OPERATION RESTORE DEMOCRACY:

Humanitarian Intervention

Or

U.S. Imperialism?

An essay by Brendan Sexton

Since then we have seen much of the opposite. The world we live in today is more unstable than it was ten years ago. Since 1989, we’ve seen numerous wars, we’ve seen genocide in various countries, and now economic recession grips 37 percent of the world’s population. The promise of order and stability for the world’s population has proven to be empty.

While George Bush was making his statement, General Roul Cedras was plotting a bloody coup, where he was to rise to power and declare himself president of the republic of Haiti. This coup and the U.S. military operation that followed it are now all too familiar in a world ravaged by competition, inequality and instability.

In the fall of 1994, the U.S. for the second time this century occupied Haiti in the name of protecting democracy and stability, those very things promised by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Many people who were disgusted by the barbarity produced by the military coup of General Cedras, supported the U.S. occupation called, "Operation Restore Democracy". Even many people on the American left who know the history of United States intervention in other countries, saw the U.S. occupation as a humanitarian act and not as the world’s lone super power exercising force to assert it’s own agenda.

In this paper I aim to show that the United States’ latest intervention into Haiti wasn’t about restoring a popularly elected president forced into exile; it wasn’t out of concern for ordinary Haitians that the US intervened in Haiti; it was out of concern for profit and stability within the US’s own backyard – as the Caribbean and Latin America often get called - that the US occupied Haiti. In this paper I will expose some of the US’s history in Haiti which should help guide us in our decision to support the occupation or not. I will also look at the history of the US’s support for dictators in Latin America and the world over, proving that the US does not necessarily have a disdain for dictators and that the US government will actually support dictatorships if it suits their interest. I will also examine the conditions of Haitian people since the occupation ended in early 1996, to see if life has improved at all for ordinary Haitians thus examining the success of the mission in ousting the coup.

The occupation of 1994 marked the 26^th. time the US took military action in Haiti. The US Navy had sent ships into Haitian waters to protect the property of American citizens in 1849, 1851, 1857, 1858, 1865, 1866, 1867, 1868, 1869, 1876, 1888, 1891, 1892, 1902, 1903, 1904, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1909, 1911, 1912, 1913. Then in 1914, and 1915, US warships had remained almost a constant in Haitian waters. <Paul Farmer p.89: 1994> This pattern of intervention led to the first US occupation of Haiti in 1915, which lasted until 1934.

This initial occupation was - as most interventions are nowadays - in order to "restore stability" to Haiti. The situation in Haiti was and always has been somewhat volatile. Ever since the Haitian slaves revolted and emancipated themselves in 1804, Haitian history has become full of crises and revolutions of various sorts.

The invasion and following occupation was sparked by the fall of the Haitian president at the time, General Vilbrun Guillaume Sam in July of 1915. General Sam was well aware of the discontent with him from the masses, and in response in a sick display of power, ordered the execution of 163 political prisoners. The violence that erupted from the Haitian population in reaction was enough reason for the US to declare this as evidence that the Haitian people weren’t fit to rule to rule themselves.

The immediate human cost of the occupation was the displacement of 50,000 peasants and a total of a quarter million people fleeing to Cuba. The immediate aims of the occupation were to disarm the part of the peasantry that had kept their weapons since the Revolution, and create an army and police force that would protect American capital. (American firms had literally seized 266,000 acres of land.) The training the new armed forces of Haiti received, made them specialists at preventing revolt and organizing a society of terror.

It would be from this armed force that Francois Duvalier would emerge and learn the tricks of the trade of brutality and terror. Duvalier came to power in a military junta in 1957, ousting a president that wished to carry out promised reforms; a pattern that has been repeated throughout the world and copied by the junta of 1991.

The bloody terror to come from the Duvalier regime was not ignored by the United States in fact it was rewarded. "During his first four – and bloodiest – years in power, Duvalier received $40.4 million from Washington, much of it in the form of outright gifts."<P.Farmer 108:1994>

The U.S. even went so far as to send Marines to protect Duvalier from any popular movement that might threaten his rule. This quote from Colonel Heinl telling of the only advice he received from the State Department in his mission in Haiti in the 1960’s, exposes the support the regime received:

The most important way you can support our objectives in Haiti is to help keep Duvalier in power so he can serve out his full term in office, and maybe a little longer than that if everything works out. <Farmer 109:1997>

Recently declassified documents from the 1960’s summarize the objectives of U.S. involvement in Haiti:

The overriding objective is to deny Haiti to the Communists… The U.S. has the continuing objective of protecting private American citizens and property interests in Haiti.

Francois Duvalier and his armed forces were exactly what the US ruling class needed to protect their private interests i.e. their plantations and sweatshops. When Duvalier died in 1971, he passed the reins of rule to his son Jean-Claude "Baby –Doc" Duvalier. Like father, like son, Baby Doc Duvalier continued the system of repression and exploitation. The only difference was that he hired Madison Avenue public relation firms to help sell the legitimacy of his regime to the people of the world. Although there was mass suppression of ordinary Haitians under his rule, governmental aid from the US never ceased to flow.

While repression from, and financial support to the regime never ceased, neither did the resistance from the Haitian people. The peasantry and the working class showed their capacity and willingness to topple a brutal dictatorship that was responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of people.

In the face of massive rebellion, Baby Doc was forced to leave Haiti on an American cargo plane on February 7^th, 1986. With the departure of Duvalier, a political vacuum at the top of society was left unfilled. In the three months following the fall of Baby Doc, Haiti saw the rise of three unelected presidents.

It took four and a half years for Haiti to hold actual national democratic elections for president of the country. The popular priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had shown great courage in opposition to the Duvalier and neo-Duvalier regimes, was elected president with an overwhelming majority of the Haitian vote. Aristide would receive almost 70% of the popular vote while the next closest candidate, Marc Bazin a former World Bank official only received 14%.

Aristide’s popularity was no fluke. He didn’t just come out of anywhere he was an indigenous part of the grassroots democracy movement in Haiti. While he was no socialist, he showed courageous opposition to the military, to US imperialism and to US- style capitalism.

Aristide was inaugurated into office on February 7^th, 1991 and within his first month in office, declined his presidential salary of $10,000 a month, calling it "scandalous in a country where most people go to bed hungry". <Farmer 165: 1994> Although they quickly refused, he even pushed for his Congressional colleagues to accept a wage of $2,000 a month compared to $7,000.

Rhetorically, Aristide’s presidency was aiming for a "transition from misery to poverty with dignity". These weren’t the demands of a "loony Communist" or a dictator as some in the US press made him out to be. His reforms and attempts at reform were on some level quite modest. His demands were demands for basic human needs. In his "ten democratic commandments" speech to the United Nations in September of 1991, he listed three rights he considered being fundamental to humanity. Besides the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Aristide called for the right to eat, to work, and the right of the impoverished masses to demand what they are owed. <Dupuy 94: 1997>

Concretely, his government kicked off a major literacy program, rejuvenating the university and public education systems. He lobbied to increase the minimum wage from 15 gourdes a day to 25, which was still less than three US dollars. The government abolished the chef de section, which were the police chiefs who terrorized people in their jurisdiction, as they ran their departments like little fiefdoms.

Possibly most damaging to the military elite, who prospered during the Duvalier, and neo-Duvalier regimes between 1986 and 1990, was Aristide’s campaign to break up the drug trafficking that passed through Haiti.

What would seem like modest reforms, ended up being too threatening to the profits of the military elite and the bourgeoisie. Because of this threat to the established powers, a military coup – recently armed with 2,000 Israeli-made Uzi submachine guns – stormed Aristde’s residence on September 29^th, 1991.

Brigadier General Raoul Cedras, leader of the coup, engaged in a campaign of bloody terror against the Haitian people. Within days, the coup was responsible for over 1,500 murders.

You would think that the official representatives of a country built on the ideals of liberty, and democracy would be outraged at the smashing of a new democratic government. Representative Robert Toricelli, a Democrat from New Jersey, proves differently. He went on to brag about how:

The US Government develops relationships with ambitious and bright young men at the beginning of their careers and often follows them through their public service. It includes people in sensitive positions in the current situation in Haiti. <Farmer 192: 1994>

Torecelli was referring to Cedras and the training he received at the School of Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, where the US has trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers in the past 50 years. George Bush, who for only the past year had been singing the song of democracy in opposition to tyrants like Saddam Hussein, was hesitant to take action against the new military dictatorship in Haiti.

Hesitance by the US to stand against, and its support of military dictatorships shouldn’t be a surprise. The US has a long history of supporting authoritarian regimes when it is most beneficial to corporate interests, which is more often than not.

Henry Kissinger's famous statement about the election of Salvador Allende to the Chilean presidency expresses the sentiment of the US ruling class anytime people elect a government that isn’t willing to buckle to every demand made by Corporate America. Kissinger talked of how "we're not going to let a country turn Communist because of the irresponsibility of its people!" Allende was far from a radical. All he had to do was nationalize the copper industry that was dominated by US corporations to deserve the wrath of a bloody coup in 1973 that was orchestrated by the CIA.

Eventually to save face, George Bush enacted an embargo against Haiti. This embargo which was hardly enforced and was ineffective in weakening the junta, was a way for the US government to pretend to take action against the regime without actually having to do anything. It in no way was enacted to help the struggle of ordinary Haitians. Bush’s policy on the refugees fleeing Haiti should indicate the type of contempt he actually had for the Haitian people.

The INS’s practice of considering Haitians as "economic refugees" completely ignored the brutality emanating from the coup. In defiance of international law, the US continued to forcibly repatriate Haitians back to their country. This was a practice started in1981, in a deal arranged between the US and Baby-Doc. The United States granted political asylum to a grand total of eight Haitians out of a possible 24,559 during the period of 1981 and 1991. <Farmer 267: 1994>

In the eight months following the 1991 coup, the US Coast Guard intercepted 34,000 Haitians fleeing the country by boat. The majority of those captured were sent to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Here, where some Haitian refugees were held for as long as two years, one could enjoy sleeping in tents in the rain - while in the company of rats, snakes and scorpions - as well as food that caused diarrhea, and mistreatment at the hands of American soldiers. <Farmer Chapter 6(Guantanamo): 1994>

Through the grassroots organizing of Haitian Americans, word began to spread of the mistreatment of Haitian refugees at the military base in Cuba. A ripple of student activism occurred up and down the East Coast of America. Yale students organized "Operation Harriet Tubman" to educate people and involve them in pressuring the government to open up US borders. <Smith December 1999> Celebrities at award ceremonies could be seen wearing purple ribbons in solidarity with the detainees. It was this activism that pushed Bill Clinton to call Bush’s policy on Haiti, "inhumane".

Bill Clinton, who would later go on to complain of how American borders were leaking like sieves, strengthened the blockade against the refugees, largely decreasing the refugee flow. Clinton’s actions and attitude towards the refugees would not go unnoticed:

At a conference that Aristide organized in Miami, Haitian activists, members of the congressional Black Caucus, as well as Jesse Jackson, criticized the Clinton Administration’s refugee policy as racist and chastised the administration for pushing Aristide to negotiate with a "fascist military". <Dupuy 154:1997>

The conference also called on the US to intervene militarily.

The US tried its hardest to prevent an intervention. The Clinton Administration, seeing that the violence from the coup was threatening stability in the Caribbean, constantly sought a deal that would get the bloody regime to step down peacefully. At the same time because the US was reluctant to have Aristide back in power threatening the profits of US corporations, the US was constantly trying to limit Aristide’s power to make change, should he return to Haiti as president. The Governors Island Agreement signed on July 3,1993 was constructed to do just that.

The agreement granted amnesty to the military, and all others responsible for mass killings and repression (the police and the paramilitaries). It allowed the military leaders to stay in power until Aristides’s return, and provided all sorts of loopholes that would allow the military to ignore the Agreement for another year. And ignore the agreement for another year is what they did.

They overstayed, and Clinton threatened force. Right up until the point of the occupation, it was unclear if the intervention was going to be an invasion, or a "peaceful" change of the guards with the US and UN troops acting as the new, temporary police force.

The troops didn’t enter Haiti with their guns blazing, but by September 19^th, 1994, one day after the invasion was set to take place, the US occupied Haiti for the second time this century. This time was no different from the last in the respect that it was to restore stability. Clinton himself gave the reasons for intervening in this speech on September 15th:

To protect our interests, to stop the brutal atrocities that threaten tens of thousands of Haitians, to secure our borders, and to preserve stability and promote democracy in our hemisphere. <cited in Dupuy 160: 1997>

Stability unfortunately only applies for the rich and not the poor. Stability is somewhat a code word used nowadays to express a business friendly environment. Business friendly environments usually mean an atmosphere where it is difficult to challenge the status quo if you are poor or working class.

The 15,000 US troops – of whom only 120 spoke Creole – were not meant to be there forever. Clinton and his colleagues drew up a plan that would create a new Haitian police force, which would look remarkably similar to the army that had just terrified the nation for the past three years. The reason for the similarities being, Clinton planned to entice 3,000 soldiers from Cedras’ army to join the police force through sizeable bonuses. <Smith 15: 1994>

On top of the coup leaders having access to all of their frozen bank accounts, they were provided with free transportation to their mansions in Queens, Panama and other safe havens. As for the 4,000 other soldiers who didn’t make it to the police force, they were offered $12.5 million total from the US Agency for International Development. <Smith 15: 1994>

Sounds like a sweet package for a bunch of US backed murderers! What did ordinary Haitians get? Very little. USAID was to temporarily provide Haitians with 2 million meals a day up from the 1.3 million they were providing in recent weeks. <NY TIMES 9-24-94>

Unfortunately many people saw the occupation as a step forward towards democracy. While the military regimes in Haiti were quite brutal, and had no regard for human rights what so ever, that was only possible with the US’s indirect and most of the time direct support.

Alex Dupuy in his otherwise really good book, given the choice of coup or occupation, he chooses occupation as the lesser evil. He argues not to "confuse maintaining order with preventing dissent and political activism. The intervening forces did not crack down on popular protests or the reemergent popular movement, as many who had opposed the occupation predicted." <page 164>

What he fails to understand is that a combative working class and peasantry do no good for the neo-liberal economic reforms that he said the US has been trying to implement all along. What the US and UN did was tame the people for the time being, but they made it look respectable as they gave the murderers from Cedras’ army new titles and uniforms. A quote from Yannick Etienne, a trade union organizer in the garment assembly plants will suffice:

The objectives sought by the coup de tat are the same for the US and UN occupants today. That is to preserve the old social order, impose a neo-liberal order and block popular demands for the fundamental transformation of Haiti. <Dan Coughlin 1999>

What Yannick is telling us is that the coup and the US had (and still have) the same goal, they just have slightly different strategies.

Dupuy also poses the intervention as the only logical answer for Haiti because the "Haitian masses [weren’t] willing or capable of launching and sustaining an armed revolution against the military" <page 166> That could just as easily have been said about the Revolution of 1803 when the enslaved Haitian population kicked out the slave masters and won emancipation.

One could make that same argument about the Indonesian population. No one ever thought the workers, students, and peasants had the power to overthrow Suharto. This was a man who came to power by killing three-quarters of a million people!

The cheering of poor Haitians at the arrival of US troops is offered as evidence that the people supported the occupation. The poor were told even by their beloved, ousted president that the occupation was necessary for progress in their country. If their leader told them to believe it, many were going to believe it. Discussing the sentiment of the Haitian people at the time, Ashley Smith said, "There was common sense hostility from the left in Haiti who were happy to see Cedras go, but were skeptical of the motives of the US. Evidence of this could be seen in the political graffiti that is common in Port-au-Prince. Various slogans included ‘Jimmy Carter - faux democrat’ or ‘a-pa Jimmy Carter’ which went along with ‘a-pa FRAPH’ etc."<Smith 1999>

"Faux-democrat" meant fake democrat, and "a pa" means down with, but loosely translated, it can mean death to as well. This anger shows the willingness of the Haitian population to fight back, who have a long and proud history of fighting back.

In a country that is still ravaged by massive poverty, which one can argue has gotten worse since the occupation, the need to fight back is more urgent now than ever. In a country whose external debt has increased by 60% since 1994, in a country where 1 in 2 pre-school age children go to bed hungry every night, and 1 in 8 of them dies. The need to fight back is more urgent than ever.

Haitian workers showed the capacity to fight back once again with a general strike in January of 1997 that shut the country down. <Coughlin 1999> What is needed is international solidarity. Solidarity with Dominican workers and especially with the workers here in the US. American workers have shown the willingness and ability to fight back in recent years as well.

On top of that solidarity in anger, what’s needed here in the US is an organization and a movement that has learned the lessons of past US interventions, for all too often the same tragedies get repeated and repeated. Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, and now Kosovo. We need to take these lessons and organize for the next time so that the US doesn’t have the chance to intervene.

Sources of Information