Ja: Aristide's departure a coup

The deed is done.
Haiti has been raped.
The act was sanctioned by the United States, Canada and France.
.... what happened in Haiti yesterday was nothing short of a coup d'etat.

This language is a bit over the top and highly fraught. Who has raped Haiti? Some Haitians would say Aristide. While it is true that Guy Philippe and his fellow rebels are responsible for the deaths of a significant number of Haitians, so is Aristide. After all, the whole uprising began because of the slaying of Amiot Metayer, which act caused Philippe and others to turn against Aristide. If there was a coup, why is it that SJC Boniface Alexandre, rather than Guy Philippe, is now president of Haiti, according to constitutional process? It is not clear what, if any, role the rebels will play in the government. However, with foreign troops on the ground, it is highly unlikely that they will be at liberty to seize power for themselves and really do pull a coup in Haiti.

Indeed, having pressured President Jean-Bertrand Aristide into resigning and going into exile, these powers have firmly placed their imprimatur on a politics that rewards violence and a process that abjures principle in favour of narrow ideological positions and personality preferences.

The other point of view is that Aristide had no choice but to resign because

One by one, those who helped bring [him] to power [had] fallen away, into exile or into the opposition. Evans Paul, now a key figure in the democratic opposition, was once an adviser to Aristide whose ribs were broken by thugs in the early 1990s for supporting Aristide's return to the presidency. Robert Manuel, who was in charge of Aristide's security and who later was appointed to oversee the reform of the country's corrupt police force, fled the country in 1999 after his life was threatened for trying to carry out those reforms. Leon Manus, the retired lawyer appointed to oversee Haiti's elections, fled in 2000 -- to Nashua, N.H. -- when his life was threatened for refusing to certify false election results.

Thus, the pressure that the international community brought was the no less than reality slapping Aristide across the face. He was forced to acknowledge the truth of what A.N.R. Robinson, former PM of T&T, had said:

he was not in favour of a rebel group overthrowing the President. But he also noted that Aristide cannot now govern Haiti. "I don't see how he can rule at all in this situation and quite frankly, my own view is that he should demit office. He can't rule, he can't govern. the country cannot be governed by him."

So, should the U.S., Canada, and France (not exactly an ally of the U.S.) be faulted for presenting Aristide with a stark statement of his choices? I would think not. Had Aristide not been so desirous of retaining power, he would have followed Robinson's suggestion of his own accord, and he would also have asked his supporters to stand down.

It is an issue that Caricom leaders must seriously contemplate when they discuss the Haiti issue in Kingston tomorrow. These islands are all vulnerable.

I quite agree with this. Furthermore, Caricom must address a number of things including what is to be done with a leader who abuses his people; the pressures that Caricom will bring to bear on such a leader to avoid intervention by the international community; the swiftness, or lack thereof, of Caricom's response to situations that are rapidly evolving -- Caricom must have a set of standard responses to crises that they can implement at a moment's notice without having emergency meetings that occur days after the crisis has ended; also, Caricom needs to ask itself if it is possible to balance concern for constitutional process with concern for the welfare of a citizenry under siege, without sacrificing the rule of law.

The truth be told, Mr Aristide was never the flavour of the Parisian set, the inside-the-beltway crowd of Washington or the new Canadians. And hardly was Mr Aristide ever going to be the favourite of the types in Haiti who fomented yesterday's coup d'etat, who engineered his previous overthrow in 1991, and who have been the fulcrum of real power in pre-Aristide dictatorships, even if they did not directly hold the reins of Government.

The truth was that Aristide came to be not the flavor of the month with many of his former allies. He was not even the flavor of the month with Caricom, since only the PM of the Bahamas was willing to attend independence celebrations in Haiti because the other heads of Caricom did not want to be seen supporting Aristide whilst there were doubts about the constitutionality of the election.

But Messrs Powell, de Villepin and Graham, having reneged on their endorsement of a Caribbean Community initiative, under which Mr Aristide undertook to share power with his opponents, deemed that the Haitian president was expendable. The niceties of democracy were thrown out the window, and the matters of principle so vigorously defended by President Chirac and Foreign Minister de Villepin over Iraq were quickly shunted aside. And new Canadians went with the flow.

Having seen the back of Mr Aristide, trampled on the considered position of their friends in the Caribbean, and welcoming a putsch in Haiti, the troika is ready to sanction a UN-backed peace-keeping mission to Haiti to restore order and DEMOCRACY!

I'm not sure if the writer is seriously miffed because Aristide is gone or because Caricom's initiatives did not come to pass. The U.S. agreed with Caricom about a power-sharing agreement between Aristide and the rebels. Yet, Guy Philippe, leader of the rebels, indicated that he was not interested in ruling, but in getting rid of Aristide. His cessation of battle on the outskirts of Port au Prince was a reality check to Aristide, yield or die. The bottom line is, nobody was going to sacrifice not one of his country's soldiers to save Aristide's skin. In the face of the rebels' inflexibility about power-sharing what was supposed to happen? The countries involved attempted to preserve the constitutional process by presenting Aristide with options. Confronted with the loss of his security detail, and valuing his own life as more dear than that of the Haitian people's, Aristide resigned. It seems the writer of this editorial erroneously believed in Aristide more than the Haitian people and his former supporters did.

When all is said and done, it all comes down to damned if you do and damned if you don't. The constitutional niceties were upheld when Aristide resigned and Alexandre was sworn in. The people of Haiti are no longer being slaughtered on the streets of Port au Prince