Shunpiking Online Vo.3 No.2 Canada in Haiti: waging war on the poor majority “Responsibility to Protect”

Canada in Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority
Anthony Fenton and Yves Engler
Red-Fernwood Publishing Co. Ltd.
120 pages
2005
$CDN 14.95
ISBN: 1-55266-168-7

HALIFAX (11 October 2005) – INDEPENDENT journalists Anthony Fenton and Yves Engler have been touring Canada for two months, including the Maritimes, popularizing their hard-hitting and informative new book, Canada in Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority (Fernwood). Several thousand people attended their meetings, often combined with film and documentary exposes of the brutal reality on the ground.

Their tour focuses on exposing the role of the Canadian government in the violation of the human rights of the Haitian people, especially its role in the preparation and implementation of the coup d’etat which removed Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide from power and created the conditions for the death squad democracy Canada is currently building there. The right to self determination is the most fundamental human right.

Haiti Action Halifax and the Halifax Peace Coalition hosted Yves Engler on 30 September 2005 as the tour visited Halifax where some 90 people attended the local book launch in a lively evening forum at Dalhousie University.

The meeting in Halifax came on the heels of the World Summit held at the United Nations where Canada lobbied to have its interventionist “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine included in the summit’s closing document. In presentations and discussions about Canada’s role in Haiti it came out that Canada’s crimes against the Haitian people are justified by Canadian government officials claiming that Canada has a “responsibility to protect” the Haitian people.

There are multiple reasons, Engler says, why Canadians should be concerned about what has unfolded in Haiti. For starters, it is largely thanks to Canadian efforts to unseat Jean Bertrand Aristide’s democratically-elected government that the country is currently so unstable.

The “Ottawa Initiative”

The Montreal-based journalist highlighted how the preparations made for the coup against Aristide — specifically the “Ottawa Initiative” meeting where Canada, along with representatives of the Organization of American States, France the United States and others a year before – discussed plans to 1) Get rid of Aristide, 2) Re-introduce the hated Haitian military, and 3) Put Haiti under UN tutelage. It showed that Canada is not telling the truth when it claims that internal instability led to the removal of Aristide. Everything discussed at the Ottawa Initiative Meeting has either happened or is being put in place.

Significantly, it took place at the very moment in 2003 that the United States was preparing to invade Iraq, and as the Chrètien Liberals and such other “major parties” as the NDP were making a big show about insisting on a “multilateral” approach through the United Nations Security Council as the sine qua non to Canada’s overt participation in the Bush-Blair “coalition of the willing” for the Iraqi adventure -- the identical scenario implemented a year later in Haiti.

Through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the Chretien Liberals funded non-governmental organizations in Haiti that helped build opposition to Aristide in collaboration with the US International Republican Institute and the National Endowment for Democracy. They note in their book that “without exception, documents obtained from CIDA reveal that organizations ideologically opposed to Lavalas (Aristide’s party) were the sole recipients of Canadian government funding. Civil society groups supportive of Lavalas simply did not receive development money.”

Then, during the so-called rebellion in 2004, over 600 soldiers from the Royal Canadian Regiment -- which itself had received counter-insurgency training from the US Marine Corps for several years at Camp LeJeune, NC (“Exercise Osprey”) -- were airlifted to Haiti from CFB Gagetown, NB to take the airport.

These interventionist forces held the country, along with soldiers from France and the United States, until troops under United Nations command could land.

Since then the Martin Liberals have contributed RCMP expertise to train the Haitian National Police, who have been responsible for massacres and assassinations of civilians since the coup in 2004, and is putting $25 million into a much-delayed election that many observers say is a sham.

The two journalists point out that it was the campaign of destabilization and the coup organized by Canada and the US and others which led to the current situation.

Multi-national military forces in Haiti armed with a Security Council mandate are allowing and, in some cases carrying out, mass violations of human rights. These include the slaughter of civilians in such poor neighbourhoods as Cité Soleil, which are politically sympathetic to Aristide’s and the Lavalas party. In one UN assault on Cite Soleil on 6 July 6, 2005 they killed at least 23 people, and wounded at least 27 others.

Mr. Enler emphasized that, following the coup and the imposition of a puppet interim government, there has been a campaign of state terror to wipe out Haitians who disagree with the occupation and want the return to the constitutional order. Liberal Minister of Foreign Affairs Pierre Pettigrew airily dismissed such war crimes as "propaganda." (1) In this respect the reality of Canada’s role in Haiti exposed Canadian hypocrisy about its desire to stop gross violations of human rights and genocide.

Mr. Engler highlighted the fact that the big powers have done everything possible to destabilize and wreck Haiti in order to have it as a jewel in their colonial crowns.

This was the case with the French, the British the Spanish, the Americans and now Canada. Far from protecting the Haitian people, Mr. Engler explained how companies such as Gildan Active Wear based in Montreal and mining interests want Haiti as a source of cheap slave-like manual labour. Through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the government is using the period that the interim government is in power as a “window of opportunity” to put in place economic arrangements which favour Canadian monopoly interests in the Caribbean. These would be hard to change by a new government that is to be elected.

Canada’s role in Haiti is consistent with its foreign policy historically and its participation in international secret diplomacy and intrigues. Paul Martin Sr. as Minister of Foreign Affairs under Lester B. Pearson quietly supported the US invasion of Vietnam. Paul Martin Jr. is following in his father’s footsteps today.

Canada nurtures a fifth column

Discussion focused on how the government is using its agencies and so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to give legitimacy to the coup and the government in the name of “responsibility to protect” and “humanitarian intervention”. This is one of the most revealing chapters of their book. It is reproduced in full for the reader’s interest on Shunpiking Online. (2)

Yves Engler detailed examples which show how, in the case of Haiti, CIDA uses its resources to assist NGO’s which will present the current government as legitimate and attempt to embroil Canadians in discussing how Canada can “build democracy” in Haiti.

This is how, he said, Canada’s role in Haiti gets covered up. Elections Canada is playing a major role in the preparations and oversight for the upcoming elections, part of the campaign to cover up the coup and legitimize the neo-colonial actions of Canada, the United States, France and the UN Security Council. In 2000, when Aristide was elected, there were 12,000 polling places. The plan for the forthcoming election is to have somewhere between 600 and 800 places to vote. To date these elections have been delayed five times. President Aristide is still in exile.

Tony Seed, editor-publisher of shunpiking magazine, congratulated Anthony Fenton and Yves Engler in their courageous initiative as independent journalists in disclosing the objective reality regarding Canada’s shameless role, and Fernwood Publishers of Black Point, Nova Scotia for co-publishing the work. This investigative work was contributing to smashing the silence of the major media, and unravelling the Liberal adventure in Haiti and its exposure amongst the Canadian people.

Both the invasion of Haiti and this experience of the role of certain NGOs is also, he underlined, a precursor of hostilities and neocolonial intervention against the Republic of Cuba and even Venezuela. The same modus operandi was being used by the United States to destablize the island socialist republic, wherein NGO’s operating in Cuba are required as a condition of CIDA grants to “build democracy”, that is, to participate in the formation of an internal fifth column of so-called “dissidents” – “democracy movement” quarterbacked by the US Special Interests Section in Havana aimed at destabilizing Cuba and returning it to Yankee rule. The term fifth column refers to any clandestine group of people which works covertly inside a nation to undermine its strength (psychological warfare) while the nation is simultaneously suffering an overt attack by a foreign power or another faction in a civil war.

The stand of the “major parties” on Haiti was also discussed. Stu Neatby of Haiti Action Halifax said that they had met with both Alexa McDonough, Halifax MP and NDP foreign affairs and human rights spokesperson, and Halifax West MP and Liberal cabinet minister Geoff Regan. They both gave the identical line that Haiti was not an issue amongst Canadians which was a surprising allegation to the 90 people present. Tony Seed made clear that the NDP conciliation with the Liberals on the Haiti issue is a betrayal of the principles of equal relations between peoples, the right of self-determination, and the interests of the Canadian polity. The silence of Alexa McDonough and of Jack Layton was in sharp distinction to the speeches in the House of Commons by Svend Robinson and Joe Comartin on 10 March 2004, who initially condemned the invasion. For certain, in the future no MP from Nova Scotia can claim they were not informed about the Haiti issue or were ignorant of the crimes being committed in Haiti in the name of Canada.

Endnotes

(1) Pierre Pettigrew, the foreign affairs minister, was decisively defeated in the 39th general election. The Haiti Action Montreal and Le Comite Haitien Pour Les Elections Federales 2006 distributed 12,000 leaflets in his riding urging electors to hold him accountable for Canada's role in the 2004 overthrow of democratically-elected president Aristide and subsequent human rights disaster in Haiti, as well as 2000 posters painting him as a war criminal, and staged a string of demonstrations whenever he made a public appearance. On one occasion, Pettigrew cancelled a meeting and another threatened legal action.

For further reading:

Using NGOs to Destroy Democracy
Canadian-based NGOs helped the federal government use development assistance as a tool of political influence. A chapter from the new book by Yves Engler and Anthony Fention exclusively online on shunpiking.com

http://www.shunpiking.com/10210/0210-BR-YEAF-usingngo.htm