[R-G] This Week in Haiti

[Anthony Fenton]

From: K M Ives <kives at toast.net>

This Week in Haiti" is the English section of HAITI LIBERTE  
newsweekly. For
the complete edition with other news in French and Creole, please  
contact
the paper at (tel) 718-421-0162, (fax) 718-421-3471 or e-mail at
editor at haitiliberte.com. Also visit our website at  
<www.haitiliberte.com>.

                            HAITI LIBERTE
                  "Justice. Verite. Independance."

                   * THIS WEEK IN HAITI *

                           April 9 - 15, 2008
                             Vol. 1, No. 38

NATIONWIDE UPRISING DEMANDS AFFORDABLE FOOD
by Kim Ives

Historically, it always unfolds like this in Haiti. Anger and  
resentment over an economic or political problem builds in the  
population for weeks, months, or even years. Then one day the top  
blows off the pressure cooker. That day is today.

Tens of thousands of demonstrators in towns and cities around Haiti  
are rising up to demand that the Haitian government provide relief  
from "lavi che," the high cost of living. The protests are combined  
with calls for an end to the United Nations Mission to Stabilize Haiti  
(MINUSTAH), which militarily occupies Haiti with some 9,000 troops.

On Apr. 7 and 8, demonstrations were held not just in the capital,  
Port-au-Prince and departmental cities like Cayes, Jacmel, Jeremie and  
Gonaives, but in many smaller towns as well including Petit Goave,  
Miragoane, Aquin, Cavaillon, Saint-Jean du Sud, Leogane, Vialet, Anse- 
a-Veau and Simon.

In Port-au-Prince, thousands massed in front of the National Palace,  
where they attempted to pull down the Palace gates. Jordanian and  
Brazilian MINUSTAH troops dispersed them with gunfire and tear-gas.  
Two journalists were wounded: Jean-Jacques Augustin of Le Matin and  
Yves Joseph of Haiti Progres.

Protesters carrying branches and empty plates surged through the  
capital's streets, massing in front of the Prime Minister's and other  
government offices. Along the way, they broke windows on over 100  
vehicles and on many businesses such as Air France and the National  
Bank of Credit (BNC). Demonstrators also assailed the headquarters of  
the conservative daily Le Matin, which is owned by the Boulos family.  
A UN vehicle was burned in front of the Education Ministry.

The capital's streets were virtually empty of traffic. Residents rose  
on Monday to a virtually spontaneous unpublicized general strike, with  
many shops shuttered and public transport stopped. Barricades went up  
around the city.

Demonstrations in front of the National Palace were continuing into  
the night on Aug. 8, as we go to press.

Smaller protests over the high cost of living have been held  
sporadically for months. For example, in Port-au-Prince, the Cite  
Soleil-based popular organization "Aba Satan" (Down with the Devil)  
has held a picket line every Tuesday since last September in front of  
the Ministry of Commerce and Industry to call for government action to  
stop rising food costs (see Haiti Liberte, Vol. 1, No. 37, 4/2/2008).  
Around the country, people referred to their pain as "grangou kloroks"  
- Clorox hunger - to describe the burning in their stomachs.

The prices of many basic necessities have tripled in the past year,  
while unemployment hovers at 70%. "In my neighborhood, there are  
people who cook only once a week, on Sunday," said one demonstrator.

The current nationwide wave of protests began in the southern city of  
Les Cayes on Apr. 3 and 4. The Platform of Organizations of La Savane  
called a demonstration against lavi che for which thousands poured  
into the streets. Demonstrators put up barricades of burning tires and  
car chassis around the city and looted two trucks carrying hundreds of  
sacks for rice. They assailed UN bases around the city, with cries of  
"Down with the MINUSTAH!" On several occasions, UN soldiers fired on  
the demonstrators, in one case killing a mechanic at a barricade set  
up outside a UN base near Laborde, according to the Haitian Press  
Agency. UN bullets also killed a lottery (borlette) ticket seller near  
the Quatre Chemins intersection, at the entrance to the city. The UN  
claimed that only one person died in the skirmishes, but radio reports  
said that four protesters were killed, and over 30 wounded.

Demonstrators also broke through the wall surrounding the UN base in  
Cayes's Breset neighborhood, making off with computers and other  
equipment. Demonstrators also seized 12 shotguns from security guards  
at gas stations; UN troops only recuperated five of the guns.

Also on Apr. 3, hundreds of demonstrators, including high school  
students and merchants, marched in Gonaives, Haiti's fourth largest  
city. Directors at the Frabre Geffrard high school refused to release  
their students to join the demonstration, provoking rock-throwing from  
the protesters in which five people were injured.

On Apr. 4, thousands marched in the southern city of Petit Goave,  
where they set up a barricade on Route Nationale #2, the main artery  
to the south, threw rocks at UN soldiers, and surrounded the town  
hall, threatening the mayor.

Demonstrations resumed around the country with a vengeance on Monday,  
Apr. 7. In Les Cayes, a bullet killed a worker in a church after UN  
soldiers fired on a crowd demonstrating outside "Le Manguier" hotel  
being built by Senator Jean Gabriel Fortune of the Union party.  
Fortune had made several provocative public statements about the  
demonstrations, saying they were fomented by drug-dealers.

In Jeremie on Apr. 3, police and UN soldiers dispersed a large  
demonstration with tear-gas.

OFFICIAL ALOOFNESS

Some see the spark for the current uprising in the remarks and conduct  
of President Rene Preval. Told during a meeting some weeks ago that  
there would be a demonstration against lavi che, Preval responded  
ironically: "If there is a protest against rising prices, come to get  
me at the Palace and I will demonstrate with you." Demonstrators who  
shook the National Palace's gates on Apr. 7 returned the irony, saying  
they had just come to get Preval as he had asked.

Others speculate that anger grew after Preval vacationed over Easter  
at a beach near Les Cayes, with no official visit or declaration in  
the city. Such seemingly innocuous, but highly symbolic, events have  
caused people to perceive the government as either powerless, lacking  
political will, subservient to foreign dictates, or, worst,  
indifferent to their suffering.

The Haitian people are also fed up with the MINUSTAH. They see  
millions of dollars being spent each month to feed and house thousands  
of foreign troops who only repress, harass and humiliate them.  
Cruising aimlessly in armored vehicles with guns drawn, the UN troops  
have created deep resentment as they whiz past people squatting in the  
dust and heat, starving.

"We are hungry and have given up on the UN and the Preval government  
to help us," Sonia Jeanty, 32, told the Haiti Information Project.  
"After all the money they have spent here most of us are eating only  
one meal a day. It's unacceptable especially as we hear the UN trying  
to tell us everyday on the radio that things have gotten better. It's  
a lie!"

GOVERNMENT RESPONSE

Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis joined with Senator Fortune in  
claiming that the demonstrations were manipulated and provoked by drug- 
dealers who were angry about recent government closure of supposed  
clandestine drug-transhipment airfields in the south.

On Apr. 3, after months of inaction, government ministers huddled in  
emergency meetings to cobble together a $42 million (1.6 billion  
gourdes) package of measures to mollify public anger. The plan,  
combined with measures announced a month ago, involves public works  
job creation, the opening of community and school food dispensaries,  
and loans to small entrepreneurs.

"The high-intensity labor projects will begin next week, the credits  
to merchants will be available in three weeks, the university  
restaurants will be launched this week, and the community restaurants  
and food basket distribution will be launched in three weeks," Alexis  
said.

The government also says it will take measures to promote national  
food production, such as offering farmers half-price fertilizer and  
cheaper tools.

Most of Haiti's food is now imported, in stark contrast to the  
situation 25 years ago when most was produced by Haitian farmers. In  
particular, rice production in the Artibonite Valley has been  
decimated by a flood of heavily subsidized U.S. rice. Haiti is the  
fourth largest market for U.S. rice producers.

WORLD TREND

Uprisings for food are taking place around the world. In Africa,  
countries like in Egypt, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast,  
Mauritania, and Senegal have seen food riots, as well as Indonesia and  
Cambodia.

Globally, there has been a 25% increase in food prices, according to  
analyst Rowan Wolf. "As much as half the population of the planet  
faces dangerously increasing food pressures," he writes. "It is  
telling that riots regarding food prices are starting to occur (i.e.  
Egypt and Haiti). These type of events will likely increase. "

This is the result of what some food analysts are calling a "perfect  
storm" brought about by changing weather patterns induced by global  
warming, the rising cost of oil used for food transport and  
fertilizer, and the growth of bio-fuel production.

"The U.S. bio-fuels incentives put not just the U.S. food supply, but  
the global food supply, in competition with the fuel supply," Wolf  
says. "Farmers (and corporate agriculture) in the U.S. took much of  
the corn crop to the refinery rather than to the food processing  
plants." Corn prices are predicted to rise as much as 50% this year,  
Wolf says.

Meanwhile, in New York, MINUSTAH chief Hedi Annabi addressed a session  
of the UN Security Council meeting on the unfolding crisis in Haiti.

"In Haiti, we face a time of opportunity, which is also a time of  
risk," Annabi told the Council. He spoke of "initial signs of  
improvement" in Haiti's socio-economic situation, admitting however  
that progress remained "extraordinarily fragile and subject to swift  
reversal."

That reversal is occurring today as the Haitian people tell the UN  
that its military occupation has brought no "improvement" in the  
misery they are enduring.


THE UNRECOGNIZED COUP
by Ben Terral

Review of
Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment  
(Paperback)
by Peter Hallward

Paperback: 488 pages
Publisher: Verso (April 7, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1844671062
ISBN-13: 978-1844671069

Of all the illegal and dishonest misadventures that the Bush  
Administration got away with, the least criticized of all might be the  
2004 overthrow of Haiti's democratically-elected government. Even  
human rights groups and left-leaning press that stood up against the  
Iraq war gave, and still give, Bush a pass on the horror he unleashed  
on Haiti by kidnapping President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Peter Hallward's new book Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the  
Politics of Containment is a welcome corrective to the false  
impressions and historical amnesia about Haiti afflicting most of the  
English-speaking world. Jonathan Kozol called it "a brilliant  
politically sophisticated and morally infuriating work on a shameful  
piece of very recent history that the U.S. press has either distorted  
or ignored. The most important and devastating book I've read on  
American betrayal of democracy in one of the most tormented nations in  
the world."

Hallward, a UK-based philosophy professor, was teaching a course in  
2003 which involved daily reading of Le Monde and other French  
newspapers when he noted a systematic demonization of President  
Aristide and his Lavalas movement. He subsequently wrote one of the  
best long articles about the 2004 coup (New Left Review 27, May-June  
2004) shortly after it happened. Ever since, he seems to have been  
collecting information for a bill of indictment against the U.S.,  
France and Canada, the coup's principle backers, ever since. In the  
process he has also put together a damning critique of liberals and  
self-described radicals who either through intellectual laziness or  
lack of cross-class solidarity accepted Bush-approved PR on Haiti.

In his research Hallward used mostly public sources. He appears to  
have read everything written about Haiti in the past ten years, as  
well as much earlier work. Interviews with principles ranging from  
Aristide to several key coup players, and both pro- and anti-Aristide  
figures, buttress his scholarship. Hallward puts the country's recent  
violence in the context of 200 years of "great power" hostility toward  
Haitian sovereignty, beginning with the 1804 revolution, the only  
successful slave revolt in world history.

Hallward excels at showing the means by which Haiti's ultra-rich  
minority worked hand in glove with right-wingers in Washington and  
Paris to create a case for "regime change" that even Iraq war  
opponents could embrace. After the first U.S.-backed coup against  
Aristide in 1991, when public opinion in the U.S. was still largely  
sympathetic to Lavalas, Hallward notes, "Jesse Helms spoke for much of  
the US political establishment when on 20 October 1993 he denounced  
Aristide as a 'psychopath and grave human rights abuser.'" But  
"neither Helms nor anyone else could pin a single political killing on  
the 1991 [Aristide] administration. In the run up to the second coup,  
incomparably more insistent versions of the same charge would  
resurface at every turn."

As Hallward painstakingly shows, left of center and liberal NGOs were  
all too willing to accept Washington's destabilization program for  
Haiti. The smears and propaganda were well-funded and carried out in  
concert with "Democracy Enhancement" and similar programs of the  
United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and other  
U.S. government agencies. The project recalled what the U.S. did to  
Nicaragua in the 1980s, as documented by political scientist William  
Robinson in his excellent study A Faustian Bargain.

Hallward notes that when it comes to "the supervision of human rights  
in the most heavily exploited parts of the planet . most of the  
'neutral,' affluent and well-connected supervisors live at an  
immeasurable distance from the world endured by the people they  
supervise, and at a still greater distance from the sort of militant,  
unabashedly political mobilization that can alone offer any meaningful  
protection for truly universal rights." This helps explain the ease  
with which Human Rights Watch took anti-Aristide propaganda at face  
value, then dragged their feet interminably (as did Amnesty  
International) when Aristide's government was ousted and the rightist  
bloodbath began in earnest.

Hallward carefully wades through the accusations of human rights  
violations leveled at Aristide's government. After an exhaustive  
examination, he can find no evidence that holds up. In many cases, he  
finds that the supposed abuses themselves were greatly exaggerated, if  
not entirely fabricated.

Damming the Flood (lavalas means "flood" in Haitian Kreyol) is  
brilliantly written and extremely thorough in examining the players  
behind the 2004 assault on Haitian popular democracy and its horrific  
aftermath.

In the wake of the thousands killed and countless more tortured and  
raped, it is inevitable that many readers not versed in Haiti's past  
would ask: Why? Hallward does a fine job of answering that question,  
addressing fundamental structural injustices enforced by U.S. foreign  
policy.

Aristide emerged as a priest in the tradition of liberation theology,  
which promotes a "preferential option for the poor." In Hallward's  
words: "All through the 1980s and early 90s [U.S. army intelligence  
officers] recognized that 'the most serious threat to U.S. interests  
was not secular Marxist-Leninism or organized labor but liberation  
theology.' Nowhere did the counter-insurgency measures that the US and  
its allies devised in order to deal with liberation theology in the  
1980s and early 90s fall more heavily than they did on the Haiti of  
Lavalas and the ti legliz ["little church" movement]. It's no  
coincidence that the most notorious assassin hired to terrorize  
Lavalas from 1990 to 1994, Emmanuel "Toto" Constant, first began  
working for the CIA on a course designed to explain and contain the  
'extreme leftwing' implications of 'The Theology of Liberation,' which  
Constant understood as an attempt 'to convince the people that in the  
name of God everything is possible" and that, therefore, it was right  
for the people to kill soldiers and the rich.'"

Hallward continues: "Haiti is the only country in Latin America that  
had the temerity to choose a liberation theologian as its president -  
twice. If Aristide still remains the defining political figure in  
Haiti to this day it's not because he represents a utopian alternative  
to the economic status quo, or because he embodies a demagogic  
charisma that threatens to stifle the development of democracy, or  
because his followers believe that he made no strategic mistakes. It's  
because in the eyes of most people he is not a politician, precisely,  
but an organizer and an activist who remains dedicated to working  
within what he famously affirmed as 'the parish of the poor.' It was  
as such an activist that Aristide disbanded the army in 1995, and it  
was as such an organizer that he dedicated the rest of his political  
life to helping the popular mobilization deal with the new threats and  
the old antagonisms that soon emerged as a result."

The priest turned president threatened to help Haiti's poor enough to  
earn the eternal enmity of the World Bank, the International Monetary  
Fund, and both Republicans and Democrats. His government was denied  
much-needed international funds (which in a more sane world would be  
reparations for past injustices, not loans or aid-with-strings- 
attached), and his poor followers demonized as "chimeres," or  
"devils." Instead of looking at the structural roots of the  
exploitation and ecological devastation to which the country has been  
subjected, foreign journalists took their sound bites from English or  
French speaking elites at odds with Lavalas's commendable, and only  
moderately leftist, goal to raise the poor "from misery to poverty  
with dignity."

The scant media coverage of Haiti that exists tends to continue  
centuries-old patterns of ignoring the perspectives of the poor  
majority. In Hallward's words, what most English speakers get instead  
is repetition of "perhaps the most consistent theme of the profoundly  
racist first-world commentary on the island: that poor non-white  
people remain incapable of governing themselves."

Though the UN "peacekeeping" mission, put in place in 2004 to  
legitimize the most recent coup, remains in Haiti, Hallward points to  
ongoing resistance from the poorest neighborhoods as evidence that the  
story is not over. While coup forces continue to dominate most  
ministries of the current government, the 2006 presidential election  
resulting in Haiti's rulers conceding victory to Aristide's former  
Prime Minster Rene Preval shows the unavoidability of some concessions  
to pressure from the poor majority.

For those who feel a debt to the people of Haiti for inspiring  
resistance to U.S. slavery, and for setting an example of the true  
potential of declarations of liberty espoused by the French  
Revolution, this book is an essential resource. Damming the Flood will  
inspire international activists to support the struggles of those  
Haitians who continue to stand up for their fundamental human rights.  
It should be widely read.

All articles copyrighted Haiti Liberte. REPRINTS ENCOURAGED.
Please credit Haiti Liberte.

                                       -30-