Headlines, North America

HAITI: Democrats Grill Bush Officials Over Aristide Departure

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Mar 4 2004 (IPS) - The Bush administration’s role in facilitating the ouster of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide came under sharp and sustained attack by opposition Democrats in Congress on Wednesday.

In an unusually rancorous hearing of the House of Representatives western hemisphere affairs subcommittee, Democrats repeatedly assailed the administration for failing to intervene last week to protect Aristide’s government against a rebellion by former military and paramilitary officers known as notorious human rights abusers, particularly after Aristide had accepted the terms of a U.S.-backed Caribbean Community (CARICOM) plan to share power with his opposition.

Once Aristide accepted the proposal, both he and CARICOM called for the international community to immediately deploy troops to halt the insurgency.

But the administration said it would only support sending troops if the opposition, which had repeatedly refused to engage in any negotiation with Aristide since his election in 2000, also accepted the proposal.

When the opposition rejected it, Washington urged Aristide to resign and leave the country. Only then did it begin deploying troops to Haiti, following a hastily approved resolution of the United Nations Security Council hours after Aristide climbed aboard a plane that took him to the Central African Republic on Sunday.

Democrats on Capitol Hill echoed CARICOM leaders, who on Wednesday called for an independent probe into Aristide’s flight from Haiti and called his removal a “dangerous precedent” for all democratically elected governments in the region.

People throughout the Americas were “watching this government turn its back on democracy”, New Jersey Representative Robert Menendez told Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega.

“The message is clear: this government will not stand up for a democratically elected head of state they do not like,” added Menendez.

Noriega insisted Washington had not forced Aristide to leave the country, as the ousted president has since alleged. And he maintained the United States was under no obligation to protect the ousted leader, insisting, “it wasn’t a sustainable political solution to merely prop him up”.

“We have to make decisions about where we will put American lives at risk,” Noriega argued, adding that, in Washington’s view, Aristide “was not a reliable interlocutor”.

In a speech to Congress on Tuesday, Senator Christopher Dodd, the Democrat’s ranking expert on western hemisphere affairs, charged that U.S. actions might also have violated the three-year-old Inter-American Charter on Democracy, a U.S.-backed document that requires parties to come to the aid of any democratically elected government in the region that is threatened with removal by unconstitutional methods.

“President Aristide, a democratically elected president, made that request and, of course, not only did we not provide assistance,” said Dodd, “In fact, we sat back and watched as he left the country, offering assistance for him to depart”.

“When governments are challenged by violent thugs, people with records of violent human rights violations, engaged in death squad activity … then I think it is worthy of note that we have walked away from these international documents, signed only three years ago,” he said.

In his testimony, Noriega stressed that the 2000 elections, in which Aristide officially won some 80 percent of the vote, fell short of international standards, although he admitted Washington had recognised the former priest as the constitutional president.

Backed by Republican lawmakers, Noriega repeatedly insisted that Aristide had governed poorly and had turned “a blind eye to the rampant corruption and drug trafficking of those within his circle of power”.

“Aristide had undermined democracy and economic development in Haiti rather than strengthened it,” he said.

Noriega also confirmed that U.S. officials had told Aristide they could not guarantee his safety in the event of an assault by the rebels, whose leaders had sworn to arrest or kill him.

He agreed that the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Haiti, who had escorted Aristide from his residence to the airport, had asked for a letter of resignation before the leader boarded the plane Washington had chartered to take him into exile..

But Noriega said Washington would “probably” have flown him to safety even had he not provided the written resignation.

Charles Rangel, a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), suggested that, under the circumstances, Aristide had been essentially coerced into resigning. “I would’ve signed (a resignation note), too,” he told Noriega.

“He was forced out,” said Rep Maxine Waters, another CBC member, who has reported speaking with Aristide.

Dodd also questioned the administration’s position that Aristide’s resignation was voluntary. “”It is indisputable based on everything we know,” he said, “that the U.S. played a very direct and public role in pressuring him to leave office by making it clear that the United States would do nothing to protect him from the armed thugs who (were) threatening to kill him”.

“His choice was simple: stay in Haiti with no protection from the international community, including the U.S., and be killed, or you can leave the country. That is hardly what I would call a voluntary decision to leave.”