USA consollidates hold on Haiti with 12,000 troop invasion

[Ed Jewett]

[Ed Jewett]

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Americans charged with child trafficking in Haiti

By North America correspondent Lisa Millar and wires
Posted 40 minutes ago
There are fears that traffickers could try to exploit the chaos and turmoil following Haiti's quake (AFP: Jewel Samad)


Ten Americans have been charged with child trafficking after they allegedly tried to leave Haiti with more than 30 survivors of the country's devastating earthquake.
The Americans say they were trying to help orphaned children, but Haitian authorities say they had no documents to prove they had cleared the adoption of the children.
The Baptists were arrested at Malpasse, Haiti's main border crossing with the Dominican Republic, after Haitian police conducted a routine search of their bus.
There were 33 children, aged from two months to 12 years, on board.
Haitian culture and communications minister Marie Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue says border police "saw a bus with a lot of children".
"When asked about the children's documents, they had no documents," she said.
Social affairs minister Yves Christallin says the Americans are members of an Idaho-based charity called New Life Children's Refuge.
"This is an abduction, not an adoption," he said.
But the group's leader, Laura Silsby, says they were trying to take abandoned children to an orphanage across the border in the Dominican Republic.
"The entire team deeply fell in love with these children," she said.
"They are very, very precious kids that have lost their homes and their families and are so, so deeply in need of God's love and his compassion and just a very nurturing setting."
But a care centre chief says most of the children "have family" that survived the January 12 earthquake.
Patricia Vargas, regional director of the SOS Children's Village, where the children are being cared for, says officials at the Haitian Institute of Social Welfare told her "most of the kids have family".
Ms Vargas says older children of the group say some of the youngsters' "parents are alive, and some of them gave us an address and phone numbers".
The US embassy has confirmed 10 US citizens are being held for "alleged violations of Haitian laws related to immigration".
There have been growing concerns traffickers could try to exploit the chaos and turmoil following Haiti's quake to engage in illegal adoptions.
In addition to outright trafficking in children, authorities have voiced fears legitimate aid groups may have flown earthquake orphans out of the country for adoption before efforts to find their parents had been exhausted.


http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/...tion=world

[Ed Jewett]

Saturday, January 30, 2010

America's Sorry History with Haiti

I just completed a long article on Haiti for ConsortiumNews.com, which will be published in two parts. Part 1 is up today - Part 2 should be up tomorrow.

There are some interesting nuggets related to George de Mohrenschildt's strange role in Haiti as well.

Start here: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/013010a.html

And I'd love to hear your thoughts.

posted by Real History Lisa at 6:22 PM - Permanent Link -

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America's Sorry History with Haiti
By Lisa Pease
January 30, 2010
With all the talk of America taking charge of Haiti for a while, it would be prudent for us to take a step back and review the history of our various interventions in Haiti, and the outcomes of those efforts.
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For there is another kind of aid that the people of Haiti need that isn’t being talked about. They need us to understand their real history, their culture and their potential.

They need us to stop patronizing them and interfering with their progress so they can realize the freedom they are still seeking two centuries after officially casting off the shackles of slavery. [For more on that era, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Haiti and America’s Historic Debt.”]
If there’s one lesson we’ve had to learn in Haiti over and over, it’s that the solutions to Haiti’s problems can never be imposed from the outside. They must be allowed to grow from within.
And we have to let those solutions flourish, instead of trying to shape them to the liking of our business class, as we have repeatedly attempted to do, with disastrous effect.
The Military Occupation
In 1915, the United States began a nearly 20-year military occupation of Haiti, ostensibly to guarantee the country’s substantial debt repayments to American and other foreign lenders. But historian Hans Schmidt, among others, questioned this motive, as he found that Haiti’s record of repayment had been “exemplary” compared with that of other Latin American countries.
The larger reason for the occupation, according to Schmidt and others, was to keep European financial interests (German and French in particular) from economically colonizing Haiti at a time when America, having recently completed the Panama Canal, was hoping to expand its own sphere of influence in the Caribbean.
And potential investors in Haiti, such as the United Fruit Company (whose name is familiar to anyone who has studied the CIA’s coup in Guatemala), weren’t going to move in unless the U.S. took over the government and brought stability.
To be fair, it’s not like America alone ruined the place. Haiti was a mess when the U.S. forces got there. Of the 11 presidents who had held office in Haiti from 1888 to 1915, only one had apparently died a natural death, and none had served their full term. Seven presidents were killed or overthrown in 1911 alone.
And from 1843 to 1915, Haiti had been through, according to Robert and Nancy Heinl in their book Written in Blood, “at least 102 civil wars, revolutions, insurrections” or as one commentator called it, a series of “bloody operettas.”
Years of various colonization attempts had divided Haiti into an economic and cultural caste system that was in part racially based. The whites and lighter-skinned people often held the money and position; the darker the skin, the lower down the economic totem pole one was likely to be.
Efforts to spread modern technology among the peasant population fell flat, and working all day for someone else’s profit wasn’t much of an incentive for people who had few needs and were accustomed to scarcity.
In addition, many Americans who came to Haiti looked down on the native people, often due to racial prejudice. The Americans typically didn’t recognize the value of the natives’ knowledge, and believed that America knew what was best for Haiti.
One notable exception was Major Smedley Butler, who noted that “The Haitian people are divided into two classes; one class wears shoes and the other does not. The class that wears shoes is about one percent. …
“Ninety-nine percent of the people of Haiti are the most kindly, generous, hospitable, pleasure-loving people I have ever known. They would not hurt anybody [unless incited by the shoe-wearers; then] they are capable of the most horrible atrocities.”
“Those that wore shoes I took as a joke,” Butler added. “Without a sense of humor, you could not live in Haiti among these people, among the shoe class.”
Ignorance and Arrogance
You’d think that if you wanted to help a people become a prospering democracy that the first thing you’d offer them would be an education. But over 10 years into the U.S. occupation, 95 percent of the Haitian population remained illiterate.
The one educational effort the U.S. put forward was the Service Technique, a training program in agricultural and industrial technology. The problem with that, as Schmidt noted, was that the elite “traditionally held that manual labor was demeaning, while the peasants were enmeshed in subsistence farming and were reluctant to risk an already tenuous existence in outlandish experiments that were fundamental to American technological progress.”
In addition, American arrogance even prevented an exchange of ideas that could have benefited American businesses. For example, the Haitians had developed a much more efficient way of farming cotton than the industrial farming methods employed by the Americans. But Americans pushed their own technology instead.
Not surprisingly, the Americans failed to win many converts.
What little profit Haiti did make, financially, was used to pay off American bankers, sometimes in advance of the payment schedule. Funding education and public projects -- the very projects the loans had been provided for -- were not the priorities.
Haitian laborers were paid pennies an hour to work 12-hour days. Raising wages was discouraged for fear it might cause capital to seek a more favorable climate.
In 1925 and 1926, in an attempt to make the country more attractive to farming interests such as United Fruit, the Marines took aerial photographs of the land in the hopes of creating a cadastral survey showing actual boundaries of property.
But the photographs were destroyed in a fire, and American officials for the large part refused to pressure the masses into selling their tiny, title-less but generations-held property to American businesses.
When the market crash in 1929 rippled around the world, Haiti’s productive coffee farms lost their markets, and the people returned to subsistence-level farming. Students began striking to protest the American occupation, and soon others joined in a general strike.
An early attempt at “shock and awe” failed as miserably in Haiti as it did in Iraq. The Marines dropped bombs in a harbor where a particularly aggressive group of protesting Haitians had gathered. But instead of cowing them, the demonstration seemed to instigate them further. The Marines had to fire on the group to disperse them.
Ultimately, the depression turned the tide of opinion in Haiti against its American occupiers, increasingly seen as oppressors.
By 1932, tensions had come to a head, and President Hoover began taking steps to end the occupation. President Roosevelt completed the action in 1934.
Evaluating the Effort
What did the United States leave the Haitians with in return for the occupation? The U.S. did bring them some years of relative stability, law and order. The U.S. built some hospitals and rural health clinics as well as some roads and bridges and airstrips.
But for all that, as a contemporary observer noted, “the Haitian people are, today, little better fitted for self-government than they were in 1915.”
U.S. military forces also killed thousands of Haitians in efforts to achieve security.
The aforementioned Major Butler became quite outspoken about the role he’d been forced to play. “I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912…
“Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."
Did the U.S. learn from this failed attempt at nation building? No. The U.S. just kept intervening, with repeatedly disastrous results.
Cut to 1957. Whatever modernization was achieved from the U.S. occupation was already a distant memory. Bridges and roads had fallen into disrepair. The same drive that in 1934 took two hours to complete by 1957 took nine hours by jeep (in good weather) due to unpaved potholes and the island’s “wrinkled paper” topology.
And that was just one road.
Imagine a country without a telephone system, with failing bridges, ports with crumbling docks, patients lying ill on the floor of dirty hospitals, political institutions in shambles or even nonexistent. Imagine what you’re seeing now, post-earthquake, as the everyday state of things.
‘President for Life’
Enter François Duvalier, a Haitian man of medicine who became known as “Papa Doc.” He was an educated man, not a soldier. He was a black man who wore suits and ties. He looked like the kind of conservative figure American business interests could support.
But Duvalier was also an adept of Voodoo. He studied Machiavelli. He mastered his country’s history, and learned what hadn’t worked for his predecessors, and took steps to avoid their mistakes.
Despite the New York Times’ initial portrait of him as “mild-mannered doctor,” Duvalier, upon winning the presidency in 1957, became a ruthless, corrupt dictator.
Duvalier knew he needed to gain control over the military, since most of the previous coups against Haitian leaders had come from that source. He built his own private strike force, the Tonton Macoutes, and got rid of opposition leaders in the military.
He brought back the death penalty, which had been abolished for years. Private radio transmitters were confiscated. Journalists were followed, harassed, and in some cases beaten into silence. He quickly turned Haiti into a police state, ruling by terror and brute force.
In 1958, Duvalier hired a U.S. consulting firm to review his government and offer suggestions for improving its efficiency. And then he ignored their advice. He had already learned that the easiest way to get money from the U.S. was simply to raise the threat of communists in his country.
In 1961, Duvalier ran a slate of candidates for top government positions under his own name, and when they were “elected” (by 1.3 million people out of 1 million eligible voters), baldly claimed that he himself had been re-elected to a second term, as his name had been at the top of the ballot.
Second terms were expressly forbidden by the Haitian constitution. But since Duvalier held the military in tow, no one dared press that point. The U.S., however, refused to recognize the legitimacy of his claim, and President Kennedy promptly recalled the American ambassador in Port-au-Prince.
When Duvalier had first come to power under the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. had given him aid money to help get him off to a good start. But after the sham of an election in 1961 and additional atrocities that followed, President Kennedy slammed the brakes on American aid and by August 1962 began closing out operations.
The 70-person AID mission was reduced to eight people, who remained to administer a malaria-prevention program and to supervise the distribution of surplus food. U.S. military assistance programs were cancelled.
(Duvalier later celebrated when President Kennedy was assassinated, and sent an emissary to gather some air from Kennedy’s grave site, among other items, so he could attempt, through Voodoo, to capture Kennedy’s “soul” and harness it for his own purposes.)
In 1962, Duvalier’s Foreign Minister threatened to block an Organization of American States (OAS) vote unless the U.S. gave him aid money. An angry Dean Rusk agreed, causing desk officers to joke that Dean’s expense account for the day read, “Breakfast: $2.25. Lunch with Haitian Foreign Minister: $2,800,000.00.”
American Backing
On his way to power, Duvalier had quietly suggested to some that he had American backing.
Indeed, Clemard Joseph Charles, an American with a variety of financial ties, became “banker and bagman” for Duvalier, paying off military officers to support Duvalier’s ascent to power. Charles was the president of the Banque Commerciale d’Haiti.
According to various witnesses interviewed by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in the late 1970s, Charles received funding from businessmen in Texas and had numerous CIA ties. Charles’ work included finding ways to join American capital with Haitian development projects. He also managed to obtain two American fighter jets for Duvalier.
In May of 1963, Sam Kail, an army intelligence officer working closely with the CIA’s Miami station, thought Duvalier might be of use to the CIA in their efforts to remove Castro from power.
(Oddly enough, Walt Elder, CIA Director John McCone’s assistant, told the Church Committee that the CIA was arming rebels in the hopes that they would overthrow Duvalier. A CIA document notes Duvalier had become intractable and that overthrowing him would help the CIA’s image, which was regarded in Latin America as primarily propping up repressive regimes.)
Kail asked Dorothe Matlack, who served as the Assistant Director of the Office of Intelligence in the Army as well as a liaison to the CIA, if she would see Clemard Charles in Washington, D.C., during Charles’ upcoming trip.
Matlack invited Charles to speak with her and CIA officer Tony Czaikowski, whom she introduced to Charles as a Georgetown professor. Charles, for his part, brought George de Mohrenschildt and de Mohrenschildt’s wife to the meeting.
George de Mohrenschildt was a White Russian who had befriended that “communist” Lee Harvey Oswald at the request of J. Walter Moore, a CIA officer in Dallas.
According to Edward J. Epstein, who interviewed de Mohrenschildt, Moore asked de Mohrenschildt to meet with Oswald, as Oswald had just returned from Minsk and Moore knew de Mohrenschildt had grown up in that area.
De Mohrenschildt responded that, while he knew there could be no strict quid pro quo, he’d appreciate some help from the U.S. Embassy to aid in an oil exploration deal he was trying to accomplish with Duvalier.
Matlack told the HSCA that Charles seemed “frantic and frightened” as he urged Matlack to get the U.S. Marines to overthrow Duvalier. (Czaikowski suggested in his notes of this meeting that a cousin of Charles might eventually succeed Duvalier. Elsewhere, Charles and de Mohrenschildt suggested Charles himself as a potential candidate. In 1967, Duvalier imprisoned Charles.)
Matlack was unnerved by the way de Mohrenschildt seemed to “dominate” Charles. Matlack wondered what the true nature of their relationship was, and didn’t believe the explanation they gave her -- that they were developing a jute business together in Haiti.
“I knew the Texan wasn’t there to sell hemp,” Matlack told the HSCA.
Matlack was so disturbed by de Mohrenschildt’s behavior that she notified the FBI liaison, about it. And she wasn’t the only one disturbed by de Mohrenschildt’s behavior.
Another witness told the HSCA that de Mohrenschildt used to follow people in his car, that he appeared to have “some intelligence connections,” and that a mutual acquaintance who swam in intelligence circles said some $200,000 had been deposited in de Mohrenschildt’s Haitian bank account (though not the one at Charles’ bank) shortly after the Kennedy assassination.
The money was later paid out, but the acquaintance wasn’t sure to whom.
George McMillan, who wrote a book that claimed James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King (a finding a jury did not uphold in a civil trial in 1999), and who was married to Priscilla Johnson McMillan (who wrote a book about Oswald and whose CIA file listed her as a “witting collaborator”), wrote in the Washington Post that he had once stayed with de Mohrenschildt and his wife in Haiti at their home in Port-au-Prince.
McMillan noted the de Mohrenschildt’s lived, “not insignificantly, I suppose, within the compound where Papa Doc Duvalier then lived. We had to pass through heavily guarded gates as we came and went.”
Why was de Mohrenschildt so close to Duvalier? Was he keeping tabs on the dictator for the CIA? Or was he keeping tabs on the CIA for Duvalier? Whatever the truth, this 1964 State Department document sadly sums up America’s priorities at the time when it came to Haiti:
“United States interests range from the need to protect American citizens and property interests to ensuring that Haiti votes on the merit of questions of importance to the United States and the free world in international organizations and forums. The United States also has an abiding interest in the social and economic welfare of the Haitian people.” [Emphasis added.]
In June 1964, Duvalier rewrote his country’s constitution so that it included a provision by which he could be named “President for Life,” and then had his hand-picked legislators “vote” to make him so. He now officially met anyone’s definition of a dictator, in full bloom.
Throughout both Duvaliers’ rule – “Papa Doc” and his son who was called “Baby Doc” – the U.S. sent selected Haitian officials to the infamous School of the Americas, where they were trained in torture techniques and other methods of oppression. The graduates were then returned to the Haitian military and civilian police forces, giving Americans increasing control over the military during the Duvaliers’ regimes.
“Papa Doc” Duvalier’s shrewd manipulations continued even after his death. He had made provisions for his son to rule in the event of his passing. Observers didn’t think the son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, had the grit to run the country.
But the son managed to hold the presidency for 15 years after his father’s death before a coalition of forces that included the U.S. ousted him due to the cumulative horrors perpetrated under the family’s rule and the disastrous economic mess they had created.
In 1981, Hurricane Allen ripped up the Haitian countryside as well as the usually untouched Port-au-Prince at a time when the Haitians were already in economic despair. Unable to vote in any meaningful way at home, many Haitians started voting with their feet, and left Haiti en masse to seek refuge in America.
No Haitians Allowed
But unlike the Cubans who fled their homeland, Haitians were not welcomed in the U.S. with open arms.
The new administration under Ronald Reagan claimed there was no racial bias, that the Cubans were political refugees whereas the Haitians were merely economic refugees. (It probably helped that the Cubans were fleeing a leftist government, while the Haitians were fleeing a right-wing one.)
When bevies of volunteer lawyers rushed to defend the incoming poor from Haiti, the Reagan administration, with Jean-Claude’s acquiescence, stationed a U.S. Coast Guard ship off the coast to head off refugees before they got to U.S. shores.
As part of this agreement, U.S. aid money to Haiti increased. In addition, a former World Bank official named Marc Bazin, whom the U.S. favored, was installed as the new finance minister.
But conditions in Haiti continued to worsen. Arable land was declining due to dramatic deforestation. Diseases still ravaged the island, including now AIDS. Literacy rates continued to be obscenely low, and corruption was as rampant as ever. And as usual, to control the populace, violence was too often employed.
By 1986, the citizens were in full revolt. Fearing widespread bloodshed, and urged out by the United States, Jean-Claude departed the country. Anything and anyone related to the Duvaliers and other oppressors became a subject of attack.
The Duvaliers sent Papa Doc’s coffin to France so the masses couldn’t get to it. Streets were renamed back to their original Haitian names. A statue of Columbus was toppled.
While Jean-Claude denied that the U.S. forced him out, he accepted a flight on a U.S. cargo plane to leave the country for France. (France had only offered him temporary asylum, but no other country would take him.)
Another series of revolving door leaders would temporarily preside over the country.
End of Part One

[Ed Jewett]

Let them eat mudcake: Cruise ship docks at its trademarked private fantasy island of Labadee® in Haiti

Jim Walker
Cruise Law News
Sat, 30 Jan 2010 13:22 EST



Labadee, paradise for the rich, Haiti: can anything better sum up the gulf between the parasites and humanity?

Following the devastation and destruction of Port of Prince, Royal Caribbean faced the potential public relations nightmare of sailing its mega cruise ships into its private resort of Labadee with thousands of affluent Americans partying and gorging themselves while over 100,000 Haitians lay dead and decaying in the streets and millions more already impoverished Haitians face hunger and hopelessness.

The Guardian newspaper in the U.K. reported that Royal Caribbean's decision to go ahead with scheduled cruises into Labadee "divided passengers." One passenger commented on the popular Cruise Critic forum that he was "sickened" by the thought of frolicking in the Haitian port while other suffered:

"I just can't see myself sunning on the beach, playing in the water, eating a barbecue, and enjoying a cocktail while [in Port-au-Prince] there are tens of thousands of dead people being piled up on the streets, with the survivors stunned and looking for food and water . . . It was hard enough to sit and eat a picnic lunch at Labadee before the quake, knowing how many Haitians were starving," said another. "I can't imagine having to choke down a burger there now.''

Another article "Cruise Ship Docks at Private Beach in Haiti for Barbeque and Water Sports" debates the appropriateness of all of this. The comments range from pointing out the "grotesqueness" of the spectacle of thousands of partying Americans in an idyllic beach to the nonchalant attitude - "life goes on . . . and as always, life is for the living."

© Unknown

There has always been an uneasy disconnect between the opulence of a cruise ship like Royal Caribbean's Independence of the Seas and a country as desperately impoverished as Haiti with a poverty rate of around 80 to 85 %. Most Haitians are forced to survive on less than $2 a day. The U.S. passengers on the Royal Caribbean cruise ship, on the other hand, spend more for the cruise, drinks, casino chips, and excursions than most Haitians will see for decades. In addition to the Independence, Royal Caribbean's Navigator, Freedom, Enchantment and Liberty of the Seas, as well as its subsidiary Celebrity Cruises' Solstice, will all call on Labadee this year.

The disparity between the haves and the have-nots will become even more pronounced as the $1,400,000,000 (billion) Oasis of the Seas, which visited Labadee in December last year, will begin arriving every other week in Labadee starting in May.

The executives at Royal Caribbean know how to make a hard bargain with Caribbean islands which have little economic bargaining power. CEO Richard Fain cut a deal where for only $6 a passenger (paid by the passenger), Haiti turned over a 260 acre tropical waterfront paradise of Haitian sovereign land for Royal Caribbean to consider it "private property" bearing the trademarked name "Labadee®." Yes, that's right. This is a name that Royal Caribbean trademarked as a variation of the French slave owner Marquis de La'Badie who settled in Haiti in the 1600's.

Many years ago an article revealed the hypocrisy of this whole endeavor. Entitled "Fantasy Island: Royal Carribean Parcels Off a Piece of Haiti," the article explained that Royal Caribbean began docking in Haiti in January 1986 after the ruthless dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier leased the land to Royal Caribbean. He thereafter fled to France and the country turned into chaos for the next decade.

Royal Caribbean's timing was perfect.


The article continues: "plagued by a ravaged economy, residual political unrest, and 7,000 unemployed soldiers, the Haitian government was willing to bargain . . . Royal Caribbean got dirt-cheap entry, minimal regulation, and tactful silence." The Haitian government earns less than $30,000 a week from the Royal Caribbean cruise ships, but, as Haiti's minister of tourism said: "we need to start somewhere." Haiti was desperate. Royal Caribbean was Haiti's only choice.

Many argue that for the past many years, Royal Caribbean has not promoted or invested in Haiti. Instead, as the article explains, it "exploited an acquiescent government and dictated its own terms of entry." Its plan was to sell U.S. customers on an imaginary paradise.

Travel agents took the cue from Royal Caribbean and marketed the port as a "private island." The fact that it was no island at all, but part of the mainland of Haiti, didn't bother the travel agents or the cruise line. And it worked. Consider a cruise review a couple of years ago:

One of the best Private Island experiences you could ever wish for! Labadee has four beaches and facilities for lots of people! Labadee is owned and operated by Royal Caribbean for the exclusive use of it's own passengers only . . . Royal Caribbean maintains a nice lunch area on the island. Here you can graze at your heart's content, The cuisine was hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken, ribs, various salads, and deserts. No charge. It's all included in the cost of your cruise!

Even last week, the Miami Herald ran a headline, cluelessly referring to Royal Caribbean returning to the "island" of Labadee. But the pretense of an island is only half of the illusion. Not only did Royal Caribbean fail to promote Haiti, it didn't even refer to Labadee as being in Haiti. Rather it referred to Labadee as part of Hispaniola (the island comprising the Dominican Republic and Haiti) to try and keep the image of Haiti's poverty, violence, and civil unrest away from its customers.

Labadee might as well be an island, considering that Royal Caribbean hires armed guards to patrol the 10-12 foot fences which isolate the Haitians from the cruise line's "private island." Royal Caribbean keeps the locals away from its passengers who are "happily ensconced on the shores of paradise" with no idea that just over the walls are shanty-towns, sweat shops, and hungry and impoverished Haitians. The money spent in the private paradise of Labadee doesn't spread far beyond the fences. The article points out that all of the food, drinks, and even the tropical fruits and vegetables all come from Miami.


So now after isolating itself physically, financially and figuratively from Haiti for the past 20 years, Royal Caribbean is trying to justify not disrupting its business while not seeming indifferent to a country it has been indifferent to for 20 years. It just spent big bucks ($50,000,000) building a new wharf - one of the few locations which can handle the new mega ship Oasis of the Seas - as well as the world's longest zip line and an alpine coaster. Royal Caribbean is banking on bringing the Oasis' 6,000 captive passengers onto that new wharf and charging them for the new zip line ($65), or wave runners ($80) or para-sailing, etc.

In the last few days, Royal Caribbean has made a big deal talking about offloading pallets of food for Haiti. Royal Caribbean's Independence of the Seas sailed with only 60 cases of food and water last Friday according to the Royal Caribbean President's "Nation of Why Not?" blog. That's just four pallets. The blog has some photographs of the few pallets from the Independence of the Seas - four pallets of flour, tomato sauce, can goods, and water bottles. Four pallets? Considering that on a typical seven-day cruise the cruise ship's passengers consume over 100,000 pounds of food and 12,000 gallons of alcohol over the course of over a hundred thousand meals- the photograph of the meager provisions sitting on the dock dwarfed by the huge Independence of the Seas seems like a sick joke.

Subsequent articles mention that other cruises have included up to 40 pallets of food, photographs of which no one has seen, but if true this still is a pittance given the enormous needs of the Haitian people and the huge capabilities of Royal Caribbean's cruise ships.

Supporters of the cruise line point out that Royal Caribbean also pledged to donate a million dollars to Haiti over an unspecified period of time. It talks about using the net profits collected from the passenger's monies spent in Labadee. Whether this occurs over the course of 6 months or a year remains to be seen. Now a million dollars is a lot of money to me and probably anyone reading this article, but it is peanuts for a cruise line like Royal Caribbean.

Royal Caribbean collects around $6,000,000,000 (billion) a year. And because it registered its business in Liberia and its cruise ships fly the foreign flags of Liberia or the Bahamas, it pays $0 in federal Income taxes. $0.


Why only a million dollars? That will accomplish little. Even Royal Caribbean's competitor Carnival promised to send $5 million to Haiti, and it has no relationship with Haiti. The $6 a passenger deal which Royal Caribbean struck with the leaders of Haiti rips the Haitian people off. $6 to go into a 260 acre private paradise? Well established ports in Alaska collect $50 a passenger in head taxes just to step off of the cruise ship.

Americans are generous people. For the next two years, Haiti should receive $100 a passenger. With 6,000 passengers from the Oasis of the Seas alone coming into Labadee a week, the country could receive $600,000 a week rather than the current pittance of $30,000. Each passenger can pay $50 and the cruise line can pay the other $50.

If the cruise line can collect $65 for a 2 minute zip line in Labadee for fun, it can sure as hell can pay $50 a passenger to Haiti to deal with the humanitarian crisis unfolding before its eyes.

$600,000 a week could begin to accomplish something.

But instead the cruise line is talking peanuts. And its PR people have created the illusion that the Royal Caribbean executives are in Haiti walking the streets and helping the people.

Royal Caribbean's website shows a a photograph of CEO Fain and President Goldstein (above) walking with President Clinton with the mountains of Haiti in the background, next to headlines:

"HUMANITARIAN AID TO HAITI"

© Unknown

The photograph looks impressive; any photo shoot with a President is worth hanging on your wall. But neither Mr. Fain nor Mr. Goldstein have traveled to Haiti since the disaster. And the photograph has nothing to do with humanitarian aid. It was actually taken last year before the earthquake when President Clinton was visiting Haiti on an official visit as the United Nations special envoy.

This U.N. trip was covered by Jason Maloney, of the Pulitzer Center, who ironically enough commented on Royal Caribbean's historical reluctance to support or even acknowledge Haiti. The center explained that there are "political

Richard Fain, Bill Clinton, Adam Goldstein in Labadee before the disaster

sensitivities surrounding the ownership of the resort." It called Royal Caribbean out on its claim that Labadee is a "private beach destination" or the company's "private island." It also ran a photograph (left) of CEO Fain, President Clinton, and Royal Caribbean President Goldstein (in baseball cap and shorts) when Clinton was visiting the cruise line's "private destination."
It seems rather shameful for Royal Caribbean to pull out a photo which has nothing to do with the "humanitarian" crisis for its own PR purposes.

Royal Caribbean has a net worth of $15,000,000,000. It has a (tax free) annual income almost twice greater than Haiti's gross national product.

So in this context - Royal Caribbean's highly publicized pledge of a measly one million dollars, random pallets of food and water, and a misleading photograph of the cruise line executives with an ex-President are... pitiful.

Royal Caribbean is proposing nothing meaningful to address the profound problems of this impoverished and exploited country.

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/202150...e-in-Haiti

[Magda Hassan]

That is beyond sickening :puke: I hope there is a special circle in hell for people who do this And another for those who arrange it.

[Ed Jewett]

America's Sad History with Haiti, Part 2
By Lisa Pease
February 1, 2010
The Haitians have a saying in their native créole language: Piti, piti, wazo fe nich li. “Little by little, the bird builds its nest.”
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Freed of the powerful grip of the Duvaliers in 1986, and despite a dysfunctional system, little by little, the Haitians undertook the difficult work of rebuilding their nation into a more democratic place from within.
They formed trade unions, created independent radio stations, initiated literacy programs, and built silos to store their grain so they could wait for better prices before selling their crops.
Meanwhile, a quiet, small Haitian man who spoke eight languages and who had declared capitalism a “mortal sin” was espousing a brand of liberation theology too radical for the Catholic Church that had ordained him.
In 1988, the Catholic Church expelled Jean Bertrand Aristide for preaching class warfare in a move that, ironically, made him far more powerful.
Undaunted, Aristide, called affectionately by the diminutive “Titide,” opened a medical clinic, ran a children’s shelter, and continued to speak to the people.
As Haiti headed into its first internationally supervised election, the U.S. was banking on Marc Bazin, now their chosen candidate for president. But the majority of the Haitians saw Bazin as “America’s Man” and refused to support him.
The strongest leftist candidate, however, was considered lackluster, and the other candidates were too little known to win.
On Oct. 16, 1990, just two months before the elections were to be held, Aristide entered the race. He called his movement and its followers the Lavalas, a créole word for torrents of water that rushed down gullies, sweeping away everything in their path. He summed up his platform in three words: “participation, transparency, justice.”
Predictably, the U.S. government, then headed by President George H. W. Bush, was disconcerted. One businessman probably summed up a lot of businessmen’s thoughts when he called Aristide “a cross between Fidel and the Ayatollah.”
Just before the election, Ambassador Andrew Young, at the request (he said) of former President Jimmy Carter, tried to persuade Aristide to sign a letter accepting Bazin as president if Bazin should win, in the hopes of forestalling a violent reaction from Aristide’s followers. William Blum, in his book Killing Hope, noted the Bush White House likely had a hand in this as well.
Hope, Then Tragedy
On Dec. 16, 1990, in the country’s first internationally supervised election, Aristide won with over two-thirds of the vote, proving the Lavalas worthy of their name. The margin also gave him the largest majority of any democratically elected leader in the Western Hemisphere.
But in a sad parallel to some recent U.S. elections, when the time came to vote for the legislature and other offices, turnout was light. An opposition-dominated legislature then thwarted much of the legislation that Aristide proposed.
Still, Aristide upset the status quo. He initiated “programs in literacy, public health, and agrarian reform,” Blum wrote. Aristide also sought to increase the minimum wage; he asked for a freeze on the prices of basic necessities; and he created a public works program to generate jobs.
Aristide also criticized the business class, accusing some of the Haitian elite of corruption. He also sent a youth group from Haiti on a friendly visit to Haiti’s neighbor to the west, Castro’s Cuba.
Aristide, who had survived assassination attempts in the past, created a private force that he could trust. He further antagonized the military by making temporary appointments to key positions rather than permanent ones. He hoped this would encourage good behavior, but instead it rankled those stuck in tenuous situations.
But perhaps Aristide’s greatest affront to the military was to crack down on smuggling and drug-running, which were rampant in Haiti. According to Robert and Nancy Heinl in their book Written in Blood, Aristide’s actions “were putting a dent in many officers’ life styles.”
Janus-faced America
Any student of real history can guess what happened next. The military overthrew Aristide a short nine months into his five-year presidential term.
And as Blum notes, while there is no direct evidence that the CIA or the United States supported the coup, given the CIA’s role in training and supporting the Haitian military, the coup could hardly have come as a surprise.
Bob Shacochis supports Blum’s suspicions in his book The Immaculate Invasion, where he wrote that President George H.W. Bush “swiftly announced that the coup would not stand, then just as quickly receded into embarrassed silence when informed by his staff that his own crew in Port-au-Prince not only had foreknowledge of the putsch but had allowed it to advance without a word.”
Shacochis decried how America had been essentially “Janus-faced” toward Haiti due to a the split between those in the U.S. willing to support a true democracy, no matter how messy, and those whose knee-jerk reaction was to decry the leftist president, despite the fact that “the Haitians democratically chose Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the only Haitian president who ever attempted to lead his people out of darkness; the only Haitian chief of state who seemed to display an ideology beyond self.”
Initially, only the Vatican recognized the new government. The United Nations and the Organization of American States (OAS) and U.S. still supported Aristide. An embargo on oil and weapons was ordered, if not fully supported.
Once again, the desperate Haitians, suffering under yet another military regime, took to their boats and headed for Americas shores. The U.S. created a temporary camp at the Guantanamo base in Cuba to house some of the intercepted refugees. But it was clear from the start this solution would not hold.
Meanwhile, the gap between the rich elites and the poor peasants in Haiti bordered on the obscene.
As the Heinls’ described, “To provide additional generating capacity at Péligre [a hydro-electric project], water was being diverted …, further crippling agriculture, but in Pétionville the elite dined well off French wines and Norwegian salmon.”
The rich eschewed the unreliable public utilities and turned to private generators. And while the elite “could not avoid traveling on the ruined roads whose upkeep they refused to pay taxes for,” they bought four-wheel drive vehicles to navigate the rocky terrain instead -- an option not available to the masses, the Heinls noted.
The U.N. reluctantly began talking of the need for a full-scale military invasion to return Aristide to power. By this time, U.S. voters had ditched Bush Sr. in favor of Bill Clinton, a man who, on the face of it, seemed more sympathetic to the restoration of democracy in Haiti, despite the fact that quickly after the election, he vowed to continue Bush’s Haitian anti-immigration policies.
As President Clinton sought an agreement between Haitian leaders and the U.N. to restore Aristide for the remaining portion of his presidential term, a paid CIA informer named Emmanuel Constant was working with FRAPH, a paramilitary organization -- a death squad, essentially – he had formed in Haiti, to prevent Aristide’s return and to terrorize the ousted president’s former supporters.
Constant led an anti-American demonstration at the dock in Port-au-Prince when Clinton dispatched the first U.S. troops seeking to facilitate Aristide’s reinstatement. In the face of Constant’s demonstration, the administration lost its nerve, and the American troops turned back.
Trashing Aristide
At this point, an all-out effort was launched domestically in the U.S. by right-wing elements to keep President Clinton from authorizing another landing. Aristide was accused of inciting his followers to violence and of being mentally deranged.
A serious, if dubious, charge was made in an effort to turn the liberals in Congress against Aristide. A video was surfaced ostensibly showing Aristide urging his supporters to “necklace” opponents, i.e., to put a burning tire around their necks. But what did Aristide really say?
Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, entered the following translation into the record, but added the caveat that the only tape he had seen had been obviously edited, so he was not certain this was fully representative of what Aristide had said. The State Department’s translation of the incendiary section read as follows:
“You are watching all macoute activities throughout the country. We are watching and praying. We are watching and praying. If we catch one, do not fail to give him what he deserves. What a nice tool! What a nice instrument! [loud cheers from crowd] What a nice device! [crowd cheers] It is a pretty one. It is elegant, attractive, splendorous, graceful, and dazzling. It smells good. Wherever you go, you feel like smelling it. [crowd cheers] It is provided for by the Constitution, which bans macoutes from the political scene.”
Combined with the spliced in shots of burning tires, this passage clearly sounded like Aristide was urging people to punish the macoutes in a violent way. But that was out of character with other parts of the speech, where he said:
“Your tool is in your hands. Your instrument is in your hands. Your Constitution is in your hand. Do not fail to give him what he deserves. [loud cheers from crowd]. That device is in your hands. Your trowel is in your hands. The bugle is in your hands. The Constitution is in your hands. Do not fail to give him what he deserves.”
In that section, clearly the law was the weapon Aristide was urging his supporters to employ.
Later, an Internet poster who claimed to be present during this speech vigorously denied Aristide had approved of necklacing:
“I was present at that famous speech when Aristide returned from the USA. The speech was taped and cut and spliced to make it appear that Aristide condoned...even encouraged necklacing; such *was not* the case. Aristide said that he understood peoples' desire to necklace, but he emphasized that it was positively immoral.
“He said words to this effect: I understand your desire to smell their burning flesh; but that is not the way of Jesus. We will win without violence; we will overcome. The anti-Aristide people spliced the tape to make it come out this way: I desire to smell their burning flesh. We will win with violence; we will overcome!”
CIA Report
That same day that Harkin entered the text into the record, Sen. Jesse Helms, R-North Carolina, had invited longtime CIA analyst Brian Latell to Capitol Hill to talk about the agency’s report on Aristide’s psychological state.
The report claimed that Aristide was a psychopath, had been treated for depression in a Canadian hospital, and was taking ongoing medication. In other words, he was too unstable to be returned to Haiti.
The problem was, none of that was true.
A Miami Herald investigation found that the hospital the CIA named had no record that Aristide had ever been treated there. Three other facilities in Montreal were investigated, but not one of them had ever treated Aristide.
Aristide had been hospitalized for hepatitis in his teens, but had never been to a hospital for any reason thereafter, and was not taking any medication. No evidence ever surfaced to support Latell’s claims.
Latell also told Congress how peaceful Haiti was under their man, former World Bank executive Marc Bazin, who had been appointed Prime Minister by the people who overthrew Aristide.
But Latell’s claim that there was no systematic or frequent violence against civilians lay in stark contrast to the record observed by human rights groups and others.
“Obviously, we have visited two different countries,” Amnesty International’s program officer for the region said. “That anyone could go to Haiti at that time and not observe repression by the military is absurd.”
Indeed, in Aristide’s absence, FRAPH had gone from heinous to horrific, forcing new members to watch existing members rape and kill people. During the initiation process, the members were forced to participate in the raping and killing.
Why would the CIA want to defend these murders over the leftist Aristide? According to the right-wing Washington Times, intelligence analysts were particularly concerned about Aristide’s opposition to privatizing some industry in Haiti.
And as for that longstanding canard that the CIA only follows orders from the President and never makes policy, the Washington Times reported on Nov. 28, 1995, that “The CIA’s Directorate of Operations … successfully opposed efforts by the White House to take covert action to unseat Haiti’s military leaders to pave the way for restoring Mr. Aristide to office, even though he had been elected in a popular vote in 1990, the sources said. They said such action was deemed not suitable.”
Turning to the Military
President Clinton, unable to persuade the CIA to do his bidding, turned to the military instead; there, at least, he was still recognized as Commander in Chief.
In the wake of the failed landing in 1993 that was intended to reinstitute Aristide, as the violence in Haiti perpetrated by the ruling military junta against its citizens increased, even the Army War College, hardly a liberal outpost, issued a 60-page report decrying America’s timidity in this situation.
Eventually, the trio of former President Jimmy Carter, Sen. Sam Nunn and retired Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell were able to construct an arrangement that would return Aristide to power.
But by then, Aristide had only a year left in his term to serve, and by then, the problems he faced were even greater than the ones he had started with.
In addition, the agreement that brought Aristide back included a promise not to prosecute the coup leaders for their crimes. Forgiveness and reconciliation were the watchwords of the new Aristide administration. Justice was never on the menu.
Still, the public was so enthralled with Aristide that, after he stepped aside and let his hand-appointed prime minister run the country for several years, they voted him enthusiastically back into the presidency in the elections of 2000. This time he managed to serve three full years before being again ousted in a coup.
Aristide’s problems were compounded by the debacle in Florida that put George W. Bush in the White House. The new Bush administration went after leftists in the hemisphere with a vengeance.
Regarding Haiti, the Bush administration blocked loans that had been approved by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). These loans were targeted for projects that would provide health, education, roadwork and clean drinking water.
The Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Foundation was so outraged by this blatant obstructionism that it sued the IDB in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. The executive director of the foundation, Todd Howland, railed, “There have been actual deaths linked to the fact that the IDB never disbursed these loans.”
And to add insult to injury, the Haitian government had already paid $5 million in interest for the loan money it wasn’t receiving.
Annoying the French
Aristide made enemies in France as well when he tried to collect on a 200-year-old debt, dating back to when the Haitians won independence from France in a devastating war in which African slaves overthrew their slaveowners.
France remained covetous toward its former colony and demanded the equivalent of $21 billion in reparations. France, which had benefited from Haiti’s slave labor for many years, threatened to invade the country again if the ex-slaves did not pay off their former masters, and Haiti agreed.
In 2003, Aristide convened a four-day international conference to construct a plan to get that money back. France’s response was to ask Aristide to step down.
But the action that may have most directly precipitated Aristide’s final ouster might have been the one Aristide performed on Feb. 7, 2003: he doubled the country’s minimum wage. He raised it from $1 a day to $2.
This action was opposed by an organization of wealthy business leaders called Group 184, led by an American businessman named Andy Apaid, who ran a garment factory in Port-au-Prince. Apaid and Group 184 pressed constantly for Aristide’s removal.
Evidently, the business interests just couldn’t let a liberal leader do right by his people. Not at their expense. As Mark Weisbrot opined in The Nation (among other publications):
“The fix was in: The U.S. Agency for International Development and the International Republican Institute (the international arm of the Republican Party) had spent tens of millions of dollars to create and organize an opposition -- however small in numbers -- and to make Haiti under Aristide ungovernable.
“The whole scenario was strikingly similar to the series of events that led to the coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in April 2002. The same U.S. organizations were involved, and the opposition -- as in Venezuela -- controlled and used the major media as a tool for destabilization.
“And in both cases the coup leaders, joined by Washington, announced to the world that the elected president had ‘voluntarily resigned’ -- which later turned out to be false.”
And the 2004 coup against Aristide looked familiar to another infamous plot. It reeked of the operation that removed Jacobo Arbenz from power in Guatemala in 1954. In both cases, word of growing military opposition, headed toward the capital, was trumpeted daily in the media.
In both cases, the powers of that coming military opposition were grossly exaggerated. In both cases, had Arbenz or Aristide chosen to fight, they would likely have been able to hold their ground against the rag-tag forces that didn’t match the hype. But in both cases, neither leader knew this at the time.
Two Faces
Officially, of course, America pronounced that no one who overthrew the democratically elected leader of Haiti in a coup would be recognized as legitimate. But few in Haiti trusted those pronouncements.
As friends of Aristide, African-American activist Randall Robinson and his wife Hazel received a warning of a coming coup, which Robinson detailed in An Unbroken Agony.
On Feb. 28, 2004, radio talk show host Tavis Smiley called Robinson’s wife Hazel. Smiley was supposed to interview Aristide for his program the following day.
But Smiley told Hazel that he had heard from former Democratic Rep. Ron Dellums that Colin Powell had told Dellums that Guy Philippe (a former Haitian police chief who had trained with the U.S. Special Forces in Ecuador in the early 1990s) was leading a team to Port-au-Prince to kill Aristide and that the Bush administration was going to do nothing to prevent it.
Philippe had been openly boasting that on his birthday, Feb. 29, he would come to Port-au-Prince and kill the president.
Separately, Rep. Barbara Lee, D-California, called Hazel to offer help finding Aristide safe passage out of the country.
Hazel passed all this information along to Mrs. Aristide, who said thanks but no thanks, the president would not leave until he served out his full term.
Fearing Aristide and his wife might be killed, Hazel called Dellums and urged him to talk to the media, but her suggestion was met with silence.
Robinson called Peter Jennings and a couple of others in the media suggesting they talk to Dellums. All three called him back later to say Dellums declined to confirm the information. Someone had clearly set someone up. But who?
Robinson came to believe that Colin Powell had given Dellums bad information (that Phillipe was coming to attack, when in fact he was spotted leading his team in the opposite direction just days earlier).
Dellums, however, apparently believed the information, but wasn’t willing to jeopardize his relationship with Powell by confirming it, even though Powell appears to have deliberately leaked false information to Dellums in the hope that he would disclose it to frighten Aristide out of the country.
But that plan failed. So a different tack was taken.
Abdication or Abduction?
On Feb. 29, Hazel got a call from another Democratic Congresswoman from California: Maxine Waters, who said CNN was reporting that the Aristides had fled the country the night before. Hazel didn’t believe it, given the calm manner in which Mrs. Aristide had responded the day before.
In addition, Hazel was incensed. “Did you see what the networks did?” Hazel asked Waters. The networks had used old footage of Aristide getting on a commercial plane, using file video to give the impression of a man voluntarily leaving his country.
The next morning, Robinson received a call from Aristide, who told him, over a fragile line, “They brought us to the Central African Republic,” and, “Tell them for us it was a coup. …”
And then the line went dead.
Robinson later obtained a detailed statement from Frantz Gabriel, the president’s helicopter pilot, a former sergeant in the U.S. Army, of how Aristide was essentially kidnapped around 4:00 a.m. at gunpoint and removed from the presidential palace in Gabriel’s presence.
My first blog post ever at my Real History Blog was about this event. As I wrote at the time:
“I used to have the time to publish essays at my Real History Archives site, but with events moving so quickly, I realized what I really needed was a blog to keep up with the (dis)information being spewed at us daily.
“Today was a classic case in point. I had to get a blog up when I saw what was being done to the Aristide coup story. A typical headline told us that Aristide has stepped down from ruling Haiti to avoid bloodshed.
“But read a few more stories and you'll see that he said he was abducted, that this was a coup helped along by the US Government. Bush (I refuse to call an unelected man ‘President’) stated that Aristide resigned. But around the world, other voices have reason to doubt. You would too, if you knew the Real History ... stay tuned.”
It’s taken me until the recent earthquake to tell the rest of that sad story.
Aftermath
Had America let Aristide run his country, without interfering, or had the United States interfered only to protect the Haitian people from the Duvaliers, the Guy Philippes and the Andy Apaids, the suffering in Haiti would have been greatly lessened.
If Washington had let them have their loans for health care, infrastructure, and clean water, there might not be the degree of suffering that we are witnessing in Haiti today.
America bears a huge burden of responsibility for Haiti’s poverty and government dysfunction. But if Americans truly want to reduce Haiti’s suffering now, there must be an end to U.S. support for those who would exploit their own people for personal gain.
Let Haitians decide who will lead them and in what manner. The United States must let their light shine, in whatever direction they choose to point it. America must, for once, follow, and not lead. The Haitians know best what is in their own interest.
Piti, piti, wazo fe nich li. Little by little, they will rebuild their nest.
For Part One, click here.


http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/013110d.html

[Peter Lemkin]

Saturday, January 30, 2010

America's Sorry History with Haiti

I just completed a long article on Haiti for ConsortiumNews.com, which will be published in two parts. Part 1 is up today - Part 2 should be up tomorrow.

There are some interesting nuggets related to George de Mohrenschildt's strange role in Haiti as well.

Start here: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/013010a.html

And I'd love to hear your thoughts.

posted by Real History Lisa at 6:22 PM - Permanent Link -

####

America's Sorry History with Haiti
By Lisa Pease
January 30, 2010
With all the talk of America taking charge of Haiti for a while, it would be prudent for us to take a step back and review the history of our various interventions in Haiti, and the outcomes of those efforts.
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For there is another kind of aid that the people of Haiti need that isn’t being talked about. They need us to understand their real history, their culture and their potential.

They need us to stop patronizing them and interfering with their progress so they can realize the freedom they are still seeking two centuries after officially casting off the shackles of slavery. [For more on that era, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Haiti and America’s Historic Debt.”]
If there’s one lesson we’ve had to learn in Haiti over and over, it’s that the solutions to Haiti’s problems can never be imposed from the outside. They must be allowed to grow from within.
And we have to let those solutions flourish, instead of trying to shape them to the liking of our business class, as we have repeatedly attempted to do, with disastrous effect.
The Military Occupation
In 1915, the United States began a nearly 20-year military occupation of Haiti, ostensibly to guarantee the country’s substantial debt repayments to American and other foreign lenders. But historian Hans Schmidt, among others, questioned this motive, as he found that Haiti’s record of repayment had been “exemplary” compared with that of other Latin American countries.
The larger reason for the occupation, according to Schmidt and others, was to keep European financial interests (German and French in particular) from economically colonizing Haiti at a time when America, having recently completed the Panama Canal, was hoping to expand its own sphere of influence in the Caribbean.
And potential investors in Haiti, such as the United Fruit Company (whose name is familiar to anyone who has studied the CIA’s coup in Guatemala), weren’t going to move in unless the U.S. took over the government and brought stability.
To be fair, it’s not like America alone ruined the place. Haiti was a mess when the U.S. forces got there. Of the 11 presidents who had held office in Haiti from 1888 to 1915, only one had apparently died a natural death, and none had served their full term. Seven presidents were killed or overthrown in 1911 alone.
And from 1843 to 1915, Haiti had been through, according to Robert and Nancy Heinl in their book Written in Blood, “at least 102 civil wars, revolutions, insurrections” or as one commentator called it, a series of “bloody operettas.”
Years of various colonization attempts had divided Haiti into an economic and cultural caste system that was in part racially based. The whites and lighter-skinned people often held the money and position; the darker the skin, the lower down the economic totem pole one was likely to be.
Efforts to spread modern technology among the peasant population fell flat, and working all day for someone else’s profit wasn’t much of an incentive for people who had few needs and were accustomed to scarcity.
In addition, many Americans who came to Haiti looked down on the native people, often due to racial prejudice. The Americans typically didn’t recognize the value of the natives’ knowledge, and believed that America knew what was best for Haiti.
One notable exception was Major Smedley Butler, who noted that “The Haitian people are divided into two classes; one class wears shoes and the other does not. The class that wears shoes is about one percent. …
“Ninety-nine percent of the people of Haiti are the most kindly, generous, hospitable, pleasure-loving people I have ever known. They would not hurt anybody [unless incited by the shoe-wearers; then] they are capable of the most horrible atrocities.”
“Those that wore shoes I took as a joke,” Butler added. “Without a sense of humor, you could not live in Haiti among these people, among the shoe class.”
Ignorance and Arrogance
You’d think that if you wanted to help a people become a prospering democracy that the first thing you’d offer them would be an education. But over 10 years into the U.S. occupation, 95 percent of the Haitian population remained illiterate.
The one educational effort the U.S. put forward was the Service Technique, a training program in agricultural and industrial technology. The problem with that, as Schmidt noted, was that the elite “traditionally held that manual labor was demeaning, while the peasants were enmeshed in subsistence farming and were reluctant to risk an already tenuous existence in outlandish experiments that were fundamental to American technological progress.”
In addition, American arrogance even prevented an exchange of ideas that could have benefited American businesses. For example, the Haitians had developed a much more efficient way of farming cotton than the industrial farming methods employed by the Americans. But Americans pushed their own technology instead.
Not surprisingly, the Americans failed to win many converts.
What little profit Haiti did make, financially, was used to pay off American bankers, sometimes in advance of the payment schedule. Funding education and public projects -- the very projects the loans had been provided for -- were not the priorities.
Haitian laborers were paid pennies an hour to work 12-hour days. Raising wages was discouraged for fear it might cause capital to seek a more favorable climate.
In 1925 and 1926, in an attempt to make the country more attractive to farming interests such as United Fruit, the Marines took aerial photographs of the land in the hopes of creating a cadastral survey showing actual boundaries of property.
But the photographs were destroyed in a fire, and American officials for the large part refused to pressure the masses into selling their tiny, title-less but generations-held property to American businesses.
When the market crash in 1929 rippled around the world, Haiti’s productive coffee farms lost their markets, and the people returned to subsistence-level farming. Students began striking to protest the American occupation, and soon others joined in a general strike.
An early attempt at “shock and awe” failed as miserably in Haiti as it did in Iraq. The Marines dropped bombs in a harbor where a particularly aggressive group of protesting Haitians had gathered. But instead of cowing them, the demonstration seemed to instigate them further. The Marines had to fire on the group to disperse them.
Ultimately, the depression turned the tide of opinion in Haiti against its American occupiers, increasingly seen as oppressors.
By 1932, tensions had come to a head, and President Hoover began taking steps to end the occupation. President Roosevelt completed the action in 1934.
Evaluating the Effort
What did the United States leave the Haitians with in return for the occupation? The U.S. did bring them some years of relative stability, law and order. The U.S. built some hospitals and rural health clinics as well as some roads and bridges and airstrips.
But for all that, as a contemporary observer noted, “the Haitian people are, today, little better fitted for self-government than they were in 1915.”
U.S. military forces also killed thousands of Haitians in efforts to achieve security.
The aforementioned Major Butler became quite outspoken about the role he’d been forced to play. “I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912…
“Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."
Did the U.S. learn from this failed attempt at nation building? No. The U.S. just kept intervening, with repeatedly disastrous results.
Cut to 1957. Whatever modernization was achieved from the U.S. occupation was already a distant memory. Bridges and roads had fallen into disrepair. The same drive that in 1934 took two hours to complete by 1957 took nine hours by jeep (in good weather) due to unpaved potholes and the island’s “wrinkled paper” topology.
And that was just one road.
Imagine a country without a telephone system, with failing bridges, ports with crumbling docks, patients lying ill on the floor of dirty hospitals, political institutions in shambles or even nonexistent. Imagine what you’re seeing now, post-earthquake, as the everyday state of things.
‘President for Life’
Enter François Duvalier, a Haitian man of medicine who became known as “Papa Doc.” He was an educated man, not a soldier. He was a black man who wore suits and ties. He looked like the kind of conservative figure American business interests could support.
But Duvalier was also an adept of Voodoo. He studied Machiavelli. He mastered his country’s history, and learned what hadn’t worked for his predecessors, and took steps to avoid their mistakes.
Despite the New York Times’ initial portrait of him as “mild-mannered doctor,” Duvalier, upon winning the presidency in 1957, became a ruthless, corrupt dictator.
Duvalier knew he needed to gain control over the military, since most of the previous coups against Haitian leaders had come from that source. He built his own private strike force, the Tonton Macoutes, and got rid of opposition leaders in the military.
He brought back the death penalty, which had been abolished for years. Private radio transmitters were confiscated. Journalists were followed, harassed, and in some cases beaten into silence. He quickly turned Haiti into a police state, ruling by terror and brute force.
In 1958, Duvalier hired a U.S. consulting firm to review his government and offer suggestions for improving its efficiency. And then he ignored their advice. He had already learned that the easiest way to get money from the U.S. was simply to raise the threat of communists in his country.
In 1961, Duvalier ran a slate of candidates for top government positions under his own name, and when they were “elected” (by 1.3 million people out of 1 million eligible voters), baldly claimed that he himself had been re-elected to a second term, as his name had been at the top of the ballot.
Second terms were expressly forbidden by the Haitian constitution. But since Duvalier held the military in tow, no one dared press that point. The U.S., however, refused to recognize the legitimacy of his claim, and President Kennedy promptly recalled the American ambassador in Port-au-Prince.
When Duvalier had first come to power under the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. had given him aid money to help get him off to a good start. But after the sham of an election in 1961 and additional atrocities that followed, President Kennedy slammed the brakes on American aid and by August 1962 began closing out operations.
The 70-person AID mission was reduced to eight people, who remained to administer a malaria-prevention program and to supervise the distribution of surplus food. U.S. military assistance programs were cancelled.
(Duvalier later celebrated when President Kennedy was assassinated, and sent an emissary to gather some air from Kennedy’s grave site, among other items, so he could attempt, through Voodoo, to capture Kennedy’s “soul” and harness it for his own purposes.)
In 1962, Duvalier’s Foreign Minister threatened to block an Organization of American States (OAS) vote unless the U.S. gave him aid money. An angry Dean Rusk agreed, causing desk officers to joke that Dean’s expense account for the day read, “Breakfast: $2.25. Lunch with Haitian Foreign Minister: $2,800,000.00.”
American Backing
On his way to power, Duvalier had quietly suggested to some that he had American backing.
Indeed, Clemard Joseph Charles, an American with a variety of financial ties, became “banker and bagman” for Duvalier, paying off military officers to support Duvalier’s ascent to power. Charles was the president of the Banque Commerciale d’Haiti.
According to various witnesses interviewed by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in the late 1970s, Charles received funding from businessmen in Texas and had numerous CIA ties. Charles’ work included finding ways to join American capital with Haitian development projects. He also managed to obtain two American fighter jets for Duvalier.
In May of 1963, Sam Kail, an army intelligence officer working closely with the CIA’s Miami station, thought Duvalier might be of use to the CIA in their efforts to remove Castro from power.
(Oddly enough, Walt Elder, CIA Director John McCone’s assistant, told the Church Committee that the CIA was arming rebels in the hopes that they would overthrow Duvalier. A CIA document notes Duvalier had become intractable and that overthrowing him would help the CIA’s image, which was regarded in Latin America as primarily propping up repressive regimes.)
Kail asked Dorothe Matlack, who served as the Assistant Director of the Office of Intelligence in the Army as well as a liaison to the CIA, if she would see Clemard Charles in Washington, D.C., during Charles’ upcoming trip.
Matlack invited Charles to speak with her and CIA officer Tony Czaikowski, whom she introduced to Charles as a Georgetown professor. Charles, for his part, brought George de Mohrenschildt and de Mohrenschildt’s wife to the meeting.
George de Mohrenschildt was a White Russian who had befriended that “communist” Lee Harvey Oswald at the request of J. Walter Moore, a CIA officer in Dallas.
According to Edward J. Epstein, who interviewed de Mohrenschildt, Moore asked de Mohrenschildt to meet with Oswald, as Oswald had just returned from Minsk and Moore knew de Mohrenschildt had grown up in that area.
De Mohrenschildt responded that, while he knew there could be no strict quid pro quo, he’d appreciate some help from the U.S. Embassy to aid in an oil exploration deal he was trying to accomplish with Duvalier.
Matlack told the HSCA that Charles seemed “frantic and frightened” as he urged Matlack to get the U.S. Marines to overthrow Duvalier. (Czaikowski suggested in his notes of this meeting that a cousin of Charles might eventually succeed Duvalier. Elsewhere, Charles and de Mohrenschildt suggested Charles himself as a potential candidate. In 1967, Duvalier imprisoned Charles.)
Matlack was unnerved by the way de Mohrenschildt seemed to “dominate” Charles. Matlack wondered what the true nature of their relationship was, and didn’t believe the explanation they gave her -- that they were developing a jute business together in Haiti.
“I knew the Texan wasn’t there to sell hemp,” Matlack told the HSCA.
Matlack was so disturbed by de Mohrenschildt’s behavior that she notified the FBI liaison, about it. And she wasn’t the only one disturbed by de Mohrenschildt’s behavior.
Another witness told the HSCA that de Mohrenschildt used to follow people in his car, that he appeared to have “some intelligence connections,” and that a mutual acquaintance who swam in intelligence circles said some $200,000 had been deposited in de Mohrenschildt’s Haitian bank account (though not the one at Charles’ bank) shortly after the Kennedy assassination.
The money was later paid out, but the acquaintance wasn’t sure to whom.
George McMillan, who wrote a book that claimed James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King (a finding a jury did not uphold in a civil trial in 1999), and who was married to Priscilla Johnson McMillan (who wrote a book about Oswald and whose CIA file listed her as a “witting collaborator”), wrote in the Washington Post that he had once stayed with de Mohrenschildt and his wife in Haiti at their home in Port-au-Prince.
McMillan noted the de Mohrenschildt’s lived, “not insignificantly, I suppose, within the compound where Papa Doc Duvalier then lived. We had to pass through heavily guarded gates as we came and went.”
Why was de Mohrenschildt so close to Duvalier? Was he keeping tabs on the dictator for the CIA? Or was he keeping tabs on the CIA for Duvalier? Whatever the truth, this 1964 State Department document sadly sums up America’s priorities at the time when it came to Haiti:
“United States interests range from the need to protect American citizens and property interests to ensuring that Haiti votes on the merit of questions of importance to the United States and the free world in international organizations and forums. The United States also has an abiding interest in the social and economic welfare of the Haitian people.” [Emphasis added.]
In June 1964, Duvalier rewrote his country’s constitution so that it included a provision by which he could be named “President for Life,” and then had his hand-picked legislators “vote” to make him so. He now officially met anyone’s definition of a dictator, in full bloom.
Throughout both Duvaliers’ rule – “Papa Doc” and his son who was called “Baby Doc” – the U.S. sent selected Haitian officials to the infamous School of the Americas, where they were trained in torture techniques and other methods of oppression. The graduates were then returned to the Haitian military and civilian police forces, giving Americans increasing control over the military during the Duvaliers’ regimes.
“Papa Doc” Duvalier’s shrewd manipulations continued even after his death. He had made provisions for his son to rule in the event of his passing. Observers didn’t think the son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, had the grit to run the country.
But the son managed to hold the presidency for 15 years after his father’s death before a coalition of forces that included the U.S. ousted him due to the cumulative horrors perpetrated under the family’s rule and the disastrous economic mess they had created.
In 1981, Hurricane Allen ripped up the Haitian countryside as well as the usually untouched Port-au-Prince at a time when the Haitians were already in economic despair. Unable to vote in any meaningful way at home, many Haitians started voting with their feet, and left Haiti en masse to seek refuge in America.
No Haitians Allowed
But unlike the Cubans who fled their homeland, Haitians were not welcomed in the U.S. with open arms.
The new administration under Ronald Reagan claimed there was no racial bias, that the Cubans were political refugees whereas the Haitians were merely economic refugees. (It probably helped that the Cubans were fleeing a leftist government, while the Haitians were fleeing a right-wing one.)
When bevies of volunteer lawyers rushed to defend the incoming poor from Haiti, the Reagan administration, with Jean-Claude’s acquiescence, stationed a U.S. Coast Guard ship off the coast to head off refugees before they got to U.S. shores.
As part of this agreement, U.S. aid money to Haiti increased. In addition, a former World Bank official named Marc Bazin, whom the U.S. favored, was installed as the new finance minister.
But conditions in Haiti continued to worsen. Arable land was declining due to dramatic deforestation. Diseases still ravaged the island, including now AIDS. Literacy rates continued to be obscenely low, and corruption was as rampant as ever. And as usual, to control the populace, violence was too often employed.
By 1986, the citizens were in full revolt. Fearing widespread bloodshed, and urged out by the United States, Jean-Claude departed the country. Anything and anyone related to the Duvaliers and other oppressors became a subject of attack.
The Duvaliers sent Papa Doc’s coffin to France so the masses couldn’t get to it. Streets were renamed back to their original Haitian names. A statue of Columbus was toppled.
While Jean-Claude denied that the U.S. forced him out, he accepted a flight on a U.S. cargo plane to leave the country for France. (France had only offered him temporary asylum, but no other country would take him.)
Another series of revolving door leaders would temporarily preside over the country.
End of Part One

Good article, and sadly the 'same-old, same-old'. Mattlack was working under Lansdale, who many [including myself and Prouty] believe was involved in the JFK Assassination and even in Dallas - walking past the tramps - obviously 'his men'. Now that we know there is vast oil and gold reserves, the poor Haitians don't have a chance.....and they certainly can't have the democratically and popular leader they want [Aristide], but must have an American client dictator....as in so many other places past and present. Disgusting. Really is such an honor being an American - were I not a dissident one, I think I'd feel compelled at some ritual suicide or self-flagellation to cleans our endless crimes. But, being on the 'other side' I just feel the constant nausea - political and existential. Meanwhile MOST Americans do NOT get IT!

[Ed Jewett]

Haiti: The Broken Wing

by MediaLens / February 3rd, 2010
It matters that the media have lavished so much attention on the aftermath of Haiti’s January 12 earthquake. The coverage has helped inspire people around the world to give of their time, energy and money in responding to the disaster. On the Democracy Now! website last week, filmmaker Michael Moore described how almost 12,000 members of the US National Nurses Union had signed up to leave for Haiti immediately. Moore explained:

… the executive director of the National Nurses Union. She contacted the [Obama] administration. She got put off. She had no response. Then they sent her to some low-level person that had no authority to do anything.
And then, finally, she’s contacting me. And she says, ‘Do you know any way to get a hold of President Obama?’ And I’m going, ‘Well, this is pretty pathetic if you’re having to call me. I mean, you are the largest nurses union… I don’t know what I can do for you. I mean, I’ll put my call in, too.’ But as we sit here today, not a whole heck of a lot has happened. And it’s distressing.

The courage and compassion of thousands of people willing to enter a chaotic disaster zone threatened with aftershocks are very real. Compassion arises out of a recognition that ‘their’ suffering is no different to ‘my’ suffering. The heart trembles and softens in response to this awareness. Such a subtle resonance and yet it has the power to relieve much of the world’s despair. It is the only counter force to the brutality and greed of human egotism willing to sacrifice everyone and everything for ‘me’.
But if compassion is to make a real difference, it must be allied to rational analysis. In the absence of this analysis, compassion is like a bird with a broken wing flapping in futile circles, never leaving the ground.
Joining compassion with reason means asking why over 80 per cent of Haiti’s population of 10 million people live in abject poverty. Why less than 45 per cent of all Haitians have access to potable water. Why the life expectancy rate in Haiti is only 53 years. Why seventy-six per cent of Haiti’s children under the age of five are underweight, or suffer from stunted growth, with 63 per cent of Haitians undernourished. Why 1 in every 10,000 Haitians has access to a doctor.
In September 2008, Dan Beeton of the US-based Center for Economic and Policy Research told us:

Media coverage of floods and other natural disasters in Haiti consistently overlooks the human-made contribution to those disasters. In Haiti’s case, this is the endemic poverty, the lack of infrastructure, lack of adequate health care, and lack of social spending that has resulted in so many people living in shacks and make-shift housing, and most of the population in poverty. But Haiti’s poverty is a legacy of impoverishment, a result of centuries of economic looting of the country by France, the U.S., and of odious debt owed to creditors like the Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank. Haiti has never been allowed to pursue an economic development strategy of its own choosing, and recent decades of IMF-mandated policies have left the country more impoverished than ever.1

John Pilger has witnessed the reality on the ground that explains Western interest in the country:

When I was last in Haiti, I watched very young girls stooped in front of whirring, hissing, binding machines at the Port-au-Prince Superior Baseball Plant. Many had swollen eyes and lacerated arms. I produced a camera and was thrown out. Haiti is where America makes the equipment for its hallowed national game, for next to nothing. Haiti is where Walt Disney contractors make Mickey Mouse pyjamas, for next to nothing. The US controls Haiti’s sugar, bauxite and sisal. Rice-growing was replaced by imported American rice, driving people into the cities and towns and jerry-built housing. Years after year, Haiti was invaded by US marines, infamous for atrocities that have been their specialty from the Philippines to Afghanistan.2

Peter Hallward examined recent US policy in Haiti in the Guardian:

Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti’s people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s phrase) ‘from absolute misery to a dignified poverty’ has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.3

The US Double Game
Aristide took office in February 1991 and was briefly the first democratically elected President in Haiti’s history before being overthrown by a US-backed military coup on September 30, 1991. The Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs observed after the coup:

Under Aristide, for the first time in the republic’s tortured history, Haiti seemed to be on the verge of tearing free from the fabric of despotism and tyranny which had smothered all previous attempts at democratic expression and self-determination.” His victory “represented more than a decade of civic engagement and education on his part,” in “a textbook example of participatory, ‘bottom-up’ and democratic political development.”4

Aristide’s balancing of the budget and “trimming of a bloated bureaucracy” led to a “stunning success” that made White House planners “extremely uncomfortable”. The view of a US official “with extensive experience of Haiti” summed up the reality beneath US rhetoric. Aristide, slum priest, grass-roots activist, exponent of Liberation Theology, “represents everything that CIA, DOD and FBI think they have been trying to protect this country against for the past 50 years.”5
Following the fall of Aristide, also with US support, at least 1,000 people were killed in the first two weeks of the coup and hundreds more by December. The paramilitary forces were led by former CIA employees Emmanuel Constant and Raoul Cedras. Aristide was forced into exile from 1991-94. Noam Chomsky summarised the situation:

Well, as this was going on, the Haitian generals in effect were being told [by Washington]: ‘Look, murder the leaders of the popular organisations, intimidate the whole population, destroy anyone who looks like they might get in the way after you’re gone.’… And that’s exactly what Cedras and those guys did, that’s precisely what happened — and of course they were given total amnesty when they finally did agree to step down.6

In 1994, the US returned Aristide in the company of 20,000 troops. This was presented as a noble defence of democracy, but in fact the US was playing a double game. As Chomsky noted, Aristide was allowed to return only after the coup leaders had slaughtered much of the popular movement that had brought him to power. His return was also conditional on acceptance of both the US military occupation and Washington’s harsh neoliberal agenda. The plans for the economy were set out in a document submitted to the Paris Club of international donors at the World Bank in August 1994. The Haiti desk officer of the World Bank, Axel Peuker, described the plan as beneficial to the “more open, enlightened, business class” and foreign investors.7
In 2004, the US engineered a further coup by cutting off almost all international aid over the previous four years, making the government’s collapse inevitable. Aristide was forced to leave Haiti by US military forces. US Congresswoman, Barbara Lee, challenged the US government:
“It appears that the US is aiding and abetting the attempt to violently topple the Aristide government. With all due respect, this looks like ‘regime change’.”8
In our search of the Lexis Nexis media database (February 3) we checked for articles containing the word ‘Haiti’ over the last month. This gave 2,256 results (some online press articles are not captured by Lexis Nexis). Our search for articles containing ‘Aristide’ gave 47 results. The words ‘Haiti’ and ‘Voodoo’ gave 53 results. The words ‘Haiti’ and ‘looting’ gave 136 results.
These numbers give an idea of how the broken wing of media analysis keeps public compassion grounded in an endless circling that is powerless to end the suffering of the people of Haiti.
Media Performance
The 47 mentions of Aristide in 2,256 articles discussing Haiti contained around nine articles that discussed US responsibility for his overthrow. We found several more online articles — notably two excellent pieces by Mark Weisbrot and one by Hugh O’Shaugnessey in the Guardian — that were not picked up by Lexis Nexis.
Hallward made a brief reference in his Guardian article, cited above. Seumas Milne wrote in the Guardian that Aristide’s challenge to Haiti’s oligarchy and its international sponsors “led to two foreign-backed coups and US invasions, a suspension of aid and loans, and eventual exile in 2004.”
Isabel Hilton wrote in the Independent:
“President Clinton negotiated his [Aristide’s] return in 1994, reportedly on condition that he accept a US blueprint for Haiti’s economic development. When Aristide won a second election in 2001, he was again deposed, in 2004, this time forcibly flown by George W Bush’s administration to exile in Africa, where he remains.”
Mark Steel, Patrick Cockburn and Andrew Buncombe made similar comments in the Independent. To his credit, Buncombe published two pieces mentioning the US role in Aristide’s overthrow. This handful of brief references to the US role in destroying Aristide, restricted to two national newspapers — the Guardian and the Independent — represents most of the honest commentary on this issue available to the public. Meanwhile, a flood of mainstream broadcast and print coverage has depicted the US as the high-tech saviour of Haiti.
Even more shocking, not one of the above national media journalists made any mention of the role of the +media+ in suppressing the truth of the US role in Haiti. Journalists apparently do not find this silence problematic.
If it is important for journalists to hold governments to account, then why not their own industry? Public awareness and outrage +do+ have the power to obstruct government criminality. But the public cannot know enough to be outraged, to resist, if the media does not tell them what is happening and why.
Nevertheless, it seems clear to us that there has been a marked improvement in current media performance on Haiti compared to the output we analysed in 2004. Then, the US role was almost completely buried out of sight.
It could be that Aristide’s fate simply matters less now. Alternatively, it could be, as we believe, that this is evidence that the mainstream is beginning to improve its performance in response to pressure from alternative, web-based media. With all mainstream trend lines pointing down, notably advertising revenues, and with readers turning in droves to non-corporate websites, it could be that the mainstream liberal media are being forced to compete by publishing more honest, radical material. If so, this is an extremely hopeful sign for everyone who cares about working for a more peaceful, rational world.
Of Devils And Dignity Lost
The rest of recent media performance is consistent with earlier coverage. In 2004, as democracy was being crushed, The Times observed:
“Mr Aristide, a former Roman Catholic priest, won Haiti’s first free elections in 1990, promising to end the country’s relentless cycle of corruption, poverty and demagoguery. Ousted in a coup the following year, he was restored to power with the help of 20,000 US troops in 1994.”9
There was no mention of the history of US support for mass murderers attacking a democratic government and killing its supporters.
The Guardian also believed the US had “restored” Aristide:

To a degree, history repeated itself when the US intervened again in 1994 to restore Mr Aristide. Bill Clinton halted the influx of Haitian boat people that had become politically awkward in Florida. Then he moved on. Although the US has pumped in about $900m in the past decade, consistency and vision have been lacking.10

The BBC, Channel 4 News and other media followed the same themes11
Following the January 12 earthquake, Charles Bremner wrote in the Times: “Bankrupt, barren, misruled and ravaged by nature and human violence, the country on the western end of Hispaniola island serves as a text-book example of a dysfunctional nation.
“While the rest of the Americas have been pulling out of poverty in recent decades, Haiti has sunk deeper into destitution, dependent on foreign charity and a United Nations force to keep its eight million people from starving and fighting.”
And the explanation for this? Bremner quoted Joel Dreyfuss, a Haitian journalist, who observed sagely: “Some countries just have no luck. Haiti is one of those places where disaster follows on disaster.”
The photo caption to Vanessa Buschschluter‘s piece on the BBC website read: “The Clinton Administration intervened to restore President Aristide to power.” She added: “US troops left after two years — too soon, some experts argue, to ensure the stability of Haiti’s democratic institutions.”
In the Observer, Regine Chassagne could only lament “the west’s centuries of disregard.”12
Tragicomically, the media has preferred to focus on the colonial past 200 years ago rather than on the destruction of democracy in the last decade. Ben Macintyre wrote in The Times: “But for many Haitians, the fault lies earlier — with Haiti’s colonial experience, the slavers and extortionists of empire who crippled it with debt and permanently stunted the economy. The fault line runs back 200 years, directly to France.”
As for the role of the US: “When the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, pledged a US presence in Haiti for today, tomorrow and the time ahead, she was addressing a central concern of a relationship that has swung wildly from intervention to neglect.”
In the Guardian, Jon Henley wrote a piece entitled, ‘Haiti: a long descent to hell.’
We wrote to Henley on January 26:
Hi Jon
In your January 14 Guardian article, ‘Haiti: a long descent to hell,’ you discussed Haiti’s history without once mentioning the role of the United States. Also in the Guardian, Peter Hallward wrote on January 13:
“Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti’s people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s phrase) ‘from absolute misery to a dignified poverty’ has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/...tis-plight)
In 2004, Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics at Columbia University, wrote in The Nation:
“Haiti, again, is ablaze. Almost nobody, however, understands that today’s chaos was made in Washington – deliberately, cynically, and steadfastly. History will bear this out.” (Sachs, ‘Fanning the flames of political chaos in Haiti’, The Nation, February 28, 2004)
Why did you make no mention of these issues?
Best wishes
David Edwards
Henley replied on January 27:
hi david
obviously i “did not once mention the role of the united states” (which is untrue, in fact: i did mention the occupation) because i am a fervent believer in the longterm benefits of US cultural and commercial imperialism.
happy?
no seriously: the article was about haiti’s colonial and post-colonial inheritance, the impossible reparations it was still paying until 1947, and the impact of its own corrupt and despotic rulers. i had five hours to write the piece and i ran out of time nd space to discuss the aristide era, about which many readers know something already and which in any event only compounded the country’s pre-existing problems.
i’m sorry this meant the article did not meet your high quality criteria. many other people have expressed their appreciation for throwing some light on an earlier period in haiti’s troubled history about which they knew nothing.
best wishes
jh
ps i assume you have chapter and verse to substantiate rofessor achs’s comment. unfortunately, at time of writing, didn’t.
If the media has had little time or space to consider the recent demolition of Haitian democracy, there has been room aplenty for speculation on the mysterious causes of Haitian suffering: “Why does God allow natural disasters?”, asked philosopher David Bain on the BBC website.
Archbishop of York John Sentamu wisely declared that he had “nothing to say to make sense of this horror”, while Canon Giles Fraser preferred to respond “not with clever argument but with prayer.” American Christian televangelist Pat Robertson said of Haitians: “They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil… ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another.”
For others the problem with Haiti appears to be the innate lawlessness of Haitians – “looting” has been a constant, shameful theme in media reporting of survivors’ efforts simply to stay alive. The BBC’s well-fed Washington correspondent, Matt Frei, opined from the stricken country that “looting is the only industry” and “the dignity of Haiti’s past is long forgotten”.
Other commentators have been awestruck by the fortitude and dignity of a people tragically accustomed to struggling against impossible odds.
Talk of colonial betrayals, deals with the devil, and a loss of dignity are fine. They are embarrassing, certainly, but not to the vested interests with the power to reward and punish. Expressions of sympathy in response to heartbreaking pictures on the evening news are also fine — they are important and admirable but ultimately unthreatening to the political and economic forces crushing the Haitian people.
More even than water, medicine, food and petrol, the people of Haiti need truth. They need donations of honesty from journalist whistleblowers willing to defy the self-imposed super-injunction on the complicity of their industry. They need journalists willing to break the silence, to defy the lie that only governments are to blame for the misery in our world.
Donate to Haiti.

1. Email to Media Lens, September 9, 2008. [↩]
   
2. Pilger, ‘The kidnapping of Haiti.’ [↩]
   
3. Hallward, ‘Our role in Haiti’s plight,’ The Guardian, January 13, 2010. [↩]
   
4. Quoted, Chomsky, Year 501 — The Conquest Continues, Verso, 1993, p.209. [↩]
   
5. Quoted, Paul Quinn-Judge, ‘US reported to intercept Aristide calls,’ Boston Globe, September 8, 1994. [↩]
   
6. Chomsky, Understanding Power, The New Press, 2002, p.157. [↩]
   
7. Quoted Noam Chomsky, ‘Democracy Restored,’ Z Magazine, November 1994. [↩]
   
8. Quoted Anthony Fenton, ‘Media vs. reality in Haiti,’ February 13, 2004. [↩]
   
9. ‘Barricades go up as city braces for attack’, Tim Reid, The Times, February 26, 2004. [↩]
   
10. ‘From bad to worse’, Leader, The Guardian, February 14, 2004. [↩]
    
11. See our media alerts ‘Bringing Hell To Haiti’ and Part 2. [↩]
    
12. Chassagne, ‘Think of Haiti and imagine all that you love has gone,’ The Observer, January 17, 2010. [↩]
    

Media Lens is a UK-based media watchdog group headed by David Edwards and David Cromwell. The first Media Lens book is Guardians of Power: The Myth Of The Liberal Media (Pluto Books, London, 2006). Read other articles by Media Lens, or visit Media Lens's website.
This article was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 9:00am and is filed under "Aid", Democracy, Haiti, Media.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/02/haiti-...oken-wing/

[Ed Jewett]

Child Slavery in Haiti

by Stephen Lendman / February 3rd, 2010
In November 1989, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child, recognizing “that in all countries in the world, there are children living in exceptionally difficult conditions, and that such children need special consideration.” Then in May 2000, the General Assembly adopted an Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography.
In 1990, the UN Commission on Human Rights appointed a Special Rapporteur on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography with a mandate to investigate the problem and submit reports to the General Assembly.
Today, Gulnara Shahinian holds the post, and on June 10, 2009 addressed Haiti’s Restaveks, a century-old system under which impoverished families, mostly rural and unable to adequately provide for their children, send them to live with wealthier or less poor ones in return for food, shelter, education, and a better life in return for tasks performed as servants — de facto slaves subjected to verbal and physical abuse.
Some as young as three are beaten, forced to do anything asked, request nothing, speak only when spoken to, display no emotion, and receive none of the benefits parents expected, just exploitation and mistreatment that’s often severe. Too often it’s from relatives as poor families often send their children to live with those better able to provide care, yet they seldom do.
Haiti’s poor also use them to help with domestic and other chores, and some work for homeless families under the worst of conditions, including nothing to eat for days, harder work, greater abuse, at times whippings leaving scars, getting attacked by rats in their sleep or street predators any time, and being easy prey for kidnappers who seize them for prostitution or forced labor, internally or abroad.
On July 10, 2009, Shahinian released a report titled, “Promotion and Protection of all Human Rights, Civil, Political, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, including the Right to Development” covering contemporary forms of slavery that affect adults and children.
She called it a global issue in traditional and emerging forms that haven’t been sufficiently addressed. She also found that where laws on forced labor exist, enforcement is limited, and “very few policies and programmes… address bonded labour.” They should given its scale worldwide, affecting an estimated 27 million people conservatively and very likely many more as much of the problem is unreported.
In March 2009, this writer addressed it in an article titled, “Modern Slavery in America.” It’s disturbing and pervasive despite US laws prohibiting all forms of human trafficking through statutes created or strengthened by the 2000 Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (VTVPA) providing for imprisonment for up to 20 years or longer as well as other penalties. Other laws were also enacted, including the 2003 Protect Act to end child exploitation.
Yet slavery exists in different forms, affecting farm workers, domestic help, factory and other sweatshop labor, restaurant and hotel work, guest workers on US military bases in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, and most of all for prostitution and sex services that exploit children as well as adults.
The International Labor Organization (ILO) defines forced labor as follows:
“… all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which said person has not offered himself (or herself) voluntarily.”
Forced child labor is:
(a) all forms of slavery or practices similar to slavery, such as the sale and trafficking of children, debt bondage and serfdom and forced or compulsory labor, including forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict;
(b) the use, procuring or offering of a child for prostitution, for the production of pornography or for pornographic performances;
© the use, procuring or offering of a child for illicit activities, in particular for the production and trafficking of drugs as defined in the relevant international treaties; (and)
(d) work which, by its nature or the circumstances in which it is carried out, is likely to harm the health, safety or morals of children.
The Free the Slaves.net’s definition is being “forced to work without pay under threat of violence and unable to walk away.”
Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.”
If sweatshop wage slavery is included, the problem is far greater, affecting many hundreds of millions of exploited workers globally, including a 2004 UNICEF estimate of about 218 million children performing labor (other than domestic), some as young as five, many in forced bondage, the majority doing hazardous work, and governments doing little or nothing to protect them.
On December 29, 1994, Haiti ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Under its provisions, authorities issue reports on the problem as required, but little else. Until he was ousted, however, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide addressed it. He created a special Haitian National Police child protection unit, and in 2003, got a new law passed prohibiting child domestic labor, mostly as Restaveks. Other legislation also passed banning trafficking in persons, a longstanding problem affecting adults as well.
Except for measures under Aristide, Haiti did little before or after his tenure to curb the problem, claiming a lack of resources. Instead, it established a hotline for children and others to report abuses, has a minimal staff, gets about 200 requests a year, visits homes for educational purposes, advises violators to stop their practices, occasionally removes abused children, but barely addresses the problem Shahinian called tantamount to slavery and condemned.
After a nine-day visit in early June, she said Haiti’s Restavek system:

deprives children of their family environment and violates their most basis rights such as the rights to education, health and food as well as subjecting them to multiple forms of abuse including economic exploitation, sexual violence and corporal punishment, violating their fundamental right to protection from all forms of violence.

She condemned professional recruiters who exploit children for financial gain and called for establishing a National Commission to eliminate the problem. She recommended registering all of them, providing alternative income generating programs for poor families, compulsory free primary education, and training for government officials to address the issue. Under the current Preval government, practically nothing has been done so far.
In June 2009, the US State Department Trafficking in Persons Report called Haiti a: “Special Case for the fourth consecutive year as the new government formed in September 2008 has not yet been able to address the significant challenges facing the country, including human trafficking.”
Urging its government “to take immediate action to address its serious trafficking-in-persons problems,” it was silent about America’s role in ousting Aristide and the fascist regime it installed. In collusion with Haitian elites, the result has been rampant oppression, sham elections, destruction of the majority democratic opposition, jails overflowing with political prisoners, and ending the beneficial political, economic and social changes Haitians briefly enjoyed.
Now the State Department calls Haiti a:
“source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and sexual exploitation. Haitian women, men, and children are trafficked into the Dominican Republic, The Bahamas, the United States, Europe, Canada, and Jamaica for exploitation in domestic service, agriculture, and construction…. Several NGOs noted a sharp increase in the number of Haitian children trafficked for sex and labor to the Dominican Republic and The Bahamas during 2008,” the majority being Restaveks, including those trafficked internally.
Dismissed and runaway Restaveks comprise “a significant proportion of the large number of street children, who frequently are forced to work in prostitution or street crime by violent criminal gangs. Women and girls from the Dominican Republic are trafficked into Haiti for commercial sexual exploitation.”
Some Haitians in the Dominican Republic, The Bahamas and America become virtual slaves as forced labor on sugar-cane plantations, in agriculture and construction. To a large degree, America bears major responsibility, yet is silent and initiates no change.
The Restavek Foundation
Founder Jean-Robert Cadet was once one himself, “endur(ing) years of physical and emotional abuse as a domestic slave until he received access to education-first in Haiti and later in the United States.”
He now addresses the problem on his web site and by speaking at colleges and universities throughout America and to government organizations globally. He also uses his foundation to help trapped children, providing them opportunities for education, paying for their tuition, uniforms and books, feeding them once a day, monitoring their health and well-being, and restoring their dignity.
His mission is to end Haitian child slavery and give hope to those enslaved. The Restavek Foundation “invest(s) in Haiti so that Haiti will allow us to invest in the children” — through a network of over 500 advocates across the country acting as a “voice for the voiceless.”
In the aftermath of Haiti’s quake, the Foundation is providing food and other essentials to areas not reached by others. They need help and ask for donations on their web site.
Post-Quake Child Trafficking
On February 1, New York Times writer Ginger Thompson headlined, “Case Stokes Haiti’s Fear for Children, and Itself,” reporting that, on January 29, 10 Americans were detained at the Dominican border for illegally trying to spirit 33 children from the country.
“The 10 Americans, the authorities said, had crossed the line.” Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive called them “kidnappers (who) knew what they were doing was wrong.” National Judicial Police chief, Frantz Thermilus, said: “What surprises me is that these people would never do something like this in their own country.” He’s wrong as the US is beset with adult and child trafficking, and the problem is global.
Affiliated with two Idaho-based Baptist churches, the excuse given rings hollow, saying that: “God wanted us to come here to help children, we are convinced of that. Our hearts were in the right place.”
They were headed for a Dominican Republic orphanage, existing only on paper, later to be “adopted” by US Evangelical Christian families. When stopped at the border, Haitian agents found them packed inside a bus. None had passports, and no documents authorized their transfer.
SOS Children’s Villages ran the Port-au-Prince orphanage where they were temporarily placed. Its regional director, Patricia Vargas, told Agence France Presse that “The majority of these children have families. Some of the older ones said their parents are alive, and some gave an address and phone number.” One eight-year child said “I am not an orphan. I still have my parents.” The Haitian Social Ministry confirmed that so did others. On January 30, SOS Villages was asked to help under the circumstances.
Its officials accused the Idaho group of taking “children under false pretenses. The allegations have to be thoroughly investigated but the Haitian police consider this incident as organized child trafficking.”
Laura Silsby heads the groups as CEO of a Boise-based online shopping web site called personalshopper.com. Last November, it filed papers with Idaho authorities to establish the New Life Children’s Refuge, ostensibly as an NGO. As part of their “Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission,” they plan a Dominican Republic orphanage for up to 200 children, earmarked for US adoptions, conversion to Evangelical Christianity, and apparent extremist indoctrination, given Silsby’s admission that Sarah Palin and the Manhattan Initiative are two of her favorites, the latter a right-wing Evangelical group opposed to abortion and gay marriage.
Although one scheme was stopped, UNICEF says, pre and post-quake, documented evidence shows many Haitian child abductions, including from hospitals, orphanages, and the street where so many are vulnerable.
The agency explained that pre-quake, Haiti had about 380,000 orphaned children. The number now is incalculable, but the message is clear. Many are on their own own to find food, shelter and medical care, making them vulnerable to traffickers for profit and exploitation.
In 2000, the UN adopted the Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, then in 2003, its Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children. Under its provisions, trafficking is illegal, defined as:

Trafficking in persons (by) the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.

Exploitation is defined, “at a minimum,” to include “prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.”
Anyone under 18 is considered a child, and State Parties are called on to adopt laws or other measures “to establish criminal offences” under the Convention. Haiti hasn’t done so, leaving its children vulnerable to trafficking and other abuses.
Pan American Development Foundation (PADF) Report on Child Trafficking in Haiti
In November 2009, PADF published a report titled, “Lost Childhoods in Haiti: Quantifying Child Trafficking, Restaveks & Victims of Violence.” It’s a disturbing picture of “extremely poor children who are sent to other homes to work as unpaid domestic servants,” and end up being beaten, sexually assaulted, and exploited by host families. Later, in their teens, “they are commonly tossed to the streets to fend for themselves and become victims of other types of abuses” because Haitian labor laws require employers to pay domestic workers over aged 15.
PADF studied the problem through “the largest field survey on human rights violations, with an emphasis on child trafficking, abuse and violence.” It conducted 1,458 personal interviews in troubled urban neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince, Cap-Haitien, Gonaives, Saint-Marc and Petit-Goave and learned the following:

• children are moving from impoverished households to less poor ones;
  
• in urban areas, an estimated 225,000 children are Restaveks, two-thirds of them girls;
  
• the impoverished Cite Soleil Port-au-Prince neighborhood had the highest percentage of Restavek children – 44%;
  
• families in the southern peninsula communities of Les Cayes, Jacmel, Jeremie and Leogane supply the most Restaveks to Port-au-Prince;
  
• some children sent to host families for education aren’t classified as Restaveks, but perform similar duties;
  
• more than 7% of urban households report incidents of rape, murder, kidnapping, or gang involvement, but the true number is likely higher as many incidents go unreported; and
  
• Port-au-Prince households had over double the amount in other cities (16%).
  

Over 30% of surveyed households have Restavek children, affecting 16% of all children and 22% of them treated that way. Overall, study findings show Restaveks aren’t solely a rural phenomenon given the high proportion of urban households with them.
The majority of urban ones were born in rural Haiti, but urban households comprise the largest recruitment destination. All regions supply them, the most important being southern peninsula rural areas. In addition, many households take in children as school borders, the vast majority treated like Restaveks without the label, and some families with them also send their own children to live with host families in return for services performed.
Kinship is a prime and more socially acceptable recruiting source. However, family ties may camouflage poor treatment when children are away during the school year. They traditionally do household chores at home, but as Restaveks far more in an abusive environment.
PADF cited other issues, including:

• growing numbers of street children forced to beg to survive;
  
• young women (including underage adolescents) recruited for prostitution;
  
• Restavek cross-border trafficking to the Dominican Republic, including for sex;
  
• kidnappings to sell children and women into bondage; and
  
• violence in urban neighborhoods, including organized murder, rape, other physical assaults, and kidnappings committed by the Haitian National Police, UN MINUSTAH peacekeepers, other armed “authorities,” and politically partisan gangs.
  

PADF Summary of Key Findings
An “astonishing high percentage” of surveyed children live with host families — 32% and 30% of surveyed households had Restaveks present. Other findings included:

• 16% of all surveyed children were placed as Restaveks, and 22% were treated that way, including 44% in Cite Soleil;
  
• two-thirds of Restaveks are girls;
  
• poverty is the root cause of Restavek placements;
  
• a significant minority of Restavek households placed their own children with host families; yet kinship ties don’t shield them from abusive treatment, even for those sent only for the school year;
  
• “the magnitude of the intra-urban movement of children within… metropolitan area(s) is (a) significant new development;”
  
• most urban Restaveks were born in rural areas, but in Port-au-Prince, other households are the largest single source; thus Restavek recruitment no longer can be viewed solely as a rural to urban phenomenon;
  
• other victimization forms include rape, murder, kidnapping, and cross-border trafficking; and
  
• most abused victims don’t seek help from authorities because little is available, including in court.
  

Public Policy and Haitian Law
Haitian law doesn’t specifically prohibit trafficking internally or cross-border, so seeking judicial redress is futile, and the police child protection unit doesn’t pursue these cases because statutory restrictions don’t exist.
Nonetheless, in March 2009, the Haitian parliament ratified (but doesn’t enforce) the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and its protocols on human trafficking and smuggling. The parliament is also considering a human trafficking law, but real social change was never before achieved, except under Aristide. Haitians have been oppressed for over 500 years. The current government has done nothing to change things, and now can’t under occupation.
A Final Comment
Given their overwhelming hardships, the last thing Haitians needed was the January 12 quake (the most destructive in the region in 170 years), affecting Port-au-Prince, surrounding areas, and other parts of the country, devastating the capital, killing many thousands, injuring many more, and disrupting the lives of three million or more people, adding to their crushing burden.
Many tens of thousands lost everything left stranded on their own, given the lack of essential aid most still aren’t getting. Everything is in shambles. Rubble is everywhere. The National Cathedral, Palace of Justice, and Supreme Court collapsed. So did hotels, other municipal buildings, business structures, schools and hospitals.
People still wander the streets dazed, searching for loved ones. The National Palace was heavily damaged, now under US control as a command center. So was UN headquarters, and many of its employees remain missing. In the wealthy Petionville neighborhood, a hospital, ministry building and private homes collapsed. So did other buildings across the capital and in rural communities like Leogane. Jacmel in the southeast also sustained major damage.
The Parliament collapsed. So did public buildings and hospitals, and those functioning are packed with victims or others queued outside waiting for treatment. The World Food Program (WFP) reached only 100,000 people as of January 31. On February 2, targeted vaccinations will begin that, according to the world’s foremost authority, Dr. Viera Scheibner, will exacerbate, not lessen the communicable disease problem as vaccines often cause the diseases they’re designed to prevent.
Enough food, clean drinking water and medical care remain urgent problems, the US occupation force doing nothing to help and actually obstructing aid deliveries by restricting incoming humanitarian flights and letting supplies stack up undelivered at the airport it controls. As a result, vital shipments are reaching a fraction of the millions who need them.
In its latest February 1 report, OCHA said hundreds of thousands of displaced Haitians need shelter provisions. Poor sanitation greatly increases the risk of communicable diseases and remains a huge challenge, and virtually all essential needs are in short supply.
It added:

Preliminary results from Port-au-Prince found that 93 percent of people surveyed said there was no adequate lighting; 93 percent said there were no latrines for women and men; 41 percent said the level of security was acceptable and 29 percent said it was very poor. The preliminary findings confirm that food, water, sanitation, health and shelter are the areas with the most urgent needs.

Before the tragedy, most Haitians had no running water, electricity, sanitation, or other public services leaving them on their own, virtually out of luck, and now out of it entirely with relief expected only for the privileged, not them beyond lip service and bare essentials, way short of what’s needed.
It’s an old story for some of the most abused, exploited, and neglected people anywhere, mostly by their powerful northern neighbor allied with Haitian economic elites; names like Acra, Apaid, Baussan, Biglo, Boulos, Brandt, Coles, Kouri, Loukas, Madsen, Mevs, Nadal, Sada, Vital, Vorbes, and other influential bourgeoisie interests exploiting their own people for profit.
Hundreds of thousands around the country are still coping with the damage that summer 2008 storms caused leaving them without food, clean water, other essentials, and around 70,000 homes destroyed. Gonaives, Haiti’s third largest city became uninhabitable. Most of Haiti’s livestock and food crops were destroyed as well as farm tools and seeds for replanting. Irrigation systems were demolished, and buildings throughout the country collapsed or were damaged, many severely. Now this, affecting Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas with the overall toll yet to be assessed.
For poor Haitians, it’s already known. Decimated by unimaginable hardships and deprivation, they’re on their own and out of luck because of the callous disregard for their lives and well-being – and their country now occupied for the duration.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. Contact him at: lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site and listen to The Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Mondays from 11AM-1PM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests. All programs are archived for easy listening. Read other articles by Stephen, or visit Stephen's website.
This article was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 9:00am and is filed under Anti-slavery, Children, Haiti, Poverty.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/02/child-...-in-haiti/

[Ed Jewett]

VIDEO: Haitian Realities Contrast With Stereotypes
Interview with Jean Saint-Vil

by Ish Theilheimer



Jean Saint-Vil: Canada should own up to hosting 2003 summit to plot Aristide's overthrow

Last week, CBC's Radio One's The Current featured a panel discussion that included Ottawa-area resident Jean Saint-Vil, who is active with the solidarity network Canada Haiti Action. Afterwards, we invited him to visit at the Straight Goods News Ottawa bureau.

Media coverage of and political reaction to the Haitian disaster don't offer much perspective on the situation. Saint-Vil explained that Haitian realities that go beyond the stereotypes of endemic poverty and corruption. He pointed to a racist subtext that subtly portrays Haitians as incompetent and ignores a centuries-old history of oppression and foreign meddling.


Saint-Vil said, for instance, that
Haiti has never recovered from reparations it was forced to pay to France, totaling $40 billion in modern currency. Returning that money to the Haitians would help them recover much better than a patchwork of foreign "aid" with all the vested interests and strings inevitably attached.
Jean Saint-Vil talks to Pat Van Horne about Haiti's realities, part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkDBS9eaw..._embedded#

Many Haitians are frustrated by relief NGOs whom they see as self-serving. "The organizations are getting bigger, stronger, more recognized. The people they're helping are getting more desperate."
He compared the situation in Haiti with that of First Nations people in Canada, saying we must "acknowledge that the society in which we live was built on international crimes." White supremacists stole the "land of first nations people of Africa and the Americas."

Saint-Vil called for investment "in institutions of self-sustainability," especially agricultural production. "

"...The US is dumping rice on the Haitian market as part of aid to Haiti, but this is aid that kills, because a Haitian farmer cannot compete with the farmer in Texas, especially when that farmer is supported by the big machine, and the Haitian farmer ends up leaving his or her agricultural land, selling it to somebody who's probablylooking for mining, and moves to the city. That's why Port-au-Prince, a city that was built for 250,000 people, had 2.5 million people in it."

History of struggle

"The history of Haiti is one of a struggle. The island of Haiti was first inhabited by people of the Taino First Nation, who were almost all dead within fifty years after the arrival of Columbus. Some of the indigenous people escaped to Cuba, and Puerto Rico, but on the island, forget it. They were replaced by Africans," who, for three hundred years, suffered as slaves on the island before successfully rebelling aginst the French, leading to the creation of state of Haiti in 1803....

"This was the only place in the Americas where African people were not enslaved, but it also meant they couldn't trade with anybody..."

Jean Saint-Vil talks to Pat Van Horne about Haiti's realities, part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebm4IMCLY...r_embedded

"In 1805, the French foreign minister Charles Talleyrand wrote to the US president to help them crush Haiti because they said the existence of the Negro people in arms is a terrible threat to all white nations. The response of the Americans was to impose an embargo on Haiti that was renewed several times...

"The whites returned and became the main merchants in the big cities, and every time there was some kind of event that threatened their existence, the Germans, for instance, would show up with their guns and their boats and they threaten to blow up the national palace in order to get ransom. A few weeks later, the Spanish show up and do the same thing.

"Thoughout the nineteenth century, you go and look in the history books and you will see eventually, you'd have countries like Denmark, Sweden, countries you'd never think about, were part of this, for instance, in 1883....

":In 1915, the US invaded, and stole Haiti's national reserves, and took it to the National City Bank in New York and basically imposed what we call a string of Mulatto dictatorships. Mulatto, for those who don't recognize what the term means, is the result of African women raped by white men, which created light-skinned Haitians, and these people were given higher status by the Americans. They became the whites of Haiti," and its political leaders...."

Coup follows coup follows...

Finally a black leader named Dumarsais Estimé came to power in 1946. He built rural schools but was deposed by an American coup. Another democratic leader, Fignolé, came to power in 1957 just before Duvalier.

"He lasted 19 days," said Saint-Vil. "The Americans deposed him. The Duvalier leadership in came under the same movement of black power. Duvalier pretended he was going to support the black masses, but in reality he was an equal-opportunity criminal. He killed Mulattos, he killed blacks. The Americans supported him because he said he was going to fight communism. Duvalier is the one who kicked Cuba out of the OAS [Organization of American States]."

In 1990, "finally the Haitian population managed to get democratic elections organized and participated en masse and named a liberation theologian President. At the time George Bush, the elder, was the American President. Seven months later they deposed Aristide in a bloody coup using the Haitian military.

"When Aristide came back with Bill Clinton, there was a lot of hoopla about that, but they didn't realize that Aristide had to agree that the three years he spent in exile were part of his five year mandate. And the Haitian constitution does not allow him to take more than one five year term. And he had to sign a plan accepting to privatize state-owned enterprises....

"His justification for accepting it was that it was either that or let the military rule forever...." Once re-elected in 2000, "Aristide was declared to be a fraud by the so-called international community.... It's not very hard to demonize a black leader. You can call any black leader a dictator and eventually people will believe it. But I'll have people remember that when Aristide was elected in 2000, his popularity was the highest of any leader in the Americas"

Aristide, now living in South Africa, was rescued from exile in the Central African Republic by a group of US activists led by Amy Goodman .

Saint-Vil says Canada is in league with the USA and France in exploiting Haiti for its own purposes. "There's a Canadian company called Eurasian Mines that has concessions on ten percent of the Haitian territory, digging gold. And Haiti is right beside Cuba, not too far from Venezuela."

Jean Saint-Vil talks to Pat Van Horne about Haiti's realities, part 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMhIAy52f...r_embedded

Canada, he says, was forced, under the Jean Chrétien government, to cooperate with the Americans on Haiti. He quotes former Canadian foreign minister Bill Graham as saying "There is a limit to how much we can constantly say No to the political masters in Washington.... Eventually we came onside on Haiti, so we got another arrow in our quiver."

Canada hosted an international summit on Haiti on January 31-Febuary 1, 2003 at Meech Lake, one year before the coup that removed Aristide. "That meeting is when they plotted the overthrow of Haiti's president," according to Saint-Vil.

"The coup was not just against Jean-Bertrand Arisitide. There were 7,000 elected officals, they were removed in a single day, including some who were trained in search and rescue. They were all removed, so when the storm happened in September 2004, there was nobody trained and nobody with any equipment to do the search and rescue."

Addressing Haiti's many problems begins with understanding their origins — and taking action to correct injustices. Outspoken activists like Jean Saint-Vil bring us a picture of Haiti's realities that we didn't hear from the Foreign Ministers's summit.

Ish Theilheimer is founder and president of Straight Goods News and has been Publisher of the leading, and oldest, independent Canadian online newsmagazine, StraightGoods.ca, since September 1999. He is also Managing Editor of PublicValues.ca. He lives wth his wife Kathy in Golden Lake, ON, in the Ottawa Valley.

Email: ish@straightgoods.com.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=17351