The Furious Spinner

“The Haitian people believe Americans are good people,” human rights lawyer Brian Concannon says, “and they want to know where we are.”

Concannon was in Hood River this weekend to kick off Haiti Solidarity Week 2004 (May 15-23). Until the recent coup d’etat, Concannon worked in Haiti with the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), a group of lawyers assisting the Haitian judiciary with human rights cases. Many of the people the BAI prosecuted are now in positions of power in the new government, so Concannon will not be returning to Haiti any time soon.

Concannon left Haiti February 10, 2004 about the time Aristide asked the international community for help with a grassroots rebellion in his country. The U.S. and the U.N. both refused.

“No one else would help Haiti’s democratic government,” Concannon said, “even though there are OAS (Organization of American States) agreements to help out other OAS members.”

“A few days before the coup, Colin Powell was still saying things like, ‘We won’t deal with thugs and we want change in Haiti that is both constitutional and peaceful,’” Concannon said. But that was not what happened.

On February 28, a South African plane carrying police supplies for the Haitian police was en route to Haiti. According to Concannon, the U.S. wanted Aristide gone before any help came.

“The U.S. went repeatedly to Aristide’s house and said, ‘You’ve got to go, you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go.’ They knew they had to get Aristide out before the ammunition arrived,” Concannon said. “The chargé d’affaires went to Aristide’s house with about twenty-five heavily armed guys. They started pressuring Aristide really hard to leave.

“Finally Aristide said, ‘Can I at least do a press conference?’ The U.S diplomats said ‘Sure, get in the car and we’ll take you to the embassy and we’ll have a press conference.’ Instead they took him to the airport where a U.S. plane was waiting. They put him on the plane. All his Haitian security had been left behind. They said ‘We are going to leave you and your wife at the airport and the rebels are going to come and kill you if you don’t sign this piece of paper.’ And he signed a piece of paper, but it wasn’t a resignation, and he did it under duress.”

On February 29, the U.S. plane took off with Aristide and his wife. They traveled for more than nineteen hours, and Aristide was not allowed to contact anyone. They eventually landed in the Central African Republic.

“While Aristide was in the air, the U.S. kept making things up about what was happening,” Concannon said. “They’d say, ‘Oh Aristide is going to Panama, he’s going to Taiwan,’ places where dictators go because they wanted to make him look like a dictator going to these places when they were in control all the time. So they parked him in the Central African Republic, and he wasn’t allowed to talk to people--until we got there.”

Concannon traveled to the CAR in March. “The Central African Republic has got to be the most remote place in the world,” Concannon said. “Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, and it looks rich compared with the CAR.”

“We brought Aristide a satellite phone and that allowed him to do a few interviews,” Concannon said. “Then Maxine Waters came and because of her prestige and because there’d been enough stink raised from our trip to the CAR, Aristide was sprung and sent to Jamaica where he is much safer, but he is not allowed to talk. Jamaica is under extreme pressure to keep him quiet.”

The U.S. claimed Aristide asked to be taken out of the country and said he signed a paper saying he resigned. Aristide says he never agreed to step down, and he did not resign.

The U.S. Department of States asked Bryant Freeman, director of the Institute of Haitian Studies at the University of Kansas, to translate the so-called “resignation” letter. The U.S. Embassy claimed the letter read, “Tonight I am resigning in order to avoid a bloodbath. I accept to leave, with the hope that there will be life and not death.” Freeman translated the same passage as, “If this evening it is my resignation which can prevent a bloodbath, I agree to leave in the hope that there will be life and not death.”

The United States has a long history of interfering in Haiti. In 1791, slave-owners in the United States watched nervously from afar as 400,000 African slaves in Haiti revolted against French colonial rule. Thomas Jefferson, a major slave-holder himself, “slapped an embargo on arms to Haiti and trading with the freed slaves and gave a ton of money to the slave owners to help them fight the revolt,” Concannon pointed out. The United States did not recognize Haiti until 1864.

According to the Haiti Action Committee the United States has “moved to sabotage Haiti’s fledgling democracy through an economic aid embargo, massive funding of elite opposition groups, support for paramilitary coup attempts, and a propaganda offensive against the Aristide government.”

The United States claimed the economic aid embargo was because of the contested 2000 election, although the U.S. appeared to be the only one contesting. Polling results before and after the election coincided with the election results, Concannon said.

“The journalists believed what the state department said,” Concannon said. “It became like a mantra that the elections were fixed; it was said enough times that people started to believe it. Even though the U.S. had done polls that showed that wasn’t true. Those polls were classified so that even Congress couldn’t look at them.”

Haiti has had 350 years of dictatorship (if you count the 150 years of slavery), Concannon said, and “they know it does not work.” While the Haitians may have complained about the government, they did not want a violent overthrow. Although the Aristide government was not perfect, Concannon said he saw no evidence that Aristide himself or the upper levels of the government participated in violence or human rights violations. During Aristide’s administration, he disbanded the military; the government supported the work of the BAI; over 200 radio stations operated in Haiti; and the opposition dominated the media.

Aristide was first elected to the presidency in 1991. Eight months after he took office, a U.S.-backed military junta took over the government and Aristide went into exile. Upon Aristide’s request, the United Nations (and United States) eventually brought military action against the junta, and Aristide returned to office. In 1996, René Preval became president. He served out his term, becoming the first democratically elected Haitian president to do so. In November 2000 Aristide was reelected with 92% of the vote.

Concannon is often asked why the United States would care enough about Haiti to interfere in its government. After all, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere; it has no oil reserves or any other resources the U.S. is interested in; it’s not a particularly strategic area; and it’s environmentally devastated.

Concannon cites a history of interference. The slave-owners of the United States thought Haiti was a “bad example.” The slave uprising was the only successful slave revolt in the known history of the world. He recounted what a member of the U.S. military intelligence in charge of political prisoners told him. He said they were told that the prime enemy of the United States was not communism or Cuba or anything like that; they were told that the prime enemy was “liberation theology: priests walking around the countryside telling peasants the world wasn’t fair; the rich should share with the poor,” Concannon said. The U.S. sees liberation theology as a threat in Haiti.

According to Concannon and the Haiti Action Committee, the new Haitian government is run by the elite with no peasant or union representation; members of the Fanmi Lavalas political party have become targets in a terror campaign; names of “blacklisted” people are read every day on the radio; hundreds of bodies are arriving at the morgue, their hands tied behind their backs with a gunshot wound to the head.

Concannon believes the American people can help the Haitians. He said Americans often claim they are disempowered, but “disempowered is my clients. It’s poor women who can’t write because they don’t know how to write, can’t afford pen or paper if they did, don’t have a telephone, don’t have a fax machine, never turned on a computer, certainly can’t send email. If all the Americans who believed in democracy and believed this was wrong responded, our government would cave in and do something.”

He encouraged Americans to pressure Congress to (a) do an investigation of U.S. involvement in the coup d’état and (b) to make sure the almost 2,000 U.S. Marines in Haiti are not committing any violations.

“It’s not Iraq,” Concannon said, “but the Marines are doing a lot of illegal arrests involving excessive force.”

“I talk with people from Haiti and these poor, disempowered people who are hiding in the dark corners of their houses hoping no one comes, and one of the things they’re thinking is they believe most Americans are good and they’re wondering 'when are Americans going to stop this from happening?' Americans are the only ones who can stop this. Americans have to stand up and tell their government to stop this.”

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