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<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-flynn/not-even-the-past_b_813172.html">
In</a>
<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-flynn/not-even-the-past_b_813172.html">
Haiti, Reliving Duvalier, Waiting for Aristide</a> <br><br>
</font><h2><font size=3><b>
<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-flynn">Laura
Flynn</a></b></font></h2><font size=3>Writer, Activist, and Board Member
of the Aristide Foundation for Democracy<br>
<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-flynn/not-even-the-past_b_813172.html?view=screen" eudora="autourl">
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-flynn/not-even-the-past_b_813172.html?view=screen<br>
<br>
</a>Posted: January 24, 2011 01:53 PM <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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,<i> jen
pase pran jen</i>, 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: <i>Fok sa Chanje</i>. 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.<br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.guardia.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jan/10/haiti-oas-election-runoff">
an "election" that was an insult to democracy </a>(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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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<a href="http://humanrights.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2011/01/20/duvalier-brutality-survivor-speaks/">
ormal legal complaints against Duvalier</a> for torture, forced exile,
rape, and murder. <br><br>
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 <i>teledyol</i> (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." <br><br>
On Sunday <i>The Miami Herald</i>
<a href="http://haitisolidarity.net/article.php?id=493">ran a full-page
letter (Sunday, January 23, 2011) sponsored by the Haiti Action Committee
in California,</a> 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. <br><br>
What does the U.S. government say? <br><br>
Regarding Duvalier:<br><br>
"this is a matter for the Government of Haiti and the people of
Haiti." (from State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley) <br><br>
Regarding Aristide:<br><br>
"today Haiti needs to focus on its future, not its past,"
(Crowley again). <br><br>
In case there were lingering doubt about who is
<a href="http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2011/01/20/1825636/blocking-aristides-return-to-haiti.html">
preventing Aristide's return</a>. <br><br>
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.
<i>Moun Anba Tant, Moun Nan Kay.</i> 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 <i>would be</i> a sign of
hope to Haiti's poor who've had precious little of that in the last year.
<br><br>
"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
<a href="http://waters.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=220435">
election that everyone knows was a sham</a>. Let all parties participate;
let the Haitian people vote freely. And let Aristide come home again.
<br><br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
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