By Roger Annis ( [email protected] This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )
(This is a revised version of the original published on Upside Down World (http://upsidedownworld.org), December 28, 2010)
Of all the commentaries and interviews coinciding with the anniversary of Haiti’s earthquake, none are likely to exceed in significance the interview granted by OAS Representative to Haiti, Ricardo Seitenfus, to the Swiss daily Le Temps on December 20.
The critique he delivered to the newspaper is especially significant for Latin America and the Caribbean because Seitenfus is Brazilian. Sensitivity is running high in the region over the evident failure of the international relief effort led by the big powers – the United States, Canada and Europe – whose interventionist policies had already done so much harm to Haiti before this latest catastrophe. Read more…
By Charlie Hinton and Kiilu Nyasha
Wyclef: The Ronald Reagan of Haiti
BASICS Online – August 2010
Reprinted with permission from the authors – To appear in the August edition of the San Francisco Bay View Newspaper To cut to the chase, no election in Haiti, and no candidate in those elections, will be considered legitimate by the majority of Haiti’s population, unless it includes the full and fair participation of the Fanmi Lavalas Party of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Fanmi Lavalas is unquestionably the most popular party in the country, yet the “international community,” led by the United States, France, and Canada, has done everything possible to undermine Aristide and Lavalas, overthrowing him twice by military coups in 1991 and 2004, and banishing Aristide, who now lives in South Africa with his family, from the Americas. A United Nations army, led by Brazil, still occupies Haiti, 5 years after the coup. Their unstated mission, under the name of “peacekeeping,” is to suppress the popular movement and prevent the return to power of Aristide’s Lavalas Party. One must understand a Wyclef Jean candidacy, first of all, in this context. Read more…
by Kabir Joshi-Vijayan – BASICS Issue #18
“Natural Disaster: a disaster caused by natural forces rather than by human action, e.g. an earthquake”
-MSN Encarta
Within 18 hours of notification 8 ,000 US paratroopers parachuted, docked and landed in Haiti seizing its national airport.
Within two weeks, over 20,000 heavily armed American troops had arrived, securing key locations and taking complete control of the nation’s borders, ports, airspace and waters – and the US embassy began to make statements on behalf of the country’s government.
(reproduced by BASICS with permission from the author)
Any large city in the world would have suffered extensive damage from an earthquake on the scale of the one that ravaged Haiti’s capital city on Tuesday afternoon, but it’s no accident that so much of Port-au-Prince now looks like a war zone. Much of the devastation wreaked by this latest and most calamitous disaster to befall Haiti is best understood as another thoroughly manmade outcome of a long and ugly historical sequence.
The country has faced more than its fair share of catastrophes. Hundreds died in Port-au-Prince in an earthquake back in June 1770, and the huge earthquake of 7 May 1842 may have killed 10,000 in the northern city of Cap Haitien alone. Hurricanes batter the island on a regular basis, most recently in 2004 and again in 2008; the storms of September 2008 flooded the town of Gonaïves and swept away much of its flimsy infrastructure, killing more than a thousand people and destroying many thousands of homes. The full scale of the destruction resulting from this earthquake may not become clear for several weeks. Even minimal repairs will take years to complete, and the long-term impact is incalculable.
What is already all too clear, however, is the fact that this impact will be the result of an even longer-term history of deliberate impoverishment and disempowerment. Haiti is routinely described as the “poorest country in the western hemisphere.” This poverty is the direct legacy of perhaps the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in world history, compounded by decades of systematic postcolonial oppression.
The noble “international community” which is currently scrambling to send its “humanitarian aid” to Haiti is largely responsible for the extent of the suffering it now aims to reduce. Ever since the U.S. invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti’s people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s phrase) “from absolute misery to a dignified poverty” has been violently and deliberately blocked by the U.S. government and some of its allies.
Choice Between Super-Profitability and Two Meals a Day
BASICS #16 (Nov / Dec 2009)
by Niraj Joshi
The United Nations Security Council has just voted to extend the UN “peacekeeping” mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) for another year. MINUSTAH will now enter its sixth year of illegal occupation, in violation of both the Haitian constitution and international law. The military force was imposed on Haiti in June 2004 and used to violently contain and repress the popular resistance to the western-backed 2004 coup d’etat against President Aristide. Since the 2006 election of President Preval, it has been used to violently contain and repress popular resistance to the neoliberal and imperialist program imposed on the Haitian government, and which has only worsened poverty and increased misery on the Caribbean island.
Such has been the case in the last months when several thousand workers and students have tirelessly protested President Preval’s failure to raise the minimum wage in Haiti. The protestors were brutally repressed by MINUSTAH and the Haitian police, with at least two demonstrators killed and several others beaten and arrested.
Haiti has the lowest minimum wage in the hemisphere. In May of this year both chambers of the Haitian parliament voted to increase the minimum wage from the daily 70 gourdes to 200 gourdes ($5.32 Cnd). The current 70 gourdes is not even enough to cover transportation and two meals a day. Even the proposed 200 gourdes is not an actual increase but rather an adjustment, since inflation has soared drastically beyond the purchasing power of the minimum wage. However, it is a small step toward alleviating the rampant poverty endured by Haitian workers. The last minimum wage raise happened in 2003 under President Aristide, but was immediately revoked by the western-installed dictatorship after Aristide was kidnapped by the joint forces of U.S., Canada, and France.
But under foreign occupation, President Preval has yielded to the demands of international institutions, foreign governments and the business sector. He has blocked the wage raise arguing it would hurt the country’s maquialdora sector (the tax-exempt plants that assemble products mostly for export and that is slated for expansion – but that produces some of the most exploitive and precarious employment in the country). Foreign factory owners, such as Canada’s Gildan Activewear, have threatened to shut down because they cannot afford to pay the higher wages (Gildan cleared 150 million in profits this year and projects a free cash flow of $600 million over the next 3 years).
A compromise of a woefully deficient raise to 125 gourdes is likely to be passed. However, the foreign investor’s export zones (where most of the lowest paid jobs exist) will be exempt! Haiti under American, Canadian and UN occupation remains on its neoliberal course despite the moderately contrary efforts of some of its legislators. And if outraged Haitian workers chose to resist with strikes or protests, the MINUSTAH “peacekeeping” forces will be on site to take up their military position and lead the unruly back to their slave-like posts.
Demonstrators rally outside the Haitian Parliament to demand a minimum wage increase to 200 gourdes ($5 dollars / day) – which would still remain the lowest wage in the western hemisphere.
When the popular Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide was elected in 2000 with 93% of the popular vote (in elections deemed free and fair by international observers), this was a result that neither the United States, nor the rich in Haiti could accept. Aristide had been brought to office by a popular movement of the poor, known as the Lavalas movement. For the lighter-skinned and French-speaking wealthy elite (in a country where 90% are Creole-speaking, dark skinned, and poor) the coming to office of a representative of the poor was deemed unacceptable.
Consequently, the United States, alongside the help of France and Canada, worked to undermine the ability of Aristide and the Lavalas movement to govern. First, the Haitian government was cut-off from access to loans and aid – with what aid that did enter the country being directed to the unelected opponents of Aristide. All of the so-called Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) being funded by the Canadian and American governments were actually anti-Aristide groups, meaning that the hard-earned tax-payer dollars of Canadians were spent to help the rich, undemocratic elite attack Haiti’s poor majority.
With the Aristide government cut off from all loans and aid funding, it was very difficult for the administration to govern. With a flood of NGOs pouring into the country from Canada and the United States, no doubt Haitians would have been asking themselves why foreigners were claiming to be there to help them but refused to cooperate with their elected government. Read more…
