Washington renouvelle sa campagne contre aristide! - Haiti Liberte

By Kim Ives
Haiti’s former president Jean-Bertrand
Aristide “is once again in
the crosshairs of the U.S. government,”
reported the Miami Herald on
Mar. 4, “this time for allegedly pocketing
millions of dollars in bribes from
Miami businesses that brokered longdistance
phone deals” with TELECO,
the once state-owned phone company.
(TELECO was privatized in 2010.)
The Herald’s writers got a little
carried away. They were working from
a U.S. indictment charging that a certain
Haitian “Official B” – whom the
Herald and a defense lawyer deduce,
but cannot confirm, is Aristide – made
off with about $1 million, not “millions.”
But the whole story stinks to
high heaven. Aristide’s accuser is one
of those indicted, Patrick Joseph, 50,
TELECO’s former director. Aristide fired
him in 2003 for corruption, a key fact
never mentioned in any of the Herald’s
reports. Is it surprising that Joseph or
his lawyer might now accuse Aristide
as an accomplice, especially given the
incentives U.S. prosecutors are surely
offering him?
Washington’s campaign to pin
something – anything – on Aristide has
long been known. About 2000 secret
U.S. State Department cables obtained
by the media organization WikiLeaks,
and then provided to Haïti Liberté provide
one of the best confirmations of
the U.S. witch-hunt.
Some of the cables, not previously
published by Haïti Liberté,
show that in recent years the U.S.
Treasury Department’s Office of Technical
Assistance (OTA) gave hundreds
of thousands of dollars in funding as
well as “monthly training and technical
assistance” (according to a Jul. 25,
2008 cable) to Haitian agencies like
the Central Unit for Financial Investigation
(UCREF). Prime Minister Gérard
Latortue’s de facto government formed
UCREF to find evidence of and make
a case for corruption under Aristide’s
government, which was overthrown in
a Feb. 29, 2004 coup d’état supported
by Washington.
A Jan. 17, 2008 cable notes that
OTA trained UCREF in a program costing
the U.S. taxpayer $350,000 over
two years “to improve investigation
and prosecution of financial crimes,”
i.e. to find something on Aristide.
Despite such U.S. support, UCREF
could never build a credible case. Even
a civil suit based on UCREF’s 69-page
report against Aristide, brought in a
Miami court in November 2005, was
abandoned by the lawyers filing it after
a few months when they saw that
it was going nowhere. Why? Because
there was no evidence.
Ironically, UCREF’s chief, Jean-
Yves Noel, was himself briefly jailed
by a Haitian judge for kidnapping. He
gave a “a rambling, emotional and
sometimes confusing account” of his
arrest to U.S. Embassy officials and
“Treasury investigators,” reported U.S.
Ambassador to Haiti Janet Sanderson
in a Jun. 1, 2006 cable marked “Confidential.”
Noel claimed there were two attempts
to assassinate him while he was
imprisoned from May 22-29, 2006.
“Noel’s story should not necessarily
be taken at face value,” Sanderson
opined. “His cooperation with
USG [U.S. Government] investigators,
always spotty at best, deteriorated
severely over the past 6 months for a
variety of reasons that arouse our suspicions.
Many claim that Noel is corrupt
and his arrest was payback for
past corruption.”
Undeterred, Sanderson recommended
that “We need to be careful
to separate Jean-Yves Noel, the individual,
from the work of UCREF, the
institution,” arguing that “we need to
continue to support the work of the
fledgling anti-corruption office” even
though “corruption is entrenched in
Haitian society and political interference
the norm.” Of course, Sanderson
was not referring to the political interference
of her own embassy.
On the evening of Mar. 6, 2012,
two days after the Herald’s story, gunmen
on two motorcycles fatally shot
in the mouth Venel Joseph, 80, as he
was returning to his home in Port-au-
Prince. He was the father of Patrick Joseph
and, under Aristide from 2001 to
2004, had been the director of Haiti’s
Central Bank, which the indictment alleges
distributed the bribes paid by the
U.S.-based telecoms.
The Miami Herald and the Wall
Street Journal, historically the two
principal vectors of Washington’s ver-
This Week in Haiti
Exhuming Failed Prosecutions:
Washington Renews its Campaign Against Aristide
Newly Revealed WikiLeaks Show Long History of Fruitless U.S. Pursuit
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Jean-Bertand Aristide on his return
to Haiti on mar. 18, 2011. As
president in 2003, Aristide worked
to root out corruption at TELEco.
Rather than applaud those efforts,
today the u.S. is seeking to
prosecute him.
sion of events in Haiti, immediately
implied that Aristide was behind the
killing.
“The shooting of Venel Joseph
at the wheel of his car looks more
like a hit job,” wrote Mary Anastasia
O’Grady, for years the Wall Street
Journal’s point-person for attacks on
Aristide. Since Patrick Joseph “according
to Herald sources, has fingered”
Aristide, O’Grady reasons, he “could
be the best hope that Haitians have of
getting to the truth about Mr. Aristide
and his American business partners.
But sources say the former Teleco executive
still has relatives in Haiti. If
he fears for them, he could clam up.
That would be one explanation for his
father’s murder.”
But Aristide’s long-time lawyer
Ira Kurzban took another view. “To
me, Venel Joseph’s killing bears all the
markings of a U.S. intelligence community
hit,” he said. “First, they eliminate
someone who might contradict
and discredit the charges of corruption
against former President Aristide
presently being attributed to his son,
Patrick Joseph. Secondly, they smear
Aristide, trying to make it look like
he’s behind it. Lastly, the killing might
push Patrick Joseph to make other allegations
against Aristide in a desire
to avenge his father.”
In 2003, Aristide moved forcefully
against Patrick Joseph when he
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got wind of corruption at TELECO. “We
are fighting corruption,” Aristide declared
when he made a surprise visit to
TELECO’s Port-au-Prince headquarters
on Jun. 19, 2003. “Nobody at TELECO
would be happy to be laboring away
while they see other people bathing in
corruption. And that is why, we are
fighting corruption in TELECO and in
the state as a whole. And if there are
private individuals who are bathing
in corruption and who want to corrupt
people in TELECO, that also is no
good.”
Four days later, on Jun. 23, 2003,
Patrick Joseph was dismissed from his
post. Rather than applaud Aristide’s
moves against corruption at TELECO,
the U.S. seeks to portray Aristide as
behind it. Meanwhile, Joseph has confessed
to taking kickbacks.
“In the end, there is not a shred
of evidence in the indictment that
Aristide did anything corrupt except
uncorroborated testimony of a person
who is an admitted corrupter and
criminal,” Ira Kurzban concluded.
The campaign to prosecute Aristide
for corruption, in an attempt to politically
neutralize him, has been going
on for years. In a Jul. 25, 2008 Embassy
cable, Chargé d’affaires Thomas
Tighe wrote that the OTA wanted then
President René Préval’s “cooperation
with the USG in moving cases involving
telecommunications companies
with reported ties to Aristide to prosecution
in the United States,” and that
the “OTA team advised Préval that a
criminal case is close to indictment
in the U.S. but U.S. prosecutors were
requesting Teleco officials’ immediate
assistance in providing certain documentation.”
But now, almost four years
later, the U.S. prosecutors still have no
documentation or other evidence, only
the testimony of Patrick Joseph.
“The US government has spent
millions, possibly tens of millions, of
dollars trying to railroad Haiti’s former
president,” wrote Mark Weisbrot
of the Washington-based Center for
Economic and Policy Research in the
Guardian on Mar. 13. “On behalf of US
taxpayers, we could use a congressional
inquiry into this abuse of our tax
dollars. It also erodes what we have
left of an independent judiciary to
have federal courts in Florida used as
an instrument of foreign policy skull-
duggery.”
Thousands marched in Port-au-
Prince on Feb. 29, the coup’s anniversary,
cheering Aristide and lambasting
Haiti’s current neo-Duvalierist president
Michel Martelly.
“The display of popular support
for Aristide is very worrisome to
the U.S., so indicting Titid [Aristide]
before a potential comeback makes
perfect sense,” said Robert Fatton, a
Haitian-born professor at the University
of Virginia who has written several
books on Haiti, to the Miami Herald.
As Weisbrot then notes, “It
makes even more sense if you look at
what the US government – in collaboration
with UN officials and other allies
– has been doing to Aristide since
they organized the 2004 coup against
him.” For example, Edmund Mulet, the
head of the UN’s military occupation
force called MINUSTAH, had advice for
Assistant Secretary of State Thomas
Shannon in a Jul. 25, 2006 meeting
in Port-au-Prince, an Aug. 2, 2006
WikiLeaked cable reveals. Among other
things, Mulet “urged US legal action
against Aristide to prevent the former
president from gaining more traction
with the Haitian population.” That
“legal action” is what we’re seeing today.
Although Aristide has studiously
maintained a low profile since
his return to Haiti last Mar. 18 from a
seven-year Washington-enforced exile
in South Africa, he remains a political
symbol that stirs the passions and
courage of Haiti’s masses. Washington’s
clumsy and transparent attempts
to discredit him have always served to
only increase his appeal, not diminish
it.
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Vol. 5, No. 36 • Du 21 au 27 Mars 2012 Haiti Liberté/Haitian Times 9