Aristide: rightfully restored to Haiti

This article is more than 9 years old
The US did its damnedest to prevent the return of the elected president it helped oust in 2004. That it failed is a turning-point

Late at night on 17 March 2011, former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide boarded a small plane with his family in Johannesburg, South Africa. The following morning, he arrived in Haiti. It was just over seven years after he was kidnapped from his home in a US-backed coup d'etat.

Haiti has been ravaged by a massive earthquake that killed more than 300,000 people and left a million and a half homeless. A cholera epidemic carried in by United Nations occupation forces could sicken almost 800,000. A majority of the population lives on less than a dollar a day.

Now, Aristide, by far the most popular figure in Haiti today, and the first democratically elected president of the first black republic in the world, has returned home.

"Bon retou, Titid" ("good return, Titid" – the affectionate term for Aristide) read the signs in Port-au-Prince as thousands flocked to accompany Aristide from the Toussaint L'Ouverture airport to his home. L'Ouverture led the slave uprising that established Haiti in 1804. I was able to travel with Aristide, his wife, Mildred, and their two daughters from Johannesburg to Haiti on the small jet provided by the government of South Africa.

It was my second flight with them. In March 2004, the Aristides attempted to return from forced exile in the Central African Republic, but never made it back to Haiti. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other US officials warned Aristide to stay away from the western hemisphere. Defying such pressure, the Aristides stopped in Jamaica before travelling to South Africa, where they remained until last weekend.

Just before this Sunday's election in Haiti, President René Préval gave Aristide the diplomatic passport he had long promised him. Earlier, on 19 January, then US state department spokesman PJ Crowley tweeted, referring to Aristide: "today Haiti needs to focus on its future, not its past." Mildred was incensed. She said the US had been saying that since they forced him out of the country. Sitting in the plane a few minutes before landing in Haiti, she repeated the words of an African leader who criticised the historic abuses of colonial powers by saying, "I would stop talking about the past, if it weren't so present."

Mark Toner, the new state department spokesman, said last week:


Aristide did not choose to leave, or to remain outside Haiti, and the Obama administration knows that. On 29 February 2004, Luis Moreno, the No 2 man in the US embassy in Haiti, went to the Aristides' home and hustled them off to the airport. Frantz Gabriel was Aristide's personal bodyguard in 2004. I met him when he was with the Aristides in the Central African Republic then, and saw him again last Friday as the Aristides arrived home. He recalled:

"It was not willingly that the president left, because all the people that came in to accompany the president were all military. Having been in the US military myself, I know what a GI looks like, and I know what a special forces [soldier] looks like also … when we boarded the aircraft, everybody changed their uniform into civilian clothes. And that's when I knew that it was a special operation."

The US continued to prevent Aristide from returning for the next seven years. Just last week, President Barack Obama called South African President Jacob Zuma to express "deep concerns" about Aristide's potential return, and to pressure Zuma to block the trip. Zuma, to his credit, ignored the warning. US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks reveal a concerted drive, over years, to hamper the return of Aristide to Haiti, including diplomatically punishing any country that helped Aristide, including threatening to block a UN security council seat for South Africa.

After landing in Port-au-Prince, Aristide wasted no time. He addressed the people of Haiti from the airport. His remarks touched on a key point of the current elections there: that his political party, the most popular party in Haiti, Fanmi Lavalas, is banned, excluded from the elections. He said:

"The problem is exclusion, and the solution is inclusion. The exclusion of Fanmi Lavalas is the exclusion of the majority … because everybody is a person."

Looking out on the country he hadn't seen in seven years, he concluded:


Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column

© 2011 Amy Goodman. Distributed by King Features Syndicate