12260: Haiti Condemned Over Violence Against Labor Activists (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Tttnhm@aol.com

Haiti Condemned Over Violence Against Labor Activists
Wed Jun 5,10:13 AM ET
Jim Lobe,OneWorld US

The world's leading umbrella organization of free trade unions has condemned the treatment of labor activists by authorities in Haiti, following reportedly fatal clashes last week between plantation workers and guards in the northern part of the country.

The Brussels-based International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) rounded on Haiti Tuesday for its "flagrant violations of workers' trade union rights, including violence against trade union activists" in a new report which calls for "determined measures" to bring the country's labor standards up to levels set over the past five years at World Trade Organization (news - web sites) (WTO) ministerial meetings.

"Haiti has undertaken to comply with numerous international standards...yet it has brazenly failed to do so on numerous occasions," said ICFTU economist Collin Harker. "Haiti maintains practices that are an anomaly in the modern world, and we are calling on its peers in the WTO...to bring pressure to bear in order to force it to join the 21st century."

The ICFTU report, 'Internationally-recognized Core Labor Standards in Haiti'--which uncovers "grave" evidence of bonded child labor on the island, among other rights violations--was released just days after Amnesty International called for an investigation into violence between plantation workers and guards at the Guacimal orange plantation in St. Raphael, which reportedly resulted in the killings of two trade unionists and the detention without charges of seven others, including two reporters.

The plantation has been the focus of rising tension in recent months between the union, Batay Ouvriye First of May, and the company, Produits Agricole Guacimal, which produces orange extract sold mainly to European beverage and liquor companies, such as Remy Cointreau, the famous Paris-based firm that, at least until recently, owned a minority share in the plantation.

The clashes took place on May 27 when plantation workers, accompanied by organizers from Batay Ouvriye and two local journalists, arrived at the plantation to carry out the usual seasonal practice of allocating plots of land to workers who have traditionally grown subsistence crops there.

In the violence which followed, two elderly union members were reportedly hacked to death, while a number of others, including the two journalists, were injured in the melee.

Police later arrested the journalists, Darwin St. Julien from Haiti Proges newspaper and Allan Deshommes from Radio Atlantik, and five other participants in the union's march. They were subsequently transferred to the National Penitentiary in Port-au-Prince where they have not yet been provided medical care for their wounds, according to Amnesty and Reporters Sans Frontieres, which noted that the mayor of St. Raphael, Adonija Severe, had accused the workers of being "terrorists."

The company and its agents have charged the union with trying to carry out an illegal invasion of its land. The union has argued that the company's local owners, Nonce and Daniel Zephir, and local police and officials have been trying to force its members off the plantation.

Since March, three workers have been thrown in jail without trial, according to the British-based Haiti Support Group which has charged that the company and local officials are violating the workers' constitutional right to join a union.

While Nonce Zephir, who runs the plantation, has said he considers the workers to be casual workers and thus not eligible to join a union, the Support Group and other international union and solidarity organizers have launched a campaign to press Remy Cointreau to use its influence to bring Guacimal to the table.

Remy Cointreau and Marnier-Lapostolle, which produces Grand Marnier, have generally preferred Guacimal oranges both because they are organic and because the peeling, which is done at a processing plant in nearby Madeline, is labor-intensive. In the words of one Remy Cointreau executive quoted last year by Multinational Monitor, "There is nowhere that grows oranges with labor as cheap as it is in Haiti." Plantation workers are currently paid about US$1.50 a day.

After meeting with the campaign organizers and insisting for months that it was urging the Zephir brothers to negotiate, Remy Cointreau announced last January that it had decided to stop buying extract from Guacimal, an assertion that was contradicted by Nonce Zephir in the British Observer newspaper one month later.

The company has not replied to an inquiry emailed by OneWorld last month to determine whether it retains its interest in Guacimal.


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This article is fowarded as a service of the Haiti Support Group - www.gn.apc.org/haitisupport