Haiti - Colin Powell's Crime In Progress

http://www.blackcommentator.com/117/117_cover_haiti.html





History will record that the first Black U.S. Secretary of State personally engineered the theft of the national sovereignty of Haiti, the world’s first Black republic and the second nation in the western hemisphere to free itself from European rule. Such is Colin Powell’s horrific legacy – an historic shame and blight on the collective honor of Black America.

Powell returned to the scene of his crime last week to assure Gerard Latortue, the evilly buffoonish U.S.-installed interim Prime Minister, “We are with you all the way" – words of encouragement to a man who is said to have estimated it will be necessary to kill 25,000 people in the capital alone to stop calls for the return of exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide (see , “A Clandestine Interview from Haiti: Resistance in the Slums of Port-au-Prince,” October 14, 2004).

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In a December 3 letter soaked in sarcasm and timed to coincide with Powell’s trip to Haiti, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) urged the lame duck Secretary, “as your last official acts of mercy and compassion for the Haitian people, to call for the immediate release of all remaining political prisoners and other Haitians who are being illegally detained in Haitian prisons, and to do whatever is required to expedite desperately needed humanitarian assistance.”

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”It is a mind-boggling measure of the Bush Pirates’ ferocious lawlessness that Powell would personally initiate the overt, criminally culpable act in the kidnapping of a head of state. This aspect of the crime alone should send him to The Hague.”


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What double-speak! The Bush administration, with Colin Powell on point, destroyed Haitian democracy and sovereignty, employing death squads and criminals as its favored instruments. Far from exerting pressure to stop the massacres, the U.S. has leaned heavily on the UN force’s Brazilian commanders to act more aggressively against the population. "We are under extreme pressure from the international community to use violence," said General Augusto Heleno Ribeiro Pereira, speaking to a congressional commission in Brazil. "I command a peacekeeping force, not an occupation force ... we are not there to carry out violence, this will not happen for as long as I'm in charge of the force."

The general specifically cited the U.S., France and Canada as the countries demanding greater use of violence by the UN force. "To do this would require a force of 100,000 men prepared to seek and kill in large numbers and this is not our role, nor do we want it," he said.

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Canada proved that it remains “The Great White North” by joining the U.S. and France in their Coalition of the Racists to overthrow Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In response to a request from the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Canadian House of Commons, the Canadian Foundation for the Americas prepared a plan to establish a UN-sanctioned protectorate in Haiti, thus formally stripping the nation of sovereignty for the foreseeable future. Like Brazil, Canada hopes to promote its own interests at the expense of Haitian independence. “This is an opportunity for Canada to assert the leadership, which the Prime Minister is seeking, complement multilateral measures that Canada already has supported and raise Canada's hemispheric profile,” says the report.

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As Powell passes the baton of shame to Condoleezza Rice, African Americans – especially those who are acutely concerned with the Black “image” – must contemplate how that image has been mangled and debased by two individuals from the very bottom of our moral barrel. Secretary of State-in-Waiting Rice thought the United States had succeeded in destroying Venezuela’s leftist democracy in April, 2002, when it appeared that a military/rich white elite coup had toppled the elected government of Hugo Chavez. After a popular uprising restored the proud mestizo-mulatto Chavez to power, a surly Condoleezza Rice greeted the news in the most undiplomatic way imaginable "I hope that Hugo Chavez takes the message that his people sent him, that his own policies are not working for the Venezuelan people, that he's dealt with them in a high-handed fashion."

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As TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson said on learning that Powell had stabbed Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the Haitian nation in the back: “Colin Powell is the most powerful and damaging black to rise to influence in the world in my lifetime.”
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(I don't think the Black Commentator will mind that I posted more than 4 paragraphs)