Chomsky backgrounder on Haiti :
<<< The U.S. has upheld Article 14 in this manner since Carter (and Christopher) "promoted human rights" by shipping miserable boat people back to torment under the Duvalier dictatorship, a respected ally helping to convert Haiti to an export platform for U.S. corporations seeking supercheap and brutalized labor -- or to adopt the terms preferred by USAID, to convert Haiti into the "Taiwan of the Caribbean." The violations of Article 14 were ratified formally in a Reagan-Duvalier agreement. When a military coup overthrew Haiti's first democratically elected President in September 1991, renewing the terror after a brief lapse, the Bush Administration imposed a blockade to drive back the flood of refugees to the torture chamber where they were to be imprisoned.
Bush's "appalling" refugee policy was bitterly condemned by candidate Bill Clinton, whose first act as President was to make the illegal blockade still harsher, along with other measures to sustain the junta, to which we return.
Again, fairness requires that we recognize that Washington did briefly depart from its rejection of Article 14 in the case of Haiti. During the few months of democracy (Feb.-Sept. 1991), the Bush Administration gained a sudden and short-lived sensitivity to Article 14 as the flow of refugees declined to a trickle -- in fact, reversed, as Haitians returned to their country in its moment of hope. Of the more than 24,000 Haitians intercepted by U.S. forces from 1981 through 1990, 11 were granted asylum as victims of political persecution (in comparison with 75,000 out of 75,000 Cubans). In these years of terror and repression, Washington allowed 28 asylum claims. During Aristide's 7-month tenure, with violence and repression radically reduced, 20 were allowed from a refugee pool 1/50th the scale. Practice returned to normal after the military coup and the renewed terror >>>
<<< Also revealing is the record of sanctions against Haiti after the military coup of September 1991 that ended the seven-month period of democracy. The U.S. had reacted to Aristide's election with alarm, having confidently expected the election of its own candidate, World Bank official Mark Bazin, who received 14% of the vote. Washington's reaction was to shift aid to anti-Aristide elements, and as noted, to honor asylum claims for the first time, restoring the norm after the military junta let loose a reign of terror, killing thousands. The OAS declared an embargo, which the Bush Administration at once violated by exempting U.S. firms -- "fine tuning" the sanctions, the press explained, in its "latest move" to find "more effective ways to hasten the collapse of what the Administration calls an illegal Government in Haiti." Trade with Haiti remained high in 1992, increasing by almost half as Clinton extended the violations of the embargo, including purchases by the U.S. government, which maintained close connections with the coup regime; just how close we do not know, since the Clinton Administration refuses to turn over to Haiti 160,000 pages of documents seized by U.S. military forces -- "to avoid embarrassing revelations" about U.S. government involvement with the terrorist regime, according to Human Rights Watch. President Aristide was allowed to return after the popular organizations had been subjected to three years of terror and he had pledged to accept the extreme neoliberal program of Washington's defeated candidate.
The U.S. Justice Department revealed that the Bush and Clinton Administrations had rendered the embargo virtually meaningless by authorizing illegal shipments of oil to the military junta and its wealthy supporters, informing Texaco Oil Company that it would not be penalized for violating the Presidential directive of October 1991 banning such shipments. The information, prominently released the day before U.S. troops landed to "restore democracy" in 1994, has yet to reach the general public, and is an unlikely candidate for the historical record. These were among the many devices adopted to ensure that the popular forces that swept President Aristide to power would have no voice in any future "democracy." None of this should surprise people who have failed to immunize themselves from "inconvenient facts." With general agreement, the Clinton Administration advertises this as a grand exercise in "restoring democracy," the prize example of the Clinton Doctrine. >>>
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