Ottawa Actively Participated in Haiti Coup d’Etat:
Canadians Apologize to Haiti, Ten Years after the Coup
We sign this statement to tell the world, and especially the
Haitian people, that we are ashamed and outraged by the Canadian
Government’s active participation in the February 29, 2004 Coup d’Etat
that toppled the duly-elected Government of Haiti led by President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
On behalf of all Canadians, the great majority of whom are kept
ignorant of this Coup and its aftermath, we sincerely apologize for the
terrible, lasting damage it has caused.
An RCMP officer training Haitian National Police recruits in 2005.
Unelected coup Prime Minister Gerard Latortue speaks to Canadian soldiers.
Ten (10) years after the Coup, we sign this statement because there is disturbing and compelling evidence that:
1) Canada was centrally involved in planning the Coup. A year in advance, on January 31 and February 1, 2003, Canada hosted the Ottawa Initiative on Haiti.
This controversial meeting was held at the Meech Lake Government
Resort, near Gatineau, Québec, to plan and consolidate the Coup.
2) Canada took an active part
in the actual forced removal from Haiti and exile to Africa of
President Aristide. Canadian soldiers, notably those serving in Joint
Task Force 2, were assigned by Canadian government leaders to join local
paramilitary mercenaries and U.S. troops illegally deployed to
Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to conduct the Coup d’État.
A Canadian soldier at the Port-au-Prince airport on February 29, 2004.
Records of the Canadian Parliament
show that on March 10, 2004, ten days after the coup, Stockwell Day,
then-foreign affairs critic for the Conservative opposition, declared in
Parliament: “… we have an elected leader Aristide. We may not have
wanted to vote for him… But the (Canadian) government makes a decision
that there should be a regime change. It is a serious question that we
need to address. That decision was based on what criteria? We must have
this discussion…This was clearly a regime change. Whether we like to
admit it or not, we took part.”
3) The Coup was followed by several documented massacres and arbitrary arrests
of pro-democracy activists. It dismantled Haiti’s entire elected
government structure, and U.S.-appointed post-coup regimes — backed
financially, militarily and diplomatically by Canada — are marred by
serious human rights abuses.
4) One of the most disastrous consequences of the Coup and subsequent
U.N. tutelage is that Haiti, a country with no known cases of cholera
for the past 100 years, now has one of the worst cholera epidemics in
the world. The cholera death toll has already reached 8500 and as of
January 2014, more than 700,000 have gotten sick from the deadly
bacterium.