First, the U.S. should remove itself from the decision making power in politics and economy. "Economic policy has steadily supported the interests of U.S. investors and exporters. U.S. political interests in Haiti have been less unified, careening between support for democracy and development and traditional U.S. collusion with the elites and the military. Too often, the interests of the Haitian people, who live in the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, have been sacrificed for the imperatives of Washington policymakers." Foreign Policy in Focus Haiti's most popular elected president Aristide was overthrown with the help from the U.S., under the Bush administration, by helping finance and launch the military organization FRAPH because the CIA received wrong information stating that Aristide was a psychopath. In 1994, the Clinton administration tried to force the disbanding of the paramilitary organization but the organization still exists threatening democracy. Aristide was eventually returned to power but the damage was already done.

Second, the economic infrastructure must be rebuilt to sustain the population and create a stable workforce. Coffee was one of Haiti's most exported good but coffee prices in the world dropped and caused the coffee industry to be unprofitable for the island. Tourism can in fact help the island nation's economy and give the citizens jobs and their own business. U.S. manufactures once was a viable source of income for many residents, but many pulled out leaving residents without any sources of income. The most profitable side of Haiti is Port Au Prince and also the side that Carnival Cruise Lines uses in part of its Caribbean tour packages. These areas of do relatively well because of the tourist industry but more outer and inner most part of the island lives well below a third world's country's poverty level.

Finally the U.S. Policy on Haiti must be revamped, overhauled or simply destroyed...Maybe in an Obama administration this may happen. Wake up Black America.... When one hurts we all should hurt.

Slavoj Zizek

A new account of Haiti's recent history shows how the genuinely radical politics of Lavalas and its leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, proved too threatening to the country's wealthy elite and their foreign backers.

Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment

Peter Hallward, Verso, 480pp, £16.99

Noam Chomsky once noted that "it is only when the threat of popular participation is overcome that democratic forms can be safely contemplated". He thereby pointed at the "passivising" core of parliamentary democracy, which makes it incompatible with the direct political self- organisation and self-empowerment of the people. Direct colonial aggression or military assault are not the only ways of pacifying a "hostile" population: so long as they are backed up by sufficient levels of coercive force, international "stabilisation" missions can overcome the threat of popular participation through the apparently less abrasive tactics of "democracy promotion", "humanitarian intervention" and the "protection of human rights".

This is what makes the case of Haiti so exemplary. As Peter Hallward writes in Damming the Flood, a detailed account of the "democratic containment" of Haiti's radical politics in the past two decades, "never have the well-worn tactics of 'democracy promotion' been applied with more devastating effect than in Haiti between 2000 and 2004". One cannot miss the irony of the fact that the name of the emancipatory political movement which suffered this international pressure is Lavalas, or "flood" in Creole: it is the flood of the expropriated who overflow the gated communities that protect those who exploit them. This is why the title of Hallward's book is quite appropriate, inscribing the events in Haiti into the global tendency of new dams and walls that have been popping out everywhere since 11 September 2001, confronting us with the inner truth of "globalisation", the underlying lines of division which sustain it.

Haiti was an exception from the very beginning, from its revolutionary fight against slavery, which ended in independence in January 1804. "Only in Haiti," Hallward notes, "was the declaration of human freedom universally consistent. Only in Haiti was this declaration sustained at all costs, in direct opposition to the social order and economic logic of the day." For this reason, "there is no single event in the whole of modern history whose implications were more threatening to the dominant global order of things". The Haitian Revolution truly deserves the title of repetition of the French Revolution: led by Toussaint 'Ouverture, it was clearly "ahead of his time", "premature" and doomed to fail, yet, precisely as such, it was perhaps even more of an event than the French Revolution itself. It was the first time that an enslaved population rebelled not as a way of returning to their pre-colonial "roots", but on behalf of universal principles of freedom and equality. And a sign of the Jacobins' authenticity is that they quickly recognised the slaves' uprising - the black delegation from Haiti was enthusiastically received in the National Assembly in Paris. (As you might expect, things changed after Thermidor; in 1801 Napoleon sent a huge expeditionary force to try to regain control of the colony).

Denounced by Talleyrand as "a horrible spectacle for all white nations", the "mere existence of an independent Haiti" was itself an intolerable threat to the slave-owning status quo. Haiti thus had to be made an exemplary case of economic failure, to dissuade other countries from taking the same path. The price - the literal price - for the "premature" independence was truly extortionate: after two decades of embargo, France, the old colonial master, established trade and diplomatic relations only in 1825, after forcing the Haitian government to pay 150 million francs as "compensation" for the loss of its slaves. This sum, roughly equal to the French annual budget at the time, was later reduced to 90 million, but it continued to be a heavy drain on Haitian resources: at the end of the 19th century, Haiti's payments to France consumed roughly 80 per cent of the national budget, and the last instalment was only paid in 1947. When, in 2003, in anticipation of the bicentenary of national independence, the Lavalas president Jean-Baptiste Aristide demanded that France return this extorted money, his claim was flatly rejected by a French commission (led, ironically, by Régis Debray). At a time when some US liberals ponder the possibility of reimbursing black Americans for slavery, Haiti's demand to be reimbursed for the tremendous sum the former slaves had to pay to have their freedom recognised has been largely ignored by liberal opinion, even if the extortion here was double: the slaves were first exploited, and then had to pay for the recognition of their hard-won freedom.

The story goes on today. The Lavalas movement has won every free presidential election since 1990, but it has twice been the victim of US-sponsored military coups. Lavalas is a unique combination: a political agent which won state power through free elections, but which all the way through maintained its roots in organs of local popular democracy, of people's direct self-organisation. Although the "free press" dominated by its enemies was never obstructed, although violent protests that threatened the stability of the legal government were fully tolerated, the Lavalas government was routinely demonised in the international press as exceptionally violent and corrupt. The goal of the US and its allies France and Canada was to impose on Haiti a "normal" democracy - a democracy which would not touch the economic power of the narrow elite; they were well aware that, if it is to function in this way, democracy has to cut its links with direct popular self-organisation.

It is interesting to note that this US-French co-operation took place soon after the public discord about the 2003 attack on Iraq, and was quite appropriately celebrated as the reaffirmation of their basic alliance that underpins the occasional conflicts. Even Brazil's Lula condoned the 2004 overthrow of Aristide. An unholy alliance was thus put together to discredit the Lavalas government as a form of mob rule that threatened human rights, and President Aristide as a power-mad fundamentalist dictator - an alliance ranging from ex-military death squads and US-sponsored "democratic fronts" to humanitarian NGOs and even some "radical left" organisations which, financed by the US, enthusiastically denounced Aristide's "capitulation" to the IMF. Aristide himself provided a perspicuous characterisation of this overlapping between radical left and liberal right: "Somewhere, somehow, there's a little secret satisfaction, perhaps an unconscious satisfaction, in saying things that powerful white people want you to say."

The Lavalas struggle is exemplary of a principled heroism that confronts the limitations of what can be done today. Lavalas activists didn't withdraw into the interstices of state power and "resist" from a safe distance, they heroically assumed state power, well aware that they were taking power in the most unfavourable circumstances, when all the trends of capitalist "modernisation" and "structural readjustment", but also of the postmodern left, were against them. Constrained by the measures imposed by the US and International Monetary Fund, which were destined to enact "necessary structural readjustments", Aristide pursued a politics of small and precise pragmatic measures (building schools and hospitals, creating infrastructure, raising minimum wages) while encouraging the active political mobilisation of the people in direct confrontation with their most immediate foes - the army and its paramilitary auxiliaries.

The single most controversial thing about Aristide, the thing that earned him comparisons with Sendero Luminoso and Pol Pot, was his pointed refusal to condemn measures taken by the people to defend themselves against military or paramilitary assault, an assault that had decimated the popular movement for decades. On a couple of occasions back in 1991, Aristide appeared to condone recourse to the most notorious of these measures, known locally as "Père Lebrun", a variant of the practice of "necklacing" adopted by anti-apartheid partisans in South Africa - killing a police assassin or an informer with a burning tyre. In a speech on 4 August 1991, he advised an enthusiastic crowd to remember "when to use [Père Lebrun], and where to use it", while reminding them that "you may never use it again in a state where law prevails".

Later, liberal critics sought to draw a parallel between the so-called chimères, ie, members of Lavalas self-defence groups, and the Tontons Macoutes, the notoriously murderous gangs of the Duvalier dictatorship. The fact that there is no numerical basis for comparison of levels of political violence under Aristide and under Duvalier is not allowed to get in the way of the essential political point. Asked about these chimères, Aristide points out that "the very word says it all. Chimères are people who are impoverished, who live in a state of profound insecurity and chronic unemployment. They are the victims of structural injustice, of systematic social violence [. . .] It's not surprising that they should confront those who have always benefited from this same social violence."

Arguably, the very rare acts of popular self- defence committed by Lavalas partisans are examples of what Walter Benjamin called "divine violence": they should be located "beyond good and evil", in a kind of politico-religious suspension of the ethical. Although we are dealing with what can only appear as "immoral" acts of killing, one has no political right to condemn them, because they are a response to years, centuries even, of systematic state and economic violence and exploitation.

As Aristide himself puts it: "It is better to be wrong with the people than to be right against the people." Despite some all-too-obvious mistakes, the Lavalas regime was in effect one of the figures of how "dictatorship of the proletariat" might look today: while pragmatically engaging in some externally imposed compromises, it always remained faithful to its "base", to the crowd of ordinary dispossessed people, speaking on their behalf, not "representing" them but directly relying on their local self-organisations. Although respecting the democratic rules, Lavalas made it clear that the electoral struggle is not where things are decided: what is much more crucial is the effort to supplement democracy with the direct political self-organisation of the oppressed. Or, to put it in our "postmodern" terms: the struggle between Lavalas and the capitalist-military elite in Haiti is a case of genuine antagonism, an antagonism which cannot be contained within the frame of parliamentary-democratic "agonistic pluralism".

This is why Hallward's outstanding book is not just about Haiti, but about what it means to be a "leftist" today: ask a leftist how he stands towards Aristide, and it will be immediately clear if he is a partisan of radical emancipation or merely a humanitarian liberal who wants "globalisation with a human face".

Slavoj Zizek is the author of "In Defence of Lost Causes" (Verso, £19.99)

Posted on Tue, Jun. 24, 2008

U.S. behind Haiti's water woes, rights activists charge
By JACQUELINE CHARLES

In the overcrowded streets of Port-de-Paix, Haiti, spigots that once gushed with clean drinking water run empty, distribution lines are broken and the only source of potable water is private vendors.

The U.S. government is to blame for the lack of access to drinking water, according to several human rights groups, who on Monday accused American officials of delaying the disbursement of $54 million in loans to improve water access in Port-de-Paix as leverage for political change in the hemisphere's poorest country.

''There is not a question a crime was committed,'' said Dr. Evan Lyon, a physician who has worked in Haiti since 1996 and was among several activists who issued the 87-page report. ``There was an illegal and political-motivated manipulating of the funds.''

ADVOCACY GROUP

Lyon helped prepare the report on behalf of Partners in Health, the Haiti-based healthcare provider founded by Dr. Paul Farmer. Others involved in the report include the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights; Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York University School of Law; and Zanmi Lasante, a Haitian advocacy group that Farmer also is involved with. The report looks at the effects of the slowdown of the distribution, noting that 10 years after the Inter-American Development Bank approved the $54 million loan, the city's 100,000 residents still lack access to potable water.

Rob Saliterman, spokesman for International Affairs in the U.S. Department of the Treasury, declined to comment, saying he had not seen the report. But he noted that ``the U.S. has been extremely supportive of multilateral assistance efforts for Haiti.''

In 1998, the IDB agreed to provide Haiti with a $54 million loan as part of an effort to improve sanitation and water distribution in the cities of Port-de-Paix in the northwest, and Les Cayes in the southwest. Two years later, Haiti's parliament approved the loan.

According to the report's authors, e-mails and other documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Treasury Department reveal that there was ``a high level of strategic interference by U.S. personnel to stall the disbursement of these loans indefinitely in order to use them as leverage for political change.''

''This was a real calculated attempt to implement a political policy with total disregard for the impact on the ground,'' said Monika Varma, director of the RFK Center. ``This is a shining example of what we understand is a pretty common practice, U.S. government using its power in multilateral institutions.''

Varma and others involved in the report say they not only want an investigation into what happened but ''regular monitoring of U.S. government'' behavior in its dealing with foreign nations like Haiti.

POLITICAL INFIGHTING

Though multilateral institutions like the IDB and others have long cited Haiti's political infighting and turmoil as blame for the slow distribution of funds, Lyon said that was not the case this time around. In 2002, Haitian government officials publicly complained about the aid holdup, prompting members of the Congressional Black Caucus to urge President Bush to release the loan.

In Port-de-Paix, contracts were awarded in 2007, funds are being disbursed to contractors and work should be completed by 2009, IDB spokesman Peter Bate said.

''Although we do not comment on internal deliberations involving member states, project execution in Haiti is often delayed in the face of institutional challenges,'' he said. ``The IDB has worked with the Haitian government and other stakeholders to address such issues. Indeed, the IDB has remained continually engaged in Haiti during the toughest political and economic circumstances.''

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation/v-print/story/580790.html

Peter Hallward is the author of a new book, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment, which details recent Haitian history including the 2004 coup backed by the United States, France and Canada. Hallward completes a four-city Canadian book tour this Saturday, June 7 in Vancouver. He was interviewed by Paul Boin, a professor of media and communication studies at the University of Windsor.

Click here to see a 2 June talk by Peter Hallward on video

Paul Boin: Whether it's the Associated Press, the Globe and Mail, the UN, or the CIA World Fact book, mainstream media and other organizations continue to characterize what happened in Haiti on February 29, 2004 in the following manner: that Haiti's twice elected President Jean Bertrand Aristide "departed" from Haiti? After all the extensive research and interviews you've done for your book, how would you most accurately characterize what happened on that day?

Peter Hallward: There's no question. It was a coup. The denials aren't exactly impressive. People also denied that it was a coup back in 1991. In 2004 it was presented as a kind of version of the "orange revolution" that was happening in other places like Ukraine. So it was presented that Aristide was under pressure by a popular uprising, he had lost credibility, and he had no other alternative except to turn to the U.S. for help to leave the country in order to avoid a bloodbath. That's basically the official line.

But if you look at that official line it's already very peculiar. If you're trying to "avoid a bloodbath" why would you have the president leave rather than try and stop the few insurgents who were causing havoc in parts of the country given that these insurgents did not have any popular support (this lack of support was subsequently confirmed as the leader of this insurgent group stood for president in the most recent election and only received 2 per cent of the vote). So why you would ask a president who'd been elected with a massive majority to go rather than the insurgents is kind of curious.

So if the official line isn't the correct one, than what is?

If you look at what actually happened, the story is much more complicated and it has nothing to do with a type of "orange revolution." The problem with Aristide's second government is that he was elected [in 2000] with a big mandate, bigger then the first time he was elected in 1990.

So he comes in with this mandate and a more coherent political organization, his Fanmi Lavalas party, with a solid infrastructure and support all across the country. So they're poised to implement genuine political change. And for the first time in Haitian history that political victory and support was combined without the presence of an army, that had previously been used to get in the way or overturn previous Haitian governments. So it is this situation that unleashes this huge international campaign to destabilize his government and to spread a very elaborate web of propaganda, presenting Aristide as a tyrant and human rights violator so that he could eventually be presented as a kind of new version of François Duvalier. Figure after figure state this line, including Roger Noriega who says in front of the U.S. Congress that Aristide is just like another Duvalier and his supporters are just like the Tonton Macqoutes, that they slaughtered the political opposition, and that he had to be pushed out of office as a result. So that's the first thing.

In response to this popular government of Aristide, the Americans, the French and the elite of Haiti do a few things. First, they deprive his government and Haiti of all international funding and aid, which cuts their national budget in half. So virtually all the social programs that the Aristide government had lined up had to be put on ice. Secondly, they support and fund Aristide's opponents by pouring millions of dollars to them, plus supplying about another $70 million per year into NGO groups that our complicit with Aristide's opponents. Without this outside money there would have been very little political opposition to Aristide.

They also made particular investments in the media that was hostile to the Aristide government. So for example, if you look at the 25 radio stations in Haiti, and radio is the main source of news for the Haitian population, about 20 of them belong to an anti-Aristide coalition that was funded by US AID, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the European Union. And these radio stations spread lie after lie after lie, and create a kind of massive accumulation of accusations and rumours and innuendo against Aristide that present him as a kind of tyrant and human rights abuser. And after a while it kind of starts to sink in and its hard to disprove these unsubstantiated charges on a case-by-case basis.

The third step that was done was to strengthen resistance to the Aristide government in the business, civil society and in some student groups, which carry out the odd demonstration. These occasional demonstrations then cause counter-demonstrations by pro-Aristide supporters, which sometimes can get out of hand. Leading up to the coup some of these demonstrations lead to a couple of deaths on each side. Which then allows those against Aristide to blame Aristide for presiding over a wave of violence and a climate of insecurity, and to accuse Aristide of intimidating the opposition.

The fourth thing that was done was to promote a contra-style military insurgency that's based in different parts of Haiti and in the Dominican Republic, which were able to conduct hit-and-run operations against police stations and other government facilities starting in July 2001 and running all the way through to the final month when there's a full-blown military insurgency. The numbers are never huge, just about fifty or so soldiers, most of them ex military members of the Haitian National Army that Aristide disbanded back in 1995. These people eventually succeed in putting the Aristide government in a very difficult position, as now having no army (and less than 3000 police officers scattered throughout Haiti) it was difficult for the government to confront these insurgents. The U.S. had also imposed an ammunition embargo on Haiti so their police forces did not have needed supplies.

So all these factors combined put Aristide into a pretty impossible position. Then the Americans threaten him with a "bloodbath" looming in the streets. So under these circumstances and under severe pressure, and very much at the last minute, he ends up having to leave Haiti. The final details as to how he left still remain very unclear. I would urge your readers to carefully read through the numerous articles and postings at HaitiAnalysis.com.

What role have you found Canada to have played, both prior to February 29, 2004 and since, in Haiti?

Canada played a significant role in creating an ideological and propaganda type of climate in which Aristide came to be seen as a kind of international pariah. So they funded some anti-Aristide NGOs and Canada provided a kind of legitimacy and credibility to the campaign to discredit Aristide. The basic idea was to say that the Aristide government was presiding over a worsening human rights situation and was continuing the continuum of human rights disasters and the cycle of violence in Haiti since François Duvalier to Jean Claude Duvalier through the coups and now by the Aristide Government.

Now that's something we can look at and analyze. Under François Duvalier the number of killings in Haiti attributed in some way to his government is about 50,000. The number of people killed in the first coup against Aristide (1991) is about 4,000 or 5,000. The number of people killed during the second coup (2004) is estimated to be 3,000, it's hard to know exactly. And how many people killed are attributed to the Aristide government or their supporters? The number is just in between 10 and 40 people, and 40 being a largely exaggerated number.

In the spring of 2005 I interviewed Canadian Member of Parliament and Special Government Envoy to Haiti, Denis Coderre. When I asked him why the Canadian and U.S. government would not allow Aristide to be a candidate in the upcoming Haitian presidential elections, Coderre stated the following: "The issue is this. Aristide belongs to the past. And we want to build on the future. We don't want to build on the nostalgia of the past. It is clear in our mind that you can't go back." What is your response to a Canadian government official with this type of opinion?

First of all the form of it is incredible. I mean who is it that can tell Canada what does or does not belong to your future. This is a question for the Haitian people to decide. If you believe in democracy there is a well established process for doing that. It's called an election. And Aristide was elected by a huge mandate. Far more powerful a mandate then that enjoyed by any Canadian government in recent history. Far more powerful a mandate then any of the governments that overthrew him, the U.S., France and Canada.

Secondly, it's a ludicrous thing to say to the Haitian people. For the vast majority of the Haitian people fundamentally Aristide represented hope. The reason why he was elected with such enthusiasm was that he gave voice to a very widely felt sense of injustice and hope for change. And he did it in terms that made sense for Haitian people. He's not a firebrand revolutionary talking about radical change on a model that has nothing to do with Haiti and which has no practical chance of success. He's not talking about turning the world upside down or a cultural revolution. He's talking about democratic change within the existing constraints broadly speaking, and working for a slow but significant reform of the existing Haitian institutions to slowly but surely empower ordinary people, and begin to get rid of the type of class-apartheid that structures Haitian society. And that is the thing that is very inspiring to most people and was threatening to the elite.

In this regard, Aristide still has a part to play. Aristide himself has said that he doesn't want to stand again as president for Haiti. That remains his position at the moment. He does want to go back to Haiti to help strengthen Fanmi Lavalas, which remains the most powerful political organization in the country. And that's the thing I think his enemies in Canada, and in other parts of the world, are most afraid of. That's the last thing they want to happen. You know this line, "Aristide belongs to the past, and we need to move onto the future," that basically means that popular politics in Haiti should come to an end, and that they should accept a version of a kind of democracy that's been imposed on them by very undemocratic organizations and other governments and NGOs funded by USAID and CIDA and transnational technocrats in the IMF and World Bank who will manage the country in the interests of the ruling class. That's what it boils down to. That the people who would want to mobilize for something different, those people, should accept their lowly place in society.

The mainstream conventional "wisdom" reported in the press and stated in privileged countries like Canada, the U.S. and France is that Haiti is a "failed state." While other, more historically versed, Haiti watchers counter that it is the world that has failed Haiti. It also seems that this type of coverage is analogous to the way the mainstream media often covers Africa. What are your thoughts on who's failing whom, and to what degree do race and racism play a role in how western media and governments continue to misrepresent Haiti?

It is fundamentally racist. The only way that this level of propaganda can begin to be understood is if the story begins with the racist attitude that "these people are black." And that's why we (in the west) can characterize them (Haiti and Haitians) as "undemocratic," and "intransigent," "unreasonable," "irrational" and a few other things. Even though the most basic look at the facts at the international role in Haiti will show that that is complete crap. From the beginning of Haiti's history, after winning their freedom from slavery, and setting an example that was profoundly threatening to the world's imperial powers, they've had to fight to keep the world from closing its ranks on them.

Yes, 1804, in terms of an example of true freedom and democracy, Haiti provided the world with a wondrous example of the success of a double-revolution – a revolution for independence from France and a revolution against slavery. And it was both incredibly sad and remarkable that on January 1, 2004, when the world should have been celebrating the bicentennial of the truest accomplishment of freedom and democracy that our planet has ever seen, the western world ignored it. I believe only a handful of countries sent official delegates. Canada, the U.S. and France sent no one. When you think back to the blanket coverage that the world's mainstream press gave to the American and French bicentennial celebrations, the difference is stark, shocking and shameful.

It is outrageous. Truly outrageous. South Africa's President Mbeki should be credited. He was one of the only high-profile people to go to Haiti's historic bicentennial. Mbeki also made the connection between Haiti's struggle and victory over slavery and South Africa's over apartheid. It really is a scandal that so few world leaders attended.

It's also a cruel irony of history that Haiti was also robbed of a proper anniversary to mark the day that Haiti's first-ever democratically elected leader was removed from office for a second time, as this latest coup happened on the leap year date of February 29, 2004. So when earlier this year we had our first leap year since the coup (February 29, 2008), I was expecting, yes perhaps naively, that the mainstream media might have some form of coverage of this historic international event, given that it was the first time in four years that the actual date was before us. Yet, incredibly, there was none, and I mean no North American media coverage whatsoever, except for a very brief mention in the Miami Herald. What are your other thoughts on why the mainstream media coverage is so terrible when it comes to Haiti?

I also saw really no coverage from my vantage point in the U.K. I was trying get on or get some kind of acknowledgement on radio, and I couldn't get anywhere with that. Well, mainstream media does the job that it seems it's designed to do. Which is to preserve or promote a type of corporate agenda that doesn't ask fundamental questions about why the world is the way it is. If you look at a place like Haiti, it's very difficult to look at it without calling into question some of the things that structure the world the way the world is.

Paul Boin is a professor of media and communication studies at the University of Windsor. He the director of the Media Justice Project, an investigative journalist and a media democracy activist. Paul's forthcoming book is entitled Media For the Public Mind: Creating a Democratic and Informative News Media, and is to be published in the spring of 2009 by Fernwood Publishing.

Yes! They are both for "change". Months ago that mini-scandal hit when Obama stole some lines off a couple of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick's pre-gubernatorial campaign speeches. Now Obama has shared the wealth with Raila Odinga, a guy who claims to be his cousin and who he held in such high regard that he interrupted his New Hampshire campaigning to speak to him on the phone. Odinga claims to be a Marxist and a Muslim who led his followers to burn Christians to death right inside their own churches. Do not believe he is a Muslim for a second. Wherever you see this sort of activity you will always find Satanism and astral/demonic entity worship when you look hard enough. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the seriously inhuman looking former president of Haiti, comes to mind. If elected, he will bring in the barbaric Sharia law, which gets the Muslim ladies treatment typically like this:

Some of those flogged have been under the age of eighteen. One of the earliest and most publicized cases was that of Bariya Ibrahim Magazu, a teenage girl who had become pregnant and was accused of pre-marital sex. While it was widely reported by the media that Bariya Magazu was seventeen years old, local sources, including the women’s rights organization Baobab for Women’s Human Rights, believed that she was no more than thirteen or fourteen. In September 2000, the Shari’a Court in Tsafe found her guilty of zina (fornication) and sentenced her to one hundred lashes. She was also accused of bringing false charges against three men who she claimed had raped her, for which she was sentenced to an additional eighty lashes. The three men were arrested, but denied the charge and were released after three days. With the help of lawyers hired by Baobab for Women’s Rights, Bariya Magazu appealed the conviction. The lawyers advanced several grounds for appeal, including that the defendant was under eighteen, and therefore could not have consented to the act; nor, if found guilty, should she be given the same punishment as an adult. Eventually, the sentence of eighty lashes for bringing false charges against the men was dropped, but Bariya Magazu was flogged one hundred times on January 19, 2001, even though her appeal was still pending. She was only given one day’s notice that she would be flogged on that date; initially, the flogging was to take place one week later, forty days after the birth of her baby.

He has also named his kids after Fidel Castro and Winnie Mandela, who had her bodyguards, nicknamed the Mandela United Football Club, to commit murder, arson, and beatings against anyone who disagreed with her and her beloved "football club" in South Africa. She even held torture sessions in her own home. And this is a person many people actually look up to in America as a symbol of freedom. It's the same story every time. Like some big joke. I can't help wondering, looking at her features, if she has some possible Windsor bloodline in her.

Finally, taking a look at Odinga's campaign website, we see the slogans which have caused so many to fall under the sway of the Obama Mind Trick: Vote for Change. He is Your Agent for Change! Yeah, I'll bet if we follow the money we'd see that you probably are one, all right. You can Register for Change too.

Obama has seriously connected scum who are behind him in the shadows like Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was responsible for drawing up the plan of goading the Russians into invading Afghanistan. This invasion was a decade long nightmare for the Afghan people which militarily and emotionally crippled them and kept them from effectively resisting the subsequent takeover by the Taliban and then the coalition forces. In short, he's the ultimate Washington insider. You can read more about Obama and his Bush mirroring aggressive policies in an article I wrote called Selection '08 - Buyer Beware!

To all Obama supporters who may come across this, I leave you with this.

PRÉVAL'S FRIEND AND ARISTIDE'S FOE BOB MANUEL
by Kim Ives

On May 25, Haitian President René Préval nominated his long-time friend and close advisor Robert "Bob" Manuel to be Haiti's next prime minister replacing Jacques Edouard Alexis, whom the Haitian Senate voted out of the post on April 12 following a nationwide popular uprising against the rising cost of living (see Ha ti Liberté, Vol. 1, No. 39, 4/16/2008). Haiti's Chamber of Deputies rejected Préval's first nominee for the post, Inter-American Development Bank official Ericq Pierre, on May 12 (see Ha ti Liberté, Vol. 1, No. 43, 5/14/2008).

"Intense discussions took place between the head of state and the presidents of the two [Parliamentary] houses before the designation of M. Manuel," said Kelly Bastien, the Senate president. "The name of M. Manuel was proposed when we explained that certain senators were not favorable to the nomination of Jean Max Bellerive nor Joanas Gué," respectively Alexis's Planning Minister and Agriculture Secretary of State.

Manuel, 55, has a long and contradictory history in Haiti's movement for justice and democracy over the past three decades. He was born into the bourgeoisie, the great grandson of Haitian president Tancrede Auguste (1912-1913) and a distant cousin of famed writer and Haitian Communist Party founder, Jacques Roumain. An architect, writer, and poet, Manuel worked in anti-Duvalierist groups in the 1980s and became part of the Fred Coriolan Committee in 1986 with other pro-democracy activists like Patrick Elie and René Préval. He helped usher Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide to safety when dictatorship thugs massacred worshipers at St. Jean Bosco church on Sep. 11, 1988. In November 1990, he became the first security chief for presidential candidate Aristide, and after his Feb. 7, 1991 inauguration, an advisor on security matters to President Aristide and his Prime Minister Préval.

Following the Sep. 30, 1991 coup d'état against Aristide, Manuel took refuge in the Mexican Embassy, which soon flew him to Mexico. He was appointed first secretary of the Haitian Embassy in Mexico (Haitian diplomacy was under the direction of the president in exile), and, after Aristide's return to power in October 1994, Manuel moved to Guatemala, the native country of his second wife, Maricelle Dieguez de Manuel. (His first wife, Clothilde Charlot, had been a secretary for Aristide during his Washington, D.C. exile; today she is a bitter opponent of her former employer.)

Manuel returned to Haiti to run René Préval's successful presidential campaign in 1995 and became the Secretary of State for Public Security, the number two Justice ministry position, for most of Préval's first presidential term from 1996 to 2001.

During that time, Manuel became increasingly unpopular with the Haitian masses. Armed with a Galil assault rifle and dressed in the intimidating black body armor of the CIMO anti-riot police, Manuel personally directed several vigorous crackdowns against popular organizations aligned with Aristide's Lavalas Family party, founded in late 1996. He also took measures to counter-balance Aristide's appointees and partisans in the Presidential Guard and fledgling police force. Among the people he imported into the National Palace security force were a group of young Haitian Army recruits who had been trained by U.S. and Ecuadorian Special Forces in Ecuador during the coup years. The "Ecuadorians" (also jokingly referred to in Haitian security circles as "Bob Manuel's jewels") became infamous as a group of officers that would later attempt a coup against Préval in 2000 and launch an armed insurgency from the Dominican Republic against President Aristide's second administration in 2001. They were led by Guy Philippe, who commanded the "rebels" that briefly took over towns in Haiti's north in early 2004 (see Ha ti Liberté, Vol. 1, No. 37, 4/2/2008). Also among the "Ecuadorians" were Bernard Elie, Jackie Nau, and Gilbert Dragon, all of whom distinguished themselves, like Philippe, as repressive police chiefs once they were reassigned from the Presidential Guard.

In 1998 and 1999, Manuel also played the role of Préval's chief political negotiator, brokering the formation of the Provisional Electoral Council that would eventually preside over the 2000 elections that brought Aristide back to the presidency and made the Lavalas Family dominant in the Parliament.

During this period, Manuel grew increasingly close politically to the Struggling People's Organization (OPL), a bitter enemy and rival of Aristide's emerging Lavalas Family party (FL). At the same time, a virulent political antagonism grew between Manuel (working in close coordination with his cousin Pierrot Denizé, then police chief) and former captain and Interim Police Force Chief Dany Toussaint, who was at that time an FL ally. The political and personal friction between Toussaint and Manuel reached a head in October 1999, when Préval pressured Manuel to step down. The following day, October 8, ex-Colonel Jean Lamy, who was going to replace Manuel, was mysteriously murdered. Dany Toussaint and Lamy's family accused Manuel of the crime, but no formal indictment was ever brought. (Palace insiders mostly dismiss Toussaint's accusation as feud-related.) Manuel returned to Guatemala.

Manuel once again strode onto the national stage in 2006, with the re-election of Préval on Feb. 7, 2006. Having worked during the interim in United Nation's "peace-keeping" missions in places like Afghanistan, he returned to Haiti as an unsalaried, unportfolioed "advisor" to the new president, a strong-man behind the scenes, again sitting in on most important meetings and political negotiations. Once a Marxist, Manuel is now a born-again evangelical Christian, having been "converted" during his last stay in Guatemala (second only to Haiti in the Western Hemisphere as an evangelical missionary honeypot).

In short, Manuel's political arc over the years has brought him from the left to the right, and maybe the extreme right. "In the 1980s, he was a militant revolutionary, but now I don't know if that is what he still is." said his long-time comrade in arms Patrick Elie diplomatically. "We simply do not know if the Bob Manuel who came back is the same Bob Manuel who left."

Other sources who have worked closely with Manuel over the years report that he is now deeply distrustful and dismissive of popular demands and fiercely opposed to the return of former President Aristide from exile in South Africa.

"One thing is for sure," said one well-placed former Haitian government security source. "If Manuel becomes Prime Minister, Aristide will not be returning to Haiti while Préval is president."

There are already three key posts filled with anti-Lavalas officials: current Secretary of State for Public Security Luc Joseph Euscher, police chief Mario Andrésol, and state prosecutor Claudy Gassant. "Bob Manuel is the chief of all of them," the source said. "He saw to it that they were put in those posts. If Manuel becomes Prime Minister and all four posts are in their hands, Aristide can forget about returning."

Up until now, Lavalas Family leaders have remained mum about Manuel's nomination. The Préval government, using Manuel as an intermediary, have been courting key sectors of the Lavalas Family's popular base, providing them with large amounts of money. "The situation is very complex," said Lavalas leader René Civil. In the Lavalas base, "things are split. There are some who are close to Manuel and favorable to him. But the great majority of the base is very unfavorable."

Many parliamentarians expressed surprise and disapproval at the nomination of so controversial a figure. "Lavalas" Senator Rudy Hériveaux said that Manuel's nomination had created a "great malaise in the Parliament" and that the majority of both houses were "unfavorable toward Manuel's nomination." Deputy Jean Marcel Lemeran from Grand Goave said that Manuel "does not fit the profile of a prime minister" as defined by parliamentary consultations with Préval. Deputy Enel Appolon from Thomonde said that "if a vote was held today, the choice of M. Manuel would be rejected" by the Parliament.

Manuel has the support, apparently, of Fusion and OPL, the parliament's two principal social-democratic parties. But the position of the Coalition of Progressive Parliamentarians (CPP), a 53-member cross-party voting bloc in the House of Deputies, will be the key to any nomination. The CPP nixed Ericq Pierre because of his neoliberal credentials, although a citizenship technicality was the excuse.

If no other disqualifying "technicalities" emerge (such as his not having lived in Haiti continuously over the past five years), many expect that Manuel's real battle will be fought when he presents his cabinet and "general policy," which the Parliament can also refuse.

"The Senators and Deputies should force him into a debate, because that is what interests us," said Patrick Elie. "We want to know what policy he will have. Let's have a debate in this country about what policy to pursue. What are we going to do to produce food in this country? What are we going to do when confronted with subsidized rice from the U.S.? That is what we need to hear."

©2008 Haiti Liberte

Photo edited from original

Article originally appeared in Haiti Liberte. For the complete edition with other news
in French and Creole, please contact the paper at (tel) 718-421-0162, (fax) 718-421-3471
or e-mail at editor@haitiliberte.com.

http://haitiaction.net/News/KI/5_31_8/5_31_8.html

A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to catch possibly my favorite band, Arcade Fire, play a free show for the Obama campaign. It was actually the best show I've ever been to, and, well, I've seen some good shows. They played the unsettlingly beautiful song Haiti, which appears on the first album, Funeral. Win Butler, who sings most of their songs, explained the poverty that exists in Haiti, and that his wife Régine (who is also a part of the band and sings Haiti), had lived in that poverty as a child. I guess the thing that is so haunting is that while the instrumentation is upbeat, and I would say even kind of hopeful, the vocals, which are in French have an intangible sorrow and are terribly mournful. Not being able to understand the lyrics, I think, amplifies the experience and increases the emotional connection. Well, this song has been haunting me for weeks now. Here are the lyrics:

Haiti, mon pays,
Wounded mother I'll never see.
Ma famille set me free.
Throw my ashes into the sea.

Mes cousins jamais nes
Hantent les nuits de Duvalier.
Rien n'arrete nos esprits.
Guns can't kill what soldiers can't see.

In the forest we are hiding,
Unmarked graves where flowers grow.
Hear the soldiers angry yelling,
In the river we will go.

Tous les morts-nes forment une armee,
Soon we will reclaim the earth.
All the tears and all the bodies
Bring about our second birth.

Haiti, never free,
N'aie pas peur de sonner l'alarme.
Tes enfants sont partis,
In those days their blood was still warm.

And a rough translation, I think:

Haiti, my country
Wounded mother I'll never see
My family set me free
Throw my ashes into the sea

My never-born cousins haunt the nights of Duvalier
Nothing stops our spirits
Guns can't kill what solders can't see

In the forest we are hiding
Unmarked graves where flowers grow
Hear the soldiers angry yelling
In the river we will go

All the stillborn form an army
Soon we will reclaim the earth
All the tears and all the bodies
Bring about our second birth

Haiti, never free, don't be scared to ring the bell
Your kids are gone
In those days their blood was still warm

I think this is terribly beautiful, tragic, and depressing. It also seems to holds on to an unknown hope. Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere, and out of 177 countries, it is ranked 146 on the U.N.'s human development index, which measures life expectancy, education, literacy, and GDP per capita. All of this in a democratic country ninety miles off of the U.S. Coast. Of course, we have not been very good neighbors. If you want to learn more about the recent history of Haiti, a great documentary to check out is Aristide and the Endless Revolution. If you're in Raleigh and I know ya I'll even let you borrow it. Any how, the issues in that country are far more complex than I can write about here, or even fully grasp. The song has been running through my head and heart for weeks and I thought I'd share it. Here's a great video of a live performance:

I don't know what the best way to help is, or who best to donate to, but Arcade Fire does support Partners in Health, who send aid to Haiti as well as other tragically impoverished areas in the world.

]]> http://machetera.wordpress.com/?p=236 Sat, 17 May 2008 14:29:30 +0000 machetera http://machetera.pt-br.wordpress.com/2008/05/17/germans-are-so-good-at-recycling/

A headline in Friday's New York Times owned International Herald Tribune, claimed that Peru's President, Alan García, has come to the defense of Angela Merkel "in a verbal spat with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez," saying "No one has a reason to use exaggerated or insulting terms with respect to another country or leader because that reduces the level of discourse."

Machetera is sure that President Garcia also must have pointed this out to the King of Spain several months ago.

But what did Chávez say that was so shocking? Well, let's back up a minute and see what Merkel said first, the part that you can't find anywhere in the English language press - about Latin American countries needing to distance themselves from governments such as the one headed by Hugo Chávez. Chávez mentioned Merkel's remarks on his television show, "Alo Presidente," and said, in reply, "Get Out!" which Reuters, in an imaginative linguistic stretch, translated as meaning "Go to hell," even though the word "hell" was never actually used...the Reuters correspondent, apparently also a gifted mind reader, claimed that since Chávez had followed this with "Because she's a lady, I won't say anything more," he really meant to add "al infierno" to the formal "Vaya usted!" but didn't because it was Mother's Day. (You can see what Chávez said, exactly the way he said it - in Spanish - here.)

But that's not what's got all the media's knickers in a twist now. Now the problem is that Chávez pointed out the relationship between Angela Merkel's party, the Christian Democratic Union, and fascism. See, this is what keeps getting Chávez in trouble with the press. He tells the truth.

(Alert readers will notice the similarities in this tale with what was done to President Aristide, in Haiti.)

* * *

Why it's Vital for the ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas) Countries to Remind Merkel and her Co-religionists What They Did in Chile

Ingo Niebel - Rebelión

Translation: Machetera

Once again, the German media are angry with President Hugo Chávez. This time, the pretext is that he put the head of the German government, Chancellor Angela Merkel, in her place. The interesting thing is that the German press accuse the commander of the Bolivarian Revolution of having compared the Christian Democrat [Merkel] with the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler, which isn't true.

The media accusations are based on the television program "Alo Presidente" of May 11, 2008, in which Chávez put the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party on the side of the right-wing "that supported Hitler and fascism." The head of the Bolivarian Republic reacted this way, according to the German media, when Merkel made declarations against Venezuela during a debate about relations between the European Union (EU) and Latin America, which took place in Berlin and was directed at the summit that countries from both regions will hold in Lima on May 16 & 17.

The German media came to Merkel's defense, first, because they have already established a ritual of permanent attack on Chávez. They even went so far as to accuse him of preparing a biological war against the summit, if she is forced to attend while still suffering from the flu. Recently they've taken up the echo about the "documents" that surface every so often from the "magic computer" of the assassinated FARC commander, Raúl Reyes. Chávez's remarks in respect to Merkel have served to crank up their media campaign against the Bolivarian Revolution. Furthermore, they've had to embellish the issue, because Chávez has said nothing more than what is already in the history books: Merkel's CDU has put itself in the tradition of the Catholic conservative party that in its day actually supported German fascism and Hitler. But with his assertion, Chávez has fallen short, because this same right-wing not only "recycled" many Nazis after World War II, it also helped the Chilean military in its coup d'etat against Salvador Allende in 1973. But let's take it one step at a time.

The Christian Democrats live with the legend that in Hitler's time (1933-45), they'd been "anti-Nazi." In fact, the Catholic conservative party of that era, the "Zentrumspartei" (the Center Party) maintained an ambiguous attitude toward the fascist movement led by Adolf Hitler. However, in the end, the Catholic conservatives joined with the Nazis in order to do away with communists and socialists. In 1933, they approved the law that gave Hitler full power, and became the legal basis for his dictatorship. Then, many thousands of "centrists" affiliated themselves with the Nazi party and made peace with the followers of the swastika. After the defeat of Nazism in 1945, the conservatives found their best witness for presenting them as Hitler's victims, in the ex-mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer. The Catholic politician was overthrown by the Nazis in 1933 and in 1944 was even jailed by the regime's feared secret police; the Gestapo. Nevertheless, one of his sons, an army commander, managed to get him released. How he did it remains a mystery. Adenauer was the first president of the CDU, and in 1949, the first Chancellor (Germany's term for its head of state) of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). The supposed "victim" of Nazism had not the least hesitation in selecting Hans Globke as his adviser. This jurist, who certainly belonged to the Zentrumspartei before 1933, drafted the Nazis' racist laws along with other attorneys. He wasn't the only ex-Nazi to find a new political future in the CDU. Kurt Georg Kiesinger was another, who in 1933 affiliated himself with the Nazi party and later connected the propaganda units of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the Propaganda Ministry of the sinister Joseph Goebbels. From 1966 to 1969, he was the Federal Republic's Chancellor. The CDU recycled former Nazis, integrating them into its party or employing them in state offices. Many SS and Gestapo executioners found new jobs in the police and secret services, created by the Adenauer government. This ignorance of history lasted until the end of the 1960's and it was practically impossible to speak of or discuss the past and the responsibility of the new political elite for the crimes committed between 1933 and 1945.

But the CDU also devoted itself to helping install new fascists. One of them was the Chilean general, Augusto Pinochet. It's well known that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) prepared the coup against Chile's elected president, the socialist Salvador Allende. Fairly less well known is the fact that behind the scenes, politicians from the Federal Republic of Germany - both Christian Democrats and Social Democrats - supported Washington's plan for that other bloody September 11th (of 1973). Uncle Sam's faithful German vassals acted on two fronts. The Social Democratic Chancellor Willy Brandt ordered a freeze on development aid from his government to Chile. As an excuse, he offered the argument that Allende had officially recognized the other German state; the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR). Overnight, Allende lacked several million dollars of German aid that was desperately needed to help a poor population. In parallel, Bonn's justice department ordered the confiscation of Chilean boats carrying Chilean copper to Europe, yielding to Yankee businesses lodging complaints in German courts. That metal was the Chilean state's largest source of revenue. German industry, together with U.S. companies, chose to cancel its purchases of Chilean copper to help cause a fall in the metal's price. Apart from this participation in the economic war against the socialist Allende, the German state permitted CDU members, among them, Heinrich Gewandt, to carry cash to Chile to finance Allende's opposition. Shortly before the key date, the FRG's secret service outside Germany, the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst), told Brandt of the planned military coup. But the Chancellor refused to alert his Chilean counterpart, even though both were part of the Socialist International. When the military coup led by Pinochet began its massive slaughter, the CDU and her regional counterpart, the Christian Social Union (CSU) did everything possible to justify the fascist Chileans' actions. Their media justified the massacre, and Gewandt urged Chancellor Brandt to lift economic sanctions against Chile. The Social Democrat complied. Bonn's politicians submitted themselves so completely to Washington's orders that its consuls even refused to help some German citizens who'd been mistakenly arrested by Pinochet's executioners. In 1988, the son of one of them, Ulli Simon, published the story of how he and his brothers fought to get their father off a prison ship. The FRG consul didn't want to help them; denying that the father had been registered as a German citizen in his consular district.

Merkel will not remember all of this because at the time, she lived in the GDR, where she was the regional secretary of the Free Socialist Youth. After the fall of European socialism in 1990, she made a 180 degree ideological turn to affiliate herself with the CDU.

A quarter century has passed since the coup against Allende, but the CDU has not changed in the least. On May 2, 2004, the neo-conservative Washington Times quoted the then Christian Democrat deputy Klaus-Jürgen Hedrich, saying, "Sooner or later, you [Yankees] cannot continue with Chavez, considering how he's behaved. If it's a question of doing it sooner or later, then do it sooner. Later, it will be less of a surprise." Merkel, who was then the leader of the party, and the opposition, said nothing, lending her consent to the words of her co-religionist.

Against this background, it's imperative to keep in mind that at that the beginning of April, 2008, the [German] Development Aid Ministry, directed by the Social Democrat Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, canceled the seven million euros it had promised to Nicaragua. Merkel supported the decision saying that corruption had increased since the Sandinista victory. This attitude shows that Berlin is following the same path as in 1973. For progressive Latin American governments, their best defensive weapon remains to unite as they have in the ALBA - and remind the German political elite of their past.

Ingo Niebel is a German historian and journalist, and author of the book "Venezuela Not for Sale" (Berlin, 2006)

Machetera is a member of Tlaxcala, the network of translators for linguistic diversity. This translation may be reprinted as long as the content remains unaltered, and the source, author, and translator are cited.

by Kevin Pina

The family of slain Spanish journalist Ricardo Ortega recently held a press conference in Madrid, Spain where they presented evidence that he was killed by U.S. Marines in Haiti and not by gunmen associated with ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The organization Reporters without Borders (RSF) immediately seized upon the opportunity to release the following statement, "The investigation at first focused on armed supporters of Jean-Bertrand Aristide but in addition to the autopsy carried out in Spain, witness accounts gathered by a journalist colleague on Antena 3, Jesus Martin, who was sent to Haiti six months later, confirmed the thesis that the shooting had come from US troops..."

I found this utterly disingenuous and contemptible given that RSF had been the main proponent of the theory that gunmen associated with ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide were responsible for Ortega's killing. RSF's assertion would be uncritically repeated ad nauseum in the international press, and ultimately used by the U.S.-installed government that replaced Aristide, to justify a wholesale campaign of slaughter and mass arrests against his supporters in the following months and years.

I was living in Haiti and reporting almost daily on the situation there when Ortega was gunned down. The day before his murder on March 6, 2004, I was busy organizing photos I had taken of a Lavalas demonstration a day earlier that condemned Aristide's ouster and the landing of U.S. Marines in Haiti. The demonstration was important as it showed press reports of Aristide having lost popular support, repeated over and over again to justify his ouster, were simply not true. I worked in earnest, as I knew the next day Andy Apaid and the Group 184 were planning a 'celebration' of Aristide's departure. My sources told me a lot of money was being spread around the streets of Port au Prince to insure a large turnout.

After reporting on the unceremonious departure of Aristide on Feb. 29, 2004, the U.S. Embassy literally received thousands of inquiries about my safety as a journalist. I had become, as one consular official put it, "A real pain in the ass." That's why I wasn't too surprised when I received a call from them on March 6. The voice on the other end said, "Mr. Pina, you know we've received a lot of calls on your behalf and folks here are worried you might go down to cover tomorrow's demonstration. Don't do it! They're gunning for you and I've heard a report there's going to be trouble. Just stay away from it!" I thanked her and said I wasn't exactly sure how to cover the demonstration, threats notwithstanding. After that call, I contacted two friends I knew were unknown to Apaid's crew and who I could count on to report on the next day's events. They agreed and we met later that evening to make plans.

On the morning of March 7, I received a call from one of my field reporters in Petionville where a large truck had pulled up in front of the Mayor's office. They described a very professional sign painting organization from the back of a large flatbed truck that was mass producing hundreds of placards for the demonstration. I was amazed as he read off some of the signs that said things like "Denounce Jesse Jackson" and "Denounce Maxine Waters." They also included slogans like "Judge So Anne" whose real name was Annette Auguste. U.S. Marines would later arrest her on May 10 based on the incredible accusation that she was organizing with Muslims in Haiti to attack U.S. forces. He also said they had several placards that read "Denounce Kevin Pina."

Throughout that morning I received calls at regular intervals describing the size of the crowd and identifying the leadership of the demonstration on March 7. They also gave accounts of the role and tactics of the U.S. Marines who clearly had the leading role in providing security that day.

In the early afternoon shots were fired near the old Rex Theatre on the edge of Champ Mars. My source told me U.S. Marines were on the rooftops of the area at the moment the shooting started and he could not see anyone else with guns in the vicinity. Later that day we would learn the Spanish journalist Ricardo Ortega had been killed by several gunshots to the chest. In the confusion others were killed and wounded by similar and seemingly indiscriminate gunfire.

The next day on March 8, 2004, the organization Reporters without Borders would state, ""Unfortunately, the safety of journalists in Haiti will not be guaranteed as long as armed militias are free to operate without any control by a recognised central authority." They continued, "Witnesses said the shots were fired by pro-Aristide gunmen known as chimères. The demonstrators had been calling for Aristide followers to be brought to trial." To make sure there would be no uncertainty about who was responsible for the gunfire RSF concluded, "Several foreign journalists have been targeted by Aristide supporters in recent weeks…several dozen journalists have been threatened or physically attacked by pro-Aristide chimères in recent years." Following RSF's conclusions the international press, with few exceptions, repeated the assertion that Ricardo Ortega and others had been felled by 'pro-Aristide chimères'.

In the days and weeks following the events of March 7, 2004, RSF and others would contribute towards an increasingly intolerant and incendiary political climate. I soon discovered that providing critical radio interviews from Haiti to the U.S. and Canada made me a larger target. Daniel Morel published a photo of a demonstrator from March 7 holding a placard that read "Condemn Kevin Pina" in the rightwing newspaper Le Matin. Morel knew the notorious Boulos family owned it. He also knew I had reported they were behind the Haiti Democracy Project, a conservative think tank in Washington D.C., and had been questioned in the assassination of Haitian journalist Jean-Dominique. Following the appearance of that photo, I personally received several death threats and was forced to go into hiding with my Haitian wife and our three month-old son.

That something was wrong with RSF's portrayal of the events of March 7, 2004 became utterly clear to me later that summer. After resurfacing and on one of my many visits with political prisoner Annette Auguste (called So Anne by her followers) in Petionville, I was corralled by a group of women. They said there was a prisoner who was a former police officer who was suffering terribly and desperately needed medications his guards were denying him. The prisoner was Jean-Michel Gaspard, the former chief of the police station known as La Ville in the old section of downtown Port au Prince. When I asked him why he was arrested he explained that he had been accused of being one of the 'Lavalas intellectual authors' of the violent attacks on March 7, 2004.

As Gaspard and I talked it occurred to me that I had several reports in my notes by the likes of the Associated Press and Reuters who wrote the U.S. Marines had shot and killed one of the purported Lavalas gunmen on March 7. It bothered me for some time that no one had pushed for the release of the identity of the man killed by the Marines. Nothing else was ever mentioned about it and it was as if it had never occurred.

This especially troubled me given that RSF had released another statement on July 6 stating, "Attacks and threats against the media and attempts to kill journalists climaxed in the weeks before the regime [of Aristide] collapsed on 29 February 2004. Seven days after that, an outburst by Aristide supporters caused the death of Ricardo Ortega, of the Spanish TV station Antena 3."

I told Gaspard that if he wanted to mount a defense he should have his lawyer call the U.S. Embassy and demand that they disclose the identity of the gunman killed by the Marines. I left for a nearby pharmacy and returned to Gaspard's jail cell with his medications. I gave him my telephone number before returning home.

I was surprised when he called me later that same evening after having been released. He said his lawyer came by shortly after I left and he told him what I had said about pressing the U.S. Embassy for the identity of the gunman. His lawyer called the U.S. Embassy and incredibly Gaspard was released within the next two hours. Gaspard made it clear the quid pro quo was he would never raise the question of the Lavalas gunman again. His last words to me at the time were, "Thank you Pina! They are also restoring me to the police force with full honors." Much to my horror, Gaspard would turn up again a year later as one of the main leaders within the Haitian police of the infamous "Lame Ti Machete" or Little Machete Army that was responsible for several massacres of Aristide supporters.

Gaspard would be arrested again in late 2005 for the real crimes he committed in places like Gran Ravine and Bel Air. I can only suppose he was acting on instinct when I was among the the first people he called after his second arrest.

As for the credibility of RSF, it would find itself ostracized by even the United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO). The international body withdrew its sponsorship from the group after declaring, "The conduct of RSF does not fit the profile or the purposes of UNESCO, and the group has once again shown itself to be sensationalist in its eagerness to set itself up as a court of inquisition against developing nations."

Kevin Pina is a journalist and filmmaker who has been reporting about Haiti since 1991. He lived in Haiti from Jan. 1999 to Feb. 2006 and is currently the editor of the Haiti Information Project, a non-profit news agency providing news and analysis. Pina and the Haiti Information Project are recipients of the Project Censored 2008 Real News Award for Investigative Journalism. He can be heard regularly on the radio program Flashpoints broadcast on the Pacifica Network's flagship station KPFA in Berkeley, CA, or worldwide on the web at www.flashpoints.net.

http://www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/5_15_8/5_15_8.html

Haiti: The Benefits of a Weak State

By Darren Ell

HIP Special Report - Darren Ell is a photojournalist from Montreal, Canada who contributes to the Haiti Information Project (HIP). His previous work, interviews with Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, Mario Joseph, and Brian Concannon Jr., focused on the violation of civil and political rights following the 2004 coup d'état. This article looks at the international community's violation of the social and economic rights of Haitians. His photographic work on the impact of the 2004 coup d'état will be presented in a public exhibition in Montreal in the last two weeks of September 2008.

This article assumes that Western nations have an option. In the past, they invested in their own people in the midst of economic depression; they rebuilt the economies of entire nations following World War II; they now have unprecedented resources to invest elsewhere. Instead, their governments and the international financial institutions they control are bankrupting countries like Haiti in order to satisfy the selfish interests of a tiny foreign and domestic business elite. A key tactic in their policies is to weaken foreign central governments. As Peter Hallward states in Damming the Flood, the most comprehensive book written about recent Haitian history, "both the domestic elite and its foreign patrons have a vested interest in the weakness of the state and the instability of its government. A weak government means minimal taxes or tariffs, minimal regulations, minimal interference in the exploitation of labor, trade or contraband"

And so it has gone for all progressive governments in Haiti since 1990: dramatic reductions in foreign aid have been used to cripple the government's ability to deliver on its promises; aid has been taken from the government and given to foreign NGO's; forced tariff reductions have ruined indigenous economic activity, driven up unemployment and destroyed Haiti's tax base; and coup d'états have been financed whenever governments have tried to collect corporate taxes, raise the minimum wage or implement desperately needed social spending. Aside from local business elites and their foreign partners, the only other group to benefit from the pillage has been foreign NGO's who are now in charge of "developing" the country, the government lacking the resources to do it itself. This, in a nutshell, has been the international community's vision for Haiti since Haitians sacrificed their lives throwing off dictatorship: destroy local economic competition, weaken the state, then send in charities and NGO's to pick up the pieces.

The Government of Haiti has conveniently been blamed for the country's problems. Canada even claimed that the International Community had to protect Haiti from its own democratically elected government in 2004. Meanwhile, Canada - whose citizens enjoy world-class government-subsidized transportation, education, health care and social security - had been working to undermine the state apparatus in Haiti since 2000. Whatever mistakes elected Haitian governments may have made since 1990, they pale in comparison to the wrecking ball unleashed on them by foreign powers. As political activist and member of Haiti's Sovereignty Commission Patrick Elie recently stated: "Every progressive government in Haiti since 1990 has found itself in the position of trying to fix a collapsing house while assassins are trying to break down the back door. People looking at the house later blame the government, but it was busy the whole time keeping the assassins – you guys – from breaking in with your machine guns. People always leave out that part – the constant aggression, the constant sabotage."

How cash-starved is the government of Haiti? In 2000, ten years of sabotage had left the Aristide government with a miniscule $600 million budget, half of it derived directly from foreign aid. After the US and Canada cut aid or diverted it away from the government into NGO's, Hallward points out that "the total government budget was reduced to the risible sum of just $300 million. To put this in context, this amount is roughly equal to the municipal budget of a small US city with around 100,000 inhabitants." Note that the $300 million also had to cover "the annual $60 million payment on the national debt, 45% of which was incurred by the Duvalier dictatorships." In other words, while the municipal government of a US city had $3,000 to spend on each of its 100,000 citizens, Aristide had $29 to spend on each of his 8.5 million citizens. As Canadian freelance journalist Anthony Fenton has shown, Canadian policy dovetailed with US policy, and aid skyrocketed as soon as the popular progressive Fanmi Lavals (FL) regime was overthrown in 2004 and Gerard Latortue's "interim government" began murdering and jailing thousands of FL supporters. What's more, unlike Lavalas governments, which had a consistent record of investing in social and material infrastructure of the country, Latortue weakened the state's influence by bringing constructive investment to a full stop, cancelling literacy, land reform and subsidized meal programs, the collection of corporate taxes, price controls and import regulations, and firing thousands of public sector workers. Today, in 2008, the UN spends the equivalent of twice Haiti's national budget policing frustrated unemployed Haitians.

What does a weak state mean for the people of Haiti? Let's start with people who in Canada or the US would belong to the "middle class"? A part-time teacher in Port-au-Prince told me he was deciding which of his children had to miss a year of school because he couldn't afford the fees; a man from Cap Haitian with diplomas in French and Economics had been looking for employment for 2 years and was living off his parents; full-time hospital workers in Port-au-Prince were complaining about not being paid for four months; the teachers in a Pétionville school expressed their relief that a foreign donor had come through with their unpaid $112 a month salaries; the leader of a Haitian national union organization said he occasionally pockets $300 a month, but was putting his children through school thanks to his wife's job; a former member of the Haitian Parliament, illegally imprisoned for three years, stated that he lost his possessions in 2004 when anti-Lavalas thugs ransacked his home, and that he has not found work since his release from jail; unionized dock workers in Port au Prince said that after 15 years of struggle they negotiated one of the most lucrative agreements in Haiti: $440 a month salaries. However, their achievement was about to be crippled by a mass firing: 70% of Port-au-Prince's 1,300 dock workers are about to lose their jobs in a privatization scheme.
Left: In the burning garbage dump of Fort Dimanche, a man shakes amagenta computer printer roller free of its ink so he sell the roller in a local scrap market. Right: A young boy in the Cap Haitian slum of Shada stands amid the fetid water where he just defecated. Behind him stands a community latrine which drains into the water. 01

None of these people could guarantee that their children would finish high school. 96% of Haitian children never do. Yet they are the lucky ones, being employed and earning more than the minimum wage, which sits at $2 a day. For the 70% of Haitians who have no employment at all, life is a matter of survival. At the back of the Cap Haitien slum, Shada, I met a woman sitting despondent outside her home which was situated next to a 2,500 square meter pile of toxic trash. She had four children under the age of 7. Her sons had light colored hair, a sign of the chronic malnutrition gnawing away at a quarter of all Haitian children. Her husband had left her and she was living off handouts from community members. Around the corner, another woman sat with three young children, her breastfeeding son bathed in a terrible sweat, his face covered with sores and his hair showing signs of malnutrition. A 26-year-old man named Wilfrid was repairing a metal cooking pan. Poverty forced him from school in grade 3. He said he was suffering from terrible chronic headaches. He was depressed and despondent , never looked at us, and didn't know how much he earned by repairing pans. Twenty meters from his home, a young boy was defecating in the middle of a pool of garbage, next to a community latrine that drained into the water beside him. I was told one of the principle occupations of men in Shada is pushing a wheelbarrow, backbreaking work that nets them 50 cents a day, enough to buy one cup of rice. Men who don't work stay home and sleep, depressed. People here eat a full meal every second day.

Citizens in the developed nations who are undermining Haiti's government are protected against this scale of insecurity by publicly funded programs: unemployment insurance, welfare, and pension plans. Not so in Haiti. Some support comes from the diaspora whose remittances account for 30% of Haiti's GDP, but state support is minimal. Even the private sector has little to offer: staff at Haiti's largest private pension plan company, the Office National d'Assurance Vieillesse, told me that 60% of Haitians have no social security whatsoever, and that the most lucrative retirement package they offer is $42 a month. They acknowledge that not working in Haiti is a sentence to misery. This economic insecurity is taking a toll on people's health. Eating two meals or less a day is the norm even for the employed of Haiti. There are hollow-eyed youth and adults throughout the country. Children in school have difficulty concentrating because of inadequate nourishment. One rarely sees an elderly person in Haiti (the average lifespan is 53 years). Haitians who have travelled to Canada described their astonishment at how many elderly people they see there.

They are probably equally surprised by the quality of public health care from which Canadians benefit. Marie Michelle Jean-Baptiste, head of a new health care worker's union in Port au Prince, explained that the General Hospital (Hôpital de l'Université de l'État) is one of only two functioning public hospitals in the capital. Everything else in the city aside from the Tuberculosis sanatorium is private. Because of a lack of resources, the General Hospital provides only basic consultations, medications and lab work, a few x-rays, and essential surgery. All other services – medications, x-rays, lab tests, ultrasounds, major surgeries and so forth are run through the multitude of private clinics and pharmacies that line the streets surrounding the hospital in every direction as far as the eye can see. Very few Haitians can afford to eat regularly and health care has become a luxury only the wealthy few can afford.

The hospital staff copes with low or unpaid salaries, random firings and serious material shortfalls. The hospital's two public ambulances, donations from Taiwan, have been broken down since mid-2005 with no new funds to repair them. By contrast, ten new Red Cross ambulances paraded through the crowds of the recent Carnaval festivities. Because of material shortages, the hospital laboratory is able to provide basic tests only: essential blood, urine, and faeces analysis. Anything else has to be paid for in private clinics. The hospital's only ultrasound machine is broken. Since the spring of 2005, there has been no food service for patients in the hospital. Missionaries provide this service. Numerous sources confirmed that doctors have been robbing the hospital of its instruments and most prized technology in order to establish and maintain their own private clinics. Part of the problem, Marie Michelle Jean-Baptiste tells me, is that the state only pays doctors $420 a month.

The hospital pharmacy, intended to provide subsidized medications to Haitians, has been gutted and closed for 18 months. The sign lies broken in the yard. The medications room has a small number of drugs on half-empty shelves. The radiology department is no different. A frustrated technician pointed out that only one of the hospital's five x-ray machines is functional. A second x-ray machine donated by Japan has been broken for a year and no one is able to repair it. A third machine is broken down sitting in a dusty room. A fourth lays broken on the floor in a hallway. One x-ray room is empty, apparently once containing a machine stolen by the director of the department for his private clinic. In other words, the radiology department is one breakdown away from being irrelevant. Unfortunately for the public, x-ray services in the private sector, like all other services, cost 4 to 5 times what they do in the General Hospital.

Numerous sources confirmed that Haitians have a habit of only consulting the "health care system" when they are desperate, when their illnesses are life-threatening or holding them back from functioning in society. Usually they stop after the consultation, unable to afford medications or surgeries. This partly explains the multitude of terrible ailments one sees in Haiti as well as the 53-year lifespan of Haitians
26 out a total of 31 students from Cap Haitian that had been sent home from school in January 2008 because their parents couldn't afford school fees. Madame Bwa, the community activist fighting for them, estimates a third of children in her community never go to school at all.

The state of Haitian education is equally troubling. Patrick Elie points out that 85% of Haitian schools are private and cost four to five times as much as public schools. A case in point is Haiti's second largest city, Cap Haitian. With a population of over 500,000, children there only have access to 2 publicly-funded high schools. The rest are private. Students stop and start school constantly, depending on their parents' ability to pay. It is common to meet 20-year-olds in grade 8 and 12-year-olds in grade 3. When I visited the Cap Haitien slum of Shada, a community activist presented me with a list of 31 students ranging in age from 4 to 18 who had been sent home from school in the previous two weeks because their parents were unable to pay their school fees. Many students are inadequately nourished and can't concentrate. Almost no one can afford glasses in Haiti, so many students can't read what's on the blackboard. Many can't afford notebooks or pencils. Because of a lack of curricular resources, teachers often resort of rote strategies. Patrick Elie notes that regulation – a key function of a healthy government – is virtually absent in Haiti's education system: "The state doesn't impose rules on schools. There is no regulation regarding the number of students in a class, nothing about student evaluation, teacher qualifications or curriculum. People send their kids to schools run by a French organization and their exams are graded in France, not Haiti. You can open a two-room building with one teacher and call it a university. You can call anything an 'institute.' Nobody will come and look at what you're doing."
Clockwise from top left: (1) a bus company mechanic has to verify every bolt on every wheel after each 10 mile return trip from Lestere to Gonaives. He stated that at lease one bolt was always bent or broken. (2) The road is so rough that vehicules veer toward a smooth narrow corridor on the side of the route. (3) Trucks regularly break down on the road. The driver of this truck had already spent 24 hours trying to repair the broken bolts on his wheel. 8 women were traveling with their produce in the back of the truck. They had missed a day at the market and were concerned their produce would spoil. (4) The 4-6 inch rocks that litter the road. 03

Transportation is another area where strong state support is desperately needed. The foreign officials that bankrupted the Haitian government and killed, jailed or exiled its best minds should try riding a bus in Haiti. The rocky 10-mile stretch between Gonaives and Lestere splits tires, cracks axles, bends and breaks wheel bolts. Drivers and passengers stop talking and brace themselves for a 30-minute vertebrae-jarring gift from the international community. Passengers are injured by falling luggage. In the mountains, buses stuffed with 100 human beings weave around 6-foot-wide 2-foot-deep potholes, on a road without guardrails that lurches around 1000-foot ravines. According to Fortuné Patrice, head of the APCH, a Haitian trucker's union, navigating these exhausting treacherous roads will net a Haitian driver anywhere between $2 and $12 for a day's work. He also points out that the Haitian government can't afford bus stations, so buses stop along the road, while passengers young and old have to urinate and defecate along the highway or in the streets of the cities.

People shouldn't live like this. The current economic model forced on Haiti – minimal taxes or tariffs, an anaemic state forced to service crippling odious debt while 80% of its health, education, food and water services are run by non-Haitian organizations – has failed. It has left Haitians hungry, deprived of education, health care and the dignified living conditions to which they have a right. Despite Haiti's cash-starved government, despite the country being one of the most privatized nations on earth, the mantra chanted by the powers financing Haiti's coup d'états has been "privatization." The only way more privatization can make sense in Haiti is if 8.5 million human beings are removed from the equation. Nonetheless, in February 2008, Paul Chéry, the head of the Confédération des Travailleurs haitiens, stated that Haiti's once public telephone company, Teleco, was about to fire 800 employees.

People from privileged countries are both reviled and moved by the poverty of Haiti. They often open their wallets to support an NGO or a charity. I have done so myself because the needs are pressing. Ultimately however, this is not the best thing foreigners can do for Haiti. It is Haitian institutions that need strengthening, not foreign ones. However, twice since 1990, America, and later Canada and France shattered elected Haitian governments whose programs their own people would have supported at home. Thousands of Haiti's most talented people were exiled, jailed or murdered. That the nations responsible for this got away with it is a sign of failure in democracy abroad, not in Haiti. Haitians have thrown off dictatorship and built a resilient progressive democratic movement capable of inspiring populations around the world. On the other hand, American, French and Canadian populations remain oblivious to what their governments are doing in Haiti. They also remain unaware that the same business philosophy working to keep Haiti's government weak has powerful disciples in their own countries, pushing to privatize everything belonging to the collective.

The United Nations Development Program has stated that "Haiti will need more than 50 years or the equivalent of two generations to recover from its current state if the process of recovery were to start now." Haitians know they need economic assistance to rebuild their country. While the current economic model forced on them is a failure, wealthy nations have at their disposal the capacity to help Haiti turn the corner. They also control the policies that keep Haiti in economic dependence. Policies will be changed and adequate support channelled properly when the citizens of donor nations learn what their own governments are doing, then mobilize to force a change in their destructive foreign policies.

(go to the original to view article with photos: http://www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/3_22_8/3_22_8.html)©2008 Haiti Information Project - All Rights Reserved

The Haiti Information Project (HIP) is a non-profit alternative news service providing coverage and analysis of breaking developments in Haiti.

Winner of the CENSORED 2008 REAL NEWS AWARD for Outstanding Investigative Journalism

HIP- The Lavalas movement of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti simply will not quit. Despite pronouncements by the United Nations that the movement was dead nearly six months ago, over ten thousand supporters demonstrated in Port au Prince this last February 29, 2008. The date was auspicious in that it took place on the first Feb. 29 since Aristide's ouster in 2004, commemorating a date that occurred only during a leap year four years ago.

The United Nations played a heavy-hand in attempting to discourage Haitians from commemorating the event in the weeks leading up to it. In early February, Brazilian forces conducted several high profile raids that led to the mass incarceration of males between the ages of 15 and 30 in several neighborhoods of the capital where support for Lavalas and Aristide still remain strong. One week before the demonstration, Brazilian troops detained former political prisoner and grassroots activist Yvon Antoine. Known as by his nickname 'Zap Zap', Antoine had been previously arrested on March 2, 2004 without a warrant and held for two and a half years. When he finally got his day in court, there was not a single witness or a single piece of evidence against him, and he was acquitted of all charges. According to witnesses, UN forces detained him again on Feb. 21, 2008 in Bel Air because he flashed a photo of Aristide as their troops passed by on a routine patrol. He was held for questioning for seven hours without charge and eventually released.

The day before the Feb. 29 demonstrations, where more than 10,000 people marched through the streets of the capital for Aristide's return, several hundred gathered at the ousted president's former resident in the neighborhood of Tabarre for a prayer vigil. Once there, they offered a tour to journalists highlighting the gains the majority of the poor gained under Aristide's administration. Members of peasant and religious groups stated in Tabarre that Aristide's government was the first that truly represented their interests. They added that they hoped that current president Rene Preval would not forget it was their ranks that elected him in 2006.

A major contingent participating in the demonstration of Feb. 29 was the September 30 Foundation, a group representing a leading human rights activist who disappeared seven months earlier. Unknown assailants kidnapped Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine on August 12, 2007 after he met with a human rights delegation from the US. In an exclusive interview with HIP during a protest on July 15, 2006 and before his abduction, Mr. Pierre-Antoine stated, "We have shown them again today that we are not going away. We have always been here and we will be here long after they have left Haiti because we are Haitians and this movement represents the majority of the Haitian people. Those who were killed in the terror that forced our president into exile are honored today. Those of us who survived the terror are not ghosts and we will not be silenced." The Preval government has provided scant information about the investigation into his disappearance leading to speculation of complicity in some quarters of the capital. Preval has since stated through intermediaries that the Haitian police are doing everything possible to resolve the case.

Reactions to the Feb. 29 demonstration for Aristide and Lavalas by the international press were varied. The Associated Press and the Miami Herald held to an apparently agreed upon figure of 5000 protestors despite photos and reports of a march nearly double in size. The Miami Herald and its reporter Jacqueline Charles went further. Charles, a well-known antagonist of Aristide and his Lavalas movement, went out of her way to portray the demonstration as a fringe event pitting the demands of protestors against the goals of current president Rene Preval. Charles quoted anti-Aristide luminaries such as Robert McGuire the director of the Haiti Program at Trinity College in Washington. In reaction to the demonstrations McGuire stated, "The only way Aristide can succeed in making a comeback is if Préval fails. It's in the interest of everybody in Haiti that Préval succeeds because no one wants to descend into hell again.''

Interesting to note is that organizers of the demonstration on Feb. 29, 2008 have a deep-seeded fear of Charles and McGuire. One of the leaders of the protest specifically refused to give their name when responding; "Ms. Charles has proved over time where her interests lie. While thousands of supporters of Lavalas were murdered, imprisoned or forced into exile she remained silent. Mr. McGuire tries to hide behind his history of once supporting the poor majority in Haiti while we know of his collusion with Bush to justify the second coup against Aristide. It is false for him to say that for Aristide to return Preval must fail. He represents the most backward voice of US foreign policy towards our true sovereignty."

©2008 Haiti Information Project - All Rights Reserved

The Haiti Information Project (HIP) is a non-profit alternative news service providing coverage and analysis of breaking developments in Haiti.

Winner of the CENSORED 2008 REAL NEWS AWARD for Outstanding Investigative Journalism

http://haitiaction.net/News/HIP/3_9_8/3_9_8.html

Below are articles that provide background on the coup and its aftermath. The stories were authored by the Haiti Information Project and are posted at the Haiti Action website: www.haitiaction.net

PLEASE NOTE THAT THE ARTICLES ARE ACCOMPANIED BY VERY GRAPHIC PICTURES

-In the following article, Randall Robinson gives you an insider’s look at the hours leading up to President Aristide’s kidnapping and the involvement of the US government

“Randall Robinson on the US’s Kidnapping of President Aristide”

http://www.haitiaction.net/News/RA/10_18_17/10_18_7.html

-The following article chronicles eyewitness accounts of a UN massacre on July 6, 2005, in the poorest neighborhood in Port-au-Prince by an estimated 300-400 UN troops. Through an FOIA request much later, it was found that the UN spent 22,000 rounds of ammunition in the attack.

“Evidence Mounts of a UN Massacre in Haiti”

http://www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/7_12_5.html

-And, another massacre by UN Troops in Cite Soleil, on December 26, 200t

“UN in Haiti Accused of Second Massacre in Cite Soleil”

http://www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/1_21_7/1_21_7.html

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/yang030208.html 

The Black Jacobins 70 Years Later
by Manuel Yang

This year marks the seventieth anniversary of C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins: Touissaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. This classic account of the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1803 is one of the greatest books in the twentieth century. Its title refers to the Jacobins, the most radical element within the French Revolution who propagated, says the Oxford English Dictionary, "extreme democracy and absolute equality" -- principles fully embraced by the slaves who made history's first and only successful slave revolution in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which afterwards they renamed Haiti.

The Black Jacobins is a masterpiece because it's first and foremost a Movement book, intended to give inspiration to the then-struggling forces of pan-African revolt against European colonialism and racial oppression. James (1901-1989), himself a child of a middle-class black family in the British Caribbean colony of Trinidad, knew from direct experience the intimate relationship between history and contemporary social struggle. He said he wrote The Black Jacobins listening "most clearly and insistently" to "the booming of Franco's heavy artillery, the rattle of Stalin's firing squads and the fierce shrill turmoil of the revolutionary movement striving for clarity and influence." And clarity and influence it gave aplenty to the national liberation movements that overthrew Europe's rapacious exploitation of Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean after World War II.

One note of clarity The Black Jacobins struck concerned the working class's relationship to imperialism. In 1936 James wrote a play, also entitled The Black Jacobins, performed in London with the African American actor and radical Paul Robeson in the role of Toussaint L'ouverture, the slave leader of the revolution. It was intended to prompt the British labor movement to take a critical stance toward the Western imperialist collusion with Mussolini's fascist invasion of Ethiopia. In his essay "Abyssinia and the Imperialists," James underscored how imperialism destroyed the working class: ". . . all the money that the imperialists are making out of the country has to be paid for by labour, and the real sufferers are those millions who, unprotected by trade union organisation or any sort of organised public opinion, are driven off their lands, down into mines at a shilling a day, or working above ground for fourpence a day as in Kenya. . . ."

In order to prevent this destruction, which soon spread into the genocidal conflagration of a world war, James extracted two important insights from the Haitian Revolution.

One was the fact that the slaves recognized and organized themselves as a class of workers exploited under modern capitalist conditions: ". . . working and living together in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugar-factories which covered the North Plain, they were closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time, and the rising was, therefore, a thoroughly prepared and organised mass movement."

Another was the internationalism of this class whose collective labor made the wealth of empires and nations. The titles of chapter four ("The San Domingo Masses Begin") and chapter five ("And the Paris Masses Complete") run together to make a single sentence, driving home the solidarity that workers forged between Haiti and France: "'Servants, peasants, workers, the labourers by the day in the fields' all over France were filled with a virulent hatred against the 'aristocracy of the skin.' There were so many moved by the sufferings of the slaves that they had long ceased to drink coffee, thinking of it as drenched with the blood and sweat of men turned into brutes." Touissaint himself acquired the knowledge for his prescient military and political insights -- "a thorough grounding in the economics and politics, not only of San Domingo, but of all the great empires of Europe which were engaged in colonial expansion and trade" -- from the work of Abbé Raynal, the French abolitionist writer who laid the intellectual groundwork for the French Revolution.

Both of these revolutions however soon foundered because this solidarity was not preserved and developed further. Although "[t]here were Jacobin workmen in Paris who would have fought for the blacks against Bonaparte's troops," once in power Touissaint "ignored the black labourers" and tried to appease the white elites by executing General Möise, his adopted nephew who, after him, "symbolised the revolution." The French counterrevolutionary force, on the other hand, sent by Napoleon Bonaparte, sought to reinstate slavery in Haiti by massive military intervention. After his forces captured Toussaint through deception, Bonaparte shipped him off to the Fort-de-Joux prison in France's Jura mountains, where he died of "ill-treatment, cold and starvation." Despite these serious setbacks, the embattled black Jacobins managed to defeat Napoleon's mighty army, prompting him to abandon plans for a North American empire and negotiate the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the U.S. and gave the latter a Caribbean gateway through the port of New Orleans. W.E.B. DuBois, the great African American scholar and activist, said it was Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution that "intensified and defined the anti-slavery movement, became one of the causes, and probably the prime one, which led Napoleon to sell Louisiana for a song, and finally, through the interworking of all these effects, rendered more certain the final prohibition of the slave-trade by the United States in 1807."

Published three years before The Black Jacobins, when African miners in Northern Rhodesia's Copperbelt went on strike against unfair British colonial taxes, DuBois's Black Reconstruction in America argued that the massive flight of slaves from the Southern plantations during the Civil War constituted a "general strike" of workers: "This was not merely the desire to stop work," but "a strike on a wide basis against the conditions of work," which "directly involved in the end perhaps a half million people." Black Reconstruction, inspired by the struggles of black workers, helped overthrow the elitist, racist theories dominant in American history and led to critical race studies -- showing that the action of workers can remake ideas and scholarship.

James and DuBois were colleagues in the Pan-African movement and practiced working-class solidarity in deed as much as in words: James spent time in the United States aiding sharecroppers in Missouri, putting together a widely circulated pamphlet of their struggle in their own words (Down with Starvation Wages in Southeast Missouri), and DuBois co-founded the National Association of the Advancement of the Colored People (NAACP), which defended workers from lynching and legal railroading (for example, in 1919 when hundreds of black sharecroppers in Elaine, Arkansas were massacred by white mobs and federal troop after they had tried to organize a union). James praised Black Reconstruction as "magnificent." Its great virtue, he said, was that that it "recognized that the Negroes in particular had tried to carry out ideas that went beyond the prevailing conceptions of bourgeois democracy" at the time of the Civil War and Reconstruction. This is the great lesson of The Black Jacobins, too. The term "Jacobin" had taken on authoritarian connotations because the French Jacobin leadership stopped listening to the workers and commoners and shut down their radical organizations -- much as Toussaint in power lost touch with the Haitian workers. In short, the Haitian and French Revolutions -- as well as Reconstruction in the post-Civil War South -- failed to go as far as they could because the new rulers destroyed, in the interest of capital and empire, the original conceptions of democracy that the self-activity of workers had made possible.

Today we are facing a similar destructive moment in history. The presidential election is poisoned with anti-immigrant rhetoric seeking to divide and decimate the working class. Following the Bonapartist model, the American Empire is perpetrating this class destruction in Haiti as well. According to the