NEW YORK (CMC):
A FORMER United States ambassador to Haiti has charged that mixed signals from Washington helped tilt Haiti towards chaos.
Brian Dean Curry, who was ambassador up to the waning days of the presidency of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, said in a published report here that the United States' action did not always match its words.
He told the New York Times that the U.S. often spoke with two contradictory voices in a country where its words carry enormous weight. Consequently, Curry said, the mixed message made efforts to foster political peace "immeasurably more difficult."
Curry accused the International Republican Institute (IRI), a democracy-building group close to the White House, of trying to undermine the reconciliation process after disputed 2000 Senate elections threw Haiti into a violent political crisis.
He charged that the group's leader in Haiti, Stanley Lucas, an avowed Aristide opponent from the Haitian elite, counselled the opposition to stand firm and not to work with Aristide, as a way to cripple his government and drive him from power.
His account is supported in crucial parts by other diplomats and opposition figures, many of whom spoke publicly about the events for the first time.
ADMINISTRATION' S TRUE INTENTIONS
Curran, a 30-year Foreign Service veteran and a former President Clinton appointee retained by President Bush, also accused Lucas of telling the opposition that he, not the ambassador, represented the Bush administration' s true intentions.
He said he had warned his bosses in Washington that Lucas' behaviour was contrary to American policy and "risked us being accused of attempting to destabilise the government."
Yet, when he asked for tighter controls over the IRI in the summer of 2002, he hit a roadblock after high officials in the State Department and the National Security Council expressed support for the pro-democracy group.
Aristide was eventually forced out of office in controversial circumstances in February, 2004.
