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<font size=3>ARISTIDE STANDS, THE PEOPLE STAND<br>
by Nia Imara<br><br>
With President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s return to Haiti this past March,
President Obama once again landed his administration on the wrong side of
history. After seven years of forced exile in South Africa—an exile
orchestrated and imposed by the United States—Aristide and his family
returned home to the rejoicing of millions of their fellow
citizens. Tens of thousands of supporters greeted the Aristides at
the Port-Au-Prince International Airport on the morning of Friday, March,
18 and ushered them to their home in Tabarre. The grounds
surrounding the house, from which the Aristides were kidnapped seven
years ago by US special forces, were packed that morning with a jubilant
crowd that included international supporters. <br><br>
In the predawn hours on Sunday, February 29, 2004, United States Special
Forces and more than two dozen US soldiers came to President Aristide’s
home, ordered him and his wife get into a car, drove them to the airport,
and put them onto an American plane that eventually landed in the Central
African Republic. Ever since his kidnapping, the Haitian people
that overwhelmingly elected him into office in 1990 and 2000 called for
his return. Yet instead of respecting the will of the majority and
offering support that might have expedited the return of Haiti’s twice
democratically elected president, Obama followed in the path of the Bush
administration and took measures to stop Aristide’s return from South
Africa. In the last days leading up to the planned return, US State
Department officials repeatedly pressured the South African government to
prevent him from leaving the country. And just a few days before
the family left for Haiti, Obama personally called South African
President Jacob Zuma to express his “concern” over Aristide’s
return.<br><br>
The United States’ centuries-long bullying of Haiti, its pressuring of
Haiti, and its economic and military interference in Haiti have not
ceased with the Obama administration. The ostensible presidential
elections held last November were fraudulent and undemocratic from the
inside out. To start, Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP)
prevented the country’s most popular political party, Fanmi Lavalas, from
running candidates. Ever since the senatorial elections in April
2009, in fact, Lavalas has been banned from participating in elections,
due in no small part to pressure exerted on the CEP and the UN by
Washington. In spite of demands made by the Haitian grassroots and
the international solidarity movement that the United Nations, the CEP,
and the US not support elections in which Lavalas was excluded, the Obama
administration spent a total of $16 million to fund the elections in
November and the runoffs in March. <br><br>
On election day last November, voter fraud of every variety was
documented: the names of registered voters went missing from polling
stations, ballots were stuffed with the names of victims who died in the
January 2010 earthquake, votes were miscounted or not counted at all, and
there were only about 2,000 polling stations across the country, down
from 12,000 during the last elections in which Lavalas participated. That
the elections were fraudulent, however, could not have come as a surprise
to Washington, the UN, or the CEP, who were forewarned by Haitian and
international organizations. <br><br>
Immediately following the November elections, Haitians came out onto the
streets by the tens of thousands to vote with their feet and their
voices. They demanded that the “selections” be annulled and they
protested the ongoing occupation of their country by the United States,
France, Canada, and the United Nations. With hundreds of thousands still
homeless since the earthquake, and in the midst of a cholera epidemic
brought to the country by the UN, how could such a farcical election be
given priority over the needs of the people? How can there be
democracy when a people are under military occupation? How can
people participate in the rebuilding of their country when the movement
representing the majority is excluded and repressed? The
contradictions can only be pushed so far. The crimes committed
against the Haitian people by Washington, the United Nations, and by the
elite within their own country do not go unnoticed.<br><br>
***<br><br>
The “impartiality” with which the American media treated the return of
Jean-Claude Duvalier to Haiti last January was cynical, if not
immoral. Tens of thousands of people were murdered during the
twenty-nine year long, US-funded dictatorship of Francois Duvalier and
his son, Jean-Claude. The severe economic divide in Haiti today and
the country’s dependence on foreign resources directly extend from the
exploitation and corruption that that regime tried to entrench in
society.<br><br>
In 1986, Duvalier the younger was forced out of Haiti due to the mounting
pressure of the people’s resistance. The driving force of this
movement came to be known as Lavalas. This Kreyol term means
“flood” or “torrent,” the idea being that the people were united in a
cleansing flood that would wash away all the corruption and injustice of
Duvalierism. <br><br>
In the early 1980s, a young priest whose parish was in La Saline—an
especially impoverished area in Port-au-Prince—emerged as a courageous
opponent of Duvalier, Duvalierism, and policy of the US government, which
had provided the dictatorship with millions of dollars over the
decades. He was guided by liberation theology, he worked on
behalf of the poor, the youth, and political prisoners, and he spoke
about the right of Haitians to be free from foreign interference.
Jean-Bertrand Aristide shared in the suffering of the people and
uncompromisingly fought for a society in which dignity, education,
shelter, healthcare, and jobs were not the rights of a privileged
few. He mirrored the aspirations of Lavalas—its slogan was
“justice, transparency, participation”—and at the people’s urging, he
became the party’s presidential candidate. In 1990, during the
first democratic election in Haiti’s history, the people elected
Jean-Bertrand Aristide by an overwhelming 67% of the vote.<br><br>
Although Duvalier was removed from power, the small, very powerful, and
very rich elite that supported him remained intact. Aristide was
and is so loved by his people because he stands for everything the
Haitian elite, America, and France—Haiti’s former colonizer—are
against. Seven months after he assumed office, the Haitian
military—which had been trained and funded by the US—staged a coup
d’état, and Aristide was forced into exile. Anti-Lavalas forces
took over the government and, in their attempt to maintain power,
reassumed their repressive Duvalierist tactics. Meanwhile, Bill
Clinton tried to manipulate the situation to the advantage of US big
business by trying to pressure Aristide into making a number of
unacceptable concessions. If Aristide agreed to privatize his
country’s national resources—including the airport, banks, the telephone
company, and the electrical company—and sell them primarily to American
corporations, then Washington would sanction Aristide’s return and
provide him with the protection of the US military. But Aristide
refused, and due to the sustained resistance of the grassroots movement
in Haiti, in combination with the mounting international support, he was
able to return in 1994. <br><br>
But Clinton is back and is pursuing Washington’s agenda of transforming
Haiti into one of its markets. After the 2010 earthquake, Obama
placed him and George W. Bush in charge of America’s fundraising efforts
for relief. Given Clinton’s record with Haiti, and considering that
Bush’s administration blocked 500 million dollars in international loans
to Haiti, Obama’s decision must be regarded as rather cynical. Last
year, the occupation government of Haiti made Clinton co-director of the
Interim Reconstruction Committee. Soon afterward, his wife
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton brokered a deal in which a South
Korean clothing company called Sae-A Trading would open sweat shops in
Haiti.<br><br>
When Aristide stepped down from office at the end of his first term in
1995, the people elected René Préval, who became the first president to
serve his full five-year term in office. (Although after he was
reelected in 2006, he betrayed the people by allying himself with the
occupational forces.) Aristide was popularly elected president
again in 2000, and again he faced attacks from the US, France, and also
Canada. These governments and the big business interests they
represented did not want Aristide in office because he empowered his
people, making it more difficult for them to be exploited.
<br><br>
President Aristide stands for education and literacy of the people.
Between 1994 and 2004, the Lavalas administrations built hundreds of
schools—195 primary schools and 104 high schools—more than had ever been
built in Haiti’s history up to that point. (The US and UN have not
built any schools during their seven-year occupation of Haiti.) The
nationwide literacy campaign instituted by Lavalas reduced the rate of
illiteracy from 85 to 55 percent, and in 2001 Aristide designated twenty
percent of the national budget for education. Since his
return to Haiti in 2011, Aristide again declared his intention to focus
on education. As he has explained many times before, education and
the day-to-day participation of people in the running of the country are
the true tests of a democracy. <br><br>
Aristide stands for economic justice. During his second term in
office, he nearly doubled the minimum wage from 36 to 70 gourdes (about
$1.70) per day. His administration also initiated a campaign to
collect unpaid taxes that the elite owed the government. For
decades, dictators did everything they could to economically and socially
disenfranchise the masses. Lavalas empowered and enabled the
people. Tens of thousands of fishermen were provided with
assistance, new tools and boats, and fifty new lakes with stock fish were
constructed. Lavalas built hundreds of new stores and restaurants
at which food was sold at lower prices, thus challenging the monopolies
of the elite. Moves like these, while they solidified Aristide’s
support amongst the poor majority, obviously increased the elite’s
animosity toward him and Lavalas.<br><br>
Aristide stands for healthcare. Before the 2004 coup, Lavalas
spent more on health care than any previous government. And during
the ten-year period leading up to the coup, the malnutrition rate dropped
from 63% to 51%. The administration began an AIDS treatment and
prevention program; people were provided with free healthcare; forty
clinics and hospitals were built or rebuilt; and clean water was being
made accessible to the poorest parts of the country that up till then had
been neglected. Eight hundred Cuban health care workers came to
work in the traditionally underserved rural areas in Haiti, and over
three hundred Haitians went to Cuba to be trained as doctors. A new
nursing school was also being planned, but the work was halted when the
US military appropriated it after the 2004 coup.<br><br>
Above all, Aristide stands for the dignity of his people. And not
just symbolically. During his first term in office, he disbanded
the Haitian army, which was created by the United States during its first
occupation of Haiti in 1915, and which was notorious for terrorizing the
people. When he was elected for the second time, Aristide made it
clear that France owed Haiti restitution for the 21.7 billion dollars it
extorted from the ex-slaves after the Haitian Revolution. (It is
doubtful that the president of this country would ever make moves to
disband the police, the military, or to demand restitution for the
descendents of slaves.) In making the demand for restitution,
Aristide was speaking not only for the people of Haiti but for black
people everywhere who are descendants of slavery. <br><br>
At every turn, Aristide challenged the unjust power structure in Haiti
and in the world—a power structure characterized by a privileged few
profiting from the exploitation of the poor majority. Thus, in
February 2004, the United States and a Haitian paramilitary consisting of
Duvalierists and former army members violently took over the government
of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The US Marines occupied the country and
were later replaced by the United Nations, which has since acted as a
proxy military force for America, France, and Canada, whose mission has
been to transform Haiti into a safe playground for big business. In
order to do this, these governments have worked with the Haitian elite to
crush the Lavalas movement. During the first months of the
occupation, many Lavalas leaders fled the country because their lives
were threatened by the coup-makers. In the years that followed,
thousands of people were either murdered, disappeared, or imprisoned by
the police, UN troops, and paramilitaries acting on behalf of the
rich. The casualties number in the thousands—men, women, children,
elderly. <br><br>
The occupation put a halt to the reforms begun by Lavalas, and the
quality of life has plunged dramatically during the last seven
years. The elite and the defacto Haitian government have acted
completely contrary to the most fundamental aspects of the Haitian
constitution, which states that “The State recognizes the right of every
citizen to decent housing, education, food, and social security.”
And in condoning Aristide’s kidnapping and preventing his return to
Haiti, Obama has violated the clause of the constitution that states, “No
person of Haitian nationality may be deported or forced to leave the
national territory for any reason.”<br><br>
All along, the UN has protected the coup-makers and has itself
participated in murder and rape. In 2006, the medical journal The
Lancet published research showing that at least 8,000 Haitians had been
murdered and 35,000 women raped since the coup, and the UN has
participated in these crimes. Since its presence in Haiti,
political repression has increased, the cost of living has skyrocketed,
the infrastructure has deteriorated, and access to medical care,
employment, and education have plummeted. Many Haitians have
compared this period to the Duvalier regime at its worst. The idea
that the more than 10,000 UN troops in Haiti are there to bring about
peace and stability is a myth. They are there to enable the
occupation and provide it with a facade of legitimacy. The strategy
of the US/UN occupation has been to re-enslave Haiti; and if the US is
the equivalent to the slave master in this affair, then the UN is
equivalent to the overseer.<br><br>
The veneer, however, is thin. The people of Haiti know well that
the holding of elections should not be mistaken for
democracy. The runoff held in March did not have a much
higher voter turnout than did the November elections—between 10% and
25%. The CEP recently announced that the majority of the votes were
taken by Michel Martelly, a man who supported the Duvalier regime and its
death squads. But given the Haitian people’s history of resisting
corruption and repression, the story is not over yet. Neither truth
nor justice can be evaded forever.<br>
Indeed, the people persevere. In Haiti is a people born out of
struggle—a people who have pledged their determination to die in struggle
rather than live as slaves. The return of Aristide gives reason to
hope and proves that their struggle has not been fruitless. If we
stand with the people of Haiti, we stand on the right side of
history. <br>
Haiti Action Committee<br>
<a href="http://www.haitisolidarity.net/">www.haitisolidarity.net</a> and
on FACEBOOK<br>
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