Le Projet de la destruction d'une Nation par la Société Internationale

 

Imperialism behind a humanitarian mask

 (original story from Upside Down World; link to original here)

Haiti and the Danger of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P)

by Anthony Fenton

As an emerging lobby advocates for the institutionalization of a controversial doctrine of “humanitarian imperialism,”1 and  a new administration that is friendly to this doctrine gets set to occupy the White House, a reminder of the case of Haiti points to the potential dangers posed by an “operationalized” Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm.

Introduction

In 2004, Haiti’s democratically-elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, was overthrown by a small but well organized and funded opposition movement backed by the most powerful members of the “international community” - the U.S., Canada, and France.2

Doing what his father and Bill Clinton were unable to before him, President George W. Bush led the way in answering the question that had vexed consecutive administrations since Haiti’s popular movement swept the Duvalier’s totalitarian dynasty from power in 1986: “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?”3

In December of 2005, Fabiola Cordova, the program officer who was overseeing the National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) burgeoning program in Haiti described how, even after more than a decade of efforts to undermine, demonize, and isolate Aristide leading up to the 2004 coup, the U.S. based their political operations on the following calculation:

“Aristide really had 70% of the popular support and then the 120 other parties had the thirty per cent split in one hundred and twenty different ways, which is basically impossible to compete [with]…”

The goal, then, was to us “even the [political] playing field’ inside of Haiti under the auspices of ‘promoting democracy.” This translated to the establishment of policies operating in parallel fashion on several tracks. The political opposition, factions of which were linked to the ‘rebel’ paramilitary movement that would emerge, was bolstered in attempt to consolidate it as a united movement against Aristide. Meanwhile, Aristide’s government was simultaneously isolated diplomatically, a de facto economic embargo was placed on his government, and aid money was circumvented around the government and given to NGO’s, many of which helped form the opposition.

Combined with a variety of other factors, the strategy had the effect of creating an enabling environment for Aristide’s extra-constitutional removal from power.

With UN Security Council authorization, the U.S., Canada, France, and Chile were the first countries to send their militaries in to “stabilize” the country. They quickly joined forces with the anti-Aristide political opposition and “rebel” insurgency. On the one hand, they set up a puppet regime that was swept clear of Aristide’s Lavalas party, which was occupied by Western ‘technical assistants’ and Western-friendly ‘technocrats.’ On the other hand, the UN occupying forces joined the anti-Aristide insurgency and waged a counterinsurgency (COIN) war against Lavalas, whose members were included among those identified as anti-occupation ‘insurgents.’4

By the end of the summer of 2004, the UN’s Multilateral-Interim Force (MIF) had morphed into the Brazilian-led MINUSTAH. A lower intensity COIN war continued through 2006; according to various reports, thousands of Haitians – civilians, militants, non-violent activists – lost their lives to conflict during this period.5

The UN’s military and policing occupation continues today, with continuing Brazilian leadership alongside the forces of ten other Latin American countries, plus Jordan, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines.6 Despite having largely receded from their muscular military role, the U.S., Canada, and France remain, individually, the three most powerful external political actors in Haiti.

Needless to say, the kind of ’stability’ sought by the foreign interveners has not yet arrived; nearly five years of UN-sanctioned occupation has not improved life for most Haitians; incredibly, a popular movement still exists calling for the return of exiled former President Aristide.7 Few would contest the claim that, were he to return to Haiti and run in a future election, Aristide would win in a landslide.

Protecting Haitians, ‘Sharing’ their Sovereignty

Some comments published recently by the former commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army, Juan Emilio Cheyre, speak to the need to return our attention to the roots of the Haiti intervention. Having just returned from Haiti, Cheyre, now the director of an elite Chilean think tank, wrote a column calling for a reduction of the Haiti’s sovereignty, which he thinks should be placed in “de facto trust” with the international community. Together, the foreigners and Haiti would exercise a sort of “shared sovereignty.” Although a “drastic option,” Haiti is, according to the retired general, after all, a “failed state.” The evolution of “the conventional concept of sovereignty,” Cheyre reasons, renders foreign tutelage over Haiti a necessary evil.8

Cheyre is only the latest in a long line of foreigners to publicly pontificate on the neo-colonization of Haiti.

Speaking to a Canadian parliamentary committee only a few weeks after Aristide’s removal, the head of a Canadian think tank and ‘democracy’ promotion NGO, John Graham of the Canadian Foundation for the Americas (FOCAL), wanted to avoid having “the stones of anti-colonialism hurled,” at the foreign trustees, but at the same time felt that some measure of foreign control over the Haitian state was necessary:

“We don’t want to call it a trusteeship, but we didn’t call Bosnia a trusteeship. We didn’t call East Timor a trusteeship. But some control has to be vested in the international community to give Haiti a beginning.”9

As it turned out, the “international community” opted to officially abandon the rhetoric of trusteeship, following both the advice of Graham, as well as one of the concept’s 21st century progenitors, Stephen Krasner. Writing in the NED’s Journal of Democracy in 2005, Krasner reasoned that “for policy purposes,” “shared sovereignty” should be termed “partnerships,” in order to simultaneously undermine and pay lip service to state sovereignty.10 The distinction is important. By claiming that they are merely a collective of “donors” who are “accompanying” their “partner,” Haiti, the foreign interveners try and render themselves unaccountable for their actions. If things go wrong, the blame can be placed on Haitians themselves.

Another, related concept that has been abandoned rhetorically but applied in actuality in Haiti is that of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) doctrine. Alongside the multi-track process of destabilizing Haiti in the period 2000-2004, a radical reconfiguration of how state sovereignty is to be viewed began to be formalized. In the middle of this process, Haiti was characterized by some as an ‘ideal R2P situation.’ Since the coup, however, and since the R2P is becoming embedded in international institutions and law, Haiti has dropped off the R2P radar. Dozens of papers, panels, symposiums, and conferences seem to have studiously avoided Haiti when discussing R2P.

Although its roots go back at last as far as the conceptualization of the idea of “sovereignty as responsibility,” first formulated by the elite Brookings Institution think tank’s Francis Deng with generous funding from the Carnegie foundation in the early 1990s11, R2P made its most serious advancement with the 2001 Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS).12

The ICISS was spearheaded and coordinated by the Canadian government beginning in 2000, and, importantly received crucial seed money from several key U.S.-based liberal philanthropic foundations. As two U.S.-based R2P advocates, Adelle Simmons and April Donnellan wrote recently, the R2P simply “would not have come about without the support of philanthropy.”13

Historically, many foundations have undertaken extensive programming abroad, at arms length but also inextricable from the interests of U.S. imperialism. In the case of R2P, philanthropy is said to possess a “comparative advantage” to the extent that they can contribute “to the larger goal of establishing norms by supporting civil society groups whose work complement[s] and reinforce[s] governments or official organizations.”14

Indicative of the elitist nature of R2P’s development, an American R2P advocate described how an early R2P conference he helped organize was, in effect “an insiders game to discuss and decide what some of the elements of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine should be so that the political extremists wouldn’t get a hold of it before considered people were able to define it.”15

R2P typifies in doctrinal form the ‘evolution of the conventional concept of sovereignty’ by “considered people.” In short, R2P has been defined as a situation wherein “the power of the sovereign state can be legitimately revoked if the international community decides that the state is not protecting its citizens.”16 Importantly, the state’s power is not only taken in extreme instances, via military intervention. Sovereignty can also be undermined by policies imposed under the “preventive” and “rebuilding” phases of the R2P spectrum, often in the form of economic sanctions, “coercive diplomacy,” “democracy promotion,” “good governance,” and structural adjustment programs.

For myriad reasons, many of which are illustrated by the case of Haiti, R2P remains relevant for die hard supporters of sovereignty, not the least of which due to the fact that the Haiti intervention is seen by some as a model for future interventions in the hemisphere.

Providing a case in point in the fall of 2005, a Canadian diplomat told a group of journalists gathered in Canada’s austere Port au Prince embassy that Haiti is “an example for the crisis to come in this hemisphere. We could think, for example, what will happen when Cuba will be in transition…”17

Not only for Cuba, who, for good reason, have remained one of the few outspoken critics of R2P, but for the entire world, the case of Haiti shows that the attempted institutionalization of this doctrine carries with it serious, potential dangers.

Following the controversial inclusion of the (albeit watered-down) R2P language in the UN’s 2005 World Summit Outcome document18, a veritable, well-funded “R2P Lobby” has stealthily emerged to advance and consolidate the doctrine as a ‘global norm.’ Some lessons from R2P’s application in Haiti offer some sobering reasons to monitor, and, if necessary, counter R2P’s consolidation.

R2P’s Haitian Genesis

On the last weekend of January 2003, the Canadian government hosted a secret meeting to discuss Haiti’s future. Only informing the Haitian government after the fact, the “Ottawa Initiative on Haiti,” was attended by representatives of the self-identified “friends of Haiti,” including, chiefly, the U.S., Canada, and France, along with representatives from the EU and OAS.

Although the details of the meeting remain disputed – the relevant portions of declassified documents describing the meeting were redacted – the journalist who broke the story of the meeting, Michel Vastel, stands by his claim that the meeting’s attendees arrived at “a consensus that ‘Aristide should go.’” Vastel claims that the French government “suggested there should be a ‘trusteeship’ like there was in Kosovo. That was not an intervention, they said, that was their responsibility – all these countries – to protect.”19

One of Vastel’s sources for the story was then-Canadian Secretary of State for Latin America and Liberal Member of Parliament Denis Paradis, who organized the meeting. In an interview following Aristide’s removal in 2004, Paradis denied that Aristide’s ouster was discussed, but said that R2P was the “thematic that went under the whole meeting,” and that “if there is one place where the principles of this ‘responsibility to protect’ would apply around the world, it’s Haiti.”20

Paradis’s statements are important to the extent that Canadian and UN officials were loathe to publicly tout Haiti as an example of R2P’s application, especially when at the same time R2P advocates were busily lobbying to get it adopted at the 2005 UN Summit.

Nevertheless, there is some indication that Haiti was seen by Canadian officialdom as an ideal R2P situation. In a declassified talking points memo from Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs dated 26 March 2004 titled “Canada’s Responsibility to Protect Follow-up Efforts,” the following question is posed: “Why is Canada not applying The Responsibility to Protect in the case of Haiti?” The answer is revealing.

On the one hand, the R2P was, at that point, “a report only” and “not considered part of customary international law,” although this was (and remains) the goal. On the other hand, “Canada’s actions in the case of Haiti are entirely consistent with our support for R2P’s core-findings…”21

Official rhetoric aside, there are other sets of since-declassified memos that illustrate the extent to which ‘R2P principles’ were applied, not to ‘protect’ Haitians, but to destabilize the democratically elected government in preparation for its overthrow.

There is an interesting convergence that is worth noting between Canada’s unprecedented leadership role in Haiti, and its leadership role in advancing the R2P doctrine. As Paul Martin, the Prime Minister at the time of both the coup d’etat in Haiti and R2P’s adoption in 2005, wrote in his recently published memoir, Canadian leadership on R2P was desirable since, as Canada “was never a colonial power, and no one suspects us of neo-colonial ambitions, we are able to come to this work with ‘clean hands.’”22

Such sentiments were consistent with those expressed by John Graham’s colleague at FOCAL, Carlo Dade, during Parliament’s post-coup hearings on Haiti, who referred to Canada’s “perception in the region as a counterweight to what is viewed as heavy U.S. involvement in the region.”23 It was this perception that compelled the U.S. to support a Canadian leadership role both in Haiti and on the R2P file.

Although there is no space for an analysis of the entire ICISS report here, it is worth noting that it stressed that military intervention was considered a last resort, and that attention is to be paid to “direct prevention efforts.” According to the ICISS, such measures can “make it absolutely unnecessary to employ directly coercive measures against the state concerned.”24

Examples of preventive measures listed that can be found in the case of pre-coup Haiti include “political and diplomatic” efforts such as “friends groups,” (i.e. the ‘Friends of Haiti), or “problem-solving workshops” (i.e. the ‘Ottawa Initiative on Haiti’). More importantly for the purposes of this article, the ICISS lists “economic direct preventive measures,” sometimes of “a more coercive nature” that can be employed, such as “threats of trade and financial sanctions…threats to withdraw IMF or World Bank support; and the curtailment of aid and other assistance.”25

It is no coincidence that all of these “preventive” economic measures were undertaken against Haiti beginni