Les "casseurs de pouvoir" du G184, par Richard Sanders

The G184’s  Powerbrokers -Apaid and Boulos: Owners of the Fourth Estate; Leaders of the Fifth Column
By Richard Sanders, editor, Press for Conversion!

Andy Apaid and Reginald Boulos may be Haitiís most despised men. Despite this obvious shortcoming, the media fourth estate often presented them to the world as Haitiís greatest saviours.
This farce was only possible because most of the countryís major media firms are owned by the anti- Aristide elite, including Apaid and Boulos. Apaid, for instance, is the ìounder of Tele-Haiti,1 the main cable television network,2 while Boulos owns...the USAID-funded Radio Vision 2000...and Le Matin,3 which describes itself as a non-partisan, nonideological newspaper.4 While Haiti's elite-owned media pretends to be neutral, it was instrumental in the political successes of the Group of 184 (G184).

(Tiens, je ne savais pas que  Radio Vision 2000 de Boulos était financée par l'USAID.  Vision 2000, Monsanto, décidément ces duvaliéristes ont un sacré pouvoir.)

Being two of Haiti's richest white businessmen the owners of numerous factories and mass media outlets Apaid and Boulos were poorly suited to representative anything but an exceedingly thin slice of Haiti's population. And yet for years, as leaders and spokesmen for the G184, they presided over a multimillion-dollar coalition of wealthy individuals, businesses, professional, media, and other associations.5 Dominated by the country ís biggest corporate entities and funded by foreign governments, the G184 brought together the cream of Haiti's civil society.

Under the guidance of Apaid and Boulos, the G184 successfully pushed the ultraviolent, antidemocratic agenda of Haitiís elite to its logical conclusion the brutal 2004 coup. Their dream come true was to rid Haiti of its elected government and supplant it with a more business-friendly regime. Because CIDA, and other government agencies from the U.S. and Europe, blessed them with tremendous financial, logistical and diplomatic support, and made their dream a bloody reality, it is worth examining the backgrounds of these two industrial magnates.

(Ce n'est pas simplement le CIDA (l'agence de coopération canadienne qui les a couverts d'or mais aussi l'Union européenne et le département d'Etat US. Ce transfert d'argent  continue sous d'autres formes avec les contrats liés à la reconstruction. Juste avant le tremblement de terre du 12 janvier passé, l'Etat haïtien s'est endetté auprès de la BID, pour financer la modernisation des entreprises d'assemblage, dites sweatshops, de ces messieurs multimillionaires. Vous remarquerez que ces mêmes entités qui dénoncent la faillite de l'Etat et veulent tout privatiser, utilisent les finances de l'Etat, celles donc du peuple haïtien, pour financer leurs  propres entreprises privées. Tout en refusant par ailleurs d'augmenter le salaire minimum de leurs employés. Tout pour moi et rien pour le peuple haïtien : c'est ça l'extrême droite duvaliériste, le cynisme total qui accompagne la prédation.)

Although he is widely known as the founder and the leader of the Group of 184, the political movement or association
 that was so ardently opposed to the elected Aristide government,6 Apaid is not even a Haitian citizen.7 But the fact that he was born in the U.S. and holds an American passport is not the least attractive of his qualifications for representing Haitiís largely-destitute, black population. Unlike most Haitians, Apaid is not descended from African slaves. In fact, being of Syrian heritage, he hails from the large middle eastern segment of the Haitian elite.8 It is not difficult to understand Apaid's virulent hatred of all things Aristide. Advocacy for the poor was not his strongpoint. The Apaid family ís business empire Alpha Industries is the biggest sweat-shop operator in Haiti, with 15 or 16 garment-assembly plants,9 where workers sew clothing for such profitable foreign firms as Canada's Gildan Activewear.

(Gildan vient d'annoncer que ses activités en Haïti ont peu souffert du tremblement de terre. L'entreprise prévoit une hausse de ses bénéfices pour 2010)
Since his factories reportedly paid only a paltry, wage-slave salary of as little as 68 cents a day at the time of the 2004 coup,10 it was no wonder that Apaid so feverishly opposed Aristide's increases to the minimum wage. The Apaid empire also includes Alpha Electronics, a components exporter to U.S. war industries like Sperry/ Unisys, IBM, Remington and Honeywell for use in radar and sonar.11 The family patriarch André Apaid, Sr., founder of Alpha Sewing in the 1970 was close to dictator Baby Doc Duvalier. Apaid Jr. followed the political footsteps of his father who had led a so-called civil societyí campaign to support the 1991-1994 military coup against President Aristide which successfully eased U.S. sanctions on the export of goods from Haitiís assemby sweat-shops.12 Apaid Sr. was one of the chief lobbyists in the U.S.13 for the military junta that ousted Aristide eight months after his first landslide election in 1990. Despite all this, the National Commission for Haitian Rights'Haiti (see pp.3-32) described Apaid as the public voice behind the G184, as well as its best salesperson.14

(Je ne savais pas que le père d'Apaid avait été l'un des lobbystes du coup d'Etat de Cédras en 1991. Ce qui est assez remarquable, c'est que ces Haïtiens qui jouent aux marionettes pour le compte de quelques familles d'origine syrolibanaises, allant même jusqu'à boycotter le bicentenaire de leur indépendance, se retrouvent à vivre  à  l'étranger, comme Cédras, ou bien à  se terrer à l'intérieur même du pays comme Guy Philippe, alors que les autres n'ont jamais eu besoin de quitter le pays et que leurs affaires sont de + en + florissantes.)

Reginald Boulos
The other most frequently quoted mouthpiece for the G184, was Reginald Boulos. Like Apaid, his credentials would appear to make him less than desirable as a candidate to represent Haiti's populace. For one thing, Boulos like Apaid is a multi-millionaire of middle-eastern, not African, heritage. What''s more, Pharval Labs the pharmaceutical company he leads is infamous throughout Haiti for having sold a poisonous, cough syrup that killed 88 children in 1996 when it was distributed throughout poor neighborhoods of the capital.15 Distributing Pharval's deadly product in poor Port-au-Prince areas was the Caribbean Canadian Chemical Company.

Another incident victimizing innocent Haitian children and implicating Dr. Reginald Boulos, occurred in the early 1990s when more than 2,000 babies in Cité Soleil, a dirt-poor Por-tau- Prince area, were given an experimental measles vaccine up to 500 times stronger than normal. This U.S. government test was conducted by the U.S.-funded Centres pour le Développement et la Santé (CDS), which Boulos then headed.17 The result was a  higher than expected death rate,though how many Haitian babies died as a resultî is unknown.18
This was not the only time that Boulos CDS used the dirt-poor people of Cité Soleil as medical guinea pigs. Many women in this pro-Aristide area suffered extremely severe side effects 19 when, without informed consent, CDS used them to test a subdermal contraceptive called Norplant.20

Such willingness on the part of this Boulos-led organization to repeatedly sacrifice the health of impoverished Haitians did not prevent him from leading the Haitian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, one of the most prestigious members of the G184. In September 2005, Boulos was among a handful of Haitian business and coup-regime officials flown in for a meeting at the government's Meech Lake resort near Ottawa. These handpicked Haitians, who Joe Clark described as really excellent people,21 met with a dozen bankers, 15 top CIDA bureaucrats and Foreign Affairs officials, and representatives from agencies funded by the U.S. and Canadian governments. On the agenda were such controversial topics as the privatization of Haitiís publicly-owned resources.22

( On pourrait se demander comment quelqu'un dont la famille a été bien accueillie dans un pays, y a fait fortune, peut en arriver à utiliser les habitants de ce pays comme des "guinea pigs",  c'est-à-dire comme testeurs de médicaments, mais  il suffit de se rappeler des Taïnos qui ont accueilli les bras ouverts les Espagnols et qui ont  tous été trucidés, avec les méthodes les plus atroces les unes que les autres, par ces mêmes Espagnols.

L'appat du gain mezanmi. L'appat du gain et une certaine voracité, limite pathologique,  qui tend à avoir  un plaisir quasi-orgasmique, une sorte de drogue, à s'emparer de tout, en dépossédant l'autre de tout, ne le laissant plus qu'avec la peau sur les os.)

Media complicity
One would think that their backgrounds would invalidate Apaid and Boulos from becoming leaders of a supposedly
popular, neutral civil society organization like the G184 which loudly proclaimed its neutrality in trying to bridge the political chasm between Haiti's rich and poor. However, with tremendous hubris, they pushed aside their blatantly obvious, image problems and became with incredible panache media darlings for the G184.
This preposterous affront was only conceivable thanks to wondrous personality makeovers staged by the Haitií's corporate media and by the G184ís allies abroad. Because they received consistently favourable news coverage, the gulf between their elitist agenda and the will of Haitiís poor citizenry was maliciously ignored.

(Non seulement leur "background" n'a pas invalidé leur posture de défenseurs du peuple, comme le dit l'auteur, mais en plus de celà, par exemple à Paris, on a pu voir les gens de "Pour Haïti", une revue qui se dit de gauche, organiser et soutenir les G184 en acceuillant deux de ses grands chefs de l'époque, A. Apaid et. Y.Lahens eux-mêmes accompagnés d'un "petit nègre noir" de Cité Soleil, présenté comme témoin des crimes d'Aristide. Cette scène qui a été filmée est assez marrante. On voit le "petit nègre noir" de Cité Soleil,  intimidé, assis entre les 2 potentats, ça fait penser aux "musées humains" quand on amenait des autochtones des colonies pour les montrer au public occidental. Qu'est devenu ce "petit nègre noir "de Cité Soleil ?)

The G184's membership included several large media groups, like the Haitian National Media Association, 23 which brought together the owners of the largest Haitian commercial media stations in Port-au-Prince to combat the dictatorship of President Aristide.24 As such, Haitiís media was never likely to expose the major lies told by this phony grassroots organization. Likewise, with all the complimentary sound bites about the G184 emanating from their cheerleaders, coaches and corporate sponsors in foreign governments, the leadership of Apaid and Boulos was rarely questioned abroad either. If anything, the G184 was constantly being egged on by the media, both at home and abroad, to take their anti-Aristide struggle to its ultimate conclusion.

Indeed, Apaid, Boulos and their cronies in the G184 could never have fanned the flames of class hatred against Haiti's poor, or set the stage for the 2004 coup, without such unrelenting media support. Whenever they spoke at a G184-sponsored protest or fired off missives denouncing Aristide as an insane dictator, they were sure to garner the most positive media results that money could buy.

References
1. Yifat Susskind, Haiti - Insurrection in the Making,MADRE backgrounder,
February 25, 2004. <www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=5043>
2. David Adams, Confusion rules Haiti; rebels rejoice, St. Petersburg Times, March 2, 2004.

<www.sptimes.com/2004/03/02/Worldandnation/Confusion_rules_Haiti.shtml>
3. Profile: Rudolph Boulos. <www. cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?entity=rudolph_boulos>
4. Haitian Links Directory <www.haitian links.com/links.php?ax=list&sub=2&cat_id=2>5. Thomas Griffin, Haiti: Human Rights
Investigation, Nov.11-21, 2004. CSHR, University of Miami, p.27. <www.law.miami.edu/cshr/CSHR_Report_02082005_v2.pdf>
6. Ibid.
7. Haitian Opposition Leader not even
Haitian,Haïti Progrès, November 12, 2003. <www.haiti-progres.com/2003/sm031112/eng11-12.html>
8. Kevin Pina, Canada and the UN are fronting for U.S. foreign policy in Haiti,CPAC, February 21, 2005.
<www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7299>
9. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, The Situation in Haiti, Committee on International Relations, House of Representatives, March 3, 2004, p.98. <www. foreignaffairs.house.gov/archives/108/92343.pdf>
10. Miami Times, February 26, 2004, cited in Emmanuel W. Vedrine, Aristide in past tense,February 20, 2006. <www.
potomitan.info/vedrine/preval.php>
11. National Labour Committee Report, 1993, cited in Ronald Cox, Private Interestsand U.S. Foreign Policy in Haiti
and the Caribbean Basin, Contested Social Orders and International Politics, David Skidmore ed., 1997.
12. Haitian Opposition Leader not even Haitian,îHaïti Progrès, November 12, 2003. <www.haiti-progres.com/2003/
sm031112/eng11-12.html>
13. Charles Kernaghan, Sweatshop or Real Development, Contested Social Orders and International Politics. David
Skidmore ed. 1997.
14. NCHR-Haiti, cited by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, February 13, 2004. <www.unhcr.org/home/RSDCOI/
414ef40b4.pdf>
15. Haiti Information Project, New Attack in Haiti,ZNet, January 20, 2006.
16. Lack of Government Regulation Protested, Haiti Information Project (HIP), July 25, 1996.
17. Ibid.
18. Medicines poison kids,î HIP, June 28, 1996. <www.tulane.edu/~libweb/RESTRIC TED/HAITINFO/1996_0629.txt>
19. Reproducing Inequities (in Haiti), December 1, 2006. <thdblog.wordpress. com>
20. Lack of Government Regulation Protested, HIP, July 25, 1996. <www.tulane.edu/~libweb/RESTRICTED/HAITINFO/1996_0725.txt>
21. Matt Campbell, ìInterviewing Joe Clark, mattcampbell.ca, Oct. 12, 2006.
22. The Role of the Private Sector in Rebuilding Haiti,September 9-10, 2005.<www.focal.ca/pdf/haiti_dialogue.pdf>
23. Membres,G184 website (Archived January 29, 2004). <web.archive.org/web/20031208075649/group184.org/
membres.html>
24. The Freedom of the Press Barons,The Dominion, February 1, 2007. <www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/976>

September 2007 (Issue # 61) Press for Conversion!