Haiti’s brutal history largely of our making

[NV1962]

http://www.startribune.com/stories/462/4649957.html

Nick Coleman: Haiti’s brutal history largely of our making

Nick Coleman
Star Tribune
Published 03/07/2004

In 1992, Antoine Izmery sent me grisly autopsy photographs of the bullet-riddled corpse of his dead brother and begged me — an acquaintance — to tell Americans the truth about Haiti. By the time I did, he had been murdered, too.

The Izmerys were descendants of Palestinian Christians who immigrated to Haiti in the early 1900s. Wealthy merchants, they were early supporters of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the Catholic priest and champion of the poor who had been the victor in Haiti’s first democratic election, upsetting a U.S.-backed favorite.

But their ties to Aristide, who was denounced in Washington, D.C., as a leftist, made the Izmerys marked men. Within two years after Aristide was overthrown in a military coup, both Antoine and Georges Izmery were martyred.

Today, democracy in Haiti is dead with them, strangled by an American government that can send 200,000 troops to the other side of the world to overthrow a dictator but didn’t lift a finger to save a democratic leader next door.

There is much ignorance and misinformation about Haiti, and the U.S. news media have done a lazy job of explaining events there. It may be a waste of time to write anything about the cruelly impoverished country that lives in America’s shadow and suffers greatly from our indifference (not to mention from the effects of a brutal American takeover from 1915 to 1934).

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