The story of the international community’s role in Haiti over the last four years has been told almost solely through global independent media networks and by the alternative press. For Canadians, the story of their government’s leading role in the planning, funding and military execution of the 2004 coup d’etat that removed democratically-elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide reached its audience as a result the meticulous, diligent, and usually unpaid work of independent journalists and researchers. Meanwhile, the mainstream media, as well as the vast majority of academia, remained utterly silent during the human rights catastrophe that followed the coup. The recent reportage of the food riots across Haiti--riots that were clearly directed against the UN's presence as much as against the inaction of the Preval government in halting the rise in food prices--exhibited the amnesic symptoms consistent with the international community’s role in the 2004 coup.
The media blackout surrounding the bloodbath that followed the 2004 coup d’etat in Haiti--and particularly Canada’s clear complicity (to the point of paying the salaries of officials within the coup government)--has thus far been countered by frontline research carried out by several Canadian, Haitian and US independent journalists, such as Anthony Fenton, Yves Engler, Jeb Sprague, Isabelle Macdonald, Andrea Schmidt, Darren Ell, Kevin Pina and Jean Ristil. However, until now no single author has managed to piece together a comprehensive account of exactly how the coup of 2004 was carried out, who the actors were in Haiti and internationally, what its effects have been, and how the Lavalas movement of Jean-Bertrand Aristide has managed to weather the violence of this period.*
Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood does exactly this. Hallward’s account of how the international community pulled off the “most successful act of imperial sabotage since the end of the cold war” is a brilliant, comprehensive and courageous piece of modern history. It is also a first-rate piece of journalism.
Like many of the independent journalists mentioned above, Hallward’s interest in Haiti began with the 2004 coup. But, as Damming the Flood chronicles, the 2004 coup was not the first regime change in Haiti. Aristide, a Catholic priest whose religious teachings were steeped in the theology of liberation, was deposed in 1991, less than a year after his overwhelming victory in Haiti’s 1990 elections. These elections ended decades of US-backed military dictatorship. (Unsurprisingly, the coup was backed financially by the first Bush administration.) The ensuing three-year period was characterized by a campaign of terror directed against Haiti’s poorest neighbourhoods. By 1994, President Clinton, in need of a foreign policy success story after spearheading a disastrous international intervention in Somalia, militarily re-instated Aristide. Aristide was forced to agree to conditions, most notably that his government adopt widely unpopular IMF-oriented economic reforms and that Haiti’s moneyed elite--many of whom had supported Aristide's deposition--retain positions of power. Haiti’s democratic government then adopted many unpopular free market reforms--whose fallout in the agricultural sector is evident today--but also managed to dismantle Haiti’s hated military. The 10-year period that followed, from 1994 to 2004, saw an unprecedented drop in human rights abuses throughout the country and a modest investment in social programs.
Perhaps as a result of his widespread appeal among Haiti’s poor, whose newfound influence upon Haiti's government enraged and terrified the country's elite, Aristide remained a deeply unpopular and vilified figure among foreign policy-makers in the United States, Canada, the European Union, and even the UN.
Hallward notes in his introduction that the book is a response to the “striking difference between the international reactions to the two anti-Aristide coups of 1991 and 2004.” According to Hallward, the 2004 coup represented the “most successful exercise of neo-imperial sabotage since the toppling of Nicaragua’s Sandinistas in 1990.” Hallward also writes that the international campaign of demonization of Aristide in the years leading up to the coup was “one of the most successful propaganda episodes of modern times,” a media coup on par with the acceptance by the world press of the pretense of weapons of mass destruction as the motivation behind the US invasion of Iraq.
Throughout his exhaustively footnoted account, Hallward examines the claims made against Aristide by members of the country’s opposition parties and by the small class of moneyed elite. By analysing documented evidence, he debunks a number of still-prevalent myths, from the claim that Aristide relied upon an apparatus of gangs to repress political opponents--indeed, from 2001 to 2004, the number of political killings was miniscule and evidence linking the crimes to their perpetrators remains tenuous, while 4,000 political killings are estimated to have occurred from 2004-2006 in Port-au-Prince alone--to the assertion that the Lavalas party had lost its legitimacy and popularity among the poor--despite the fact that a Gallup poll in 2002 put Aristide’s support at 60 per cent--to the notion that Aristide rigged the parliamentary elections of 2000--even though the elections were deemed “free and fair” by the Organization of American States among others, and they occurred, not under Aristide’s watch, but during the presidency of Rene Preval.