[News] Return to Port-au-Prince

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/terrall08282008.html

August 28, 2008


"All the Time We are Hungry and Now We Have No One"


Return to Port-au-Prince

By BEN TERRALL

As I flew from JFK to Port-au-Prince Airport on 
August 11, a fellow journalist handed me the 
front section of that day’s New York Times with a 
laugh.  My friend pointed to a passage in an 
article about Russia’s war with Georgia that had prompted her bitter chuckling.

The piece quoted Ambassador Zalmay Khalizad of 
the United States, who charged that the Russian 
foreign minister had told Secretary of State 
Condoleeza Rice “that the democratically elected 
president of Georgia ‘must go.’” Khalizad 
described the Russian’s comment as “completely unacceptable.”

Of course, Washington’s posturing as a beacon of 
peace and freedom has become increasingly more 
ludicrous as wars in Iraq and Afghanistan 
continue with no end in sight and Bush explains 
that we do not torture while testimony to the 
contrary accumulates around the globe.  But the 
U.S. role in supporting the February 29, 2004 
rightist coup in Haiti makes the hypocrisy of 
Khalizad’s statement especially galling.

The Bush Administration made it clear that 
Haiti’s democratically-elected president 
Jean-Bertrand Aristide had to go, then flew him 
to the Central African Republic under U.S. Marine 
Guard (as detailed in Randall Robinson’s 
excellent book An Unbroken Agony) as a brutal 
right-wing military takeover seized Aristide’s 
homeland. The coup government, UN forces, and 
anti-Aristide paramilitaries killed around 4,000 
people in the next two years, according to a 
study published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet.

Among the many pro-Aristide activists who were 
forced into exile was the grassroots leader 
Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine.  Lovinsky, a key figure 
in the Port-au-Prince base of Aristide’s Lavalas 
movement, returned to Haiti during the apparent 
democratic opening after the 2006 election of President Rene Preval.

I saw Lovinsky speak in July 2007 at a 
demonstration across from the headquarters of 
MINUSTAH, the UN mission in Haiti.  The occasion 
was the anniversary of the 1915 U.S. marine 
takeover of the island nation.  Lovinsky led a 
spirited crowd of around 50 Haitians, many 
elderly.  The psychologist-turned-activist 
forcefully read out a bill of indictment against 
the UN:  MINUSTAH’s legitimizing the 2004 coup by 
replacing the initial wave of U.S., French, and 
Canadian troops, and propping up an illegal 
government; UN troops engaging in massacres of 
unarmed civilians; and carrying out a modern-day 
colonial occupation  of Haiti.  As a few 
reporters and activists taped audio or shot video 
of this fiery speech, across Ave. John Brown at 
the UN entrance a mix of uniformed and 
plainclothes military representing a handful of 
the countries participating in MINUSTAH clicked 
away on digital cameras pointed at 
Lovinsky.  This seemed a tactic of intimidation, 
given the close operations the UN has conducted 
with the notoriously brutal Haitian police (as 
documented in reports from Harvard Law School and 
the University of Miami Law School).  A few weeks 
later, Lovinsky was abducted after meeting with a 
human rights delegation from the U.S.  He hasn’t been heard from since.

August 12 was the one year anniversary of 
Lovinsky’s disappearance.  I walked with a 
sinking feeling to the demonstration 
commemorating the sad day.  It was hard to 
believe such an impressive, committed figure had 
been missing for an entire year.  Between 150 and 
200 demonstrators, many wearing t-shirts bearing 
Lovinsky’s likeness, marched in a circle around 
the statue of a man holding aloft a dove in the 
center of the Plaza of the Martyrs.  Aristide 
built the monument in memory of the thousands 
killed in the first (U.S.-backed) coup against him of 1991-1994.

Lavalas activist Rene Civil, imprisoned on 
trumped-up charges in 2006 but freed under a 
conditional release after an international 
campaign on his behalf, addressed the crowd.  He 
said that Lovinsky’s disappearance was a threat 
to Lavalas supporters, intended to stop them from 
struggling for Aristide’s return.

As the demonstration wound through downtown 
Port-au-Prince, several police vehicles 
followed.  Police had already blocked off streets 
near the Plaza of Martyrs, which protest 
organizers claimed was done to discourage more 
people from participating.   The police presence 
as the march ended in front of the National 
Palace was low-key, but  a jeep with six heavily 
armed Brazilian troops was a bit more hostile.  I 
took photos of them as one of them photographed me.

The next day I returned to the Palace of the 
Martyrs, where the September 30th Foundation, a 
group co-founded by Lovinsky to support 
reparations and justice for victims of the 1991 
coup, holds a protest at 11am every 
Wednesday.  Since their leader (one member told 
me, “we see Lovinsky as a father and a brother”) 
has been abducted the primary focus of the weekly 
action has been calling for the safe return of Lovinsky.

Edwidge (for her safety, a pseudonym), a woman 
participating in the protest, told me “Lovinsky 
used to help us.  All the time we’re hungry, now 
we have no one.” She continued, “Lovinsky was not 
a criminal.  We know when the wealthy are 
kidnapped the government does everything it can 
to recover the victim.  Lovinsky is not a dog, 
not an animal.  He deserves the same treatment as 
the wealthy people.  Give us a report.  If he’s 
dead, give us the bones and we’ll bury him.”

Many of his supporters hold out hope that their 
sorely-missed friend is alive.  The forty present 
at the Wednesday protest sang political lyrics 
set to traditional evangelical tunes (and, in  at 
least one instance, a vodou song).  One roughly 
translated as “The victims are asking for the 
key/ give us the key so we can open the door of 
justice/ who are we asking for? Lovinsky!”

In an interview later that day, human rights 
lawyer Mario Joseph of the Bureau des Avocats 
Internationaux (BAI) told me that in some ways 
the current Preval Administration is “worse than 
the interim [coup] government.”  Joseph said he 
told the Haitian ambassador in Washington, “your 
government needs to launch an investigation 
 
[but] on Lovinsky, they don’t want to do 
anything.” Joseph argues, “The Preval government 
continues the policies of the Latortue [coup] 
government,” and says most of those now in power 
are holdovers from the illegal 2004-2006 government.

(A Lavalas activist who has worked with Aristide 
since 1984 and who was diplomatic about Preval, 
told me, “on the social and economic plane, we 
can work with him.” But this member of the 
National Cell for the Reflection of the 
Grassroots, who was beaten so badly he had to be 
hospitalized in prison under the 2004-2006 
regime, said all “ministers, ambassadors, and 
delegates” left over from the coup period are “criminals” who should be fired.)

Joseph’s family has had to relocate to Miami 
because of death threats.  Noting that human 
rights abusers he helped put behind bars under 
Aristide had escaped prison after 2004, the 
lawyer said, “They need to arrest people escaped 
from jail.  My life is in danger.”

Meanwhile, Joseph remains extremely busy 
defending prisoners, some of whom have been moved 
to outlying regions he has a hard time getting 
to.  Of the political prisoners still behind 
bars, he said, “I have too much work to do, it’s 
hard to keep track,” but that there “were more 
than 100.”  Most high profile Lavalas figures 
have been freed but many less well-known 
progressive activists remain locked down.  Joseph 
explained, they “had contact with the Lavalas 
movement, that’s why they’re in jail.”  Some 
think the number of political prisoners is 
higher, given the many poor people picked up in 
sweeps of “popular,” or pro-Lavalas, 
neighborhoods.  (The majority of inmates in the 
country’s overcrowded prisons have still not seen 
a judge, though the Haitian constitution 
stipulates that all prisoners must have access to 
a judge within 48 hours of their arrest.)  Joseph 
stressed the “really vague” nature of charges 
made in such sweeps.  “They accused kids of being 
gang members, bandits, and of ‘association with 
malefactors,’ the same techniques as under [former dictator] Duvalier.”

Joseph filed a rape complaint against Sri Lankan 
soldiers accused of sexually abusing Haitian 
girls, but there was no prosecution.  The Sri 
Lankans were shipped home.  To add insult to 
injury, the UN presence has had a harshly 
inflationary effect on rents and other basic 
expenses.  UN SUVs are in evidence throughout 
exclusive Port-au-Prince gated communities, but 
UN money doesn’t trickle down to many of the 
country’s poor majority, who are having a harder 
and harder time surviving.  Several street 
vendors perched in a heavily flooded corner of an 
outdoor market in the city’s Lasaline 
neighborhood told me the cost of a cup of rice 
had doubled since the capital’s food riots of 
April.  The vendors could no longer save 
anything, and had no idea how they were going to 
scrape together enough to pay school fees for 
their kids in September. In the stagnant water at 
their feet parasites were visible.  A health care 
worker later confirmed a huge number of kids have worms in their bodies.

Ben Terrall is a freelance writer living in San 
Francisco. He can be reached at: <mailto:bterrall at gmail.com>bterrall at gmail.com




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