Reply #26: As Haiti’s Contras Launch Major Offensive:Washington Suggests Aristide’s R [View All]

[Judi Lynn]

As Haiti’s Contras Launch Major Offensive:
Washington Suggests Aristide’s Removal


Haiti’s “armed opposition” launched its most lethal offensive yet last week, creating the civil strife that many suspect Washington seeks to justify foreign military intervention in the country. On Feb. 10, State Department officials gave their first public hints that they would favor President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s resignation.

CARICOM representatives are flying to Washington this week to meet with Bush administration officials about the crisis in Haiti. A State Department official contacted by Haïti Progrès Feb. 10 would not comment on whether Aristide’s removal was on the meeting’s agenda. He would only repeat that “President Aristide is the democratically elected leader of his country.”

Meanwhile, in one of the largest mobilizations in recent years, hundreds of thousands of Haitians marched and rallied in Port-au-Prince on Feb. 7, the anniversary of the 1986 fall of the Duvalier dictatorship, to demand that Aristide fulfill his five-year term, which ends Feb. 6, 2006. Thousands more held similar anti-coup demonstrations in provincial cities. Pro-government popular organizations have begun setting up barricades and taking up arms in the capital and other cities like Jacmel, Cayes and Cap Haïtien to prevent the spread of the armed opposition’s attacks.
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On Feb. 10, popular organizations took up positions around the northern city of Cap Haïtien to prevent rebel attacks there. On Feb. 7, they burned down the local relay of Radio Vision 2000, a powerful USAID-spawned powerful opposition-aligned station. On Feb. 8, barricades went up at the city’s bottleneck entrance, and gunfire crackled during the day and night in its outlying suburbs. The armed opposition, in particular Dominican Republic-based former police chief Guy Philippe, has made no secret of their plans to capture Cap, Haiti’s second largest city. Presently cut off from the capital at Gonaïves, the city, UN aid workers are warning, faces a possible food crisis. Gas supplies have already dwindled.
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http://www.haiti-progres.com/eng02-11.html