[News] In Haiti, Reliving Duvalier, Waiting for Aristide

[Anti-Imperialist News]

<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-flynn/not-even-the-past_b_813172.html>In<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-flynn/not-even-the-past_b_813172.html> 
Haiti, Reliving Duvalier, Waiting for Aristide


<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-flynn>Laura Flynn

Writer, Activist, and Board Member of the Aristide Foundation for Democracy
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-flynn/not-even-the-past_b_813172.html?view=screen

Posted: January 24, 2011 01:53 PM

In the 1980s, when the armed forces of 
Jean-Claude Duvalier's regime set about 
exterminating "Haiti's Creole pigs", they would 
come to Haiti's rural villages, seize all of the 
"pigs", pile them up, one on top of the other, in 
large pits and set fire to them, burning them alive.

A Haitian friend recounted this story to me this 
week. It was an image that she could not get out 
of her head since Jean-Claude Duvalier returned 
to Haiti. Because that's what it was like for 
her, to watch Duvalier be greeted like a 
dignitary at the Port-au-Prince airport, and then 
escorted to his hotel by UN military forces -- like being burned alive.

In 1968, when my friend was 3 years old, members 
of Duvalier's Ton Ton Macoutes came to her home 
at 3 o'clock in the afternoon as her extended 
family shared a meal in the courtyard of their 
house in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of 
Martissant. The Macoutes dragged her father and 
two of her uncles away. They then went to two 
other houses on her block, and took away all the 
men from those families as well. Her father and 
the other men in the neighborhood were members of 
MOP, the mass political party of Haitian populist 
leader Daniel Fignolé, which Duvalier wiped out, 
along with all other forces of opposition in the country.

None of the men taken from Martissant that day 
were ever seen again. They disappeared, perhaps 
perishing in the Duvaliers' infamous prison, Fort 
Dimanche, after enduring torture, beatings, and 
starvation. The families could not even hold 
public funerals, and they never recovered the 
bodies of their loved ones. With the help of a 
sympathetic nun, my friend's mother did manage a 
clandestine a mass for her husband, and later she 
consecrated an unmarked, empty tomb for him in 
Haiti's National Cemetery. To this day, she 
visits that empty tomb on All Spirits Day each 
year to honor the husband she lost over 40 years ago.

The common wisdom, repeated endlessly in the 
international press since Duvalier's return, is 
that Baby Doc's regime was less repressive than 
his father's. But my friend's mother does not 
remember it that way. Left to raise six children 
on her own, she lived for nearly 20 years --until 
the fall of Baby Doc in 1986 -- in constant 
terror that she or her children would be targeted 
again. Each day, the children rushed straight 
home from school and didn't leave the house 
again. Each summer as soon as school ended, she 
packed them off to the countryside to breathe a sigh of relief.

Under Baby Doc the most spectacular violence, the 
murdering of whole families, mass purges of the 
military, and especially violence targeting 
Haiti's wealthy families, abated. But the 
intimate terror the Duvalier regime exercised 
over every aspect of daily life continued. In 
Martissant, as in most Port-au-Prince 
neighborhoods, there were active members of the 
Macoutes in every other home. With almost 
unlimited power, they spied on and policed their 
neighbors, attacking, arresting, even killing 
people for such infractions as wearing an Afro, 
not wearing shoes, or leaving a light on after 
dark. Since the Macoutes were not formally paid, 
and since the economy was in a free fall, they 
enacted daily violence and extortion on the population to survive.

The children of those taken in Martissant that 
day in 1968 never forgot what happened to their 
fathers. As soon as they were old enough -- just 
kids really, 12, 13 years old -- they found 
themselves drawn into, and then propelling 
forward, a movement for change. Each Sunday 
morning, a chain of young people from Martissant 
set off across the city, jen pase pran jen, young 
people gathering more young people, until they 
numbered in the hundreds, arriving at doors of 
St. Jean Bosco in La Saline where a young priest 
was saying out loud what they had been saying in 
their hearts all their lives: Fok sa Chanje. This 
must change. These young people, joined by 
thousands of others in church and grassroots 
organizations across the country, ignited a 
movement that after long struggle and many lost 
lives, finally overthrew a 30-year dictatorship.

For the veterans of this struggle to have to 
watch Jean-Claude Duvalier return a free man to 
the scene of his crimes now -- on the heels of 
the one-year anniversary of the earthquake, after 
losing 300,000 countrymen; while a cholera 
epidemic rages, having already taken 4000 lives; 
while a UN military mission occupies the country, 
at a cost of over $500 million a year, while the 
UN cannot even raise a third of that to fight the 
cholera that its troops brought to the country in 
the first place; while more than a million people 
live in the streets of Port-au-Prince under 
nothing more than shredded tarps; after 
<http://www.guardia.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jan/10/haiti-oas-election-runoff>an 
"election" that was an insult to democracy 
(excluding Fanmi Lavalas Haiti's largest 
political party, drawing less that 25 percent of 
eligible voters, and riddled with fraud and 
irregularities even for the limited voting that 
did take place); and while Haiti's twice 
democratically-elected former President, 
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, is in forced exile in 
South Africa -- under these circumstances 
watching Duvalier return was excruciating.

The fact that Duvalier himself appears ill, and 
rather feeble is no great comfort. The fact that 
he was questioned by prosecutors on Tuesday and 
then released back to his luxury hotel, while far 
better than nothing, is still not reassuring. The 
presence of Jodel Chamblain, the founder of the 
notorious death squad FRAPH, which terrorized 
Haiti from 1991-1994, at Duvalier's side as he 
went to court, was flat out terrifying. The 
traumatizing symbolism of Duvalier's return at 
Haiti's weakest hour, is an insult to the dead and an assault on the living.

If the response of Haitians to Duvalier's return 
has so far has been muted, it is in part because 
people are still in shock. This has been a week 
of intense resurgent memory, private at first, 
but more and more communal, as people gather to 
recount and retell, as parents share new details 
with their children, as the radio waves fill with 
the voices of survivors. By week's end the flood 
of memory was transformed into the first half 
dozen of what will likely be a flood of 
f<http://humanrights.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2011/01/20/duvalier-brutality-survivor-speaks/>ormal 
legal complaints against Duvalier for torture, forced exile, rape, and murder.

All week rumors flew that Aristide was on his way 
-- will come Tuesday or Thursday or next week -- 
this offset some of the anger. Last Thursday, the 
teledyol (rumor) had it that CNN was reporting 
Aristide had purchased a one-way ticket home. 
Hearing this, willing it to be true, some 
Haitians, began making painful concessions in 
their heads. One former parishioner of St. Jean 
Bosco put it this way: "OK, Duvalier, he's old, 
he's dying, we'll stomach him, if that's what it 
takes to bring Aristide back."

On Sunday The Miami Herald 
<http://haitisolidarity.net/article.php?id=493>ran 
a full-page letter (Sunday, January 23, 2011) 
sponsored by the Haiti Action Committee in 
California, echoing the call of Haitians for the 
return of Jean-Bertrand Aristide from exile. The 
statement is signed by politicians, activists, 
and other prominent figures, including Dr. Paul 
Farmer, founder of Partners in Health, Danny 
Glover, actor and activist, and Reverend Jesse Jackson.

What does the U.S. government say?

Regarding Duvalier:

"this is a matter for the Government of Haiti and 
the people of Haiti." (from State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley)

Regarding Aristide:

"today Haiti needs to focus on its future, not its past," (Crowley again).

In case there were lingering doubt about who is 
<http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2011/01/20/1825636/blocking-aristides-return-to-haiti.html>preventing 
Aristide's return.

The U.S. government is always quick to urge 
others to forget the past. But memory is long, 
bodies bear scars, the murdered father gives 
birth to the life long militant, and the coup 
d'etat of 2004 is not even the past. As long as 
Aristide is in exile that coup remains an open 
wound. The divisions the State Department is so 
concerned Aristide will somehow seed, are there 
in plain view for everyone to see. Have and Have 
not. Moun Anba Tant, Moun Nan Kay. The people 
living under tents, the people who have homes. 
The earthquake, and especially the disastrous 
international response, seem only to be further 
entrenching the chasm between rich and poor. 
Aristide didn't create this chasm, nor can his 
return transform it in a day. But his presence 
would be a sign of hope to Haiti's poor who've 
had precious little of that in the last year.

"Build back better," Bill Clinton said last year. 
A house built on impunity and exclusion will fall 
again. The rubble must be cleared first. Let 
Duvalier face justice for his crimes. Stop trying 
to hobble together a government from an 
<http://waters.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=220435>election 
that everyone knows was a sham. Let all parties 
participate; let the Haitian people vote freely. 
And let Aristide come home again.






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