Dessalines Is Rising!!
Ayisyen: You Are Not Alone!

*********************

From Thug to Freedom Fighters, COHA, Larry Birns and Seth DeLong, December 14, 2004
***************

Prime Minister Yvon Neptune's explosive and condemning August 23, 2004 letter from Prison to US Ambassador James Foley
*********

The Revolutionary Potential of Haiti, its creeds, values and struggle

*****
Media Lies and Real Haiti News

*****
Bwa Kayiman 2007 and the case of Lovinsky Pierre Antoine

Eyewitness account of the abduction of the Aristides - Statement of Frantz Gabriel, Haitian pilot, on the events of Feb. 29, 2004 (From Randall Robinson's "An Unbroken Agoney: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President, pg. 196, 197, 198-20)
***************

(Click on this link
http://www.democracynow.org/
article.pl?sid=07/07/23/141241

then click on "Watch 128k stream" or "Watch 256k stream" to view Democracy Now! video footage showing tens of thousands of Haitians demonstrating recently (July 16, 2007) in Haiti for return of Aristide and release of the political prisoners; footages of Aristide after the US kidnapping on a plane back from Central African Republic on a plane chartered by Congresswoman Maxine Waters and Randall Robinson, et al to return Aristide and his Haiti's first lady to Jamaica for temporary asylum, and footages of interview with Randall Robinson on his new book on Haiti, et al....(Democracy Now!, July 23, 2007)
********


Democracy Now! Interview with Randall Robinson on Haiti (Audio)

Eyewitness Account of the abduction of President Jean Bertrand Aristide and First Lady Mildred Aristide of Haiti and the ouster of Haiti’s democratically elected government by the United States

From An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President, by Randall Robinson, pg. 196, 197, 198-203 (http://randallrobinson.com/ ).

Reproduced by Ezili’s HLLN, October 27, 2007

“…Port au Prince is A TWO HOUR drive south from Gonaives along a coastal road. When President Aristide and his wife disappeared during the early hours of Sunday, February 29, 2004, Guy Philippe, Luis-Jodel Chamblain, and their American-armed paramilitary force were in the vicinity of Gonaives, one hundred kilometers north of the capital, presumably awaiting further instructions...." pg. 196 (emphasis added).

"…as things turned out, [Philippe, Chamblain and their American-armed paramilitary force, were] DECOYS whose roles in a murderous plot ended hours, if not days before the coup and Aristide’s disappearance." pg. 196 (emphasis added)

"….In the late afternoon of Saturday, February 28, the president’s helicopter pilot, Frantz Gabriel, reported for the last time to the government on the pattern of movement and exact whereabouts of the American-armed paramilitary force that had ground to a FULL STOP somewhere in the neighborhood of Gonaives on the north west cost of the country. (emphasis added)

Gabriel believed that the “thugs were afraid to come into Port-au-Prince” and said as much to his superiors in the government." (From, An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President, by Randall Robinson, pg. 196, 197, http://randallrobinson.com/)

***

Statement of Frantz Gabriel by Randall Robinson
(From, An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President, pg. 198-203, http://randallrobinson.com/)

“…The telephone rang in Gabriel’s home at 3:15 in the morning. The call was made by one of the president’s Haitian security guards who said to Gabriel in Kreyol that “there is something happening that I don’t understand. I think you’d better come here.” The voice on the phone had been colored with alarm. Gabriel dressed quickly and went out, positioning on the front seat at his car beside him an M3, the equivalent of a small M16 automatic rifle. The streets would be deserted at this time of night, and Gabriel expected to reach the president’s home at Tabarre in twenty minutes.

*

"Besides the president, his wife, and the few Haitian security personnel present at the president’s home in the early hours of February 29, Frantz Gabriel would be the only eyewitness to the coup d’etat and abduction of the president and his wife that was carried out between 3:45 and 4:00 A.M. by American Special Forces soldiers.

On October 25, 2005, I took this statement from Gabriel in Pretoria, South Africa, where he was living in exile.

	'I got to the house at 3:30 A.M. on Sunday morning. The gate is usually opened by a member of the CAT team (Haitian Counter Ambush Team). That morning it was opened by the Steele people. This never happened before. (I later thought that the Steele people had gotten a call to play the game, to play along.) The gate closed behind me. I parked in my usual space in the parking lot on the right between the two walls. I left the M3 on the seat of my car. I walked through the second gate and into the command post. No one said anything to me. I then walked through the office and then into the president's living room. The president was standing alone in the room dressed in a suit with a white shirt and a dark tie. The First Lady was somewhere else. She was not in the living room. I then asked, "Is there a problem, Mr. President?" The president said, "There has been a lot of pressure coming from all different directions." I said, "What do you mean, sir?" He said, "The way things are looking – I am under intense pressure." The phone rang and the president went to answer it. I heard him talk. No American forces were there at that time. While he was on the phone, I said to myself that I should go out and see what was going on in the yard where Haitian security and the Steele people [US private security hired by Haiti to protect Haiti’s president] were. As I walked out [the front door], pulling up to the walk to the front door was a big white Suburban with diplomatic plates. I was standing by the steps to the door. [Luis] Moreno got out of the Suburban with two American soldiers. I turned and went back into the living room to be closer to the president. The president was putting the phone down. Moreno said, "Mr. President, I'm from the U.S. Embassy. Ten years ago, I was there when you came in. I was there to greet you. It's too bad that ten years later, I'm the one that has to announce to you that you've got to go." I looked at the president and then at Moreno. By then the First Lady had come downstairs. The president went into the dining room to speak with her. They came out together. The First Lady was carrying a small bag. She was wearing a suit. Outside there were twenty to thirty American soldiers on the walls that surrounded the house. They had lasers on their guns that made red dots. The red dots filled the yard. They were crisscrossing and coming from all directions. The two soldiers with Moreno were Special Forces. I knew this because they had beards. They carried M16's and wore full battle dress with steel helmets and bulletproof vests. They were white and said nothing. We got into the Suburban. The president sat in the second row by the window. The First lady sat in the middle and Moreno sat by the sliding door. The two solders sat up front with one of them driving. I sat in the back row. We went through the main gate and made the right toward the airport. Outside the gate, we were joined by a convoy of ten U.S. embassy vehicles. There were all white Suburbans. We made a right into the airport in the direction of the general aviation area. There were two hangers there. The old Huey helicopter was there. There was s white Airbus there. It had a huge American flag on the tail. There was no tail number and no other markings. Moreno opened the door and got out of the Suburban. He said to the president and the First Lady, "Okay, let's go." That's all he said. He didn't say anything to me. He stood at the foot of the plane and sort of motioned to the president, the First Lady, and me to board the plane. The three of us went up the stairs into the plane. The two American soldiers who were in the Suburban boarded the plane and changed into civilian clothes (polo shirts and sneakers) while the door was still open. Moreno never boarded the plane. The [American] ambassador was not there. All this happened very quickly. Everything was timed so well. The Suburban came into the yard at about 4:00 A.M. We got to the plane at about 4:30 A.M. The Suburban went right to the bottom of the stairs. We sat in the Suburban about five minutes before Moreno opened the door and said, "Okay, let's go." The plane looked like it would seat about 365 people. All the window shades were pulled down. Behind the first seating section was a big operations centre with telephone, a fax machine, and a computer. The machines were on one side of the plane and there were seats on the other side. The president and the First lady were told to sit in the front section. I sat ten rows behind a bulkhead that was behind the American soldiers who were behind the operations centre. I could not see the president and the First lady from where I was sitting, but I went to talk to them several times. He was quiet. She was crying silently. I said to myself, This is incredible. This is a kidnapping. They just came and kidnapped the president in his home and took him away. I'm in the middle of a fucking kidnapping. This is the first thing that hit my mind. There were about thirty American soldiers on the plane. They came from the house in the ten Suburbans. They all had beards. They boarded the plane with their gear and then changed into civilian clothes. One of them, who seems to be in charge, said to me, "Are you going back with us?" like he thinks I am one of his men. Maybe it was just because of my beard. The American soldiers sat on the plane between me and the president and the First Lady. All the way in the back behind me were the Steele men with their wives and children. They were all wearing casual clothes. The pilots wore regular pilot's uniforms. We waited on the plane about thirty minutes before we took off. There were five black people on the plane. Besides the president, the First Lady, and me, there was a Haitian woman who was with one of the Steele men. They had a baby. After we landed the first time, I asked somebody where we were but nobody would tell me. Everybody was quiet. I heard the fuel nozzle attach. Once in a while the baby would cry. After the baby was fed, everything was quiet again. They offered the president and the First lady some sandwiches, but they did not take them. We were on the ground for five hours. The guys who spoke to me before, who seemed to be in charge, said to everyone over the PA system, "So far we don't have an official invitation yet for President Aristide. It seems like nobody wants him." The guy was on the phone the whole time behind the president who was sitting face forward. His staff was also on the phone. Some of the phones were black and some were red. They were using the fax and the laptops also. We flew for a long time after we took off again. We landed again and waited on the ground for fuel. We didn't know where we were. When we were approaching the Central African Republic, the guy who was in charge asked me, "What are you gonna do? Are you going back with us?" I told him that I was staying with the president. Then he said, "You are going to a French military prison." This is what he said to me. I said, "I don't care. I'm going where the president goes." Then he said, "You will be greeted by a French colonel on your arrival." No Americans got off the plane. Nobody. Only the three of us. Only the Central African Republic minister of foreign affairs came on the plane. We left the airport before the plane took off. Before that, we went into a small terminal. It was in the morning. We sat in the terminal for thirty minutes. The minister allowed journalists to ask him questions, but he was in no mood to talk. Then they drove us to President Bozize's palace. The president was out of town. They took us to two rooms in a side section of the palace. It was three days before President Bozize returned from out of town. You asked me if the Central African Republic people where respectful to us. The only time that they were a little disrespectful was when your plane came.' [Randall Robinson, Congresswoman Maxine Waters and Jamaican parliament member, Sharon Hay-Webster, traveled to the Central African Republic and rescued the Aristides, arranging temporary asylum in Jamaica, against US-Condoleezza Rice’s strong-armed pressure for Jamaica not to provide said temporary asylum.]

**

(For more information and greater details, please purchase Randall Robinson’s book “ An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President - Buy the book at: http://randallrobinson.com/buy_agony.html ; and visit http://randallrobinson.com/ ) See also:
http://www.margueritelaurent.com/pressclips/randall.htm
***********************

Randall Robinson on Haiti's Tortured Past, Troubling Present By Theola Labbé, a Washington Post Metro reporter of Haitian descent
Thursday, October 18, 2007; Page C03

AN UNBROKEN AGONY
Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President
By Randall Robinson
Basic Civitas 280 pp. $26

Randall Robinson, the founder of the social justice organization TransAfrica, has never shied from expressing his views. In "Quitting America" (2004), he declared that the United States had nothing to offer him and other native-born blacks -- a realization that drove him to move with his family to the Caribbean nation of St. Kitts and Nevis. In "The Debt" (2000), he argued in favor of reparations to African Americans for the legacy of slavery. In his latest work, Robinson offers a passionate retelling of the history of Haiti and the circumstances surrounding the rise and fall of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Using history, eyewitness accounts and his own role as a monitor for parliamentary elections, Robinson has created a worthy account, in his trademark incensed style, of how American and European policies have harmed, rather than helped, Haiti.

The book opens with Haiti's beginning as an island inhabited by 8 million Taino Indians when Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492. Three decades later, only 200 Tainos remained. Three hundred years later, freed slave Toussaint L'Ouverture transformed fellow ex-slaves into soldiers and led "the only successful slave revolt ever mounted in the Americas." Robinson calls it "the most stunning victory won for the black world in a thousand years."

While much has been written about the slave revolt, Robinson's contribution is his focus on the revolt's reverberations throughout the rest of the Americas in an era when slavery permeated the political and social landscape. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, whose ideas were precursors to future foreign policy, were dismayed by how the slave rebellion was progressing and reached out to French political leaders to express their displeasure at seeing "such a spirit of revolution among the blacks."

Following the successful slave revolt, however, Haiti saw years of instability, with rulers replaced in coups d'etat and military generals appointing themselves leaders. The United States occupied the country for nearly 20 years at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1957, the authoritarian Francois Duvalier was elected president. Known as "Papa Doc," he would be succeeded by his son, nicknamed "Baby Doc."

The election in 1990 of Aristide, a poor, populist priest, as Haiti's president was a watershed moment. Aristide energized millions of poor black Haitians, who for the first time felt that the government might represent them rather than the interests of a coterie of wealthy Haitian families. After a coup attempt and three years in exile, Aristide was elected again in 2000.

Robinson's prose is often fiery as he lays out his indictment of the colonialists who created the country's fractured economic and social landscape. Haiti's successful slave revolt will always be an affront to Western countries, he believes, but should be an inspiration to Africans and African Americans. "Haitians have a culture that slaves once bled to defend. . . . For this, Haitians are reviled by a white world that the rest of us broken souls have long since succumbed to imitate," he writes.

But Robinson is most appalled at the way Aristide and his wife (he resigned from the priesthood in 1994) were removed from the country in 2004. By far the most gripping and enlightening sections of the book are ones in which Robinson, relying on interviews with Aristide's helicopter pilot, Frantz Gabriel, describes how U.S. troops whisked Aristide out of the country. Gabriel arrived at the president's house at 3:30 a.m. on Feb. 29, after getting a call from security guard who sensed that something strange was happening and told him to come.

When he got there, he found the president alone, but soon U.S. officials pulled into the driveway. One walked into the living room and told Aristide, "I'm the one that has to announce to you that you've got to go."

The Aristides were driven to the airport in a convoy of 10 white Suburbans; they boarded a plane and, after some uncertainty as to where they would be taken, were flown to the Central African Republic. Robinson spoke to Aristide nearly daily after the forced exit and traveled to Africa along with Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) to find out what had happened.

In recounting these events, Robinson often takes on a crusading tone, using words such as "abduction" and "kidnapping" to describe Aristide's departure. These are more than opinions to Robinson; they are his truth, but with his urgent tone, he risks alienating the kind of reader he may want to edify, someone ignorant of Haiti's unusual history as a rebel slave colony.

Nevertheless, with his strong eye for detail, Robinson manages to illuminate a tragedy that the rest of the world experienced only through news reports and photographs -- if it paid attention at all. Describing his visit with Waters to the Aristides in exile, he writes, "At the bottom of the stairway, we saw the president and Mrs. Aristide standing side by side in shadow waiting for us. Their faces wore small, guarded smiles. Tired and emotionally drained, they appeared, nonetheless, composed and dignified."

Three years later, unanswered questions still haunt Robinson. Why has no one in the U.S. media investigated Aristide's claims that he was wrongfully removed and forced to resign? Why was he spirited out of his country and never told where he would be taken? Robinson has written this book because he wants to invite more people to search for the answers.

*********************************************
*********************************************

Randall Robinson on "An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President" | Monday, July 23rd, 2007 | Democracy Now!

Listen to Segment || Download Show mp3
Watch 128k stream Watch 256k stream Read Transcript

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/23/141241

TransAfrica Founder Randall Robinson chronicles the 2004 U.S.-backed coup that ousted Haiti's democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Robinson challenges the Bush administration's claim that the Aristides voluntarily left Haiti and recalls his trip to the Central African Republic to bring the Aristides back to the Caribbean. He also reveals new details on the U.S.-backed coup militants armed and trained in neighboring Dominican Republic, including the accused drug smuggler Guy Philippe. As the Aristides remain in exile, Randall Robinson joins us in the Firehouse studio for the hour to talk about the coup, the history of Haiti and the state of affairs there since the 2004 coup. [includes rush transcript] Over 10,000 people marched in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince last Sunday. They were calling for the return of the exiled president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. It was his fifty-fourth birthday. A number of people spoke, we begin with the folksinger Annette Auguste, popularly known as "So An."

* Annette Auguste
On February 29th, 2004, the democratically elected president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was removed from office by the United States and flown to the Central African Republic. Two weeks later, in defiance of the United States, a delegation led by California Congressmember Maxine Waters and TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson chartered a plane and headed off to Central African Republic themselves to bring President Aristide and his wife back to the Caribbean. I accompanied them on that trip. After hours of negotiating with the dictator in the capital Bangui they freed the Aristides. As we flew back over the Atlantic, President Aristide said that he had been kidnapped in a US-backed coup d'etat.

* Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide
Its now more than three years later. The Aristides remain in exile in South Africa and Randall Robinson has just written a book called "An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President."

He flew in from the Carribean island of St. Kitts last night and joins us in our firehouse studio today.

* Randall Robinson, author of "An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President." He is founder and past president of TransAfrica and the author of the bestsellers "The Debt", "The Reckoning", and "Defending the Spirit." His website is RandallRobinson.com.


****************************************