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Aristide Gets His Passport Back & Plans Return To Haiti. I smell a trap! - Peter Lemkin - 09-02-2011
Haiti Issues New Passport for Aristide
By DAMIEN CAVE
Published: February 9, 2011
MEXICO CITY Haitian officials issued a diplomatic passport on Tuesday for Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti's first democratically elected president and even after years in exile one of the country's most popular and divisive figures.
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Rodrigo Abd/Associated Press
A protester rested near a portrait of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Port-au-Prince on Feb. 2 at a pro-Aristide rally.
Mr. Aristide's American lawyer, Ira Kurzban, said he collected the document at dusk in the capital, Port-au-Prince. "It's a long time coming," Mr. Kurzban said. He added that Mr. Aristide, after seven years of exile, mostly in South Africa, "wants to come home as soon as he can."
His reappearance would represent a second stunning return for Haiti: Just three weeks ago, Jean-Claude Duvalier, the dictator known as Baby Doc, who was overthrown in 1986, arrived unexpectedly in Port-au-Prince.
Both Mr. Duvalier and Mr. Aristide claim that they are interested in national reconciliation; both are doubted by critics of their governments. Experts inside and outside Haiti fear that the presence of the two former leaders could further destabilize the country, which is already struggling with cholera, tent cities created by last year's earthquake and political instability before the delayed presidential runoff on March 20.
Once Mr. Duvalier entered Haiti, Mr. Aristide demanded that his exile end, too. "Once Duvalier was back, there could be no rationale for keeping Aristide out," said Jocelyn McCalla, a senior adviser to Haiti's special envoy to the United Nations.
Given the public's deep lack of faith in the nation's political class, many Haitians would welcome the shake-up Mr. Aristide might bring. But members of the international community have expressed concern that Mr. Aristide who was beloved by the poor but criticized by many for demagoguery, corruption and the suppression of political opponents could create widespread instability at a precarious moment.
José Miguel Insulza, the secretary general of the Organization for American States, said Mr. Aristide's return should not be considered until after the next president is sworn in. But the two leading candidates are not Aristide supporters, possibly making it harder for him to return then.
Jon Piechowski, a spokesman for the American Embassy in Haiti, said that while Haiti's government had the right to decide on the timing, "what Haiti needs right now, coming out of a prolonged first round of elections, is a period of calm, not divisive actions that can only distract from the vital task of forming a legitimate and credible government."
Brian Dean Curran, the American ambassador to Haiti during Mr. Aristide's final years in office, offered a far more blunt assessment. "I think it's a colossal mistake," Mr. Curran said. "It's particularly bad at this moment when the political situation is so fragile."
Mr. Aristide has said little about his intentions. Over the last few weeks, he has been reluctant to speak with reporters in South Africa, where the government has paid for a home, a car and security for the past few years.
He explained his desire to return in a recent op-ed article in The Guardian, using pointed language: "What we have learned in one long year of mourning after Haiti's earthquake is that an exogenous plan of reconstruction one that is profit-driven, exclusionary, conceived of and implemented by non-Haitians cannot reconstruct Haiti. It is the solemn obligation of all Haitians to join in the reconstruction and to have a voice in the direction of the nation."
He went on to say that he planned to focus on education "the field I know best and love."
Mr. Curran said he doubted Mr. Aristide would limit himself to teaching. "No one should believe that for an instant," he said.
Indeed, a quiet academic life may not be likely for a populist like Mr. Aristide, whose popularity may surpass any other contemporary political figure. "His return would make very stark the real rouleau-compresseur, or bulldozer power, of the population," said Amy Wilentz, author of "The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier." "I believe they would rise en masse to greet him and that the airport scene would be like nothing anyone has witnessed in recent times in Haiti."
This popular support, Ms. Wilentz said, could protect him from the fate of Mr. Duvalier, who was quickly questioned and now faces charges of corruption and human rights abuses. United Nations officials have already raised the issue of Mr. Aristede's legal vulnerabilities, and other efforts to influence his decision are also likely to be employed, according to diplomats, though they may be counterbalanced by President René Préval. He was a protégé of Mr. Aristide, and even before the earthquake that further damaged his standing he had become concerned with being forced into exile, according to embassy cables published by WikiLeaks.
One theory advanced by some Haiti observers is that Mr. Préval believes that Mr. Aristide, with his large following, could help prevent that from happening.
Celia W. Dugger contributed reporting from Johannesburg, and Deborah Sontag from New York.
Aristide Gets His Passport Back & Plans Return To Haiti. I smell a trap! - Peter Lemkin - 09-02-2011
Haiti: coup enforcer's son murdered in Honduras
Tue, 02/08/2011 - 08:40.
Jean-Michel François, the son of exiled former Haitian police chief Joseph Michel François, was killed the night of Feb. 3 in the northern Honduran city of San Pedro Sula. The younger François, a law student, was thrown from a moving vehicle in front of his father's electronic appliance store in the Medina neighborhood; he died hours later at a nearby hospital. According to some sources he died of bullet wounds, while others say he was badly beaten and died from his injuries. No motive had been given as of Feb. 5.
The elder François, then a lieutenant colonel, was part of a triumvirate of military officers that overthrew then-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in a bloody September 1991 coup and ran a ruthless dictatorship until a US military intervention restored Aristide to office in the fall of 1994. François was allowed to leave for the Dominican Republic but was expelled in 1996. He then moved to Honduras. The US indicted him for drug trafficking in 1997, but the Honduran Supreme Court rejected the US extradition request. The other coup leaders, Gen. Raoul Cédras and Gen. Philippe Biamby, both moved to Panama, where Biamby died of cancer in 2008.
"Crime isn't just in Honduras," François said after his son's murder, according to the Honduran daily La Prensa. "It's in all countries…. [T]here's a saying that everything that happens in the life of a believer is for the good,' because God is sovereign." (La Prensa, Feb. 4)
Aristide Gets His Passport Back & Plans Return To Haiti. I smell a trap! - Bernice Moore - 09-02-2011
Peter; note, you need to clear out some of your older saved emails here in the forum email program, in order to receive what i just replied to you,or any new, a notice told me so, thanks..best b
Aristide Gets His Passport Back & Plans Return To Haiti. I smell a trap! - Peter Lemkin - 09-02-2011
U.S. troops in Haiti to prevent Aristide's return
By Wayne Madsen
(WMR) -- President Obama, in keeping with his CIA lineage, has permitted the Pentagon under Robert Gates to take charge of the humanitarian relief efforts in Haiti.
As Cuban and Venezuelan field hospitals were already rendering first aid and trauma care to Haitians injured in the mega-quake, Obama was gathered at a White House photo op with Vice President Joe Biden and other Cabinet officers to state that U.S. military reconnaissance aircraft would fly over Haiti to assess the situation from the air. A U.S. P-3 Orion spy plane from Comalapa air base in El Salvador was dispatched to conduct the surveillance operation, an act that was already being accomplished by earth satellites, the images of which were available on Google Maps.
As Obama was garnering praise from such sycophantic White House outlets as the largely-discredited Washington Post, a 37-person Icelandic search-and-rescue team was pulling trapped earthquake victims from the rubble of collapsed buildings in Port-au-Prince. Iceland, a nation bankrupted by Obama's banker pals on Wall Street and in the City of London, was able to react in a way that the slumbering and oafish dying super-power, the United States, could not -- with action aimed at providing immediate assistance to the Haitian people.
Obama's generals and admirals, who are mostly more concerned about their appearance than in taking charge and moving out, were still scratching their heads about where to land the U.S. Marines and 82nd Airborne. In fact, military aircraft carrying weapons and other war supplies crowded the airport aprons at Port-au-Prince airport that could be used by planes from other countries carrying much needed food, water, and medical supplies. Argentine doctors already on the scene in Haiti complained that they were running out of simple sewing kits being used as stitches for the injured who had undergone surgery.
When U.S. Special Operations forces hit the ground at Port-au-Prince airport they pointed their weapons at desperate Haitians at the airport perimeter who wanted help not a gun pointed in their faces. Russia, Spain, Mexico, Chile, and Guatemala were rushing in food and water for Haiti.
Meanwhile, Obama was phoning former President George W. Bush to ask him and former President Bill Clinton to launch a fund drive for Haitian earthquake relief. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was partly behind engineering the 2004 coup that deposed democratically-elected Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, attended a Haitian relief fundraiser at a Washington hotel called "W." The symbology could not have been worse -- it was Bush who showed the world that he was totally disinterested in the 2004 Asian earthquake and tsunami and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 that decimated New Orleans and surrounding areas.
Apparently, the so-called media-savvy Obama failed to realize the revolting nature of asking Bush to do anything related to Haiti when people remembered his lack of action over Katrina. Bodies of African-Americans floating in the streets of New Orleans became juxtaposed with the bodies of Afro-Haitians piling up in the streets of Port-au-Prince. But, of course, Obama is the "Max Headroom" of America's political leadership -- a talking head -- whose rhetorical flourishes speak louder than principles or concrete action.
Aristide, from an exile in South Africa imposed by the United States, France, and Canada, vowed to return to Haiti to be with his people in their time of stress and despair. Aristide, a former Roman Catholic priest, served the people of the Haitian slum of La Saline and he understands best the plight of his people. On the other hand, Rene Preval, the U.S. stooge who was placed in power twice by the CIA and the U.S. Southern Command to replace Aristide, once in a fraudulent election (Preval won in 1995 with 88 percent of the vote in a 25 percent voter turnout) and the other in a coup, could only complain to CNN's Sanjay Gupta about not having any place to sleep for the night, "I cannot live in the palace. I cannot live in my own house, because the two collapsed."
Preval has been reaping all sorts of "free trade" deals that caused Haiti's agrarian population to stream into Port-au-Prince to work in the sweat shops heralded as "progress" by the likes of George Soros and his gang of thieves on Wall Street. Because of Port-au-Prince's swollen population of sweat shop workers, the death count from the earthquake will be much higher as the result of collapsed tenements that housed more people than they were designed for.
Dr. Gupta, who was Obama's first choice to be surgeon-general of the United States, was more interested in using dying Haitians in makeshift hospitals as stage props for CNN's ratings than in rendering medical assistance to the injured. Imagine, being one of the few doctors available to the severely injured and breaking away to go on camera and tell some old fool like Larry King or some Israeli agent of influence like Wolf Blitzer about how awful the situation is in Haiti.
However, Gates and his military brass will ensure that Aristide will not show up to threaten Preval's continuing disastrous leadership of Haiti. It was Gates, who was George H. W. Bush's nominee to be CIA director, who helped plan the military coup that ousted Aristide the first time in September 1991. Gates, at the time, was Bush's deputy national security adviser.
Clinton helped Aristide regain his presidency from the CIA-backed coup leader General Raoul Cedras in 1994. But Clinton's disastrous flip-flopping on Haitian refugees from the Cedras dictatorship plunged his new administration into a major crisis. It is certain that when Haiti's earthquake struck, people like Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel were conducting focus group polls to find out how U.S. assistance to Haiti would be received by the public. Although a clear majority of Americans favor helping the beleaguered people of Haiti, and many feel that Obama's assistance has been extremely slow, Emanuel only seems to be concerned about the handful of Americans, including Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck, who have uttered racist language in reacting to the Haitian tragedy, are worth listening to. But Emanuel does not view things through the enlightened lenses of America's founders but through the religious myopic eyesight of Talmudic interpreters.
Haiti under Aristide and Preval, was forced by Clinton to agree to horribly one-sided "free trade" deals that saw Haiti's workers press ganged into toiling away in Port-au-Prince sweat shops to produce clothing for America's major retailers like Disney. Haiti had no choice -- Clinton imposed devastating economic sanctions against Aristide to force his compliance with the diktats of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Clinton sweetened the pie for his Arkansas rice-growing cronies by ensuring that Haiti went from being an exporter of nutritional rice to an importer of expensive bleached and genetically-modified "junk rice," primarily from Arkansas.
When Aristide regained the presidency in 2000, he took immediate steps to improve the lot of the Haitian workers -- he raised the minimum wage to two dollars a day. Bush decided it was time for the CIA and the Southern Command to remove Aristide, which they did with the help of France and Canada. Aristide was exiled to the Central African Republic and then South Africa.
Preval regained office in 2006 after a phony election engineered with the help of the National Endowment for Democracy's International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI), two CIA contrivances acting under the aegis of the U.S. Republican and Democratic Parties, respectively. Soros has adopted Haitian politicians like former Prime Minister Michèle Pierre-Louis who continue to advocate disastrous "free trade" policies and provides them with funding and travel expenses through his Open Society Institute (OSI).
UN "peacekeeping" forces in Haiti have ensured that Aristide and his Lavalas Party does not regain power. One of the methods the UN uses is periodically raiding pro-Aristide slums and killing Lavalas activists in their homes. Bill Clinton was rewarded last year for his guile and deceit committed against Haiti by being named by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon as the UN's Special Envoy for Haiti.
When Honduran President Manuel Zelaya also raised the minimum wage in his country, the CIA and Southern Command arranged for a military coup to remove him. Obama has now decided to place the Southern Command, headquartered in the right-wing Latin American exiles' rat's nest of Miami, to coordinate humanitarian relief in Haiti, along with the head of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) a CIA pass-through headed by Rajiv Singh, a one-time political hack for Pennsylvania's corrupt Democratic Governor Ed Rendell.
The perfidy that is America's relationship with Haiti extends to Bill Clinton's wife, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She has appointed her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, to oversee America's role in Haiti. Mills has stated, "We actually see our role as ensuring that the leadership of Haiti is able to provide the leadership that the Haitian people properly expect them to provide." That represents an endorsement of the hapless leadership of Preval and a thumbs down to any return for Aristide.
Note: The editor's book, "Jaded Tasks" is named for the covert Pentagon and CIA operation that removed Aristide in 2004: Operation Jaded Task. Aristide was presented a signed copy of the book in South Africa with a note that states I hope he is rightfully restored to the presidency in Haiti. Haiti needs Aristide more now than it has ever needed him in the past. People like Obama, Gates, Emanuel, the Clintons, Mills, and Southern Command commander General Douglas Fraser need to step out of the way and allow the legitimate president of Haiti to lead his people out of the rubble of their country, "moving from misery to poverty with dignity," as he said from Oliver Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg awaiting permission for a return to his native country.