Disney merchandise, according to scholar Yasmine
Shamsie. Those jobs, paying as little as 11 cents an hour, coincided
with a decline in per capita income and living standards. (Ban
Ki-moon wants Haiti to emulate Bangladesh, where sweatshops pay as
little as 6 cents an hour.) At such low pay, workers had little left
after purchasing food and transportation to and from the factories.
These self-contained export-processing zones, often funded by USAID
and the World Bank, also add little to the national economy,
importing tax free virtually all the materials used. The elite use
the tax-free import structure to smuggle in luxury goods. In
response, the government taxed consumption-based items more, hitting
the poor the hardest.
U.S.-promoted
agricultural policies, such as forcing Haitian rice farmers to
compete against U.S.-subsidized agribusiness, cost an estimated
830,000 rural jobs according to Oxfam, while exacerbating
malnourishment. This and the decimation of the invaluable Creole pig
(because of fears of an outbreak of African swine fever), led to
displacement of the peasantry into urban areas, along with the
promise of urban jobs, fueled rural migration into flimsy
shantytowns. It’s hard not to conclude that these development
schemes played a major role in the horrific death toll in
Port-au-Prince.
The latest scheme, on
hold for now because of the earthquake, is a $50 million “industrial
park that would house roughly 40 manufacturing facilities and
warehouses,” bankrolled by the Soros Economic Development Fund
(yes, that Soros). The planned location is Cite Soleil. James
Dobbins, former special envoy to Haiti under President Bill Clinton,
outlined other measures in a New York Times op-ed: “This disaster
is an opportunity to accelerate oft-delayed reforms” including
“breaking up or at least reorganizing the government-controlled
telephone monopoly. The same goes with the Education Ministry, the
electric company, the Health Ministry and the courts.”
It’s clear that the
Shock Doctrine is alive and well in Haiti. But given the strength of
the organisations populaires and weakness of the government, it will
have to be imposed through force.
For those who wonder
why the United States is so obsessed with controlling a country so
impoverished, devastated and seemingly inconsequential as Haiti, Noam
Chomsky sums it up best. “Why was the U.S. so intent on destroying
northern Laos, so poor that peasants hardly even knew they were in
Laos? Or Indochina? Or Guatemala? Or Maurice Bishop in Grenada, the
nutmeg capital of the world? The reasons are about the same, and are
explained in the internal record. These are ‘viruses’ that might
‘infect others’ with the dangerous idea of pursuing similar paths
to independent development. The smaller and weaker they are, the more
dangerous they tend to be. If they can do it, why can’t we? Does
the Godfather allow a small storekeeper to get away with not paying
protection money?”
Republished from Alternet
Arun Gupta is a
founding editor of The Indypendent newspaper. He is writing a book on
the politics of food for Haymarket Books.