But Aristide is now also under the threat of imminent attack. Since returning, he has ventured out from his home in Tabarre only once, due to security concerns.
Newly installed right-wing president Michel Martelly has, in the past, made no secret of his antipathy for Aristide. He recently cut back Aristide’s security detail and took back the government vehicle which former President René Préval had provided Aristide on his return.
In a falsely magnanimous gesture, Martelly recently suggested he would grant Aristide an “amnesty” (which he proposed also for recently returned former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier), although Aristide has never been charged, much less convicted, of any crimes whatsoever....
No charges were ever filed against Aristide for drug trafficking, although his lawyer Ira Kurzban asserts Washington has tried. “The United States government has spent, literally, tens of millions of taxpayer dollars trying to pin something, anything on President Aristide,” Kurzban told Pacifica’s Flashpoints Radio earlier this month. “They’ve had an ATF investigation, a tax investigation, a drug investigation, and now apparently some kind of corruption investigation. The reality is they’ve come up with nothing because there is nothing.”
Under the heading “Aristide Movement Must Be Stopped” in an August 2006 cable, US Ambassador to Haiti Janet Sanderson described how former Guatemalan diplomat Edmond Mulet, MINUSTAH’s head, “urged U.S. legal action against Aristide to prevent the former president from gaining more traction with the Haitian population and returning to Haiti.”
At Mulet’s request, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan urged South Africa’s President “to ensure that Aristide remained in South Africa,” where Aristide and his family were living under an arrangement with the government there.