JEAN-BERTRAND ARISTIDE FOR THE HAITIAN SENATE?
(Defend Haiti) -
ORLANDO, USA – There is much speculation building, that former two-term President Jean-Bertrand Aristide may be on the ballot to become the next Senator of the Ouest Department of Haiti.
An early list of candidates for the Haitian Senate relayed by the Father Gerard Jean Juste Foundation, had notable names, such as the current chief of the Haitian National Police, Mario Andresol, and famous singer, Jacques Sauveur Jean, as candidates. Perhaps most notable of all is that of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the twice elected and twice ousted president of the republic.
The correspondence from the Jean Juste Foundation, claimed it had received confirmation of Aristide’s intention’s to run from Journalist Garry Pierre Paul Charles and Maryse Narsiste.
Adding to the fire, radio host on Radio Metropole, Nancy Roc, herself has chimed in on the rumors and what a Senator Aristide would mean for Haiti, writing:
"… from official sources yesterday, I learned that Jean Bertrand Aristide will be a candidate for the Senator of the West (Ouest) in the next legislative elections. NEVER, in the world, in my humble knowledge, has a former head of state run as a candidate for the Senate, so retrograde a position relative to his former one as president.”
Roc also recalled to readers and listeners, the history of the friction between then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and the former musician, now President, Michel Martelly, who many believe played a big role in both coups.
”It is therefore clear that this application will help Mr. Aristide to escape potential prosecution of justice, enjoying parliamentary immunity. Secondly, I am convinced that if Mr. Aristide was elected Senator of the West, he will maneuver to become President of the Senate of the Republic and, thereby, will WITH ALL LATITUDE, CONTROL POLICY, IN OPPOSITION TO THE CURRENT SYSTEM.”
DH has sent a correspondence to President Aristide on this matter and has not yet received a response.
Since returning to Haiti in March of 2011, Aristide has shied away from the public eye, and has repeatedly said that he has no intention of returning to Haitian politics. Aristide has instead been engaged with his university, and schools throughout the country.
Showing posts with label Articles - Aristide. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Articles - Aristide. Show all posts
Saturday, June 16, 2012
Friday, March 30, 2012
ARTICLE - FUGITIVE FOE OF ARISTIDE
FUGITIVE FOE OF ARISTIDE BACKS EX-HAITI PRESIDENT
(San Francisco Chronicle) - By Wendell Bataille, AP
CAP-HAITIEN - Fugitive rebel Guy Philippe made a rare public appearance Thursday and urged Haitians to seize the streets if foreigners try to arrest the president he helped topple eight years ago, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
It was an odd twist to the recent political drama as crowds of people marched in the country's biggest cities to mark the 25th anniversary of the signing of Haiti's constitution.
In an interview with the Associated Press Television Network and other journalists, Philippe said Haitians should defend Aristide if outsiders move into Haiti to arrest Aristide. Rumors have circulated in recent weeks that Aristide is wanted on various criminal charges, a claim denied by the United States government and Haitian officials.
"If they arrest him, all Haitians should take to the streets," Philippe said as he acknowledged his past grievances with Aristide. "Everybody knows I'm not a friend of Aristide. They all know I have a problem with Aristide."
Unlike Aristide, Philippe is an actual fugitive who is wanted on a U.S. indictment charging him with drug offenses. He was at the helm of a band of former soldiers that ousted Aristide during the president's second term in 2004.
On Thursday, some of the remnants of the disbanded army, along with hopeful recruits, shadowed Philippe in the colonial streets of Cap-Haitien as they called for President Michel Martelly to fulfill his campaign pledge of restoring the armed forces. Police officers looked on as the men in military fatigues, some carrying handguns, passed through Haiti's second biggest city jammed in the back of pickup trucks.
Western diplomats have opposed Martelly's plan to bring back the military, which Aristide abolished in 1995 because of its history of human rights abuses.
Mariano Fernandez, the top official with the United Nations' peacekeeping mission in Haiti, has called the public appearances by several hundred ex-soldiers in uniform an "unnecessary provocation." Security updates sent to humanitarian groups refer to them as "paramilitary elements."
As in Cap-Haitien, other veterans and their followers drove through Haiti's capital and called for the army to be reinstated because the force is recognized in the constitution. Bystanders cheered them on.
Earlier Thursday, a few hundred Aristide supporters rallied in Port-au-Prince.
They accused Martelly of abusing the constitution because they believe he has dual nationality, something that the charter bars for top officials and would disqualify him from office.
Martelly has denied he is a citizen of two countries. Earlier this month, he showed his old passports at a news conference in an effort to dispel the rumors.
Associated Press writer Evens Sanon and APTN videographer Pierre-Richard Luxama in Port-au-Prince contributed to this report.
(San Francisco Chronicle) - By Wendell Bataille, AP
CAP-HAITIEN - Fugitive rebel Guy Philippe made a rare public appearance Thursday and urged Haitians to seize the streets if foreigners try to arrest the president he helped topple eight years ago, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
It was an odd twist to the recent political drama as crowds of people marched in the country's biggest cities to mark the 25th anniversary of the signing of Haiti's constitution.
In an interview with the Associated Press Television Network and other journalists, Philippe said Haitians should defend Aristide if outsiders move into Haiti to arrest Aristide. Rumors have circulated in recent weeks that Aristide is wanted on various criminal charges, a claim denied by the United States government and Haitian officials.
"If they arrest him, all Haitians should take to the streets," Philippe said as he acknowledged his past grievances with Aristide. "Everybody knows I'm not a friend of Aristide. They all know I have a problem with Aristide."
Unlike Aristide, Philippe is an actual fugitive who is wanted on a U.S. indictment charging him with drug offenses. He was at the helm of a band of former soldiers that ousted Aristide during the president's second term in 2004.
On Thursday, some of the remnants of the disbanded army, along with hopeful recruits, shadowed Philippe in the colonial streets of Cap-Haitien as they called for President Michel Martelly to fulfill his campaign pledge of restoring the armed forces. Police officers looked on as the men in military fatigues, some carrying handguns, passed through Haiti's second biggest city jammed in the back of pickup trucks.
Western diplomats have opposed Martelly's plan to bring back the military, which Aristide abolished in 1995 because of its history of human rights abuses.
Mariano Fernandez, the top official with the United Nations' peacekeeping mission in Haiti, has called the public appearances by several hundred ex-soldiers in uniform an "unnecessary provocation." Security updates sent to humanitarian groups refer to them as "paramilitary elements."
As in Cap-Haitien, other veterans and their followers drove through Haiti's capital and called for the army to be reinstated because the force is recognized in the constitution. Bystanders cheered them on.
Earlier Thursday, a few hundred Aristide supporters rallied in Port-au-Prince.
They accused Martelly of abusing the constitution because they believe he has dual nationality, something that the charter bars for top officials and would disqualify him from office.
Martelly has denied he is a citizen of two countries. Earlier this month, he showed his old passports at a news conference in an effort to dispel the rumors.
Associated Press writer Evens Sanon and APTN videographer Pierre-Richard Luxama in Port-au-Prince contributed to this report.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
ARTICLE - ARISTIDE - HAITIAN LAZARUS
Op-Ed Contributor
THE HAITIAN LAZARUS
(New York Times ) By Amy Wilentz, Op-Ed Contributor
SAY the name Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti this week, and it’s as if the revolutionary slave leaders Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines were still riding over the plains and mountains here, astride Delacroix-worthy steeds, making their descent with sabers drawn upon the vast plantations of the French masters.
The Haitians one meets on the street or in their little shops or in the market or on the byways of the countryside and in the shantytowns of the provincial capitals are for the most part pleased at the prospect of former President Aristide's return this week from seven years’ exile in South Africa. But when members of Haiti’s tiny elite, small middle class and growing international community here discuss Mr. Aristide, they look over their shoulders, shake their heads, raise their eyebrows. They speak in whispers or in great gulps of nervousness.
Cut off their heads and burn down their houses, Dessalines told his troops, who went on to win a historic and singular victory over the French Army in 1804. Two centuries later, the elite, some of whom are descendants of the French colonists, still have a profound fear of the poverty-stricken general population. They understand fully that the triumph of the slaves never brought about the structural changes in Haitian society for which those early, bloody battles were fought.
The ruling class still fears the overturning of the customary order. Revolution is a scary thing.
When the slaves gathered in 1791 to plot the end of French rule, there were about 500,000 of them on the island, and some 40,000 French colonists. Today the demographics are even more skewed, with about nine million people living in unimaginable poverty, while a microscopic elite guards among themselves whatever wealth is to be had here. Among all this flits the aid and development community, who have arrived in droves since the January 2010 earthquake, with their airy expensive apartments, S.U.V.’s, vans and pickup trucks, and packets of money to hand out.
In some places, the schism between haves and have-nots is almost farcical. Around the Place Boyer in Pétionville, the wealthy town above Port-au-Prince, clubs and restaurants with security guards cater to the elite and to foreigners, while across the street, in a refugee camp, hundreds of Haitians huddle under tarps and in tents in the mud and wind of the season’s unpredictable rains.
It’s perfect volatile tinder in which to toss the match of Mr. Aristide’s return. Plunk a three-cornered hat on Mr. Aristide’s head and sit him on a horse, and he is another revolutionary leader. The people in those camps are his people — though not, by far, his only people.
Jean-Bertrand Aristide has a complicated history. During the troubled times after the ouster of the dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986, he repeatedly confronted the interim junta with enormous, even foolhardy, personal courage. A Roman Catholic priest from a shantytown parish, Father Aristide gave sermons in those days that were biting and vituperative, intended both to enrage the country’s rulers and make the people laugh at power. His amazing escapes from the many assassination attempts against him made him a kind of folk hero, a Lazarus who could not be eliminated. I knew him then, and remember him rising from these attacks, each time with a greater following.
For a long time, Mr. Aristide had no money; he had no social standing; he had no political party; he had no powerful foreign friends; his own church reviled him. These were all points in his favor among the Haitian people. For a long time, the people were his only power. While all other politicians (except for those whom he has supported) have had to rush around stuffing ballot boxes, altering counts and paying for votes, Mr. Aristide has twice been elected in clean balloting.
The first time was in 1990, in the first successful election after 29 years of dictatorship by Mr. Duvalier and his father, François. He won handily, but, with his leftist rhetoric and his huge support from the poorest sectors, he was not exactly the leader that the international community had envisioned when they promoted democracy and elections in Haiti. Reluctantly, international monitors certified his election.
Finding himself alone in a political sea of the entitled and the empowered, Mr. Aristide believed that all he could trust in the end was the brute power of the street — the “rouleau compresseur,” as it is called in Haitian politics, or the steamroller.
He was almost pathologically reluctant to work toward agreement among his advisers, among equals. He shares this distaste with many Haitians, who believe that theirs is a fatally polarized society and that consensus-building here almost inevitably leads to capitulation to the elite, and by extension to the international community.
Seven months after he took office, Mr. Aristide was overthrown by the Haitian Army with the tacit approval of the United States and the international community. The steamroller did not save him, and he was sent into exile. His second term was much more violent, with supporters repulsing perceived conspirators with guns and machetes. There were also allegations of human-rights abuses and corruption.
It ended with another coup, in 2004, that was again supported by members of Haiti’s business elite and tolerated, at least, by Haiti’s international allies, putting an end to the people’s flailing baby steps toward power.
Mr. Aristide gave the Haitian people two invaluable things: self-confidence and a voice, and thereby earned their lasting loyalty. That’s not nothing, after 200 years of repression, but it is perhaps his only positive legacy.
During his first exile, in Washington, Mr. Aristide agreed to make compromises and concessions that were entirely the opposite of what he’d always stood for. Like a kidnapping victim negotiating his own ransom, he was willing to accept any demand in order to be allowed to return to Haiti.
Here was a people’s president who, from a comfortable banishment, lobbied successfully for a brutal embargo against his own country, and who, returning to power in 1994, accepted international demands for a rapacious end to Haiti’s import bans. Here was a Haitian patriot and intransigent denouncer of all collaboration with “imperialists” who was brought back to Haiti on the shoulders of an international military intervention led by the United States, and who countenanced the establishment afterward of what was essentially an international occupation force run by the United Nations, which controls the forces of order in Haiti to this day, Mr. Aristide having disbanded the army that helped oust him.
Mr. Aristide, of course, did not see this as hypocrisy. Above all, he felt, the people wanted him to return. And he was right the first time he returned, and he’ll be right the second time. The Haitian people want justice and a decent life, and they think he’s the man to give that to them.
Yet they have already poured their love onto him and he has repaid them with nothing but dreams.
By the end of Mr. Aristide’s two abortive terms, the Haitian revolution had once again failed.
The only Haitians whose lives he improved were those to whom he personally gave jobs or for whose communities he personally — for reasons of political loyalty or old connection — provided housing or schools. He changed nothing structurally; he put in place only one institution, his own Aristide Foundation for Democracy, which runs a small university, mobile schools in five earthquake camps and many youth and women’s groups.
In the past weeks, as Mr. Aristide plans his return, the United States has been putting pressure on the South African government to prevent him from coming back to Haiti at such a fraught political moment. Jean-Claude Duvalier, the ousted scion of the old dictatorship, has just come back to Haiti himself in a surprise move, and can be seen here and there, dining in expensive restaurants like the ones in Place Boyer, and moving around the city in big, rich-man’s cars.
Mr. Duvalier's appearance provided further justification for Mr. Aristide’s return, for if the former reviled dictator can come back, how about the first democratically elected president?
Haitians are preparing to vote (or not to vote) on Sunday in a contested runoff presidential election. The sudden entrance onto the proscenium of both controversial former leaders — one stage right, the other stage left — has highlighted the unreality of the current campaign, which pits a constitutional scholar against a popular musician.
Mr. Duvalier is unlikely to be permitted to run for office. And Mr. Aristide has said that he wants to return as a simple educator and to open a medical school. Having technically served his constitutionally allotted two terms, he could come to power now only if he were to pull off some Machiavellian scheme.
Whatever Mr. Aristide chooses to do in Haiti, his voice is likely to be very powerful, as long as he can avoid assassination. Given his popularity, he should be able to influence election results far into the future, if not the one immediately upon us. As always at election time, violence simmers just below the surface, and has exploded once already in this voting season because of anger over fraud.
Meanwhile, those who helped to overthrow Mr. Aristide or who thwarted his ambitions or who disagreed with him are worried for their own security after he returns. “Aristide does not have to open his mouth for his vengeance to be done,” one young man said to me last week, with admiration. There is a perception of an impending payback time.
The incredible thing is that a narrative most Haitians thought was over is now to begin again.
Because he is such a potent symbol of democracy for a huge number of people here, Mr. Aristide keeps popping up in Haitian history like a return of the repressed. In traditional Haitian belief, a person’s soul goes back to Africa, or lan guinée, when he dies. For Jean-Bertrand Aristide to reappear in Haiti from his African exile would be a real resurrection.
THE HAITIAN LAZARUS
(New York Times ) By Amy Wilentz, Op-Ed Contributor
SAY the name Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti this week, and it’s as if the revolutionary slave leaders Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines were still riding over the plains and mountains here, astride Delacroix-worthy steeds, making their descent with sabers drawn upon the vast plantations of the French masters.
The Haitians one meets on the street or in their little shops or in the market or on the byways of the countryside and in the shantytowns of the provincial capitals are for the most part pleased at the prospect of former President Aristide's return this week from seven years’ exile in South Africa. But when members of Haiti’s tiny elite, small middle class and growing international community here discuss Mr. Aristide, they look over their shoulders, shake their heads, raise their eyebrows. They speak in whispers or in great gulps of nervousness.
Cut off their heads and burn down their houses, Dessalines told his troops, who went on to win a historic and singular victory over the French Army in 1804. Two centuries later, the elite, some of whom are descendants of the French colonists, still have a profound fear of the poverty-stricken general population. They understand fully that the triumph of the slaves never brought about the structural changes in Haitian society for which those early, bloody battles were fought.
The ruling class still fears the overturning of the customary order. Revolution is a scary thing.
When the slaves gathered in 1791 to plot the end of French rule, there were about 500,000 of them on the island, and some 40,000 French colonists. Today the demographics are even more skewed, with about nine million people living in unimaginable poverty, while a microscopic elite guards among themselves whatever wealth is to be had here. Among all this flits the aid and development community, who have arrived in droves since the January 2010 earthquake, with their airy expensive apartments, S.U.V.’s, vans and pickup trucks, and packets of money to hand out.
In some places, the schism between haves and have-nots is almost farcical. Around the Place Boyer in Pétionville, the wealthy town above Port-au-Prince, clubs and restaurants with security guards cater to the elite and to foreigners, while across the street, in a refugee camp, hundreds of Haitians huddle under tarps and in tents in the mud and wind of the season’s unpredictable rains.
It’s perfect volatile tinder in which to toss the match of Mr. Aristide’s return. Plunk a three-cornered hat on Mr. Aristide’s head and sit him on a horse, and he is another revolutionary leader. The people in those camps are his people — though not, by far, his only people.
Jean-Bertrand Aristide has a complicated history. During the troubled times after the ouster of the dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986, he repeatedly confronted the interim junta with enormous, even foolhardy, personal courage. A Roman Catholic priest from a shantytown parish, Father Aristide gave sermons in those days that were biting and vituperative, intended both to enrage the country’s rulers and make the people laugh at power. His amazing escapes from the many assassination attempts against him made him a kind of folk hero, a Lazarus who could not be eliminated. I knew him then, and remember him rising from these attacks, each time with a greater following.
For a long time, Mr. Aristide had no money; he had no social standing; he had no political party; he had no powerful foreign friends; his own church reviled him. These were all points in his favor among the Haitian people. For a long time, the people were his only power. While all other politicians (except for those whom he has supported) have had to rush around stuffing ballot boxes, altering counts and paying for votes, Mr. Aristide has twice been elected in clean balloting.
The first time was in 1990, in the first successful election after 29 years of dictatorship by Mr. Duvalier and his father, François. He won handily, but, with his leftist rhetoric and his huge support from the poorest sectors, he was not exactly the leader that the international community had envisioned when they promoted democracy and elections in Haiti. Reluctantly, international monitors certified his election.
Finding himself alone in a political sea of the entitled and the empowered, Mr. Aristide believed that all he could trust in the end was the brute power of the street — the “rouleau compresseur,” as it is called in Haitian politics, or the steamroller.
He was almost pathologically reluctant to work toward agreement among his advisers, among equals. He shares this distaste with many Haitians, who believe that theirs is a fatally polarized society and that consensus-building here almost inevitably leads to capitulation to the elite, and by extension to the international community.
Seven months after he took office, Mr. Aristide was overthrown by the Haitian Army with the tacit approval of the United States and the international community. The steamroller did not save him, and he was sent into exile. His second term was much more violent, with supporters repulsing perceived conspirators with guns and machetes. There were also allegations of human-rights abuses and corruption.
It ended with another coup, in 2004, that was again supported by members of Haiti’s business elite and tolerated, at least, by Haiti’s international allies, putting an end to the people’s flailing baby steps toward power.
Mr. Aristide gave the Haitian people two invaluable things: self-confidence and a voice, and thereby earned their lasting loyalty. That’s not nothing, after 200 years of repression, but it is perhaps his only positive legacy.
During his first exile, in Washington, Mr. Aristide agreed to make compromises and concessions that were entirely the opposite of what he’d always stood for. Like a kidnapping victim negotiating his own ransom, he was willing to accept any demand in order to be allowed to return to Haiti.
Here was a people’s president who, from a comfortable banishment, lobbied successfully for a brutal embargo against his own country, and who, returning to power in 1994, accepted international demands for a rapacious end to Haiti’s import bans. Here was a Haitian patriot and intransigent denouncer of all collaboration with “imperialists” who was brought back to Haiti on the shoulders of an international military intervention led by the United States, and who countenanced the establishment afterward of what was essentially an international occupation force run by the United Nations, which controls the forces of order in Haiti to this day, Mr. Aristide having disbanded the army that helped oust him.
Mr. Aristide, of course, did not see this as hypocrisy. Above all, he felt, the people wanted him to return. And he was right the first time he returned, and he’ll be right the second time. The Haitian people want justice and a decent life, and they think he’s the man to give that to them.
Yet they have already poured their love onto him and he has repaid them with nothing but dreams.
By the end of Mr. Aristide’s two abortive terms, the Haitian revolution had once again failed.
The only Haitians whose lives he improved were those to whom he personally gave jobs or for whose communities he personally — for reasons of political loyalty or old connection — provided housing or schools. He changed nothing structurally; he put in place only one institution, his own Aristide Foundation for Democracy, which runs a small university, mobile schools in five earthquake camps and many youth and women’s groups.
In the past weeks, as Mr. Aristide plans his return, the United States has been putting pressure on the South African government to prevent him from coming back to Haiti at such a fraught political moment. Jean-Claude Duvalier, the ousted scion of the old dictatorship, has just come back to Haiti himself in a surprise move, and can be seen here and there, dining in expensive restaurants like the ones in Place Boyer, and moving around the city in big, rich-man’s cars.
Mr. Duvalier's appearance provided further justification for Mr. Aristide’s return, for if the former reviled dictator can come back, how about the first democratically elected president?
Haitians are preparing to vote (or not to vote) on Sunday in a contested runoff presidential election. The sudden entrance onto the proscenium of both controversial former leaders — one stage right, the other stage left — has highlighted the unreality of the current campaign, which pits a constitutional scholar against a popular musician.
Mr. Duvalier is unlikely to be permitted to run for office. And Mr. Aristide has said that he wants to return as a simple educator and to open a medical school. Having technically served his constitutionally allotted two terms, he could come to power now only if he were to pull off some Machiavellian scheme.
Whatever Mr. Aristide chooses to do in Haiti, his voice is likely to be very powerful, as long as he can avoid assassination. Given his popularity, he should be able to influence election results far into the future, if not the one immediately upon us. As always at election time, violence simmers just below the surface, and has exploded once already in this voting season because of anger over fraud.
Meanwhile, those who helped to overthrow Mr. Aristide or who thwarted his ambitions or who disagreed with him are worried for their own security after he returns. “Aristide does not have to open his mouth for his vengeance to be done,” one young man said to me last week, with admiration. There is a perception of an impending payback time.
The incredible thing is that a narrative most Haitians thought was over is now to begin again.
Because he is such a potent symbol of democracy for a huge number of people here, Mr. Aristide keeps popping up in Haitian history like a return of the repressed. In traditional Haitian belief, a person’s soul goes back to Africa, or lan guinée, when he dies. For Jean-Bertrand Aristide to reappear in Haiti from his African exile would be a real resurrection.
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