Bush, Clinton and the crimes of US imperialism in Haiti

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Bush, Clinton and the crimes of US imperialism in Haiti
18 January 2010

The Obama administration has announced that former presidents Bill
Clinton and George W. Bush will head the fundraising for relief
efforts in the wake of the Haiti earthquake. In his radio speech
Saturday, Obama declared: “These two leaders send an unmistakable
message to the people of Haiti and the world. In a moment of need, the
United States stands united.”

The message of the Clinton-Bush appointment is indeed significant, but
hardly what the White House and the American media have suggested. In
selecting his two immediate predecessors, those who have set US policy
in the Caribbean since 1993, Obama demonstrates that the devastating
human tragedy in Haiti will not bring any alteration in the rapacious
role of US imperialism in that impoverished semi-colonial country.

For eight years apiece, Clinton and Bush were directly and deeply
involved in a series of political machinations and military
interventions that have played a major role in perpetuating the
poverty, backwardness and repression in Haiti that have vastly
compounded by the disaster that struck that country last Tuesday. Both
men have the blood of Haitian workers and peasants on their hands.

Clinton took office in the immediate aftermath of the military coup
which ousted Haiti’s first democratically elected president, the
populist cleric Jean-Bertrand Aristide. That coup was backed by the
administration of Bush’s father, who saw Aristide as an unwanted and
potentially dangerous radical.

The new Democratic Party administration undertook a tactical shift in
policy. Clinton imposed economic sanctions on the Haitian junta, which
destroyed Haiti’s fledgling export industries, then dispatched the
Marines to Haiti—for the third time in the 20th century—to compel Gen.
Raoul Cedras, the junta leader, to depart. The US restored Aristide to
the presidency, after he had given assurances that he would do nothing
to challenge the domination of either Washington or the native Haitian
elite, and that he would leave office in 1996 without seeking reelection.

After Aristide obediently left office on schedule, he was succeeded by
René Préval, who served the first of his two terms as president from
1996 to 2001, carrying out the dictates of an International Monetary
Fund “structural adjustment” program that slashed employment, cut
public services, and ruined domestic rice farmers.

When Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas party won a clear victory in May 2000
legislative elections, the Clinton administration and the
Republican-controlled Congress refused to accept the election and cut
off US aid. Aristide himself returned to the presidency after winning
a landslide election victory in November 2000, only to face an
implacable enemy in the incoming Bush administration.

For three years, Haiti was systematically starved by the US aid cutoff
and measures taken by the Bush administration to block international
aid and isolate the Aristide government. Finally, in February 2004,
amid protests fomented by the Haitian ruling elite with covert
American backing, the US military again intervened in the country,
seizing Aristide and shipping him out of the country to exile.

The Marines turned over effective control of the country to a United
Nations peacekeeping force, with Brazil providing the biggest troop
contingent, propping up a series of unelected Haitian prime ministers
until elections in 2006, from which candidates of Fanmi Lavalas were
largely excluded. René Préval was elected president for the second
time, in a term scheduled to end late this year. Once a supporter and
professed political “twin” of Aristide, Préval has long since made his
peace with both Washington and the Haitian ruling elite, and his
second term has been characterized by slavish subservience to the
economic prescriptions of Wall Street and the International Monetary Fund.

Throughout the Clinton and Bush administrations, US demands for
adherence to IMF austerity policies were combined with a vicious
program of repression against Haitians fleeing the country of their
birth to seek refuge and a better life in the United States. In his
first campaign for the presidency, in 1992, Clinton criticized the
persecution and forced repatriation of Haitian refugees, only to
reverse himself and continue those policies unaltered. For the next 17
years—and continuing with no change from Obama—hundreds of refugees
have died in small boats seeking to evade the US Coast Guard blockade.

Most recently, Clinton has been the official UN envoy for Haiti,
backing the corrupt Préval regime and seeking to develop Haiti as a
base for a profitable US-run garment industry founded on
near-starvation wages. Food riots swept the country in April 2008, but
that did not stop Préval from blocking legislation that would have
raised the minimum wage of $1.72 a day for workers in the garment
factories.

As for George W. Bush, his selection as co-leader of a supposed
humanitarian campaign is an insult to the people of both Haiti and the
United States. His appointment by Obama is in keeping with the
Democratic president’s unflagging efforts since his election, the
result of popular hatred of Bush and his party, to rehabilitate the
Republicans.

An unapologetic war criminal who is responsible for the slaughter of a
million Iraqis, Bush’s signature domestic “achievement” was the abject
failure of the US government either to prevent the devastation of New
Orleans and the Gulf Coast in Hurricane Katrina, or to mount an
effective relief and recovery effort afterwards.

This is the record of the two men whom Barack Obama has selected as
the public face of the latest US initiative in Haiti. Bush and Clinton
made a series of media appearances over the weekend, including
interviews on all five Sunday television news programs, during which
they emphasized the need to restore “stability” to Haiti, and the
important role that the United States would have to play in that effort.

Bush and Clinton personify the pernicious and reactionary role that
American imperialism has played in Haiti for the last century. It is
no exaggeration to say that the policies of their administrations have
caused as much death and devastation in that country as last Tuesday’s
earthquake.

Patrick Martin

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/pers-j18.shtml

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