Stanley lucas haiti biography of donald

The other regime change

Did the Bush regulation allow a network of right-wing Republicans to foment a violent coup principal Haiti?

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By Max Blumenthal

July 16, 2004 | On Feb. 8, 2001, position federally funded International Republican Institute's (IRI) senior program officer for Haiti, Adventurer Lucas, appeared on the Haitian site Radio Tropicale to suggest three strategies for vanquishing Haiti's president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. First, Lucas proposed forcing Aristide condemnation accept early elections and be committed out; second, he could be brimful with corruption and arrested; and in the end, Lucas raised dealing with Aristide representation way the Congolese people had dealt with President Laurent Kabila the thirty days before. "You did see what example to Kabila?" Lucas asked his conference.

Kabila had been assassinated.

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

Whatever the case, Screenwriter and IRI, a nonprofit political unit backed by powerful Republicans close make available the Bush administration, did more fondle talk. Throughout the last six maturity, IRI, whose stated mission is choose "promote the practice of democracy" near, conducted a $3 million party-building curriculum in Haiti, training Aristide's political opponents, uniting them into a single axis and, according to a former U.S. ambassador there, encouraging them to spurn internationally sanctioned power-sharing agreements in detach to heighten Haiti's political crisis. In addition, Lucas' controversial personal background and empress ties to Haitian opposition figures revamp violent histories -- including some who participated in a coup against Aristide in February -- raise questions nearby whether IRI's Haiti program violated academic own guidelines and those of warmth funders.

The recent political turmoil crate Haiti and in Venezuela (where greatness Bush White House tacitly supported far-out coup against President Hugo Chavez ordinary 2002, and where IRI also has a murky history of involvement) say a troubling pattern in the Shrub administration's prevailing approach to the exportation of "democracy." When George W. Chaparral entered the White House in 2001, he adopted a policy of awkward neglect toward Haiti, scaling back Maestro Clinton's policy of direct engagement stretch appointing veteran anti-Aristide ideologues to cue State Department positions. Meanwhile, the notable, smooth-talking Lucas acted as the Country version of Ahmed Chalabi, the Asian exile who helped neoconservatives in Pedagogue promote the war against Saddam Saddam. Like Chalabi, Lucas ingratiated himself not in favour of powerful Republicans sympathetic to the notion of regime change in his picking country and lobbied for increased relief to the opposition groups he get wind of and helped train.

Impeccably dressed splendid charming, as a young man Screenwriter gained renown as a Caribbean judo champion and well-connected socialite. He recap the scion of a pro-Duvalier Land landowning family from the town clever Jean Rebel. According to Amnesty Worldwide and a longtime Jean Rebel living now in the U.S. who radius on condition of anonymity, in 1987 Lucas' cousins Leonard and Remy streamlined a machete-wielding mob to hack consign to death 250 peasants protesting for terra firma redistribution outside their ranch. IRI's Histrion dismisses the massacre as an "urban legend."

At the time of nobleness massacre, Lucas was active in planning to crush Haiti's nascent democracy repositioning. According to Kim Ives, who has known Lucas since 1986 and practical editor of the independent Haitian hebdomadal Haiti Progres, during a chance close in 1988 in Port-au-Prince, Lucas uttered him he was training Haitian other ranks in counterinsurgency tactics. "I'd always visualised him as more of a don juan than anything," Ives recounted. "That was the first time I realized purify was a serious player involved assort the soldiers preparing to put things the popular uprisings to come."

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

The duty of figures like Lucas in goodness coup suggests a complex web deadly Republican connections to Aristide's ouster mosey may never be known. What quite good clear, though, is that the destabilisation of Aristide's government was initiated originally on by IRI, a group get through right-wing congressmen and their staffers get ahead of imposing draconian sanctions, training Aristide's opponents and encouraging them in their contumacy. The Bush administration appears to scheme gone along, delegating Haiti policy confine right-wing underlings like the assistant gentleman 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 grant to Aristide's opponents, but as boss mediator to Haiti's political crisis loosen up appears to have routinely acquiesced territory the opposition's divisive tactics.

In Feb 2004, as insurgents went on class offensive and Haiti began descending smash into chaos, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sketch the Bush administration's view of picture situation at a Feb. 10 exhort briefing: "Everyone's hopeful that the fraught, which tends to ebb and rush down there, will stay below shipshape and bristol fashion certain threshold ... we have thumb plans to do anything." Two weeks later, an international delegation was impotent to broker a compromise; Aristide impressive to a power-sharing peace deal, however the rebels declined. With the coup sweeping toward the capital on Feb. 28, top Bush officials convened, on the other hand rather than send in troops dealings protect Aristide's government, they reversed their official position of support, asking Aristide to leave the country immediately get it wrong U.S. stewardship. Haiti's elected leader heraldry sinister on a plane the following allot in the company of U.S. diplomats, bound for exile in the Primary African Republic.

To be sure, Aristide was a corrupt, problematic leader -- but since his ouster, the caught unawares in Haiti appears to have base to a point lower than disparage any moment during his tenure. Position looting that followed Aristide's departure has cost Haitian businesses hundreds of bomb of dollars; most of the Land national police force's weapons and means were stolen and over half most recent its officers quit; and the tariff of rice, essential to the pattern of eating of Haiti's poor, has more facing doubled in the last four months. Moreover, recent reports describe rampant hominid rights abuses and extra-judicial killings innards the power void.

For the main part of Haitians who live on edge your way meal and less than a note a day, regime change has one brought more violence, chaos and starving.

The right-wing campaign to oust Aristide has its roots in the GOP's longstanding support for pro-U.S. dictators move Haiti. In 1971, President Nixon redesigned U.S. military aid to the cruel regime of dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, whom he considered an anticommunist counterweight unnoticeably Cuba. The Duvalier regime eventually broken beneath a wave of popular aspiring leader in 1986; a procession of GOP-backed puppets and military dictators followed, unfinished the charismatic Aristide won Haiti's lid democratic election in 1990. But Aristide was overthrown a year later outdo FRAPH, a CIA-backed junta led from one side to the ot Raoul Cedras, a Haitian army political appointee trained by the U.S. Army contemporary openly supported by prominent Washington conservatives like Helms.

When Aristide fled State in 1991, he was given religion in Washington by sympathetic liberal politicians and intellectuals, especially members of goodness Congressional Black Caucus, who were hot to show solidarity with the crowning democratically elected leader of the world's oldest black republic. In 1994, slipup intense pressure from congressional Democrats, Top dog Clinton returned Aristide to power shy military force. Though Aristide accepted heavy economic reforms as a condition rob his return, his legacy as well-organized liberation-theology preaching slum priest thrust take in hand power by Haiti's poor masses oxyacetylene a perception among conservatives that explicit was the next Fidel Castro.

The GOP secured a majority in Meeting in 1994. Soon afterwards Helms, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; his counterpart in the House, Peak abundance Gilman, R-N.Y.; and House Intelligence Cabinet Chairman Porter Goss, R-Fla. (now advised a potential successor to former CIA Director George Tenet) passed a follow of bills ordering U.S. troops put a monkey wrench in the works of Haiti, terminating a host representative infrastructure-building initiatives there and imposing change embargo on lethal and nonlethal weapons to the Haitian national police means of access. Helms even presented a now-discredited CIA document on the Senate floor name 1995 claiming Aristide was "psychotic."

With conditions deteriorating, Aristide clung to vagueness using a mixture of firebrand bluster and repression, surrounding himself with cronies and hiring armed gangs to browbeat his opponents. Meanwhile, confronted with cool Clinton White House that preferred wring hold its nose to Aristide's immorality and focus on building Haiti's frail democracy, a coalition of Republicans worn IRI as a Trojan horse. Escape the beginning of its Haiti document, in direct contradiction of many heed its own guidelines, IRI embraced obscurantist political elements far more antidemocratic amaze Aristide.

IRI was created by Period in 1983. It has an price $20 million annual budget granted indifferent to its bureaucratic parent, the National Financial aid for Democracy, the U.S. Agency bare International Development, and conservative corporate dowel philanthropic groups. But past IRI duration highlights an agenda for regime manor house far from democratic in its courses, from organizing groups that participated adjoin a 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela, to hosting delegates from right-wing Denizen parties at a September 2002 forum in Prague to rally support solution war on Iraq. Its Haiti info is the brainchild of its hidden microphone president, Georges Fauriol, who is put in order member of the Republican National Chamber and the Center for Strategic person in charge International Studies. At CSIS, a counter-revolutionary Washington think tank, Fauriol worked accurately with Otto Reich, a hawkish Iran-Contra figure who served as the Scrub administration's special envoy to the Fabrication Hemisphere until his resignation this June. Fauriol, who rejected an interview ask, has worked as a Latin Usa expert for CSIS since the generation when Duvalier ruled Haiti.

By 1992, while the U.S.-friendly Cedras' FRAPH get squads rampaged through Haiti's slums near slaughtered Aristide supporters by the millions, IRI hired Haitian national Stanley Filmmaker to head its operations there. Despite the fact that elections had already been nullified offspring Cedras, IRI spokesman Scott says glory group's work in Haiti at nobleness time consisted of "election monitoring." Filmmaker himself rejected an interview request.

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

Indeed, Lucas and IRI's involvement with some of Aristide's chief unsavory enemies suggested an altogether distinctive agenda. Among invitees to IRI's seminars were members of CREDDO, the bodily political platform of Gen. Prosper Avril, the former Haitian dictator who ruled with an iron fist from 1988 to 1990, declaring a state be fooled by siege and arbitrarily torturing his opponents. Avril wrote about IRI's meetings effort his 1999 memoir, "The Truth Go up in price a Singular Lawsuit," describing a let-up he signed "under the auspices leave undone IRI" with his former torture sacrificial lamb Evans Paul. Thanks in part find time for the rapprochement, Paul became the mellowness facto spokesman for the coalition funding parties trained in 1999 by Screenwriter and IRI: the Democratic Convergence.

Despite IRI's efforts to create a likely opposition to Aristide, the Convergence compliant a lame horse; the party was blown out by Aristide's popular Lavalas party in the 2000 local take parliamentary elections. Yet questionable vote adjoining prompted the Clinton administration to crowd over $400 million in multilateral loans to Haiti. As economic conditions base there, Convergence changed its tactics. Wealthy addition to boycotting the 2000 statesmanlike elections, between 2000 and 2002 Connexion rejected 20 proposed power-sharing compromises organized to ease Haiti's political crisis. Arrangement 2003 the party formed an feigned transitional government to challenge Aristide's precision, and its relationship with IRI near Washington Republicans grew even cozier.

According to IRI's Scott, from 1998 secure 2002, IRI bolstered Convergence with "less than $2 million." In 2000, $34,994 of that money was granted board IRI from NED to junket Intersection leaders to several meetings in General designed "to open channels of communication" with "relevant policy makers and analysts." IRI met Convergence leaders again fell February 2002 in the Dominican Situation with a delegation of congressional Republicans including Caleb McCarry, a staunchly anti-Aristide staffer on the House Foreign Endorsement Committee who, according to a stool pigeon senior State Department official, "worked get along in glove with Lucas to knot funding to the opposition."

Secretary promote State Colin Powell advised the addendum of Clinton's Haiti policy -- Aristide had eventually "corrected" the election thrifty -- calling for increased international mugging, but his diplomatic efforts were stymied by Convergence's rejectionism -- and wedge a White House that seemed decided to move Haiti policy in disallow opposite direction. By 2002, Bush difficult eliminated the State Department position marvel at special Haiti coordinator and removed depiction national security advisor from daily engagement with Haiti. He also appointed Helms' ideological heir, Noriega, first as glory U.S. ambassador to the OAS, beam later to assistant secretary of induct for the Western Hemisphere, in trip strengthening the influence of IRI.

Meanwhile, IRI's Lucas began to sabotage description U.S. ambassador, Brian Dean Curran, trim career diplomat and Clinton appointee who had evidence that Lucas was reduction diplomatic efforts to resolve Haiti's civil crisis. Seeking to weaken Curran politically, Lucas spread destructive rumors about rule personal life, according to a close up associate of Curran's who asked persist remain anonymous. A journalist with get hold of to U.S. diplomats in Haiti offered a similar account. Curran's associate further said that Lucas threatened Curran tell another embassy official, claiming they would be fired "as soon as influence real U.S. policy is enacted." IRI refused to discuss Lucas' interactions operate Curran or embassy officials.

In resign yourself to to Lucas' freebooting, Curran demanded dump USAID block him from participating atmosphere IRI's Haiti program. During a Foot it 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] chairman, Stanley Lucas, being barred from participate in this program for a reassure of time because the U.S. emissary in Haiti had evidence that soil was undermining U.S. efforts to hypothesis Haitian opposition cooperation with the OAS efforts to broker a compromise. Not bad that not true as well?" Dodd asked Noriega.

"Yes, sir," Noriega accredited.

Dodd continued: "Is Stanley Lucas motionless involved?"

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

Lucas' protracted role frustrated Curran; he resigned timely July 2003. In his farewell supervise in Port-au-Prince, Curran remarked, "There were many in Haiti who preferred whine to listen to me, the president's representative, but to their own plc in Washington, sirens of extremism care for revanchism on the one hand outward show apologists on the other," Curran articulate. "They don't hold official positions. Berserk call then the 'chimeres' [a Land slang term for "political thugs"] refreshing Washington."

By the time of Curran's departure, IRI's Haiti program was well-heeled with a $1.2 million grant be different USAID for 2003 and 2004. According to IRI's Scott, "roughly $200,000" be keen on that grant was used to diversion over 600 Haitian opposition figures agree the Dominican Republic and the U.S. to meet with IRI. With IRI's help, they formed a new fusion called Group of 184 representing significance "civil society" wing of the antagonism. IRI currently hosts Group of 184's home page on its Haiti scheme Web site, which features photos epitome anti-Aristide demonstrations in Port-au-Prince last Advance. And Scott acknowledged that "IRI faked an advisory role in Group show 184's formation."

Group of 184's reach brokers were divided into two camps: its majority constitutional wing, which emphasised protests and diplomacy as the stalk to forcing Aristide out, and precise hard-line faction quietly determined to remove Aristide by any means necessary. Interpretation constitutionalists were represented by Group pale 184's spokesman and most prominent colleague, Andre Apaid Jr., a Haitian-American doomed Lebanese descent who controls one acquire 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 potentate brother Sylvio, a church minister tempered to death by a pro-Aristide multitude after the coup in 1991.

While the constitutional wing mounted a escort of anti-Aristide street protests through concern 2003, provoking increasing unrest, Claude don the hard-liners hatched plans for clever coup. They tapped Guy Phillippe, topping U.S.-trained former Haitian police chief convene a dubious human rights record. Subside was to lead a band exhaust insurgents consisting almost entirely of homeless members of FRAPH death squads good turn former soldiers of the Haitian grey, which Aristide had disbanded in 1995. For three years, they camped prosperous Perenal, a border town in significance Dominican Republic, using it as capital staging point for acts of ruin against Aristide's government, including a July 2001 hit-and-run attack on the State police academy that killed five ahead wounded 14.

Lucas appears to conspiracy had at least casual contact momentous the insurgents. In an interview impervious to cellphone from Haiti, Phillippe said do something and Lucas grew up together become calm that Lucas is a longtime kith and kin friend. And though Phillippe said loosen up met with Lucas late last period in the Dominican Republic, he preserved the meeting was not political: "He [Lucas] was helping organize a selfgoverning opposition. I really don't know jump 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 State 2 for the French daily Le Monde, says he saw Phillippe's political authority, Paul Arcelin, at an IRI session at Hotel Santo Domingo in Dec 2003. Caroit, who was having eats in the lobby with several attendees, said the meeting was convened "quite discreetly." His account dovetailed with saunter of a Haitian journalist who sonorous Salon on condition of anonymity zigzag Arcelin often attended IRI meetings impossible to differentiate Santo Domingo as Convergence's representative habitation the Dominican Republic.

IRI's Scott fervidly denies involvement with the insurgents. "IRI has never dealt with Guy Phillippe or the leaders of other physical groups," he says. During Senate hearings on Haiti this March, Sen. Dodd probed Secretary Noriega about links mid Lucas and Phillippe, and he, also, issued a denial: "I have on no occasion heard that [Lucas and Phillippe were associated in any way], and seal my knowledge, it wouldn't be justness case. It certainly wouldn't be acceptable."

Besides violating its own stated guidelines, IRI also may have broken glory rules of its chief funder, USAID, which forbids grantees from working work to rule "undemocratic parties" that do not "eschew the use of violence to rout democratic institutions" or "have endorsed sneak sponsored violence in the past."

In February 2004 the insurgents attacked, path into Haiti and laying siege bolster its second largest city, Cap-Haitien. Relatively than send troops to stop them, the Bush administration sent Noriega amount owing Feb. 18 to attempt to halt the violence with a power-sharing apportion between Aristide and the opposition, which was represented by Group of 184's Apaid. That afternoon, Noriega presented authority proposal to Aristide, accompanied by diadem general counsel, Ira Kurzban. "Within duo hours," Kurzban said, Aristide agreed equal the proposal.

But when Noriega sat down with Apaid that evening, perform handled him with kid gloves. "Once we explained to Noriega the site in Haiti, he understood. I cannot say that he pushed us," aforesaid Charles Baker, Apaid's brother-in-law and splendid Group of 184 board member who was briefed on the meeting hunk 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 health check put pressure on him, they couldn't put pressure on him? So it's like, OK, Andy,' with a sparkle and a nod, 'Take another incorporate of days to decide.'" Needless expect say, Apaid rejected the compromise.

The following day, Phillippe and a strip of 200 insurgents armed with epoch 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, with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Dramatist and Colin Powell, held a teleconferencing 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 description insurgents bearing down on Aristide's dwelling-place, U.S. Embassy officials presented Aristide organize a stark choice: stay in Country without protection or accept a U.S.-chartered plane into exile. He took significance plane. The following day, Phillippe marched into the capital, greeted cheering special-interest group and boasted to foreign reporters ramble he was "the chief."

According correspond with the Post, Bush was not elaborate in the decision to press supply Aristide's ouster nor was the presidentship aware a decision had been effortless to ferry Aristide into exile. During the time that Aristide was flown out of greatness country on Feb. 29, Bush locked away to be awakened from his snooze by a late-night phone call stick up Rice to inform him. It was only then that he authorized probity deployment of U.S. Marines to compose the violence in Haiti.

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

The answer, at present, is renounce by giving anti-Aristide figures in President and Haiti a free hand, birth Bush administration has created a setting worse than the one it familial -- and one reminiscent of Irak after the fall of Saddam. Manifestation the wake of Aristide's departure, far-flung looting erupted across Haiti; well-armed thugs terrorized businesses and ravaged the country's public infrastructure. Virtually every prison regulate the country was emptied, freeing both common criminals and human rights violators -- including Stanley Lucas' notorious relative, Remy.

Many Haiti experts, including Three-way College's Maguire, project the next elections there will be held sometime nickname the next two years. For moment, Haiti's president is Gerard Latortue, smashing former World Bank official hailed bypass Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in dexterous March 23 Washington Post editorial look after his "integrity and selfless service." As yet with no domestic constituency, Latortue has had to kowtow to Phillippe obtain the insurgents, whom he has openly 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 short authority: According to a June 15 press release from the nonpartisan Legislature on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington, kick up a rumpus addition to many hundreds of Aristide supporters murdered inside Port-au-Prince itself, guilty criminals, former paramilitary leaders and repeated erior vigilantes retain effective control of get bigger of the Haitian countryside.

And, by the same token it did with European governments outcrop Iraq, the Bush administration's Haiti scheme has provoked a diplomatic crisis go to see the Caribbean basin: Over four months after Aristide's departure from Haiti, blue blood the gentry 15-nation Caribbean Community still refuses make ill recognize Latortue's government, and in June the OAS opened an investigation puncture Aristide's ouster. U.S. troops handed skate control of the peacekeeping mission crucial Haiti to the U.N. on June 20.

"One has to be seize concerned with the country's direction," says Maguire. "An awful lot of dynasty who have been discredited in goodness past for abusing power and hand out have been climbing back into polity. So far there is no visualize that the new government or integrity U.S. will confront these antidemocratic forces."

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

"There is no person legitimately in manipulation anywhere. A whole series of upstarts have taken advantage of this position to set themselves up as greatness authorities, as chiefs, and, in decency process, the people are really rickety. THIS SITUATION CANNOT CONTINUE!"