The massacre of the poor that the world ignored

[Ayinde]

6/7: the massacre of the poor that the world ignored

The US cannot accept that the Haitian president it ousted still has support

by Naomi Klein, The Guardian UK

When terror strikes western capitals, it doesn't just blast bodies and buildings, it also blasts other sites of suffering off the media map. A massacre of Iraqi children, blown up while taking sweets from US soldiers, is banished deep into the inside pages of our newspapers. The outpouring of compassion for the daily deaths of thousands from Aids in Africa is suddenly treated as a frivolous distraction.

In this context, a massacre in Haiti alleged to have taken place the day before the London bombings never stood a chance. Well before July 7, Haiti couldn't compete in the suffering sweepstakes: the US-supported coup that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide had the misfortune of taking place in late February 2004, just as the occupation of Iraq was reaching a new level of chaos and brutality. The crushing of Haiti's constitutional democracy made headlines for only a couple of weeks.

But the battle over Haiti's future rages on. Most recently, on July 6, 300 UN troops stormed the pro-Aristide slum of Cité Soleil. The UN admits that five were killed, but residents put the number of dead at no fewer than 20. A Reuters correspondent, Joseph Guyler Delva, says he "saw seven bodies in one house alone, including two babies and one older woman in her 60s". Ali Besnaci, head of Médecins Sans Frontières in Haiti, confirmed that on the day of the siege an "unprecedented" 27 people came to the MSF clinic with gunshot wounds, three-quarters of them women and children.

Where news of the siege was reported, it was treated as a necessary measure to control Haiti's violent armed gangs. But the residents of Cité Soleil tell a different story: they say they are being killed not for being violent, but for being militant - for daring to demand the return of their elected president. On the bodies of their dead friends and family members, they place photographs of Aristide.

It was only 10 years ago that President Clinton celebrated Aristide's return to power as "the triumph of freedom over fear". So it seems worth asking: what changed?

Aristide is certainly no saint, but even if the worst of the allegations against him are true, they pale next to the rap sheets of the convicted killers, drug smugglers and arms traders who ousted him. Turning Haiti over to this underworld gang out of concern for Aristide's lack of "good governance" is like escaping an annoying date by accepting a lift home from Charles Manson.

A few weeks ago I visited Aristide in Pretoria, South Africa, where he lives in forced exile. I asked him what was really behind his dramatic falling-out with Washington. He offered an explanation rarely heard in discussions of Haitian politics - actually, he offered three: "Privatisation, privatisation and privatisation."

The dispute dates back to a series of meetings in early 1994, a pivotal moment in Haiti's history that Aristide has rarely discussed. Haitians were living under the barbaric rule of Raoul Cédras, who overthrew Aristide in a 1991 US-backed coup. Aristide was in Washington and, despite popular calls for his return, there was no way he could face down the junta without military back-up.

Increasingly embarrassed by Cédras's abuses, the Clinton administration offered Aristide a deal: US troops would take him back to Haiti - but only after he agreed to a sweeping economic programme with the stated goal to "substantially transform the nature of the Haitian state".

Aristide agreed to pay the debts accumulated under the kleptocratic Duvalier dictatorships, slash the civil service, open up Haiti to "free trade" and cut import tariffs on rice and corn. It was a lousy deal but, Aristide says, he had little choice. "I was out of my country and my country was the poorest in the western hemisphere, so what kind of power did I have at that time?"

But Washington's negotiators made one demand that Aristide could not accept: the immediate sell-off of Haiti's state-owned enterprises, including phones and electricity. Aristide argued that unregulated privatisation would transform state monopolies into private oligarchies, increasing the riches of Haiti's elite and stripping the poor of their national wealth. He says the proposal simply didn't add up: "Being honest means saying two plus two equals four. They wanted us to sing two plus two equals five."

Aristide proposed a compromise: Rather than sell off the firms outright, he would "democratise" them. He defined this as writing anti-trust legislation, ensuring that proceeds from the sales were redistributed to the poor and allowing workers to become shareholders. Washington backed down, and the final text of the agreement called for the "democratisation" of state companies.

But when Aristide announced that no sales could take place until parliament had approved the new laws, Washington cried foul. Aristide says he realised then that what was being attempted was an "economic coup". "The hidden agenda was to tie my hands once I was back and make me give for nothing all the state public enterprises."

He threatened to arrest anyone who went ahead with privatisations. "Washington was very angry at me. They said I didn't respect my word, when they were the ones who didn't respect our common economic policy."

The US cut off more than $500m in promised loans and aid, starving his government, and poured millions into the coffers of opposition groups, culminating ultimately in the February 2004 armed coup.

And the war continues. On June 23 Roger Noriega, US assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, called on UN troops to take a more "proactive role" in going after armed pro-Aristide gangs. In practice, this has meant a wave of collective punishment inflicted on neighbourhoods known for supporting Aristide, most recently in Cité Soleil on July 6.

Yet despite these attacks, Haitians are still on the streets - rejecting the planned sham elections, opposing privatisation and holding up photographs of their president. And just as Washington's experts could not fathom the possibility that Aristide would reject their advice a decade ago, today they cannot accept that his poor supporters could be acting of their own accord. "We believe that his people are receiving instructions directly from his voice and indirectly through his acolytes that communicate with him personally in South Africa," Noriega said.

Aristide claims no such powers. "The people are bright, the people are intelligent, the people are courageous," he says. They know that two plus two does not equal five.

· Research assistance was provided by Aaron Maté.

· A version of this column was first published in the Nation (www.thenation.com).

Reprinted from:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1530800,00.html

[kristine]

by Ed Kinane

Let's begin with 1492. Since that year, when it was "discovered," no country in the Caribbean has suffered more pain per capita than Haiti.
In the 15th century, according to Columbus, Haiti was an island paradise. Now it is an ecological disaster. In the 18th century, Haiti was the richest colony in the New World. Now it is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.

In the early 1500s, Haiti's indigenous people, the Taino, were rendered extinct. Alien disease took its inevitable toll. But it was the Spanish obsession with gold and Columbus' brutal ways of extracting and extorting what little gold there was that sealed their fate.

Soon thousands of West Africans were imported every year to fill the labor vacuum. Africans, under the lash, were put to work raising indigo and then cane sugar. So savage was the slave regime, at first under the Spanish and then under the French, that a slave's life expectancy upon reaching Haiti was only several years. Slaves didn't live long enough to assimilate "Western civilization." To this day Haiti remains essentially an African country.

In the 1790's, the Afro-Haitians revolted. In 1804, led by the slave Toussaint L'Ouverture, the Africans succeeded in whupping Napolean's army and driving it off the island.

This was the world's first successful slave revolt. Ignored in our history books, it was an accomplishment as significant and as liberating as the French or U.S. revolutions.

Western civilization -- France and the other white colonial slave-holding powers -- has yet to forgive the Afro-Haitians. Like Sandinista Nicaragua and Castro's Cuba, liberating itself was Haiti's original sin. Two centuries later the forces of counter-liberation are still relentlessly applied against it.

For years, few nations would recognize Haiti's independence. The United States, despite the lofty sentiments of its founding documents, did not recognize Haiti until our own slave regime crumbled in the 1860s. France, despite the ideals of its 1789 revolution, would not recognize Haiti until it paid a crushing multi-million dollar indemnity.

In the Catholic theology of my youth, we are all born -- like Haiti -- with original sin. And many of us go on to commit grievous sins of our own. These are called mortal sins. In the last dozen or so years unrepentant Haiti and President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whom it keeps electing, has committed a number of these. This is why the so-called "international community" -- especially the United States and France -- are determined to keep Haiti in hell.

In Haiti's 1992 presidential election the U.S.-financed candidate, Marc Bazin, was pre-ordained to win. At the last minute, however, a Catholic priest preaching liberation theology entered the race. Father Aristide won the election by a 67 percent landslide.

Within eight months, a U.S.-sponsored coup toppled Aristide. The next time Aristide stood for election -- in 2000 -- he won by an even greater share of the vote. And this was an election internationally certified as fair. Aristide was, and continues to be, the choice of the vast majority of Haiti's people.

But on February 29, 2004, Aristide was again overthrown. The U.S. military abducted Aristide at gunpoint, transporting him to the Central African Republic, one of the most isolated countries on the planet.

Why does the U.S. government hate Aristide so?

For five centuries, the imperial powers have seen Haiti only as a dark, placid pool of super-cheap labor. Upon first becoming president, however, Aristide sought to raise Haiti's miserable minimum wage. A major no-no.

Aristide kept up his offensive behavior. In 1994 when he returned from exile and resumed his presidency, he abolished Haiti's brutish military.

And, finally, consider this brazen deed. During his second term, Aristide sued France for reimbursement of the aforementioned indemnity. Aristide presented France with a bill -- corrected for inflation and with 5 percent interest compounded. The bill, still outstanding, totals $21 billion.

For the time being, President Aristide lives in South Africa. Aristide's party, Lavalas, has once again been forced underground. Even so, it insists there can be no elections in Haiti without the return of its president and the democratic constitutional order he embodies.

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