President Lula article on Haiti: Brazil's committed to the long haul!

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by H. E. LUIZ INACIO LULA DA SILVA
www.brazilemb.gov | www.brazil.gov.br

In 2004, a major challenge brought us to Haiti.

Brazil, with a U.N. mandate and welcomed by the Haitian government, arrived to help establish security and stability.

Above all, our objective was to sow the seeds of a longstanding peace. 

The U.N. Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) sought to create a new paradigm for peacekeeping missions.

Our intent was to show that security can only be assured by achieving development and social justice.

The Jan. 12 earthquake struck a terrible blow: 220,000 lost their lives.

Much of the physical infrastructure of Port-au-Prince was destroyed. Houses, universities and hospitals vanished.

A nation that previously endured precarious conditions now faces the challenge of struggling to survive.

I will visit Haiti on Thursday. 

My presence in Port-au-Prince expresses Brazil's fraternal solidarity with the long-suffering people of Haiti.

Brazil shares the pain of those who lost family members and their possessions, but we will also help to rebuild lives and homes. 

I will reaffirm Brazil's commitment to cooperate in order to once again lift up a country that has already demonstrated its determination to find its way back to development, political stability and democratic participation.

Before the earthquake, the endemic violence in the Cité Soleil neighborhood had become a memory. 

Businesses were resuming production, agricultural recovery projects were advancing, schools were full of students with dreams for the future. 

No earthquake can shake our confidence in that promising future. 

Now we are taking in Haitian university students, so they can complete their studies in Brazil. 

They will return to Haiti fully prepared to work on rebuilding their nation.

Heroism and solidarity

Brazil and MINUSTAH must persevere because we know the Haitians themselves will not give up hope.

We are certain of that after witnessing the countless demonstrations of heroism and solidarity in the wake of the earthquake. 

The sacrifice of our heroic soldiers who lost their lives reinforces our commitment to Haiti.

We are inspired by the unyielding determination to survive by those who endured days, or even weeks, under the rubble. 

They never ceased to believe in being rescued, nor did the rescuers lose hope, as they relentlessly dug, even with their own hands, in search of signs of life.

With that same sense of urgency and dedication, Brazilian Air Force flights have been delivering humanitarian assistance to Haiti daily.

Brazilian ships weighed anchor immediately, transporting doctors, civilian volunteers and helicopters, as well as tons of food, medicine and water.

I dispatched three of my cabinet ministers to Port-au-Prince to oversee these actions.
 
The total funding allocated by Brazil in emergency assistance to Haiti has now reached $210 million. 

We are also ramping up our presence, sending an additional 1,300 soldiers to strengthen MINUSTAH and assist in reconstruction.

This is a joint national effort. Brazilian companies and representatives of civil society are also deeply engaged.

Their work is inspired by the example set by Dr. Zilda Arns, the founder of the ``Pastoral da Criança,'' who, along with hundreds of other Brazilians and foreigners who perished in Haiti, embody a model of love and devotion.

At the Haiti Donors' Conference in March, we will have the opportunity to mobilize this renewed solidarity internationally.

Brazil has redoubled its coordination with the world community to ensure that its assistance arrives promptly to those who are most in need.

Once the current emergency is behind us, Haiti will continue to confront the challenge of creating productive capacity adequate to sustain the country's development.

In order for Haiti to find new ways to develop its potential fully, we should avoid the proliferation of disconnected stand-alone projects that would fragment the country.

We need long-term responses that will enable Haiti to implement, with sovereign control, programs that are truly in its national interest.

Supplying water, energy

With this goal, Brazil conducted a viability study for a hydroelectric power plant project that will supply water and energy for the reconstruction of Haiti. We are prepared to contribute financially to this project. 

Toward the same end, an emergency meeting of the South American Union of Nations, held in Quito with the participation of Haitian President René Préval, decided to strengthen regional solidarity with Haiti.

We invite Haiti's principal trading partners to give privileged access to exports of Haitian manufactured products.

We call on the business community and investors to resume their investment plans for Haiti.

For this purpose, it is essential that we all grant access to our markets for Haitian goods.

I am not afraid to say that the destruction caused by the earthquake was exacerbated by the international community's longstanding lack of engagement in Haiti.

I am certain, however, that the international community also needs Haiti.

Our planet is undergoing an unprecedented crisis. We now face the imperative of finding genuinely global solutions to the threats we have in common.

The world yearns for examples from people -- such as the Haitians -- with a strong determination to live and the readiness to confront adversities with a spirit of serenity and generosity.

A popular Haitian saying captures this spirit perfectly: ``The victory belongs to those who perform miracles, not to those who wait for them to occur.''

We need to see Haiti return to being the nation that inspired generations and gave birth to heroes, such as Tousaint L'Ouverture, who led Haiti to independence and empowered peoples around the world. 

Haiti is now rising up to fulfill its destiny. Its people and government have already shown us that they will not succumb to powerlessness and fatalism.

The international community now has both the opportunity and the duty to assist them in performing this miracle. Without losing sight of what is truly essential, it is worth noting that the Haitian people continue to recognize their legitimately elected officials as the true leaders for the reconstruction of their country.

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is president of Brazil

Zimbabwe: Haiti As Seen Through Pan African Eyes

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THE HERALD
Published by the government of Zimbabwe

Tichaona Zindoga

23 February 2010

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opinion

FOLLOWING the devastating earthquake that left over 200 000 people dead and destroyed almost everything in Haiti last month, the world was treated to eccentric Western hype about self-inflicted poverty, hopelessness and the heroism of foreign rescue efforts.

The West, through its media, even justified the occupation of this second largest Caribbean Island, which they religiously touted as the "poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere".

One example of the foregoing was aptly demonstrated by one Tony Itis who wrote for the Green Left weekly on January 23, questioning the derision of the suffering people of Haiti.

In the article he cites "right-wing" columnist David Brooks of the New York Times who reminded his readers in a piece on January 15 that when, in October 1989, the San Francisco Bay Area was hit by a Haiti-like quake, the death toll was (only) 63.

"Brooks used crude racism to blame 'a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences [including] the influence of the voodoo religion'," the Green Left writer said.

He continued as saying that although most (Western) media coverage of Haiti's latest tragedy lacked Brooks' crudeness, the same racist assumptions dominated.

"This racist narrative is being used as a smokescreen, behind which the US is cynically using the earthquake to increase its military, political and economic control of Haiti. (Actively hampering relief efforts in the process.)," he inferred.

Turn to February 1's New York Times International story, "In quake's wake, Haiti faces leadership void".

One understands the real reason why the United States could send a naval flotilla and almost 13 000 soldiers in a country that desperately needed food, medicines, water and shelter, among other essentials -- guns and tanks not included.

In this story, Ginger Thompson and Marc Lacey seem to justify a take-over of power in Haiti.

"During this greatest disaster Haiti has ever faced," they wrote, "its president (Rene Preval) has seemed incapable of pulling himself together, much less this deeply divided society."

They quote Mirlande Manigat, a former first lady of Haiti "who makes no secret of her presidential aspirations".

Manigat says what the country has "seen since the earthquake is not a leader but a broken man," concluding that the country could not move with him as president.

In fact, the paper caricatures the leader as wandering around "in a daze" and "lapsing into moments of disorientation", claiming that the "disappointment with the president seems most palpable".

It critically reveals that United Nations and American officials "did not believe" in Preval and that because of alleged corruption and inefficiency "only a fraction of aid flowing into Haiti is permitted to pass through government channels". That is what self-serving Western interests could only see, on top of barbaric acts of looting and need for Western salvation, in this bastion of African quest against racial domination that has of late become a colony of the West following years of Western subversion of democracy and people's will.

A UN military force has been occupying Haiti since 2004, when the US sent marines to support a coup against the democratic government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Following the quake, the UN announced it would add 2 000 soldiers and 1 500 police to the 9 000-strong force already there, sources say.

Westerners could not heed the message in Preval's "Kembe" (Creole for "hold on") or the resilience of the Haitian people in heroically sifting through the rubble and rescuing their own with bare hands and improvised tools and implements.

But for those who can genuinely identify with Africans, it has been a different case altogether.

Coltrane Chimurenga of the pan-African grouping, the December 12th Movement, said he was amazed at the determination of the Haitian people amidst daunting odds, with the Creole message of hope, "Haiti will rise again", being the dominant theme as people here grappled with the devastation of the 7.0 magnitude quake.

The December 12 Movement sent a five-member team led by Haitian Collete Pean to Haiti to deliver a shipment of water on a "Pan-African support mission", early this month.

The water, 1 200 twenty-five-litre bottles, was purchased in the nearby Dominican Republic through US$25 000 funds raised by the movement in New York in an effort to help the people of Haiti and "to show the solidarity of black people in the United States."

In an interview with The Herald after returning from Haiti where the movement donated water to the people of Léogâne -- a town near the epicentre of the quake -- Chimurenga described the poverty of the country, the devastation of the quake and lamented foreign involvement in Haiti.

"After crossing the border from neighbouring Dominican Republic, you can notice the stark change in infrastructure," he said, referring to the level of poverty in Haiti, ironically the first-ever country to defeat colonialism.

"Although the people live in shanties and they are poverty-stricken, you can see their industriousness and fighting spirit," he said.

He recounts that the level of destruction caused by the earthquake progressively magnified as one entered the capital, Port au Prince, hundreds of kilometres from the border with the Dominican Republic.

"When you reach Port au Prince everything is level.

"The buildings are all mounds of rubble and gigantic cracks knife through the earth's surface. People's homes have been destroyed completely and they have settled in open spaces and the streets," he said.

Yet amid a people trying to rediscover their shattered life -- with little success -- there is an overarching foreign and alien force in the midst.

Chimurenga says that foreign military, and notably US forces, are everywhere depicting a virtual occupation of the island.

"In Port au Prince, the military is pervasive. Soldiers holding M16 guns will be everywhere sometimes just walking about or setting up distribution camps for aid while military tanks are seen driving up and down," he said.

He insinuated that the military, far from providing security or prevent looting as pronounced in the public, played no real positive role here except to keep Haitian people oppressed and unable to rise.

When the disaster struck, the US took over the main airport, a move that not only prevented but also delayed other rescue efforts.

The high volume of military traffic prevented many aid flights from landing.

One report says that five planes belonging to Doctors without Borders were turned back by the US forces.
Chimurenga said he noted a certain aloofness of Western organisations in dealing with the people of Haiti, as contrasted with the solidarity of the people from countries like Cuba and Venezuela.

Following the quake, the two countries were among the very first to send help in the form of doctors, search and rescue teams, as well as tents for temporary shelter.

Some sections of the media have accused Western rescue teams for concentrating their efforts on tourists and expatriates. Because of the stranglehold that American forces maintained in Port Au Prince, the December 12 Movement chose Leogane where it could freely distribute the water.

"One thing is that the town was one of the most affected areas," Chimurenga explained.

"Secondly, the town was relatively free from interference compared with the capital."

He said that when the movement reached the town, they were met with Haitian grassroots contacts who co-ordinated a rapid unloading of the water from the container truck.

Old people, pregnant women and the weak were prioritised with each household receiving a 25-litre bottle each.

There were no incidents of looting or violence, Chimurenga said.

There will be a second such trip in the near future and the December 12 Movement has pledged to be involved in the reconstruction of Haiti, which the movement reckons is "a beacon of Pan-African liberation from the time of its successful war against slavery".

And from the modest gesture of giving water to thirsty brothers and sisters in Haiti, the movement wanted to send the simple, non-judgmental but powerful message: "Africans can always come to the assistance of Africans anywhere in the world in the fight for self-determination".