France and U.S. Team Up in Haiti
By Jefferson Morley
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Friday, March 5, 2004; 8:50 AM
A geopolitical role reversal helped drive Haitian president Jean Betrande Aristide from power, according to European online observers.
In their view, France took the lead in urging intervention in Haiti. The United States reluctantly followed. While French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin pushed for "regime change," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell counseled compromise.
And while news sites in Africa and Latin America play up Aristide's charge that he was "kidnapped" and forced from power by the United States, the French press is ignoring them. Instead, the leftist French daily Le Monde has cautiously welcomed the "curious Franco-U.S. partnership."
Analyst Robert Graham, writing in London's Financial Times (by subscription) on Wednesday, said "France, which was quicker than the U.S. to recognize that the Aristide regime was becoming untenable, made a shrewd calculation that the situation could be turned to its advantage: Haiti was an opportunity to relaunch international crisis management with the U.S."
"The rift over Iraq has not been forgotten," wrote columnist Maurizio Molinari in the Italian newspaper, La Stampa (in Italian) "but the Caribbean pact between [French President Jacques] Chirac and [U.S. President] Bush has been spawned by converging interests.
"France wants to prove that it is still a leading player in crisis scenarios and it is aiming to persuade the United States that multilateralism pays far better dividends than trials of strength in the United Nations," Molinari said Tuesday.
"For its part the Republican White House fears a wave of refugees on the Florida coast bang in the middle of an election year, it wants to disprove charges of ideological unilateralism, and it is not totally unhappy about achieving that at the expense of...Aristide, a political creature of the Clinton administration."
The key moment, according to Le Monde, came on Feb. 25 when de Villepin declared Aristide "bears an onerous responsibility. He must draw the necessary conclusions within observance of the law," a very French way of saying he should resign. Three days later, Washington came around to this point of view. The next day Aristide was on a plane to unhappy exile in the Central African Republic, a French ally.
Outside of Europe, many online news sites are not favorably impressed with the seemingly revived Franco-American partnership. Four major dailies in Latin America, ranging from Clarin (in Spanish) in Buenos Aires to Reforma (in Spanish, by subscription) in Mexico City ran front page news stories on Tuesday highlighting Aristide's claim that he was the victim of a U.S.-led "coup d'etat."
In the Caribbean, the Jamaica Observer reported Thursday that the leaders of Caricom, a group of 15 island nations, called for a United Nation's investigation of Aristide's ouster, a move that "is likely to offend the United States." The Caricom leaders branded Aristide's overthrow unconstitutional and said that it "set a dangerous precedent to elected governments everywhere."
The Observer's editors endorsed the idea of a U.N. probe saying, "Mr. Aristide was offered as sacrifice on an altar of expediency by an axis of powerful nations, led by the United States and France and including Canada."
Lidice Valenzuela, correspondent for the state-controlled daily of Cuba, Granma, predicts a rerun of the past.
"Those who believe that a foreign military presence will constitute a guarantee for pacifying the country are making a great error. When those soldiers return to their bases, life will be the same in this little nation, the first free republic in the Caribbean and a country that today, in the 21st century, possesses levels of poverty that are medieval. We have seen this film already."
But several pundits in Africa, such as the editors of the Daily Nation in Kenya, say Aristide's fall was due, not to outsiders, but to the "corruption and repression" practiced by his government.
"As the U.S., France and other states move troops into Haiti, they would be wise to acknowledge that their mandate must be severely limited. They can play a crucial role in preventing the place from descending into worse anarchy than already exists. They can even help put in place some sort of governing administration.
"But in the long term, it is only the people of Haiti who can shape their own destiny. It is they who will decide whether they prefer the hellhole of outright anarchy or a modern democratic state."
Democracy, say the Daily Nation editors, "cannot be installed through the barrel of a gun."
In Ghana, columnist Abdul Rahman Harruna Attah lamented the failure of a black-led government. In the Accra Daily Mail, he said the ousted president "added yet another notch to our totem of bungling incompetence at handling our own affairs.
"O what happened? Why did he allow so much to go so wrong and fail to see the writing on the wall?"
No one anticipated the depth of the Haitian peoples' desire to be rid of yet another failed government. Washington and Paris couldn't ignore it any longer.
Momoji Furudate provided research for this article.
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