[R-G] Saint Patrick Goes to Haiti

[Anthony Fenton]

Saint Patrick Goes to Haiti
by Brian Concannon Jr.
Global Research, May 1, 2008
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8862

Saint Patrick is celebrated in Haiti, although not with the green beer  
and clothes he inspires in the United States. There he is better known  
as Dambala, a loa or spirit who often appears in the form of the snake  
in Haiti’s Vodou religion. Dambala and the other spirits were brought  
from West Africa to Haiti in slave ships that brought the ancestors of  
today’s Haitians across the Atlantic. Vodou was brutally suppressed,  
so the Haitians disguised their worship by representing their spirits  
with Christian symbols and icons. St. Patrick, often painted with  
snakes at his feet, and himself an escaped slave, must have seemed a  
good match. So centuries later, prints of St. Patrick with his staff  
and his bishop’s mitre still preside over the drumming and chanting of  
vodou ceremonies in Haiti.

In the United States, St. Patrick is celebrated with sad songs that  
recognize the starvation and injustice that drove the ancestors of  
today’s revelers across the Atlantic. One of the saddest and most  
popular of these songs, The Fields of Athenry, can bring tears to your  
eyes, whether it is sung softly in the original folk version or  
shouted in the punk rock remake by the Dropkick Murphys. The song  
begins:

     By a lonely prison wall

     I heard a young girl calling
     Michael, they have taken you away
     For you stole Trevelyn's corn
     So the young might see the morn
     Now a prison ship lies waiting in the bay.

At first blush this is personal tragedy- a young man deported from  
Ireland (to Australia), leaving his wife and young children behind,  
perhaps forever. All because he stole food to keep his kids alive. But  
with more context, the personal tragedy evolves into a natural and  
economic disaster, and eventually into an outrageous international  
injustice.

The song’s Trevelyn is Sir Charles Edward Trevelyn, a British  
bureaucrat during the Great Irish Famine of 1845-1849. By 1845 Britain  
had controlled Ireland for centuries, during which the large British  
landowners (and a few wealthy Irish ones) had, with government help,  
pushed Irish peasants into smaller and smaller parcels. Although the  
Emerald Isle was a fertile country that grew more beef, grain and  
other food than it needed, most of that food was grown on large  
estates and exported to Britain. Irish peasants -- the majority of the  
population -- ate mostly potatoes because that was the only crop they  
could grow enough of to feed their families on their small plots. So  
when a fungus killed almost the entire potato crop in 1845 (and again  
for the next four years), the peasants had nothing to eat.

Sir Charles Trevelyn was responsible for managing the British  
government’s relief efforts during the Famine. These efforts were the  
outrageous international injustice. British relief programs did save  
lives, but they did not come close to matching the need, because the  
government refused to take life-saving measures if they conflicted  
with its free-market economic theories. Trevelyn himself welcomed the  
famine as a "mechanism for reducing surplus population."

“Trevelyn’s corn” was dried corn that the British government bought  
from the U.S. to distribute cheaply to the hungry. The government  
feared interfering with the free market more than it feared people  
starving to death, so it refused corn rations to anyone who could  
theoretically buy food on the market. This included people physically  
able to work but unable to find jobs in a collapsed economy, and  
families with any land- even a quarter acre. The economic theories did  
not fill empty stomachs, so people not theoretically poor enough for  
help starved to death while food sat undistributed in the warehouses.

Meanwhile, the potato blight did not affect other crops, including  
beef and grain. Ireland continued to be a net exporter of food  
throughout the famine. Keeping the food in Ireland would have saved  
lives, but it might have interfered with the free market. So the  
British kept eating beef and grain imported from a starving Ireland.  
Some Irish desperately ate their island’s famously green grass: they  
were found dead, with green stains around their mouths.

Trevelyn’s “mechanism” for reducing Ireland’s population worked. Over  
one million people- by conservative estimates- were reduced to their  
graves, starved to death or killed by the diseases of hunger. More  
than 2 million were forced to flee the island- to America, England,  
Australia and many other places where St. Patrick is honored. All  
told, Ireland lost a quarter of its population.

Today, the Great Famine is as much a distant memory in Ireland as it  
is in Boston, New York or San Francisco. After centuries of being one  
of the poorest nations in Western Europe, Ireland is now one of the  
wealthiest and peaceful countries in the world, the product of an  
economic boom fueled by strong government investment, especially in  
education and infrastructure.

But a century and a half after the Great Famine, people in Haiti are  
still being killed by the same economic theories. Haiti has made  
headlines recently, for people eating cookies made of salt, butter and  
brown dirt to hold off starvation. The stories were, at first blush, a  
personal tragedy (a mother unable to feed her infant son) and a  
natural and economic disaster (hurricanes, high fuel prices). But with  
more context, the personal tragedy evolves into an outrageous  
international injustice.

For decades, the World Bank and the Inter-America Development Bank  
(IDB) propped up Haitian dictators with generous loans. The notorious  
“Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc” -- Francois and Jean-Claude Duvalier--  
received almost half of Haiti’s current outstanding loans. The  
Duvaliers used the money to buy warm fur coats and fast cars, and to  
fund the brutal Tonton Macoute death squads. In return, the  
international community, especially the United States, received a  
reliable vote against Fidel Castro in the United Nations and the  
Organization of American States.

The Haitian people received very little from these loans. Since 1980,  
when Haiti started receiving the Banks’ help in earnest, its per  
capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has shrunk by 38.3%. Along the  
way, Haiti became the poorest country in the Americas, and one of the  
hungriest countries in the world. Today, about half of school-age kids  
in Haiti are not in school. Over half of all Haitians struggle to  
survive on $1 a day or less, and life expectancy is in the mid-50’s.  
Many of those who can flee do so, including cities like Boston and New  
York, that sheltered the refugees from Ireland’s famine.

The loans lavished on the Duvaliers and other dictators are now due,  
so Haiti’s elected government is sending almost a million dollars  
every week to the well-appointed offices of the World Bank and the IDB  
in Washington. Like Ireland exporting beef while people starved, Haiti  
is exporting money while people die of poverty.

The World Bank and the IDB are not commercial banks. They are funded  
by our tax dollars, and were not established to make a profit. They  
are supposed to be, in the World Bank’s words, “working for a world  
free of poverty.” Like the British in Ireland, the Banks have their  
“relief programs” for Haiti, including programs that will eventually  
forgive a portion of Haiti’s debt. But like the British response to  
Ireland’s famine, the Bank programs do not rise to the seriousness of  
the situation.

The Banks’ programs are too late -- they will not provide full relief  
for months, perhaps years. The Banks started their programs in 1996,  
but would not admit Haiti until 2007. Like the British declaring the  
starving Irish theoretically able to work, in 2000 the World Bank  
declared Haiti theoretically able to pay its debts, and therefore  
ineligible for the Bank’s help: “[d]espite being very poor and having  
a relatively significant external debt level, …. after taking  
advantage of other sources of debt relief, Haiti’s debt …. will be  
reduced to a sustainable level.” So Haiti has just started jumping  
through the many hoops required to receive relief.

The Banks’ programs are also too little – they stop where the  
requirements of helping poor people conflict with the requirements of  
the Banks’ economic theories. The Banks could simply cancel Haiti’s  
debts, especially those from loans given to dictators, which would  
immediately make a million dollars a week available for life-saving  
government programs. But the very institutions that gave generously to  
the Duvaliers-- knowing full well how the money was being spent-- now  
demand “accountability” from Haiti’s democratic government before  
cancelling the dictators’ debts. Accountability means, in part, that  
the government has an economic plan that satisfies the Banks’ free  
market theories. Haiti’s plan is not yet available, but the Banks have  
required other poor countries to demonstrate accountability by  
slashing public health and education spending. For now, accountability  
means keeping the $1 million coming every week, while the citizens of  
Haiti eat dirt.

The citizens of the United States could put a stop to this injustice  
immediately. We pay the largest share of the Banks’ costs, and have  
the largest say in the Banks’ governance. If our leaders made  
cancellation of Haiti’s debt a priority, the debts would be cancelled.

Some members of the U.S. House of Representatives have taken the first  
step towards ending this injustice. In mid-February, Rep. Maxine  
Waters circulated a letter that 53 of her colleagues signed, urging  
the U.S. Treasury Department to arrange the immediate suspension of  
all debt payments from Haiti. The Haiti Debt Cancellation resolution  
in the House, House Resolution 241, seeks to permanently cancel  
Haiti’s IDB and World Bank debts, and has 66 co-sponsors.

In The Fields of Athenry, Michael calls out his final words to his  
wife Mary:

     Against the famine and the Crown
     I rebelled, they cut me down
     Now you must raise our child with dignity.

If his children survived, Michael’s wish would have eventually come  
true. Athenry, Ireland, is now a dignified tourist destination and  
commuter town, known for its quaint medieval buildings and ruins.  
People do not flee Athenry anymore, or steal corn to feed their  
children. Instead, people move there for jobs and opportunity - the  
latest census classifies one in five Athenry residents as “not Irish.”

The children of “Michel” and “Marie” in Haiti deserve the same chance  
at dignity and prosperity that the children of Michael and Mary  
received. They can take a big step in the right direction if the  
international community lets Haiti’s government invest in its people,  
their education and the infrastructure, rather than in payments to  
wealthy banks. So this St. Patrick’s Day, as we sing about long-ago  
starvation and injustice in what is now a wealthy island, we should  
also think about the misery and injustice under St. Patrick’s eyes in  
Haiti, an outrage we can still do something about.

Human rights lawyer Brian Concannon Jr., brian at ijdh.org, directs the  
Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH). More information on  
the fight to relieve Haiti’s burden of debt can be found on IJDH’s  
website,