On the night of February 28 and into the morning of Sunday February 29, U.S. military personnel arrived in Port au Prince, Haiti and took over some key posts such as the Presidential Palace and the airport. They also arrived at the Presidential residence of now ousted President Jean Bertrand Aristide in Tabarre - a suburb of Port au Prince - at approximately 3.00 a.m. together with U.S. diplomats from the U.S. Embassy in the Capital. According to U.S. government sources as reported in the U.S. press, President Aristide signed a letter of resignation and he was then taken to the airport, deported from the country and eventually transported to the Central African Republic. According to President Aristide, however, whose actual testimony we now have at hand, something quite different happened on that fateful night. Aristide relates that the military and U.S. diplomats who arrived at his house told him that a bloodbath would ensue if he didn’t resign as they had ordered that reinforcements to the Presidential security would be blocked by the U.S. and they would do nothing to defend him or his Government. In other words, he was given an ultimatum to resign or be killed. Soon thereafter President Aristide was taken from his residence - according to some witnesses in handcuffs - to the airport, and put in a plane for an undisclosed destination. President Aristide describes what happened as a "kidnapping disguised as a coup". Despite the differences in the two accounts of events of that night, they essentially amount to the same thing namely a coup d’etat. The U.S Government decided that Aristide’s tenure as President was over and they put in place the means for his removal from office. Thus came to an end Haiti’s latest experiment in democracy as evidenced by the first three democratic elections in the nation’s history.

The immediate background to the coup and President Aristide’s removal from the Presidency was an uprising in various cities towards the North of the country. Some three leaders of these uprisings have been identified, all with criminal backgrounds. One of the leaders of the uprisings was Guy Phillipe, a former member of the Haitian Army, then a Police chief in Cap Haitien. In December 1991 he organized an unsuccessful coup against Aristide after which he fled to the Dominican Republic. He received U.S. training in Ecuador in 1995 and is also alleged to have been deeply involved in the drug trade. A second leader of the revolts is Jodel Chamblain; he was convicted of the murder of Antoine Izmery in 1993 and of a foreign Minister of Haiti, Guy Mallory. The third leader is Jean Pierre Baptiste a.k.a. General Tatoune. Tatoune is also a convicted murderer who belonged to the terrorist organization FRAPH. The U.S. Embassy in Port au Prince seems to have been in contact with these thuggish leaders and there is speculation that they received military equipment and clothing from the U.S. while in the Dominican Republic. These were the elements against whom the U.S. would not defend the democratically elected President of Haiti and even prevented his own security retinue from doing their paid task. In addition to the criminal element of the opposition in Haiti, there was a political opposition that had two components: the Democratic Convergence and the Group of 184. At no time did these political parties condemn the violence of the thugs or dissociate themselves from them or their tactics and so they bear a great responsibility for the breakdown that Haiti has experienced.

The roots of the coup d’etat against President Aristide, however, go away back. Some trace it to his first election as President in 1990. At that time, former President Carter tried to implore Aristide not to run for the Presidency. At any rate, the U.S. candidate at the time, Marc Bazin lost to Aristide. Since the U.S. Administration never recognized Aristide as someone they could do business with because of his leftist and social justice leanings, the policy has been how to oust him. The first success in this direction was in September 1991 through a military coup followed by a reign of terror for the people of Haiti. Aristide was returned to Haiti in 1994 by President Clinton but it was hoped that he was chastened and he had given his solemn promise that he would end his Presidency in 1995. Really he was restored as President as a lame duck interim figure with no future.

President Aristide was again elected President of Haiti in November 2000 after an interim Presidency of Rene Preval. Undermining his Presidency by the U.S. Administration, however, had even preceded his election. In May 2000, parliamentary elections had taken place in Haiti with overwhelming victory for Aristide’s Party, the Fanmi Lavalas. There were some nine Senatorial seats that were disputed. The U.S. and the OAS rejected the outcomes but the neutral electoral commission of Haiti ruled that although there were irregularities the elections should stand. On the basis of this dispute about internal matters of Haiti, the U.S. has blocked all official government aid to Haiti, in particular a loan of $500 million from the Inter-American Development Bank of the World Bank. This blocked all development opportunities for Haiti, the economy was made to scream, poverty deepened and the population became more and more disillusioned with the Aristide government that promised so much especially to the poor. This deliberate policy of making the economy scream proved very successful in destabilizing the country and making it ungovernable. It was the perfect setting for the uprisings and the return of the Tonton Macoute, the militias and the thugs. It just took time to work.

Although official aid was denied to Haiti, money flowed into Haiti through the non-governmental organizations. In particular, the National Endowment for Democracy was a conduit of aid to any and every political opposition to the Fanmi Lavalas Party of President Aristide. The money flowed through the IRI ( International Republican Institute) and the NDI ( National Democratic Institute) to the quarrelling opposition under the umbrella of the Democratic Convergence. Since May 2000 this group has blocked virtually any attempt at resolving the political crisis of Haiti. They refused to take part in elections, they refused to accept the recent proposals put forward by the State Department. Their one demand was resignation of Aristide and an end to his party’s rule. They knew that their intransigence would be rewarded by the Bush Administration and so they hung tough right to the bitter end. The Democratic Convergence, however, were merely the political tool of destabilization of a disliked regime, somewhat like Saddam Hussein’s in Iraq. The political and the economic strands of the destabilization process merged nicely in the uprisings and the coup of February 29, 2004

While the Aristide Government had many failings and was by no means a show case for democratic practice, it achieved much and was an incredible improvement on the previous 190 years of Haiti’s independence governments. The brutal, cruel Army was abolished in 1995, the Tonton Macoutes were brought to an end and the boat loads of refugees halted. But this experiment in democracy had no chance of success with economic strangulation from outside and political stalemate within. In these circumstances, it sounds surreal that Washington is talking about restoring democracy and a non-corrupt non-dictatorial government to Haiti just after it had helped to end Haiti’s best chance in 200 years. It sounds like another macabre version of the story of having to destroy a village in order to save it.