3/8 Haiti News: Ira Kurzban Says Deposed Leader May Bring Criminal Charges Against US

Posted: 03.08.04 @ 12:20 p.m.
Aristide Lawyer: Bush Getting Even In Haiti
Ira Kurzban Says Deposed Leader May Bring Criminal Charges Against US
By Hazel Trice Edney | SACOBSERVER.COM WIRE SERVICES
WASHINGTON (NNPA) - An attorney for former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide, now in exile, says he believes President George W. Bush sought to
finish the agenda of his father by removing rather than protecting the embattled
president last week.

Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was originally deposed during the
presidency of George H.W. Bush in 1991. He was reinstated by President Clinton
in 1994, but ousted again on Feb. 29.
"Dick Cheney was the secretary of defense, Colin Powell was the head of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, and George Bush, the father, was president at the time
of the first military coup against President Aristide," recalls the attorney,
Ira Kurzban of Miami. "Is there a settling of scores in some sense? They
thought they got rid of him the first time, but Clinton brought him back. And now
they want to make sure, before the November election, that they get rid of him a
second time."
Kurzban, who says the deposed leader may bring criminal charges against the
U.S. for what he calls Aristide's involuntary resignation on Feb. 29.
In 1991, the newly-elected President Aristide, a parish priest, was first
deposed by the Haitian military during the presidency of George H. W. Bush. He
remained out of office until he was reinstated with the help of President
Clinton in 1994.
Most members of the Congressional Black Caucus have been outspoken in their
criticism of George W. Bush.
"We have undertaken a coup against a democratically-elected government in
Haiti," Congressman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) said on CNN last week. Rangel said he
had spoken with Aristide by phone.
"He was kidnapped. He resigned under pressure. He and his wife had no idea
where he was going. He was very apprehensive for his life," Rangel charged.
As armed rebel forces closed in on Aristide's Port-Au-Prince palace last
week, Aristide abruptly resigned and was whisked away by U.S. Marines. He and his
American-born wife, Mildred Trouillot, are being housed in Bangui, Central
African Republic, reportedly with no phone privileges after he told the Cable
News Network that he'd been kidnapped.
Secretary of State Colin Powell has called the allegations "baseless, absurd."
But Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who has also spoken recently to Aristide,
dismissed Powell's response.
"He's really not in charge in this issue. He's a mouthpiece that they've run
out there," Waters says. She notes that this isn't the first time rebels, with
U.S. complicity, tried to oust Aristide.
"There were those who tried to pull a coup d'état on him when he had been in
for seven months (in 1991)," Waters says. "There are those who say they pulled
a coup d'état on him now because he didn't govern well and he was corrupt and
all of that. What was their excuse when he had only been in for seven months?"
Waters, who participated in a hearing of the House International Relations
sub-committee on the Western Hemisphere last week, notes that it was the U.S.
that funded and trained the Haitian military during the former Bush
administration. Though disbanded under Clinton, that same army never disarmed. It
became
part of the Front For the Advancement and Progress of Haiti. For protection,
Aristide formed gangs of his own, according to some Haiti observers.
Ron Daniels, founder of the Haiti Support Project and executive director for
the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, said of Aristide: "He's made
some errors and some major mistakes. But that notwithstanding, the United
States had no business coercing and forcing a democratically-elected president
out."
Haiti is a nation of 7.5 million people who are the poorest in the Western
Hemisphere, with 80 percent living in poverty.
Bush has asked Haiti to "Reject violence, to give this break from the past a
chance to work."
More than 500 U.S. Marines are part of a United Nations Multinational Interim
Force that has been sent to Haiti to curb violence. With no army of its own,
the Haitian police is too poorly armed to maintain law and order. Meanwhile,
Boniface Alexandrre, chief justice of the Haiti Supreme Court, has been sworn
in as leader of a transitional government until elections in 2005.
Caricom, the Caribbean Community and Common Market - representatives from the
15 leading Caribbean nations - has proposed that the next president shares
power with the opposition. Caricom has also called for an investigation into the
removal of Aristide.
Amnesty International, a leading human rights organization, worries that
criminals could seize power in Haiti.
"Amnesty International urges the international community, as a matter of
priority, to ensure that under no circumstances are those convicted of or
implicated in serious human rights abuses given any position of authority, whether in
a transitional government or among the security forces, where they might
commit further violations," the organization says in a 14-page report titled
"Perpetrators of Past Abuses Threaten Human Rights and the Reestablishment of Rule
of Law."
American television has been filled with images of bloody bodies lying in the
streets. Unlike the decision to not show dead U.S. soldiers on TV, there is
no such restraint shown toward Haiti's deceased.
''How can we send in people and just allow the killings to go on?" Rep.
Donald Payne (D-N.J.) asked in the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee meeting.
There are unspoken issues, as well.
"There is one issue that is at the core of the problems in Haiti that few
people are talking about," says retired Congressman Walter Fauntroy (D-D.C.), Who
served for 15 years as chairman of a bi-partisan, bi-cameral Congressional
Task Force on Haiti. "In the last 10 years, Haiti has become a major illegal
drug transshipment for the Cali, Medellin and Baranquilla drug cartels in South
America."
Therefore, Fauntroy says, among other actions, the Bush administration must
immediately deliver humanitarian aid and work to prosecute drug lords.
Eugenia Charles, the Haitian co-director of the Haiti Reborn Program of the
Quixote Center, a non-profit social justice advocate in Brentwood, Md., sees
hope among all the bloodshed.
"The hope lies in the process of democracy," Charles says. "The hope lies
when America would stop mingling in Haiti's politics. When you have American
hands behind it, tweaking every angle of it, it is impossible for that process to
go forward."
Hazel Trice Edney is a NNPA Washington correspondent.