The Invasion of Haiti
by Stan Goff and Anthony Fenton
May 19, 2004
In late March, the International Action Centre [http://www.iacenter.org] organized a delegation to the Dominican Republic to investigate the US role on the February 29th, 2004 coup that overthrew democratically elected President Jean Bertrand Aristide and the Lavalas government. The Haitian “rebels” are known to have trained and in and entered Haiti from the neighbouring Dominican Republic.
Retired US Army Master Sergeant and author of Hideous Dream and Full Spectrum Disorder, Stan Goff, was one of the investigators.
Fenton: So these “rebels” were definitely trained and probably armed by the United States and the Dominican Republic, dating back to 2000. What are these “rebels” doing now and where does this information fit in to the context of the recent coup?
Goff:From all the reports we’re hearing right now, these FRAPH paramilitaries are now basically running around doing anything they want, anywhere they want, in Haiti. The same people who were guilty of all these crimes against humanity from 1991-1994; these right-wing paramilitary death squads are now traveling around, armed, and not being interfered with in the least by French, Canadian, or American troops, and basically taking over town after town after town, and basically imposing themselves as local governments. In fact there’s a contingent of French foreign legions in Cap Haitien right now. The last we heard Chamblain was with all his guys was drinking beer in the Mt. Jolie hotel, with their uniforms on. That’s kind of the situation.
This is a situation that nobody really understands right now. It was a coup that had been planned and facilitated for the last four and a half years by the United States government, clearly, and explicity, and demonstrably done by the US government, if you look at the millions of dollars that’s been funneled by the NED and IRI to this fake political opposition that created the “political crisis”. It was the United States that also compounded that with an economic crisis by withholding almost a half a billion dollars in loans and entitlements to the Haitian government in order to make sure that Aristide’s government could not deliver on any of its political promises.
And then [they] followed up by a security crisis that was created by this invasion of Haitian paramilitaries coming directly from the Dominican Republic, and with the knowledge and probably the complicity of the US Embassy there as well. Because it’s important to understand that the Dominican government does not do anything militarily that the United States does not allow it to do. The Dominican government is a colonial government, and nothing else, because they would suffer incredible and punitive economic sanctions of they bucked the Washington Consensus. This is a context that a lot of people don’t understand when looking at what’s going on over there. None of this could have happened without the complicity of the United States, without the facilitation by the United States, without the funding and support of the United States, and the icing on the cake is the fact that at the last minute, American military personnel, with weapons, enter the Presidential residence and tell the President – the democraticaslly elected President of Haiti, elected with 92% of the vote, that he has to leave. Not that ‘we’re here top proptect you because there’s paramilitaries marching here coming to get you right now’, but that ‘the paramilitaries are on their way: they’re going to kill you and your family. Your option is to stay here and die, or to leave with us on an airplane, to god knows where’. For Colin Powell and some of the other Administration Servants to sit there and say that this constitutes a voluntary departure or not coercion….it defies belief. That’s sort of the nutshell version.
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