a1898: This Week in Haiti 20:7 5/1/2002 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

"This Week in Haiti" is the English section of HAITI PROGRES
newsweekly. To obtain the full paper with other news in French
and Creole, please contact us (tel) 718-434-8100,
(fax) 718-434-5551 or e-mail at <editor@haitiprogres.com>
Also check our website at <www.haitiprogres.com>.

                           HAITI PROGRES
              "Le journal qui offre une alternative"

                      * THIS WEEK IN HAITI *

                          May 1 - 7, 2002
                          Vol. 20, No. 7

AS PROMISES BREAK, UNREST MOUNTS

Protests demanding that the Haitian government deliver on
promised development projects rocked neighborhoods around Port-
au-Prince this week. At press time, one boy was killed and four
other people injured in the violence.

Meanwhile, in Haiti's northeast, tensions are growing over the
government's proposal to build "free trade zone" assembly
factories on the region's most fertile farmland (see Haïti
Progrès, Vol. 20, No. 4, 4/20/2002).

On Apr. 29 and 30, angry demonstrators around the capital erected
burning tire barricades, threw rocks and bottles at cars, and
broke some car windows to protest unfulfilled government
promises. The police's elite crowd-control unit -- the CIMO --
was deployed but was unable to keep up with the demonstrations
which ignited and reignited like brush-fires in teeming quarters
such as Carrefour, Delmas, and Nazon.

"Healthcare, a professional school, a telephone calling center,
piped water, and jobs for our militants in state offices: the
president himself made a series of such promises," a demonstrator
in the Carrefour neighborhood of Solino said. "He has to keep
them."

Marc Arthur Alexandre, a 12-year-old boy, was killed on his way
to school when someone in a car driving past demonstrators
lowered the window and fired at them. "My little boy was standing
beside me when the bullet hit him," his distraught mother
explained on Radio Kinase. "I saw his guts begin to spill out, so
I wrapped up his stomach and ran with him to the hospital... but
he died."

Another demonstrator was shot in the shoulder, and one broke his
leg fleeing from police. As the street battles heated up, so did
the demonstrators' anger. "I am not in the Lavalas anymore," one
protestor said to Radio Haïti Inter on the second day of unrest,
referring to the political movement which brought President Jean-
Bertrand Aristide to power in 1991 and whose name is used for his
party, the Lavalas Family. "This is a Lavalas which smells, a
garbage Lavalas. The country has to change."

Similar rebellions have been occurring elsewhere. Last week,
residents of the capital's Carrefour-Feuilles neighborhood held
protests demanding that Aristide fulfill promises he made to the
unfortunate district which has experienced a police massacre,
multiple electrocutions from downed power lines, and landslides
in the past two years. For several days, protestors have closed
the wharf which serves boats sailing to the city of Jérémie;
promised repairs on the landing are long overdue. In Pétion-
Ville, municipal workers walked off the job because they have not
been paid for ten months.

May Day also promises to be filled with protests. The National
Popular Party (PPN) announced that 3000 peasants from their
branches around the country would march on the National Palace to
demand agrarian reform and justice.

Another May Day demonstration in the northeast town of
Ouanaminthe may be foiled, the AlterPresse news agency reported.
Agronomists, human rights workers, and political activists were
planning to demonstrate their solidarity with peasants of the
area protesting a planned "free trade zone," whose ground-
breaking ceremony was held near the town earlier this month. "But
on Monday, Apr. 29, an official vehicle of the [Northeast]
department's central government representative urged the peasants
with megaphones to assemble for the distribution of tools on the
same day and in the same place as the planned solidarity
activity," the agency reports.

"We don't want a confrontation with anybody," one of the
demonstration organizers told AlterPresse. "We are only defending
our rights. And we informed all the Ouanaminthe authorities (the
police and others) about the demonstration which has long been
planned. The population was preparing to support us in our just
demands."

CRACKDOWN ON WORKERS IN ST. RAPHAEL
BATAY OUVRIYÈ WARNING OF DANGER OF A MASSACRE

by Charles Arthur, Haiti Support Group

In a statement issued on Apr. 24, the Haitian workers'
organization, Batay Ouvriyè, denounced a month-long wave of
violent repression endured by workers and peasants at the
Guacimal orange plantation at St. Raphael in northern Haiti. The
violence perpetrated by police, acting in collusion with the
local landowners and agents of the Guacimal company, has forced
workers in the area
to go into hiding.

Two peasant farmers have been imprisoned without trial for over a
month, while another was arbitrarily arrested last week. One
worker was brutally beaten up on Mar. 22 but when he tried to
file a legal complaint, the judge at the St. Raphael court
refused to hear him and made it clear he was not concerned with
the fate of the Guacimal workers.

The main targets of the repression are members of the St. Raphael
orange workers' union and a local association of peasant farmers,
both of which have been involved in a long and bitter dispute
with the Cap-Haïtien-based Guacimal company.

The Haitian state authorities have refused to back the workers'
legitimate struggle for union rights and collective bargaining,
and the judiciary has openly sided with the ruling class in land
disputes. Batay Ouvriyè says that these factors have created the
context where the local bosses and landowners have decided to get
rid of, to eliminate, all those who work and cultivate
the plantation land.

Batay Ouvriyè is warning that the situation is now so dire that
there may be a repeat of the massacres seen in earlier times,
such as those at Piatre and Gervais. Batay Ouvriyè is calling on
all organised workers and all progressive forces to mobilize
themselves to support the St. Raphael workers, and to force the
state and the ruling class to respect workers' rights.

The St. Raphael workers, who grow and harvest oranges that
provide orange extract for European companies such as Remy
Cointreau, formed a union in late 2000 in the hope of negotiating
improved pay and conditions. However, the Guacimal management
refused to even recognize the union's existence, and used every
trick in the book to try and crush it.

An international solidarity campaign attempted to press Guacimal
share-holder and principal client, the Paris-based drinks giant
Remy Cointreau, to take action in support of the workers'
legitimate rights. For months, Remy Cointreau said it was doing
what it could to make its junior partner in Haiti play fair, then
suddenly, at the beginning of this year, Remy Cointreau announced
that it had only ever been a client, and that the problems at
Guacimal obliged it to end its involvement in Haiti and buy its
orange extract for the Cointreau liqueur elsewhere. However,
weeks after this announcement, Guacimal boss, Nonce Zephir, told
a reporter from the British newspaper, The Observer, that he had
not heard of any changes in Guacimal's relationship with Remy
Cointreau.

Meanwhile, the peasant farmers of the area, many of whom are
related to the orange plantation workers, have grown increasingly
angry with the Guacimal company's failure to carry out the
improvements to local infrastructure that formed part of the
leasing agreement when the plantation land was acquired by
Guacimal over forty years ago. Their frustration boiled over when
guards at the Guacimal orange plantation began discriminating
against peasant farmers
connected to the workers' union by preventing them from
cultivating plots of land between the orange trees during the
summer.

In early March some peasants began cutting down orange trees in
protest. A short time later, Myrtho Julien, the departmental
delegate of President Aristide (there is one for each of the
country's nine departments, and they act as a link between the
executive and the local government) visited the St. Raphael
fields. He met with various officials, including the police, and
declared his opposition to the tree-cutting. Immediately after
this, the wave of repression of workers and peasants began in
earnest.

The situation has been further aggravated by the installation of
a new mayor of St. Raphael in place of Fernand Sévère who was
shot dead in Dec. 2001. (The elected representative of the region
- the member of Parliament or Deputy -  was arrested and charged
with involvement in the murder, and remains jailed to date.)
Whereas the Deputy had sympathized with the Guacimal workers, the
murdered mayor had clearly opposed them, and in Feb. 2001 had
personally intervened to break a workers' strike at the
plantation. Consequently, the decision, taken in late March 2002,
to install the brother of the murdered Fernand Sévère as the new
Mayor, has clearly impacted negatively on the workers' struggle.

For more background on this story, see the Batay Ouvriyè web
site: http://www.ifrance.com/syndicats-bo-haiti

or the Haiti Support Group web site:
http://www.gn.apc.org/haitisupport

- - - - - - - -

The Haiti Support Group is a London-based organization in
solidarity with the Haitian people's struggle for justice,
participatory democracy and equitable development since 1992.

All articles copyrighted Haiti Progres, Inc. REPRINTS ENCOURAGED
Please credit Haiti Progres.

                               -30-