Haiti to become a colony again?

It is, on the face of it, deeply ironic that Haiti, the second nation in the Americas to become independent from European colonialists after the U.S., should again become a colony in the year of its 200th anniversary.

I say "ironic, on the face of it" because really there is no irony. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, for all the weakness of his deeply impoverished state, posed a threat to the neocons in Washington: He represented a promise of some sort of social progress outside the programs of the World Trade Organization and other U.S.-led schemes.

Now it emerges that not only were CIA-influenced, ex-Duvalier elements involved in the "revolt" against him but that -- more seriously -- he may have been kidnapped by U.S. Special Forces. This, at least, is the view of Randall Robinson, founder of the NGO TransAfrica, who told Wolf Blitzer on CNN, "We have undertaken a coup against a democratically elected government". Robinson was one of the last people to speak to Aristide before his removal.

One is left to wonder if there is not, perhaps, a very thinly veiled message in this piracy to President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and President Lula da Silva of Brazil. The neocons such as Wolfowitz and Cheney are certainly that arrogant. Are they that stupid?

DAVID JARDINE Jakarta