Last year, U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Brian Dean Curran declared, "The United States accepts President (Jean-Bertrand) Aristide as the constitutional president of Haiti for his term of office ending in 2006."

Two weeks ago, Secretary of State Colin Powell said the elected president of Haiti should not be forced from office by thugs.

Yet last week, as a small band of armed thugs stirred chaos across Haiti in a drive to depose Aristide, the United States refused to aid the country's elected president or its endangered democracy. As the violence spiraled out of control over the weekend Aristide, the first democratically elected president in Haitian history, left the country.

The U.S. State Department, which is seeking to foster the lie that the president and his aides have clean hands, claims that Aristide asked to be taken to safety. Aristide says he was forced to go by U.S. operatives on the ground in Haiti. Considering the fact that the State Department's point man has a long history of defending Haitian dictator Jean Claude Duvalier while attacking proponents of democracy and economic justice such as Aristide, reasonable people will be disinclined to believe the State Department.

No matter what the precise circumstances of the regime change in Haiti, however, the reality was well summed up by U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn. When U.S. officials pointedly refused to aid Aristide, Dodd says, they effectively told the president that he must either leave or die at the hands of an armed insurgency against Haitian democracy.

U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., was blunter. "We are just as much a part of this coup d'etat as the rebels, as the looters, or anyone else," explained Rangel, who explained that the Bush administration "made it abundantly clear that Aristide would do best by leaving the country. Which means that the rebels, the looters ... (were) given to believe that they should never, never, never accept Aristide as the president."

No doubt, Aristide was an imperfect leader, who failed on a number of fronts to live up to his election promises. He was an often ineffectual and disappointing leader.

But many countries have ineffectual and disappointing leaders, including the United States.

President Bush disregarded core American values, as well as its international commitments, by effectively siding with the thugs who used violence and fear to depose the democratically elected leadership of Haiti. Despite the fact that it was the stated policy of the U.S. government to respect Aristide as the elected president of Haiti, Bush and his aides refused to provide the support - economic, political or military - that would have maintained the rule of law in Haiti.

Bush sat back, as blood flowed in the streets of Haitian cities. Only after Aristide left did the U.S. president send a substantial contingent of Marines to help restore order in Haiti,amid flowery talk about how Haiti would now have a bright future.

That's not true. The only Haitians who will have a brighter future are the wealthy elites who opposed Aristide because the president sought an equitable distribution of wealth in a land where inequality had been the norm. Those elites had been urging the United States to help them depose a duly elected government. By holding up economic assistance and then refusing to protect Aristide, Bush did their bidding.

Bush's actions have been shameful. And they ought to be weighed against his talk about nurturing democracy in Iraq and other countries. With its response to the crisis in Haiti, the Bush administration sent a powerful signal: It only respects democracy in other countries when the elected leaders of those countries serve the interests of local economic elites and their business partners.

Copyright 2003 The Capital Times

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