Rally denounces White House role in Haiti coup

[Tinoire]

Rally denounces White House role in Haiti coup

Author: Tim Wheeler, Washington correspondent


WASHINGTON – Protesters rallied in front of the White House, March 6, chanting “U.S. out of Haiti, Aristide in” and holding placards proclaiming, “End the U.S. coup in Haiti!”

<snip>

“This is not just about democracy in Venezuela or Haiti. It’s about democracy in the U.S.,” said Aristide, who is no relation to the ousted president. “Everybody realizes the Bush administration is determined to uproot democracy all around the world.”

Marx Aristide pointed out that this year is the bicentennial of the revolution led by the slave, Toussaint L’Ouverture, which freed Haiti from French colonial rule. Turning to address the White House behind him, he shouted, “If you think you can do to Haiti what Napoleon couldn’t do, think again! We’re going to send you back to Texas in November!” The crowd cheered.

<snip>

“Why is the United States siding with the rebel groups instead of the democratically elected president of Haiti?” she demanded. “Where are these rebels getting their weapons and uniforms? Why did the U.S. pressure the World Bank, the IMF and USAID not to send financial assistance to Haiti in the past 10 years? This is a call to action. We want people to call their congresspeople to demand a full investigation. The United Nations should be more involved. And don’t forget, we have an election here in the U.S. Nov. 2. We want regime change here.”

<snip>

Demonstrations against the coup were also held in Chicago, South Florida, New Orleans, the Bay Area, and New York, among other places.

<snip>

http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/4911/1/206

[efhmc]

1. You know I always suspect the bushies of evil and I love anything that

causes them grief but I am still confused about Haiti. I am not so sure Aristide is a good, but maligned guy. Maybe we just should stay out of the affairs of others even if the good guys don't come out on top. I don't know where the right is in this.

[bobthedrummer]

2. It was a coup of some type, and now US Marines are back in Haiti.

Aristide was/is the elected President of his country.

[efhmc]

3. Truly, I pretty much never have a problem seeing through the haze

and getting at what for me is the TRUTH, but this one gives me grief. Don't go into this sovereign country there is probably the right thing to do but when have you or I seen this pretend pres do anything right?

[Kool Kitty]

4. Yes, it's a shame, isn't it?

I don't think you can believe a word out of any of their mouths. I'm suspicious of everything they say or do.

[efhmc]

5. I heard the new pres., who is coming from the US ,speak on NPR tonight

and he seemed to have a good message about democracy. I really hope he is an okay guy and all goes well (or at least better) for this strife torn country.

[Kool Kitty]

7. Well, I certainly hope so,

for their sakes.

[rman]

9. well, Bush has good messages about Democracy

it's just that his acts belie his words.
so lets just see what actually happens in Haiti.

[lostnfound]

11. Handpicked by the US ==> malleable and bribe-able nt

[Tinoire]

8. Aristide is not God but he was good enough to care more for the people

than for corporations. That was his crime.

Aristide, in a few short years, took the country from almost 90% illiteracy to less than 40%. More shools were built under him than had been built in the last hundred years.

He built free hospitals, free clinics, free hospitals, better housing for the poor and fought the excessive IMF reforms the US wanted as well as imposing a decent minimum wage for sweatshop workers.



http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomskyOdonian_Haiti.html

==

The Tragedy of Haiti

1. "The First Free Nation of Free Men"

"Haiti was more than the New World's second oldest republic," anthropologist Ira Lowenthal observed, "more than even the first black republic of the modern world. Haiti was the first free nation of free men to arise within, and in resistance to, the emerging constellation of Western European empire." The interaction of the New World's two oldest republics for 200 years again illustrates the persistence of basic themes of policy, their institutional roots and cultural concomitants.

<snip>

2. "Unselfish Intervention"
Between 1849 and 1913, US Navy ships entered Haitian waters 24 times to "protect American lives and property." Haiti's independence was scarcely given even "token recognition," Schmidt observes in his standard history, and there was little consideration for the rights of its people. They are "an inferior people," unable "to maintain the degree of civilization left them by the French or to develop any capacity of self government entitling them to international respect and confidence," Assistant Secretary of State William Phillips wrote, recommending the policy of invasion and US military government that President Woodrow Wilson soon adopted. Few words need be wasted on the civilization left to 90 percent of the population by the French, who, as an ex-slave related, "hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars..., forced them to eat shit, ... cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitos, ...threw them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup" -- when not "flaying them with the lash" to extract the wealth that helped give France its entry ticket to the rich men's club.

<snip>

The brutality and racism of the invaders, and the dispossession of peasants as US corporations took over the spoils, elicited resistance. The Marine response was savage, including the first recorded instance of coordinated air-ground combat: bombing of rebels (Cacos) who were surrounded by Marines in the bush. An in-house Marine inquiry, undertaken after atrocities were publicly revealed, found that 3250 rebels were killed, at least 400 executed, while the Marines and their locally recruited gendarmerie suffered 98 casualties (killed and wounded). Leaked Marine orders call for an end to "indiscriminate killing of natives" that "has gone on for some time." Haitian historian Roger Gaillard estimates total deaths at 15,000, counting victims "of repression and consequences of the war," which "resembled a massacre." Major Smedley Butler recalled that his troops "hunted the Cacos like pigs." His exploits impressed FDR, who ordered that he be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for an engagement in which 200 Cacos were killed and no prisoners taken, while one Marine was struck by a rock and lost two teeth.

<snip>
the 1980s, IMF Fundamentalism began to take its customary toll as the economy deteriorated under the impact of the structural adjustment programs, which caused agricultural production to decline along with investment, trade and consumption. Poverty became still more terrible. By the time "Baby Doc" Duvalier was driven out in 1986, 60 percent of the population had an annual per capita income of $60 or less according to the World Bank, child malnutrition had soared, the rate of infant mortality was shockingly high, and the country had become an ecological and human disaster, perhaps beyond hope of recovery. Through the 1970s, thousands of boat people fled the ravaged island, virtually all forced to return by US officials with little notice here, the usual treatment of refugees whose suffering lacks propaganda value. In 1981, the Reagan Administration initiated a new interdiction policy. Of the more than 24,000 Haitians intercepted by the US Coast Guard in the next ten years, 11 were granted asylum as victims of political persecution, in comparison with 75,000 out of 75,000 Cubans. During Aristide's brief tenure, the flow of refugees dropped dramatically as terror abated and there were hopes for a better future. The US response was to approve far more asylum claims. Twenty-eight had been allowed during the ten years of Duvalier and post-Duvalier terror; 20 during Aristide's seven and a half months in office. After Aristide's overthrow, a new surge of boat people reached several thousand a month, most of them forcibly returned in callous disregard of the grim circumstances that awaited them. For the few permitted to apply for asylum under a new policy, treatment was hardly better. One of the first was an Aristide supporter whose application was rejected on the grounds that he suffered only "petty harassment" when soldiers raked his home with gunfire and destroyed his shop.

<snip>

"Under Aristide, for the first time in the republic's tortured history, Haiti seemed to be on the verge of tearing free from the fabric of despotism and tyranny which had smothered all previous attempts at democratic expression and self-determination," the Washington Council on Hemispheric Affairs observed in a post-coup review. His victory "represented more than a decade of civic engagement and education on his part," spearheaded by local activists of the Church, small grassroots-based communities, and other popular organizations that formed the basis of the Lavalas ("flood") movement that swept him into power, "a textbook example of participatory, `bottom-up' and democratic political development." With this popular base, his government was committed to "the empowerment of the poor," a "populist model" with international implications that frightened Washington, whose model of "democracy" does not entertain popular movements committed to "social and economic justice, popular political participation and openness in all governmental affairs" rather than "the international market or some other current shibboleth." Furthermore, Aristide's balancing of the budget and "trimming of a bloated bureaucracy" led to a "stunning success" that made White House planners "extremely uncomfortable": he secured over half a billion dollars in aid from the international lending community, very little of it from the US, indicating "that Haiti was slipping out of Washington's financial orbit" and "demonstrating a degree of sovereignty in its political affairs." A rotten apple was in the making.

<snip>
http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/year/year-c08-s01.html to
http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/year/year-c08-s05.html

And there you have it. Read the entire article there or here:http://cyberspacei.com/jesusi/authors/chomsky/year/y501_008.htm & you will understand the greed at the bottom of this.

Or I could sum it up in pictures for you...


The business IMF-loving elite





VS



the people

[Judi Lynn]

17. Who could not see so much meaning in these photographs?

Who could REALLY be happy living like this at the unbearable expense of the poor?

You really have to be hardened, and completely dead inwardly.

[lostnfound]

10. If we stay out of the affairs of others, MORE good guys WILL come up..

No, I am not saying that the US is the source of all evil in the world.

But the US government habitually and consistently supports right-wing repressive dictators, gets nervous about organized populist movements, and reportedly gives lists of left-wing organizers and agitators -- whenever these coups take place -- for targeted "investigations" and/or killings.

Our government is property-centered rather than life-centered.

Ponder this: If the US really wants to interfere in Haiti, why don't they go all the way and try to make it a US state with US minimum wage laws? Or would that defeat the purpose?

Aristide must be a stubborn man...not to cave in entirely to the bully on the block. But he did do a lot of caving -- agreeing to power-share with the opposition party -- and it hasn't been enough for the Bushies.

I am reading Aristide's (pre-power) book "In the Parish of the Poor" now; I will have a better sense by the time I am done of who he was or what mattered to him. His ideas are radical and eloquent, and clearly contain the threats to the wealthy class which Washington so much hates.

[Bandit]

15. It has absolutely nothing to do with Aristide ~It is all about Democracy

Sorry you can't see that. A Democratically elected leader was ousted by coup with the aid of the US. It doesn't matter one wit who that leader is. He was elected by the people, which can't be said of our own leader.

[leesa]

18. The point is that he was elected.

[hedgetrimmer]

6. Haiti, yet another shame of my country. n/t

[AP]

12. Venezuela and Haiti remind me of Edwards's campaing: nobody ever speaks

up for the poor in the US because there's no gain in it. It may be the moral an ethicall thing to do, but they have no power, so nobody speaks for them.

Chavez has alienated the middle class in VZ and might lose a recall election becuase of hit. He didn't forget them. He just decided the best thing to do for VZ was to help the poor first, which is going to help the middle class (and the whole country) in the long term. But they might not have the political power to keep him in office in the short term.

Same with Aristide. He tried to help the poor first. But look how easy it has been for the rebels to overpower them. They are poor. They have no political power. They have no guns, no money, no lawyers, no influence, nothing.

This is why politicians don't help the powerless.

It's interesting, because it shows why, for example, Chavez tried to undergo a program of transferring as much political, economic, and cultural power as possible to the poor as fast as possible -- which is the biggest reason they're trying to recall him before his term is over. The right wing is AFRAID that he'll pass too much power to them.

This is also why (as I've heard) that the oligarch's took out Aristide after he said he'd enact a property tax that, for the first time, would ask the rich to put a little something into the pot. Progressive taxation generating revenue to be invested in infrastucture that would create equality of opportunity was going to transfer a lot of power to the poor quickly. That's what they were stopping.

Yeah, there are a lot of lessons to be learned by listening to what Edwards was saying and then comparing that to Venezueal and Haiti.

[AP]

13. kick.

[Just Me]

14. Yeah, and it seems that those who do take a stand for the poor,...

,...are demonized and removed by the "powers that be". Makes no sense, huh. Unless, of course, you are one of those "powers that be" or a regular recipient of those powers' propaganda.

[AP]

16. The lessons are really interesting. You have to give as much power to the

poor as fast as possible, or you can forget about it.

[Judi Lynn]

19. S. Florida Haitians assume control of government in strife-torn nation

S. Florida Haitians assume control of government in strife-torn nation

By Alva James-Johnson
Staff Writer
Posted March 12 2004

Haiti's new prime minister comes from Boca Raton. The proposed defense minister is from Miami Shores. And the latest adviser to the new government hails from Lauderhill.

Louis Noisin, the former president of the Senate, said he's returning to Haiti today to serve as a consultant to his friend and television co-host, Prime Minister Gérard Latortue.
(snip)

"Right now, I think the diaspora needs to become more visible, and people who have been away for 25 and 30 years ... need to think about how they can help the country move forward," said Marc Prou, executive director of the Haitian Studies Association, a Boston-based organization of researchers. "I think there's a bankruptcy of ideas and know-how in the country. We have to become the driving force, bring some of the skills back home."
(snip)

Haiti lost much of its intellectual talent under the Duvalier regimes. Claude Louissant, a Broward County human services regional coordinator and Haitian lecturer, said many of those people are now retired professionals who have a lot to offer the country.
(snip/...)

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-cnoisinmar12,0,7601538.story?coll=sfla-news-sfla