"The Haitian Coup: An Unresolved Injustice After 5 Years, by Bill Fletcher (former TransAfrica prez

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"The Haitian Coup: An Unresolved Injustice After Five Years
by Bill Fletcher, Jr
NNPA Columnist
Originally posted 2/25/2009

On the morning of 29 February 2004 I was asleep in Oakland, Calif., having gone to that city to deliver a speech. My cell phone went off around 6am and a voice announced herself as a journalist from a major media outlet. She asked me, in my then capacity as President of TransAfrica Forum, whether I could confirm that Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide had stepped down from office. Needless to say I was stunned and, having no new information, could neither confirm nor deny the rumor.

It turned out that Aristide had not exactly stepped down; he had been removed in a coup, a coup in which the then Bush administration was complicit.

At the time of the coup, the mainstream media accepted the line from the Bush administration that President Aristide had voluntarily chosen to go into exile in the face of an insurrection.

As the days and weeks went on, and through the work of Congresswoman Maxine Waters, TransAfrica Forum founder Randall Robinson, and Democracy Now producer and host Amy Goodman, a very different story was revealed. Rather than Aristide having voluntarily left Haiti, he had been forced to leave, first going into the hell of the Central African Republic, and then returning, briefly, to the Caribbean (where he stayed in Jamaica), and finally residing in South Africa in de facto exile. In either case, the Bush administration was vehement that Aristide would not be permitted back in Haiti.

The coup, though successful in removing democratically elected President Aristide, was unsuccessful in stabilizing the situation in Haiti or improving the living standard of the Haitian people. Despite the best efforts of the Bush administration to ensure that a puppet remained in control of the country, the Haitian people--when they had a chance to vote--elected Rene Preval, a former president and ally of President Aristide, to the office of the Presidency.

While the overt puppets were now removed, the US continued to keep its hands in Haiti largely through the occupation of the country by a United Nations force, a force that was initially greeted as liberators turning back the mercenaries who overthrew the Aristide presidency.

U.S. Congresswoman Barbara Lee has reintroduced House Bill 331, a bill ''To Establish the Independent Commission on the 2004 Coup d'Etat in the Republic of Haiti.''

This is an important piece of legislation that should be supported by progressive and all fair-minded people and should be pushed to the Obama administration to sign into law. In essence this act provides for an investigation into what actually transpired in the period around the February 2004 coup. It seeks to ascertain, among other things, the role of the US government in supporting the coup.

There have been many discussions regarding holding the Bush administration's personnel accountable for crimes that took place during those very rough eight years. Most of the time attention focuses on issues of Iraq, torture, Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and domestic civil liberties. As important as are those areas it is too easy to forget Haiti. In fact there is a long history in the USA of forgetting Haiti, irrespective of whatever crimes the USA commits there.

Now we have a chance to set things right.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies and the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum.
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http://www.seattlemedium.com/news/Article/Article.asp?NewsID=94686&sID=34&ItemSource=L