16238:This Week in Haiti 21:20 7/30/2003 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

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

                           HAITI PROGRES
              "Le journal qui offre une alternative"

                      * THIS WEEK IN HAITI *

                      July 30 - August 6, 2003
                         Vol. 21, No. 20

VOODOO AND HAITI'S IMPACT ON THE U.S.
by Greg Dunkel

(The second of two articles)

In last week's installment, Dunkel examined how the term "voodoo" has
entered the U.S. lexicon as a pejorative or facetious jab. He then began to
trace voodoo's "inspirational and unifying role" in the early days of
Haiti's slave revolution, particularly in the planning of the first major
insurrection on August 21, 1791.




The uprising did not succeed completely. The plan was for the slaves in the
city of Cap François (now called Cap Haïtien) to desert their masters and
the city on the night of August 21, and for the slaves on the plantations to
rise up, kill their masters, burn the fields, join with the slaves from Le
Cap, then seize and destroy the city. A few plantations rose up early,
tipping off the French slave owners, who retrenched in Le Cap. The city
remained in their hands, but they could not crush the uprising, which spread
widely.

By mid-September, more than 250 sugar plantations and uncounted coffee
plantations had been burned. A major part of the colony, which exported $130
million worth of goods a year, a vast sum for the 18th century, was
destroyed. The smell of burning sugar, death and revolution filled the air.
The slaves of northern Haiti had embarked on a irreversible revolutionary
course. Panicked slave owners fled to Cuba and Jamaica, New Orleans, and the
United States, the closest havens.

The U.S. press published sensationalistic accounts of  chaos  gripping the
island, of satanic rites driving slaves into a rampaging frenzy of
destruction, of white slave owners fighting for their lives. The United
States had always had a significant trade with St. Domingue, even when it
was technically illegal. The young republic wanted to avoid becoming
entangled in the war between England and France while maintaining
significant trade with the French colony. Still, the slave-owning President
George Washington wanted to help French slave owners, who had appealed for
aid. His secretary of state, slave-owner Thomas Jefferson, authorized
$40,000 in emergency relief as well as 1,000 weapons. Then Washington
authorized $400,000 in emergency assistance to the slave owners of St.
Domingue, on the request of the French government who wanted this treated as
a repayment for the loans it granted during the Revolutionary War (see
Alfred Hunt, Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America, p 31.) Later, the
Spanish governor of Venezuela also granted $400,000 in aid to the French
army which Napoleon sent in a vain attempt to reconquer Haiti.

Thus, the United States granted its first substantial foreign aid in an
effort to maintain slavery in St. Domingue. It didn't succeed.

The southern U.S. followed the lead of Spanish colonies like Cuba and
Louisiana in banning the importation of slaves from St. Domingue to prevent
the spread of Jacobin ideas about republican government and black
emancipation. So terrified were slave owners that some states barred any
importation of slaves.

In 1803, just before Haiti declared its independence, Southern newspapers
published a document, supposedly of French origin, discussing how U.S.
factionalism and popular habits would allow France to spread sedition,
especially if it controlled the mouth of the Mississippi River. According to
Hunt, the document was probably a forgery, designed to impress Southern
readers with the danger of French ideas and the vulnerability of slaves to
foreign incitement.

The shadow of the St. Domingue uprising haunted the Southern press. As early
as 1794, the Columbia Herald of South Carolina ran a series of articles
drawing the lessons of the slave insurrection (Hunt, p. 111). Whether the
first major U.S. slave insurrection in 1800 led by Gabriel Prosser was
inspired by the events in St. Domingue is an open question, but both the
abolitionists in the North and the slave-owners' press in the South analyzed
it in that context.

The next insurrection organized by Denmark Vessey in 1822 in Charleston, SC
definitely was inspired by Haiti. Vessey was born in the West Indies,
traveled there as a slave trader's servant, and wrote to Jean-Pierre Boyer,
then president of Haiti, seeking aid. The reaction in the Southern states
was to tighten the bonds of slavery.

Nat Turner's bloody revolt in 1831 again was seen as a replay of tactics and
strategy from the Haitian insurrection. He was compared in morals and
boldness to Haiti's founding father Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Whether or not
he was inspired by events in Haiti, Southern whites viewed his revolt as
coming from the same volcano of rebellion. After this revolt until the U.S.
Civil War, the pro-slavery Southern press always caste Haiti in the worst
possible light, as hell on earth, to fight abolition and defend the
institution of slavery which made them so much money.

One of the most famous skirmishes preceding the Civil War, John Brown's 1859
raid at Harpers Ferry, VA, was immediately interpreted as  an abolitionist
conspiracy to instigate a slave uprising.  (Hunt, p 139) The Southern press
resurrected the themes of  Northern Jacobinism  and the Haitian revolution
in lurid, emotional articles, as if these were fresh events, not 60 or 70
years in the past.  Even during the Civil War, Confederate propaganda used
Haiti as an example of how the Confederacy would protect white families from
the evils of Jacobinism and abolition.

For over 70 years, Haiti was the example that Southern slave owners raised
to defend their peculiar, and profitable, institution against abolition,
even to the last days of the Civil War. The image of slaves breaking their
chains was burned into their consciousness and that of the Northern
bourgeoisie, which opposed slavery as a hindrance to their economic
expansion, but remained deeply racist.

It is hard to know how much impact the Haitian revolution had on the slave
masses in the southern United States. They knew something about it for sure,
despite the slave owners' attempts to insulate them from the example. Enough
refugee slave owners brought slaves to the United States and Louisiana that
word spread about Haiti, this beacon of hope, this model of
self-emancipation. But the historical record is still unclear about how deep
Haiti's influence was.

Outside the South, however, Haiti was a central theme. In August 1843 in
Buffalo, New York, at a National Negro Convention meeting, Henry Highland
Garner, a prominent abolitionist and former slave, talked about Tousaint
L'Ouverture, Denmark Vessey, and Nathaniel Turner. "Brethren, arise, arise "
he said. "Strike for your lives and liberties. Now is the day and the hour.
Let every slave throughout the land do this and the days of  slavery are
numbered. You cannot be more oppressed than you have been -- you cannot
suffer greater cruelties than you have already. Rather die freemen than live
to be slaves. Remember that you are FOUR MILLION " The Convention rejected
Garner's revolutionary approach to abolition, which was inspired by Haiti.

With the abolition of slavery in the United States, Haiti, as a political
issue, began to fade. But its impact did not disappear. A singular event
like the Haitian revolution, raised so often and so sharply by both
reactionaries and abolitionists, doesn't just vanish. The modern use of the
term  voodoo  by so many bourgeois commentators makes it abundantly clear
that Haiti still has a major impact on U.S. society today.

A LETTER TO THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

July 28, 2003

Associated Press
Regional Bureau, Puerto Rico
Attention: Bureau Chief and Editor

Dear Bureau Chief and Editor:

I am writing to express my serious concern regarding your July 25th story
reporting on the ambush of a Ministry of Interior delegation in which four
government staff were killed and one critically wounded.

The use of the word  gang  in the title of the article,  Haiti Gang Kills
Four Gov't Officials  serves to minimize the gravity of the situation and
misleads your readership regarding the true nature of the attack. The use of
the word  gang  inaccurately characterizes those who carried out this attack
in the same locality where for nine months a pattern of sustained terror and
continuous attacks have been waged by armed men who use Pernal in the border
region of the Central Plateau as their base. The countless incidents include
the murder of twenty people, including a judge and police, abduction of
doctors and a foreign journalist, attacks on police stations, arson of the
main hydroelectric plant, and more.

The use of the word  gang  leads readers to believe that this planned ambush
of government officials was a random, isolated act committed by ordinary
criminals. In the body of the article, the author further dilutes the
situation by stating that the  government alleges the attackers are 'the
armed wing of the opposition'" when the terrorists themselves have
previously identified themselves to the press as former military men bent on
violently overthrowing Haiti's government.

It appears that virtually everyone except Associated Press has correctly
identified the assailants in this case. Writing about the Central Plateau
tragedy, The National Coalition for Haitian Rights (NCHR), in their July
28th press release described the incident as  an armed commando  attack,
further stating,  reportedly, this act was committed by the same
anti-government group or groups responsible for several other acts of armed
violence in the Central Plateau over the course of many months against
government targets.

In response to this politically-motivated attack, NCHR went on to state
that,  All parties must adhere to the commitment of finding a peaceful
resolution, engaging in serious dialogue, not violent attacks against
government officials.  and went as far as to call on the opposition to
Vigorously condemn and repudiate any acts of violence and sabotage, which
will only contribute to the Haitian people's misery.

The Prime Minister spoke on Friday immediately following the attack, and
prior to the release of your article, characterizing the act as  terrorist
and having been carried out by  a group of terrorists aimed at destroying
the foundation of Haitian democracy.

To better understand the timing of this attack, Dr. Jean Claude Desgranges,
the Chief of Staff for the President, pointed out to the press that this
attack comes at the same time that the government has made headway in
setting up a new electoral council, which would get local and parliamentary
elections off the ground. Similarly, NCHR stated that,  The deterioration of
the crisis at this particular moment is all the more regrettable in light of
some encouraging progress that has been made over the past three months,
and also pointed out recent events that may enable Haiti to finally hold
elections.

Lovinksy Pierre-Antoine, director of the Haiti based human rights group,
Fondation 30 Septembre, which represents victims of the September 30th coup
d'etat, said the politically-motivated attack was designed to thwart the
efforts and progress by the government to resolve the political crisis,
explaining that elections are the only way out of the current political
crisis.

Dany Fabien, chief of staff for the Secretary of State for Public Security
at the Ministry of Justice, called the assailants the  armed branch of the
opposition.  The Minister of Interior attributed the ambush to former
soldiers who, he said,  are mobilizing an anti-people army and are operating
under cover of a particular opposition organization, the Force de Protection
Citoyenne headed by Judy C. Roy, who is presently being detained.  (It is
important to note
that earlier this year, after the destruction of the hydroelectric plant,
the police, acting on a tip, raided the home of Judith Roy finding a cache
of weapons along with detailed plans for attacking the National Palace and
the President's home with  battalions  composed of persons they had
recruited to carry out a coup d'etat.)

Your choice of the word  gang  in your title, which was widely picked up
internationally, is particularly disturbing given that your office regularly
receives our releases, including the recent July 14th PRNewswire press
release [...] in which the counsel for Haiti, Ira Kurzban, Esq., described
in detail the history, operations, and objectives of this 'contra' group
which calls itself San Manman, which literally translates to  motherless
but more accurately implies  lawlessness and against the law.

In light of the wide distribution of your article, it would appear that a
new article correcting the false perception generated is in order. Given the
pattern of the attacks over the past nine months and the increasing
frequency of terrorism in the Central Plateau, which is widely reported
inside Haiti, and impacts on Haiti as a whole, your readers deserve to be
accurately informed in a manner that reflects the depth and ramifications of
this grave situation.

Very truly yours,

Michelle Karshan
Foreign Press Liaison
National Palace
Haiti

LA TROUPE MAKANDAL CELEBRATES BWA KAYIMAN IN BROOKLYN

La Troupe Makandal, the theatrical music and dance ensemble led by master
drummer Frisner Augustin, will hold its 5th Annual celebration of the Bwa
Kayiman vodou ceremony on Saturday, August 16 at 4 p.m. in the southwestern
corner of Brooklyn's Prospect Park.

The group will present a drum-and-dance drama based on the testimony of 19th
century vodou priestess Dedée Magritte, who described the Bwa Kayiman
ceremony of August 14, 1791 where the first major uprising of the Haitian
revolution was planned.

Produced by Executive Director and musicologist Dr. Lois Wilcken, the free
event is choreographed by Mikerline Pierre and sponsored, in part, by the
Brooklyn Arts Council and the Puffin Foundation.

The yearly celebration takes place near the edge of the lake, about 150
yards from the intersection of Parkside and Ocean Avenues and the Parkside
stop on the Q train.

For more information, call 718-953-6638 or check www.makandal.org.

All articles copyrighted Haïti Progrès, Inc. REPRINTS ENCOURAGED.
Please credit Haïti Progrès.

                               -30-