Haiti: Confusion in the Ranks By William Bowles

3 March 2004

In a piece in Dissident Voice, the author proposes that Aristide may not have been abducted and forcibly deported by the US Marines. Instead it says:

“After making spirited verbal comments about how he would stay and fight the rebels to the end, Aristide, now safely in the CAR, had to put forth some face saving story for his supporters about his departure, while taking the opportunity to make a claim that would embarrass the Bush regime and possibly lead to international pressure for his reinstatement. So he contacts his most ardent supporters in the US, and now the Bushites are on the defensive.”
‘Aristide – Not Kidnapped?’

Haiti: Gangster (F)RAP(H) By William Bowles

2 March 2004

“Tell the world that it’s a coup. That American soldiers abducted (me).”
Jean Bertrand Aristide

“”Aristide would “leave Haiti in a Lear Jet or in a pine box.””
James Foley, US Ambassador to Haiti

No matter that the corporate media have done their best to cover up the outrage that has been committed against the people of Haiti, things have a way of working their way out into the light of day.

The telephone conversation between Randall Robinson of the TransAfrica Forum and Jean Bertrand Aristide has blown the lid of the gangsters game plan. And it might well be that the phone call saved Aristide’s life, as more information about how the abduction took place comes to light.

HAITI: Rhetoric Versus Reality By William Bowles

26 February 2004

“[In 1825] Haiti was obliged to repay more than it received…. France’s King Charles X ordered former French slaves to pay 150m francs [over $2 billion at today’s prices] before France would grant diplomatic recognition to Haiti, Latin America’s oldest republic. A French diplomat recently told me, without irony, that during François Mitterrand’s presidency, “Haiti still owed us part of that debt”.” [1]

So what else has changed in the following 179 years? Not very much and predictably, the media is doing a hatchet job on Haiti’s Aristide. A piece by Andrew Gumbel in Saturday’s Independent (21/02/04 p. 21) is pretty typical. Headed “The little priest who became a bloody dictator like the one he once despised” is an outrageous rewriting of the history of Haiti with nary a mention of the role that the US has played in the island’s sorry history for the past 179 years including refusing to recognise the world’s first independent Black republic until 1864, fearful of the example it set for its own enslaved African population.