***** Davie Lecture, University of Cape Town, May 1997
Market Democracy in a Neoliberal Order: Doctrines and Reality
Noam Chomsky
...The announcement of the Clinton Doctrine was accompanied by a prize example to illustrate the victorious principles: What the Administration had achieved in Haiti. Since this is again offered as the strongest case, it would only be appropriate to look at it.
True, Haiti's elected President was allowed to return, but only after the popular organizations had been subjected to three years of terror by forces that retained close connections to Washington throughout; the Clinton Administration still refuses to turn over to Haiti 160,000 pages of documents on state terror seized by U.S. military forces -- "to avoid embarrassing revelations" about U.S. government involvement with the coup regime, according to Human Rights Watch. It was also necessary to put President Aristide through "a crash course in democracy and capitalism," as his leading supporter in Washington described the process of civilizing the troublesome priest.
The device is not unknown elsewhere, as an unwelcome transition to formal democracy is contemplated.
As a condition on his return, Aristide was compelled to accept an economic program that directs the policies of the Haitian government to the needs of "Civil Society, especially the private sector, both national and foreign": U.S. investors are designated to be the core of Haitian Civil Society, along with wealthy Haitians who backed the military coup, but not the Haitian peasants and slum-dwellers who organized a civil society so lively and vibrant that they were even able to elect their own president against overwhelming odds, eliciting instant U.S. hostility and efforts to subvert Haiti's first democratic regime.
The unacceptable acts of the "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders" in Haiti were reversed by violence, with direct U.S. complicity, not only through contacts with the state terrorists in charge. The Organization of American States declared an embargo. The Bush and Clinton Administrations undermined it from the start by exempting U.S. firms, and also by secretly authorizing the Texaco Oil Company to supply the coup regime and its wealthy supporters in violation of the official sanctions, a crucial fact that was prominently revealed the day before U.S. troops landed to "restore democracy," but has yet to reach the public, and is an unlikely candidate for the historical record.
Now democracy has been restored. The new government has been forced to abandon the democratic and reformist programs that scandalized Washington, and to follow the policies of Washington's candidate in the 1990 election, in which he received 14% of the vote.
The prize example tells us more about the meaning and implications of the victory for "democracy and open markets."
Haitians seem to understand the lessons, even if doctrinal managers in the West prefer a different picture. Parliamentary elections in April 1997 brought forth "a dismal 5 percent" of voters, the press reported, thus raising the question "Did Haiti Fail US Hope?" We have sacrificed so much to bring them democracy, but they are ungrateful and unworthy. One can see why "realists" urge that we stay aloof from crusades of "global meliorism....
<http://www.bigeye.com/chomsky.htm> ***** -- Yoshie
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