[R-G] Haiti Genocide a la bonne femme

[Anthony Fenton]

Haiti Genocide a la bonne femme
John Maxwell
This article originally appeared in Jamaica Observer.
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php? 
option=com_content&task=view&id=520&Itemid=36

"This clay is guaranteed to make your bones stronger even as your  
flesh melts away."

We have some great news for dieters this week!

The Haitians, with a little help from the Americans, the French and  
the Canadians, have produced a solution to the obesity crisis that  
now threatens western civilization.

Haiti's great and good friends in Washington, Paris and Ottawa have,   
at last, after several years of hard, grinding effort, managed to  
create the condition known as ‘critical mess'  [sic] allowing the  
Haitians to produce a diet which - unlike any other slimming solution  
- is absolutely guaranteed to work. Other slimming solutions have  
always had one weak spot: no matter how low-calorie the diet is,  
dieters can always defeat the purpose by overeating.

The new Haitian diet makes that impossible!

No matter how much you eat you will not get fat!!

This is sensational news!!!

Here for the information of our avid readers is the recipe, direct  
from the street vendors of Port au Prince.

One caveat: the special ingredient may have to be imported from  
Haiti. We haven't yet found a gourmet specialty shop in North America  
which stocks the main ingredient - Glaise de Plateau Central - a  
special kind of clay from the Central Plateau of Haiti. This clay is  
yellowish in color and the best grades contain lots of healthy  
calcium, guaranteed to make your bones stronger even as your too, too  
solid flesh melts away.

Method

Take enough Glaise de Plateau Central and dry it in the sun.

Pound (in a mortar) and sieve the  dried  glaise, to remove any small  
stones, twigs, insect parts, bird droppings or other visible impurities.

Add a little water, enough to make a soft dough.

Add a little fat and a soupçon of salt (gros sel, pounded fine).

Mix all together forming small - say 2 inch - cookies.

Expose to the sun on a zinc sheet  (beaten as flat as possible).

When dry your mud pies are ready to eat.

Bon appetit!!!

It may sound better in French but it is genocide in any language.

‘And so say all of us!'

The Haitians are giving new meaning to the phrase "dirt poor."

Four years after the Americans, Canadians and French beheaded  
democracy in Haiti it is now clear that a Final Solution is in sight  
for the 200-year old Haitian  problem.

Almost exactly three years ago, on January 30, 2005, I wrote in this  
column in this paper  about the world's commemoration of the  
liberation of  the Auschwitz murder factory sixty year before

Elie Weisel, a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews, said  
eloquently:

"In those times those who were in the death camps felt not only  
tortured and murdered by the enemy, but also tortured and murdered by  
what they considered to be the world's silence and indifference ."

" ... Those who committed the crimes were not vulgar, underworld  
thugs, but men with high positions in government, academia, industry  
and medicine."  Weisel said.

I wrote then: "The world is remembering Auschwitz and the Holocaust.  
It is not paying any notice to the 200-year Holocaust still underway  
in Haiti. There too, the people in hazard must feel tortured and  
murdered by the indifference of a world conned into believing that  
the high-minded leaders of the United States, France, Canada and  
Brazil have the interest of the Haitian people at heart when their  
agents torture, murder, maim and rape Haitians for no better reason  
than that they support their democratically elected and  
unconstitutionally removed President, Jean Bertrand Aristide."

That was in 2005.

"Haitians have had their leaders kidnapped, tortured and murdered,  
innocent women and children have been killed by the UN occupation  
forces working to eliminate the enemies of the Haitian ruling elite."

HaitiSewage Since then the Haitians have continued to languish in  
suffering. They have had their leaders kidnapped, tortured and  
murdered, innocent women and children have been killed by the UN  
occupation forces working to eliminate the enemies of the Haitian  
ruling elite, the destruction of  Haitian democratic organization  
meant the death of thousands from hurricane, floods and other natural  
disasters, and they have waited for hours in the heat of the sun to  
cast their votes hoping that those votes would have meant a better  
life for them, or at least a chance for a better life. That hasn't  
happened.

Haiti is still paying for the foreign aid gormandized by the  
Duvaliers and their allies and they still have no roads, no  
hospitals, and their medical school started by Aristide with the aid  
of the Cubans is now the site of the barracks of the occupying forces.

These Haitians are the people who helped the Americans win their  
independence, destroyed the American ambitions of Napoleon, destroyed  
slavery and accelerated the abolition of the slave trade. They are  
guilty on all counts and obviously deserve to be punished. They  
inhabit one of those places Mr. Bush called "the dark corners of the  
world."

Three years ago, at the Holocaust commemoration the US vice president  
Mr. Cheney delivered himself of these  words:

" ...these great evils of history were perpetuated not in some  
remote, uncivilized part of the world, but in the very heart of the   
civilized  world. ... Men without conscience are capable of any  
cruelty the human mind can imagine. Therefore we must teach every  
generation the values of tolerance and decency and moral courage. And  
in every generation, free nations must maintain the will, the  
foresight and the strength to fight tyranny and spread the freedom  
that leads to peace."

And so say all of us!  And so say all of us!! And so say all of us !!!

Meanwhile, the Haitians eat dirt.

Gimmick Development

Caribbean culture - the product of a tiny proportion of the world's  
people, is awesome. We have produced Jean Jacques Dessalines,  Marcus  
Garvey, Fidel Castro and Norman Manley, Capablanca and George  
Headley, Alexandre Dumas, Arthur Lewis and Derek Walcott, Ernesto  
Lecuona, Bob Marley and the Mighty Sparrow, Karl Parboosingh and  
Cecil Baugh, Colin Powell and Malcolm X to name only a few who have  
changed the world. Visitors to the region, especially to Jamaica, are  
unlikely to discover any of this.

Caribbean culture is the magnet that draws foreign visitors to these  
countries but once they get here, they could be anywhere. They don't  
eat Caribbean food or meet Caribbean people or hear any but the most  
formulaic, tired Caribbean music.HaitiJamaicaTouristCouple

There are exceptions of course. But Caribbean tourism is largely not  
a Caribbean product. The people who are the stewards of the flame  
that draws the visitors have very little part in the industry. In  
Jamaica the people are losing their beaches and even their landscapes  
to so-called "developments" which accord no respect nor pay attention  
to their Jamaican context.

"Caribbean tourism is largely not a Caribbean product."

The Jamaica of song and story is replaced by petting zoos featuring  
captive camels, parakeets and dolphins and other exotica imported  
from other places.

"Development" in Jamaica follows the maxim quoted in the 1954 World  
Bank Report on Jamaica: "In Jamaica, the absolute ownership of land  
means in practice the absolute right of the owner to ruin the land   
in his own way." These days one does not  even have to be the  
absolute owner. If, like Robert Cartade, one can persuade the right  
people one can get permission to destroy Hope Gardens and if the  
"proles" protest too much, Long Mountain instead. If you are the  
government you can pour concrete and sterilize an area half the size  
of Hanover to build a Doomsday Highway that, as I predicted, will be  
impossible to pay for. We can try to rescue disastrous developments  
like the Port Antonio Marina by making an even bigger bet on a new  
airport (for flying yachts?). We can destroy Falmouth so that  
financiers can make millions from cruise ships before they are sunk  
by the price of petroleum in five or ten years.

HaitiJamaicaTouristHotel We can destroy Kingston Harbor by pollution  
or by dredging and we are now told that the parish of Portland is so  
beautiful and so attractive that it must be saved for foreigners and  
covered with villas and other attractions which will change it into  
Las Vegas by the sea.

The latest "development" proposals for St. Thomas mean that the  
people will give up some of the most valuable farmland in Jamaica for  
our fourth - fourth! - international airport. Jamaica already has one  
mile of roadway for every square mile of land. We will now have one  
international airport for every thousand square miles of land or one  
international airport for every 200 square miles of reasonably level  
land.

And all this is to be done without consultation with the Jamaican  
people whose sacrifice is essential for these ‘developments'.  
Although we are bound by the Treaty of Rio, by the Cartagena  
Convention and other national and international laws, the people of  
Jamaica will be asked to yield their treasure as the Arawaks/Tainos  
were "asked" to yield theirs.

"I claim this land in the name of Development!"  So There!

Give us a break.

Endnote: Is it just me? Or is anyone else disturbed by the heavy  
promotion of the film "Vantage Point" on CNN in concert with news  
reports and programs about the US party presidential primaries.  
‘Vantage Point" is about the assassination of an American President,   
and the promos, especially when they follow Barack Obama political  
advertisements, give me the creeps.

John Maxwell of the University of the West Indies (UWI) is the  
veteran Jamaican journalist who in 1999 single-handedly thwarted the  
Jamaican government's efforts to build houses at Hope, the nation's  
oldest and best known botanical gardens. His campaigning earned him  
first prize in the 2000 Sandals Resort's Annual Environmental  
Journalism Competition, the region's richest journalism prize. He is  
also the author of How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for  
Environmentalists and Journalists. Jamaica, 2000. Mr. Maxwell can be  
reached at jankunnu at gmail.com