US military enforces attacks on Haitian unions Pt3

US military enforces attacks on Haitian unions Pt2

US military enforces attacks on Haitian unions Pt2

Didier Dominique: Deliberate US policy weakened Haitian farming to create pool of cheap textile labor

Didier Dominique is a trade unionist and a prominent spokesperson for Batay Ouvriye. BATAY OUVRIYE is an organization that regroups factory unions and committees, workers’ associations and militants, all struggling in Haiti for the construction of an independent, combative and democratic union movement, and to organize wage-workers, self-employed workers as well as the unemployed for the defense of their rights.

US military enforces attacks on Haitian unions

US military helping to repress organizing of textile worker's unions in Haiti

Haiti: The politics of rebuilding - Al Jazeera Fault Lines: For whom will Haiti be rebuilt?

Peter Hallward on “Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment”

Haitian President René Préval said Sunday that the death toll from the earthquake could reach 300,000 once all the bodies are recovered from the rubble. We speak to Peter Hallward, professor of Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University. “Unless prevented by renewed popular mobilisation in both Haiti and beyond, the perverse international emphasis on security will continue to distort the reconstruction effort, and with it the configuration of Haitian politics for some time to come,” wrote Hallward recently. “What is already certain is that if further militarisation proceeds unchecked, the victims of the January earthquake won’t be the only avoidable casualties of 2010.” [includes rush transcript]

Filed under Haiti, Haiti Earthquake

Email to a friend

Help

Printer-friendly version

Purchase DVD/CD

LISTEN WATCH

Real Video Stream Real Audio Stream MP3 Download More…

Guests:

Peter Hallward, author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment and a professor of Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University.

Kim Ives, journalist with the newspaper Haiti Liberté, speaking from Port-au-Prince

Rush Transcript

This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, More...

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today with an update on Haiti a month and a half after the magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit the Caribbean island nation. Haitian President René Préval said Sunday the death toll from the earthquake could reach 300,000 once all the bodies are recovered from the rubble.

PRESIDENT RENÉ PRÉVAL: [translated] You have seen the images. You know the figures. More than 200,000 bodies were collected on the streets. Counting those still found under the rubble, the death toll could rise to 300,000. More than 250,000 destroyed or damaged homes, more than 1.5 million people are suddenly homeless.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking in a regional summit of Latin American and Caribbean leaders in Mexico, Préval urged them to send aid to his devastated country. The Inter-American Development Bank estimates rebuilding Haiti could cost as much as $14 billion. Préval warned of the approaching rainy season and made a plea for emergency shelter materials to assist the one-and-a-half million homeless Haitians.

On Saturday, Claudy Trevange was one of hundreds of Haitians waiting in line for waterproof shelter materials to be distributed by the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations agency.

CLAUDY TREVANVE: [translated] We sleep in the street with our children. We have no money. Our children catch colds. They sneeze.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, for more on Haiti, we’re joined here in New York by Canadian political philosopher Peter Hallward. He’s the author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment, and he’s professor of modern European philosophy at Middlesex University.

We welcome you to Democracy Now!

PETER HALLWARD: Thank you very much, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Peter, as you watch what has taken place, your book is extremely extensive about the history of Haiti. Can you put what has happened after the earthquake in this historical context?

PETER HALLWARD: Unfortunately, very easily, because the history of Haiti really, for the last—particularly the last twenty-five, thirty years—but, in a way, the history of the country really since independence, for the last two centuries—has been about maintaining the control of a small group of very wealthy, privileged people in partnership with their international backers. And the problem that they’ve faced has been how to maintain a situation, structured in terms of gross inequalities, particularly in terms of wealth, political power, this kind of thing, in the face of something like a democratic challenge, where if the poor majority, if the majority of Haitian people, who live on pennies a day, if they were able to form a political movement that could press for radical political and social changes, you know, how would you stop that? How would you contain the threats of that kind of mobilization?

And the main strategy has been to deflect political questions away from the political field itself and put them onto more like military terrain, where you can structure these questions in terms of security issues, crime, problems that basically not a political government but an army can solve. And that’s been the main driving thrust, I think, of the political situation in Haiti for the last—certainly for the last—since really since 1990, when Aristide was elected for the first time.

So what I think has happened with the earthquake is another phase in this general tendency towards turning Haiti into a kind of—a sort of police protectorate, really, where the key locus for political power is in the army or something like the army. In this case, the American army, the United Nations army, eventually perhaps a new version of the Haitian army, something like that.

AMY GOODMAN: Where is the Haitian government in all of this?

PETER HALLWARD: Well, the Haitian government basically is the—does what it’s told, largely. So, I think it’s going too far to call it a protectorate, because there is still a thriving grassroots democratic tradition there. And when—with the last election in Haiti in 2006, there was a real mobilization of people to get René Préval, the current president, elected, very largely, I think, on the basis of the fact that he’s remembered as Aristide’s first prime minister. He was elected when Aristide stood down after his first election in 1996. And so, he’s someone who’s perceived—you know, if he’s widely called the “marassa d’Aristide,” the twin brother of Aristide, he’s seen as someone who is in that trajectory, the Lavalas movement, basically. And so, when he was—when he stood for office, late in the day, as it happens, in 2006, there was a real mobilization of people to get him elected and essentially to try and undo the coup that overthrew Aristide in 2004.

So there is a real popular—there is still a genuine grassroots democratic force in Haiti. The problem is that there’s a real disconnect between that grassroots mobilization and what the government itself can do. The government is very, very constrained. Their funding is dependent almost entirely on international support. There’s a lot of pressure around issues like keeping minimum wages low, adhering to neoliberal reforms, as they’re called, which essentially open the country up to international investment and have locked the country into a kind of systematic cycle of disempowerment and impoverishment.

And Préval has basically gone along with that. If you look at the things that he’s done in the last year, he vetoed a move to increase the minimum wage to $5 a day, so it’s locked down at $3 a day, roughly. He continued to push through a really disastrous privatization policy that’s, as we speak, is in the process of breaking up the phone company and selling that off. There’s pressure to sell off the last remaining public resources that Haiti has, the ports and other things. And he blocked the most popular political party in the country, Fanmi Lavalas, from participating in elections last spring and that were—another set of elections, more important elections, that were due to happen this month, which will be postponed now, of course. So he’s someone who has really cut himself off, in fact, really from the beginning, from anything like a mass-based popular mobilization. And as a result, I think he doesn’t have a great deal of support among at least ordinary people in Haiti now.

AMY GOODMAN: Of course, I mean, the palace was seriously devastated.

PETER HALLWARD: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And then, just driving along the roads in Port-au-Prince, one ministry after another just in rubble.

PETER HALLWARD: Yes. So, that, of course, that doesn’t help him. You know, that doesn’t help, of course. But—

AMY GOODMAN: And many of the government officials killed.

PETER HALLWARD: Yes. And so, these—of course, that would cause very, very significant problems, no matter what the situation was.

But I think the more—in the longer term, at least, the more important fact is that the government was already very weak, largely because of international pressure, the pressure to cut public spending; to lay off public servants; to funnel all international investment, or at least the vast majority of it, into—not into state-based enterprises or state-based investment, things like a national health service or a national education system, that kind of thing, but instead into fragmented NGO-type projects that, in many ways, compete and sometimes replace what should be a public service, I think. So there’s been, systematically, a whole set of policies that have weakened the government, deprived it of any real capacity, for example, to collect anything like the tax revenue that it should, deprived it of a capacity to invest in the public services, even basic infrastructure like water, rubbish removal, that kind of thing.

These things have never happened, and they haven’t happened since the international community has been essentially ruling Haiti, more or less directly since 2004. You had this huge UN force there, you know, with a budget of $600-plus million a year, and they spent almost all of that money on military measures to maintain social control, political control, to pacify a population, basically, after a coup that overthrew one of the most popular governments in the world, a government that had been elected with 70, 75 percent of the vote, that was happy to organize a new set of elections with its opposition, and the international community and the small clique of unelectable political manipulators in Haiti refused to go along with this. And the result is a military solution to a political problem, having this huge UN force whose only real contribution has been to maintain a version of order in the streets of Port-au-Prince.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Peter Hallward. He is the author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment. We’ll come back to this conversation in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We are talking to Peter Hallward. He is the author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment.

When we were traveling through Port-au-Prince and on to Carrefour, Gressier, to Léogâne, after the earthquake, the word was coming down that the UN and US were not going to move out into what was really the epicenter of the quake until security was guaranteed, which we found shocking, because people were just covered in cement ash, scratching at the rubble, digging, trying to find their grandparents and their children and their neighbors. What about this issue of security?

PETER HALLWARD: It’s unbelievable. I mean, and your report that you filed from the hospital, you know, what was it now, ten, fifteen, more like two weeks ago, it was an incredible situation. Basically, anything that couldn’t be cordoned off behind a security perimeter was left to—was simply abandoned. People were simply left to die. So Carrefour, you know, very close to the epicenter, very poor neighborhood, as you know, packed with people, was basically just left to its own devices for—I don’t think any aid of virtually any description arrived for ten days after the earthquake. So, you know, very cynical, you know.

And this happened at every level. It happened in terms of where the rescue teams went. They went to a few places like the Montana Hotel, the Caribe supermarkets, the UN headquarters, where you had a secure perimeter, where mainly wealthy people were among the victims, and where you could work, you know, in a secure environment. And pretty much everywhere else was simply abandoned. And it happened with the hospitals. It happened with the distribution of aid. I mean, and, you know, also it happened in terms of what the international response was initially. Rather than send the help that was needed, they instead secured the airport. They sent thousands of troops, who basically did virtually nothing.

You have a situation where what is urgently required is to enlist Haitian people to distribute, you know, essential supplies—water, food and so on. Instead, you have thousands of Marines, hanging—you know, patrolling the city, with armed to the teeth, you know, for no purpose. It’s incredible. And it’s grounded in, unfortunately, in one of the fundamental structural tendencies of Haitian political life, particularly in last twenty-five years or so, when you’ve had a political mobilization of people that can only be solved, from the elite’s perspective, with military means.

And this goes right back to the history of Haiti, as, you know, it was established as a colony designed to extract a maximum amount of wealth from slave labor. And it was extremely successful at that. It was more profitable than the whole of the United States combined at the time of American independence.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain that.

PETER HALLWARD: So, it was generating, you know, more than half—it was, by far, the largest supplier of coffee, sugar, you know, the big commodities at the time, also hardwoods, various other things. And it generated more revenue for France in the 1780s than all of the North American colonies combined. So it was really an extraordinarily lucrative, very concentrated wealth generator in the eighteenth century.

And it worked because you had a very brutal system of exploitation. Five—about five—almost half-a-million slaves, a very small number of white plantation owners, a few people in the middle. And this system worked to extract just vast amounts of profits. It was really exceptionally brutal by—even by colonial standards. It meant—the death rate was so high that by the time the Haitian slaves rose up against the system in 1791, most of the slaves that participated in that rebellion were born in Africa. You know, they never managed to create a system like they did in the southern United States, where the slave economy was self-replicating, where you could basically grow your own slaves locally. And this meant that the original security problem in Haiti, the plantation system, where you maintain order by, you know, simply massive, brutal levels of violence, had to be redesigned after the revolution, because the revolution was successful and the people who won that revolution were determined to avoid a return to the plantation system.

So in Haiti, really unlike most other places in the world, certainly among like most of Latin America, the tendency towards the concentration of big farms and the expropriation of small holdings and of peasant farms didn’t really happen in Haiti, which meant that small farmers were able to hold onto their farms, resisted tendencies that pushed them—that would have pushed them in other places into slums in the cities, where they would have been exploited, basically, in factories and so on. That happened much later in Haiti, and it only happened to a relatively limited extent.

So you then have to look at, well, how did that—and basically, in the twentieth century, there have been a couple of key episodes that allowed that process to accelerate a little bit and generated new security problems.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m going to interrupt, because we’ve reached Kim Ives in Haiti. Kim Ives is a journalist with the newspaper Haiti Liberté. He’s joining us on the line from Port-au-Prince.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Kim. You’re returning now for the second time after the earthquake. What have you found?

KIM IVES: Well, things have changed a lot since we were here, Amy. There is the massive—the massive destruction that we saw, but it has begun to be cleaned up. It’s a real testament to the resilience of people.

The vultures are arriving, however. They are mostly in the form of security forces who are driving around with the mainstream media, with [inaudible] construction companies from the US, which are looking to set up.

I’m getting tremendous feedback. I’m not sure if there’s anything that can be done to resolve it, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re trying to fix it, to turn off the feedback back to Kim. But Kim, just keep talking. We’ll try to do this as long as we can. It’s been almost impossible to reach you this morning. We can hear you pretty well.

KIM IVES: I know. That’s the—OK, very good. I’ll do my best. That’s the problem here, is a lot of the infrastructure is not in place. The phones are still spotty and difficult.

But I should just say, Amy, that the horrors continue, as yesterday out at Saint Gerard in the Carrefour-Feuilles area, there was a tremendous hole in the ground where they buried 240 people. It’s not covered. The stench coming from it is tremendous. A young boy at Saint Gerard explained how the school had fallen down on his classmates, killing forty of them. And the University of Saint Gerard across the street had fallen, killing 200 students. It’s a horror.

And at the same time, the people are returning to commerce. Restaurants are opening, and airlines have started to fly again. Electricity is back on. People are trying to survive, Amy, through scavenging, mostly. You see the National Council of Equipment is distributing lots of sites, mostly schools, is what they’re starting with. You see people all over trying to get the rebar, aluminum. Copper wire is particularly prized; that sells for a dollar a pound. The aluminum sells for about seven cents a pound. So you can see—yet when we were out two days ago watching the TeleCo building being raised, the TeleCo security people came out, began to chase away the scavengers with guns, whipping them, beating them. It was a very tense scene. Nobody was shot.

AMY GOODMAN: Kim, we’re having—Kim, we’re having trouble understanding you. Kim, if you could go as close as you can to the microphone on your computer. We haven’t been able to reach you by cell phone or any other way, and we’re trying this by audio Skype, but you’re coming in and out. Maybe if you go as close as you can to the computer microphone. Kim?

KIM IVES: OK, well, I’ve got the mike right to my face now. Can you hear me OK now?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes, a little better.

KIM IVES: I think it’s the [inaudible].

AMY GOODMAN: No, that was—

KIM IVES: I think it’s the internet, which has—again, is very—which is very [inaudible]. In any case, the other element you should be aware of is the response of the population, the hostility of the population [inaudible] NGOs which have come here. You see graffiti everywhere [inaudible] their presence in the country [inaudible]—

AMY GOODMAN: Kim, we’re going to have to try this tomorrow, because it’s just not audible enough. We sometimes hear you, and we sometimes don’t. But what we do hear is very interesting. We’re going to try to get complete sentences out tomorrow. Kim Ives is a journalist with the newspaper Haiti Liberté, joining us online from Port-au-Prince. Very difficult still to get through.

We’re also joined by Peter Hallward. His book is called Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment. He talked about the vultures. He talked about contractors that are now coming in, this whole issue of who develops Haiti, and going back to what you were saying about how—the riches that Haiti brought to France. And interestingly, that’s what increasingly depleted Haiti right through World War II. The Haitians, after declaring a republic in 1804, ultimately they agreed to pay reparations—

PETER HALLWARD: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: —to Haiti—to France.

PETER HALLWARD: Well, “agreed” is one way of putting it. The French sent their entire Atlantic fleet and put it outside Port-au-Prince, guns ready, and said, basically, “Pay up or face the consequences.” And what were—what did Haiti—what choice does he have?

And in the war of independence, one of the most extraordinary national liberation struggles ever fought, lasted for thirteen years, and it ends in the end of 1803, kills a third of the population, destroys the entire country. All the cities are destroyed, the plantations wrecked. And the country is then locked in this quarantine, not able to trade. It’s not able to generate any revenue that would allow it to rebuild. The little resources that it does have, it spends on building fortifications to block the French from returning. And twenty years of this, and the Haitian government is prepared finally to sign an agreement to pay a huge amount of money, I mean, three—more than three times, around three times the amount of money that France charged the United States when it sold Louisiana in 1803, as reparations for themselves, basically.

It’s reparations for lost—for the lost colonial and slave property to France. And yes, the money—the simple interest payments on this French debt by the end of the nineteenth century was consuming the bulk of the Haitian budget, about 80 percent of the Haitian budget. And these payments went on, as you said, until 1947.

So, that alone—I mean, when we talk about Haitian debt, the crucial debt is the debt that is owed to Haiti. And this is a point Aristide always made. He made it in his early speeches in the 1980s. He made it in his speeches as president in the early ’90s. And then he said it again, very emphatically, in the run-up to the bicentenary of Haitian independence in 2004, that France should pay this money back and that the United States should pay some of the money that it owes Haiti. After it took over the bank, when it occupied the country in 1915, it expropriated land from tens of thousands of peasants. It ravaged the economy for twenty years. It did the same again in different ways more recently, by contributing to these two disastrous coups, in 1991 and again in 2004.

So the debt that France and the United States and Canada also owes Haiti is immense. It would be billions and billions of dollars, not as charity, but simply debt. And Aristide had the temerity to demand this as head of state. It was a policy not by a kind of fringy NGO that can make, you know, idealistic speeches and demands, but of a well-documented, serious demand by a head of state to another sovereign power that was very, very uncomfortable. France was clearly rattled by this. Chirac said, you know, “The Haitian president should consider the implications of what he’s saying more carefully.” And it’s very clear, I think, that this demand was one of the key factors that led to the French involvement in the coup in 2004.

AMY GOODMAN: And the coup in 2004, the United States and France pushing Aristide and Mildred Aristide, the First Lady of Haiti, out of Haiti on a US military jet—

PETER HALLWARD: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: —to the Central African Republic.

PETER HALLWARD: That’s right, in the middle of the night. So here’s a scenario where the government is elected with 70 to 75 percent of the vote, has a massive majority in Parliament, seventy-two out of eighty-three seats in Parliament, has all but one seat in the Senate. Aristide has disbanded the army at this point, which had been traditionally the mechanism of control, which had overthrown his government back in 1991. So you have a situation here for the first time where you have a popular movement that’s still relatively strong, despite all the violence that it had survived in the mid- and early ’90s. It has a popular president. It has clear leadership. It has a clear program. It has a massive majority in Parliament. There’s no extra-political military mechanism waiting to overthrow it. And it’s at that point that this massive international campaign starts to destabilize the government, to misrepresent it, to starve it of funds, to push it into the corner that eventually, as you say, leads to this coup d’état at the end of February 2004.

AMY GOODMAN: What would it mean now if Aristide were to return? He has said he wants to return from South Africa. The reports are he almost—it’s almost as if he was in Bangi. While it’s a friendly government, that the pressure is on for him to stay there.

PETER HALLWARD: Well, clearly. He’s been—he said this—he’s been saying this for five years or six years virtually now, that he’s ready to come back. And it’s—the first thing it would do, it would establish some continuity. So we’ve heard any number of calls for “let’s make a new start,” you know, a new Haiti, etc. This is not very helpful, I think. It’s not what people want. What people want is some continuity with its remarkable political mobilization that has had the courage to face off and, in fact, overcome military pressure.

You know, this is a popular movement that began in an uprising against the Duvalier dictatorship, that was strong enough to overthrow the Duvalier dictatorship and, in particular, to uproot, as they put it, the Macoutes, the paramilitaries that had controlled that country for decades, powerful enough to overcome that then in 1986, ’87, powerful enough then to overcome the army directly when it tried to run the country. And the crucial thing for many people in Haiti is to maintain a kind of continuity with that tradition and to remobilize it, to reengage those—you know, that legacy of hope and perseverance and courage.

Aristide represents that, fundamentally. He’s the spokesperson for that movement, for that moment in Haitian history. So, for him to return, I think, would be, first of all, a kind of an acknowledgement that this has indeed been the fundamental fact of Haitian political life in the last thirty years and that this is what has to be the priority, is to empower and enable Haitian people with their own leadership and their own priorities to set the agenda and to force the international community to do what it is told, rather than the opposite. So, Aristide’s return would be to return the most forceful, the most inspiring, the most powerful voice in Haitian politics where it belongs, back where he belongs, not to run the country, not to be the savior who comes with all the solutions, but to be the someone who can be a spokesperson for popular empowerment. That’s what I think it would represent.

AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think it would take for him to return?

PETER HALLWARD: A little bit of political will. A little bit of—I mean, one phone call is what it would take. The thing is, what would it force—what would it require to force that? And what that would require, unfortunately, is a massive amount of effort from people like you and me and the people in the countries, particularly the United States, Canada—

AMY GOODMAN: Is it more important what’s on the ground in Haiti?

PETER HALLWARD: Yeah, it is, but—of course, it is. The crucial thing is the—I think, to facilitate something like a genuine collective mobilization. But Aristide has his place in that. He’s one of many people who could contribute to that. But he is the most important person, I think, the one who has the highest profile, the person who is—who was able, has been able to do this time and time again, to find the right words to say what has to be said. This is what people appreciate about him, and to do it in ways that are not deferential. You know, one of the things that people appreciate him is that he stood up to pressure and that he stood up for people’s right to confront military pressure, for example, and to defend themselves. So he’s been a very articulate spokesman for that, for justice and for empowerment. So he’s important because of that, not because of he’s an individual, he would come and have all the solutions [inaudible]. I’m sure he’d be the first to say that’s not the case.

But that the empowerment of Haitian people, as a whole, and in meaningful ways, not in the kind of trivial ways that everyone will say, it has to be driven by the Haitian people. What does that actually mean concretely? And I think, concretely, in terms of organization, in terms of having something like a program for national change, it’s been Fanmi Lavalas, the mobilization around Fanmi Lavalas, that has been the most important development in Haitian politics since the mid-‘90s. So, to maintain a kind of continuity with that, to allow it to go forward, to allow the organization to reestablish itself, to reorganize itself—it suffered a great deal, you know, under the pressure of the last six years, in particular—would be a very important way forward. It’s simply allowing the Haitian people to use the resources that they’ve got, rather than maintaining them in a sort of state of passive, deferential docility.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to leave it there. Peter Hallward, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Damming the Flood is the name of his book, Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment.

Related stories

• Report from Haiti: Desperate Call for Aid with Rescue Equipment, Medicine, Food & Water in Short Supply
• Naomi Klein Issues Haiti Disaster Capitalism Alert: Stop Them Before They Shock Again
• “The Sound of Screaming Is Constant”–Haiti Devastated by Massive Earthquake, Desperate Search for Survivors Continues
• ICE Officials Accused of Covering Up Immigrant Deaths in Detention
• Haiti Devastated by Largest Earthquake in 200 Years, Thousands Feared Dead

The real reason for the excessive number of U.S. troops in Haiti

Haiti: A Creditor, Not a Debtor

By Naomi Klein -

Published in The Nation

If we are to believe the G-7 finance ministers, Haiti is on its way to getting something it has deserved for a very long time: full "forgiveness" of its foreign debt. In Port-au-Prince, Haitian economist Camille Chalmers has been watching these developments with cautious optimism. Debt cancellation is a good start, he told Al Jazeera English, but "It's time to go much further. We have to talk about reparations and restitution for the devastating consequences of debt." In this telling, the whole idea that Haiti is a debtor needs to be abandoned. Haiti, he argues, is a creditor—and it is we, in the West, who are deeply in arrears.

Our debt to Haiti stems from four main sources: slavery, the US occupation, dictatorship and climate change. These claims are not fantastical, nor are they merely rhetorical. They rest on multiple violations of legal norms and agreements. Here, far too briefly, are highlights of the Haiti case.

§ The Slavery Debt. When Haitians won their independence from France in 1804, they would have had every right to claim reparations from the powers that had profited from three centuries of stolen labor. France, however, was convinced that it was Haitians who had stolen the property of slave owners by refusing to work for free. So in 1825, with a flotilla of war ships stationed off the Haitian coast threatening to re-enslave the former colony, King Charles X came to collect: 90 million gold francs--ten times Haiti's annual revenue at the time. With no way to refuse, and no way to pay, the young nation was shackled to a debt that would take 122 years to pay off.

In 2003, Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, facing a crippling economic embargo, announced that Haiti would sue the French government over that long-ago heist. "Our argument," Aristide's former lawyer Ira Kurzban told me, "was that the contract was an invalid agreement because it was based on the threat of re-enslavement at a time when the international community regarded slavery as an evil." The French government was sufficiently concerned that it sent a mediator to Port-au-Prince to keep the case out of court. In the end, however, its problem was eliminated: while trial preparations were under way, Aristide was toppled from power. The lawsuit disappeared, but for many Haitians the reparations claim lives on.

§ The Dictatorship Debt. From 1957 to 1986, Haiti was ruled by the defiantly kleptocratic Duvalier regime. Unlike the French debt, the case against the Duvaliers made it into several courts, which traced Haitian funds to an elaborate network of Swiss bank accounts and lavish properties. In 1988 Kurzban won a landmark suit against Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier when a US District Court in Miami found that the deposed ruler had "misappropriated more than $504,000,000 from public monies."

Haitians, of course, are still waiting for their payback--but that was only the beginning of their losses. For more than two decades, the country's creditors insisted that Haitians honor the huge debts incurred by the Duvaliers, estimated at $844 million, much of it owed to institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. In debt service alone, Haitians have paid out tens of millions every year.

Was it legal for foreign lenders to collect on the Duvalier debts when so much of it was never spent in Haiti? Very likely not. As Cephas Lumina, the United Nations Independent Expert on foreign debt, put it to me, "the case of Haiti is one of the best examples of odious debt in the world. On that basis alone the debt should be unconditionally canceled."

But even if Haiti does see full debt cancellation (a big if), that does not extinguish its right to be compensated for illegal debts already collected.

§ The Climate Debt. Championed by several developing countries at the climate summit in Copenhagen, the case for climate debt is straightforward. Wealthy countries that have so spectacularly failed to address the climate crisis they caused owe a debt to the developing countries that have done little to cause the crisis but are disproportionately facing its effects. In short: the polluter pays. Haiti has a particularly compelling claim. Its contribution to climate change has been negligible; Haiti's per capita CO2 emissions are just 1 percent of US emissions. Yet Haiti is among the hardest hit countries—according to one index, only Somalia is more vulnerable to climate change.

Haiti's vulnerability to climate change is not only—or even mostly—because of geography. Yes, it faces increasingly heavy storms. But it is Haiti's weak infrastructure that turns challenges into disasters and disasters into full-fledged catastrophes. The earthquake, though not linked to climate change, is a prime example. And this is where all those illegal debt payments may yet extract their most devastating cost. Each payment to a foreign creditor was money not spent on a road, a school, an electrical line. And that same illegitimate debt empowered the IMF and World Bank to attach onerous conditions to each new loan, requiring Haiti to deregulate its economy and slash its public sector still further. Failure to comply was met with a punishing aid embargo from 2001 to '04, the death knell to Haiti's public sphere.

This history needs to be confronted now, because it threatens to repeat itself. Haiti's creditors are already using the desperate need for earthquake aid to push for a fivefold increase in garment-sector production, some of the most exploitative jobs in the country. Haitians have no status in these talks, because they are regarded as passive recipients of aid, not full and dignified participants in a process of redress and restitution.

A reckoning with the debts the world owes to Haiti would radically change this poisonous dynamic. This is where the real road to repair begins: by recognizing the right of Haitians to reparations.

The interview with economist Camille Chalmers was conducted by my partner Avi Lewis for an in-depth report that aired today on Al Jazeera English. The piece, Haiti: The Politics of Rebuilding, offers a deeply compelling portrait of a people who are brimming with ideas about how how to rebuild their country based on principles of sovereignty and equity—far from the passive victims we have seen on so many other networks. It was produced by my former colleague Andrea Schmidt, one of the main researchers on The Shock Doctrine, and is crucial viewing for anyone concerned with avoiding a disaster capitalism redux in Haiti.

U.S. Attempts to Erase Haitian Nationhood

The world’s sole superpower behaves as if Haitian sovereignty no longer exists. Notions of legality are wholly absent in America’s occupation of Haiti, where the U.S. poses as the internationally recognized authority. Washington arrogantly improvises the terms of the Haitian “protectorate.”

U.S. Attempts to Erase Haitian Nationhood

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

“The Haitian people ‘need democracy and self determination, said the U.S.-based Black is Back Coalition.”

Proud Haiti has been reduced to a de facto “protectorate” of the United States – a grotesque form of non-sovereignty in which the subjugated nation is “protected” by its worst enemy. Namibia under white-ruled South African administration comes to mind, although in Haiti’s case the United Nations does not even pretend to be on the side of the oppressed, acting instead as agent and enforcer for the superpower.

As Haiti writhes under the agony of hundreds of thousands dead, Bill Clinton picks through the bones in search of prime tourist spots and mango plantation sites. America’s most successful snake oil salesman is pleased to do the Haitian people’s thinking, planning and dreaming for them – and quite willing to speak for the afflicted country, as well. “This is an opportunity to reimagine the future for the Haitian people, to build what they want to become, not rebuild what they used to be,'' Clinton told the global oligarchs at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

In one sweeping sentence, Clinton claimed a kind of sovereignty over the Haitian people’s very imaginations, assigning himself the right to filter what was good or bad about Haiti’s past, and what is permissible in the future. Haitians are no longer allowed to possess their own dreams and remembrances, which have apparently been placed in United Nations trusteeship, under control of UN special envoy to Haiti, Bill Clinton.

“MINUSTAH and the U.S. expeditionary force have conspired to starve out what’s left of Cite Soleil.”

As one of the world’s most shameless personalities, the former president is eminently qualified to represent both the UN and the U.S. armed missions in Haiti. The 9,000 troops and police of the UN Stabilization Force in Haiti (MINUSTAH) have for years waged war on the seaside shanty neighborhood of Cite Soleil, a political stronghold of exiled president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Before the February, 2004, U.S.-backed coup, Cite Soleil was home to at least 300,000 desperately poor but politically organized people. Relentless MINUSTAH raids have drastically shrunk the slum’s population. By 2006, only 30 percent of residents still remained in some sections of Cite Soleil, according to human rights workers.

Since the earthquake, MINUSTAH and the U.S. expeditionary force have conspired to starve out what’s left of Cite Soleil. Three weeks after the catastrophe, the United Nations World Food Program described Cite Soleil as “no-go, for security reasons.”

Have the people of Cite Soleil been condemned to death and dispersal because of their pro-Aristide politics – a trait they shared with at least 60 percent of the population the last time a count was permitted – or are they doomed by their choice seaside location? Either reason will do, or both. Haiti’s poor are condemned in advance, for existing where inconvenient.

“Small rice farmers were forced off the land and into the shanty-opolis.”

The Haitian peasantry, which not so long ago kept the country self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs, became inconvenient after Washington forced Haiti to accept U.S. government-subsidized rice. Port-au-Prince, a town of about a quarter million in 1960, swelled to at least 2.5 million as small rice farmers were forced off the land and into the shanty-opolis, where they built what they could with the resources at hand. U.S.-imposed “structural adjustment” made Port-au-Prince a high-density death trap.

Somehow, this U.S.-mandated migration – which also contributed to the exodus abroad of many hundreds of thousands – is now numbered among the many “failures” of the Haitian people. They must now move again, to places outside Port-au-Prince where they can “reimagine the future,” in Bill Clinton’s words. But whatever the Haitians might imagine, the United States is determined to deny them the right to pursue those dreams. Americans hector Haitians to summon the will to rebuild, but strangle Haitian civil society by effectively outlawing the nation’s most popular political party, Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas. Self-determination is among those things Haitians must not be permitted to rebuild or reclaim.

“The U.S. strangles Haitian civil society by effectively outlawing the nation’s most popular political party.”

The Americans seem to prefer that Haitians have no government, at all, even one as compliant as that of President Rene Preval, who collaborated in banning Fanmi Lavalas from taking part in elections. Only one cent of every dollar in U.S. “relief” money goes to or through the Haitian government, which is thus reduced to a crippled and largely irrelevant spectator. The Americans will at some point “reimagine” precisely how the Haitian “protectorate” will be managed in these extraordinary times.

The Haitian people “need democracy and self determination,” said a statement by the U.S.-based Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations, “not more military interventions by the U.S., which has sent more than 10,000 troops to subdue our people.” On February 20, the Black is Back Coalition will hold a National March and Rally to Defend Haiti, in Miami, Florida. “Our people in Haiti must have reparations, not self serving charity from France and the U.S.”

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

For more information on the March and Rally for Haiti, contact stpeteinpdum@yahoo.com, call (727) 821-6620 or go to www.blackisbackcoalition.org.

U.S. Haiti relief operations -- Operation Child Abduction

The ten members of the Idaho-based New Life Children's Refuge (NCLR) arrested by Haitian authorities for attempting to abduct 33 Haitian children and spirit them into the Dominican Republic are part of an intertwined Southern Baptist network that involves the adoption of orphans.

The adoption network involves operations located at three addresses in Idaho that is linked to a Florida-based organization. According to an NCLR Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission document, NCLR's Haitian Team arrested by Haitian authorities is based at the East Side Baptist Church in Twin Falls, Idaho. However, donations to NCLR are made through a Wells Fargo Bank account maintained by the Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, Idaho. Haiti's Social Affairs Minister said two Haitians were also arrested with the Americans and cited the involvement of two pastors, one in Haiti and the other in Atlanta. The Haitian pastor who handed the Haitian children over to the American group was identified as being with a group called the Sharing Jesus Ministries.

Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive confirmed that Haitian children were being trafficked out of the devastated nation. NBC News reported that one of the children NCLR tried to remove from Haiti said her parents were still alive and that she was told she was going on a short vacation. NBC News reported that the director of the SOS Children’s Village in Croix des Bouquets said the Haitian police told him the NCLR group was planning to sell the traumatized children for $10,000 each. The Austrian-run orphanage took custody of the 33 children who were taken into custody by Haitian authorities at the Dominican border crossing.

Bellerive said some Haitian children were being trafficked for their organs. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley, the National Security Council spokesman during the Clinton administration, and now the press shill for Hillary Clinton, said the Haitian adoption system that has been established "is working effectively." Crowley, a retired Air Force officer, is recognized by Washington insiders as an apologist and cover-up specialist for U.S. intelligence operations. He honed his skills when the U.S. feigned ignorance about the involvement of western nations in what prompted the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.

A statement on the Central Valley Baptist Church's website states: "A ten member church team traveled to Haiti to help rescue children from one or more orphanages that had been devastated in the earthquake on January 12. The children were being taken to an orphanage in the Dominican Republic where they could be cared for and have their medical and emotional needs attended to. Our team was falsely arrested today and we are doing everything we can from this end to clear up the misunderstanding that has occurred in Port au Prince." The ten Americans include members from the Meridian and Twin Falls churches, one from Bethel Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, and a businessman from Amarillo, Texas.

The NCLR, according to the group's mission statement, conducts business from an address at 1577 N. Linder Rd., Kuna, ID 83634. According to the mission statement, the group of Idahoans planned to travel to Santo Domingo on January 22 and charter a bus and drive to Port-au-Prince to "gather 100 orphans from the streets and collapsed orphanages, then return to the DR [Dominican Republic]." The document also states that on January 24, the group's bus planned to arrive in Cabarete, DR at New Life Children Refuge. However, the Haitian authorities arrested the NCLR group on the evening of January 29 at the Malpasse border crossing with the Dominican Republic with the 33 children said to be orphaned. There has been no mention of what became of the plan to take 100 orphans the group claimed it was to collect "from the streets" to deposit in Cabarete on January 24.

The NCLR document claims God "provided an interim solution in nearby Cabarete, where we will be leasing a 45-room hotel and converting it into an orphanage until the building is complete." The "new building" refers to a new church, school, and orphanage at Magante on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic. The new orphanage is planned to hold up to 200 children from newly-born infants to ten years old with future plans to house children up to the age of 16. The complex, reported to be a joint operation with the New Life Adoption Foundation, is also planned to include a chapel, medical facility, a greenhouse and farm for cows and chickens, a seaside restaurant, and seaside villas for "adopting parents to stay while fulfilling requirement for 60‐90 day visit as well as Christian volunteers/vacationing families." The directors of NCLR are listed as Laura Silsby and Charisa Coulter. They are president and vice president, respectively, of the Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission team detained by the Haitian authorities.

The NCLR team arrested claimed it was transporting orphans left homeless with the destruction of the New Life Children's Center orphanage in Port-au-Prince.

The involvement of human organ traffickers with the abduction of children comes as Narco News's Brenda Norrell reported that Evergreen International Aviation, Inc. of McMinnville, Oregon and the Israeli firm Elbit Systems have teamed up to provide unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) reconnaissance of "rural orphanages in Haiti employing Elbit Systems Skylark" UAV.

On February 22, 2008, WMR reported that Dr. Francis Delmonico, Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, told a February 21, 2008 seminar at the Cato Institute in Washington that Israel was outsourcing kidney and liver transplants to Colombia and the Philippines. It was latr reported that Israel Defense Force personnel were harvesting the organs of Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces. WMR's February 22, 2008 report also stated: "Israel has, in the past, been a center for dubious human organ trafficking operations. It is also the case that Palestinian prisoners in Israel have sought to sell their kidneys to feed their children. The Israel Medical Association is opposing a bill that would allow the donors of certain organs to be reimbursed by the state. The group claims this will 'open the door' to organ sales."

There is another reason to be fearful of the trafficking of Haitian children to the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The tourist centers that populate the coast attract a number of pedophiles looking for children trafficked for sexual exploitation. On April 11, 1997, the Inter-Press Service reported: "In the Dominican Republic, where there are entire beaches and centers dedicated to sex tourism, another variant of prostitution are the 'hanky panky' workers." Hanky panky workers are beach boys and girls as young as 13 years old who are introduced to foreign sex tour visitors.

On June 22, 2005, Michael E. O'Connor, Jr. Director of Operations of the South Asia International Justice Mission told the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Domestic and International Monetary Policy, Trade and Technology that websites are used to provide pedophiles with information on the child sex trade in the Dominican Republic. He cited one posting dated January 19, 2002 by a prospective visitor to the Dominican Republic: "I am interested in meeting small, petite, young (18, or ones who look younger) with light skin and haven't had any babies. Am I asking too much? How can I meet these higher end girls and what would they cost per hour or per day? Are they best picked up a bar or Brothel? I'm 45 years old but I like them yung and babyless with a fine body and nice skin. What are the best place or people to contact for this kind? Are there newspaper ads that offer higher end girls .. Any comments ( + or - ) are appreciated. Do they mind if you video tape them while you are with them?"

Dyncorp International, the private military contractor that received a 2008 contract to train the Haitian National Police, was cited in a child prostitution scandal in the Balkans.

NCLR may have links far beyond Idaho. On the January 29, 2010 "The O'Reilly Factor" broadcast on Fox News, Geraldo Rivera stated on the subject of what relief charities are honest in Haiti: "What I would suggest -- I saw a little place called the World Harvest Mission, one of these small Christian faith driven -- the New Life Children fund. Give to the people who are actually hands on helping."

The Associated Press reported on January 15, 2010, that the New Life Children's Center in Port-au-Prince was run by the World Harvest Missions Outreach of Lake Wales, Florida. The group's website echoes the charge made by Rev. Pat Robertson linking Haiti to Satan: "Haiti is probably the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, while practically the neighbor to the richest country in the world. Haiti is also the voodoo capital of the world, was dedicated to Satan at its independence, and is now a growing New Age tourist mecca." The group, formed in 1977, also lists one of its Haiti projects as the "New Life Children’s Home."

Christian organizations that operate missionaries and orphanages are set up in a manner much like CIA front companies. Many use the same names and their links are circuitously masked mainly due to the opaqueness derived from their tax-exempt status. A World Harvest Missions operation based in Jacksonville, Indiana has supported a Baptist orphanage in civil war-ravaged Liberia.

The case of the attempted children abductees in Haiti mirrors a similar case involving a group with links to French President Nicolas Sarkozy. On October 29, 2007, WMR reported: "a mysterious French group known as 'Zoe's Ark,' and which stands accused of attempting to spirit 103 Chadian children out of Chad to France, is suspected of links to French neocon President Nicolas Sarkozy . . . After Chadian and French authorities accused Zoe's Ark of criminal activity, the group said it had the support of President Sarkozy, his now-estranged wife Cecilia, and the Elysee Palace."

On November 5, 2007, WMR followed up with the following: "Sarkozy flew to Ndjamena, the Chadian capital, to intercede on behalf of French, Belgian, and Spanish nationals who had been arrested for suspicions by Chad of involvement in the caper. One of the French journalists who was freed is now reporting that Zoe's Ark is a duplicitous organization . . . The Spanish charter crew members appear to have been duped by Zoe's Ark into believing the charity was legitimately operating in Chad with official Chadian government sanction using another corporate identity, Children Rescue . . . It has now been learned that the 103 children to be spirited out of Chad were not Darfur war orphans from Sudan but children with families from Chad. Zoe's Ark aid workers even wrapped bandages around some of the children's arms and dabbed the bandages with a liquid that appeared to be dried blood to make it appear that they had been wounded. Other children were lured with biscuits and candy by aid workers . . . Some Chadian families revealed the Zoe's Ark workers promised that the children would be taken to school in Chad to learn Arabic, French, English, and their local dialect while other children were told they would be schooled in France and then receive big cars to drive. It has now been revealed that French Army peacekeepers in Chad provided Zoe's Ark with logistics assistance in the African nation . . . Zoe's Ark is an enigma. It was started in the aftermath of the tsunami of December 26, 2004 by 'French motoring enthusiasts' and set up four camps in Indonesia's Banda Aceh for children displaced by the tsunami. WMR has previously reported on the trafficking of orphans from the tsunami in Indonesia and Thailand, some of it for prostitution purposes . . . During the presidential election campaign, Sarkozy opined that pedophilia is not properly understood. The comment set off a firestorm in France and earned Sarkozy a strong rebuke from the Archbishop of Paris. Some critics of the mercurial Sarkozy began referring to him as 'Sarko le Pedo.'"

On December 31, 2007, WMR also reported that French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner was also linked to Zoe's Ark: "Not only has Zoe's Ark been linked to Sarkozy and the Elysee Palace but Sarkozy's Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner, has also been connected to Zoe's Ark. Kouchner who founded the humanitarian groups Doctors Without Borders and Doctors of the World, reportedly knew of Quai d'Orsay (French Foreign Ministry) classified reports on the illegal activities of Zoe's Ark but failed to take appropriate action. Zoe's Ark has also been linked to the extraction of children from Banda Aceh, Sumatra, Indonesia following the devastating tsunami on December 26, 2004 and the adoption of Cambodian orphans . . . some French media outlets have reported on the close relationship between Zoe's Ark's number two leader, Stephanie Dhainault-Lefebvre, of Paris Biotech Sante, a semi-public medical research firm, and Dr. Francois Sarkozy, a pediatrician who is also a director of Paris Biotech Sante. Francois Sarkozy is the brother of Nicolas Sarkozy. Francois Sarkozy is involved in the testing of bio-pharmaceuticals on human subjects. AIDS- and cancer-treating pharmaceuticals are of particular interest to Francois Sarkozy and Paris Biotech Sante. The possibility that Sarkozy, who has infuriated African leaders with his racist rhetoric, may have been providing cover for the use of African child test subjects by his brother's Big Pharma friends cannot be ruled out."

Kouchner criticized the Obama administration for turning Port-au-Prince airport into a virtual annex of Washington. However, based on the Chad child abduction scandal, Kouchner's indignation may have been far from altruistic.

U.S. TO HAITI: "STAND IN LINE, CHILDREN, OR...we’re not going to help you.”

Thanks to television, on Tuesday, January 19, I heard a member of the U.S. military say to a group of Haitians, “If you don’t stand in line, we’re not going to help you.” I hope the Haitians didn’t understand him.



A week had passed since the tragic earthquake struck Haiti. These Haitians had been waiting seven days, “standing in line,” shall we say? And this well-fed U.S. soldier had the gall to say to them that if they didn’t stand in line the way he wanted them to do so, “we’re not going to help you.”

It is fortunate that he probably couldn’t speak the Haitian Creole, or even the French that some people there speak. But wouldn’t it have been nice if he would have said to a translator, “Please ask the people to stand in line, so we can distribute (whatever he was going to distribute) as fast as possible. Tell them we want to be of help, but we need their help and cooperation.”

And he should have also added, “Please tell them we are sorry that it has taken us so long to get here. Please forgive us.”

The Haitian tragedy happened Tuesday afternoon, January 12. By Wednesday morning Venezuela had the first plane land with supplies and rescue personnel. By Thursday morning, China had a similar plane there—before one arrived from the U.S. And then, seven days later, U.S. planes were dropping supplies in front of the onlooking Haitians, together with soldiers carrying weapons in their arms. There were complaints of looting. There wouldn’t have been as many if food and other necessary supplies had arrived sooner. Yes, in behalf of the citizens of the United States, he should have asked for forgiveness.

A kind elderly Catholic bishop once told me that Saint Vincent DePaul said we should ask forgiveness from the needy when we give them bread. The same should be in order for us U.S. citizens.

Even Anderson Cooper and two other CNN reporters said that excessive security measures were keeping the Haitian people from receiving help they needed. They mentioned they had no problem going wherever they wanted to go without security. The Haitians were treating them with respect.

During those first days of the tragedy, I also heard that the Haitian ambassador to the U.S. advised his countrymen and women that they should not try to enter the U.S. They would be turned back. Then I heard that the Venezuelan government formed a Haitian-Venezuelan brigade to go to Haiti. And, also, that the government planned to speed up documents for any illegal Haitian immigrant in the country that wanted to join the brigade so that they would have no problem returning to Venezuela when they wanted to do so.

Writing what I just have written makes me sad. I love my native country. I don’t want the U.S. to be the best country in the world. I just want it to be as great as every other; but I also have to recognize that we do have great power. I grew up with the impression that we also had high ideals in everything we did as a nation. It hurts to learn that we have fallen far short in the past. It hurts even more to see that we are still fumbling our responsibility, because as Uncle Ben told Peter Parker in Spiderman, “with great power comes great responsibility.” It also calls for gentleness.

I have read that there is a custom in Haiti that when one knocks at a door, one should also say, “Honor.” The person inside replies, “Respect.” After having troops in Haiti for so many years, we could have learned that custom. We should have.

-30-

This reflection was prepared originally for 21st Century Socialism .

No, Mister! You Cannot Share My Pain!

John Maxwell

If you shared my pain you would not continue to make me suffer, to torture me, to deny me my dignity and my rights, especially my rights to self-determination and self-expression.

Six years ago you sent your Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to perform an action illegal under the laws of your country, my country and of the international community of nations.

One of the survivors of Tuesday's devastating earthquake in Haiti.

One of the survivors of Tuesday's devastating earthquake in Haiti. 1/1

It was an act so outrageous, so bestially vile and wicked that your journalists and news agencies, your diplomats and politicians to this day cannot bring themselves to truthfully describe or own up to the crime that was committed when US Ambassador James Foley, a career diplomat, arrived at the house of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide with a bunch of CIA thugs and US Marines to kidnap the president of Haiti and his wife.

The Aristides were stowed aboard a CIA plane normally used for 'renditions' of suspected terrorists to the worldwide US gulag of dungeons and torture chambers.

The plane, on which the Aristides are listed as "cargo", flew to Antigua - an hour away - and remained on the ground in Antigua while Colin Powell's State Department and the CIA tried to blackmail and bribe various African countries to accept ("give asylum to") the kidnapped president and his wife.

The Central African Republic - one of George W Bush's 'Dark Corners of the World' - agreed for an undisclosed sum, to give the Aristides temporary asylum.

Before any credible plot can be designed and paid for - for the disappearance of the Aristides - they are rescued by friends, flown to temporary asylum in Jamaica where the Government cravenly yielded to the blackmail of Condoleezza Rice to deny them the permanent asylum to which they were entitled and which most Jamaicans had hoped for.

Meanwhile, in Haiti, the US Marines protected an undisciplined ragbag of rapists and murderers to allow them entry to the capital. The Marines chased the medical students out of the new Medical School established by Aristide with Cuban help and teachers. The Marines bivouac in the school, going out on nightly raids, trailed by fleets of ambulances with body bags, hunting down Fanmi Lavalas activists described as 'chimeres' - terrorists.

The real terrorists, led by two convicted murderers, Chamblain and Philippe, assisted the Marines in the eradication of 'chimeres' until the Marines were replaced by foreign troops, paid by the United Nations, who took up the hunt on behalf of the civilised world - France, Canada, the US and Brazil.

The terrorists and the remains of the Duvalier tontons and the CIA-bred FRAPF declared open season on the remnants of Aristide's programmes to build democracy. They burnt down the new museum of Haitian culture, destroyed the children's television station and generally laid waste to anything and everything which could remind Haitians of their glorious history.

Haitians don't know that without their help Latin America might still be part of the Spanish Empire and Simon Bolivar a brief historical footnote.

Imagine, Niggers Speaking French!

About 90 years ago when Professor Woodrow Wilson was president of the USA, his secretary of state was a fundamentalist lawyer named William Jennings Bryan who had three times run unsuccessfully for president.

The Americans had decided to invade Haiti to collect debts owed by Haiti to Citibank.

General Smedley Butler, the only American soldier to have twice won the Congressional Medal of Honour, described his role in the US Army:

"I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half-a-dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long.

General Butler said: "I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. ... My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical in the military service." Butler compared himself unfavourably to Al Capone. He said his official racketeering made Capone look like an amateur.

Secretary Bryan was dumbfounded by the Haitians. "Imagine," he said, "Niggers speaking French!"

Smedley Butler and Bryan were involved in Haiti because of something that happened nearly a hundred years before. The French slave-masters, expelled from Haiti and defeated again when they tried to re-enslave the Haitians, connived with the Americans to starve them into submission by a trade embargo. With no sale for Haitian sugar, the country was weak and run-down when a French fleet arrived bearing a demand for reparations. Having bought their freedom in blood, the Haitians were to purchase it again in gold.

The French demanded, essentially, that the Haitians pay France an amount equivalent to 90 per cent of the entire Haitian budget for the foreseeable future. When this commitment proved too arduous to honour, the City Bank offered the Haitians a 'debt exchange", paying off the French in exchange for a lower-interest, longer-term debt. The terms may have seemed better but were just as usurious and it was not paid off until 1947.

Because of the debt the Americans invaded Haiti, seized the Treasury, exiled the president, their Jim Crow policies were used to divide the society, to harass the poor and finally provoked a second struggle for freedom which was one of the most brutal episodes in colonial history.

Long before Franco bombed Guernica, exciting the horror and revulsion of civilised people, the Americans perfected their dive-bombing techniques against unarmed Haitian peasants, many of whom had never seen aircraft before.

The Americans set up a Haitian Army in the image of their Jim Crow Marines, and it was these people, the alien and alienated Élite who, with some conscripted blacks like the Duvaliers, have ruled Haiti for most of the last century.

When I flew over Haiti for the first time in 1959 en route from New York to San Juan, Puerto Rico, I saw for the first time the border between the green Dominican Republic and brown Haiti.

First-world journalists interpret the absence of trees on the Haitian side to the predations of the poor, disregarding the fact that Western religion and American capitalism were mainly responsible.

Why is it that nowhere else in the Caribbean is there similar deforestation?

Haiti's Dessalines constitution offered sanctuary to every escaped slave of any colour. All such people of whatever colour were deemed 'black' and entitled to citizenship. Only officially certified 'blacks' could own land in Haiti.

The American occupation, anticipating Hayek, Freedman and Greenspan, decided that such a rule was a hindrance to development. The assistant secretary of the US Navy, one Franklin D Roosevelt, was given the job of writing a new, modern constitution for Haiti.

This constitution meant foreigners could own land. Within a very short time the lumberjacks were busy, felling old growth Mahogany and Caribbean Pine for carved doors for the rich and mahogany speedboats, boardroom tables seating 40, etc. The devastated land was put to produce rubber, sisal for ropes and all sorts of pie in the sky plantations.

When President Paul Magloire came to Jamaica 50 years ago Haitians were still speaking of an Artibonite dam for electricity and irrigation. But the ravages of the recent past were too much to recover.

As Marguerite Laurent (EziliDanto) writes: Don't expect to learn how a people with a Vodun culture that reveres nature and especially the Mapou (oak-like or ceiba pendantra/bombax) trees, and other such big trees as the abode of living entities and therefore as sacred things, were forced to watch the Catholic Church, during Rejete - the violent anti-Vodun crusade - gather whole communities at gunpoint into public squares, and forced them to watch their agents burn Haitian trees in order to teach Haitians their Vodun Gods were not in nature, that the trees were the "houses of Satan".

In partnership with the US, the mulatto President Elie Lescot (1941-45) summarily expelled peasants from more than 100,000 hectares of land, razing their homes and destroying more than a million fruit trees in the vain effort to cultivate rubber on a large plantation scale. Also, under the pretext of the Rejete campaign, thousands of acres of peasant lands were cleared of sacred trees so that the US could take their lands for agribusiness.

After the Flood

Norman Manley used to say "River Come Down" when his party seemed likely to prevail. The Kreyol word Lavalas conveys the same meaning.

Since the Haitian people's decisive rejection of the Duvalier dictatorships in the early 90s, their spark and leader has been Jean-Bertrand Aristide whose bona fides may be assessed from the fact that the CIA and conservative Americans have been trying to discredit him almost from the word go.

As he put it in one of his books, his intention has been to build a paradise on the garbage heap bequeathed to Haiti by the US and the Elite.

The bill of particulars is too long to go into here, but the destruction of the new museum of Culture, the breaking up of the medical school, the destruction of the children's television station gives you the flavour. But the essence is captured in the brutal attempt to obliterate the spirit of Haitian community; the attempt to destroy Lavalas by murdering its men and raping its women, the American-directed subversion of a real police force, the attacks on education and the obliteration of the community self-help systems which meant that when Hurricane Jeanne and all the other weather systems since have struck Haiti, many more have died than in any other country similarly stricken. In an earthquake, totally unpredictable, every bad factor is multiplied.

The American blocking of international aid means that there is no modern water supply anywhere, no town planning, no safe roads, none of the ordinary infrastructure of any other Caribbean state. There are no building standards, no emergency shelters, no parks.

So, when I write about mothers unwittingly walking on dead babies in the mud, when I write about people so poor they must eat patties made of clay and shortening, when I write about people with their faces 'chopped off' or about any of eight million horror stories from the crime scene that is Haiti, please don't tell me you share their pain or mine.

Tell me, where is Lovinsky Pierre Antoine and ten thousand like him?

If you share my pain and their pain, why don't you stop causing it? Why don't you stop the torture?

If you want to understand me, look at the woman in the picture (above), and the children half-buried with her. You cannot hear their screams because they know there is no point in screaming. It will do no more good than voting.

What is she thinking: perhaps it is something like this - No, mister! You cannot share my pain!

Some time, perhaps after the camera is gone, people will return to dig us out with their bare hands. But not you.

Copyright©2010 John Maxwell

When the Media Is the Disaster - Covering Haiti

Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, In Haiti, Words Can Kill

Posted by Rebecca Solnit at 10:18am, January 21, 2010.

Just before Haiti was devastated by the most powerful earthquake to hit the island in more than 200 years, when, that is, it was only devastated by the hemisphere’s worst poverty, there were but one or two full-time foreign correspondents in the country. No longer.

Within days, the networks, CNN, and Fox had more or less transferred their news operations (already slimmed down by years of attrition) onto the island. CNN’s Anderson Cooper made it first on Wednesday morning. Katie flew in later that day. By the time Diane made it out ofKabul and into Port-au-Prince, Brian had already long since hit “the tarmac.” (All but Anderson were gone again by the weekend.) Along with them, in a situation in which resources were nearly nonexistent, went at least 44 CNN correspondents, producers, and technicians, a crew of 25 from Fox, and undoubtedly similar contingents from CBS, NBC, and ABC. Other than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Los Angeles Times, this was “the biggest U.S. television news deployment to an international crisis since the 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami” -- at a cost that can only have been obscene.

In the process, as happens on our obsessionally eyeball-gluing, single-event, 24/7 media planet, “world news” essentially became Haiti with the usual logos, tags, and drum rolls (“Earthquake in Haiti”). The three networks even briefly expanded the length of their half-hour news shows to an all-Haiti-all-the-time hour, with just bare minutes leftover for the rest of the planet. In a sense, as the earthquake had blotted out Haiti, so the news coverage blotted out everything else with an almost religious fervor and the language to match.

In place of the world came endless stories of a tiny number of riveting rescues from the rubble (“miracles”) by international rescue teams -- less than 150 saved when possibly tens of thousands of buried Haitians would not be dug out and conceivably up to 200,000 had died. Along with this went the usual self-congratulatory reporting about American generosity and the importance of American troops (they secured the airport!) in a situation in which aid was visiblynot getting through, in which people were not being saved.

And of course, with the drama of people pulled from the rubble went another kind of drama: impending violence -- even though the real story, as a number of reporters couldn’t help but notice, was the remarkable patience and altruistic willingness of Haitians to support each other,help each other, and organize each other in a situation where there was almost nothing to share. It might, in fact, have been their finest hour, but amid the growing headlines about possible “violence” and “looting,” that would have been hard to tell.

The coverage has been beyond massive, sentimental, self-congratulatory, and not anyone’s finest hour -- and a month or three from now, predictably, Haiti will still be utterly devastated and there will be but one or two foreign correspondents on hand. Anderson, Diane, Brian, Katie? They’ll be somewhere else, 24/7. Of course, much of what happened might have been far better prepared for, if any of the anchors or correspondents had read Rebecca Solnit’s revelatory book, A Paradise Built in Hell, which offers news from the past on what people, again and again, in the worst of times, actually do without the help of the authorities. The answer: generally, they take care of each other in remarkably creative ways. Tom

When the Media Is the Disaster
Covering Haiti
By Rebecca Solnit

Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for property. They act without regard for consequences.

I’m talking, of course, about those members of the mass media whose misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies a second wave of disaster. I’m talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol. They still have blood on their hands from Hurricane Katrina, and they are staining themselves anew in Haiti.

Within days of the Haitian earthquake, for example, the Los Angeles Times ran a series of photographs with captions that kept deploying the word “looting.” One was of a man lying face down on the ground with this caption: “A Haitian police officer ties up a suspected looter who was carrying a bag of evaporated milk.” The man’s sweaty face looks up at the camera, beseeching, anguished.

Another photo was labeled: “Looting continued in Haiti on the third day after the earthquake, although there were more police in downtown Port-au-Prince.” It showed a somber crowd wandering amid shattered piles of concrete in a landscape where, visibly, there could be little worth taking anyway.

A third image was captioned: “A looter makes off with rolls of fabric from an earthquake-wrecked store.” Yet another: “The body of a police officer lies in a Port-au-Prince street. He was accidentally shot by fellow police who mistook him for a looter.”

People were then still trapped alive in the rubble. A translator for Australian TV dug out a toddler who’d survived 68 hours without food or water, orphaned but claimed by an uncle who had lost his pregnant wife. Others were hideously wounded and awaiting medical attention that wasn’t arriving. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, needed, and still need, water, food, shelter, and first aid. The media in disaster bifurcates. Some step out of their usual “objective” roles to respond with kindness and practical aid. Others bring out the arsenal of clichés and pernicious myths and begin to assault the survivors all over again.

The “looter” in the first photo might well have been taking that milk to starving children and babies, but for the news media that wasn’t the most urgent problem. The “looter” stooped under the weight of two big bolts of fabric might well have been bringing it to now homeless people trying to shelter from a fierce tropical sun under improvised tents.

The pictures do convey desperation, but they don’t convey crime. Except perhaps for that shooting of a fellow police officer -- his colleagues were so focused on property that they were reckless when it came to human life, and a man died for no good reason in a landscape already saturated with death.

In recent days, there have been scattered accounts of confrontations involving weapons, and these may be a different matter. But the man with the powdered milk? Is he really a criminal? There may be more to know, but with what I’ve seen I’m not convinced.

What Would You Do?

Imagine, reader, that your city is shattered by a disaster. Your home no longer exists, and you spent what cash was in your pockets days ago. Your credit cards are meaningless because there is no longer any power to run credit-card charges. Actually, there are no longer any storekeepers, any banks, any commerce, or much of anything to buy. The economy has ceased to exist.

By day three, you’re pretty hungry and the water you grabbed on your way out of your house is gone. The thirst is far worse than the hunger. You can go for many days without food, but not water. And in the improvised encampment you settle in, there is an old man near you who seems on the edge of death. He no longer responds when you try to reassure him that this ordeal will surely end. Toddlers are now crying constantly, and their mothers infinitely stressed and distressed.

So you go out to see if any relief organization has finally arrived to distribute anything, only to realize that there are a million others like you stranded with nothing, and there isn’t likely to be anywhere near enough aid anytime soon. The guy with the corner store has already given away all his goods to the neighbors. That supply’s long gone by now. No wonder, when you see the chain pharmacy with the shattered windows or the supermarket, you don’t think twice before grabbing a box of PowerBars and a few gallons of water that might keep you alive and help you save a few lives as well.

The old man might not die, the babies might stop their squalling, and the mothers might lose that look on their faces. Other people are calmly wandering in and helping themselves, too. Maybe they’re people like you, and that gallon of milk the fellow near you has taken is going to spoil soon anyway. You haven’t shoplifted since you were 14, and you have plenty of money to your name. But it doesn’t mean anything now.

If you grab that stuff are you a criminal? Should you end up lying in the dirt on your stomach with a cop tying your hands behind your back? Should you end up labeled a looter in the international media? Should you be shot down in the street, since the overreaction in disaster, almost any disaster, often includes the imposition of the death penalty without benefit of trial for suspected minor property crimes?

Or are you a rescuer? Is the survival of disaster victims more important than the preservation of everyday property relations? Is that chain pharmacy more vulnerable, more a victim, more in need of help from the National Guard than you are, or those crying kids, or the thousands still trapped in buildings and soon to die?

It’s pretty obvious what my answers to these questions are, but it isn’t obvious to the mass media. And in disaster after disaster, at least since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, those in power, those with guns and the force of law behind them, are too often more concerned for property than human life. In an emergency, people can, and do, die from those priorities. Or they get gunned down for minor thefts or imagined thefts. The media not only endorses such outcomes, but regularly, repeatedly, helps prepare the way for, and then eggs on, such a reaction.

If Words Could Kill

We need to banish the word “looting” from the English language. It incites madness and obscures realities.

“Loot,” the noun and the verb, is a word of Hindi origin meaning the spoils of war or other goods seized roughly. As historian Peter Linebaugh points out, “At one time loot was the soldier's pay.” It entered the English language as a good deal of loot from India entered the English economy, both in soldiers’ pockets and as imperial seizures.

After years of interviewing survivors of disasters, and reading first-hand accounts and sociological studies from such disasters as the London Blitz and the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, I don’t believe in looting. Two things go on in disasters. The great majority of what happens you could call emergency requisitioning. Someone who could be you, someone in the kind of desperate circumstances I outlined above, takes necessary supplies to sustain human life in the absence of any alternative. Not only would I not call that looting, I wouldn’t even call that theft.

Necessity is a defense for breaking the law in the United States and other countries, though it’s usually applied more to, say, confiscating the car keys of a drunk driver than feeding hungry children. Taking things you don’t need is theft under any circumstances. It is, says the disaster sociologist Enrico Quarantelli, who has been studying the subject for more than half a century, vanishingly rare in most disasters.

Personal gain is the last thing most people are thinking about in the aftermath of a disaster. In that phase, the survivors are almost invariably more altruistic and less attached to their own property, less concerned with the long-term questions of acquisition, status, wealth, and security, than just about anyone not in such situations imagines possible. (The best accounts from Haiti of how people with next to nothing have patiently tried to share the little they have and support those in even worse shape than them only emphasize this disaster reality.) Crime often drops in the wake of a disaster.

The media are another matter. They tend to arrive obsessed with property (and the headlines that assaults on property can make). Media outlets often call everything looting and thereby incite hostility toward the sufferers as well as a hysterical overreaction on the part of the armed authorities. Or sometimes the journalists on the ground do a good job and the editors back in their safe offices cook up the crazy photo captions and the wrongheaded interpretations and emphases.

They also deploy the word panic wrongly. Panic among ordinary people in crisis is profoundly uncommon. The media will call a crowd of people running from certain death a panicking mob, even though running is the only sensible thing to do. In Haiti, they continue to report that food is being withheld from distribution for fear of “stampedes.” Do they think Haitians are cattle?

The belief that people in disaster (particularly poor and nonwhite people) are cattle or animals or just crazy and untrustworthy regularly justifies spending far too much energy and far too many resources on control -- the American military calls it “security” -- rather than relief. A British-accented voiceover on CNN calls people sprinting to where supplies are being dumped from a helicopter a "stampede" and adds that this delivery “risks sparking chaos.” The chaos already exists, and you can’t blame it on these people desperate for food and water. Or you can, and in doing so help convince your audience that they’re unworthy and untrustworthy.

Back to looting: of course you can consider Haiti’s dire poverty and failed institutions a long-term disaster that changes the rules of the game. There might be people who are not only interested in taking the things they need to survive in the next few days, but things they’ve never been entitled to own or things they may need next month. Technically that’s theft, but I’m not particularly surprised or distressed by it; the distressing thing is that even before the terrible quake they led lives of deprivation and desperation.

In ordinary times, minor theft is often considered a misdemeanor. No one is harmed. Unchecked, minor thefts could perhaps lead to an environment in which there were more thefts and so forth, and a good argument can be made that, in such a case, the tide needs to be stemmed. But it’s not particularly significant in a landscape of terrible suffering and mass death.

A number of radio hosts and other media personnel are still upset that people apparently took TVs after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005. Since I started thinking about, and talking to people about, disaster aftermaths I’ve heard a lot about those damned TVs. Now, which matters more to you, televisions or human life? People were dying on rooftops and in overheated attics and freeway overpasses, they were stranded in all kinds of hideous circumstances on the Gulf Coast in 2005 when the mainstream media began to obsess about looting, and the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana made the decision to focus on protecting property, not human life.

A gang of white men on the other side of the river from New Orleans got so worked up about property crimes that they decided to take the law into their own hands and began shooting. They seem to have considered all black men criminals and thieves and shot a number of them. Some apparently died; there were bodies bloating in the September sun far from the region of the floods; one good man trying to evacuate the ruined city barely survived; and the media looked away. It took me months of nagging to even get the story covered. This vigilante gang claimed to be protecting property, though its members never demonstrated that their property was threatened. They boasted of killing black men. And they shared values with the mainstream media and the Louisiana powers that be.

Somehow, when the Bush administration subcontracted emergency services -- like providing evacuation buses in Hurricane Katrina -- to cronies who profited even while providing incompetent, overpriced, and much delayed service at the moment of greatest urgency, we didn’t label that looting.

Or when a lot of wealthy Wall Street brokers decide to tinker with a basic human need like housing…. Well, you catch my drift.

Woody Guthrie once sang that “some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.” The guys with the six guns (or machetes or sharpened sticks) make for better photographs, and the guys with the fountain pens not only don’t end up in jail, they end up in McMansions with four-car garages and, sometimes, in elected -- or appointed -- office.

Learning to See in Crises

Last Christmas a priest, Father Tim Jones of York, started a ruckus in Britain when he said in a sermon that shoplifting by the desperate from chain stores might be acceptable behavior. Naturally, there was an uproar. Jones told the Associated Press: “The point I'm making is that when we shut down every socially acceptable avenue for people in need, then the only avenue left is the socially unacceptable one.”

The response focused almost entirely on why shoplifting is wrong, but the claim was also repeatedly made that it doesn’t help. In fact, food helps the hungry, a fact so bald it’s bizarre to even have to state it. The means by which it arrives is a separate matter. The focus remained on shoplifting, rather than on why there might be people so desperate in England’s green and pleasant land that shoplifting might be their only option, and whether unnecessary human suffering is itself a crime of sorts.

Right now, the point is that people in Haiti need food, and for all the publicity, the international delivery system has, so far, been a visible dud. Under such circumstances, breaking into a U.N. food warehouse -- food assumedly meant for the poor of Haiti in a catastrophic moment -- might not be “violence,” or “looting,” or “law-breaking.” It might be logic. It might be the most effective way of meeting a desperate need.

Why were so many people in Haiti hungry before the earthquake? Why do we have a planet that produces enough food for all and a distribution system that ensures more than a billion of us don’t have a decent share of that bounty? Those are not questions whose answers should be long delayed.

Even more urgently, we need compassion for the sufferers in Haiti and media that tell the truth about them. I’d like to propose alternative captions for those Los Angeles Times photographs as models for all future disasters:

Let’s start with the picture of the policeman hogtying the figure whose face is so anguished: “Ignoring thousands still trapped in rubble, a policeman accosts a sufferer who took evaporated milk. No adequate food distribution exists for Haiti’s starving millions.”

And the guy with the bolt of fabric? “As with every disaster, ordinary people show extraordinary powers of improvisation, and fabrics such as these are being used to make sun shelters around Haiti.”

For the murdered policeman: “Institutional overzealousness about protecting property leads to a gratuitous murder, as often happens in crises. Meanwhile countless people remain trapped beneath crushed buildings.”

And the crowd in the rubble labeled looters? How about: “Resourceful survivors salvage the means of sustaining life from the ruins of their world.”

That one might not be totally accurate, but it’s likely to be more accurate than the existing label. And what is absolutely accurate, in Haiti right now, and on Earth always, is that human life matters more than property, that the survivors of a catastrophe deserve our compassion and our understanding of their plight, and that we live and die by words and ideas, and it matters desperately that we get them right.

At the dawn of the millennium, three catastrophes were forecast for the United States: terrorists in New York, a hurricane in New Orleans, and an earthquake in San Francisco. Rebecca Solnit lives in San Francisco with her earthquake kit and is about to make her seventh trip to New Orleans since Katrina. Her latest book, A Paradise Built in Hell, is a testament to human bravery and innovation during disasters.

Copyright 2010 Rebecca Solnit