The Nation, 3 October 1994: pp. 344-348.

Occupation Haiti:
The Eagle is Landing

ALLAN NAIRN

For the second time this century, the U.S. government has announced that it will occupy Haiti to establish democracy. The result the first time was a nineteen-year occupation that re-instituted virtual slavery, claimed more than 15,000 Haitian lives and ended in the creation of an army that has terrorized the country to this day.

This time, many things are different but, as before, the United States is planning to prevent the Haitian population from taking politics into its own hands and to forestall the danger of radical mass mobilization.

The occupation scenarios being discussed involve elements from the very Haitian armed forces and police who are today the ostensible U.S. adversary. These scenarios also include faces familiar from earlier U.S. assaults on Panama, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala, as well as such familiar tactics as suppression of demonstrations, activation of U.S. intelligence contacts within rightist paramilitary fronts, mass detention of civilians and the tapping of political databanks.

Although the Phase I US. occupation force is expected to leave within weeks or months of Cedras’s departure, and the Phase II U.N. force to get out by February 1996, a host of U.S. military, C.I.A. and civilian advisers are slated to stay behind, participating in Haitian affairs more deeply than they have in years. ICITAP, for example, the U.S. agency assigned to build the Haitian police, is due, according to its chief Haiti planner, to stay for three years, bringing in several hundred U.S. trainers to mold a 5,000-man Haitian force.

"For me, the occupation will be an invasion against the Haitian people," says exiled peasant leader and Aristide Cabinet member Chavannes Jean-Baptiste. "And nothing good will come of this for the popular movement."

The United States has long demonstrated its aversion to mass politics in Haiti. Jean-Claude Duvalier, for example, was toppled, according to a colonel who helped do it, in an attempt to stave off "massive internal uprisings." Col. Steven Butler, the former planning chief for U.S. armed forces in the Caribbean, says, "In terms of maintaining the military as an institution, Duvalier had to be eased out."

Washington had backed Duvalier even though, according to Butler, U.S. radar had detected that his ranch was being used to run cocaine intot he United States. Only when it looked as if the populace might sweep the system aside did Washington decide that he had to go. Likewise, it backed the military plotters who ousted DuvaIier eventh ough Butler says they too wanted a share of the drug trade. In both cases the United States preferred criminals to a spontaneous popular force.

The same feeling holds today, though complicated circumstance has put Washington in an awkward relationship with the exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. But even if the United States formally has to back the man (and some officials are still searching for a way out), there is nothing that compels it to tolerate his constituents, much less the radical ideas that drew them to him.

In early September, speaking on background, one of the Pentagon’s senior occupation policy-makers said that joint patrols between U.S. troops and "the rump of the Haitian police" will probably be used to maintain order in the event that "somebody from the hills decides to start an insurgency." Potential insurgents, he said, include "Aristide followers acting in the spirit of Lavalas," the political coalition that brought Aristide to power.

One U.S. Psy Ops official who specializes in Haiti predicts that, if there is an invasion, initially people eill cheer the ouster of Cédras, but that "anti-U.S. sentiment"—indeed, popular attacks on U.S. forces—could be expected within a four-week period. This would be less likely if Aristide were to come back fast, but even then, he said, the danger of uprising would remain if popular expectations were not met soon. He said, "You publicize that you’re simply not going to tolerate that kind of stuff."

With regard to mass demonstrations, an intelligence official said: "Simple. You don’t let it happen. There is no such thing as a demonstration while you’re there."

A contractor who works for the State Department said that then naval task force now standing off Haiti has replaced its stocks of anti-armor weaponry with crowd-control gear including shields, gas masks and clubs. He said fears were running high in Haiti about the possibility of U.S. troops confronting organized slum dwellers, an encounter that would have "obvious consequences" for the unarmed Haitians.

Some U.S. officials who’ve worked in Haiti over the years are fairly frank in describing what they see as the basic U.S. program. One veteran intelligence officer said that an early priority for occupying forces should be to establish comfort for "the people who would feel protected by us: the middle class, the US.-educated, some of the business community"—those who live up on the hills above the privation of Port-au-Prince. He stressed the need to keep the bourgeoisie from fleeing, and from getting the idea that "their servants might come at them with tires," or that, if they left, they might return home one night and find that "the peuple have moved into the house and are building fires on the floor? The goal of an occupation, he said, should be "to do it right, which means people don’t resist and people don’t go up the hill."

He added that Aristide’s old reformist economic program had now passed into history and would probably not be permitted to be revived. If Bill Clinton had tried a minimum-wage hike the magnitude of Aristide’s (from $2 to $4 per day), he said, "they’d be hanging [him] in the Congress." The blunt fact is that "if you want to compete you do it the old-fashioned way: You have cheaper labor than Mexico, cheaper than Santo Domingo and the Caribbean." Echoing U.S. Commerce and Labor Department reports, which persistently make the same point, he said, "You’ve got to take advantage of what asset you have, and in Haiti that happens to be cheap labor."

Maj. Louis Kernisan, a Defense Intelligence Agency (D.I.A.) attaché in Haiti from 1989 through 1991, says, "Popular uprising? Under the watchful eye of 6,000 or 7,000 international observers? I doubt it. This is only the kind of shit they’ve been able to get away with when there is nobody watching. . . . They tried that before and it brought them two years of embargo and their little guy in golden exile in the States."

Kernisan, who was born in Haiti and grew up in the States, with a French father and Haitianm other, went into business in Haiti after serving in the U.S. Embassy; he returned to the, States after the post-coup embargo wrecked his import firm. Earlier, while at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, he did his thesis on Aristide, attacking him for views "radically out of the Haitian Mainstream." He writes: "There is no question that Aristide was popular, especially among the wretched Haitian masses," but "no one checked his qualifications," and he "did not take into consideration the needs of the bourgeoisie, the army, and other influential sectors." According to Kernisan, the 1915-34 U.S. occupation "clearly benefited the island in a number of respects, [but] Haitian xenophobia took over and the Americans were asked to leave,' whereupon the people "went back to their old shenanigans." Fortunately, he says, "an able referee was poised to call the game, the Garde d’Haiti," which became today’s Haitian armed forces. He also questions Aristide’s abolition of "the dreaded 'section chiefs,'" the rural security czars who had offered "an uncomfortable but working legal arrangement." Without them, "rural populations [were] left to police themselves."

Kernisan is now one of the key occupation figures, and is devising the plan to retrain Haiti’s police. As soon as the occupation is under way, he is due to go to Haiti to implement it. He operates out of ICITAP, an offshoot of the F.B.I. that was created in 1986 to provide training for the security forces of El Salvador and Guatemala.

Current US. planning calls for dissolving the Haitian Army and police, and then reconstituting them under close U.S. management. Approximately 1,500 of the current officer corps and enlisted men would be musteinretdo the new forces. U.S. spokespeople have said publicly that the worst human rights violators will be "screened out."

But, within the Haitian security forces and paramilitary fronts, the United States has a large network of U.S. Army trainees, D.I.A. informants and paid C.I.A. assets. And some U.S. officials say, not surprisingly, that they fully intend to use these men. Kernisan, for one, says he has a list of reliable Haitian officers. Although U.S. intelligence may be willing to cashier specific abusers—especially those who've become political burdens—the distinctions they make while doing their sorting do not center on questions of human rights.

When it comes, for example, to the FRAPH, the right-wing paramilitary hit squad, one U.S. intelligence official who knows the force well says that its number two man, Louis Jodel Chamblain, is "a cold-blooded, cutthroat, psychopathic killer," but that his boss, FRAPH chief Emannuel Constant, is a leading "young pro-Western intellectual . . . no further right than a Young Republican; he would be considered centerright in the United States." Human rights groups and survivors of FRAPH torture detect no difference between the two. The U.S. official, though, calls "Toto" Constant a man one could work with, and even divulged that, contrary to Washington’s public posture, U.S. intelligence "encouraged" Constant to form what emerged as the FRAPH.

Moreover, as one senior Pentagon official put it, "The human rights abusers will be vetted out and yet somehow taken care of." They are due to be "retrained" and given U.S.- funded jobs (with the Agency for International Development’s Office of Transition Initiative slated to help out) but "not enough authority to go out and use a truncheon on somebody."

The United States, though, has always found someone to perform that role if necessary. Colonel Butler, says, for example, that after Baby Doc was ousted and the Haitian Army disarmed its rivals in the Tonton Macoutes, there was "a total vacuum" in the internal security role: "In that year and a half to two yearsa fter Duvalier fell, things werien such a flux. Democracy, freedom, people were suddenly publishing—writing in Creole for the first time—everybody was very enthusiastic, and really thought something was going to change, and so there were a lot of strange people coming and going, and we didn’t know who they were and nobody had a handle on it, particularly in the outback, because the Tonton Macoutes had had total control in the interior and now they were gone."

The Macoutes, not the army, Butler says, had run the main informers network, and had even been in charge of tapping phones. The army, seeking to rebuild itself, and the system, turned to the United States for help. But Congress blocked the requested aid, and the C.I.A. moved in, quickly fillingt he vacuum by creating Haiti’s National Intelligence Service, or SIN, ostensibly an antinarcotics group, which watcahed and attacked Haitian dissidents. Aristide attempted—without success—to shut it down. Informed officials say that Donald Terry, then with the C.I.A. station in Haiti, told Aristide’s people that the United States would see to it that the SIN was reformed but that its continued operation was beyond question. Reached for comment at his current post in Paris, Terry said he did not speak to journalists.

Although it’s often claimed that U.S. training will reform the security men, it is, of courset, the case that many of them are already U.S.-trained, including Cédras and the legendarily brutal police chief, Michel François, as well as a number of FRAPH leaders. The C.I.A., for example, ran a course for Haitian operatives, which, according to Haitian officials, was taught by two white North Americans and included instruction in surveillance, interrogation and weaponry. The point of training is simply efficiency; what matters is the mission.

Today, the C.I.A. is beefing up its Haiti station, bringing in more operatives and recruiting’new Haitian assets. Many such officials, though brought in to help witht he occupation, will, like the hundreds of trainers with ICITAP, stay until political order is assured.

The occupation of Haiti can be expected to be run according to U.S. military doctrine. Among the key precepts is what the Army’s Military Operations in Low-Intensity Conflict manual calls "the Imperative of political dominance." The official study of the Panama occupation, for example, notes that the original post-invasion plans called for outright U.S. military government, with the head of U.S. Southern Command acting as Panama’s de facto ruler. At the last minute a decision was made to install Guillermo Endara as President (he was sworn in on a U.S. Army base), but his government was, as the Pentagon study put it, "merely a facade." Beyond formalities for the public, the U.S. military task force "found that it had no choice but [to] lead the Government of Panama." A U.S. general had a desk in Endara’s office and was patched into the President’s radio communications network.

Relations with Endara, however, were "relatively harmonious." In Haiti, Aristide has had a program, and constituency, fundamentally at odds with U.S. goals. Although one senior Pentagon planner says that "the sooner we can get Aristide in there to give his message of reconciliation and law and order, the better off we'll all be," others are uncertain about whether he will play ball but note that, regardless, he won’t really be in charge. The Psy Ops official, for one,’says that, under occupation, much of the Haitian military/administrative infrastructure will transfer its loyalty to the new "bi gwo neg (‘big man’)," meaning "whoever is settinthg erules." And "the new big man," he says, "would the United States."

The U.S. planners are, nonetheless, worried about their ability to use their power to maintain street-level dominance. Many seem to feel they failed badly at this in Panama and Somalia, and are determined not to make the same mistakes in Haiti. An active-duty U.S. Army colonel who served in Panama and is now helping to write occupation doctrine says that because the United States did not put an intimidating force on many downtown streets, the Panama City population got out of hand and began looting and "redistributing wealth."

In Panama, the 4th Psychological Operations Group, which is now preparing to go into Haiti, established a hotline on which members of the public were encouraged to dial direct to Southern Command and denounce Noriega backers, criminals, subversives and anti-U.S. fighters, whow ere then picked up by U.S. troops and consigned to detention camps. (In El Salvador the 4th Group helped run the army radio station, which broadcast repeated threats against the Jesuits in the days prior to their assassination.)

The U.S. Army also shut down newspapers and radio stations in Panama and rounded up thousands of dissidents and unionists. Kernisan says mass detentions are "quite possible" in Haiti. But one knowledgeable colonel said he wonders whether such targeted roundups could be done well in Haiti, in part because "there's probably only three or four of us in the U.S. military that know Haiti well enough to really get down to the weeds like that. We had been in Panama forever and knew it like the back of our hand."

But in fact various U.S. agencies possess rich lodes of intelligence: A.I.D., from its programfsor financing and guiding Haitian popular groups; the Immigration and Naturalization Service, with computerized files on 58,000 political-asylum applicants; and Army Intelligence, via the S-2 section of the 96th Civil Affairs Battalion, which has been assigned to monitor the refugees at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp.

According to a report by Capt. James Vick of the 96th, who also served in Panama and in Desert Storm, the unit develops "networks of informants" among the Haitian detainees and works with Marine Corps Counterintelligence in "identifying identifying ringleaders of unrest and in weeding out troublemakers." According to Captain Vick, the Creole-speaking interpreters at the camps submitt to daily debriefings which "yield. . . an information harvest" on possible "destabilizing influences." In August, Haitians at the Guantánamo Bay camp rebelled against the use of Duvalierist, openly anti-Aristide interpreters, some reportedly related to leaders of the FRAPH.

The 96th's files on refugees, of course, enter the military intelligence system. It is illegal for the I.N.S. to share its data, and people associated with the A.I.D. programs deny that their files will be usfed for any form of repression. But privacy laws and assurances have been known to fold in the face of covert operations, which are, by their acknowledged design, illegal and based on lies.

One of the key I.N.S. figures involved in Haiti policy is an archetypal practitioner of such operations. Gunther Wagner, a veteran of Hitler's army, was recruited by the United States as a military policeman in occupied Germany and went on to serve the United States in Vietnam (in the Phoenix assassination program) and in Nicaragua (as an A.I.D./C.I.A. trainer of Anastasio Somoza's National Guard) before working for Somoza personally and then returning to the U.S. fold as head of the State Department's Cuba-Haiti task force. In 1992, as an I.N.S. intelligence man, he wrote a study that involved compiling files on hundreds of refugees who’d been turned back from the United States and ended up asserting that 95 percent of Haitian political asylum claims were fraudulent.

Some U.S. officials say that though they are prepared to rein in the popular movement, its capacity for frontal resistance has been hurt by the winnowing terror of the armed forces and the FRAPH. The Psy Ops man says that through spies and "demonstration killings," the "military has tried to atomize society much the way that Pinochet did in Chile. . . . they've largely destroyed civil society . . . and the dual use social networks that might be used to plot somes sort of uprising."

Current planners, however, pride themselves on understanding that politics and control turn on far more than simple force. They say they aim to use nuanced analysis and tactics to achieve their goals, with an economical application of violence and even a sensitivity to language. The Psy Ops man says this one won’t be like the first occupation: "We're not going to have our Secretary of State saying things like William Jennings Bryan. He entertained some Haitians in Washington and afterward he said, 'Imagine that, a nigger speaking French.' It’s a much more sophisticated world now."

On August 10, Marine Corps Intelligence convened a seminar at its Quantico, Virginia, headquarters, where its War Gaming section questioned people from human rights and development groups. They wanted to know, as one participant put it, "who the key players are." They were particularly interested in voodoo priests and section chiefs, and asked specifically about whether there were "warlords" in Haiti. The Army’s 416th Civil Affairs Battalion is setting up similar sessions.

Likewise, the Pentagon's Atlantic Command (ACOM) has commissioned Booz, Allen, Hamilton, a corporate consulting firm, to devise a computer model of Haitian society. A similar model was ordered of Iraq for Desert Storm. The model tries to predict "the effects of social, political and economic actions on various sectors of society." In an April 29 report Booz, Allen presented "Power Relationship Matrix" which divides Haitian society into seven groups, including the "Lower Class Majority," and asks questions like "What would mobilize the masses to take action?"

The crux of the Booz, Allen/ACOM planning theory is thus: "Whether political power is a direct function of popular support or based on the allegiance of key groups and coercion of the remainder of the populace, cohesion of support is a critical question in assessing political power." They place greatest emphasis on theim portance of "Organized Civil Society"—popular and professional groups, unions and associations, development workers—seeking to identify the points at which mass cohesion, will crack. This, they say, is the key to any program for "control of the populace."

Their priority is to build an "organized information bank" and to run systematic, ongoing "assessment of the relative strengths of opposition organizations," as well as of leading "political personalities." "The tracking of opposition organizations," they say, "should be limited to those which are known to have a basis of political power and some established capability for taking political action."

As the Washington Office on Haithi as documented in detailed reports, A.I.D. is already exploring this divide-andconquer strategy in Haiti, seeking to cultivate and fund, as one embassy memo put it, "responsible elements within the popular movement" along with "moderate Duvalierist factions." When Aristide was in office, U.S. intelligence closely watched his work with grass-roots groups. Kernisan compiled an inventory of "Actions Takebny Aristide Which Led to His Overthrow"; it includes a detailed breakdown of government payments to the popular groups, complete with bank account numbers, payment dates and individuals' names. This time the United States wants to choose where the money goes. A.I.D., for one, is planning to target payments to local elected officials.

During the first week of September, U.S. Marines began to train in Puerto Rico for a possible evacuation of U.S. citizens from Haiti. Colonel Butler says he planned such an operation in 1986 to be launched in the event that the army coup against Duvalier did not succeed in pre-empting a mass popular revolt. Even that seemingly technical task of evacuation was conceivedo perationally as, essentially, the United States versus the poor. As Butler explains, "You have massive slums betweent he airport and the heart of Port-au-Prince, and also in and around the port." To extract the Americans from the embassy and their suburban homes, you have to surmount the problem that "once internal dissent really starts in Haiti—and it generally starts in Port-au-Prince and ripples outward—the reaction of all these little villages along the roads is immediately to put up armed barricades. So anybody trying to get in or out of Port-au-Prince has to run a gantlet."

The pivotal notions behind this practical planning—the equation of dissent with armed uprising, the definition of the local poor as the ultimate security threat—are ideas that not only are deeply embedded in U.S. doctrine but also grow out of an experienced appreciation of Washington’s actual role in exploited countries. Despite the talk of US. military actions for the common good, nuts-and-bolts planners know that in the end the United States works through local armies and business classes that are often not beloved by the local majorities. The Pentagon can’t usually draw its battle plans counting the poor on the U.S. side.

Experienced U.S. military officials know that the role of occupier—more than that of swift invader or covert boss—often dramatizes ugly truths. Colonel Butler recalled his experience in the Dominican Republic in 1965: "For a while we ran these huge detainee camps, and we came under increasing flack. . . . What do you do with the civilian detainees if you're the intervening power? You've got to do something with them, but for how long and who decides what? These are the ,things people don’t think about when they say let’s just send the military down there and kick some butt." There’s also the matter of what Butler calls "the massive needs that will suddenly revert to the shoulders of the United States immediately once you take that government out." Now the United States elite has the best of both worlds: Its firms extract revenue from the people but Washington is not held accountable for the fact that many of them starve. In an occupation the United States will openly face a population to which it had been accustomed to relating mainly as a distant labor source. As one colonel puts it, "It’s abject misery, then you look up, on the hill at all the mansions. . . . When you occupy, you go in and take over responsibility for all these things."

Nevertheless, the occupation is still on. And U.S. officials who know Haiti predict matter-of-factly that after the U.S.-managed “democratization” the same classes will bine charge. "Who are we going to go back to save?" Kernisan asks rhetorically. "You’re going to end up dealing witht he same folks as before, the five families that run the country, the military and the bourgeoisie. They’re the same folks that are supposed to be the bad guys now, but the bottomline is you know that you’re going to always end up dealing with them because they speak your language, they understand your system, they’ve been educated in your country. It’s not going to be the slum guy from Cité Soleil. The best thing he can hope for is probably 'Oh, I’ll help you offload your cargo truck.' Because that’s all he has the capacity to do. It’ll be the same elites, the bourgeoisie and the five families that run the country."