[R-G] Canada's Bloody Hands

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/html/20090418T180000-0500_149678_OBS_CANADA_S_BLOODY_HANDS_.asp

Columns
Canada's Bloody Hands
COMMON SENSE
JOHN MAXWELL
Sunday, April 19, 2009

In my teenage years, my stepfather used to buy Colliers and the  
Saturday Evening Post; I bought Newsweek and occasionally TIME, and  
those magazines formed, for a little while, my window into the modern  
world.
JOHN MAXWELL

I was never as credulous as my contemporaries, and my faith in TIME  
and Newsweek began to fray with their reporting of the clash between  
Peron and La Prensa in Argentina. It disappeared almost entirely the  
first time I read a report in those magazines allegedly about Jamaica.  
These doubts came flooding back half a century later when I tried to  
find an address in Managua, Nicaragua. It went something like this:  
Third house on the left on the second road on the right next to the  
Esso gas station on the road by the zoo.

Having read TIME I was expecting a city more advanced than Kingston.  
Instead I found a ramshackle Spanish Town Road-like mess in which  
hundreds of thousands of miserable people had contributed to the  
grandeur alleged in stories in the North American media. In 1964,  
promised an interview with Papa Doc, I flew into Haiti, seeing the  
environmental divide between brown Haiti and green Santo Domingo, a  
line discovered anew by every foreign journalist since and attributed  
to Haitian poverty and desperation instead of to the rightful authors,  
the Americans who strip-mined Haiti's economy flat in search of riches  
in the 20 years after 1915. It was smash-and-grab colonialism.

It bequeathed to Haiti the barebacked mountains, dried riverbeds,  
broken streets, pitiful water supply, grinding poverty and misery  
caused by a century of economic blackmail by France and the US, but  
even now blamed on Aristide - who was actually born into these  
conditions and determined to change them.

It is almost guaranteed that most contemporary reports on Haiti range  
from seriously inaccurate to biased to outright lies. This is  
especially so when they speak of the 'radical slum priest' turned  
president, and who "fled amid a popular revolt". These keywords tell  
you that you are reading propaganda intended to continue to enhance a  
200-year-old programme of defamation officially begun as a counter- 
attack by the nascent American Republic on the idea of universal human  
rights promulgated by the brand-new black republic of Haiti. That  
sentence does sound bizarre, doesn't it?
A man, carrying a table on his head, eats an ice cream in Port-au- 
Prince, on Wednesday, April 15, 2009. Daily life in Haiti is marked by  
abject poverty and misery. (Photo: AP)

It appears to contradict everything you've learned about the  
Enlightenment, the Rights of Man and the American and French  
Revolutions. It was that great democrat, Thomas Jefferson, the  
principal author of the Declaration of Independence who, in the  
preamble to his original draft of the Declaration wrote: "We hold  
these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all men are created  
equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive  
rights inherent and inalienable ."

And it was he also who wrote about slavery, "We have the wolf by the  
ears; and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is  
in one scale, and self-preservation in the other." And finally, it was  
Jefferson who, seeing whites and blacks as two distinct nations whose  
natural relationship was one of war, believed that if slavery was  
abolished the blacks would rebel due to the long years of intense and  
cruel oppression. He anticipated racial war if free blacks and whites  
were not segregated into disparate countries.

So, while Haiti supplied many, if not most of the so-called French  
soldiers to beat back the British in the American war of Independence,  
when those blacks defeated Napoleon in their own country, ceasing to  
be French and becoming "Ayisien" - Haitian - they took on a new colour  
and a new menace. If they could beat the French twice and the British  
and the Spaniards - a Royal Flush of 19th century imperial power -  
what wickedness were they not capable of?

Henri Christophe who fought for the Americans at Savannah and  
Yorktown, became labelled, two decades later, with a demoniac  
personality, a blood-sipping cannibal to be reincarnated two centuries  
later both as Duvalier and as the anti-Duvalier and as the Catholic  
Priest Aristide. It was a bonus that Jean-Bedel Bokassa, dictator of  
the Central African Republic (CAR), was also libellously accused of  
cannibalism. It may have been these propaganda coincidences that  
persuaded the CIA, as innocent as ever, to arrange the 'extraordinary  
rendition' of President and Mme Aristide to the CAR, hoping no doubt,  
that there just might be a real cannibal in Bangui who could accept  
the Aristides as a 'bonne bouche' from their friends in Washington.

Bloodsucking

The new American republic felt itself threatened by Haiti, which  
offered freedom to anyone fleeing from slavery and oppression, and  
armed and provisioned Bolivar to liberate Spanish America and free the  
slaves. That alone provoked the idea of an embargo against the  
Haitians. They needed to sell their sugar to new markets, since France  
refused to trade with its former colony. The Americans said they would  
recognise Haitian independence whenever France did, giving France the  
opportunity for the biggest and most evil act of extortion in human  
history.

The enormity of the blackmail was breathtaking. France demanded that  
Haiti pay an indemnity of 150 million French francs - equivalent to  
nearly US$22 billion in 2004. The ransom was equivalent to France's  
entire annual budget or 10 times the annual GDP of Haiti at its  
productive best. The French not only extracted a pound of flesh, they  
took an enormous volume of blood with it.

The first instalment - arranged by the French - was for a French bank  
to lend Haiti the money. The bank deducted management fees and  
interest up front, so that when the instalment was paid to the French  
it was still six million francs short.

The injustice of the arrangement may be further judged by the fact  
that France's Western design, frustrated by the loss of Haiti, meant  
that all the French territory below Canada became surplus to  
requirements. This area, known as Louisiana, was 74 times the area of  
Haiti, larger than the then United States itself and was bought by  
President Jefferson for less than half the French demanded from Haiti  
in Blood Money.

The major effect was the permanent economic and social distortion and  
stunting of Haitian life and freedom, largely due to the imposition of  
draconian measures to repay the debt. The main measure was the so- 
called "Rural Code". J Damu, writing on the issue reported: [According  
to] "Haitian First Lady Mildred Aristide's account in her book, Child  
Domestic Service in Haiti and its Historical Underpinnings, the Rural  
Code laid the basis for the legal apartheid between rural and urban  
society in Haiti. With the Rural Code, the economically dominant class  
of merchants, government officials and military officers who lived in  
the cities legally established themselves as Haiti's ruling class.  
"Under the Rural Code agricultural workers were chained to the land  
and allowed little or no opportunity to move from place to place.  
Socializing was made illegal after midnight, and the Haitian farmer  
who did not own property was obligated to sign a three-, six- or nine- 
year labor contract with a large property owner. The code also banned  
small-scale commerce, so that agricultural workers would produce crops  
strictly for export.

The Haitian Rural Code was all embracing, governing the lives not only  
of farmers but of children as well.

The Rural Code was specifically designed to regulate rural life in  
order to more efficiently produce export crops with which to pay the  
indemnity. The taxes levied on production were also used predominantly  
to pay the indemnity and not to build schools nor to provide other  
social services to the generators of this great wealth, the peasants."

The debt was finally paid off in 1947, 122 years after its imposition.  
Between independence in 1804 and Jean Bertrand Aristide's accession to  
office in 1990 a grand total of 32 high schools were built in Haiti.  
Under Aristide more than 200 were built, mostly in the countryside.  
When the Americans kidnapped and deported Aristide in 2004 they found  
quarters for the Marines by capturing Haiti's new medical school,  
built by Aristide and run with the help of the Cubans.

The Marines' allies, who until a few weeks before rejoiced in the name  
"the Cannibal Army", destroyed all signs of cultural progress, burning  
down the new museum of Haitian culture and shutting down the  
children's television. The Canadian representative to the OAS rather  
gave the game away for Canada when he accompanied the American  
Quisling - La Tortue - on an American marine helicopter flight to the  
north where La Tortue and his murderous lieutenants hailed the former  
Cannibal Army as Freedom Fighters.

Their only role had been their usual banditry, attacking unarmed  
police stations in the countryside, robbing peasants and chopping up  
the innocent cops - giving the American, Canadian British and French  
newspapers the right to write that the radical slum-priest (and  
probable witch-doctor) had " led amid a popular uprising".

This week, Canada's most popular newspaper, the Toronto Star, could  
say, in guilelesss innocence: "Few countries have been hit harder than  
Haiti by the global economic slump, and by the sheer force of nature.  
Last year's hurricanes did $1 billion in damage. Remittances from  
Haitians working in the United States, Canada and France may drop by  
$250 million or more this year. And now foreign aid is in danger of  
drying up. This adds up to a colossal challenge for President René  
Préval's government, which was democratically elected in 2006 after  
years of instability. Despite initial hopes, Haiti's 9 million people  
are struggling. Eight in 10 live on less than $2 a day. Now they face  
even worse hardship. The most desperate will turn to argile - patties  
made from clay, salt and margarine - to stave off hunger pangs. And  
that raises fears of food riots, soaring crime and instability."

There is not the slightest hint of Canada's leading and bloody role in  
promoting and creating those "years of instability". Shortly after  
Aristide's overwhelming victory in Haiti's first democratic  
presidential election in 1990, the relics of the Jim Crow Marine  
occupation managed to convince the Americans, first John McCain's  
International Republican Institute and then elements of Bill Clinton's  
government and various Canadian politico and officials that Haiti  
under Aristide was a threat to civilisation as they knew it. Denis  
Paradis, a Canadian minister, convened a coven of like-minded  
fascists, as I am wont to describe them, to develop a doctrine giving  
civilised states the right to intervene in 'failed states' - the  
"Responsibility to Protect" doctrine. Paradis' coven then decided that  
Aristide must go, and the Canadians, through the Canadian Association  
for Development Assistance among others, the US Agency for  
International Development and the International Republican Institute  
financed a whole panoply of Haitian francs tireurs, pimps and wannabe  
presidents to support the programme of the elites which was simply to  
extract from the Haitian people, the universal human rights  
promulgated 200 years earlier for the first time on Earth by Jean  
Jacques Dessalines and the other illustrious fathers and mothers of  
the Haitian Revolution. Sometimes innocence is not merely a sin but a  
bloody crime. More next week. Walk Good.

Copyright 2009 John Maxwell jankunnu at gmail.com