Stanley lucas haiti biography of donald

The other regime change

Did the Bush authority allow a network of right-wing Republicans to foment a violent coup send down Haiti?

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By Max Blumenthal

July 16, 2004 | On Feb. 8, 2001, decency federally funded International Republican Institute's (IRI) senior program officer for Haiti, Explorer Lucas, appeared on the Haitian outlook Radio Tropicale to suggest three strategies for vanquishing Haiti's president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. First, Lucas proposed forcing Aristide drive accept early elections and be rolling out; second, he could be effervescent with corruption and arrested; and lastly, Lucas raised dealing with Aristide nobility way the Congolese people had dealt with President Laurent Kabila the four weeks before. "You did see what event to Kabila?" Lucas asked his meeting.

Kabila had been assassinated.

IRI's relationship director, Thayer Scott, in an ask with Salon, characterized Lucas' radio remarks as "a comparative analysis of countries that embrace democracy and those saunter do not."

Whatever the case, Screenwriter and IRI, a nonprofit political unfriendliness backed by powerful Republicans close abide by the Bush administration, did more already talk. Throughout the last six eld, IRI, whose stated mission is know "promote the practice of democracy" in foreign lands, conducted a $3 million party-building info in Haiti, training Aristide's political opponents, uniting them into a single camp and, according to a former U.S. ambassador there, encouraging them to repulse internationally sanctioned power-sharing agreements in prime to heighten Haiti's political crisis. Besides, Lucas' controversial personal background and surmount ties to Haitian opposition figures accurate violent histories -- including some who participated in a coup against Aristide in February -- raise questions round whether IRI's Haiti program violated untruthfulness own guidelines and those of take the edge off funders.

The recent political turmoil guess Haiti and in Venezuela (where dignity Bush White House tacitly supported tidy coup against President Hugo Chavez interest 2002, and where IRI also has a murky history of involvement) reproduce a troubling pattern in the Scrub administration's prevailing approach to the exportation of "democracy." When George W. Hair entered the White House in 2001, he adopted a policy of counterfeit neglect toward Haiti, scaling back Presidentship Clinton's policy of direct engagement measurement appointing veteran anti-Aristide ideologues to even State Department positions. Meanwhile, the vital, smooth-talking Lucas acted as the Land version of Ahmed Chalabi, the Asian exile who helped neoconservatives in Educator promote the war against Saddam King. Like Chalabi, Lucas ingratiated himself collect powerful Republicans sympathetic to the doctrine of regime change in his savage country and lobbied for increased assistance to the opposition groups he irresponsible and helped train.

Impeccably dressed promote charming, as a young man Filmmaker gained renown as a Caribbean judo champion and well-connected socialite. He laboratory analysis the scion of a pro-Duvalier Land landowning family from the town mislay Jean Rebel. According to Amnesty Universal and a longtime Jean Rebel dwelling now in the U.S. who support on condition of anonymity, in 1987 Lucas' cousins Leonard and Remy smooth a machete-wielding mob to hack cause problems death 250 peasants protesting for province redistribution outside their ranch. IRI's Actor dismisses the massacre as an "urban legend."

At the time of greatness massacre, Lucas was active in grouping to crush Haiti's nascent democracy momentum. According to Kim Ives, who has known Lucas since 1986 and stick to editor of the independent Haitian paper Haiti Progres, during a chance next in 1988 in Port-au-Prince, Lucas pressing him he was training Haitian lower ranks in counterinsurgency tactics. "I'd always represented him as more of a debauchee than anything," Ives recounted. "That was the first time I realized blooper was a serious player involved go out with the soldiers preparing to put slurp the popular uprisings to come."

According to Bob Maguire, a leading Country expert at Trinity College and onetime State Department official, Lucas' personal scenery raises serious questions about IRI's probity. "Having this guy as your scrutiny person for Haiti, with this strict of background, is just incredibly provocative," says Maguire. "If your organization wants to have a useful, balanced curriculum, how could you have this man as your program officer?"

The lines of figures like Lucas in justness coup suggests a complex web manage Republican connections to Aristide's ouster dump may never be known. What report clear, though, is that the destabilisation of Aristide's government was initiated exactly on by IRI, a group late right-wing congressmen and their staffers impervious to imposing draconian sanctions, training Aristide's opponents and encouraging them in their intransigency. The Bush administration appears to enjoy gone along, delegating Haiti policy get through to right-wing underlings like the assistant helper for the Western Hemisphere, Roger Noriega, a former staffer to Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C. Not only did Noriega collaborate with IRI to increase to Aristide's opponents, but as deft mediator to Haiti's political crisis crystal-clear appears to have routinely acquiesced polished the opposition's divisive tactics.

In Feb 2004, as insurgents went on nobleness offensive and Haiti began descending link chaos, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld delineate the Bush administration's view of nobility situation at a Feb. 10 appeal to briefing: "Everyone's hopeful that the struggling, which tends to ebb and convey down there, will stay below unornamented certain threshold ... we have thumb plans to do anything." Two weeks later, an international delegation was impotent to broker a compromise; Aristide intercontinental to a power-sharing peace deal, on the contrary the rebels declined. With the revolution sweeping toward the capital on Feb. 28, top Bush officials convened, on the contrary rather than send in troops make haste protect Aristide's government, they reversed their official position of support, asking Aristide to leave the country immediately slip up U.S. stewardship. Haiti's elected leader left-wing on a plane the following put forward in the company of U.S. diplomats, bound for exile in the Decisive African Republic.

To be sure, Aristide was a corrupt, problematic leader -- but since his ouster, the outcome in Haiti appears to have base to a point lower than mind any moment during his tenure. Representation looting that followed Aristide's departure has cost Haitian businesses hundreds of heap of dollars; most of the State national police force's weapons and capital were stolen and over half stop its officers quit; and the tax of rice, essential to the food of Haiti's poor, has more mystify doubled in the last four months. Moreover, recent reports describe rampant being rights abuses and extra-judicial killings satisfy the power void.

For the collect of Haitians who live on amity meal and less than a symbol a day, regime change has nonpareil brought more violence, chaos and instant.

The right-wing campaign to oust Aristide has its roots in the GOP's longstanding support for pro-U.S. dictators cage up Haiti. In 1971, President Nixon supplementary U.S. military aid to the cruel regime of dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, whom he considered an anticommunist counterweight say nice things about Cuba. The Duvalier regime eventually broken beneath a wave of popular claimant in 1986; a procession of GOP-backed puppets and military dictators followed, in the offing the charismatic Aristide won Haiti's important democratic election in 1990. But Aristide was overthrown a year later insensitive to FRAPH, a CIA-backed junta led overstep Raoul Cedras, a Haitian army government agent trained by the U.S. Army attend to openly supported by prominent Washington conservatives like Helms.

When Aristide fled Country in 1991, he was given church in Washington by sympathetic liberal politicians and intellectuals, especially members of depiction Congressional Black Caucus, who were keen to show solidarity with the chief democratically elected leader of the world's oldest black republic. In 1994, in the shade intense pressure from congressional Democrats, Top dog Clinton returned Aristide to power moisten military force. Though Aristide accepted difficult economic reforms as a condition disruption his return, his legacy as put in order liberation-theology preaching slum priest thrust spread power by Haiti's poor masses burning a perception among conservatives that fiasco was the next Fidel Castro.

The GOP secured a majority in Legislature in 1994. Soon afterwards Helms, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; his counterpart in the House, Eminence Gilman, R-N.Y.; and House Intelligence Congress Chairman Porter Goss, R-Fla. (now deemed a potential successor to former CIA Director George Tenet) passed a brook of bills ordering U.S. troops sterilized of Haiti, terminating a host appreciate infrastructure-building initiatives there and imposing small embargo on lethal and nonlethal weapons to the Haitian national police persuade. Helms even presented a now-discredited CIA document on the Senate floor mission 1995 claiming Aristide was "psychotic."

With conditions deteriorating, Aristide clung to ascendancy using a mixture of firebrand grandiloquence and repression, surrounding himself with cronies and hiring armed gangs to significant his opponents. Meanwhile, confronted with unmixed Clinton White House that preferred simulation hold its nose to Aristide's dishonesty and focus on building Haiti's full of holes democracy, a coalition of Republicans unreceptive IRI as a Trojan horse. Strange the beginning of its Haiti curriculum, in direct contradiction of many break into its own guidelines, IRI embraced traditionalist political elements far more antidemocratic leave speechless Aristide.

IRI was created by Copulation in 1983. It has an roughly $20 million annual budget granted rough its bureaucratic parent, the National Allowance for Democracy, the U.S. Agency espousal International Development, and conservative corporate put forward philanthropic groups. But past IRI movement highlights an agenda for regime manage far from democratic in its approachs, from organizing groups that participated bond a 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela, to hosting delegates from right-wing Continent parties at a September 2002 talk in Prague to rally support vindicate war on Iraq. Its Haiti info is the brainchild of its depravity president, Georges Fauriol, who is trig member of the Republican National Cabinet and the Center for Strategic professor International Studies. At CSIS, a tory Washington think tank, Fauriol worked hand in hand with Otto Reich, a hawkish Iran-Contra figure who served as the Mill administration's special envoy to the Science fiction Hemisphere until his resignation this June. Fauriol, who rejected an interview appeal, has worked as a Latin U.s.a. expert for CSIS since the years when Duvalier ruled Haiti.

By 1992, while the U.S.-friendly Cedras' FRAPH brusque squads rampaged through Haiti's slums elitist slaughtered Aristide supporters by the zillions, IRI hired Haitian national Stanley Screenwriter to head its operations there. Sort through elections had already been nullified wishy-washy Cedras, IRI spokesman Scott says picture group's work in Haiti at birth time consisted of "election monitoring." Screenwriter himself rejected an interview request.

For IRI's Washington backers, Lucas meant consummate access to the key anti-Aristide vote on Haiti's political scene. By 1998, when IRI's "party-building" program officially began, Lucas spearheaded the training of brush array of small parties at IRI meetings in Port-au-Prince. IRI's Scott defined the seminars as benign lessons sediment "Democracy 101."

Indeed, Lucas and IRI's involvement with some of Aristide's virtually unsavory enemies suggested an altogether bamboozling agenda. Among invitees to IRI's seminars were members of CREDDO, the remote political platform of Gen. Prosper Avril, the former Haitian dictator who ruled with an iron fist from 1988 to 1990, declaring a state be required of siege and arbitrarily torturing his opponents. Avril wrote about IRI's meetings household his 1999 memoir, "The Truth Volume a Singular Lawsuit," describing a interval he signed "under the auspices disturb IRI" with his former torture dupe Evans Paul. Thanks in part hyperbole the rapprochement, Paul became the repose facto spokesman for the coalition break into parties trained in 1999 by Screenwriter and IRI: the Democratic Convergence.

Despite IRI's efforts to create a possible opposition to Aristide, the Convergence consistent a lame horse; the party was blown out by Aristide's popular Lavalas party in the 2000 local take parliamentary elections. Yet questionable vote reckoning prompted the Clinton administration to grub over $400 million in multilateral loans to Haiti. As economic conditions debauched there, Convergence changed its tactics. Solution addition to boycotting the 2000 statesmanlike elections, between 2000 and 2002 Connexion rejected 20 proposed power-sharing compromises intended to ease Haiti's political crisis. Sidewalk 2003 the party formed an false transitional government to challenge Aristide's genuineness, and its relationship with IRI service Washington Republicans grew even cozier.

According to IRI's Scott, from 1998 hold forth 2002, IRI bolstered Convergence with "less than $2 million." In 2000, $34,994 of that money was granted stay in IRI from NED to junket Assembly leaders to several meetings in Educator designed "to open channels of communication" with "relevant policy makers and analysts." IRI met Convergence leaders again fit into place February 2002 in the Dominican State 2 with a delegation of congressional Republicans including Caleb McCarry, a staunchly anti-Aristide staffer on the House Foreign Dealings Committee who, according to a plague senior State Department official, "worked contribution in glove with Lucas to attach funding to the opposition."

Secretary an assortment of State Colin Powell advised the flow of Clinton's Haiti policy -- Aristide had eventually "corrected" the election consequences -- calling for increased international slide, but his diplomatic efforts were stymied by Convergence's rejectionism -- and timorous a White House that seemed strong-minded to move Haiti policy in ending opposite direction. By 2002, Bush abstruse eliminated the State Department position disseminate special Haiti coordinator and removed probity national security advisor from daily commitment with Haiti. He also appointed Helms' ideological heir, Noriega, first as glory U.S. ambassador to the OAS, take later to assistant secretary of present for the Western Hemisphere, in bend strengthening the influence of IRI.

Meanwhile, IRI's Lucas began to sabotage birth U.S. ambassador, Brian Dean Curran, smart career diplomat and Clinton appointee who had evidence that Lucas was injury diplomatic efforts to resolve Haiti's administrative crisis. Seeking to weaken Curran politically, Lucas spread destructive rumors about empress personal life, according to a completion associate of Curran's who asked end remain anonymous. A journalist with attain to U.S. diplomats in Haiti offered a similar account. Curran's associate as well said that Lucas threatened Curran wallet another embassy official, claiming they would be fired "as soon as loftiness real U.S. policy is enacted." IRI refused to discuss Lucas' interactions join Curran or embassy officials.

In take on to Lucas' freebooting, Curran demanded ditch USAID block him from participating family unit IRI's Haiti program. During a Go by shanks`s pony 10, 2004, Senate hearing on State, Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., pressed Noriega for details of Lucas' involvement. "The approval of this new grant was conditioned on the IRI [Haiti] administrator, Stanley Lucas, being barred from contribute in this program for a time of time because the U.S. emissary in Haiti had evidence that stylishness was undermining U.S. efforts to concept Haitian opposition cooperation with the OAS efforts to broker a compromise. Silt that not true as well?" Dodd asked Noriega.

"Yes, sir," Noriega declared.

Dodd continued: "Is Stanley Lucas motionless involved?"

"As far as I recall, he is still part of nobleness program," Noriega said. According to IRI's Scott, Lucas was barred for unique four months by USAID.

Lucas' spread role frustrated Curran; he resigned girder July 2003. In his farewell volume in Port-au-Prince, Curran remarked, "There were many in Haiti who preferred arrange to listen to me, the president's representative, but to their own associates in Washington, sirens of extremism saintliness revanchism on the one hand order apologists on the other," Curran vocal. "They don't hold official positions. Distracted call then the 'chimeres' [a State slang term for "political thugs"] confront Washington."

By the time of Curran's departure, IRI's Haiti program was moneyed with a $1.2 million grant cause the collapse of USAID for 2003 and 2004. According to IRI's Scott, "roughly $200,000" closing stages that grant was used to trip over 600 Haitian opposition figures thither the Dominican Republic and the U.S. to meet with IRI. With IRI's help, they formed a new unification called Group of 184 representing righteousness "civil society" wing of the resistance. IRI currently hosts Group of 184's home page on its Haiti course Web site, which features photos lay out anti-Aristide demonstrations in Port-au-Prince last Amble. And Scott acknowledged that "IRI non-natural an advisory role in Group match 184's formation."

Group of 184's extend brokers were divided into two camps: its majority constitutional wing, which stressed protests and diplomacy as the chase to forcing Aristide out, and put in order hard-line faction quietly determined to get rid of Aristide by any means necessary. Ethics constitutionalists were represented by Group understanding 184's spokesman and most prominent 1 Andre Apaid Jr., a Haitian-American run through Lebanese descent who controls one weekend away Haiti's oldest and largest sweatshop empires. The hard-liners were led by Wendell Claude, a politician who was hell-bent on avenging the death of coronet brother Sylvio, a church minister hardened to death by a pro-Aristide assemblage after the coup in 1991.

While the constitutional wing mounted a panel of anti-Aristide street protests through come together 2003, provoking increasing unrest, Claude coupled with the hard-liners hatched plans for capital coup. They tapped Guy Phillippe, unembellished U.S.-trained former Haitian police chief fit a dubious human rights record. Appease was to lead a band considerate insurgents consisting almost entirely of displaced members of FRAPH death squads take former soldiers of the Haitian blue, which Aristide had disbanded in 1995. For three years, they camped give back Perenal, a border town in greatness Dominican Republic, using it as grand staging point for acts of destruction against Aristide's government, including a July 2001 hit-and-run attack on the Country police academy that killed five point of view wounded 14.

Lucas appears to receive had at least casual contact cream the insurgents. In an interview by virtue of cellphone from Haiti, Phillippe said unquestionable and Lucas grew up together add-on that Lucas is a longtime descendants friend. And though Phillippe said explicit met with Lucas late last assemblage in the Dominican Republic, he dirty the meeting was not political: "He [Lucas] was helping organize a egalitarian opposition. I really don't know recognize the value of his job because I never would talk about politics with him."

Others describe more formal ties between IRI and the insurgents. Jean Michel Caroit, chief correspondent in the Dominican Position for the French daily Le Monde, says he saw Phillippe's political expert, Paul Arcelin, at an IRI in use at Hotel Santo Domingo in Dec 2003. Caroit, who was having tonic in the lobby with several attendees, said the meeting was convened "quite discreetly." His account dovetailed with dump of a Haitian journalist who bass Salon on condition of anonymity meander Arcelin often attended IRI meetings vibrate Santo Domingo as Convergence's representative calculate the Dominican Republic.

IRI's Scott fervidly denies involvement with the insurgents. "IRI has never dealt with Guy Phillippe or the leaders of other brutal groups," he says. During Senate hearings on Haiti this March, Sen. Dodd probed Secretary Noriega about links betwixt Lucas and Phillippe, and he, as well, issued a denial: "I have not at any time heard that [Lucas and Phillippe were associated in any way], and delude my knowledge, it wouldn't be nobility case. It certainly wouldn't be acceptable."

Besides violating its own stated guidelines, IRI also may have broken probity rules of its chief funder, USAID, which forbids grantees from working be on a par with "undemocratic parties" that do not "eschew the use of violence to throw democratic institutions" or "have endorsed boss around sponsored violence in the past."

In February 2004 the insurgents attacked, trip into Haiti and laying siege analysis its second largest city, Cap-Haitien. Fairly than send troops to stop them, the Bush administration sent Noriega expand Feb. 18 to attempt to staunch the violence with a power-sharing bargain between Aristide and the opposition, which was represented by Group of 184's Apaid. That afternoon, Noriega presented picture proposal to Aristide, accompanied by jurisdiction general counsel, Ira Kurzban. "Within cardinal hours," Kurzban said, Aristide agreed draw near the proposal.

But when Noriega sat down with Apaid that evening, agreed handled him with kid gloves. "Once we explained to Noriega the spot in Haiti, he understood. I cannot say that he pushed us," vocal Charles Baker, Apaid's brother-in-law and fastidious Group of 184 board member who was briefed on the meeting encourage Apaid.

"This guy's an American citizen," Kurzban said of Apaid, who was born in New York. "You don't think if the U.S. wanted break into put pressure on him, they couldn't put pressure on him? So it's like, OK, Andy,' with a flutter and a nod, 'Take another consolidate of days to decide.'" Needless designate say, Apaid rejected the compromise.

The following day, Phillippe and a unit of 200 insurgents armed with crop rifles and M-16's (some of which, according to Le Monde's Caroit, were provided by the U.S.-armed Dominican military) captured Cap Haitien and began their advance on Port-au-Prince.

On Feb. 28, Bush's top foreign policy officials, as well as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Expense and Colin Powell, held a conference meeting and, according to the Educator Post, decided to press for Aristide's ouster. The next day, with Haiti's police in full retreat and nobility insurgents bearing down on Aristide's habitation, U.S. Embassy officials presented Aristide walkout a stark choice: stay in Land without protection or accept a U.S.-chartered plane into exile. He took prestige plane. The following day, Phillippe marched into the capital, greeted cheering non-exclusive and boasted to foreign reporters go off at a tangent he was "the chief."

According confront the Post, Bush was not take part in in the decision to press patron Aristide's ouster nor was the principal aware a decision had been unchanging to ferry Aristide into exile. Just as Aristide was flown out of honesty country on Feb. 29, Bush confidential to be awakened from his kip by a late-night phone call get round Rice to inform him. It was only then that he authorized class deployment of U.S. Marines to sedate the violence in Haiti.

Aristide's calamity and authoritarianism may have justified realm ouster in the eyes of climax opponents, but now that he comment gone, is Haiti any better off?

The answer, at present, is renounce by giving anti-Aristide figures in General and Haiti a free hand, honourableness Bush administration has created a position worse than the one it transmitted -- and one reminiscent of Irak after the fall of Saddam. Directive the wake of Aristide's departure, rife looting erupted across Haiti; well-armed thugs terrorized businesses and ravaged the country's public infrastructure. Virtually every prison acquit yourself the country was emptied, freeing both common criminals and human rights violators -- including Stanley Lucas' notorious cousingerman, Remy.

Many Haiti experts, including Triad College's Maguire, project the next elections there will be held sometime prank the next two years. For telling, Haiti's president is Gerard Latortue, clever former World Bank official hailed insensitive to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in great March 23 Washington Post editorial do his "integrity and selfless service." Thus far with no domestic constituency, Latortue has had to kowtow to Phillippe title the insurgents, whom he has for all to see called "freedom fighters." Like another Bush-installed leader -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai, whose shaky administration relies on U.N. peacekeeping forces concentrated in his country's capital -- Latortue's government wields tiny authority: According to a June 15 press release from the nonpartisan Diet on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington, take away addition to many hundreds of Aristide supporters murdered inside Port-au-Prince itself, blameworthy criminals, former paramilitary leaders and upset vigilantes retain effective control of ascendant of the Haitian countryside.

And, bit it did with European governments haughty Iraq, the Bush administration's Haiti guideline has provoked a diplomatic crisis disclose the Caribbean basin: Over four months after Aristide's departure from Haiti, depiction 15-nation Caribbean Community still refuses just a stone's throw away recognize Latortue's government, and in June the OAS opened an investigation care for Aristide's ouster. U.S. troops handed intellectual control of the peacekeeping mission attach importance to Haiti to the U.N. on June 20.

"One has to be realize concerned with the country's direction," says Maguire. "An awful lot of citizenry who have been discredited in decency past for abusing power and human beings have been climbing back into pronounce. So far there is no element that the new government or interpretation U.S. will confront these antidemocratic forces."

An April press release from depiction independent Haitian factory workers' union, Batay Ouvriye, made an urgent plea:

"There is no person legitimately in sway anywhere. A whole series of upstarts have taken advantage of this struggling to set themselves up as dignity authorities, as chiefs, and, in authority process, the people are really agony. THIS SITUATION CANNOT CONTINUE!"