[News] Haiti Must be Allowed to Decide its own Destiny

[Anti-Imperialist News]

HAITI MUST BE ALLOWED TO DECIDE ITS OWN DESTINY by Imraan Buccus

THE MERCURY: http://www.themercury.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=5327902
January 27, 2010 Edition 1 by Imraan Buccus

A MESSAGE OF SOLIDARITY FROM SOUTH AFRICA:

HAITI is not, as a newspaper recently claimed, "the island of the 
damned". In fact, Haiti is the island of the oppressed.

For a long time Haiti was the most prosperous of all French colonies. 
But just over 200 years ago slaves in Haiti rose up against the slave 
owners and three European governments and successfully fought for 
their freedom.

The revolution was literally incomprehensible even to the most 
radical European intellectuals - just as much of academia today is 
often unable to comprehend the political agency of poor black people.

But when the reality of the slave revolution finally sunk in, the 
response of Europe, later joined by the US and Canada, was to do 
everything that they could to undermine the first black republic in 
the modern world.

The French went so far as to send in their warships to demand that 
the Haitian government pay back the "value" of all the slaves that 
had liberated themselves. This "debt" of 150 million gold francs was 
only paid off by 1947.

The US first took over the job of containing Haiti when it sent in 
the Marines to occupy the country in 1915.

Since then the US government, in alliance with local elites, has run 
the country in the most brutal and oppressive manner. The violent 
alliance between the US state and Haitian elites turned Haiti into 
one of the poorest countries in the world.

The first glimmers of hope since the slave revolution began to shine 
with the formation of a poor people's movement called Lavalas (the 
flood) in the 1980s.
In 1990, that movement reached the point where it was able to elect a 
radical priest and scholar, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to power.

The US, then under George Bush sr, promptly organised a violent coup 
following which more than 4 000 Lavalas members were murdered.
In 1994, partly as a result of the euphoria around our own transition 
to democracy, Clinton decided to restore Aristide to office.

But although he had been elected in 1990 on a huge majority, the 
Americans restored him to office on the strict condition that he 
followed neo-liberal economic policies.

Aristide stuck to the agreement but still managed to make some 
progress. For instance, he built more schools in his term of office 
than had ever been built in the entire history of Haiti.

But George Bush jr would not stand for a radical priest elected to 
office by a mass movement and Aristide was kidnapped and deposed from 
power by a second US-backed coup. Once again, the country was 
occupied and thousands of Lavalas supporters killed.

The US justified its regime change by trying to present it as a 
popular uprising against a repressive government.

This was just straightforward propaganda. Aristide is as much the 
credible and popularly elected leader of Haiti as Allende was in 
Chile or Lumumba was in the Congo - before they were removed from 
power by the US state and local elites.
All of this has been scrupulously documented by people like Noam 
Chomsky, Paul Farmer, Peter Hallward and others.

And yet much of the South African media keeps reporting the lies of 
the Bush regime as if they are fact.

One would think that after the lies about weapons of mass destruction 
in Iraq, journalists would have learnt to be sceptical of any claims 
made by the Bush regime about countries that they had taken over.

But here, in a democratic South Africa, the forces of imperialism, 
together with some think tanks, are taken much more seriously by much 
of our local media than the Haitian people - or first-class 
independent scholarship.

In recent years, the SA government's support for the right of the 
people of Haiti to choose their own leaders was a position that we 
can all be proud of and one that resonates strongly with our own history.

But of course it must be remembered that at the same time Mbeki was 
supporting the Lavalas in Haiti, he was repressing poor people here 
in South Africa.

Haiti was so vulnerable to this earthquake because of years of 
domination and violence from authoritarian US-backed regimes.

It is time for Haitians to be allowed to elect their own leaders and 
to chart their own future. In the midst of the disaster, large crowds 
in Haiti have been demanding that Aristide must be allowed to return.

This is a demand that we should all support. Charity is important in 
times of crisis. But democracy and the right of a people to elect 
their own leaders and to make their own decisions is also important.




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