By: Richard Sanders - HaitiAnalysis.com

Press for Conversion, the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade's (COAT) magazine, has now releaed a 50-page issue providing detailed studies of Canada's role in the coup. The magazine looks closely at both Canada's role in aiding and abetting the 2004 coup d'état in Haiti that ousted President Aristide's democratically-elected government and supporting the illegal, coup-installed regime that was responsible for the two-year, human-rights catastrophe that followed. To order copies of the magazine visit the Press for Conversion website. Press for Conversion based out of Ottawa, Canada was founded in late 1988 to expose and oppose ARMX (Canad's largest weapons bazaar). The organization has helped organize many anti-war rallies, marches, vigils, conferences and campaigns against the arms trade, air/war shows, war toys and Canada's hypocritical role in U.S-led wars, invasions, interventions and regime changes.

COAT Examines Haiti

In early 2004, a U.S.-funded, trained and armed paramilitary force of former CIA-backed death squads and soldiers from the military (that President Aristide had disbanded in 1995), attacked Haitian police stations, massacred government supporters and released human rights abusers from prisons. The U.S., Canada and France did nothing to assist Haiti's beleaguered democracy. Instead, they actually demanded that Aristide's elected government share power with political representatives of Haiti's wealthy corporate elite that had lost the 2000 elections and supported the rebels. On February 28, President Aristide was kidnapped and forced into exile by U.S. Marines, with considerable help from a foreign occupation force of largely Canadian and French troops. That day, Haiti's popular government—which had a clear mandate to govern until 2006—was illegally replaced by a puppet regime that was approved by Aristide's political opposition, the occupation governments and the UN Security Council. The brutal, coup-installed regime that ruled for the next two years was responsible for a reign of terror in which thousands of pro-democracy, pro-Aristide supporters were killed and many jailed without charge.