Carter go home.

Jimmy Carter's act is getting old. There he goes traipsing down to Haiti, as if he were the Pope visiting his minions.

Fact is, the Haitians weren't happy to see him. They detected--quite rightly--that Carter was there not to ensure democracy but to shore up the rightwing forces aligned against President Aristide.

Carter scolded Aristide for having the audacity to try to control his own armed forces. In mid-February, Aristide dismissed Haiti's top generals and colonels. Carter was quite blunt about his reaction to this exercise in independence. "Obviously, the firing of the generals and colonels is well recognized as not being compatible with American desires."

What are those desires? That the Haitian military that so oppressed its people be left intact?

Evidently so. When Aristide had the effrontery to hire several hundred men into the Haitian security forces without clearing their names with Washington first, the Clinton Administration was outraged. "The Haitian government proposal to include hundreds of unvetted people in the Interim Public Security Force was unacceptable," a U.S. official told The Washington Post. As a result of intense U.S. pressure, Aristide was forced to fire these new officers. The president of Haiti is powerless to form his own military; the U.S. government will simply not let him do it.

Nor will the U.S. government let him prosecute the human-rights abusers who were responsible for the torture and deaths of thousands of Haitians during the time of the generals. Take the case of Emmanuel Constant, who set up the notorious paramilitary squad FRAPH while he was on the CIA payroll. (Hats off to The Nation, for breaking and pursuing this story.) In December, Aristide's government summoned Constant to appear before a tribunal to answer a complaint about human-rights abuses he committed. Constant failed to show, so an arrest warrant was issued. But Constant was nowhere to be found.

Guess where he was? You got it, he was in Washington. Seems the INS let him in, even though his visa had been withdrawn. Now the INS and the State Department want us to believe that this was just an innocent bureaucratic blunder, but they take us for fools. The INS is hardly going out of its way to find Constant, either. They haven't issued an APB, and they say they have no way of finding him, anyway. (They might want to try looking in Langley, Virginia. Constant's the guy with his feet up on the table.

Jimmy Carter has made no effort to distance himself from the old rightwing forces in Haiti when he visited in February. Quite the contrary: he met with the leaders of the anti-Aristide forces in hopes of uniting them for the elections scheduled for early June. "We asked them if any of the parties would come together in a coalition," Carter admitted.

That's lovely, isn't it? Carter, who craves a Nobel Prize for helping to restore Aristide to power, is now advising Aristide's opponents.

But it's really not a paradox at all. For Carter's initial effort was not designed to return Aristide to his presidency or democracy to Haiti. It was designed to subvert democracy in Haiti by returning Aristide to power with his hands tied behind his back. Now that Aristide is trying to loosen the ropes, Carter comes back down to tighten them.

And don't think he's acting alone. He's carrying out U.S. policy, which is the same as it's always been: to prevent the Haitian people from running their own affairs, lest they demand that U.S. companies stop ripping them off at $2 a day. Carter should take his sanctimonious act back to Plains, Georgia. The French philosopher Voltaire told would-be do-gooders 200 years ago to cultivate their own gardens. Carter should cultivate farm.