[News] The Hapless and the Wretched of the Earth

[News at freedomarchives.org]

The Hapless and the Wretched of the Earth

Sunday, September 26, 2004
7:39 AM EST
<http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/html/20040926t060000-0500_66621_obs_the_hapless_and_the_wretched_of_the_earth_.asp>http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/html/20040926t060000-0500_66621_obs_the_hapless_and_the_wretched_of_the_earth_.asp

So Kofi Annan has at last discovered that 3 A's (Anglo-American-Australian) 
attack on Iraq was illegal and against the basic premises of the United 
Nations. Some of us knew it then, and said so. Some of us wondered why 
Annan withdrew his UN inspectors from Iraq, giving the US carte-blanche to 
launch its bombers against an innocent people.

But courage was in short supply those days, as it is now, and cowards 
abound and proliferate. If the war on Iraq was a crime against humanity, 
what description do we use for the decapitation of the Haitian democracy?
The world Press, those brave gladiators for justice and truth, speak about 
"hapless Haiti" and the "hapless Haitians"; they hide their prejudice and 
deceit behind euphemisms, behind circumlocution, obfuscations and outright 
lies to conceal foul crimes. They say President Aristide fled 'amid a 
popular revolt' - of about 500 bandits in a population of eight million.

But the Haitians are "hapless". Our leaders, like the leaders of the United 
States, France and Canada, the triad behind the criminal enterprise in 
Haiti, are all full of hap: hatred, arrogance and prejudice.

While we, the hap-filled, are cleaning up and burying the few unfortunates 
killed by Category Five hurricanes, hapless Haiti is burying, in mass 
graves, thousands of the hapless killed by extremely heavy rain from a 
storm whose winds affected Haiti only minimally.
It is the second time in less than a year that thousands of hapless 
Haitians are dying because of rain.
History in Haiti has a habit of repeating itself. And history, in Haiti, 
consists largely of the United States and its assaults on Haitian freedom, 
all well meant, of course, and obviously intended to reduce Haiti's 
Haplessness index to manageable levels.
Who do they think they are?

Haiti's history of haplessness began more than 200 years ago when a 
Jamaican runaway slave called Bouckman lit the spark that fired the Haitian 
revolution. Bouckman, despite being a giant of a man, a born leader and 
probably a Muslim (think terrorist) did not survive to see the fruits of 
the revolution. He was betrayed, captured and his head stuck on a pike to 
discourage the others - perhaps a primitive attempt at exorcising demonic 
ideas of freedom and liberty from the revolutionaries.
It didn't work. The Haitians went on to defeat the French colonial forces, 
then defeated a British expeditionary force and then defeated a French 
expeditionary army under Napoleon's brother-in-law, killing some 60,000 
Frenchmen in the process.

Before that, the Haitians had fought alongside the American revolutionaries 
to help them throw the British out of the American colonies. Haitian help 
was crucial in at least two battles in which British power was broken - at 
Savannah, Georgia and at Yorktown.

In addition to all that, the Haitian revolution made another massive 
contribution to the new American nation: in defeating France, the Haitians 
exhausted the French treasury to the point where Napoleon had to sell 
Louisiana to the US or risk losing it to the British. The Louisiana 
Purchase doubled the size of the US.

So, if the Haitians contributed so much to American independence and 
development, why is it that in their extremity of grief and suffering, the 
United States treats the Haitians so meanly?

Originally, when the scale of the current disaster became known, the United 
States, the richest country in the world, offered about US $60,000 for 
Haitian relief. Venezuela offered $1 million, Trinidad and Tobago earmarked 
US$5 million while the European Union pledged US$1.8 million. Somewhat 
abashed, the US raised its pledge to US$2 million. In the US itself, where 
the damage has been far less severe, the federal government alone is 
contributing more than $6 billion in hurricane relief.

Charity, of course, begins at home or perhaps, it is simply another case of 
Haitian haplessness. But it must be said, however discreetly, that the 
United States has had a great deal to do with the current Haitian 
propensity to catastrophe, by destroying Haitian governments, Haitian 
infrastructure economic and social, and by policies which have reduced 
Haiti almost to a desert.

The United States and Britain refused to recognise Haiti after it declared 
independence. The US made recognition conditional on the former colonial 
power, France, recognising Haiti's autonomy. At that time, of course, the 
United States was busy titrating the humanity of blacks and came to the 
conclusion that a black was 60% human and therefore not entitled to all the 
rights of Man. And Liberty was as dangerous then as socialism was in the 
twentieth century.

Oddly, the French, the Americans and the Haitians had all been inspired by 
the Enlightenment and Tom Paine's codification of the Rights of man. But 
only the Haitian revolution recognised all those rights. In the US, blacks 
and women, for instance, had to wait more than a century to reach the 
status guaranteed to Haitians. France and the US maintained slavery more 
than 50 years after Haiti abolished it.

With the British and the US playing hardball on the recognition question, 
France felt able to demand that the Haitians should pay cash for their 
freedom. In Jamaica and other British colonies, the state paid the 
slaveowners compensation. In Haiti the former slaves paid twice, in blood 
and in treasure. When they had trouble paying back the French the kindly 
American bankers came to Haiti's rescue. We will lend you the money to pay 
off your debt, they said, and Haiti achieved another first becoming the 
first Third World debtor nation.
That debt was eventually paid off more than a century later - the last 
payment was in 1947. In the meantime it had caused Haiti the most extreme 
distress, wrecked her infrastructure and destroyed her independence. What 
the metropolitan countries could not achieve by conquest, they achieved by 
compound interest.

Early in the last century, the Americans became a little dissatisfied with 
Haitian repayment of their debt, and that led to an immediate increase in 
Haitian haplessness. The US invaded, changed their constitution, took away 
their land, chopped down their trees to plant sisal, logwood, coffee and 
pineapple and destroyed the agricultural base of the country. After they 
left officially in 1935, however, the Americans bequeathed Haiti an armed 
force which was corrupt, cruel, ungovernable and in thrall to the US. It 
guaranteed that any Haitian President either obeyed Washington or went into 
exile. In 1947, Dumarsais Estimé, said to be a socialist, was deposed after 
a couple of years. That began a period of dictatorship distinguished 
chiefly by American support for the ruthless Francois Duvalier and his 
inane son, Jean-Claude 'Baby Doc' Duvalier.
During the US occupation (1915 to 1935), the Haitians tried to throw the 
occupiers out, only to be bombed and strafed in a eerie foretaste of the 
fascist bombing of Guernica during the Spanish civil war. Nobody made much 
of the Haitian version, because, after all, what were they but a bunch of 
"Niggers speaking French" as they were described by William Jennings Bryan, 
one of Colin Powell's predecessors as US Secretary of State. The Haitian 
resistance leader, Charlemagne Peralte, was like Bouckman, betrayed, 
murdered and his head exhibited to discourage the others.

History repeats itself in Haiti, but never as farce.

Today, we watch as the United States leads its partners France and Canada, 
in an adventure in Haiti which already resembles King Leopold's so-called 
"humanitarian" incursion into the Congo over a century ago. That 
enterprise, described by the King of the Belgians as rather like "a Red 
Cross scheme" left between ten million and twenty million Congolese dead or 
with their hands and feet chopped off for misbehaviour. Four of them went 
to university.

The American adventure in Haiti has not so far been identified by anyone as 
an illegal enterprise. It would seem to be, on the face of it, an illegal 
trespass into the affairs of another country, an illegal complicity in the 
illegal removal of a duly elected head of state and an illegal interference 
in the sovereign rights of Haitians - for a start.
Mr Annan, who has now condemned the American adventure in Iraq, may yet 
find time to condemn the one in Haiti, but probably not before the US 
elections. He is the chief guardian, it is alleged, of the Universal 
Declaration of Human Rights.

In the meantime, however, it is clear that the intervention has had some 
catastrophic consequences. The bandits let loose and sanctioned by the 
Americans, French and Canadians, have destroyed the health, educational and 
democratic systems of Haiti - such as they were. More important for the 
latest disaster, they destroyed the Civil Defence structure, the network 
which would have warned Haitians of impending disaster and which would have 
at least attempted to rescue those worst affected. It is likely that had 
this organisation been in existence instead of in hiding from the interim 
government's murderous heroes, so many would not have died.

But it is also clear that the Americans, Canadians and French do not 
believe that the Haitians are entitled to the same rights as other human 
beings. Perhaps, using their renowned scientific expertise and prowess, 
they have once again figured out what precise degree of humanity is 
possessed by each Haitian, and perhaps by each Jamaican and Trinidadian also.

That, of course, would explain why it is not necessary for anyone to 
discover what really happened on February 29, when President Aristide was 
posted to the Central African Republic as "cargo" in a CIA plane which just 
happened to be on hand when the US Ambassador, Mr Foley, decided to pay a 
call on the President before dawn one morning.

Perhaps it may explain why various Caribbean leaders are content to watch 
the Haitians die without being able to organise to help themselves, because 
of course, the Haitians are "hapless" and not 100% human.

It may not have occurred to our leaders that in condemning the Haitians to 
'haplessness', they are in fact, recognising that the United States has the 
right to legalise a new class of human being, one without rights - like the 
thousands locked away in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and a host of secret 
dungeons around the world.

It may not have occurred to our leaders that in acquiescing to this foul 
doctrine they are not only condemning Haitians to death but they are 
condemning themselves and us. It may not have occurred to them that in 
their acquiescence they are occupying the same moral ground once inhabited 
by such as Pierre Laval, Vidkun Quisling, Pol Pot and the Africans who sold 
their brothers into slavery .

But, as the West Indies cricket team has proved, in some cases, leaders are 
expendable. When the Laras, the Pattersons and the Owen Arthurs fail us, 
there may be others on whom we can depend to defend the hapless and the 
wretched of the earth.

Copyright©2004 John Maxwell
maxinf at cwjamaica.com

The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20040927/8c384458/attachment.htm>