Posted on 02/20/2004 12:47:12 AM PST by kattracks
ONCE AGAIN HAITIAN PRESIDENT JOHN-BERTRAND ARISTIDE may be ousted by his citizens, who began a new rebellion against his tyrannical rule on February 5.
After Aristide was removed by a military coup in 1991, President Bill Clinton in 1994 sent 20,000 U.S. troops to Haiti to restore to power this former Roman Catholic Priest and advocate for Leftist Liberation Theology who once called Cuban Marxist dictator Fidel Castro his “greatest personal hero.”
“There is frankly no enthusiasm” for sending armed U.S. troops to secure Aristide’s presidency again, said Secretary of State Colin Powell on Tuesday. As of Thursday, the United States had announced plans to send only a handful of troops to secure our Embassy there. The French Government offered tentative assistance from 4,000 troops on nearby Caribbean islands that it said were trained as humanitarian peacekeepers.
But forces may be in play that are both deeper and darker than what the international press is reporting. We might be witnessing a struggle of “principalities and powers.”
These sinister forces trace their roots to Haiti’s origin as an independent nation. And those roots may have entangled Bill Clinton and even Democratic Presidential frontrunner Senator John F. Kerry in strange and twisted ways.
In our Postmodern, Deconstructionist world, there is an “alternative reading” or “subtext” to the conventional news coming out of Haiti. So that you, too, can see it, let me tell you a story. We report. You decide.
Columbus in 1492 was the first European to land on the island its native cannibalistic Arawak Indians called “Hayti” (“mountainous land”). He would rename it “Hispaniola” (“Little Spain”).
In 1697 Spain ceded the western portion of the island, the part called Haiti, to France. Spain kept the eastern half, Saint-Domingue, today the Dominican Republic. After the Arawak were exterminated, both Spaniards and French imported African slaves accustomed to tropical heat and sunshine.
By 1780 the French colony of Haiti with its rich crops of cocoa, sugar cane, cotton and coffee, had become one of the wealthiest places on Earth. This wealth derived from the labor of 500,000 slaves exploited and held down by only 26,000 white French plantation settlers and 30,000 affranchis of mixed ancestry. This disparity of power and numbers would soon end in a bloodbath.
Some of these slaves escaped to the mountains and created their own community. One was a legendary figure named Boukman, almost certainly an African, certainly a houngan (“witch doctor”) of enormous size, strength and charisma.
In Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince today you can see an iron pig statue. It commemorates the ritual of the African religion Americans today call Voodoo conducted by Boukman on August 14, 1791.
A pig on that day was ritually killed. The escaped slaves joined in drinking its still-warm blood as part of a pact. Boukman led his followers in vowing that they and their children would serve the pagan gods of the island, including the devil, for exactly 200 years in exchange for freedom from the French.
Seven days later the slaves of Haiti rose in rebellion, soaking Haiti in the blood of the French overseers and plantation owners who had enslaved them.
On January 1, 1804 – exactly 200 years ago – a beaten France acknowledged the independence of Haiti. This, as you soon shall see, is a key fact in our story.
After the coup deposed him in 1991, exiled John-Bertrand Aristide took up residence in Washington, D.C. Looking for political help to restore his power, he reportedly connected with the inner circle of soon-to-be Democratic Presidential candidate Bill Clinton.
Aristide, according to historian Joel A. Ruth, reportedly supplied Clinton with a Voodoo sorcerer. This sorcerer, according to the Haitian media, gave Clinton magical advice on how to run his campaign. (One piece of advice that Clinton reportedly followed: not to change his underwear during the final week of the 1992 race.)
The sorcerer also reportedly, in exchange for a “large sum of money,” cast a “wanga” (“malediction”) spell on Clinton’s rival, incumbent President George H.W. Bush, by “manipulating a doll made in the president’s image.”
During a March 31, 1995 visit to Haiti under Aristide’s restored rule, Clinton according to the Haiti Observateur newspaper took part in a Voodoo initiation ceremony intended to keep him impervious to Republican attacks and to guarantee his re-election.
One account, notes Ruth, related that Aristide dedicated the ceremonial site prior to Clinton’s arrival with “the blood of a newborn infant in gratitute to the gods whom he believes allowed his return to power.”
Earlier in 1995, the defrocked priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide formally renounced his Roman Catholic faith and publicly announced that he was returning to the Voodoo faith of his ancestors.
In July 1995 Aristide held a Voodoo Congress at Haiti’s National Palace. The 300 attendees included sorcerers and “bocors” (those who practice black magic), wrote Ruth, “including leaders of the dreaded ‘Bizango Cult,’ which practices zombification and human sacrifice.”
[Scientists have documented the use of poison from the Caribbean puffer fish by Haitian witch doctors as a way to simulate death and then, in smaller doses, to turn victims dug up from their graves into the “living dead,” called zombies in Haiti’s Voodoo tradition.]
Voodoo, Aristide said in his speech to congress attendees, is one of the “great religions of the world alongside Christianity, Islam and Judaism.” He announced the funding of a national Voodoo temple, doubtless to be built with U.S. taxpayer aid dollars via the Clinton Administration.
One of Aristide’s later objectives would be the shipping of Haitians to the United States, especially to Florida shores 600 miles away where they could embarrass the state’s Republicans. Senator John F. Kerry (D.-Mass.) might have shared Aristide’s motives when, in 1998, he co-sponsored a bill that resulted in amnesty for an estimated 125,000 Haitians who had been given “temporary asylum” before 1996 because they were fleeing the chaos, terror and poverty caused largely by Aristide.
In the United States, meanwhile, President Bill Clinton ordered the U.S. military to begin including witchcraft pagan chaplains to minister to the religious needs of our troops. Hillary Clinton, as observed by FBI agents, decorated her upstairs Christmas tree one year with sex and drug paraphernalia. She pressed the Postal Service to discontinue issuing Madonna and Child stamps around Christmastime.
Hillary Clinton also lobbied the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to create a new crime comparable to sexual harassment in the workplace. This new crime, “religious harassment,” could be committed by something as simple as a company manager wearing a cross or yarmulke or having a Bible on his or her desk and could be punished by heavy government fines.
Back in Haiti, Aristide was required by the nation’s Constitution to rule via a hand-picked puppet for a few years. But by 2000 he was reclaiming his power as President and in the legislature in an election so phony and rigged that it was denounced as “flawed” and a fraud by nearly every international observer. In its wake, $500 million in international aid to Haiti was suspended.
Aristide’s response to critics of his high-handed behavior has long been violence and terror. He has had followers lay their machetes on his altar and then name their enemies.
Aristide has also endorsed “necklacing” of the kind widely practiced in South Africa by Winnie Mandela. It consists of seizing a victim, forcing an automobile tire filled with gasoline down over their head and shoulders, and then setting the tire and gasoline on fire.
“What a beautiful tool!… It smells good. And wherever you go, you want to smell it,” Aristide said of the necklacing of his critics on September 27, 1991, as witnessed and reported by Associated Press.
Note the above date. Despite knowing of Aristide’s penchant for necklacing critics, and despite knowing that a CIA psychological profile had identified Aristide as “a psychopath,” President Bill Clinton three years later put at risk 20,000 of America’s most elite troops to remove a pro-American Haitian government in order to re-install this murdering psychopath Jean-Bertrand Aristide as President of Haiti.
“He is compared now with Francois ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, who set up his Tontons-Macoute gestapo-like police to harass, jail and kill his opponents,” wrote Raymond Joseph, an editor of Haiti Observateur. “Mr. Aristide’s goons are called chimeres (chimeras) and have turned Haiti into a killing field.”
“Aristide, who claims to be a prophet, a messiah, reportedly was bathed in November [2000] in the blood of a dead Haitian by voodoo priestess Marie-Anne Auguste, commonly known as So An,” wrote Yves A. Isidor, who teaches at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth.
“The purpose of [this blood] bathing…said a senior member of Aristide’s Lavalas Family Party,” wrote Isidor, “…was in an effort to put a curse on then-U.S. Rep[ublican] presidential candidate George W. Bush…. His Dem[ocratic] rival, U.S. Vice President Albert Gore would, hopefully, emerge as the winner of the November election.” But Aristide’s voodoo magic could not make a winner of Zombie-like Gore as it helped do for Clinton.
In Haiti this megalomaniac President Aristide has failed by every measure. He has not improved the national standard of living. He has not united the nation. And instead of entrenching democracy, he has destroyed it.
Aristide’s gangs of followers have killed journalists critical of his regime and gone unpunished. Five Christian missionaries have been murdered, apparently by voodoo adherents. In recent weeks he and his thugs have stopped political opponents from holding public marches or demonstrations against him. No wonder that on February 5 groups of Haitians have risen in revolt to remove Aristide, again, from power.
But in what seems to be the never-ending tragedy of Haiti, many of the groups now bent on overthrowing Aristide are as evil-minded and bloody-handed as he is. It is as if the minions of hell, the demons, have been unleashed and the politics of the whole nation are demoncratic.
“In late April,” wrote the journal Christianity Today in October 2003, “President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former Catholic priest, declared voodoo an officially recognized religion. It’s a move that some Christians in the chronically poor nation of 7.5 million say is an ominous sign.”
“The government said they are going to turn the country entirely to voodoo,” it quoted Jean Berthony Paul, founder of the Mission Evangelique du Nord D’Haiti.
[As one commentator puts it, “Haiti is reckoned as being 95% Christian (predominantly Catholic), but according to Catholic missionary John Hoet, Haitians ‘are 100% voodoo.’” Most are nominally Roman Catholic Christians, but most also practice some aspects of Voodoo and incorporate Christian saints into their pagan pantheon of African gods. Haiti ended its official recognition of Roman Catholicism as its state church in 1987.]
Christians in Haiti held their breath on New Year’s Day 2004. That day marked the end of Boukman’s 200-year “Deal with the Devil,” the day his Voodoo gods were said to have kept their end of his Free-us-from-the-French bargain and started the 200-year clock running.
Months earlier President Aristide had gathered 400 voodoo priests, many of them imported from Africa apparently at taxpayer expense, for a ceremony.
That gathering in August 2003, many Christians feared, was to ritually renew and extend the Voodoo contract with the island’s demons. Some Christian evangelicals credit their concerted prayers with causing the August gathering to disintegrate into arguing and confusion before any blood ritual could be performed. Those praying Christians believe they saved Haiti’s soul.
But did Aristide ritually renew Haiti’s voodoo pact with the devil four months later on New Year’s Day? This reporter found no news stories that he did. But such a ceremony, like that reported during Bill Clinton’s visit to Haiti, could have been conducted in secret or deceptive ways.
And this may have happened because Bill Clinton, without consulting Congress or the United Nations, felt a compulsion to invade and overthrow the government of Haiti in order to restore Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power as the voodoo king of a voodoo island. Believe it or not. But look at the evidence and hyperlinks herein before you disbelieve. What you learn might help save America’s soul…and your own.
Mr. Ponte hosts a national radio talk show Saturdays 6-9 PM Eastern Time (3-6 PM Pacific Time) and Sundays 9 PM-Midnight Eastern Time (6-9 PM Pacific Time) on the Liberty Broadcasting network (formerly TalkAmerica). Internet Audio worldwide is at LibertyBroadcasting .com. The show’s live call-in number is (888) 822-8255. A professional speaker, he is a former Roving Editor for Reader’s Digest.
I've thought that too, however, could the fact that our military is otherwise committed in another part of the world have something to do with the administrations reluctance?
Either way the possible intentions of the French sure could complicate matters.
It is a shock. I've met many people from the D.R. and they are just outstanding people who love their country. The things I hear most from the Dominicans is that Haiti is on the dry side of the island, and they raped the land for all of it's trees early on. Erosion destroyed most of the fertile topsoil, and from there it went downhill. Very difficult to grow any vast quantities of cash crops, which would have been a significant part of their revenue. At anyrate, the problems in Haiti as I understand it won't be resolved in this generation or the next.
The Duvaliers sold vast tracts of forest to Japan and other nations during their reign. That is largely responsible for the severe erosion problems.
Haiti's biggest problems are 1) lack of education, 2) the backward and evil practices of voodoo and 3) "benevolent" intervention by foreign powers. For instance, reinstalling Aristide after the coup. Haiti would likely be a stable and more prosperous country if Raoul Cedras had been left in power.
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