14725: This Week in Haiti 20:47 2/5/2003 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

"This Week in Haiti" is the English section of HAITI PROGRES
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                           HAITI PROGRES
              "Le journal qui offre une alternative"

                      * THIS WEEK IN HAITI *

                       February 5 - 11, 2003
                          Vol. 20, No. 47

PEASANTS ON THE MARIBAHOUX PLAIN STILL RESISTING FREE TRADE ZONES

On Dec. 19, 2002, the Haitian government signed a contract with
the Grupo M, a giant Dominican garment-assembly conglomerate, for
the administration of a free trade zone which Haitian government
officials plan to build on the Maribahoux plain near the
northeastern town of Ouanaminthe, just across the border from the
Dominican Republic.

"Haitian and foreign investors will have an opportunity to work
together and this program will begin at the dawn of 2003,"
exclaimed Haitian Finance Minister Gustave Faubert.

However, all Dominican press reports have indicated that
Dominicans would own the 26 factories projected for the two
planned free trade zones. Nonetheless, a few token junior
partners might be found from among Haiti's assembly-factory
bourgeoisie. The Apaid family, for example, which runs Haiti's
oldest and largest collection of sweat-shops, already has a few
plants operating in the DR.

Haiti's primary role in the projected free trade zones is to
lease the land, which will allow U.S.-quota-evading Dominican
plant owners to put "Made in Haiti" on the label, and to provide
the workers, at a considerable wage savings. Haitian workers are
generally paid $1 a day, Dominicans $7.

It remains unclear how many sweat-shop jobs the free trade zones
would even create. During a ground-breaking ceremony last April,
Dominican President Hipolito Mejia boasted that they would
eventually provide wages to 8,000 Haitians (see Haïti Progrès,
Vol. 20, No. 4, 4/10/02).

Haitian Minister of Commerce Lesly Gouttier was even more
optimistic. "The signing of this project is a success and around
80,000 jobs will be created starting in January 2003," he said.
So far, there are no signs of this coming true.

In fact, it remains to be seen how far this project, like so many
before it, really goes since it faces tremendous hurdles, not the
least of which is opposition from the population of the
Maribahoux plain, which occupies a region known as Pitobert. The
area comprises about 80% of the fertile, food-growing land in
Haiti's generally barren northeast.

On Jan. 13, the Pitobert Farmers' Defense Committee (KDP) held a
press conference in Port-au-Prince strongly denouncing the
government's signing of a deal with Fernando Capellán, Grupo M's
president, just at the beginning of planting season. KDP
Spokesman Gaston Etienne noted that demonstrations over the past
year had "pushed the Haitian government to put out a communiqué
announcing the demagogic changing of the site for the free trade
zone" to "another fertile plain called Nan Kakawo situated on the
other side of the river and only a few meters from the former
site."

Despite the assertion by Haitian government officials that they
have held extensive meetings and consultations with local
representatives, Etienne charged that "no government official has
until now judged it necessary to meet with local authorities and
other leaders of Ouanaminthe to hear their opinion on this free
trade zone project." Etienne also asked for clarification on the
length of the contract, on the number, nationality and salary of
would-be factory workers, and on how profits would be reinvested
in the area. "Also, will the security of this free trade zone be
guaranteed by the Dominican army as it was during the
inauguration ceremonies?" Etienne asked.

Predicting that the zones would only increase tensions between
the DR and Haiti, the KDP called on the Haitian government not to
establish any free trade zones along the border or on fertile
land and to shoulder its responsibility "to irrigate the
Maribahoux plain and to assist the Haitian farmers to increase
and improve national production."

OF DREAM AND REVOLUTION
by Paul Laraque

As worldwide resistance grows to the Bush administration's
relentless march towards war with Iraq, it is instructive to hear
the reflections of Paul Laraque, one of Haiti's foremost living
poets. The following text is extracted from a speech Laraque
presented on Jan. 19, 2003 at a public meeting of the Haitian
People's Support Project in Woodstock, NY. It is followed by a
poem from "Les armes quotidiennes/Poésie quotidienne" (Daily
Arms, Daily Poetry), which in 1979 was the first work in French
to win Cuba's "Casa de las Americas" literature prize.

--------

As a poet from Haiti, the first Black republic in the world and
the only state ever created by a revolt of slaves and still in
existence in the whole history of humankind, I will emphasize
other means of resistance, particularly revolutionary violence
opposed to the reactionary violence of the dominant classes. From
the Haitian Revolution that led to the abolition of slavery to
the Cuban Revolution which introduced socialism in the Americas,
all the revolutions were violent because the colonists and the
local oligarchies would not give peace a chance. The peoples of
the world could not and will not let the big powers keep the
monopoly of violence.

My poetry tends to be an explosive mixture of love and liberty,
dream and revolution, the cruelty of the present and the hope of
the future. I believe that culture cannot be dissociated from
history. Since the Spanish conquest with the cross and the sword,
our hemisphere has been marked by native resistance against
colonialism and genocide, by Black heroism against slavery, by
peoples' struggles against imperialism, by masses' revolt for
economic equality and social, political and cultural freedom.

As powerful as it might be, no state has the right to violate
international laws and the sovereignty of another state. No state
has the right to occupy the land of other people and condemn them
to die from hunger or otherwise. Solidarity with the victims of
terrorism is right, but preventive war and the deliberate killing
of innocent people, including children, pregnant women, old
people and patients in Iraq, are wrong; those were the weapons of
Nazis and Fascists against Jews and Blacks. An international
embargo against "Apartheid" in South Africa was right but,
according to most members of the United Nations General Assembly,
the U.S. embargo against the Cuban people is wrong. As for the
women's liberation movement, it is an integral part of the
struggle against inequality, racism, repression, poverty and war.

Many of my French and Creole poems are dedicated to my wife
Marcelle Pierre-Louis Laraque, whose death left me on the verge
of despair. But life goes on. Today, I am joining my voice to
yours. Indeed, you and hundreds of organizations across the
country, from California to Washington, D.C., are proclaiming the
will of the people for work and peace, against the war and
repression. It is a great satisfaction to meet here young people
like my grandson Marc Arena; they are the light of the future.

Of course, our ideologies and cultures are different. A
democratic society needs multiple voices but one goal: liberty
and the "pursuit of happiness" for all.

Poetry is truth. The inhuman living conditions of the masses must
change. That's the only way all of us can live in peace and
dignity. Nonviolent if possible, violent if necessary, only a
revolution or a revolutionary alliance between democracy and
socialism will save Haiti and the world.

REIGN OF THE PEOPLES

You say democracy
and we know it is Bolivia's tin
Chile's copper
Venezuela's oil
Cuba's sugar
raw materials and profits

You say democracy
and it's the annexation of Texas
the hold up of the Panama Canal
the occupation of Haiti
the colonization of Puerto-Rico
the bombing of Guatemala

You say democracy
and it's America to the Yankee
it's the rape of nations
it's Sandino's blood
and Peralte's crucifixion

You say democracy
and it's the plunder of our wealth
from Hiroshima to Indochina
you spread the slaughter everywhere
and everywhere ruin

You say democracy
and it's the Ku Klux Klan
o hidden people
inside your own cities
an ogre is devouring your children

Ubu from the empire of robots
you let your ravens fly
from Harlem to Jerusalem
from Wounded Knee to Haiti
from Santo Domingo to Soweto
the people will be waving
the torch of revolution

Night is a tunnel opening on the dawn
Viet-Nam stands like a tree in the storm
the frontier which marks the place of your defeat
history's lessons have no recourse
a footbridge stretches from Asia to Africa
the reign of the white race is ending on earth
and the reign of the peoples in the universe is beginning.

Paul Laraque
(Translation from French by Rosemary Manno)

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Please credit Haiti Progres.

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