[R-G] Disappearing Democracy in Haiti

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.gnn.tv/articles/3371/Disappearing_Democracy_in_Haiti


Disappearing Democracy in Haiti
Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500
_NEWS IMAGE_
  Pierre-Antoine Lovinsky

By Sam Urquhart
Two prominent Haitian activists have disappeared in recent months,  
signaling an attack on Haitian social activists

Three years after their elected president Jean Bertrand Aristide, was  
overthrown by a band of U.S.-trained adventurers, Haitians continue  
to deal with the consequences. Violence persists, both within  
desperately impoverished communities and directed at those who resist  
the UN-supported government, with frequent raids being undertaken by  
UN forces on opposition strongholds like Port au Prince’s Cite Soleil.

Thousands have died since Aristide was deposed, mostly under the two- 
year dictatorship of Gerard Latortue. A study published by The Lancet  
reported in 2006 that in the 22 months after Aristide’s removal, over  
8,000 people died violently with over 35,000 women and girls being  
raped. The whole country was essentially raped, with the connivance  
of the UN mandated MINUSTAH security forces, leaving a trail of fear,  
resentment, psychological scars and, with the police now staffed by  
many ex-participants in the 1991 coup (which also targeted Aristide),  
a budding police state. It’s been quite an intervention, and it’s  
completely off the rails.

The government has little control over right-wing paramilitaries and  
the police, while UN forces bludgeon impoverished communities into  
obedience. As journalist Ben Terrell has reported, “Though elected by  
the country’s poor majority largely because of his past association  
with Aristide (he was Prime Minister in the first Aristide  
administration which ended in the 1991 coup), most activists I spoke  
to now see Preval as at best ineffectual in standing up to rightist  
forces.”

Yet despite this, the resistance shown by Haitian civil society  
against the return of paramilitaries and foreign intervention has  
demonstrated that Haiti can’t be shocked into docility. Lavalas, far  
from melting away and disintegrating, has bounced back. In 2006, when  
popular protests brought a round of elections, it was a Lavalas old- 
hand, Rene Preval who took the presidency. That was despite massive  
corruption in favor of candidates more closely aligned with the U.S.- 
Canadian-French co-ordinated occupation.

Political activism also spread from Lavalas, and fed into it again,  
via a range of civil society organizations which developed in direct  
response to disappearances, massacres, corruption, poverty and the  
trauma of sexual assault. One of the most prominent has been the  
September 30 Foundation which has worked in the poorest areas of Port  
au Prince, with rape and torture victims, with the so-called  
“chimeres,” with the relatives of those killed in the brutal  
interventions carried out by MINUSTAH in Cite Soleil and by the  
Haitian “police.”

But that was decimated in recent months by the abduction in August of  
the September 30 Foundation’s inspirational leader, Pierre-Antoine  
Lovinsky. Haitian democracy and society took another blow last week  
when it emerged that another inspirational Lavalas activist and  
humanitarian worker, Maryse Narcisse, had disappeared.

With elections on the horizon and resistance rising, Lavalas and  
Haitian activists are under attack. MINUSTAH does nothing. Foreign  
governments too have done nothing. Their silence betrays a complicity  
in Haiti’s torment that needs to be reported.

Why Pierre and Maryse?

It’s not hard to see why powerful people might want to remove Pierre- 
Antoine from Haiti’s political map. A long-time Lavalas organizer and  
radical psychologist (he worked for years with the victims of the  
1991 coup and the Duvalier dictatorship), Lovinsky never hid his  
allegiance to the Haitian poor and his commitment to activism. He  
also never hid his opposition to the removal of Aristide and the  
subsequent UN-backed regime.

As he told Democracy Now! in December 2006, “What happened in Haiti  
is a continuation of a war of genocide against the poor population.  
And that is an expression in fact of the class struggle in Haiti.  
What happens is that the United Nations by what is called the  
MINUSTAH (United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti) is an  
accomplice of this war against the poor in Haiti.” Speaking after  
MINUSTAH troops had mounted a deadly operation in Cite Soleil,  
supposedly in pursuit of gangsters, he railed against “what happens  
every day in Cité-Soleil where soldiers kill the poor for nothing,  
and what happened this past 21st, 22nd of December of this year. This  
campaign against the poor in Haiti where they give them some kind of  
pejorative name” adding that “the presence of the United Nations  
forces is just an expression of the continuation of the 2004 coup d’  
etat.”

Never afraid to make dangerous enemies, he then told Juan Gonzalez  
that “Because all the people who were doing crimes at the end of 2003  
and all the former military, they don’t have any problem. They are  
just circulating freely in the country.”

Lovinsky has consistently defended the poor of Port au Prince against  
accusations of lawlessness and criminality, preferring to argue that  
the poor have been deliberately represented as sub-human “chimeres” –  
the easier to then shoot them down when they resist. In the Democracy  
Now! interview he even accused the UN and the government of staging  
kidnappings to create an atmosphere of crisis (“precisely so that  
they could target Cité-Soleil, to give the impression that they were  
trying to fight against insecurity” he told Gonzalez).

This year, he moved into even more dangerous territory when he began  
to link together police brutality, the UN occupation and U.S.  
“democracy promotion.” As he said in an interview with the human  
rights group Haiti Action, the U.S. has been seeking to detach an 800- 
strong contingent of loyal police to form a new Haitian “army.” This  
would be a disaster for Haitian democracy, Lovinsky argued, noting  
that it was “The absence of the army prior to the 2004 coup [that]  
made the completion of the coup impossible, so the US had to get  
openly involved in order to finish the job, even though they wanted  
to keep their involvement covert.”

It wasn’t just that Lovinsky said things which upset the powers that  
be in post-coup Haiti, however. The problem was that he then acted  
upon his own analysis. As he told Haiti Action, “we in the 30th of  
September Foundation will be campaigning against the creation of this  
parallel security force.” Before his disappearance, he had registered  
as a Senatorial candidate for Lavalas and had been leading  
demonstrations against the continuation of the MINUSTAH deployment.

Coupling that energetic activism with an uncompromising loyalty to  
the poor made Lovinsky a marked man. A man who could tell foreigners  
that “It’s always the poor who rise up to defend national sovereignty  
[and] that is why in the eyes of the Bourgeoisie, in the eyes of the  
intellectual elites, these people are no different than the “va-nou- 
pieds,” nothing but criminals, whereas in my opinion these people are  
the protectors of our sovereignty” would be a danger to authority and  
elite rule in any country.

Maryse Narcise comes from the same tradition – the defense of Haitian  
democracy, a commitment to the poor and a willingness to alienate the  
rich and powerful. In her capacity as Jean Bertrand Aristide’s  
spokeswoman, it has been Maryse who has relayed many messages of  
support back to Haitians from their exiled president. Just like  
Lovinsky, Narcise has coupled her politics with humanitarianism,  
working as a medical doctor “in the forefront of efforts to provide  
community-based health care and education for all Haitians” according  
to Haiti Action and risking a return to Haiti in 2006 “to restore  
democracy.”

Who cares about Pierre?

If Pierre-Antoine and Maryse have been disappeared and the worst has  
transpired, then these are intolerable, disgusting violations of  
human rights and basic decency. This is, however, made doubly  
intolerable as they have occured under the supposedly humanitarian  
eyes of a UN mission. But it’s worse than that, at least from a  
Canadian perspective.

Lovinsky was abducted in the middle of the visit of a human rights  
delegation which was investigating abuses committed by the Haitian  
police and MINUSTAH forces. Roger Annis, a Canadian, was one of the  
members of that delegation, and as he wrote in a piece for Znet on 27  
September, “On August 15, I and another Canadian member of the  
delegation visited the Canadian embassy to urge Canadian ambassador  
Claude Boucher to make a public statement of concern about Lovinsky’s  
disappearance. That request was refused by the embassy, and it has  
made no such statement to date.”

Annis also told the Hour that he suspected the Canadian silence was  
far from coincidental. As he told journalist Christopher Scott,  
“Canada is playing a very decisive role in…financing the Haitian  
judicial system [while] the RCMP are the training force for the  
Haitian National Police.” The official line remains that Canada  
“doesn’t get involved” in Haitian politics, according to Annis. Human  
rights activists can expect no help from that quarter, to Canada’s  
shame.

Like the Haitian people rebuilding their democracy, campaigners  
looking for official support for human rights in Haiti will have to  
work on their own, and petitions have begun to circulate across the  
world to demand action and end impunity for Haiti’s political classes  
and the multi-national occupation. There may still be time to derail  
the occupation and prevent the remilitarization of Haitian society  
along U.S.-approved lines. There may be time to rebuild a social  
justice movement in Haiti. Yet there is a brutal right-wing assault  
under way on Haitian activism and whether the people of Haiti can  
respond, only time will tell.