18339: Esser: Apaid's Sweatshops and The Cannibal Army (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

The Jamaica Observer
John Maxwell
The Cannibal Army

Sunday, February 08, 2004

MY columns on Haiti have drawn more feedback than any before. Most of
my respondents agree with me - as may be expected -but I have
received some reasoned arguments against my position.

My position, briefly, is that Haiti is too important to the cause of
Liberty and to black people all over the world for anyone to be
allowed to hijack the nation for any reason whatever. Haiti must be
Haitian-ruled; by Haitians for Haitians.

As Lou Dobbs plaintively said of the USA this week on CNN: "This is
not just a market, this is a nation."
Haiti needs help to constitute itself into the dream of all those who
fought and won Haitian independence, for those inspired by Haiti to
throw off the chains of imperial Europe, for all those who understand
the significance of slaves freeing themselves, a feat never before
accomplished in human history.

Haiti needs help just to survive.

Last week, US Congresswoman Maxine Walters denounced those who said
Haiti had nothing to celebrate in this bicentennial year. " We must
understand that this 'nothing to celebrate' talk is consistent with
the long-standing attitudes of those who never supported the Haitian
people, and never wanted Haiti to be owned by Africans. It is
consistent with those who have always had their hands deep in the
Haitian economy, and who are determined to deny the Haitian people
pride in themselves and pride in their spectacular history."

'An international crime-scene'

One of the people from whom I got feedback suggested that President
Aristide is a 'rightist authoritarian' who appeared to be behind an
'orchestrated campaign' which included the 'brutal repression' of the
student movement by gangs paid for and organised by the Aristide
government. He suggests that I should go to Haiti to see for myself
that what he says is true.
On the other hand, I have got letters from people, including an
expatriate civil rights lawyer working in Haiti for several years. He
wrote " .Your recent column was one of the most lucid and perceptive
accounts I have seen. Keep up the good work, Haiti's poor need (and
have always needed) more people like you."

Another of my correspondents eloquently described Haiti as an
'international crime scene', a nation hijacked and sequestered from
its freedom by forces outside of its control.
I have received responses from people inside and outside of Haiti,
residents, citizens and non-citizens, from journalists and others,
most of whom feel that the present situation in Haiti has been
engineered to curtail Haitian freedom, and to deny the ordinary
Haitian the chance to become a free citizen of the world.

Last Friday, the news agencies announced that a gang describing
itself as " the Cannibal Army" had taken control of Haiti's fourth
largest municipality, Gonaives. Gonaives is a city of about 60,000 in
the north east of the gulf formed by the two peninsulas which stretch
out towards Cuba. Gonaives is significant for two reasons: first is
that it is the site where Haitian Independence was proclaimed 200
years ago; second, it is the site of a murder which Aristide's
enemies attribute to forces controlled by Aristide.
According to the anti-Aristide forces, a former Aristide supporter
named Amiot Metayer was murdered by Aristide forces because he had
turned against Aristide. Metayer was once the leader of the Cannibal
Army gang. He was a popular hero, a pro-Aristide strongman who had
been serving time in prison. A jail-break by forces still
unidentified released Metayer and several other people. Metayer was
shortly afterwards murdered.

The pro-Aristide forces maintain, however, that the 'springing' of
Metayer from jail was a cover for the freeing of a number of
anti-Aristide gangsters, members of the FRAPH -a right-wing terrorist
force allied to the Cedras dictatorship. According to the
pro-Aristide side, Thursday's capture of Gonaives by the "Cannibale
Armee" completed the second part of a plot to free the FRAPH gunmen
remaining in prison after the prison break which freed Metayer.

Intransigence and obfuscation

I do not pretend to be an authority on Haiti and particularly not on
what is happening on its streets at this moment. It should be clear,
however, to anyone who has followed what's been reported about Haiti
over the past few years that the Haitian Opposition is a collection
of people who do not appear to care what damage they do to Haiti as
long as they get their way. In the 1970s, the Jamaica Labour Party
behaved in somewhat similar fashion, but never went as far as saying
that it did not recognise the government or in attempting to set up a
parallel administration, in say, May Pen.

Three years ago, on February 7, 2001, on the eve of the second
inauguration of Jean Bertrand Aristide as President of Haiti, the
opposition coalition announced that it was forming an alternative
government. The coalition, calling itself the Democratic Convergence
announced that it had selected a President, Geffrard Gourgue, a law
professor who had in 1987 been briefly part of the junta which
succeeded Jean Claude Duvalier.

At that time, the government (of President Rene Preval) and the
Opposition had been negotiating about various differences between
them, mainly to do with the disputed elections of seven senators
Essentially, the dispute was about a technicality.
The Opposition had first proposed installing a provisional
government, then a three-member junta, but finally settled on what it
called a Government of National Consensus. To them, Aristide was
simply unacceptable, despite his getting, legitimately, 67% of the
votes cast.
The Aristide Fanmi Lavalas (Lavalas Family - Lavalas meaning
Landslide, Avalanche or Cloudburst) rejected the opposition's demands
as unconstitutional.

Congresswoman Maxine Walters believes that the opposition in Haiti is
trying to foment a coup d'etat. "They claim that they are staging
peaceful protests, but that is not what they are actually doing. It
is my impression that the opposition, led by Andy Apaid, is simply
involved in a power grab. They want to place a council of their
choosing in charge of the government and the country, instead of
accepting the will of the people and respecting Haiti's
democratically elected president. And they want to ensure that the
governing council represents only their interests as members of
Haiti's bourgeoisie. They want their group, "the elite", to totally
control Haiti. The opposition's protests are becoming increasingly
violent and the United States Government, my government, is not
providing the required leadership. It is not meeting its
responsibility to help de-escalate the crisis in Haiti. The situation
there is serious." The Congresswoman wants the US to "get tough" with
the Haitian Opposition.
In all the negotiations over the years, the Opposition has simply
refused to have any dealings with the country's lawfully elected
President Aristide - who has a much better title to his office than
President George Bush.

The leader of this Opposition, André Apaid, is a millionaire
businessman of Middle Eastern extraction whose family has been in
Haiti for decades. He is the leader of the elites, the
unreconstructed class of light-skinned and white Haitians who have
never forgiven the blacks for defeating France, Spain and Britain on
their way to independence. They were extreme racists 200 years ago,
and some of them still are today, although one imagines that like the
elites in Jamaica, many would have accommodated themselves to reality.
Cheap labour the only resource?

Haiti is one of the world's poorest countries and Dr Paul Farmer,
whom I mentioned last week, was reported by Tracy Kidder in the
Nation (Oct 2003) as saying ". there's no topsoil left in a lot of
the country, there are no jobs, people are dying of AIDS and coughing
their lungs out with TB, and the poor don't have enough to eat. These
are problems in the here and now. Something has to be done. Haiti is
flat broke."
According to some businessmen, cheap labour is Haiti's only resource.
Opposition leader Apaid owns several factories of the free-zone kind
- maquiladoiras in which Haitians work for low wages. In 1997 the
American anti-sweatshop NGO - the National Labour Committee -
described his operation:

"Alpha Sewing produces industrial gloves for Ansell Edmont of
Coshocton, Ohio, which is owned by Ansell International of Lilburn,
Georgia, which in turn is owned by Pacific Dunlop Ltd. of Melbourne,
Australia. Ansell Edmont boasts in its promotional literature that it
is the world's largest manufacturer of safety gloves and protective
clothing, but the workers at Alpha Sewing do not have even the most
basic safety protection. They produce Ansell Edmont's
"Vinyl-Impregnated Super-Flexible STD" gloves with bare hands;
Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC), the chemical that toughens the glove, also
takes off layers of skin. And the dust from the production of the
"Vinyl-Coated Super Comfort Seams-Rite" gloves gives many workers
respiratory problems. Hours at the plant are from 6:00 am to 5:30 pm,
Monday through Saturday, and often from 6:00 am to 3:30 pm on Sunday
as well--a 78-hour work week. Approximately 75 per cent of the
workers make less than the [Haitian] minimum wage. In April, 1995, a
worker who refused to work on Sunday so that he could go to church
was fired. When he returned to pick up his severance pay, the manager
called the UN police and reported a burglar on the premises. The UN
police arrived and promptly handcuffed the worker. After protests
from the other employees, the UN police finally let the worker go.
The next day, management began firing, three at a time, four at a
time, all those workers who had protested the arrest."

According to the National Labour Committee ".Apaid is a notorious
Duvalierist. When asked at a business conference in Miami soon after
the coup in 1991 what he would do if President Aristide returned to
Haiti, Apaid replied vehemently, 'I'd strangle him!' At the time,
Apaid was heading up USAID's PROMINEX business promotion project, a
$12.7 million programme to encourage US and Canadian firms to move
their businesses to Haiti."
Apaid reportedly has US citizenship, having been born in the US.

It is of course perfectly possible that the businessman-politician,
who owns sweatshops, is a die-hard democrat. Whatever Apaid's
ideology, for the Haitian Opposition to attach itself to an
organisation calling itself the Cannibal Army, would not seem to
encourage confidence. As Congresswoman Walters asks: Why can't the
Haitian Opposition submit itself to elections like any other party in
this democratic world? What makes them so special?
It is a question Caricom should be asking.

Copyright 2002 John Maxwell
maxinf@cwjamaica.com