Haiti Democracy Project, Not So Democratic
While there was violence and corruption perpetrated by some within Aristide's government (example: some former officials face jail time in the United States over drug related charges) the HDP uses this to argue against the legitimacy of the entire governemnt and Famni Lavalas as a whole. The HDP’s report provides clear statements of advice to the U.S. overseers of Haiti on how best to guarantee the stability of its client state. The HDP advises that the United States government work to create a “psychological sense of momentum and excitement” towards the upcoming election. The HDP also advises that the United States “implement a fast track..for the purchase of appropriate armaments, helmets and protective gear for the Haitian National Police”. This statement coming just weeks after Haiti Information Project journalist Kevin Pina exposed a massive illegal shipment of $7 million worth of armaments to the Haitian government from the United States, a violation of the 13 year arms embargo on Haiti. These are also the same Haitian National Police forces that on April, 29th 2005 were accused by Amnesty International of using “lethal and indiscriminate violence..to disperse and repress demonstrators..” The Amnesty report states that after police officers opened fire against Lavalas demonstrators “at least 5 people died..and 4 others are reported to have died later on as a consequence of their wounds.”
The HDP “fact-finding” report, while claiming that President Aristide’s Administration was “predatory” and “murderous”, completely neglects to mention the hundreds or possibly thousands of deaths that have occurred over the course of the last year at the hands of the Haitian National Police under the Latortue government, which has been well documented in such reports as the University of Miami’s Haiti Human Rights Investigation during November of 2004 (http://www.law.miami.edu/news/368.html).
Under a subsection of the HDP “fact-finding” report entitled, “Haitian views on the police” the only view provided is that of the Haitian National Police themselves. In this “viewpoint” section the Haitian police stated to the HDP that “the U.N. mission needed to be more aggressive.” Meanwhile, on April 29, 2004 citizens of the Port-Au-Prince slum Cité Soliel accused the U.N. forces led by the feared Jordanian contingent of surrounding their community and lobbing at them fragmentation and incendiary type bombs. While heavily armed and violent U.N. incursions into and around Cité Soliel have been well documented (http://www.haitiaction.net), the HDP and the Haitian police want more.
The HDP argues that a “triple threat” of drug traffickers and Aristide supporters (“chimères” & ex-FADH) provide a potential threat to which “U.S. policy must respond”. In meeting only with the highest echelons of the Haitian government and international presence in Haiti the HDP's "fact-finding" mission provides an extremely skewed report. Knowledge or information based on real occurrences (facts) is difficult to ascertain in reading the report because of its extreme bias.
The Haiti Democracy Project on its website, states that it is “an independent research group promoting the cause of settled, responsive government in Haiti and U.S. policies conducive to this end.” Founded in 2002 as an independent organization approximately 2 years before the downfall of the Aristide government, the HDP board of directors is made up of former U.S. ambassadors, wealthy members of the Haitian-American community, and policy analysts well connected to think tanks in Washington D.C.. The HDP has clear links and friendships with the Latortue government, the Groups of 184, and the opposition to Aristide.
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More on that illegal arms transfer
Submitted on May 4th, 2005 by Dan FederYesterday, former Haitian government attorney Ira Kurzban published a scathing attack on this arms transfer in the opinion pages of dictator Gérard Latortue’s hometown rag, the Miami Herald.
All this came to light as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice traipsed around South America criticizing both Venezuela’s arming of its own military and the countries poised to sell those arms. Venezuela, of course, has a functioning democracy and a public force that has, at least since President Chávez came to power, not killed dozens of people in raids on slums and suppression of political demonstrations. (The State Department has claimed over and over again that Venezuela’s arms purchases could result in weapons and ammunition “ending up” in the hands of Colombian guerrillas, without any evidence of cooperation between Chávez and the rebels, in a revisit of its WMD “big lie” strategy from Iraq.)
The Haiti arms story has major relevance to both Rice’s Venezuela comments and Bolton’s U.N. nomination. However, mainstream media coverage has been very uneven. As far as I can tell, many large U.S. newspapers have not picked up the story, and since it broke not a single question has been asked by reporters at the State Department’s daily press briefing.