Haitian people fighting back

Haiti is usually depicted as the archetypal impoverished underdog – never as a fighting republic with a proud revolutionary history. Earthquakes and disease make the news but not the self-organisation of the Haitian people and their struggle for political independence.

It is in this light that we must view the present explosive cocktail of disease and political tension which is once again rocking Haiti. The killing of a demonstrator by UN forces yesterday results precisely from the fact that a combination of charitable donations and big power political interference can resolve nothing.

On the contrary, imposing “solutions” from outside has only worsened things for the 10.1 million inhabitants of the island. Haiti has in no way recovered from the January 12 earthquake which killed around a quarter of a million people, out of a total population of around 10 million.

The immediate cause of the street clashes aimed not only at the UN troops but also local police stations is the rising death toll from cholera – now approaching 1,000. Some locals blamed Nepalese forces who form part of the multinational UN occupation for introducing cholera and vented their anger against them.

The UN has appealed for $164m (£102m) in emergency funds in a desperate effort to prevent the lethal disease from spreading beyond the capital Port au Prince to the 1.1 million people who still live in camps. Less than 40% of the aid pledged internationally for the past year has in fact reached the country, while US aid is still due to arrive, seven months after it was promised.

On the ground, investigative writer Georgianne Nienaber quotes social networking sites:

“Chatter on Twitter and Google paints a picture of a totally broken health care system, and demonstrates malfeasance in planning for an epidemic …Here is a World Share report from Twitter: Cholera now hits the island of La Gonave, Haiti. The only functioning hospital on the island is filled to capacity. There is insufficient medical staff to treat those affected. Newborn babies and their mothers are dying.

“Here is another from a Google Group: The situation at the other Limbe hospital (Government hospital St. Jean) was worse. We brought a patient there only to discover a huge tent and no one attending a building full of patients. There was no doctor or nurse present, dry IV bags, and when we asked how a doctor could be reached no one really knew. Staff have been overwhelmed and they are looking for nurses. I think that things are not great at the hospital (St. Michel) or at the gymnasium where they are putting the suspect cholera cases. I had thought that MSF [Doctors Without Borders] was all set up, but they still won't be for a couple of days apparently.”

The street clashes are taking place in the run-up to the November 28 elections. On November 1 there was a massive demonstration organised by the Fanmi Lavalas party through the streets of the capital, Port au Prince. Tens of thousands called for the return of forcibly exiled President and Lavalas leader Jean Bertrand Aristide to the island, currently living in South Africa.

As pro-Lavalas writer Randall White says: “The picture of a meaningful, healthy and politically engaged Haitian popular movement is a picture rarely painted outside of Haiti. In fact, it the greatest resource that Haiti has today, its people. Disrupting, diminishing and destroying this movement has been the primary objective of the power elite in Haiti and Washington D.C.”

The forthcoming election is raising expectations amongst Haitians for an alternative to the corrupt elites and those backed by corporate interests who currently hold sway. The need for an alternative to these is more urgent than ever before.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Foreign troops out of Haiti!

Disaster relief in Haiti is turning into a debacle. While the earthquake was a natural event, the chaos and violence in the streets are compounded by a high-handed arrogance by the United States towards one of the poorest countries in the world.

The rapid and generous flow of donations from the public in the UK and US in response to appeals from the Red Cross has raised many millions. Haitian musician Wyclef Jean raised $1m through Twitter alone. But the way in which the relief operation is being conducted reminds many of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

After the US seized control last Friday of all inbound and outbound flights at Port-au-Prince airport, priority was given to VIPs like Hillary Clinton and Ban Ki-moon and flying in thousands of troops over landing medical and food aid. According to the campaigning Haitian lawyer Ezili Danto, “When the Haitians at the airport refused to give up their post to the US military, the US Southern Command went to President Preval and put a paper in front of him to sign giving them authority.”

Medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres has complained that five days after the earthquake ripped through Haiti, its cargo planes were blocked from landing at Port-au-Prince. One of its aircraft carrying a surgical hospital was re-routed to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic on Saturday. The Caribbean Community’s emergency aid mission to Haiti, was prevented from landing on Friday and had to return to Jamaica.

Danto believes the Obama administration is unlikely to welcome the return of ex-president Aristide whose party Fanmi Lavalas has been barred from participating in scheduled Haitian elections. Meanwhile, the election council under Haitian president Preval has approved Guy Phillipe’s Front for National Reconstruction. Phillipe was trained by US Special Forces in Ecuador and led the “rebels” who ousted Aristide back in 2004.

“Preval is NOT the Haitian government,” Danto insists. “The Prime Minister is alive and in the coming week we shall know how many of the legislators have survived. The authority given does not have the people's consent - a good indication of this is that the Haitians at the airport had to be forcibly removed. The Haitian Diaspora cannot reach their own. That's why I'm writing this to the world. Talking to the world.”

US critics like Danny Schechter have noted that, as in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, disaster planners “have an agenda that goes beyond just saving lives. They want to use the crisis to rebuild Haiti along lines they support (i.e. support of property rights etc). So far they have not spoken about how policies backed by the United States through the Caribbean Basin Initiative were responsible for uprooting peasants from the countryside to move them to the city to be a cheap labour reserve.”

Schechter points to the involvement of the Rand Corporation, which is, he says “a military contractor primarily, a centre for spooks and covert strategies. The fact that they are quoted as saviours is scary in itself. In other words, Haiti’s future is being planned outside of Haiti and will be imposed step by step”.

As foreign troops, including 1,000 from Canada, pour into the tiny island, Danto of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network, has demanded that all foreign troops to leave the country:

“The issue is not emergency rescue anymore. Emergency is immediate, it's within 48 hours. That's over. The people who could have been saved under the rubble and metal have mostly died. Now it's about medical relief, healing and rebuilding. Haitians can do that by themselves with the help of the world that wants to send monies to Haiti for the earthquake victims.

“International assistance has never helped Haiti's poor and it's not helping the bulk of the earthquake survivors right now. Mostly the more privileged classes, as per usual. Go home US military. Please. And take the UN occupation forces and the false aid NGOs with you.”


Corinna Lotz
A World to Win

Haiti a victim many times over

American forces have secured the airport in Port-au-Prince and thousands of Marines are on their way to Haiti, along with warships. Not for the first time in history either, which will help to explain why this week’s earthquake has had such a devastating impact on the impoverished country.

The United States has taken a hostile attitude to Haiti more or less since it declared independence from France in 1804, following a slave revolt. Haiti was occupied by US forces from 1915 to 1934. After World War I, angered by a US-instigated law requiring forced labour, as many as 40,000 Haitians rebelled. More than 3,000 Haitians were killed by American forces.

After World War II, Washington supported the notorious dictator Duvalier. When he was overthrown, the CIA helped depose elected politicians, including the popular president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He was removed in 1991 and then again in 2004 after he got too close to Cuba and Venezuela. Several thousand people were killed in the internationally-sponsored coup which was bitterly resented by Haitians. In place of Aristide, the Haitians were sent a US-UN “stabilisation and pacification” force to secure the country for corporate-led globalisation.

In 1996, under pressure from President Clinton, who sent troops to restore Aristide to power in 1994, Haiti agreed to the draconian conditions set by International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It called for suppressing wages, reducing tariffs, and selling off state-owned enterprises. The small amount for the countryside was designated for promoting export crops such as coffee and mangoes. The Haitian government also agreed to abolish tariffs on US imports, which resulted in the dumping of cheap US foodstuffs on the Haitian market.

Brian Concannon, director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, has explained how many of the earthquake victims came to live in shantytowns perched on hillsides. “The reason why the people got to the hillsides where they were most vulnerable to the earthquakes perched on the hillsides [is] they were pushed out of there by policies 30 years ago, when it was decided by the international experts that Haiti’s economic salvation lay in assembly manufacture plants. And in order to advance that, it was decided that Haiti needed to have a captive labour force in the cities. So a whole bunch of aid policies, trade policies and political policies were implemented, designed to move people from the countryside to places like Martissant and the hills — hillsides that we’ve seen in those photos.”

In July 2003, Haiti was forced to use more than 90% of its foreign reserves to service loans from foreign banks, requiring Aristide’s government to end fuel subsidies and slash spending on health and education programmes. This prompted Aristide to demand that France repay to Haiti “compensation” made after securing its independence. Six months later, France supported the coup against Aristide.

So it is no surprise that Haiti’s infrastructure has barely developed, explaining the slow to non-existent reaction by local authorities in the wake of the earthquake, as well as the large number of deaths of people living in makeshift dwellings on deforested hillsides. Instead, Haiti has been overwhelmed by aid agencies and NGOs of different sorts who come and go. No wonder Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world and that large sections of the population have emigrated.

The country may have won independence more than 200 years ago, but Haiti has been robbed of its self-determination and its ability to meet the needs of its own people. No one can prevent earthquakes – but the swift despatch of US troops is a reminder that the power responsible for the extent of the disaster is human and headquartered in Washington, home of the American government, the IMF and the World Bank.


Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Haiti still waiting for real support

Yesterday the people of Haiti, among the poorest in the world, witnessed the start of a high-profile visit by former US president Bill Clinton and UN general secretary Ban Ki-moon. It is billed as an attempt to turn round the island’s fortunes. The population could do with more than celebrity visits, however.

Tropical hurricanes last year left nearly 800 people dead and caused damage estimated at $1 billion. Several UN appeals for $108bn in humanitarian assistance fell on deaf ears. Tensions are running especially high as February 29 was the fifth anniversary of a CIA-sponsored coup against former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004.

Aristide, a slum priest, won a landslide victory in the 1990 Haitian presidential elections, in defiance of death squads and military coups. Dr Paul Farmer, a renowned infectious disease expert at Harvard Medical School who is accompanying Clinton, has outlined the story of how the United States and France undermined Aristide after his election.

Despite efforts by the United Nations forces to discourage Haitians from commemorating Aristide’s forced eviction, the Lavalas movement founded by the former president organised a demonstration of up to 10,000 people. Mass arrests of young males were carried out in neighbourhoods where support for Lavalas remains strong. The September 30 Foundation organised a major contingent plus protests around the world to demand the return of Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, a Haitian human rights activist who disappeared in 2007.

Last week university students barricaded themselves inside a building and clashed with police and UN peacekeepers demanding an improved curriculum. And, ahead of Clinton and Ban Ki-moon’s visit, a Brussels-based conflict watchdog, Crisis Group, warned that urgent support amounting to £3 billion was needed. The UN security council is to visit the island as soon as the two leaders depart.

Haiti’s closeness to the Guantanamo base in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, with which it shares the island of Hispaniola, makes it a strategically sensitive place. The island’s unique history makes it a powder keg within the Caribbean. It was the first island in the Caribbean to gain independence from its colonial masters which it did in 1804 as a result of a slave rebellion headed by the legendary Toussaint L’Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Dessalines’ forces defeated 30,000 French troops sent by Napoleon Bonaparte and abolished slavery.

Haitians have invested hope in Clinton’s visit because the former president ordered a US military-led intervention in 1994 to bring back Jean-Bertrand Aristide. But the 9,000 strong United Nations mission, the fifth on the island since 1993, has come under strong criticism from Haitian campaigners such as the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network. Accusations of brutality and even rape abound on independent websites such as Upping the Anti.

In past decades, the United States, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank insisted that in exchange for badly needed loans, Haiti should open its economy to global competition. This saw a country that once exported rice and sugar become a net importer, as Haitian farmers could not match the prices of a subsidy-supported US rice producers. Whether the election of Obama makes a difference to Haitians remains to be seen.


Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Food prices revolt grows

Governments across the globe are being shaken by mass protests, as people take to the streets demanding lower food prices. According to the World Bank, increases in global wheat prices reached 181% over the 36 months leading up to February 2008, and overall global food prices increased by 83%. The UN says the price of rice has soared by 75% in just two months.

There have been strikes and protests across Africa, in Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Senegal, Mauritania, Guinea and Mozambique. In Asia, there have been protests in India, Singapore, Philippines, and Bangladesh. In Mexico thousands have marched and people in El Salvador protested outside the state bank. This week alone:

· Protestors in Haiti marched on the presidential palace demanding a cut in food prices; five people were killed, leading to demands for the government to resign.
· in Vietnam, 15,000 workers in a factory making trainers went on strike demanding better to pay to cover higher food prices.
· In Egypt, strikers took to the streets demanding a cut in the cost of bread.

In Europe too, droughts in Spain, France and the Po Valley last year have led to big rises in fresh food prices. With durum wheat up 30% this year, pasta is becoming a luxury product. In Britain, the cost of an average basket of groceries has risen 12% in a year.

World Bank president Robert Zoellick has warned of growing unrest if a solution is not found. And Prime Minister Brown called for food price inflation to top the agenda at the G8 summit in Japan in July. Both Zoellick and Brown called for more aid. But G8 countries are not even meeting their existing promise, made at Gleneagles in 2005, to double aid to Africa by 2010. Aid was lower in 2007 than in 2006, and in fact rich countries gave a higher proportion of their GDP in aid in 1963 than in 2007.

As for “trade not aid”, the International Monetary Fund says more than 20 African countries will see their trade balance worsen by more than 1% of GDP through having to pay more for food. The World Bank among others blames biofuels production for driving up food prices. Brown says he will review the impact of the UK’s biofuels subsidies and opposes further increases in EU subsidies. This is too little, too late. The world is now locked into profit-driven, bio-fuel production at the expense of food production. The market itself is in the driving seat.

The immediate causes of food price inflation are selling food crops at high prices for bio-fuels; switching land from food production to bio-fuels; last year’s drought in food producing areas such as Australia and Central Europe and the increasing cost of oil, leading to higher production and transportation costs.

But the underlying cause is the profit-driven system of food production at the expense of local needs. With the expansion of agri-business in the last three decades of globalisation, food dependency has increased and local systems of food production and exchange have been overturned. Now agri-business is moving into more profitable areas, creating food shortages where there could be plenty for all.

With starvation on a global scale now looming, what is needed is a strategy to wrest control of all land and natural resources from the global corporations (and the governments that support their rule). We could then combine technology with new scientific understanding of agricultural production to create systems of sustainable, dependable local food production.

In two very concise and readable books – Running a Temperature, an action plan for the eco crisis and House of Cards: from fantasy finance to global crash, the members of A World to Win propose a programme of democratisation of both ownership and of the state as the only solution to the growing global crisis. Included in both books are radical proposals for food, agriculture and land use. We call on everyone to join us in developing these ideas further with a view to putting them into practice.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Free Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine

October is Black History month and it should be a time to celebrate the achievements of black heroes during the 200th anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade. And yet in Haiti, the small country that did more than any other to defeat slavery, a notable human rights campaigner, Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, has vanished since August 12. Supporters, and even the UN mission on the island, are concerned that Pierre-Antoine has been kidnapped because of his outspoken criticisms of the occupying forces on the island and their association with the Haitian military.

This Friday campaigners from Global Women’s Strike will gather for the third week running at the foot of the Edith Cavell statue near Trafalgar Square as part of an international series of vigils. They are demanding the return of Pierre-Antoine, who was a leader of the pro-Aristide September 30 Foundation and critic of both U.N. and U.S. involvement in Haiti. He was last seen leaving his Port-au-Prince home shortly before midnight, according to Ronald Saint-Jean, leader of a coalition called the Group Initiative to Save Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine.

Pierre-Antoine is a high-profile member of the ousted President Jean-Betrand Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas Party. He is co-founder of the Fondasyon Trant Septanm, which works with victims of the 1991 and 2004 coups d’etat in Haiti. A trained psychologist, he created organisations to support street children in the country’s capital, Port au Prince, a centre for teenage mothers and Map Vivre, “(“I live”) a programme to help victims of the 1991 coup against Aristide. He had to flee Haiti in 2004 fearing persecution by the former military, supported by the US army.

The case of Lovinsky also highlights the continuing crisis faced by the government of René Preval. It is part and parcel of a destabilisation campaign aimed at overthrowing his democratically elected government. The February 2006 election was an extraordinary victory for the Haitian people in the face of an oppressive occupying UN force which provides a cover for the armed thugs of Guy Philippe who overthrew Aristide. Preval is supported by Aristide, even though he was still the democratically elected president when kidnapped by US forces in the 1991 coup.

Haiti occupies a unique place in the hearts and minds of those seeking black and human liberation. It is the world's oldest black republic and the second-oldest republic in the Western Hemisphere, after the United States. At the time of the French Revolution of 1789, there were 790,000 slaves - one third of the entire African slave trade – working on the plantations of Hispaniola, the island of which Haiti forms a part. A decade before Abolition, a freed slave, Toussaint-Louverture, inspired by the French revolution, led a massive army of blacks to victory over the whites and free coloureds, securing native control over the colony in 1797. He defeated a massive British force, freed the slaves and tried to re-build Haiti's economy, but was eventually kidnapped and imprisoned by French forces.

Ever since that time, Haiti’s inhabitants have been singled out for punishment, by despotic leaders supported from the outside by former colonial masters. As Stephen Lendman writes, “Nothing is ever simple in Haiti, a country that for over 500 years has had very few periods of stability free from the oppressive heel of a foreign occupier or oppressive dictatorship.” Lendman has exposed how the Haiti Democracy Project (HDP) is “umbilically linked to the US State Department, backed by the corporate media tried to stop Preval from winning the election. It is now engaged in a demonisation and destabilisation campaign to undermine his administration”.

Haiti is presently the least developed country in the Western Hemisphere. Over half its people are unemployed, with many bordering on starvation. Aids is rife, especially amongst pregnant women. Seventy per cent rely on the land for their living. Eighty years ago forests covered nearly 60% of Haiti, now reduced to 2%. During Hurricane Dean last summer, Haiti was excluded from relief flights to the Caribbean because of “civil unrest”.

A World to Win joins with the millions of Haitians in their demand that Lovinsky should be brought home. We also call for the withdrawal of the UN forces from the island. Former Prime Minister Yvon Neptune must be released, should he still be in jail. Haiti must not rely on the IMF and the World Bank’s privatisation and “structural adjustment” programmes to rebuild its economy.

Corinna Lotz
Secretary, A World to Win