How Haiti Saved America

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Two centuries ago, a glittering Caribbean Island helped finance the Revolution

By Ted Widmer
March 21, 2010

The United States has been leading the response to the Haitian earthquake for all of the reasons that we would expect: our geographical proximity, our competence at emergency response, and our innate generosity.

That fits the narrative most of us hold in our heads, for we typically think of Haiti and America as a basket case and a basket, joined only by their contradictions, and the beneficence of one to the other.

On the surface, that is true enough. Haiti was desperately poor well before this latest catastrophe and routinely faces problems that border on the biblical — floods, epidemics, and a deforested landscape that suggests a plague of locusts (sadly, it was just human beings).

The United States is the world’s all-time winner, whether defined by Olympic medal count or GDP or any other national sweepstakes.

Yet a closer look at the early history of the United States and Haiti — proudly, the two oldest countries in this hemisphere — suggests that the relationship was once very different.

In fact, it was the island’s wealth that turned heads in those days. And the United States was hardly a foregone conclusion.

In the darkest days of the American Revolution, when it seemed preposterous to believe that the mighty British empire might allow 13 rogue colonies to come into existence as a new nation, the support that came from a 14th colony — French Saint Domingue, Haiti’s predecessor — made an important difference.

In recent years, the bestseller lists have been dominated by history books arguing that our founding moment is the key to understanding everything that has happened since.

That is all well and good — in fact, it’s great news that so many Americans are willing and even eager to read about the 18th century.

But to tell the story right, we need to think about all of the people who worked for our independence.

In the appeals for aid that have gone out over the last few months, there is one powerful reason for aiding Haiti that has never been articulated.

Simply put — the United States might never have come into existence without the help of our island neighbor.

That is a counterintuitive thought, to put it mildly. But to avoid defeat, Americans needed guns and powder and bullets and warm clothing. To buy those necessities, they needed money. And money in those days came from France, eager to twist the tail of the British Lion.

France supported America for many reasons, including the ones we learn in school — Benjamin Franklin’s roguish charm and the appeal of the underdog and England’s comeuppance.

But a reason we hear less often is that France had a vested interest in protecting a lucrative overseas possession with a strong connection to the United States, and to New England in particular.

Here in Boston, where the American Revolution is an everyday fact, it helps to pull the camera back, away from this tiny peninsula, and consider the broader hemisphere.

In the late 18th century, the situation was very nearly reversed — Haiti’s predecessor, Saint Domingue, was the richest colony in the world.

Its capital city, Cap Français (today’s Cap Haïtien) was larger than Boston, and among the most cosmopolitan places in the Americas.

Its culture matched anything in New York, Havana, Philadelphia, or the dour Puritan city jutting into Massachusetts Bay.

Early in the century, Benjamin Franklin had learned that modest displays of wit were punishable by jail in Boston — why he soon found it convenient to flee to Philadelphia.

In Saint Domingue, by contrast, wit was everything. Comedies were performed at playhouses around the country (the largest theater in Cap Français seated 1,500).

Le Cap’s first theater preceded Boston’s by more than 50 years. 

The historian James E. McClellan III said that Haiti’s scientific clubs “certainly rivaled, if they did not eclipse” those of Philadelphia and Boston.

A highly sophisticated urban life sprang into existence — more than 11 towns had more than 1,000 people, and in the capital, all of Cap Français danced to orchestras, laughed at cabarets, played at cards and billiards, and visited wax museums. (In 1789, a waxen George Washington was put on display, in what might have passed for the first state visit by a US president.)

As these accounts would suggest, a great deal of money was made in Saint Domingue.

To be “as rich as a Creole” was a familiar boast in Paris, and a substantial portion of the French economy depended on this one distant settlement.

This was the jewel of the French empire, furnishing the coffee drunk in Paris, the sugar needed to sweeten it, and the cotton and indigo worn by men and women of fashion.

Saint Domingue’s commerce added up to more than a third of France’s foreign trade.

One person in eight in France earned a living that stemmed from it.

By 1776, this tiny colony produced more income than the entire Spanish empire in the Americas.

But Haiti’s superheated economy required constant, grinding labor in the plantations — and that meant massive importation of human beings from Africa.

To a greater degree than in South Carolina or Virginia, the planters of Saint Domingue worked their slaves to death.

This was a slave society on a scale beyond anything seen in North America.

The profits were bigger, and so were the cruelties, distributed as generously.

A small colony of 10,000 square miles — roughly the size of Massachusetts — held a teeming population of Africans, half a million strong, ruled over by a mixture of French families, light-skinned mulattoes, and the profiteering adventurers who always congregate in lively Caribbean cities.

To a surprising degree, Boston was economically linked with a city that was in many ways its polar opposite.

New England merchants had been getting rich in Hispaniola since at least 1684, when a young adventurer, William Phips, found a Spanish treasure that made his fortune there. 

Foodstuffs like dried fish were sold by enterprising Yankees to the rich French island, and the trade in molasses (a run-off of the sugar refining process) became a New England specialty, part of the so-called Triangle Trade.

The difficulty of regulating this trade led to the strictures by which England tried and generally failed to bring New England to heel, enraging Americans in the process.

So, well before the first shots were fired at Lexington Green, New Englanders had a mutually beneficial relationship with Saint Domingue that was irritating to England.

And France was highly protective of Saint Domingue, which the English had tried on several occasions to seize.

All of this provided essential background to the key fact — the French alliance — that allowed the United States to lurch into existence.

Why did the French pour money into our cause? A large portion of the answer lies in Haiti, unremembered by Americans. 

France did not want to lose its jewel, and so it sprang into action when the American colonists began to agitate for their freedom. 

The king’s advisers worried that the British would use the conflict to shore up their Caribbean possessions, and seize Saint Domingue once and for all.

To support the Americans would not only weaken the British and help avert that disaster, it would support a people with a known interest in trading with the French colonists.

The loans were small and secretive at first, often funneled through clandestine agents.

But eventually, French support grew open and robust.

As recounted by Stacy Schiff in “A Great Improvisation,” France ultimately provided 1.3 billion livres, or the equivalent of $9 billion today.

Without this help, the Revolution probably would have fizzled. Certainly it would not have lasted as long.

When the Declaration of Independence announced the United States, the Americans had only about 30,000 fighting men and very little money.

Benjamin Franklin wrote, “the world wondered that we so seldom fired a cannon.

We could not afford it.” France’s aid made all the difference.

The battle that ended the war — Yorktown — was essentially a French production.

But not entirely French.

To do their part, the people of Saint Domingue responded enthusiastically to the call to defend the infant United States. 

Haitians of all complexions fought alongside the continentals at the Battle of Savannah in 1779 (one of them was a 12-year-old drummer named Henri Christophe, who went on to pronounce himself king of Haiti in the 19th century, after getting a taste of independence in America).

Just as importantly, Saint Domingue served as a vital point of transfer for the men, arms, and gunpowder flowing from France to the patriot cause.

As those essential donations poured in to the United States, they came through what is now Haiti. 

Americans were buying powder there as early as 1775. 

The powder that won the battle of Saratoga came from there. 

The military engineers who designed the plans for victory at Yorktown and the cannons needed to win it and the French fleet who made sure it happened all came to us via our island neighbor. 

Yorktown essentially won it all for us.

Perhaps the most important gift of all from Haiti to the United States came in a form that remains difficult to quantify, but was essential all the same.

The money that kept the United States afloat during the long war for independence came from those enormous loans, negotiated by Benjamin Franklin and John Adams during their long stay in Paris.

Does it not seem plausible that France had money to lend to one part of America because of the huge profits that another part of America — Saint Domingue — made possible? 

It is hard enough today to know how money goes from one pot into a government expenditure; the difficulty increases exponentially when looking at the distant finances of a country that no longer exists.

But the vast sums pouring into France from Saint Domingue at exactly the same time made foreign aid to the New World a distinctly more attractive option than it would have been otherwise.

The 1770s and 1780s were the richest decades Saint Domingue had ever seen. It goes without saying that the entire enterprise rested on the backs of the men and women whose labor powered it.

We are naturally drawn to the most elevated part of the story of our national birth, and there is plenty of inspiration in the orations of Sam Adams, the immortal words of the Declaration, and the valor of American soldiers at Lexington and Bunker Hill and Valley Forge.

But we do a disservice to the people of Haiti, and ultimately to ourselves, if we do not remember that a large contribution toward American freedom was made by the hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans who, in their way, toiled and died for the cause.

Ultimately, America’s cause merged into Haiti’s own, for the huge loans given to America weakened the French economy sufficiently that another revolution broke out in Paris and the world turned upside down all over again. 

Out of that chaos emerged a third revolution, and a new Haitian nation, which declared independence in 1804, the second American country to do so. 

Its path since then has been rockier than our own, to put it mildly, but it overcame more difficult challenges than we did, including the opposition of nearly every nation on earth, the United States among them.

There were voices, then as now, that saw some justice in bringing the two independent nations into closer orbit. Timothy Pickering of Salem, secretary of state from 1795 to 1800, considered the revolution’s leader, Toussaint Louverture, “a prudent and judicious man possessing the general confidence of the people of all colors.”

Under John Adams, there was a flourishing trade, and even some US naval support for Toussaint’s maneuvers.

In return, Toussaint’s supporters began to call Americans “the good whites.”

On rare occasions, Americans even saw some similarity between the revolutions that each country experienced. In 1791, as the Haitian Revolution was just getting underway, a young Pennsylvania politician rose to defend the slaves fighting for their freedom, arguing, “if the insurrection of the Negroes were treated as a rebellion what name could be given to that of the Americans which won their independence?”

In 1804, a Boston newspaper, the Columbian Centinel, wrote, “their case is not dissimilar to that of the people of the United States in 1778-1800.”

But in 1806, the Jefferson administration succeeded in a ban on all trade with the newly independent nation of Haiti, extinguishing its hopes for prosperity, at the beginning of its new history.

It is easy to see why we have generally passed over this history.

It is obscure, buried in old newspapers and articles, many written in French.

It describes a lost colony that seems to have slid off the face of the earth.

But Haiti survived Saint Domingue, and now it has survived what may be the greatest crisis in its history.

But the story does not end there. In fact, it doesn’t end anywhere, because Haitians and Americans will always bump into each other in the small hemispheric space that we occupy together.

Many more arguments could be cited to convey how entangled are the roots of our liberty trees.

How many Americans live in the great heartland that stretches from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains? 

They owe a debt not only to Thomas Jefferson, Louisiana’s purchaser, but to Toussaint Louverture and the Haitians who fought so tenaciously for their freedom that Napoleon was forced to cash out of America. (He exclaimed, on hearing of the death of his best general, “damn sugar, damn coffee, damn colonies!”) 

How many Americans have been moved by the prints of John James Audubon, or the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois, or the many other descendants of Haitian families, white and black, who came here in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution?

How many of us have admired the iron balustrades of New Orleans and Charleston, wondering where the artisans came from who designed them?

Thousands of Americans have rushed to Haiti’s hospitals and shelters and with their expertise and aid.

We have given deeply — $700 million and counting.

But as the spring rains come, perhaps we can pause to consider this shared history, and do more by a sister republic that has dogged our steps and weighed on our consciences since the dawn of the American experiment. 

It has often been said that freedom is not free. Should we not show how highly we value it, by repaying a small fragment of the debt we owe to the descendants of a people whose blood, sweat, and tears helped us to become the United States of America?

Ted Widmer directs the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. He is a senior research fellow with the New America Foundation. The library has formed a fund, ”Saving Haiti’s Libraries,” to protect the endangered cultural treasures of Haiti. See jcbl.org for details.

Brazil and US to support Haiti's spring planting season

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Brazil and the United States donate US$ 500,000 to IICA project in Haiti
March 18, 2010

The Brazilian and the U.S. Missions to the Organization of American States (OAS) announced that their governments, as a sign of their commitment to Haiti, have each donated $250,000 to support Haiti's spring planting season, which begins this March and accounts for 60 percent of Haiti's food production. The donation will be used to fund a soil preparation project to help in Haiti's most immediate and critical planting season, during the next 8 weeks.

The operation jointly funded by Brazil and the U.S. will be managed by Haiti's Ministry of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Rural Development, with the technical assistance of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation in Agriculture (IICA).

The project will cover 6,000 hectares in the areas of Plaine du Cul de Sac, Plaine Arcahaie , Region Goavienne, Bas Plateau Central and Plaine Gonaïves, and will benefit approximately 12,000 rural families.

The IICA is the specialized agency for agriculture of the inter-American system and responds to the mandates of the OAS Member States. Its mission is to support the Member States in their pursuit of progress and prosperity in the hemisphere through the modernization of the rural sector, promotion of food security, and development of an agricultural sector that is competitive, technologically prepared, environmentally managed, and socially equitable for the people of the Americas.

Haiti earthquake: As Obama meets Préval, US quietly pulls out of Haiti

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As President Obama meets with Haitian President René Préval in Washington, Haitians worry that the US reduction of troops (from 20,000 after the Jan. 12 Haiti earthquake to 9,000 now) may cause instability.

Haiti earthquake: Haitian President Rene Préval delivers remarks during a joint news conference with US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton (not pictured) at the State Department in Washington, Tuesday. (Haraz N. Ghanbari/AP) 

---

By Kathie Klarriech Correspondent
posted March 10, 2010 at 11:37 am EST

Port-au-Prince, Haiti —

As President Obama hosts Haitian President René Préval at the Oval Office today, the two will discuss how the US can best help rebuild the impoverished Caribbean country after the Jan. 12 Haiti earthquake – which the Inter-American Development Bank called “the most destructive natural disaster in modern times” – killed more than 220,000 Haitians and left more than 1 million homeless.

Meanwhile, the US is quietly, but quickly drawing down the number of troops it sent to Haiti in the quake's wake.

Over the past few weeks, the US has cut the number of troops from 20,000 to some 6,000 on the ground and another 3,000 at sea.

The USS Comfort, a naval hospital ship that arrived days after the quake and treated thousands of Haitians, headed to Baltimore on Tuesday, ending its role in Operation Unified Response-Haiti.

“Our mission was tied to our ability to facilitate humanitarian aid and disaster relief,” said Public Affairs Officer Col. Billy J. Buckner. “We’re adjusting our forces so that we can continue to do that – helping to secure sites for shelter and food distribution. So far the situation has been calm and stable.”

But last week's downpours in Haiti increased concern that time is running out for the 1 million homeless to get shelter before the rainy season begins in April. And many Haitians are concerned that the withdrawal of American troops shows a waning interest in helping Haiti, and that their absence will leave people vulnerable to gangs and street violence.

“It’s not time for them to leave yet,” says Reynold Daughin, a US resident who lost his wife and two-year-old child in the quake. Mr. Daughin is staying in a tent camp downtown, where he has set up a screen and speakers to show films. “I’m trying to provide something positive for people, so that they have something entertaining to do at night. Things may look stable, but they’re not. Anything can happen.”

Reynold Richet lives in a nearby tent camp in the Bel Aire section of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince. He also thinks it’s too early for the Americans to leave.

When US troops came in 1994 to facilitate the return of ousted President Jean Bertrand Aristide, they headed up the UN-led peacekeeping force. “Back then they built bridges and schools,” he said. “Why aren’t they doing that now when the situation is far worse?”

The US mission was, and still is, focused on humanitarian relief.

Although troops helped open the sea and airport after the earthquake, and were ready, if needed, to prevent an outbreak of violence following the quake, there was no need to use them in that capacity.

As they draw down, they are training other troops to take over their posts.

Most recently they passed off a distribution site to Brazilian and Jordanian UN troops without incident.

Other organizations, such as the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), has not needed military protection for its distributions, but the UN reported that a food convoy was looted last week en route to the capital.

Obama says conditions in Haiti still dire

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10 Mar 2010 17:39:41 GMT

Source: Reuters

 
WASHINGTON, March 10 (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama said on Wednesday conditions in quake-stricken Haiti remained dire and promised that the United States would be a reliable partner in reconstruction efforts. 

Obama, speaking at the White House after meeting with Haitian President Rene Preval, said only a global response to the country's crisis could help it recover. 

"The situation on the ground remains dire and people should be under no illusions that the crisis is over," Obama said with Preval standing at his side. 

Obama said many Haitians were still in desperate need of shelter, food, and medicine -- a situation that would only grow worse with the onset of spring rains. 

"The challenge now is to prevent a second disaster, and that's why at this very moment, thousands of Americans, both civilian and military, remain on the scene at the invitation of the Haitian government," he said. 

Obama did not offer any figures for future U.S. financial support to Haiti. 

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Tuesday the United States had already put some $700 million into Haitian reconstruction efforts. 

Preval praised the swiftness and size of the international response to the disaster and expressed gratitude to Obama for making the U.S. rescue and relief effort a priority. 

(Reporting by Jeff Mason, Editing by Sandra Maler)

Chomsky Post-Earthquake: Aid Should go to Haitian Popular Organizations, not to Contractors or NGOs

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By Keane Bhatt
March 8, 2010 | Posted in IndyBlog | Email this article By Keane Bhatt

For decades, Noam Chomsky has been an analyst and activist working in support of the Haitian people. In addition to his revolutionary linguistics career at MIT, he has written, lectured and protested against injustice for 40 years. He is co-author, along with Paul Farmer and Amy Goodman of Getting Haiti Right This Time: The U.S. and the Coup. His analysis “The Tragedy of Haiti” from his 1993 book Year 501: The Conquest Continues is available for free online. This interview was conducted in late February by phone and email. The interviewer thanks Peter Hallward for his kind assistance. This was first published in ¡Reclama! magazine.

Keane Bhatt: Recently, you signed a letter to the Guardian protesting the militarization of emergency relief. It criticized a prioritization of security and military control to the detriment of rescue and relief.

Noam Chomsky: I think there was an overemphasis in the early stage on militarization rather than directly providing relief. I don’t think it has any long-term significance … the United States has comparative advantage in military force. It tends to react to anything at first with military force, that’s what it’s good at. And I think they overdid it. There was more military force than was necessary; some of the doctors that were in Haiti, including those from Partners in Health who have been there for a long time, felt that there was an element of racism in believing that Haitians were going to riot and they had to be controlled and so on, but there was very little indication of that; it was very calm and quiet. The emphasis on militarization did probably delay somewhat the provision of relief. I went along with the general thrust of the petition that there was too much militarization.

KB: If this militarization of relief was not intentionally extreme but rather just a default response of the United States, is it just serendipity that there is a massive troop presence available to manage the rapidly mounting popular protests post-earthquake? Surprisingly large, politicized group comprised of survivors has already mobilized around demanding Aristide’s return, French reparations instead of charity, and so on.

NC: So far, at least, I don’t know of any employment of the troops to subdue protests. It might come, but I suspect a more urgent concern is the impending disaster of the rainy season, terrible to contemplate.

KB: Regarding relief work, aside from Partners in Health, Al Jazeera noted that the Cuban medical team was the first to set up medical facilities among the debris and constitutes the largest contingent of medical workers in Haiti, something that preceded the earthquake. If their performance in Pakistan [earthquake of 2005] is any indicator, they will probably be the last to leave. Cuba seems to have an exemplary, decades-long conduct in foreign assistance.

NC: Well, the Cubans were already there before the earthquake. They had a couple hundred doctors there. And yes, they sent doctors very quickly; they had medical facilities there very quickly. Venezuela also sent aid quite quickly; Venezuela was also the first country and the only country at any scale to cancel totally the debt. There was considerable debt to Venezuela because of PetroCaribe, and it’s rather striking that Venezuela and Cuba were not invited to the donors’ meeting in Montreal. Actually the prime minister of Haiti, Bellerive, went out of his way to thank three countries: the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Venezuela for their rapid provision of aid. What Al Jazeera said about Pakistan is quite correct. In that terrible earthquake a couple of years ago, the Cubans were really the only ones who went into the very difficult areas high up in the mountains where it’s very hard to live. They’re the ones who stayed after everyone else left. And none of that gets reported in the United States. But the fact of the matter is, whatever you think about Cuba, its internationalism is pretty dramatic. And the people who’ve been working in Haiti for years have been awestruck by Cuban medical aid as they were in Pakistan, in fact. That’s an old story. I mean, the Cuban contribution to the liberation of Africa is just overwhelming. And you can find that in scholarship, but the public doesn’t know anything about it.

KB: On that point, you’ve talked about how “states are not moral agents. They act in their own interests. And that means the interests of powerful forces within them.” How does the history of exemplary humanitarian work as Cuban state policy relate to that thought?

NC: Well, I think it’s just been a core part of the Cuban revolution to have a very high level of internationalism. I mean, these cases you’ve mentioned are cases in point, but the most extreme case was the liberation of Africa. Take the case of Angola for example, and there are real connections between Cuba and Angola — much of the Cuban population comes from Angola. But South Africa, with U.S. support, after the fall of the Portuguese empire, invaded Angola and Mozambique to establish their own puppet regime there. They were trying to protect Namibia, to protect apartheid, and nobody did much about it; but the Cubans sent forces, and furthermore they sent black soldiers and they defeated a white mercenary army, which not only rescued Angola but it sent a shock throughout the continent — it was a psychic shock — white mercenaries were purported to be invincible, and a black army defeated them and sent them back fleeing into South Africa. Well that gave a real shot in the arm to the liberation movements, and it also was a lesson to the white South Africans that the end is coming. They can’t just hope to subdue the continent on racist grounds. Now, it didn’t end the wars. The South African attacks in Angola and Mozambique continued until the late 1980s, with strong U.S. support. And it was no joke. According to the U.N. estimates they killed a million and a half people in Angola and Mozambique, nothing slight. Nevertheless, the Cuban intervention had a huge effect, also on other countries of Africa. And one the most striking aspects of it is that they took no credit for it. They wanted credit to be taken by the nationalist movements in Africa. So in fact none of this was even known until an American researcher, Piero Gleijeses unearthed the evidence from the Cuban archives and African sources and published it in scholarly journals and a scholarly book, and it’s just an astonishing story but barely known — one out of a million people has ever heard of it.

KB: You mentioned the Venezuelan debt cancellation. At the same time, the G7 is in the process of eliminating bilateral debt. Why is that?

NC: Well they’re talking about it, yeah. The Venezuelans were first. And they just completely canceled the debt. G7 refused. In the Montreal meeting, they refused to even discuss it. Later, they indicated that they might do something. Maybe they’re embarrassed by the Venezuelan action. But I’m not sure how it’s playing out. As far as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is concerned — the IMF is basically an offshoot of the U.S. Treasury Department—they’ve talked about it but so far they have not agreed, as far as I can discover, to cancel the debt.

KB: Bellerive, Prime Minister of Haiti, thanked the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Venezuela. The D.R. has been lauded for its relief efforts: providing food, materials and medical care, for example. But at the same time there are reports from the border of Dominican troops forcibly deporting family members of Haitian patients and sometimes even the patients themselves, in Jimaní, for example. What is your take on these contrary developments taking place and is there any historical context that you would like to add?

NC: Well, what the Dominican Republic does is up to Dominicans to decide, but the much more striking thing from my perspective, is that the United States has not brought in any — barely any refugees — even for medical treatment. And that was harshly condemned by the dean of the University of Miami Medical School who thought it was just criminal not to bring Haitians to Miami where there’s marvelous medical facilities while they have to do surgery with, you know, hacksaws in Haiti. And in fact one of the first U.S. reactions to the earthquake was to send in the Coast Guard to ensure that there wouldn’t be any attempt to flee from Haiti. I mean, that’s atrocious. The United States is the richest country in the world, it’s right next door to Haiti. It should be offering every possible means of assistance to Haitians. Furthermore there’s a little bit of background here. I mean, the earthquake in Haiti was a class-based catastrophe. It didn’t much harm the wealthy elite up in the hills, they were shaken but not destroyed. On the other hand the people who were living in the miserable urban slums, huge numbers of them, they were devastated. Maybe a couple hundred thousand were killed. How come they were living there? They were living there because of — it goes back to the French colonial system — but in the past century, they were living there because of U.S. policies, consistent policies.

KB: You’re talking about the forcible decimation of peasant agriculture in the 1990s?

NC: It started with Woodrow Wilson. When Wilson invaded all of Hispaniola, Haiti and the D.R., the Wilson invasion was pretty brutal in both parts of Hispaniola. But it was much worse in Haiti. And the reasons were very clearly stated.

KB: Racism.

NC: Yeah. The State Department said, well, the Dominicans have some European blood so they’re not quite so bad. But the Haitians are pure nigger. So Wilson sent the marines to disband the Haitian parliament because they wouldn’t permit U.S. corporations to buy up Haitian lands. And he forced them to do it. Well, that’s one of the many atrocities and crimes. Just keeping to this, that accelerated the destruction of Haitian agriculture and the flight of people from the countryside to the cities. Now that continued under former President Reagan. Under Reagan, USAID and the World Bank set up very explicit programs, explicitly designed to destroy Haitian agriculture. They didn’t cover it up. They gave an argument that Haiti shouldn’t have an agricultural system, it should have assembly plants; women working to stitch baseballs in miserable conditions. Well that was another blow to Haitian agriculture, but nevertheless even under Reagan, Haiti was producing most of its own rice when Clinton came along. When Clinton restored Aristide — Clinton of course supported the military junta, another little hidden story … he strongly supported it in fact. He even allowed the Texaco Oil Company to send oil to the junta in violation of presidential directives; Bush Sr. did so as well — well, he finally allowed the president to return, but on condition that he accept the programs of Marc Bazin, the U.S. candidate that he had defeated in the 1990 election. And that meant a harsh neoliberal program, no import barriers. That means that Haiti has to import rice and other agricultural commodities from the U.S. from U.S. agribusiness, which is getting a huge part of its profits from state subsidies. So you get highly subsidized U.S. agribusiness pouring commodities into Haiti; I mean, Haitian rice farmers are efficient but nobody can compete with that, so that accelerated the flight into the cities. And it wasn’t that they didn’t know it was going to happen. USAID was publishing reports in 1995 saying, yes this is going to destroy Haitian agriculture and that’s a good thing. And you get the flight into the cities and you get food riots in 2008, because they can’t produce their own food. And now you get this class-based catastrophe. After this history — it’s only a tiny piece of it — the United States should be paying massive reparations, not just aid. And France as well. The French role is grotesque.

KB: May I ask, regarding Aristide’s languishing in exile, was he right to go back to Haiti in 1994 in the way that he did, with U.S. troops? Also, was he right to agree, under enormous pressure of course, to the neoliberal reforms laid out in the Paris Accords?

NC: Well, I happened to be in Haiti almost at that time — 1993. I was there for a while; this was the peak of the terror. And I’ve been in a lot of awful places in the world. Some of the worst, in fact. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like the misery and the terror that was going on in Haiti under the junta, with Clinton’s backing at that time. And there was a lot of discussion, I talked for example to the late Father Gerard Jean-Juste, one of the most popular figures in Haiti, who the government recently forced out, he was then underground in a church but Haitian friends took me to him. He was very close to large parts of the population. I talked to labor leaders who’d been beaten and tortured but were willing to talk, and to activists and others. And what most of them said is, Father Jean-Juste for example, what he said is, “Look, I don’t want a marine invasion, I think it’s a bad idea. But on the other hand,” he said, “my people, the people in the slums — La Saline, Cite Soleil and so on, they just can’t take it anymore.” He said, “the torture is too awful, the terror is too awful. They’ll accept anything that’ll put an end to it.” And that was the dilemma. I don’t have an answer to that.

KB: Was Aristide wrong to argue against calls (made by some of his more militant supporters) for armed struggle inside Haiti to restore democracy after the 1991 coup?

NC: Not in my opinion. Armed struggle would have led to a horrendous slaughter.

KB: On Feb. 17, Sarkozy was greeted to street protests by thousands of Haitians holding up images of Aristide, demanding his return, and demanding reparations for what the French extorted in exchange for recognizing Haiti’s independence. At that same address, Preval was shouted down and he withdrew into his jeep. With this kind of sentiment brewing in Haiti right now, do you see Aristide’s return as an important priority, or is it something that might be desirable but not that pressing?

NC: Well, the answer to that question is going to be given in Washington. The United States and France, the two traditional torturers of Haiti, essentially kidnapped Aristide in 2004 after having blocked any international aid to the country under very dubious pretexts, not credible grounds, which of course extremely harmed this fragile economy. There was chaos and the U.S. and France and Canada flew in, kidnapped Aristide — they said they rescued him, they actually kidnapped him — they flew him off to Central Africa, his party Fanmi Lavalas is banned, which probably accounts for the very low turnout in the recent elections, and the United States has been trying to keep Aristide not only from Haiti, but from the entire hemisphere.

KB: By which way is Aristide compelled to remain exiled? How exactly is his persona non grata status in the hemisphere maintained and by whom? What is preventing him from flying into a sympathetic country near Haiti, like Venezuela, for example?

NC: He might be able to go to Venezuela, but if he tried to go to the Dominican Republic, for example, they wouldn’t let him in. And there’s good reason for that. International affairs is very much like the mafia, and the small storekeeper doesn’t offend the Godfather. It’s too dangerous. We can pretend it’s otherwise, but that’s the way it is. There was one country, I think it was Jamaica if I remember correctly, that did allow Aristide in, over serious U.S. pressure and protest. And not a lot of countries are willing to take the risk of offending the United States. It’s a dangerous, violent superpower. I don’t have to tell you, you know the history of the Dominican Republic. I don’t have to tell you about it — that’s the way it works.

KB: Using, as you’ve said, the historical U.S. legacy in the D.R., can we turn to recent Dominican history? As this humanitarian aid is provided on behalf of the D.R., and it fills in the vacuum left by a weak Haitian state, if we go back to the events leading up to the coup of 2004, it worked under U.S. aegis to actively destabilize Haiti by training the paramilitary rebels, Guy Philippe and Louis Jodel Chamblain…

NC: I know. And providing a base for them.

KB: Is there some kind of a contradiction to provide charity for people who you’ve actually worked to dismantle and destabilize?

NC: Well, you can call it a contradiction if you like, but it’s also a contradiction for Sarkozy and Clinton to appear in Haiti without abject apologies for the terrible crimes that France and the U.S. under Clinton, particularly, have carried out against Haiti. But they don’t do it. The head of Toyota has to go to Congress and apologize for hours because some people were killed by Toyota cars, but does Clinton have to go and apologize for what he did to Haiti? He dealt a death blow. Does Sarkozy have to apologize for the fact that Haiti was France’s richest colony and a source of a lot of France’s wealth and they destroyed the country and then posed an indemnity as a price for liberating themselves, which the country was never able to get out of?
A couple of years ago, in 2002 I think, Aristide appealed to France, to Chirac, to pay some remuneration for the huge debt that Haiti had to pay them…

KB: Twenty-one billion dollars…

NC: Yeah, for this huge debt that Haiti had to pay them. And they did set up a commission led by Regis Debray, a former radical. And the commission said that France has no need to give any compensation at all. In other words, first we rob and then destroy them, and then when they ask for a little bit of help, we kick them in the face. It’s not surprising.

KB: Although at the same time there are sources that say that while France put up an indifferent front, it was actually worried about a head of state bringing a legal case with overwhelming documentary evidence for international arbitration.

NC: Well, they really didn’t have to worry, because the way power politics works, the World Court can’t do anything. Look, there’s one country in the world at the moment which has refused to accept World Court decision — that’s the United States. Is anybody going to do anything about it?

KB: You mentioned Clinton, now U.N. special envoy to Haiti, who intends to woo foreign investors and continue on a low-wage textile focus for Haitian economic development. The lens of neoliberal economist Paul Collier, special adviser to the U.N. in 2009, dominates the U.N. perspective of Haiti. An advocate of sweatshop-led growth himself, he’s lavished praise on the much-resented MINUSTAH occupation force there, and has even said that the Dominican Republic “is not engaged in the sort of activities, such as clandestine support for guerrilla groups, that beset many other fragile states.” Can a true humanitarian like Paul Farmer — representing a different development model based on fair wages, public health, strengthening the Haitian state — influence the U.N. as deputy special envoy?

NC: It’s a hard choice. I don’t blame him for trying. We live in this world, not another one that we’d prefer, and sometimes it’s necessary to follow painful paths if we hope to provide at least a little help for suffering people. Like Father Jean-Juste and the marines.

KB: You’ve talked about how the media created an artificial distinction between the South American “Bad Left” and “Good Left,” omitting Brazil’s important collaboration with Venezuela in the interest of maintaining this view. However, with respect to Haiti, hasn’t Brazil legitimately earned a secure place within the ‘Good Left’? A center-left government of the South has spearheaded the MINUSTAH occupation and has pledged to increase its presence, after taking it over from the imperial architects of the coup (US, France, Canada). What factors made it so vigorous in supporting another deposed president of an equally geopolitically-unimportant country in recent times (Zelaya of Honduras)?

NC: Good questions. I haven’t seen anything useful on Brazil’s decisions on these matters.

KB: Any comments on the U.S. media regarding Haiti following the earthquake? For example, Pat Robertson’s “pact with the devil,” David Brooks’ “progress-resistant culture,” pleas with transnational capital to create more sweatshops (Kirstof), Aristide being a despot and a cheat (Jon Lee Anderson). Even Amy Wilentz has compared Aristide to Duvalier in The New York Times.

NC: It’s been mainly awful, but I haven’t kept a record. The worst part is ignoring our own disgraceful role in helping to create the catastrophe, and consequent refusal to react as any decent person should — with massive reparations, directed to popular organizations. Same with France.

KB: I guess my final question is for the future: there have been a discouraging two decades, from 1990-2010, about the popular mobilization for political change in Haiti, and how to proceed, and I guess now that the Haitian people have struggled so hard through parliamentary democracy for 25 years and have so little to show for it, what are the lessons learned and possible strategies now that they’ve exhausted this parliamentary, democratic approach? Two coups d’etat and thousands tortured and murdered in this process.

NC: The lessons are, unfortunately, that a small weak country that is facing an extremely hostile and very violent superpower will not make much progress unless there’s a strong solidarity movement within the superpower that will restrain its actions. With more support within the United States, I think the Haitian efforts could have succeeded.

And that applies right now. 

Take the aid that’s coming in. 

There is aid coming in — we have to show we’re nice people and so on. 

But the aid ought to be going to Haitian popular organizations. 

Not to contractors, not to NGOs — to Haitian popular organizations, and they’re the ones that should be deciding what to do with it. 

Well you know, that’s not the agenda of G7. They don’t want popular organizations; they don’t like popular movements; they don’t like democracy for that matter. What they want is for the rich and powerful to run things. Well, if there was a strong solidarity movement in the United States and the world, it could change that.

BRIEF CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS IN HAITI

Adapted from Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment
Courtesy Peter Hallward

• Aug. 14, 1791 A slave uprising begins in northern Saint-Domingue
  
• Feb. 4, 1794 Abolition of French colonial slavery
  
• Jan. 1, 1804 Saint-Domingue is renamed Haiti, and declares itself independent of France
  
• 1825 France recognizes Haitian independence for the payment of 150 million francs (later reduced to 90 million as compensation for lost property)
  
• 1915-34 The United States (under Woodrow Wilson) invades and occupies Haiti
  
• Sept. 22, 1957 Francois Duvalier (“Papa Doc”) becomes president
  
• April 21, 1971 Francois Duvalier dies and is succeeded by his son Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”)
  
• Feb. 7, 1986 “Baby Doc” is pushed out of Haiti by a popular uprising; General Henry Namphy takes power
  
• Dec. 16, 1990 Jean-Bertrand Aristide is elected with 67% of the vote; his prime minister is Rene Preval
  
• Sept. 30, 1991 General Raoul Cedras overthrows Aristide, who goes into exile; over the next few years several thousands of Aristide’s supporters are killed
  
• Summer 1993 The paramilitary death squad FRAPH is formed, led by Toto Constant and Jodel Chamblain
  
• Sept. 19, 1994 U.S. soldiers occupy Haiti for the second time; Aristide returns from exile
  
• Early 1995 Aristide disbands Haiti’s armed forces
  
• Mid-1995 Aristide’s party Fanmi Lavalas wins legislative elections
  
• Dec. 17, 1995 Rene Preval is elected with 88% of the vote
  
• Late 1996 Formation of Fanmi Lavalas in opposition to ex-Lavalas faction
  
• May 21, 2000 Fanmi Lavalas wins landslide victories at all levels of government; opponents form a U.S.-backed coalition called the Convergence Democratique
  
• Nov. 26, 2000 Aristide is re-elected with 92% of the vote
  
• July 28, 2001 First of many commando raids on police stations and other government facilities by ex-soldiers based in the Dominican Republic, led by Guy Philippe
  
• Dec. 17, 2001 Ex-soldiers attack the presidential palace, provoking popular reprisals against the offices of parties belonging to Convergence Democratique
  
• April 2003 Aristide asks France to repay the money it extorted from Haiti
  
• Jan. 1, 2004 Haiti celebrates bicentenary of independence from France
  
• Feb. 5, 2004 Full-scale insurgency begins, Chamblain overruns Cap Haitien
  
• Feb. 29, 2004 Aristide is forced onto a U.S. jet and flown to the Central African Republic
  
• March 2004 U.S. troops occupy Haiti for a third time, interim government is formed with Gerard Latortue as P.M., the Lancet estimates thousands killed by police and anti-Lavalas paramilitaries
  
• June 2004 U.S.-led force is replaced by a U.N. stabilization mission (MINUSTAH)
  
• Feb. 7, 2006 Preval wins presidential elections with 51% of the vote
  
• Jan. 12, 2010 Catastrophic earthquake rocks Port-au-Prince

Haitian Garment Workers Should Get at Least $5 a Day

Go to Original (The Huffington Post) >

Americans want to help Haiti; Democrats control the U.S. Congress; the Haitian Parliament has passed legislation saying Haitian workers should be paid at least $5 a day; and specific legislation that provides preferential access to the U.S. market to garments from Haiti is already U.S. law.

Therefore, the following policy reform ought to be a slam dunk: Haitian garment workers whose products receive preferential access to the U.S. market under the HOPE II Act ought to be paid at least $5 a day.

The international community is dusting off a plan to expand Haiti's low-wage garment assembly industry as a linchpin of recovery, AP reports.

The Obama Administration is on board, encouraging U.S. retailers to obtain from Haiti at least onr percent of the clothes they sell. Garments are central an economic growth plan commissioned by the UN and promoted by former President Clinton, the UN's special envoy for Haiti.

In 2008, Congress passed the "HOPE II" Act, which lets Haiti export textiles duty-free to the U.S. for a decade.

Currently, the minimum wage in Haiti for garment workers who produce for the U.S. consumer market is $3.09 a day. 

Last year the Haitian Parliament passed legislation to raise the minimum wage for all workers from $1.72 a day to $5 a day. 

But factory owners in the export sector producing for the U.S. consumer market complained to Haitian President Preval, and he refused to implement the law. 

A compromise was reached: the minimum wage is now $5, except for the garment workers; they get $3.09 a day.

AP gives the example of Jordanie Pinquie Rebeca, a garment worker:

Rebeca ... guides a piece of suit-jacket wool and its silky lining into a sewing machine...If she does this for eight hours, she will earn $3.09. Her boss will ship the pinstriped suit she helped make to the United States, tariff-free. There a shopper will buy it from JoS. A. Bank Clothiers for $550.

AP says that even the factory owners concede that garment-industry wages are too low to feed, clothe and house workers and their families.

As for Rebeca:

Rebeca ... sleeps on the street and barely eats. With a day's pay she can buy a cupful of rice and transport via group taxi, and pay down debt on her now-destroyed apartment. Anything left over goes to cell phone minutes to call her boyfriend, who was evacuated to the Dominican Republic with a leg fracture sustained in the quake, or her 4-year-old son, Mike, whom she sent to live with relatives in the countryside.

Should a worker in Haiti whose job is supported by U.S. consumer demand, whose product has preferential access to the U.S. consumer market, be forced to live like this?

The U.S. Congress could raise Rebeca's daily wage from $3.09 to $5 - a 60% increase - simply by enacting into U.S. law the benchmark established by the Haitian Parliament. 

Indeed, it is likely that if Democrats in Congress merely signaled their willingness to enact this benchmark into law, Haitian parliamentarians could do the rest.

They could go to President Preval and say: "Look, the Americans want this." And President Preval would have to listen.

Suppose that it takes Rebeca a day to produce that suit, an assumption that the AP article seems to imply is plausible. Is it too much to ask that she get an extra $2 for making a $550 suit? If we could ask the customer in the U.S. who purchased the suit for $550 for a $2 donation so Rebeca could have something to eat, how many people would say no?

Following the earthquake, the U.S. granted Temporary Protected Status to Haitians in the U.S. One of the arguments in favor of doing this was that remittances from Haitian workers in the U.S. support people in Haiti, and this support was even more needed now in the wake of the earthquake. Doesn't this logic also apply to increasing the wages of workers in Haiti supplying the U.S. consumer market? Wouldn't this be a straightforward way to get U.S. dollars into deserving hands close to the ground?

We have a principle in the U.S. - not always honored in practice - that if you work full-time, you ought to be able to feed and clothe yourself and put a roof over your head. This principle ought to apply to workers in Haiti who produce for the U.S. consumer market.

This is a policy that labor, aid and Haiti solidarity groups should be able to unite on. Labor wants to raise labor standards. Aid groups want trade to support development. These are two great tastes that would taste great together.

Establishing this policy would set a good precedent. U.S.-supported international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have long used their influence to obstruct government efforts to raise wages in countries like Haiti. But the IMF has recently reversed itself on other long-held dogmas - embracing capital controls and moderate inflation in developing countries, for example. If the IMF can re-think capital controls and moderate inflation, maybe it can re-think starvation wages.

 

Follow Robert Naiman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/naiman

Haiti Donations: New Rules for Getting a Tax Break

Go to Original (CBS Money Watch) >

by Kerry Hannon | Feb 22, 2010

Donate to a charity helping
Haiti earthquake victims
before March 1,
and the Internal Revenue Service
has some relief for you.

Under a new law, you can actually write off a 2010 Haiti donation on your 2009 tax return if you itemize. (You can put the donation on your 2010 return next year if you prefer.) “This is quite unusual,” says Tom Ochsenschlager, vice president of taxation for the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. “But there are a number of requirements to qualify for this break.”

Here are the five key rules:

• Your donation must be dated no later than February 28. That means, if you’re mailing a check, the postmark will need to be the 27; the 28^th is a Sunday and post offices will be closed.
  
  
• Your gift must be cash. Donations of clothes or other goods won’t qualify.
  
  
• The charity must qualify as tax-deductible according to the IRS. The agency’s Publication 78 has a list of many approved groups. Churches, synagogues, mosques and government agencies are also eligible, even if they are not listed in Publication 78. But contributions made to foreign organizations generally are not deductible, so if you have your eye on a foreign charity, check to see if they have an American subsidiary. (For example, you can’t claim a deduction for a donation directly to Médecins Sans Frontières, but you can deduct a gift to Doctors Without Borders.)
  
  
• You must be able to prove the donation was for Haiti relief. Be sure you have documentation that your contribution was earmarked to help victims of the Jan. 12 earthquake. The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund qualifies, and MoneyWatch blogger Kathy Kristof has noted some other groups worth considering. For contributions made by cash, check, credit or debit card, you’ll need either a bank record such as a cancelled check, a credit card statement, or a receipt from the charity. A receipt should show the name of the charity, the date of your donation and amount you gave. And if you zapped a text-message donation from your cell to the American Red Cross, United Way, or Catholic Relief Services, a phone bill will satisfy the recordkeeping requirement, as long as it has the required documentation for receipts.
  
  
• Donations of $250 or more will demand additional documentation. For these gifts, you’ll also need written acknowledgment from the charity showing whether the organization provided any goods or services in exchange for the gift.

Check back on MoneyWatch.com every day between March 1 to April 15: We’ll be giving you a tax tip a day.

Senators Ask Remittance Companies to Cut Haiti Fees

Go to Original (Bloomberg) >

By Bill Faries and Adriana Brasileiro

Feb. 22 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. Senators John Kerry and Evan Bayh asked Western Union Co. and MoneyGram International Inc. to eliminate or reduce fees on money transfers to earthquake- damaged Haiti through June.

Kerry, who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, and Bayh, a member of the Banking Committee, said suspending the fees of about 7 percent to 9 percent would help fund recovery efforts after the Jan. 12 temblor, which may have killed 300,000 people, according to Haiti’s president, Rene Preval. They praised both companies for cutting their fees in the immediate aftermath of the quake.

“While we appreciate your initial efforts, the need for a longer commitment is great because for many Haitians remittances will act as a lifeline,” the two Senate Democrats wrote in a letter today. “With your help, Haitian Americans who sacrifice to send remittances will see more of that money reach their families in Haiti who are in desperate need.” Kerry represents Massachusetts and Bayh represents Indiana.

Messages left with spokesmen for both companies weren’t immediately returned.

The Inter-American Development Bank on Feb. 16 estimated that it may cost as much as $13.9 billion to rebuild from the quake, the deadliest-ever in the Western Hemisphere, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The economic damage is equivalent to 104 percent to 117 percent of Haiti’s gross domestic product, more than any other nation in modern times has faced, the bank said.

World Bank economist Dilip Ratha said in a statement on his Web site that Haiti receives between $1.5 billion and $1.8 billion in remittances each year.

The United Nations said Feb. 18 that the $1.4 billion is needed to provide food, water, shelter and sanitation to 3 million Haitians throughout 2010, the largest appeal following a natural disaster in the world body’s history.

The U.S. in Haiti: Neoliberalism at the Barrel of a Gun

Go to Original (The Indypendent) >

By Arun Gupta
From the February 19, 2010 issue | Posted in Arun Gupta

Official denials aside, the United States has embarked on a new military occupation of Haiti thinly cloaked as disaster relief. While both the Pentagon and the United Nations claimed more troops were needed to provide “security and stability” to bring in aid, violence was never an issue, according to nearly all independent observers in the field.

The military response appears to be more opportunistic. With Haiti’s government “all but invisible” and its repressive police forces “devastated,” popular organizations were starting to fill the void. But the Western powers rushing in want to rebuild Haiti on a foundation of sweatshops, agro-exports and tourism. This is opposed by the popular organizations, which draw from Haiti’s overwhelmingly poor majority. Thus, if a neoliberal plan is going to be imposed it will be done at gunpoint.

The rapid mobilization of thousands of U.S. troops crowded out much of the aid being sent to the Port-au-Prince airport following the Jan. 12 earthquake. Doctors Without Borders said five of its cargo flights were turned away, while flights from the World Food Program were delayed up to two days. By the end of January, three quarters of Haitians still lacked clean water, the government had received only 2 percent of the tents it had requested and hospitals in the capital reported they were running “dangerously low” on basic medical supplies like antibiotics and painkillers. Nearly a month into the crisis, the Washington Post reported, “Every day, tens of thousands of Haitians face a grueling quest to find food, any food. A nutritious diet is out of the question.”

At the same time, the United States had assumed control of Haiti’s airspace, landed 6,500 soldiers on the ground with 15,000 more troops off shore at one point and dispatched an armada of naval vessels and nine coast guard cutters to patrol the waters, and the U.S. Embassy was issuing orders on behalf of the Haitian government. In a telling account, The New York Times described a press conference in Haiti at which “the American ambassador and the American general in charge of the United States troops deployed here” were “seated at center stage,” while Haitian President René Préval stood in the back “half-listening” and eventually “wandered away without a word.”

The real powers in Haiti now are the U.S. commander, Lt. Gen. Ken Keen; U.S. ambassador Louis Lucke; Bill Clinton (who has been tapped by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to lead recovery efforts); and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. When asked at the press conference how long U.S. forces were planning to stay, Keen said, “I’m not going to put a time frame on it,” while Lucke added, “We’re not really planning in terms of weeks or months or years. We’re planning basically to see this job through to the end.”

While much of the corporate media fixated on “looters,” virtually every independent observer in Haiti after the earthquake noted the lack of violence. Even Lt. Gen. Keen described the security situation as “relatively calm.” Veteran Haiti reporter Kim Ives told Democracy Now! on January 20: “Security is not the issue. We see throughout Haiti the population … organizing themselves into popular committees to clean up, to pull out the bodies from the rubble, to build refugee camps, to set up their security for the refugee camps.” In one instance, Ives continued, a truckload of food showed up in a neighborhood in the middle of the night unannounced. “It could have been a melee. The local popular organization … was contacted. They immediately mobilized their members. They came out. They set up a perimeter. They set up a cordon. They lined up about 600 people who were staying on the soccer field behind the house, which is also a hospital, and they distributed the food in an orderly, equitable fashion. … They didn’t need Marines. They didn’t need the U.N.”

A NEW INVASION

But that’s what Haiti is getting, including 3,500 more soldiers and police for the 9,200-strong U.N. force already there. These U.N. forces have played a leading role in repressing Haiti’s poor, who twice propelled Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the presidency on a platform of social and economic justice. And the poor know that the detailed U.S. and U.N. plans in the works for “recovery” — sweatshops, land grabs and privatization — are part of the same system of economic slavery they’ve been fighting against for more than 200 years. Neoliberal reconstruction, then, will happen at the barrel of the gun. In this light, the impetus of a new occupation may be to reconstitute the Haitian Army (or similar entity) as a force “to fight the people.”

This is the crux of the situation. Despite all the terror inflicted on Haiti by the United States, particularly the slaughter of thousands by U.S.-armed death squads after each coup, the strongest social and political force in Haiti today is probably the organisations populaires (OPs) that are the backbone of Aristide’s party, Fanmi Lavalas. Twice last year, after legislative elections that banned Fanmi Lavalas were scheduled, boycotts were organized by the party. In the April and June polls the abstention rate was reported to be at least 89 percent.

A new occupation of Haiti — the third in the last 16 years — also fits within the U.S. doctrine of rollback in Latin America: support for the coup in Honduras, seven new military bases in Colombia, hostility toward Bolivia and Venezuela. Related to that, the United States wants to ensure that Haiti will not pose the “threat of a good example” by pursuing an independent path, as it tried to do under President Jean-Bertrand Aristide — which is why he was toppled twice, in 1991 and 2004, in U.S.-backed coups.

SWEATSHOP SOLUTION

In a March 2009 New York Times op-ed, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon outlined his development plan for Haiti, involving lower port fees, “dramatically expanding the country’s export zones,” and emphasizing “the garment industry and agriculture.” Ban’s neoliberal plan was drawn up by Oxford University economist Paul Collier.

Collier is blunt, writing, “Due to its poverty and relatively unregulated labor market, Haiti has labor costs that are fully competitive with China.” He calls for agricultural exports such as mangoes that involve pushing farmers off the land so they can be employed in garment manufacturing in export-processing zones. To facilitate these zones Collier says, Haiti and donors need to provide them with private ports and electricity, “clear and rapid rights to land;” outsourced customs; “roads, water and sewage;” and the involvement of the Clinton Global Initiative to bring in garment manufacturers.

Revealing the connection between neoliberalism and military occupation in Haiti, Collier credits the Brazilian-led United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH ) with establishing “credible security,” but laments that its remaining mandate is “too short for investor confidence.” In fact, MINUSTAH has been involved in numerous massacres in Port-au-Prince slums that are strongholds for Lavalas. Collier also notes MINUSTAH will cost some $5 billion overall; compare that to the $379 million the U.S. government has designated for post-earthquake relief.

Speaking at an October 2009 investors’ conference in Port-au-Prince that attracted dogooders like Gap, Levi Strauss and Citibank, Bill Clinton claimed a revitalized garment industry could create 100,000 jobs. Some 200 companies, half of them garment manufacturers, attended the conference, drawn by “Haiti’s extremely low labor costs, comparable to those in Bangladesh,” The New York Times reported. Those costs are often less than the official daily minimum wage of $1.75. (The Haitian Parliament approved an increase last May 4 to about $5 an hour, but it was opposed by the business elite, and President René Préval refused to sign the bill, effectively killing it. This episode sparked student protests starting in June of last year, which were repressed by Haitian police and MINUSTAH .)

ROOTS OF REPRESSION

In his work Haiti State Against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism, Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes, “Haiti’s first army saw itself as the offspring of the struggle against slavery and colonialism.” That changed during the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. Under the tutelage of the U.S. Marines, “the Haitian Garde was specifically created to fight against other Haitians. It received its baptism of fire in combat against its countrymen.” This brutal legacy led Aristide to disband the army in 1995.

Yet prior to the army’s disbandment, in the wake of the U.S. invasion that returned a politically handcuffed Aristide to the presidency in 1994, “CIA agents accompanying U.S. troops began a new recruitment drive” that included leaders of the death squad known as FRAPH, according to Peter Hallward, author of Damning the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment.

It’s worth recalling how the Clinton administration played a double game under the cover of humanitarian intervention. Investigative reporter Allan Nairn revealed that in 1993 “five to ten thousand” small arms were shipped from Florida, past the U.S. naval blockade, to the coup leaders. These weapons enabled FRAPH to grow and to terrorize the popular movements. Then, pointing to intensifying FRAPH violence in 1994, the Clinton administration pressured Aristide into acquiescing to a U.S. invasion because FRAPH was becoming “the only game in town.”

After 20,000 U.S. troops landed in Haiti, they set about protecting FRAPH members, freeing them from jail and refusing to disarm them or seize their weapons caches. FRAPH leader Emmanual Constant told Nairn that after the invasion the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was using FRAPH to counter “subversive activities.” Meanwhile, the State Department and CIA went about stacking the Haitian National Police with former army soldiers, many of whom were on the U.S. payroll. By 1996, according to one report, Haitian Army and “FRAPH forces remain armed and present in virtually every community across the country,” and paramilitaries were “inciting street violence in an effort to undermine social order.”

During the early 1990s, a separate group of Haitian soldiers, including Guy Philippe, who led the 2004 coup against Aristide, were spirited away to Ecuador where they allegedly trained at a “U.S. military facility.” Hallward describes the second coup as beginning in 2001 as a “Contra war” in the Dominican Republic with Philippe and former FRAPH commander Jodel Chamblain as leaders. A Democracy Now! report from April 7, 2004, claimed that the U.S. government-funded International Republican Institute provided arms and technical training to the anti-Aristide force in the Dominican Republic, while “200 members of the special forces of the United States were there in the area training these so-called rebels.”

A key component of the campaign against Aristide after he was inaugurated in 2001 was economic destabilization that cut off funding for “road construction, AIDS programs, water works and health care.” Likely factors in the 2004 coup included Aristide’s public campaign demanding that France repay the money it extorted from Haiti in 1825 for the former slave colony to buy its freedom, estimated in 2003 at $21 billion, and his working with Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba to create alternatives to U.S. economic domination of the region.

When Aristide was finally ousted in February 2004, another round of slaughter ensued, with 800 bodies dumped in just one week in March. A 2006 study by the British medical journal Lancet determined that 8,000 people were murdered in the capital region during the first 22 months of the U.S.-backed coup government and 35,000 women and girls were raped or sexually assaulted. The OPs and Lavalas militants were decimated, in part by a U.N. war against the main Lavalas strongholds in Port-au-Prince’s neighborhoods of Bel Air and Cité Soleil, the latter a densely packed slum of some 300,000. (Hallward claims U.S. Marines were involved in a number of massacres in areas such as Bel Air in 2004.)

‘MORE FREE TRADE’

Less than four months after the 2004 coup, reporter Jane Regan described a draft economic plan, the “Interim Cooperation Framework,” which “calls for more free trade zones (FTZs), stresses tourism and export agriculture and hints at the eventual privatization of the country’s state enterprises.” Regan wrote that the plan was “drawn up by people nobody elected,” mainly “foreign technicians” and “institutions like the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank.”

Much of this plan was implemented under Préval, who announced in 2007 plans to privatize the public telephone company, Téléco. This plan is now being promoted by Bill Clinton and Ban Ki-moon as Haiti’s path out of poverty. The Wall Street Journal touted such achievements as “10,000 new garment industry jobs” in 2009, a “luxury hotel complex” in the upper-crust neighborhood of Pétionville and a $55 million investment by Royal Caribbean International at its “private Haitian beach paradise.”

Haiti, of course, has been here before, when the USAID spoke of turning it into the “Taiwan of the Caribbean.” In the 1980s, under Jean- Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, it shifted onethird of cultivated land to export crops while “there were some 240 multinational corporations, employing between 40,000 and 60,000 predominantly female workers,” sewing garments, baseballs for Major League Baseball, and Disney merchandise, according to scholar Yasmine Shamsie. Those jobs, paying as little as 11 cents an hour, coincided with a decline in per capita income and living standards. (Ban Ki-moon wants Haiti to emulate Bangladesh, where sweatshops pay as little as 6 cents an hour.) At such low pay, workers had little left after purchasing food and transportation to and from the factories. These self-contained export-processing zones, often funded by USAID and the World Bank, also add little to the national economy, importing tax free virtually all the materials used.

U.S.-promoted agricultural policies, such as forcing Haitian rice farmers to compete against U.S.-subsidized agribusiness, cost an estimated 830,000 rural jobs according to Oxfam, while exacerbating malnutrition. This and the decimation of the invaluable Creole pig (because of fears of an outbreak of African swine fever), led to displacement of the peasantry into urban areas, and along with the promise of urban jobs, fueled rural migration into flimsy shantytowns. It’s hard not to conclude that these development schemes played a major role in the horrific death toll in Port-au-Prince.

The latest scheme, on hold for now, is a $50 million “industrial park that would house roughly 40 manufacturing facilities and warehouses,” bankrolled by the Soros Economic Development Fund (yes, that Soros). The planned location is Cité Soleil. James Dobbins, former special envoy to Haiti under President Bill Clinton, outlined other measures in a New York Times op-ed: “This disaster is an opportunity to accelerate oft-delayed reforms” including “breaking up or at least reorganizing the government- controlled telephone monopoly. The same goes with the Education Ministry, the electric company, the Health Ministry and the courts.”

It’s clear that the Shock Doctrine is alive and well in Haiti. But given the strength of the organisations populaires and weakness of the government, it will have to be imposed violently.

For those who wonder why the United States is so obsessed with controlling a country so impoverished, devastated, and seemingly inconsequential as Haiti, Noam Chomsky sums it up best: “Why was the U.S. so intent on destroying northern Laos, so poor that peasants hardly even knew they were in Laos? Or Indochina? Or Guatemala? Or Maurice Bishop in Grenada, the nutmeg capital of the world? The reasons are about the same, and are explained in the internal record. These are ‘viruses’ that might ‘infect others’ with the dangerous idea of pursuing similar paths to independent development. The smaller and weaker they are, the more dangerous they tend to be. If they can do it, why can’t we? Does the Godfather allow a small storekeeper to get away with not paying protection money?”

Injured Haitian earthquake survivors' fate is unclear after treatment in the U.S.

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By Darryl Fears

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 16, 2010


MIAMI -- From down the hall, a high-pitched voice speaking Haitian Creole came booming into Clermond Junior's little hospital room. 

"Junior, sak pase?" -- what's happening?

Myrtho Gracia, a Haitian American nurse, sashayed through the door holding a blue plastic-foam box over her head like a waitress and carried on as though she and Junior were in the middle of Port-au-Prince. "we have curried chicken for you."

Junior, 19, smiled for the first time in hours. "I will enjoy this," he said in Creole, turning away from the half-eaten lunch prepared at Jackson Memorial Hospital. He seemed to forget for a second that half of his body was broken, that his useless left arm lay on his lap like a dinner napkin, that he could slide his thin left leg only a few centimeters, that his slowly healing head wounds, opened by the wall that buried him for two days in Haiti, itched like crazy. He eyed the greasy chicken curry. "I never had it, but I know I will like it."

America is another experience that Junior has never known but is certain he will like.

"Haiti is gone. Haiti is no more," he said, describing the rush of emotion he felt while viewing pictures of the devastation on a news Web site. In Haiti, he had few employment opportunities even before the Jan. 12 earthquake, and now his mother sleeps outdoors there because their house collapsed.

He is ready to embrace America, a fabled land that people in his Port-Au-Prince neighborhood could only talk about. In Miami, his life and his limbs were saved by his Haitian American doctor, Angelo Gousse. Haitian American workers, of which there are many at Jackson Memorial, often stop by to chat, treating him like family.

But Junior isn't part of the American family, and there are questions over whether he should stay here. Gracia would like an answer, saying she would take him in if she could. Opponents of illegal immigration would also like an answer. Some say Haitians should not have been brought to the United States for treatment, while others say they deserve medical attention but should be flown back as soon as they recover.

The question -- stay or go? -- could become a major headache for the Obama administration. Unlike Cubans, Haitian immigrants are often unwelcome in the United States, a double standard with roots in Cold War politics. But advocates for the patients point out that Haiti, one of the poorest nations in the world, lacked adequate health care even in the best of times and that the injured who were saved might be sent back to die.

An uncertain fate

The total number of patients brought to South and Central Florida is about 500. Junior, with his wispy, boyish mustache and fuzzy sideburns crawling down his cheeks, is one of 105 Haitian nationals being treated at Jackson Memorial's Ryder Trauma Center. Hospital officials said charges for the Haiti patients total just under $7.7 million so far, nearly two-thirds of which has not been covered by insurance or other sources.

Some victims are babies without parents. And some are fairly well-known, like Romel Joseph, an esteemed violinist trained at the Julliard School, who survived a three-story fall from his New Victorian Music School during the quake. His back was impaled by carpenter nails in a wall, which crushed his left leg and broke three fingers on one hand.

Their presence in Florida has already generated controversy. Two weeks ago, medical airlifts from Haiti were halted when Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (R) complained that, while the state was willing to help, the U.S. military was overburdening it with earthquake victims.

The federal Department of Health and Human Services activated the National Disaster Medical System, which reimburses hospitals for treatment costs. At the same time, the U.S. Agency for International Development started flying patients to Atlanta area hospitals and identified Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Boston as places willing to take patients.

But unresolved is the question of what the future holds for Haitians granted an array of visas to enter the United States. Will they be allowed to apply for Temporary Protective Status, forced to leave, or will some be allowed to walk out of the hospital and blend in with Haitian immigrants in their communities? U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said it has yet to determine how to track earthquake victims in this country once they're well.

Protecting her 'baby

Junior said he missed his mother, Suzanna Lindor, and his three sisters, who escaped the earthquake without harm. But, he said through an interpreter, "I would be dead if they had not brought me here." Gousse, his doctor, nodded in agreement.

On Jan. 12, Junior turned on the shower on the second floor of his house and climbed in after checking to see if the water was warm. He was talking to a friend through the curtain when the earth shook. They ran downstairs but didn't make it to the door before a wall and metal grate tumbled down, trapping them for nearly two days.

The falling debris crushed muscle, cracked bones and opened flesh. Dead tissue sent a toxin into Junior's body, causing his kidneys to fail. Gousse came across Junior at the University of Miami medical station set up near the Port-au-Prince airport six days after the earthquake.

"He was swollen," Gousse said. "His face was swollen. He's a thin guy. He was swollen twice his size. He couldn't make urine . . . and the liquid was building up in his body."

Junior needed kidney dialysis. "He didn't need surgery," Gousse said. "You just needed to take over the function of the kidney with a dialysis machine until it's better."

But Haiti couldn't provide that. "The way he looked to me, based on my clinical experience, he would not have made it more than 24 hours. He had difficulty breathing," Gousse said. On Jan. 18, Junior was flown to Miami and placed in Jackson Memorial's intensive care unit.

"He was the baby on my floor," Gracia said. Other Haitian American workers kept popping in to check on him. "We would babysit him," Gracia noted.

Last week, Junior had recovered enough to be released to the hospital's general care unit, and Gracia followed him.

"I have two sons, two grown kids, they're gone," said Gracia, who emigrated from Haiti when she was 18 and has worked at Jackson Memorial for 24 years.

"I am a proud Haitian." She looked down at Junior, a soft-spoken teenager whose future is as cloudy as the dust that shrouds Port-au-Prince.

"I don't mind to get him in my house," she said. "Especially him. He's the youngest guy to come into the ICU. Others have a wife. He's the kid of the floor."

Clinton denies being Haiti's de facto governor

Go to Original (RFI - Radio France International) >

By RFI

 

Former US President Bill Clinton was met by angry Haitians protesting at the slow arrival of international aid to the country since the devastating earthquake three weeks ago. He denied suggestions that he has effectively taken over the running of the country.

Clinton, who last week was designated by the UN as co-ordinator of international aid, said he was sorry it had been so slow to be delivered to those in need.

Speaking after a visit to a clinic in the ruined capital of Port-au-Prince, he urged Haitians to undertake an ambitious reconstruction of their country and denied suggestions that he has become the country's effective governor.

"What I don't want to be is the governor of Haiti," he said. "I want to build the capacity of the country to chart its own course. They can trust me not to be a neocolonialist, I'm too old."

Clinton stressed that he was not in Haiti to intervene in the case of ten American Christians detained on kidnapping charges. They were denied conditional release on Friday, according to their lawyer, Edwin Coq.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Friday that the US ambassador was working with Haitian officials on the case, and that Washington expressed "hope that this matter can be resolved in an expeditious way". "Obviously, this is a matter for the Haitian judicial system," she added.

There is a "strong movement" towards cancelling Haiti's death at the meeting of the G7 group of industrialised nations, according to Canadian Prime Minister Jim Flaherty.

Debt relief for the quake-hit country is on the agenda of the meeting which opened late Friday in the Iqualit, in Canada's far north.

Haiti, Forgive Us

Go to Truthdig >

Go to Democracy Now! >

Posted on Feb 9, 2010

By Amy Goodman

The tragedy of the Haitian earthquake continues to unfold, with slow delivery of aid, the horrific number of amputations performed out of desperate medical necessity, more than a million homeless, perhaps 240,000 dead, hunger, dehydration, the emergence of infections and waterborne diseases, and the approach of the rainy season, which will be followed by the hurricane season.

Haiti has suffered a massive blow, an earthquake for which its infrastructure was not prepared, after decades—no, centuries—of military and economic manipulation by foreign governments, most notably the United States and France.

Haiti was a slave plantation controlled by France.

In 1804, inspired by Toussaint L’Ouverture (after whom the now barely functioning airport in Port-au-Prince is named), the slaves rebelled, founding the world’s first black republic.

Under military threat from France in 1825, Haiti agreed to pay reparations to France for lost “property,” including slaves that French owners lost in the rebellion.

It was either agree to pay the reparations or have France invade Haiti and reimpose slavery.

Many Haitians believe that original debt, which Haiti dutifully paid through World War II, committed Haiti to a future of poverty that it has never been able to escape.

(While France, as part of the deal, recognized Haiti’s sovereignty, slave-owning politicians in the United States, like Thomas Jefferson, refused to recognize the black republic, afraid it would inspire a slave revolt here. The U.S. withheld formal recognition until 1862.)

The U.S. Marines occupied Haiti from 1915 until 1934.

In 1956, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier took control in a military coup and declared himself president for life, initiating a period of brutal, bloody dictatorship, with U.S. support.

Papa Doc died in 1971, at which point his 19-year-old son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, took over, maintaining the same violent dictatorial control until he was driven into exile by popular revolt in 1986.

Jubilee USA, a network calling for elimination of debt owed by poor countries, estimates that Baby Doc alone diverted at least $500 million in public funds to his private accounts, and that 45 percent of Haiti’s debt in recent decades was accumulated during the corrupt reign of the Duvaliers.

Loans from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) imposed “structural adjustment” conditions on Haiti, opening its economy to cheap U.S. agricultural products.

Farmers, unable to compete, stopped growing rice and moved to the cities to earn low wages, if they were lucky enough to get one of the scarce sweatshop jobs.

People in the highlands were driven to deforest the hills, converting wood into salable charcoal, which created an ecological crisis—destabilizing hillsides, increasing the destructiveness of earthquakes and causing landslides during the rainy season.

Haiti’s first democratically elected president was Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Catholic priest committed to the poor.

He was elected in 1990, then ousted in a military coup in 1991.

In 1994, with Haitian refugees flooding into Florida, the Clinton administration was forced to restore Aristide to power, but only with additional structural-adjustment demands.

Aristide was re-elected in 2000, only to be deposed again in a U.S.-backed coup in 2004, Haiti’s bicentennial.

The destruction of Haiti’s rice industry, which was replaced with U.S. government-subsidized rice that Haitians refer to as “Miami rice,” as well as the sale of critical state-owned enterprises, like Haiti’s sole flour mill and cement factory, have left the country dependent on foreign trade and aid, keeping Haiti at a permanent disadvantage.

It is critical now to cancel Haiti’s ongoing foreign debt, so that the country can devote its scant resources to rebuilding and not to repaying debt.

The G-7 finance ministers met in Canada this week and announced the forgiveness of the bilateral debt between member states and Haiti.

But the World Bank, IMF and IDB debts remain (the IMF controversially promised a $100 million loan after the earthquake, eliciting condemnation, and has since pledged to convert it to a grant).

Earthquakes alone do not create disasters of the scale now experienced in Haiti.

The wealthy nations have for too long exploited Haiti, denying it the right to develop in a secure, sovereign, sustainable way.

The global outpouring of support for Haitians must be matched by long-term, unrestricted grants of aid, and immediate forgiveness of all that country’s debt.

Given their role in Haiti’s plight, the United States, France and other industrialized nations should be the ones seeking forgiveness.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
 
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 800 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.