Wednesday, September 30, 1992

Ousted Haitian Chief, at U.N., Denounces Vatican

The Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the ousted Haitian leader, denounced the Vatican at the United Nations today, calling it the only state in the world to recognize the Government that overthrew him.

In an address to the General Assembly the radical Catholic priest, deposed exactly one year ago after becoming Haiti's first freely elected President, also called for a tighter economic blockade against the Caribbean country, which has one of the lowest standards of living in the world. "What a scandal!" he cried from the speakers rostrum to applause and cries of support from Haitians packing the Assembly hall's public galleries. "Rejected by all the states of the world, these criminals are still recognized by the Vatican, the only state to bless the crimes it should have condemned in the name of the God of Justice and Peace. What would have been the Vatican's attitude if Haiti was inhabited by whites?" he said. "What would have been Pope John Paul II's attitude if Haiti had been Polish?" 'George Bush Must Go!'

Noting that the Pope will be visiting the nearby Dominican Republic next month, Father Aristide expressed doubt that the Pontiff would he also stop in Haiti to make an effort to settle the strife there. As he spoke, a big crowd of mainly Haitian demonstrators, estimated by the police to have reached 10,000 at its peak, rallied outside the United Nations to support the ousted leader, chanting: "No Aristide! No peace!" and "George Bush must go!"

The demonstrators marched peacefully over the Brooklyn Bridge to the United Nations, waving their fists in the air, carrying placards and chanting for peace in Haiti. Some carried coffins drapped with banners saying "Stop racism" and depicting President Bush with a red tongue and horns, reflecting the demonstrators perception that the United States, like most other countries, is loosing interest in Haiti and is no longer pushing vigorously for Father Aristide's return. "I want democracy," said Rosette Elien, a 40-year-old Haitian from Brooklyn. "Bush is not for democracy."

Among the speakers at the demonstration was Jon-Christopher Bua, a spokesman for Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas, who said that if elected the Democratic candidate for President would reverse President Bush's policy and allow fleeing Haitians to apply for political asylum in the United States.

This was Father Aristide's second address to the United Nations, which still recognizes him as Haiti's legitimate head of state. And the applause delegates gave him was still warm and friendly, though the chances of his returning as Haiti's President are smaller now following the collapse of two agreements the Organization of American States thought it had negotiated to allow his return. 'Crime Against Humanity'

The O.A.S. also imposed a trade embargo on Haiti after Father Aristide was overthrown by military units supported by a business class frightened of his radical reformist ideas. But the United States subsequently exempted American-owned companies on the island from many of its provisions to enable them to continue manufacturing and preserve some employment there.

Father Aristide called for that blockade to be tightened further, saying that despite criticism that it would only make Haiti poorer still, "the Haitian people again say yes to the embargo." He called the coup that unseated him "a crime against humanity" and described present-day Haiti as a country where "blood runs, corpses pile up and repression grows greater."

Like last year, Father Aristide's address was a colorful, theatrical affair, in which he vaunted his attachment to the radical liberation theology. While popular among impoverished Roman Catholic classes in Latin America, those views have put him out of favor with the conservative Vatican.

Source: New York Times

Sunday, September 27, 1992

THE WORLD; Aristide Seeks More Than Moral Support

WHEN he confidently strode to the podium of the General Assembly one year ago bearing news of democracy's triumph after nearly two centuries of bloody failures, Haiti's first elected President, the Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was the toast of the United Nations. This week, as Haiti's deposed President, overthrown in a military coup no sooner than he had returned home, Father Aristide will stand before the same audience to plead that the world not forget his country's tragedy.

He will surely be greeted with hearty applause, but it is much less certain that he will get anything beyond moral support. Diplomats say there is little chance that anything but the use or serious threat of force can now dislodge a Haitian army that has bloodily secured its hold on the nation while gorging itself on drug money and contraband since the coup last Sept. 30. Such a rescue seems remote. If anything, as time has passed, the world consensus against taking action on Father Aristide's behalf has hardened. For different reasons, likely defenders seem not to want to get involved.

At the United Nations, increasingly stretched by compelling crises from Yugoslavia to Somalia, most diplomats agree there is little chance that the body will take up Father Aristide's expected call to actively work for his return. Nor is the Organization of American States as indignant as it once was. Having announced plans for a 500-member observer mission to Haiti, the O.A.S. is now ploddingly assembling a corps of 18.

As for the United States, since shortly after the overthrow -- when Secretary of State James Baker echoed President Bush's famous "this aggression will not stand" statement about Iraq -- little consideration has been given to backing up American principles in Haiti with American muscle.

Virtually all observers agree that facing down Haiti's ill-equipped and undisciplined 7,000-man army would take little in the way of force. Recently, an adviser of the provisional Government of the army-backed Prime Minister Marc L. Bazin repeated Father Aristide's longtime complaint when he said that "all it would take is one phone call" from Washington to send the army leadership packing. Certainly in Haiti, it is keenly recalled that the United States played a critical behind-the-scenes role in forcing out the last military leader, Col. Prosper Avril, setting the stage for the democratic elections that Father Aristide won in a landslide.

Father Aristide has undoubtedly been frustrated that other nations have found ways to avoid effectively rallying to his cause. Mexico, for example, has invoked deep-seated opposition to American or even multilateral intervention by the O.A.S. in a member country's internal affairs. The European Community has failed to even slow its trade with Haiti.

Indeed, supporters and opponents of Father Aristide agree, nothing more threatening than a leaky and ineffective embargo, quickly imposed on Haiti after the coup, has ever been seriously contemplated, which reflects Washington's deep-seated ambivalence about a leftward-tilting nationalist whose style diplomats say has sometimes been disquietingly erratic. Father Aristide rose to popularity on the wings of his calls for redemption for the hemisphere's poorest and most oppressed people and on stinging speeches that often depicted the United States as a citadel of evil and the root of many of his country's problems. His salutations have long invoked the name of Charlemagne Peralte, a leader of the Haitian resistance to the United States' occupation early in the century, so he himself recognizes the trickiness of calling for stronger American measures.

Despite much blood on the army's hands, United States diplomats consider it a vital counterweight to Father Aristide, whose class-struggle rhetoric during his nearly eight months in office, threatened or antagonized traditional power centers at home and abroad. For months Washington has mixed almost rote-like public statements of the need to restore Haitian democracy with private comments that confess its unwillingness to take on the military. "He wants us to get rid of his enemies for him so that he can have a free hand to mop up, and we're just not going to do that for him," a senior official said in a comment that has been repeatedly echoed in American diplomatic circles.

For Father Aristide there remains only the slim possibility that a new effort at mediation by the former Jamaican Prime Minister Michael N. Manley, who was recently recruited by the O.A.S. for the task, can revive diplomatic efforts to restore him to office. Failing that, Father Aristide's backers can only hope that a people who have so far remained quiescent, will rise up again, as they did in 1986 to cast off the Duvalier family dictatorship, and reclaim the right to choose their leaders. "It is possible that the international community fails to find the instruments to help us and even that our civilian Government fails," said Father Aristide's Ambassador to Washington, Jean Casimir. "But time cannot help these gorillas, and given time, the Haitian people cannot lose."

Source: New York Times

Sunday, September 13, 1992

A Bloody Ambush Jolts South Africa Toward New Talks

THE contest for the future of South Africa seems, even on good days, like a duel of schizophrenics. Both the white Government and the African National Congress are torn by conflicting impulses of civility and confrontation. Last week, on a very bad day at a razor-wire checkpoint near the town of Bisho, each side put forward its belligerent half. The outcome was grimly predictable, and sufficiently chilling that now, mercifully, the conciliatory halves may have their turn.

Within the African National Congress, the divide is between the romantic militancy born of the liberation movement that the congress was during its 30 years of banishment, and the prudent pragmatism of the governing party that the congress hopes to become. These are not simply rival factions but rival instincts that coexist to some degree in many congress leaders.

Last week the Bastille-stormers were personified by Ronnie Kasrils, a thickset, kinetic white Communist who fought in the congress's armed underground in the days when ordinary political avenues were foreclosed. The occasion was the sort of "Leipzig option" mobilization that Mr. Kasrils had long promoted, only to be overruled by the pragmatists. But as frustration mounted in the black townships, the congress's mood had swung toward militancy. Top leaders of the congress endorsed a march aimed at occupying Bisho, the campus-sized capital of the ostensibly independent black homeland called Ciskei, and toppling its military dictator.

As the main column of marchers marked time at the border, Mr. Kasrils was assigned to lead a breakaway group in a flanking maneuver. The group sprinted toward the city center through a gap left -- temptingly, and no doubt deliberately -- in the fence, and straight into an ambush by several hundred machine guns of the Ciskei army.

The white Government of President F. W. de Klerk has its own split personality. There is the Rubicon-crossing, apartheid-disavowing, make-nice Government that craves the world's respect, and that promises majority rule. And there is the Red-baiting, divide-and-rule, make-war Government that shudders at the prospect of rule by the black majority; this is the Government that tolerates (if it does not actually orchestrate) the police torture, vigilante murder and homeland despotism that keep that majority from coalescing.

On Monday, while the make-nice Mr. de Klerk was occupied at a conference on the fine points of federalism in the forthcoming nonracial South Africa, his make-war surrogate at the Bisho border was Brigadier Oupa J. Gqozo, master of Ciskei. Mr. de Klerk supplies the brigadier with guns and comforts and advisers; the brigadier, in turn, does all he can to rattle the African National Congress in a region that has traditionally been its stronghold. When Mr. Kasril's young following charged through that inviting gap in the fence, Brigadier Gqozo's soldiers opened fire with abandon.

In simpler times, the consequences of such a massacre would have been clear-cut: worldwide opprobrium heaped upon Mr. de Klerk, calls from South African white liberals for sanctions against the regime, perhaps a surge of fresh martyrs to the barricades.

But these are more ambiguous times. Although, in fact, little has changed on the ground -- the black majority is still impoverished, separate and disenfranchised -- perceptions have changed profoundly. By disowning the ideology of racial oppression, Mr. de Klerk has persuaded much of the world to judge him in ordinary political terms rather than moral absolutes. By entering the political realm, the African National Congress has conceded that it will no longer be judged solely on the justice of its grand cause; it will be judged on its fitness to govern.

Neither side admits to being even marginally in the wrong at Bisho. Mr. de Klerk, at a press conference Wednesday, never even suggested that firing thousands of rounds without warning into a crowd that is fleeing in panic might constitute excessive force.

Source: New York Times

Monday, September 7, 1992

The Bhisho Massacre: the day 29 people died

Bhisho, the administrative capital of the Eastern Cape, was once the capital of the Ciskei, a so-called homeland of South Africa. It gave its name to a massacre that happened there on September 7 1992 when Ciskei strongman Oupa Gqozo's troops opened fire on an ANC march heading into the capital. Twenty-eight protesters and one soldier died. Hundreds of others were injured.

At that time, negotiations for South Africa's non-racial constitution had broken down amid accusations that the ruling National Party was fomenting "third force" violence in black townships. Another stumbling block was the refusal of Gqozo to participate in negotiations and undertake to give up the homeland's "independence". The meeting at the stadium in Bhisho was organised by the ANC to protest this, to demand free political activity and an end to state violence and repression in the Ciskei.

About 80 000 people - including Chris Hani, Cyril Ramaphosa, Steve Tshwete and Harry Gwala - marched from King William's Town to Bhisho, chanting "no more slavery".

Disastrous miscalculation

Determined to peacefully occupy Bhisho and force Gqozo's resignation, Ronnie Kasrils, a stalwart of ANC protests, led a section of the marchers through a gap in the razor wire erected to contain them. In his autobiography Armed and Dangerous: My Undercover Struggle with Apartheid, Kasrils writes: "By not charging in their [soldiers] direction, by giving them a wide berth, we would avoid confrontation." The organisers and the demonstrators believed that with the eyes of the world on them, Gqozo's troops would not dare open fire.

But this was a disastrous miscalculation. Ciskei troops opened fire, ostensibly on the orders of Gqozo.

Recounting it later, Kasrils writes: "One moment I was running, my comrades with me. The next instant, without warning, the soldiers opened fire." Kasrils hit the ground, but bullets cut into the crowd following him. Petros Vantyu, his bodyguard, was one of those hit by the gunfire. "As I began to crawl towards him, the gunfire broke out again, as angry and prolonged as before, and I froze where I lay. The sinister whirr of projectiles overhead, followed by four dull thuds, made me realise with horror that they were firing grenades as well."

Deadlock breaker

An official investigation revealed that the first fusillade lasted one-and-a-half minutes, while the second lasted a minute. More than 425 rounds were fired. At the end, bodies lay scattered in pools of blood along the line of razor wire erected to contain the marchers.

Gqozo denied giving the order to fire. He accused ANC demonstrators of opening fire first, killing a soldier. He said his troops had acted with restraint. Then-president FW de Klerk said at the time that the massacre resulted from the ANC's failure to observe march conditions agreed with Ciskei authorities. "I did not start mass action, the ANC did. It is a fallacy, an unsubstantiated lie, that my government was involved," he said.

But Nelson Mandela differed with him. "The creation of a climate for free political activity, including in the homelands, is an important condition for us to return to the negotiating table. An enormous responsibility rests with the South African government to create that climate."

In the end, massacres in Bhisho and Boipatong, where 49 people were killed, acted as deadlock-breaking mechanisms. Key players in the negotiation process were forced to rethink their strategies and options. The spiral of violence gave way to the reopening of talks and South Africa once again resumed its journey towards democracy and freedom, which culminated in the country's first democratic elections in 1994.

Source: Buffalo City Metro