[Editor’s note: while this piece is satirical, the factual content in it is, unfortunately for Haitians and Canadians, entirely true]
On November 26th, Prime Minister Paul Martin named Denis Coderre as Canada’s ‘special advisor to Haiti.’ In this capacity, Coderre will monitor Canada’s role in the extermination of supporters of ousted President Jean Bertrand Aristide’s political party, Lavalas.
Presently, Canadian Forces officers are responsible for ‘all aspects of the logistics planning’ for the multinational UN force in Haiti. These logistics include overseeing the arbitrary arrest and detainment of Lavalas supporters, through the US of police dragnets in poor neighbourhoods where support for Aristide is strongest. Some 700 Lavalas political prisoners today languish in miserable conditions in Port au Prince.
Coderre will also communicate with UN police commissioner in Haiti, David Beer, of the RCMP. Beer, who had previously been in Iraq assisting counterinsurgency efforts, oversees the overall UN policing contingent in Haiti, which now includes contingents from China, Turkey, Spain, El Salvador, Pakistan, the Philippines, and several other US client states. Confirmation is pending on who exactly has been training the Haitian police how to publicly execute Lavalas supporters in the streets, as has occurred frequently since September 30th. All told, at least 600 predominately Lavalas supporters have been killed since this day, when Haitian police fired upon unarmed demonstrators.
Coderre was likely chosen for his slick-talking and his natural ability to obfuscate realities in Haiti. He has consistently demonstrated a seemingly infinite capacity for deflecting legitimate criticism or debate of Canada’s role in subverting Haiti’s fledgling democracy. It should be recalled that Coderre was the Member of Parliament who replaced Denis Paradis as representative to the neo-colonial La Francophonie in the final stages of the destabilization campaign against Aristide and his Lavalas party. For his part, Paradis left his mark by hosting the now infamous ‘Ottawa Initiative on Haiti’ meeting in January 2003, whereby a ‘trusteeship’ based on the ‘Kosovo model,’ premised on Aristide’s removal, was planned along with the return of Haiti’s army, which was disbanded by Aristide with near-univesral support in 1995.
The premise upon which Coderre’s new position is based is the ‘responsibility to protect,’ a new ‘humanitarian intervention’ based doctrine to be rooted in international law amidst a virtual rewriting of the UN Charter that calls for the relegalisation of imperialism. Formulated in Canada at the behest of Kofi Annan via Jean Chretien, this doctrine is now being aggressively advanced by the Martin regime, under the guise of his proposed ‘L20,’ which, according to Justin Podur, will allow the most powerful countries ‘to intervene in other countries at will.’ Once a state has been deemed to have ‘failed,’ it would be the ‘responsibility’ of L20 countries to intervene. Nothing is stated in the doctrine about instances whereby these very L20 countries systematically brought about the ‘failure’ to which they are responding, as was clearly the case in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Haiti.
In effect, Coderre will be advising on the progress of the trusteeship as well as the process of militarizing Haiti’s police force. The World Bank donor’s conference in July outlined the plans for ‘reintegrating’ former soldiers into a 20,000 member strong police force by 2015. This is an important role for Coderre who was disappointed when he was relegated along with Paradis to the Liberal party backbenches following Canada’s federal elections last June. Throughout Canadian history, many individuals have been given the task of overseeing and covering up Canadian participation in US-facilitated genocide – for example, Paul Martin, Sr. as external affairs minister during the Vietnam War. Coderre has big shoes to fill, and Paul Martin Jr. will certainly counsel the young Quebec MP to follow his father’s example of ‘Quiet Complicity’ in this respect.
A great deal is at stake for Canada in Haiti, so the pressure is certainly on Coderre and friends. Canadian mining companies KWG Resources and St. Genevieve Resources are apparently waiting for the extermination process to take effect so that they can resume their plunder of an anticipated 5 billion [or so] pounds of copper that their geologists have found in Haiti. Through a ‘private Haitian businessman,’ these companies will also have unfettered access to a further 522,000 tonnes of gold. Several hundred million dollars in profits are waiting under the soil [and the feet of farmers] in Haiti to be exploited. As such these mining corporations say ‘Godspeed!’ to Coderre so that they can have full access to their ‘key assets.’
More locally, Coderre is aiming to ensure that Haitian sweatshops are operating on full cylinders, without the right to organize and with a scaled-back minimum wage. Montreal-based Gildan Activewear has already announced plans to move part of its controversial Honduran El Progresso plant to Haiti in order to escape accountability for workers rights violations there. Gildan has also begun construction of a $60 million ‘manufacturing hub’ in the Dominican Republic, with the ‘labour intensive’ assembly work on their t-shirts to be done in Haiti. An additional $60 million plant is planned concomitant to Gildan’s entry into the retail sector in the near future. Coderre and his boss Pierre Pettigrew [himself serving as ‘underboss’ to Martin as Foreign Affairs Minister] will certainly be in regular contact with Gildan’s primary subcontractor in Haiti, Andy Apaid, the non-Haitian leader of the right-wing Group of 184. Notably, Apaid’s family had their assets seized in 1994 by the Clinton Administration for their role in funding the Cedras military junta that overthrew Aristide the first time.
Apaid and Rudolph Boulos, co-founder of the Group of 184’s Washington-based public relations front, the Haiti Democracy Project, have reportedly been hiring thugs in Haiti’s poor neighbourhoods to assist in the extermination campaign against Lavalas. When Apaid visited Montreal on September 17, he was thoroughly denounced by Haitian-Canadian group Vwa Zanset, who also issued a letter to Paul Martin before his public relations oriented trip to Haiti on November 14th.
Coderre’s role is of course crucial to Canada-US relations. On April 1st during parliamentary hearings, Carlo Dade of the right-wing policy front group FOCAL stated, ‘The U.S. would welcome Canada’s involvement and Canada’s taking the lead in Haiti. The administration in Washington has its hands more than full with Afghanistan, Iraq.It’s a sign of the interest and openness in the United States to have Canada take a lead on this.’ Dade said this in relation to a March 29th visit to Canada by coup-visionary Roger Noriega, who helped orchestrate Aristide’s downfall foremost through his role as protégé to Jesse Helms, his work at the OAS [2001-2003] and, subsequently, the US State Department, as Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs.
FOCAL, on whose board of directors sits Canada’s permanent Ambassador to the OAS, Paul Durand, has helped to shape Canadian policy toward Haiti. Dade was rather candid during his parliamentary testimony, when he listed the essential ingredients for the ‘state failure’ recipe:
‘The Aristide regime was doomed with the 2000 elections in the United States. The United States government had an active policy of supporting the opposition in undermining Aristide…That’s the situation we saw in Haiti.’
To be sure, Coderre and his colleagues will welcome Haiti’s puppet prime minister Gerard Latortue with open arms when he travels to Montreal December 10-12. The Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network had this to say about the visit, which is taking place at the request of Washington in their article ‘Montreal Conference with the Chalabis of Haiti’:
‘Paul Martin and Pierre Pettigrew’s efforts to cement the Feb. 29, 2004 victory over the ballot by putting a ‘Haitian face’ to the Canadian/France/US-led effort to re-colonize the people of Haiti are transparent and repulsive to the extreme, not to mention another callous example of their bottomless racism.’ ‘No Haitian worthy of the gift of liberty fought and bled for by our African ancestors shall stand silent as this final humiliation is being metered upon all of us by Paul Martin, Pierre Petttigrew, Jack Chirac or George W. Bush and the Chalabis of Haiti. We shall agitate, agitate, agitate until Haiti is free, all political prisoner liberated and the Chalabis of Haiti and their death squad mercenaries are brought to justice.’
Evidently, another war criminal is set to be welcomed by Canada’s war criminal Prime Minister Paul Martin and his Haiti post-coup crew led by Pettigrew and Coderre. Not surprisingly, ‘Authorized Lavalas officials and grassroots leaders from Haiti and abroad are not invited. Thus, this is simply another Canadian attempt, like to Ottawa Initiative, to further humiliate the people of Haiti.’ Paul Martin and Denis Coderre’s November 14 trip to Haiti was the first leg of this diplomatic posturing at the request of the Bush administration. In Haiti, Martin pretended to meet with Lavalas representatives. In Montreal, it appears he won’t even bother pretending.
So goes Canada’s reinvigorated committment to what neo-fascist columnist David Frum refers to as the ‘Western Alliance.’ [National Post, December , 2004]. As the Canadian government and corporate elite curry the favour of the Bush administration while they line up at the ‘reconstruction’ trough in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Haiti, the likes of Denis Coderre, Pierre Pettigrew and Paul Martin must ensure that the Canadian population does not suspect what is really going on in their names. As ‘special advisor on Haiti’ Coderre has his work cut out for him and he will certainly look to an obediently silent corporate media and a passive Canadian population to assist him in this monumental task.
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