[News] Haiti Update - July Trip Report

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Dear friends – this is an early brief report on 
our trip to Haiti [July 23 – 30, 2007], from which we returned a week ago.

Best regards, Leslie - Haiti Action Committee http://www.haitiaction.net/

August 6, 2007

The experience of entering Haiti is amazing 
because Haiti is so deeply an African country and 
people. The first time I was there, three years 
ago, I was astounded and impacted by the sights 
and sounds of Haiti which are so resonant of 
places I’ve traveled in West Africa: the market 
women, the young girls riding donkeys in the 
countryside, huge baskets on their heads, the 
vigor of massive demonstrations - pounding 
rhythmic feet, visions of Soweto. Everywhere in 
the darkened poor city neighborhoods at night, 
without electricity, in their cinderblock houses 
stacked on top of each other rising up hillsides, 
people sing, blast radio music, play instruments.

It is my privilege to have traveled my two trips 
to Haiti with fiercely political African 
Americans who have embraced Haiti as a cherished 
symbol of liberation to African people 
everywhere, as Akinyele said when greeting 
Lavalas comrades. He said African people of Haiti 
and America came on the same slave ships. He said 
the same people who are killing and oppressing 
Haiti’s people left African Americans to die by 
the thousands in New Orleans after Katrina, and 
now attempt to steal their land. Haiti’s 
grassroots movement recognizes this powerful bond 
among the two peoples. Everywhere we spoke about 
the San Francisco 8 or about New Orleans, Lavalas 
activists sent a message of solidarity.

It’s taking things out of context to try to talk 
about what exists in Haiti now without 
acknowledging what was achieved by Haiti’s 
grassroots movement under Aristide. Because it 
isn’t just that things are bad right now, but 
that what is happening is a deliberate violent 
attempt to reverse a truly democratic effort that 
stood firmly for the poor majority. It is a 
violent, brutal counter-insurgency, a counter-revolution.

For a brief moment, after decades of dictatorship 
and a long history of resistance, Haitians 
achieved the dream of social justice and 
freedom.The poor had power. During that brief 
period of time, there were no boat people leaving 
Haiti. During that brief period of time, massive 
projects were undertaken to support the poor. The 
goal was to move Haiti’s people from misery to 
poverty with dignity. Beautiful public parks were 
built in poor neighborhoods; schools, health 
clinics; micro-loans to market women; literacy 
projects; etc. During that brief period of time, 
poor street kids swam in the presidential pool. 
During that brief period of time, Haitian legal 
teams held Truth Commissions, took on the tonton 
macoutes. Death squads who had terrorized, 
tortured and killed thousands, were prosecuted and imprisoned.

This is why Aristide is so revered in Haiti. As 
one Lavalas activist put it, Aristide never gave 
up, stood up to the western powers, and fought 
for those who cannot speak. He is a symbol of hope and democracy for Haitians.

What we found in Haiti now are activists 
struggling everywhere to resist the renewed 
assaults on Haiti’s poor, to move in a period 
once again dominated by foreign guns, foreign 
economic clout, and terrorism. Twenty-five 
thousand march on Aristide’s birthday; a 
transport workers’ strike blocks roads and shuts 
down traffic throughout the country. Fifty 
grassroots activists, the elderly women in 
dresses and straw hats, mark the 92nd anniversary 
of the 1915 US invasion in a spirited protest at 
UN headquarters. We are there to see the dozens 
of heavily armed UN troops aligned against them, 
insignia marking their countries of origin – Sri 
Lanka, Jordan, Philippines, France, Bolivia, and 
among the unmarked westerners, surely americans. 
The Haitians are undeterred – chanting, yelling, 
dancing, singing, photo displays of UN and other coup victims prominent.

Why must the poor be shot down by UN troops in 
Cite Soleil? Why are the market women beaten, 
even killed, by petty bureaucrats and police 
thugs to drive them off the streets, why burn the 
markets and deprive them of their meagre income? 
Why must armed thugs storm into a school of poor 
children, headed by Lavalas activists, breaking 
the blackboards, desks – the few artifacts needed 
to teach those who could not afford $100/mo to go 
to school? Why must their teacher be beaten? Why 
must prisons be filled with those who fight for 
democracy, starving on diets of foreign white 
rice, deprived of clean water to drink, sleeping 
in shifts in stifling cells built for 20 housing 
80? Why must life be nearly impossible – 
transport workers up against heavy fees and 
costs, telephone workers laid off? Why?

Because Haitians are a deeply political people; 
they have tasted democracy; they insist on their 
human rights. Western powers cannot enforce their 
elite, global agenda on Haiti unless they can 
contain this massive popular movement and destroy its righteous vision.

Here is what Randall Robinson says in his new 
book [Haiti, from Revolution to the Kidnapping of  President]:

“What was it, though, about Haiti that made the 
place so different from other Caribbean places, 
so especially combustible? What property, what 
special character did it have that would incite 
the rich white West to engage a poor, largely 
black nation with such glowering, unrelenting 
hostility
The Haitians knew their history. The 
Haitian peasants may have had few material 
possessions to speak of, but they knew what their 
slave ancestors had done to the French, to the 
English and to the Spanish. They also knew what 
they had done to liberate all of Latin America, 
as well as themselves. No matter how poor they 
were, the Haitians knew these things about 
themselves, things that made them special to 
themselves, that made them resilient and 
independent, that gave them great art, that 
unsettled, even now, those nations the peasants’ 
slave ancestors had once soundly thrashed.”**

U.S. “low-intensity” warfare is so termed not 
because it is mild, but because it comes under 
the radar of the American people, as does most 
anything having to do with Haiti. What did the 
U.N. come to do in Haiti? As one Lavalas activist 
put it, they came to make the country go 
backwards. They spend $500 million a year to 
maintain the U.N. troops in Haiti – money that 
could provide water, schools, health care for 
Haiti but instead the U.N. does nothing for Haiti.

What do the people want from us? They want our 
solidarity. They want us to expose and mobilize 
people against what is happening in Haiti. They 
want us to demand the UN mandate in Haiti not be 
renewed; to support the return of Aristide to 
Haiti; to insist on freedom for Haiti’s political prisoners.




** See Democracy Now, Amy Goodman, July 23rd for 
more from Randall Robinson and the July 15th 
Haiti demonstration in honor of Aristide’s 
birthday at 
<http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/23/141241&mode=thread&tid=25>http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/23/141241&mode=thread&tid=25






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