US Marines in Haiti: Back to colonialism

[inthebrain]

We ain't leaving. Drs Without Borders is also levying complaints about diverting planes with supplies so the military could land at the airport.

US Marines in Haiti: Back to colonialism
27 January 2010
The US media’s coverage of the catastrophe in Haiti has increasingly included articles and broadcast reports extolling the supposed humanitarian role of US soldiers and Marines in the Caribbean country. They generally describe how “combat-hardened” veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are lending a helping hand to the survivors of the earthquake.

Some of this reporting seems aimed at countering growing international criticism of the US militarization of the response to the Haitian disaster, which has given priority to rushing in combat-equipped troops over the provision of medical supplies, food and water desperately needed to save lives.

A spokesman for Doctors Without Borders, for instance, voiced concern over “the extreme confusion of distributing food with a gun.” The organization formally protested the repeated diversion of planes bringing it medical supplies after the US military seized control of the Port-au-Prince airport, saying that many of its patients have died as a result.

With hundreds of thousands dead and hundreds of thousands more injured, there is undoubtedly shock among the troops in Haiti at the scale of the devastation and sympathy for the suffering of the Haitian people.

Those in Washington who sent them there and the senior officers who command them, however, are operating on the basis of very different motives, as one recent press report on their mission makes clear.

USA Today published an article Monday headlined “Marines Studied Their Own History in Haiti,” describing the country as “a major part of Marine Corps lore.”


http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/pers-j27.shtm...