Ottawa Initiative & 10th anniversary
This is the first in a four part series leading up to the 10th anniversary of the February 29, 2004, overthrow of Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s government in Haiti. One aim of this series is to prod major media outlets to mark the anniversary by covering a story they’ve largely ignored.
By Yves Engler, January 22, 2014
Eleven years ago this weekend Canada organized an international gathering to discuss overthrowing Haiti’s elected government. The conference was reported in a major magazine at the time, but since the coup actually happened the dominant media has refused to investigate or even mention the meeting.
On Jan. 31 and Feb. 1, 2003, Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government organized the “Ottawa Initiative on Haiti” to discuss that country’s future. No Haitian officials were invited to this assembly where high-level US, Canadian and French officials decided that Haiti’s elected president “must go”, the dreaded army should be recreated and that the country would be put under a Kosovo-like UN trusteeship.
Thirteen months after the Ottawa Initiative meeting President Aristide and most other elected officials were pushed out and a quasi UN trusteeship had begun. Since that time the Haitian National Police has been heavily militarized and steps have been taken towards recreating the military.
Present at the Ottawa Initiative discussion were Canadian Health (and later foreign) Minister Pierre Pettigrew, USAssistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere Otto Reich, another State Department official, Mary Ellen Gilroy, Assistant Secretary General of the Organization of American States, Luigi Einaudi, El Salvador’s Foreign Minister, Maria de Avila and France’s Minister of Security and Conflict Prevention Pierre-André Wiltzer. They were all invited to the government’s Meech Lake conference centre in Gatineau, Québec by Secretary of State for Latin America and Minister for La Francophonie Dennis Paradis.
Prominent journalist Michel Vastel brought the gathering to public attention in the March 15, 2003, issue ofl’Actualité, Quebec’s equivalent to Maclean’s magazine. In an article titled “Haiti put under U.N. Tutelage?” Vastel wrote that the possibility of Aristide’s departure, a potential trusteeship and the return of Haiti’s military were discussed by Paradis and Wiltzer during a joint panel titled “Obligation morale internationale; Perspectives, idées nouvelles et démarches a explorer.”
After the coup Vastel said his source on this private conference was his friend Denis Paradis and information on the meeting was corroborated by French officials. For his part, Paradis would deny Vastel’s account of the Ottawa Initiative on Haiti, but the story was never retracted by Vastel or l’Actualité. In several post-coup interviews Vastel stood behind his original article and asserted that several follow-up meetings took place involving the same participants, as well as US Secretary of State Colin Powell.
While claiming he was misinterpreted by Vastel, Paradis made it clear that a foreign intervention into Haiti was discussed. In a September 2004 interview with Haiti Solidarity activist Anthony Fenton, Paradis explained that “there was one thematic that went under the whole meeting [Ottawa Initiative]... the responsibility to protect.” A showpiece of the Liberal Party’s foreign policy, the responsibility to protect doctrine asserts that where gross human rights abuses are occurring, it is the duty of the international community to intervene, over and above considerations of state sovereignty.
As part of his effort to piece together Canada’s role in Haiti, Fenton requested all government files concerning the“Ottawa initiative on Haiti”. Initially told there were one thousand pages related to his Access to Information request, Fenton received 67 pages of material and many of these pages were blacked out. For instance, the copy of recommendations made by Paradis and Wiltzer during their joint session was blacked out. (The person with final say on the release of these documents was Christian Lapointe, head of the Latin America and Caribbean desk and primary contact person for the Ottawa Initiative meeting as shown in the very same documents.)
Still, it’s clear from the information released that Foreign Affairs monitored public reaction to Vastel’s story. In an e-mail exchange with Foreign Affairs, Canada’s Ambassador to Haiti Kenneth Cook pointed out that of the 70 letters received by l’Actualité on the topic of regime change, “most were positive.”
As such, one suspects that Paradis’ leak to Vastel was a trial balloon designed to gauge the response of the opposition parties, the Haitian community and other social organizations.
For obvious reasons, the Haitian government wasn’t too pleased with the meeting. Days after the meeting came to public attention, Haiti’s foreign demanded a meeting with Canada’s Ambassador and, reported Haiti’s radio Metropole, Paradis sent a letter to Haiti’s foreign minister telling him the Ottawa meeting posed no threat to his government.
In a striking example of subservience to power, the dominant Canadian media has refused to investigate the Ottawa Initiative and has barely mentioned the meeting. A recent Canadian Newsstand search found not one single English language report about the meeting published over the past decade (except for two opinion pieces by myself and another solidarity activist that mentioned it). Montréal’s La Presse may be the only corporate newspaper to have reported on the Ottawa Initiative after the coup. In that case progressive journalist Jooned Khan used space made available during Haiti’s February 2006 election upheaval to briefly mention the gathering on two occasions. By this point Khan, a veteran international affairs writer at La Presse, was closely following the work of Haiti Action Montreal, an anti-coup solidarity group.
The Canadian media has ignored the Ottawa Initiative even though information about the meeting is easily accessible online and solidarity activists across the country referenced it repeatedly. Additionally, Ottawa’s actions after the meeting demonstrate a great deal of hostility towards Haitian democracy.
On February 5, 2004 the self-styled “intellectual author” of the armed rebellion against Aristide, Paul Arcelin, met Liberal minister Pierre Pettigrew; Six days later ambassador Kenneth Cook cabled Ottawa that “President Aristide is clearly a serious aggravating factor in the current crisis” and that there is a need to “consider the options including whether a case can be made for the duty [responsibility] to protect”; Ottawa cut off aid to Haiti’s elected government and then funneled tens of millions of dollars to the installed government; Paul Martin made the first ever trip by a Canadian prime minister to Haiti to support the post-coup dictatorship; 500 Canadian troops invaded Haiti as part of a US-led effort to oust Aristide etc.
The Ottawa initiative on Haiti helped consolidate the international forces – particularly the US, France and Canada -that planned and carried out the coup. It’s a unique event in the annals of Canadian foreign-policy history and for that reason alone, should be investigated by the media.
But the meeting held near Ottawa on Jan. 31 and Feb 1, 2003, to discuss Haiti’s future is not simply of historic relevance. UN troops continue to occupy Haiti and the poor people’s movement has yet to recover from the interruption of their democracy.
As we approach the 10-year anniversary of the coup will any major Canadian media outlets report on the Ottawa Initiative on Haiti?
We Have an Anti-imperialist Obligation to the People of Haiti
By Ajamu Nangwaya, February 15, 2014
As we approach the 10 year anniversary of Canada’s invasion of Haiti, Ajamu Nangwaya of the Network for Pan-Afrikan Solidarity & Toronto Haiti Action Network explores humanity’s debt to, and imperialism’s crimes against, the Haitian people.
February 28th/March 1st will mark the 10th anniversary of the coup in Haiti that was orchestrated by the French, American, and Canadian governments, resulting in the kidnapping and downfall of democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. According to journalist and writer Yves Engler:
“On January 31 and February 1, 2003, Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government organized the “Ottawa Initiative on Haiti” to discuss that country’s future. No Haitian officials were invited to this assembly where high-level US, Canadian and French officials decided that Haiti’s elected president “must go”, the dreaded army should be recreated and that the country would be put under a Kosovo-like UN trusteeship.”
Just over a year after this pivotal meeting of the three Western states in Canada, the democratic government in Haiti was overthrown, President Aristide had been kidnapped and exiled to the Central Afrikan Republic, hundreds of Fanmi Lavalas’s (FL) supporters were killed, immediate occupation of Haiti by 2,000 Western troops (latter replaced by the United Nations’ military intervention), repression against grassroots organizations, filling of the jails with political prisoners and abandonment of the FL government’s investment in education, job creation, healthcare, public services and preoccupation with increasing the minimum wage.
People of good conscience across the world, especially those in the Americas, should take the upcoming anniversary of the coup to not only learn about what has transpired in Haiti these past ten years, but more importantly, develop and strengthen our ties of solidarity with the popular organizations within and serving Haiti’s working-class and peasantry.
The UN's occupation forces in Haiti were instrumental in "stabilizing" the post-coup order by conducting urban counter-insurgency operations against Port-au-Prince's major "slums", like Cité Soleil, where support for the deposed Aristide was strong and where resistance was could be expected to flow from.
The UN’s occupation forces in Haiti were instrumental in “stabilizing” the post-coup order by conducting urban counter-insurgency operations against Port-au-Prince’s major “slums”, like Cité Soleil, where support for the deposed Aristide was strong and where resistance was could be expected to flow from.
People-to-people solidarity based on mutual respect and principled collaboration will assist the Haitian people in their long struggle to rid themselves of the United Nations’ (MINUSTAH’s) occupation force that has been implicated in gross human rights abuses over the past decade, including the UN borne 2010 cholera outbreak that killed 8,300 deaths and infected close to 650,000 Haitians.
Our solidarity could support the demand put forward by kidnapped and deposed president Aristide that France repay Haiti the 90 million gold francs (over $23 billion today) ransom that was extracted from the latter as the price for diplomatic recognition and freedom from the threat of re-enslavement.
Our awareness can help end the cycle of Western military interventions, coups and/or propping up of anti-democratic, anti-people regimes that has plagued Haiti throughout the entire 20th century up to the present; and help Haitians put an end to the local elite’s and foreign capital’s exploitation of the people. Based on Haiti’s contribution to humanity, it should hold a special place in the internationalist programmes of progressive forces across the world.
- Haiti's 1804 revolution was the first successful slave revolution in human history to not only defeat its oppressor, but establish a new society of the liberated.
- Haiti’s 1804 revolution was the first successful slave revolution in human history to not only defeat its oppressor, but establish a new society of the liberated.
In the annals of history, the enslaved Afrikans in Haiti were the only people to have successfully overthrown a system of slavery. They defeated the strongest military forces of the day, that of France, Britain and Spain, in order to free themselves from the servile labour regime and boldly assert their freedom and humanity.
This historic feat, the Haitian Revolution, was significant beyond the victory that the enslaved Africans registered in using armed struggle to effect emancipation-from below. These Black Jacobins etched the fear of revolution in the hearts and minds of the enslavers or agricultural capitalists in the other slave-holding territories in the Americas.
Haiti’s role in Simon Bolivar’s wars of independence in Latin America is not widely known. In the spirit of principled international solidarity, Haiti provided a place of refugee to Bolivar and his comrade Francisco de Miranda in 1815 and gave them material aid in the form of schooners, printing presses, fighters and as well as guns for several thousand troops.
Haiti’s only condition for its contribution was Bolivar’s commitment to abolishing slavery, which he didn’t vigorously and speedily implement. Haiti was still living up to the ideal of universal freedom from slavery and colonial domination and it was there during a crucial movement in the Latin American struggle for self-determination. It is rather instructive and ironic today to see Latin American military forces serving in Haiti in occupation army under the United Nations’ banner (a force that includes Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay).
Haiti’s legacy of defying and exposing the farcical nature of the racist characterization of Africans as sub-humans by defeating the best European armies of the period, taking its freedom in its own hands, contributing to the liberation of Latin America and threatening the continued viability of slavery has probably earned the country the unenviable economic and political status it currently holds in the region.
I believe the poet William Wordsworth’s was right in declaring to the fallen and deceived Toussaint L’Ouverture (and by extension Haiti), “Thou hast great allies / Thy friends are exultations, agonies, / And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.”
Our anti-imperialist obligation to Haiti and its people for their contribution to universal freedom entail the provision of political, moral and material support in fighting our common enemies of social emancipation and justice.
As the 10th anniversary of the coup d’etat and occupation of Haiti approaches, the least you can do is inform yourself about the situation in Haiti by attending Toronto Haiti Action Committee’s February 24 public education event with Haitian human rights lawyer, Mario Joseph and Dr. Melanie Newton of the University of Toronto.
The abolitionist, former enslaved Afrikan, feminist and statesman Frederick Douglass had this to say about Haiti’s role in promoting “universal human liberty” and a reminder of our debt of gratitude and obligation to its people:
“In just vindication of Haiti, I can go one step further. I can speak of her, not only words of admiration, but words of gratitude as well. She has grandly served the cause of universal human liberty. We should not forget that the freedom you and I enjoy to-day; that the freedom that eight hundred thousand colored people enjoy in the British West Indies; the freedom that has come to the colored race the world over, is largely due to the brave stand taken by the black sons [and daughters], of Haiti ninety years ago. When they struck for freedom, they builded better than they knew. Their swords were not drawn and could not be drawn simply for themselves alone. They were linked and interlinked with their race, and striking for their freedom, they struck for the freedom of every black man [and woman] in the world.”