Coup in Haiti
From THE NATION article:
What happened in Haiti was a coup d'état, and it's almost funny to hear Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and Scott McClellan call that claim "absurd" and "nonsense." The coup didn't come in one fell strike, which fact camouflaged it for a time; we're used to a coup being a coup--which means a cut or blow in French--something sudden. But the coup against Aristide, and by extension against the Haitian people, was prolonged, a chronic coup. It began when Aristide was first elected at the end of 1990 and continued right up until he was hustled aboard a plane and flown to what he was told would be a place of his choice but that turned out to be the former homeland of fabled killer and diamond collector Jean-Bédel Bokassa, a country where, according to the CIA country report available on the web, a ten-year elected civilian government was recently replaced by a military coup d'état. Sound familiar?
One thing about coups: They don't just happen. In a country like Haiti, where the military has been disbanded for nearly a decade, soldiers don't simply emerge from the underbrush; they have to be reorganized, retrained and resupplied. And of course, for something to be organized, someone has to organize it. At the end of the 1700s when heroic fighters like Henry Christophe, Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Toussaint L'Ouverture joined forces to overthrow the French planters, they did it in a fashion quite similar to these latter-day brigands. Driving into one city after another with sabers drawn, burning and looting and seizing control, they took the north and then moved southward. Even then, with their scant means of communication, they planned it, they organized it. And they too had help from abroad--from the Americans, in fact.
In the current coup, there are several players. There is the disgruntled former Haitian army (an institution with a violent and unpalatable recent history), which has been wielded many times in the service of coups d'état, often subsidized by its masters, the elite of Haiti. The elite, too, had their hand in this coup--it's hard to believe in this day and age, but they must be called the entrenched class enemies of the Haitian people. There is "a growing enthusiasm among businessmen to use the rebels as a security force," said a news report from the Los Angeles Times after the remnants of the Haitian army that helped engineer the coup descended on the capital. "[The businessmen] welcomed the rebels."
