Email to Peggy Curran (montreal Gazette) re Haiti Options

[Emersberger]

TO: pcurran@thegazette.canwest.com
RE: How Haiti lost its way; Montreal Gazette; January 30, 2010 (article Below)

Dear Peggy Curran

Your article whitewashes the criminal role that the Canadian and US
governments have played in Haiti for years. Under the cover of disaster relief
they are likely to inflict even more damage on Haiti.

You wrote that Jean Bertrand Aristide was "returned to power with the help
of U.S. troops in 1994 after his first term was interrupted for three
years,"

You didn't say that the "interruption" was a US backed coup that left 4000
people murdered, thousands tortured, and hundreds of thousands driven into
hiding. The perpetrators were on the CIA payroll. Emmanuel Constant was
protected from deportation to Haiti for years by the Clinton Administration.
In 1994, US troops seized thousands of documents from the offices of FRAPH,
the deaths squad founded by Constant, and refused to return them to Haiti
because they incriminated US citizens. The Clinton Administration ensured
that Haitian security forces remained penetrated by perpetrators of major
crimes. Those whom the US did not keep in their jobs were sent into luxurious
exile like Raoul Cedras, whose home the US kindly leased for him. The US
strong armed Aristide to adopt economic policies favoured by the Haitian
elite that financed the 1991 coup. The US also insisted that Aristide's three
years in forced exile count as years served in office.

None of this was surprising given the generous support that US governments
gave to the Duvalier dictatorships - another fact you didn't mention. You
similarly failed to mention the brutality of the US occupation of 1915-34 or
that it created the Haitian army which ruled as US proxies after the
occupation.

You wrote of the 2004 coup that deposed Aristide's second government:

"...he, too, would be forced to flee, scuttled onto a plane to nowhere, one
more in a dismal succession of failed leaders and abusive, discredited
régimes in a land seemingly forever doomed by its past."

It is shocking that you can blandly report this characterization of
Aristide's second government as accurate. If it were accurate then Preval's
electoral victory in 2006 is impossible to explain. Preval was not part of the
US and Canadian funded opposition to Aristide. Preval's candidacy in 2006
was violently opposed by supporters of the coup, and, in contrast, endorsed
by prominent Aristide allies such as the late Father Gerard Jean-Juste, and
applauded by Aristide himself..

Your readers should know that the US spent 70 million dollars between 1994
and 2002 directly on strengthening Aristide's political opponents. The US
(joined by the EU and Canada) blocked hundreds of millions of aid from
Aristide's government.

No government's record is unblemished, especially when faced with a very
real threat of being violently overthrown, [an unsuccessful coup attempt by
far right paramilitaies took place in 2001] but despite that threat and the
assassination of Aristide supporters and other provocations, Aristide did
not rule through violence and intimidation.

Peter Hallward examined Amnesty International and press reports during
Aristide's second government. He found that "reports covering the years 2000-03
attribute a total of around 20 to 30 killings to the police and supporters
of the FL [Famni Lavalas -Aristide's party]..... at least 20 police
officers or FL [Aristide] supporters were killed by army veterans in 2001, and
another 25 in further paramilitary attacks in 2003,"

You wrote

"...as opposition sparked protests and bloody gang warfare, the former
priest was spirited out of the country, the victim, he said, of a "kidnapping"
by those who opposed his policies. United Nations peacekeepers were
dispatched to prevent the country from slipping even deeper into chaos."

You should have mentioned that the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) , the
African Union and the OAS all called for an investigation of the circumstances
under which Aristide left Haiti. The US has blocked any formal
investigation.

Moreover, the UN "peacekeepers" assisted the de facto government and its
allies launch a murderous campaign against Aristide's supporters. Thousands
of Aristide supporters were murdered between 2004-2006 according to a study
published in the Lancet medical journal. Canadian funded "human rights
groups" like RNDDH (formerly NCHR) assisted with the campaign against Aristride
supporters. Canadian government money contributed to the persecution of
political prisoners under the Latortue dictatorship such as Yvon Neptune, So
Ann, the late Gerard Jean-Juste, Rene Civil among hundreds of others. This
well documented in books by Canadian authors: Peter Hallward's "Damming the
Flood" and Yves Engler and Anthoiny Fenton "Canadian in Haiti: Waging war
on the poor majority."

One excuse that reporters often give for failing to point out facts that
incriminate their own government is that "brevity" forced them to leave
things out. Your article - at 3275 words - was hardly brief. Moreover, it
doesn't take many words to say that the US and Canada have worked very hard to
stifle democracy and development in Haiti, or that they backed a bloody coup
in 2004 that led to the murder and illegal imprisonment of thousands of
people. Too many journalists simply don't know that facts or aren't willing to
state them.

Joe Emersberger

*******

The Gazette (Montreal)

January 30, 2010 Saturday
Final Edition

How Haiti lost its way; It was the first of January, 2004, and Haiti's president Jean-Bertrand Aristide proudly led celebrations marking the 200th anniversary of independence in the only country born of a slave revolt.

BYLINE: PEGGY CURRAN, The Gazette

SECTION: SATURDAY EXTRA; Pg. B1

LENGTH: 3257 words


Haiti's first democratically-elected leader, the liberation theologian-turned-political messiah drew his support from the slums of Port-au-Prince, where he had preached against the "gluttonous pillaging" of the Duvaliers, père et fils.

Aristide was wise to savour the moment. Within eight weeks, he, too, would be forced to flee, scuttled onto a plane to nowhere, one more in a dismal succession of failed leaders and abusive, discredited régimes in a land seemingly forever doomed by its past.

The 7.0-level earthquake that ravaged Haiti on January 12, killing more than 150,000 people and leaving the capital city of Port-au-Prince in ruins was, of course, the product of geography and seismology and engineering, not politics.

But to truly understand the tremor's perilous impact on a country perpetually clinging to the edge of a cliff, we must take a closer look at Haiti's history - and how what was once the richest jewel in France's colonial crown came to be the poorest, most desperate and unstable country in the Western hemisphere.

It is a tale of racism, religion and revenge, of greed and globalization; of caste system for city and country, of light-skinned elites who used power to line their pockets and children as young as four working as unpaid domestics for people a rung up the social ladder. It is a story of superstition, corruption and secret police, of ravaged forests, overpriced rice and doomed pigs.

It is the story of a people who have been struggling uphill and into the wind ever since their ancestors stepped off slave ships in shackles five hundred years ago.

Two centuries after Haiti won its freedom, the country has had 20 constitutions and been the scene of 32 coups, most of them bloody.

Before the earthquake, 70 per cent of Port-au-Prince's residents were officially unemployed. One per cent of the country's population controlled 45 per cent of its wealth. Thirty-eight per cent of adult Haitians cannot read or write. And the vast majority speak only Créole, although French is the official language of government, its institutions and laws.

This is Haiti today. How did this happen?

A lopsided rivalry

Christmas Eve, 1492 and Christopher Columbus had to be feeling pretty good about himself and his discovery of a new world lush with fruit and rich with gold. So when his flagship, the Santa Maria, struck a reef off the northeastern shore of the Caribbean island he had named La Isla Española, the explorer turned disaster into opportunity. With a nod from the chief of the local Taino-Arawak Indians, Columbus left 39 men behind to build a settlement from remnants of the shipwreck and begin scouting for treasure. He called the makeshift village La Navidad.

When Columbus returned almost a year later, with 17 ships and more than 1,200 reinforcements and potential settlers, all his men were dead. Their fort and the nearby Taino camp had been burned to the ground. Columbus abandoned La Navidad, believed to have located some 15 kilometres east of present-day Cap-Haïtien, for a site to the east in what is now the Dominican Republic.

And so began a lopsided rivalry which continues to shape the destiny of the island's two very different countries to this day.

Haiti's situation was grim long before this month's earthquake, or the hurricanes, floods and landslides that have devastated the countryside over the last decade.

Yet the country shares the same rugged, mountain terrain, the same coastline, the same precarious weather as the Dominican Republic, the thriving tourist playground that occupies the eastern two-thirds of Hispaniola. Why then have their fates been so different?

Spanish Domination

For the next hundred years or so, Spain would be the dominant force on the island.

Within two decades, the indigenous population would all but disappear, victims of mistreatment and diseases they couldn't fight. The few who survived fled to the mountains. They were replaced by African slaves, arriving by the boatload from Guinea, Congo and Dahomey (now Benin) to work the sugar plantations and harvest crops. The Africans brought their own rituals and religious beliefs, which they called vodun, from the Fon language of Benin for "invisible force."

As Spain shifted its energies away from its main port at Santo Domingo to new colonies in Central and South America, French pirates, cattle rustlers and farmers from neighbouring Tortuga carved a foothold at Cap François (Cap Haïtien), ousting the Spanish from the western third of the island in 1697.

By 1789, Saint Domingue was the wealthiest colony in France's empire, producing 60 per cent of the world's coffee. The colony's 792 plantations supplied Europe with more than 40 per cent of its sugar. Saint Domingue's bounty - sugar, coffee, wood, copper, cotton, indigo, cacao - accounted for one-third of France's commercial output.

France has other reasons to remember 1789 - the year the French Revolution began.

'Free Men of Colour'

A long-time slave who would become private secretary to one of Haiti's first leaders had this to say about the cruel treatment of slave lords in colonial Saint Domingue.

"Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to eat excrement?"

The colonial economy hinged on access to the free, forced labour of a captive slave population. Thousands of African slaves torn from their homes to toil in the fields of the Caribbean colony clung to their old ways, despite the best - or worst - efforts of their masters to convert them. Under the so-called "Code Noir" of 1685, Louis XIV decreed that all slaves be baptized as Catholics and reject all other creeds. The result was a religious pastiche that borrowed heavily from the myths, saints and rituals of African folk culture and Roman Catholicism. Followers of voodoo believed that by developing a closeness to the spirits or "lwa," they can learn their fate, yet are powerless to change it.

Runaway slaves often fled to the hills, where they encountered the last of the island's indigenous peoples, absorbing some of their practices into the loose framework of their made-in-Africa religion, sometimes using charms and potions to terrorize or poison former masters.

By the late 18th century, the French colony also had a substantial mixed race or mulatto population, many wealthy - and free - descendants and heirs of slave-owning fathers, now themselves the owners of slaves and coffee plantations.

When the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen pronounced all men equal, they demanded and were eventually granted status as citizens.

It was the first volley in a 13-year war of independence - for "free men of colour," then for freed and rebel slaves, led by a freed slave and former coachman named Toussaint Louverture. Described as a military genius, Louverture took control of the island, declared himself governor-general-for-life and abolished slavery in 1801. Aware a former slave state would need allies to survive, Louverture sought a settlement with France when he agreed to meet Napoleon Bonaparte's emissary the following year. The meeting was a set-up: Louverture was captured and deported to France, where he was jailed and died of pneumonia a year later.

By 1804, France was at war with Britain. With her soldiers in Saint Domingue ravaged by fever and anxious to avert slave uprisings in its remaining colonies in the Indies, France gave up on Haiti and traded what remained of its North American territories to the U.S. in the Louisiana Purchase.

The victors called the new country Haiti, the Taino word for "mountainous land."

A Deal With the Devil?

Nothing would come easy for the new republic.

For decades after winning its independence, Haiti found itself a pariah, a nation without allies.

France wasn't ready to forgive Haiti for depriving it of the riches that once swelled its harbours.

In the U.S., the slave trade was increasingly contentious but remained the backbone of the Southern economy. The existence of a land where slaves were already free was a source of consternation. The U.S. would not recognize Haiti until 1862, two years into the Civil War.

Hundreds of sugar and coffee plantations had been torched during the revolt, and freed slaves balked at attempts to press them back into virtual servitude.

Without ready markets for its produce, Haiti found itself increasingly desperate. By 1825, President Jean-Pierre Boyer was ready to make a deal. Not, as evangelist Pat Robertson would have it, with the devil but with France and the banks.

Haiti agreed to pay France 150 million gold francs in reparations for losses suffered by plantation owners and France by independence. It would also lower import and export tariffs to France in exchange for official recognition.

It was a vow cash-strapped Haiti was hard pressed to keep. Though the payment would eventually be reduced to 90 million francs, it would take Haiti until 1947 to pay it off - and only after resorting to loans from French banks. "To pay for our freedom," said Jean-Bertrand Aristide, " we were forced to mortgage our future."

In Eyes of the Heart, Aristide's anti-globalization book published in 2000, he argues that in an effort to pay off the first 30 million francs, Boyer, who ruled Haiti from 1818 to 1843, made a series of decisions that would have lasting consequences for the fledgling nation.

Boyer closed Haiti's schools, a signal that education was not a priority.

He stipulated anyone born outside Port-au-Prince be identified on birth certificates as peasants or "outside people," consigning them to second-class status and sowing divisions between urban and rural dwellers.

And he sanctioned the logging of Haiti's tropical forests, beginning a practice that has persisted ever since.

Today, only two per cent of Haiti's forests remain, resulting in soil erosion, worse droughts in dry seasons and a greater risk of landslides in the wet season. Environmentalists blame deforestation for compounding the effects of hurricanes and tropical storms, noting that Haiti invariably fares worse than neighbouring Dominican Republic, where forests cover a quarter of the land.

"After the trees are cut from the mountains, the soil washes to the plains, and the people follow," said Aristide.

"When the soil washes away from the plains, the people once again follow, moving to the slums of cities by the sea."

presidents and kings

Throughout the late 1800s until the turn of the century, Haiti struggled to figure out what kind of country it would be, with a revolving door of presidents, kings and even an emperor ready to stake their claim, pillaging government coffers and collecting the spoils.

By the turn of the 20th century, Haiti had adopted a constitution that provided presidents with seven-year terms. Most barely lasted a year before being thrown out, helping fuel imperialist yearnings by its American neighbour, which prized Haiti's strategic location near Cuba.

Citing concerns of New York bankers holding unsecured loans and alleged alarm at the presence of a small but dynamic German community - population 200 - in 1915, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson dispatched the Marines to secure and occupy the island. They would stay until 1934, building roads and hospitals and improving the plumbing but also fostering resentment by excluding blacks and sometimes mulattos, Haiti's traditional ruling class, from most positions of power.

The following year, Haiti would be battered by a massive storm that killed more than 2,000 people.

In 1946, Haiti and the Dominican Republic would be rocked by an 8.1-magnitude earthquake, which was followed by a tsunami, killing 1,790 people, mostly in DR.

Duvaliers, Père Et Fils

In October 1954, Haiti would be clobbered again, this time by Hurricane Hazel, which killed 1,000 people and devastated its crops. Roughly half of the country's coffee and cacao trees toppled, never to be replaced. But the storm also had political repercussions. When relief money was squandered, the people of Port-au-Prince staged a general strike, pushing another president out the door.

He would be succeeded by Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, a country doctor who rose to power on promises to help the poor.

"The American Marines practised social racism," Amy Wilentz explains in The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier. "They kept to themselves and thought that Haitians, even those with degrees from the Sorbonne, were not good enough to come in their front doors.

From 1957 until his death in 1971, Duvalier used secret police - derisively known as the Tonton Macoutes, for the bogeyman in Haitian folk tales who kidnaps children in their sleep - to foster terror and rule with the iron fist of a man who openly admired Adolf Hitler's Gestapo.

"I shall be lord and master," Duvalier said, declaring himself president-for-life in 1964, the year after Hurricane Flora left 8,000 people dead. There were few options for those who challenged Duvalier's authority. Thousands fled to seek asylum in Canada or set sail for Cuba or the Florida coast, often to be sent back. Many more would end up in Fort Dimanche, the notorious jail where thousands were killed or died a slow death from starvation or disease.

Duvalier was succeeded by his son Jean-Claude, a big-spending playboy dubbed "Baby Doc" who enraged Haitians with his lavish lifestyle and weak handling of the crisis resulting from the outbreak of AIDS, which had the side-effect of crippling the tourism industry.

Denounced by Pope John Paul II and under intense pressure from the U.S. administration of Ronald Reagan, in February 1986, Duvalier fled for France.

Tale of the Créole Pig

A fierce critic of globalization and international lending agencies such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, Aristide argued that free trade policies were neither free nor fair to poor countries like his, which had little choice but to accept rules crafted by and for powerful developed nations.

"One fear is that the global market intends to annihilate our markets. We will be pushed to the cities, to eat food grown on factory farms in distant countries, food whose price depends on the daily numbers game of the first market," Aristide wrote in Eyes of the Heart, citing the effects of free trade on two key components of the Haitian economy and diet.

Well into the 1980s, Aristide wrote, Haiti had still been producing most of its own food, importing only 700 tons of rice. Then Haiti, a have-not country with little clout and big debts, bowed to pressure and lifted import tariffs.

"Cheaper rice immediately flooded in from the United States, where the rice industry is subsidized," said Aristide. "Haiti peasant farmers couldn't possibly compete."

Within 10 years, Haiti was importing 196,000 tons of rice and domestic rice production virtually disappeared, "leaving the Haitian population, particularly the urban poor, completely at the whim of rising world grain prices."

Then there's the strange saga of the Haitian Créole pig.

"The primary savings bank of the peasant population," these small, hardy, black pigs had long been a mainstay of rural farming. Pigs were sold to pay big bills - weddings, funerals, the cost of school uniforms, fees and books.

But in 1982 - four years after a swine fever scare in the Dominican Republic - Haiti was ordered by the UN, at the insistence of U.S. agricultural authorities, to slaughter all the pigs to prevent the possible spread of disease. Two years later, Haiti's farmers received a new breed of pigs from Iowa.

"It was a complete failure," Aristide said. Haitians dubbed their new pigs "les princes à quatre pieds" because they needed covered pens, costly imported feed and clean water, something most Haitians don't have themselves.

In Haiti's Créole pig, Aristide, sees "the classic parable of globalization."

Most peasants stopped keeping pigs. Soil quality deteriorated, Haitians ate less meat, and enrolment in rural schools slipped by 30 per cent.

tightening the screws

"Peasants are forced off the land and move to overcrowded cities, where they find neither jobs nor health care nor schools for their children or even clean water to drink," Aristide complained in Eyes of the Heart.

He chastized the IMF for tightening the screws on Haiti to privatize key industries and lower tariffs while the rich countries like the U.S. bragged to Congress that the bulk of aid money bounced back into the economy in goods and services purchased. "If 84 per cent of every dollar is going back to the donor country, how much is left for water for the peasants?"

And what exactly was Aristide himself doing for the poor during this time?

Not nearly enough, said critics, who accused Aristide, who had been returned to power with the help of U.S. troops in 1994 after his first term was interrupted for three years, of wise-spread abuses, embezzlement and involvement in drug-trafficking to bolster his regime and pay for his official mansion. Aristide denied the charges, which were never proven and eventually thrown out for lack of evidence.

But as opposition sparked protests and bloody gang warfare, the former priest was spirited out of the country, the victim, he said, of a "kidnapping" by those who opposed his policies. United Nations peacekeepers were dispatched to prevent the country from slipping even deeper into chaos.

Mired in Poverty

For the last 27 years, the United Nations has ranked countries on a Human Development Index, based on factors such as life expectancy, adult literacy and purchasing power.

Over the years, Haiti has made tiny advances. Yet it remains among the poorest on the planet. In 2009, it placed 149th out of 182 countries. Data showed 18.5 per cent of Haitians were not expected to see their 40th birthday, while 42 per cent of the population was without access to clean drinking water.

By comparison, Canada ranks fourth, the Dominican Republic 90th.

Two centuries worth of trade embargoes, foreign invasions, bloody coups and inept, self-serving, and cruel leadership have conspired to keep Haiti mired in muck and poverty. The ravages of weather and misfortunes of tectonic plates just made it that much easier.

In 1994, Hurricane Gordon killed 1,000 people. In 1998, Hurricane George killed 400 people but destroyed up to 80 per cent of Haiti's crops. In September 2004, Tropical Storm Jeanne caused flooding and landslides that killed 3,000. And in a single month two years ago, Hurricanes Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike killed 800 people, uprooted 70 per cent of the fall harvest and caused massive damage to Gonaives, the country's fourth-largest city. Damage from those four storms was estimated at over $1 billion - until then the most expensive natural disaster in Haiti's history.

Yesterday, the UN development agency called on governments and lending agencies to write off Haiti's foreign debt, which topped $1 billion U.S. That was before the earthquake, the cost of which is guessed to exceed $3 billion.

Monday's meeting here in Montreal sketched the brush strokes for a recovery scheme, ideally one which would leave Port-au-Prince and Haiti healthier, more resilient and less susceptible to acts of both God and graft than it has been for a very long time.

Foreign ministers and aid agencies insisted Haiti must take the lead in any plans to shape its future. Yet in the weeks since the Jan. 12 earthquake, Haiti's President René Preval has all but disappeared - the hapless leader of a country which has been waiting for its saviour and a plan since the day it was born.














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