Haiti coup : what did really happen ?

This much is undeniable.  After doing absolutely nothing to prevent the coup in Haiti, both France and the United States called on Aristide to resign.  Soon after, well armed U.S. personal flew him to....the Central African Republic.  Aristide called it a modern kidnapping, part and parcel of the modern coup against the only democratically elected President Haiti has ever had.  

Why CAR?  Why not Trinidad or Jamaica, or Venezuela or any number of nearby countries?  If Aristide was as free a man as Colin Powell and a half dozen other senior Bush administration officials insist, why the hell would he have wanted to go to CAR?  There's no answer to that question.  

Instead, why would the United States and France, whose leaders have cooed over their newfound spirit of "successful" cooperation, want to force Aristide to go to CAR?  For starters, there's nothing like a 20 hour plane flight surrounded by heavily armed guards to keep a deposed President kinda quiet for a while.  

But Aristide wouldn't shut up once he got to CAR.  He told CNN he'd been kidnapped by the United States and that France had been out to get him ever since he demanded that France repay the 21 billion it extorted from Haiti following the revolution.  

Haiti was impoverished by that debt when it was "only" 150 million francs.  They were still paying it off over 100 years later when the United States invaded in 1915.  I'm hard pressed to think of a more cut and dried case for historical reparations.  Unlike crimes of war and slavery, it's easy to set a dollar figure on the damages.  France could well afford to pay it.  But the last thing France, or any of the colonial powers want is to set an example for paying reparations to a former colony.

Source: http://narcosphere.narconews.com/comments/2004/3/5/224131/6954/4

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