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Randall Robinson on "An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President"

Source: Democracy Now!

Founder Randall Robinson chronicles the 2004 U.S.-backed coup that ousted Haiti's democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Robinson challenges the Bush administration's claim that the Aristides voluntarily left Haiti and recalls his trip to the Central African Republic to bring the Aristides back to the Caribbean. He also reveals new details on the U.S.-backed coup militants armed and trained in neighboring Dominican Republic, including the accused drug smuggler Guy Philippe.

As the Aristides remain in exile, Randall Robinson joins us in the Firehouse studio for the hour to talk about the coup, the history of Haiti and the state of affairs there since the 2004 coup. [includes rush transcript] Over 10,000 people marched in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince last Sunday. They were calling for the return of the exiled president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. It was his fifty-fourth birthday. A number of people spoke, we begin with the folksinger Annette Auguste, popularly known as "So An."

Hated Mercenary Denard Deserves Worse, Comoros

By Ed Harris (Reuters 7/7/07 Jul 25, 2007 - 2:02:47 PM)

A Paris appeal court jailed Denard for four years on Friday but ordered three of them suspended and fined him 100,000 euros ($136,000), overturning a five-year suspended jail term handed down by a lower court last year. "It's always been Bob Denard. We don't know of anybody else," port worker Daniel Rastami told Reuters in Mutsamudu, the capital of Anjouan island. "He made blood flow, and left Comorians with memories of hatred." Denard is widely hated in the three-island nation, which has been politically volatile ever since independence from France in 1975 and is now suffering a political crisis with the leader of Anjouan island defying the national government. "He's a bloodthirsty tyrant," Mohamed Salim, 49, another port worker, said. "By comparison with what he's done in our country (a year) is the very minimum." Denard was one of several European "Dogs of War" to play a major role in a series of African wars during the 1960s and 1970s.

Mitterrand's role revealed in Rwandan genocide warning

By Alex Duval Smith in Paris (Culled from The Independent)

The former French president François Mitterrand supported the perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide despite clear warnings that mass killings of the Tutsi population were being orchestrated, according to declassified French documents.

The publication of the documents in today's Le Monde for the first time confirms long-held suspicions against France. The previously secret diplomatic telegrams and government memos also suggest the late French president was obsessed with the danger of "Anglo-Saxon" influence gripping Rwanda.