NOW.My date with Aristide. By NAOMI KLEIN

Publié par siel sur 13 Février 2014, 16:18pm

Catégories : #PEUPLE sans mémoire...

My date with Aristide

Ousted Haitian prez reveals he was tossed because he refused to privatize

By NAOMI KLEIN

When United Nations troops kill residents of the Haitian slum Cité Soleil, friends and family often place photographs of exiled president Jean-Bertrand Aristide on their bodies.

The photographs silently insist that there is a method to the madness raging in Port-au-Prince. Poor Haitians are being slaughtered not for being "violent," as we so often hear, but for being militant, for daring to demand the return of their elected president.

It was only 10 years ago that U.S. president Bill Clinton celebrated Aristide’s return to power as "the triumph of freedom over fear." So what changed? Corruption? Violence? Fraud? Aristide is certainly no saint. But even if the worst of the allegations are true, they pale next to the rap sheets of the convicted killers, drug smugglers and arms traders who ousted Aristide and continue to enjoy free rein, with full support from the Bush administration and the UN.

Turning Haiti over to this underworld gang out of concern for Aristide’s lack of "good governance" is like escaping an annoying date by accepting a lift home from Charles Manson.

A few weeks ago I visited Aristide in Pretoria, where he lives in forced exile. I asked him what was really behind his dramatic falling-out with Washington. He offered an explanation rarely heard in discussions of Haitian politics. Actually, he offered three: "privatization, privatization and privatization."

The dispute dates back to a series of meetings in early 1994, a pivotal moment in Haiti’s history that Aristide has rarely discussed. Haitians were living under the barbaric rule of Raoul Cédras, who overthrew Aristide in a 1991 U.S.-backed coup. Aristide was in Washington, and despite popular calls for his return, there was no way he could face down the junta without military backup.

Increasingly embarrassed by Cédras’s abuses, the Clinton administration offered Aristide a deal: U.S. troops would take him back to Haiti – but only after he agreed to a sweeping economic program whose stated goal was to "substantially transform the nature of the Haitian state."

Aristide agreed to pay the debts accumulated under the kleptocratic Duvalier dictatorships, slash the civil service, open up Haiti to "free trade’ and cut import tariffs on rice and corn in half. It was a lousy deal, but Aristide says he had little choice. "I was out of my country, and my country was the poorest in the Western hemisphere, so what kind of power did I have?’

But Washington’s negotiators made one demand that Aristide could not accept: the immediate selloff of Haiti’s state-owned enterprises, including phones and electricity. Aristide argued that unregulated privatization would transform state monopolies into private oligarchies, increasing the riches of Haiti’s elite and stripping the poor of their national wealth. He says the proposal simply didn’t add up. "Being honest means saying 2 plus 2 equals 4. They wanted us to sing 2 plus 2 equals 5."

Aristide proposed a compromise: rather than sell off the firms outright, he would "democratize" them. He defined this as writing antitrust legislation, insuring that proceeds from the sales were redistributed to the poor and allowing workers to become shareholders. Washington backed down, and the final text of the agreement – accepted by the United States and by a meeting of donor nations in Paris – called for the "democratization" of state companies.

But when Aristide began to implement the plan, it turned out that the financiers in Washington thought his democratization talk was just public relations. When Aristide announced that no sales could take place until parliament had approved the new laws, Washington cried foul. Aristide says he realized then that what was being attempted was an "economic coup."

SUITE : link

Pour ceux qui ignorent qui est Naomi Klein , l'auteur de The Shock Doctrine

voici son site :link