(Haiti) Island still enslaved for all its rebellion

[bemildred]

I have a good deal of respect for Mr. Dyer. Here
he provides the no good guys version of recent events in
Haiti.

Haiti's trip to the brink of civil war began last
September, when Amiot Metayer, the leader of a
gang of street thugs called the Cannibal Army
that enforced President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's
will in the northern city of Gonaives, threatened
to reveal details of the murder of opposition
figures. Metayer was promptly murdered. His
widow then conducted a voodoo seance in which
his soul appeared and identified his killers: local
supporters of President Aristide.

The Cannibal Army switched sides, changed its
name to the Gonaives Resistance Front, and
started killing Aristide's prominent backers in the
city. Meanwhile in the capital, Port-au-Prince,
non-violent demonstrators protesting at Aristide's
rigging of the 2000 elections were being
murdered by Government-backed vigilantes
known as chimeres (monsters): 45 were killed
between September and January. Then on
February 5 the former Cannibals seized control
of Gonaives, killing and mutilating more than a
dozen policemen.

Since then they have seized more towns in the
north and been joined by various unsavoury
figures from former regimes such as former
police chief Guy Philippe and former
paramilitary death-squad leader Louis-Jodel
Chamblain. Aristide denounces them as
"terrorists" while his own thugs continue to
attack the non-violent protests of the civilian
opposition in the capital.

Haitians have been here countless times before:
there has been only one peaceful and more or less
democratic change of president in the country's
200 years of independence. Nowhere else in Latin
America comes close to matching Haiti's dismal
record of violence, poverty, corruption and
oppression - and yet Aristide was supposed to be
the man who changed all that.

New Zealand Herald