The Invasion Spectator / Barnes-storming
Caldwell, Christopher
Barnes-storming 4"\AT ith the machine guns of the enemy we shall return, and they will be dumbstruck," Jean-Bertrand Aristide announced to Haitian listeners of his U.S.-funded radio propaganda...
...The Aristide government's unprecedented arrears, and the unwillingness of the multilateral banks to proffer more than $440 million over afive-year period when they last met to discuss such a loan in July 1991, make a shortfall of $660 million almost inevitable...
...to put it on the tab...
...Polls show American support for a role in Haiti falling, and confidence in Aristide falling, too...
...The littlest orphans are spared," Bragg wrote...
...Virtually every expert hauled out to argue for the invasion was either part of the Aristide team of advisers, or paid to support it, or both...
...Killings by the Haitian military—and sympathizers only marginally under its control—ran at 14-25 per month until this spring, according to the Haitian Chamber of Deputies' Human Rights committee...
...Barnes is fond of talking about how Haiti's police state was harming the Haitian poor, but even assuming Haiti's 1,200 policemen were earning the pre-embargo per capita income of $36 a month—a generous assumption—Barnes in his heyday was taking considerably more out of Haitian government coffers than the entire Haitian police force...
...Clinton also repeated with relish the claims of "politically motivated rape" (also "systematic") that had been exposed as Aristide-camp propaganda in cables from his own State Department...
...Apologists such as Taylor Branch who claim that Aristide will respect the free market should look at the Paris document, or at the remarks of the gorgeously named Aristide adviser Marx Aristide, who has announced that the restored government would press to raise the Haitian minimum wage from 15 cents an hour to $5 a day—which would constitute a de facto dismantling of the private export sector...
...Aristide ran an orphanage...
...In other words, orphans weren't being systematically slaughtered...
...In the teeth of public curiosity, Barnes had dropped his fee to $27,500 per month, but for the bulk of his time with Aristide his billings started at $55,000 a month, plus expenses, and often reached six figures monthly...
...Ted Koppel nonetheless introduced Barnes on "Nightline" merely as one who has been "working for democracy in Haiti for the past 20 years...
...Barnes-storming 4"\AT ith the machine guns of the enemy we shall return, and they will be dumbstruck," Jean-Bertrand Aristide announced to Haitian listeners of his U.S.-funded radio propaganda network, two weeks before U.S...
...The only funds the central government does not control directly will be administered by local "communal authorities...
...rrhe killings at Cap Haltien will not be 1 the last...
...In fact, the occupation is proceeding exactly as leveler heads have predicted: it is a logical final step in a progression that began with Aristide's own politics...
...As we go to press, emerging details indicate that the ten Haitians killed by American troops in Cap Haitien on September 24 did not fire first, as was originally reported, but were mowed down in a moment of panic...
...As the occupation entered its second week, 211 of 14,000 refugees had "volunteered" to go back...
...is showing itself unable to establish a human rights record superior to that of the "thugs" it arrived to replace...
...Only one killing was documented, though "thousands" were alleged, and there was only one source for the story: a certain Robert Delano, who like Fr...
...Today, the unconcealable outrage of the Aristide camp at anything less than total vengeance seems to bear out the military version...
...Christopher Caldwell 90 The American Spectator November 1994...
...That didn't stop Al Hunt and other journalists from repeating the story on television, and President Clinton threw it into his potpourri of rationales for invasion on September 15...
...Nice work if you can get it...
...As for the other big rationale—a tidal wave of Haitian immigrants fleeing political repression—a Reuters dispatch from Guantanamo reported that few refugees have any plans to go back even with Aristide' s return...
...Colin Powell scant days after the Los Angeles Times released a poll showing that Powell was the person in America most likely to be viewed as a hero across economic, social, and racial lines...
...Michael Barnes, Aristide's hired lobbyist, was a case in point...
...Not surprisingly, since invasion had as a driving force the Black Caucus's desire to focus attention away from domestic issues, the occupying forces busied themselves fixing Haiti with all the policies—like gun-buyback programs—that have been such a rousing success in the American inner city...
...The enemy" is living up to expectations...
...A week into its most unpopular deployment of troops in decades, the U.S...
...Five days into the U.S...
...It will certainly be a precondition of Aristide's return...
...occupation, at least a dozen were dead, with indications that the violence was rising...
...rr he low point in Haiti journalism came 1 with Rick Bragg's self-refuting September 9 story in the New York Times on the systematic killing of orphans...
...Cedras countered that the agreement was a sequence-his turning over of power was contingent upon the passing of an amnesty law, which Aristide had refused to support...
...Raoul Cedras, on the other hand, was hailed as "honorable" by Gen...
...troops landed in Haiti to restore him...
...The request envisions no role for the private sector...
...Orphanages are a magnet for international aid money and hence political power in Haiti...
...The left has always argued that Cedras "reneged" on the July 1993 Governor's Island agreement that would have returned Aristide to power a year ago...
...The "orphans" in question were up to 18 years old—that is, men...
...One could have predicted as much, but the buildup to the invasion was muddled by some appalling reporting...
...One assumes that the World Bank will keep its wits, and allow the U.S...
...Now that Aristide has been reintroduced with enough firepower to challenge the armed settlement, the situation is picking up where it left off...
...Aristide, meanwhile, has gone AWOL for days at a time, and Americans are indeed dumbstruck...
...Cedras is also benefiting as the invasion settles, retrospectively, some of the contentious questions of the past year...
...With economic programs that were the work of Marxist-Leninist advisers, with attacks on democratic institutions and his exhortations to violence, Aristide effectively launched a civil war, which the military—depending on one's view—either averted or, with extreme brutality, won...
...To shoot them would be too much of an outrage...
...In August Aristide, having run through virtually all of the $53 million he took into exile three years ago, put a request before international lending agencies in Paris for $770 million over fifteen months...
...And as they continue, the administration will begin to claim that the situation on the ground has changed, that no one could have predicted the course the military operation would follow...
Vol. 27 • November 1994 • No. 11
