Peace Corps members, CARE workers and others have been told to leave the country by the State Department because of a "steady deterioration of the security situation."
U.S. 'Playing Games' With Haiti, Say Policy Critics
By Bill Alexander, BET.com Staff Writer
Posted February 20, 2004 -- As Americans are urged to leave a Haiti bordering on civil war, a cadre of diplomats from the United States and other countries will soon descend to engage President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in a game of push-and-pull, stay-and-go.
"The United States is playing games with Haiti," claims native-born Haitian Robert Fatton Jr., chairman of the Government and Foreign Affairs department at the University of Virginia.
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"Politically connected groups within the country are openly funding Aristide's overthrow (he named the DC-based National Endowment for Democracy) while the Bush administration is saying publicly that Aristide should finish his elected term (which ends February 2006)," says Fatton.
Fatton says the Colin Powell State Department is engaged in a hot "ideological war" over Haiti. Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) shares Fatton's view and singles
out Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega ("a Jesse Helms political appointee," she notes) as the architect of the "right-wing garbage" that Haiti is a pro-Communist
influence in the Western Hemisphere.
"There are 500 Cuban doctors in Haiti," acknowledges Fatton, and relations between the neighboring countries are "quite good" because of mutual survival interests. But, says Fatton, the notion that Aristide is a "mad populist" about to lunge into communism is crazed."
A densely populated country of 8 million, roughly the size of Maryland, Haiti has experienced fierce fighting of late that has killed 57 residents and resulted in the seizure of the city of Gonaives by an armed gang and former soldiers.
They have declared themselves independent of Haiti and renamed the city as the country of Artibonite.
Into all this tension strides a small U.S. security force sent to check out arrangements in the American Embassy.
Peace Corps members, CARE workers and others have been told to leave the country by the State Department because of a "steady deterioration of the security situation."
"Bush wants Haiti to go away in this election year," adds Fatton. "His administration doesn't want troops sent for another nation-building effort and they don't want boat people seized on the high seas and jailed at Guantanamo. Clinton got away with it, but Bush can't.
While Powell has expressed "no enthusiasm" for sending in troops, France and Canada have volunteered to send in police forces if a political solution can be brokered.
"A compromise can be reached only if there is a neutral party," observes Fatton. "Neither side trusts the United States. Aristide considers it unfriendly, while his opposition feels it has not been forceful enough in ousting Aristide."
