18647: Esser: Killing them softly (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

Killing them softly.

The Jaimaica Observer
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com

Columns
John Maxwell Common Sense
Sunday, February 15, 2004


Many people speak of poverty as if it is a sacred responsibility to
be assumed by certain people in the same way the British 'nobility'
assume their titles and honorifics at birth. Some of us, it seems,
are called to poverty, as holy men are called to the service of God.
This concept has made its way into a hymn about "All things bright
and beautiful":

"The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them
each and every one
And ordered their estate".
We know better. And the church now knows better. It has erased that
verse from modern hymn books.

Even if we have never heard of Karl Marx, the annual reports of the
IMF and World Bank make it plain that poverty is the result of
deliberate policy and action by people who have seized the power to
extract tribute from the rest of us. Structural Adjustment
Programmes, overseen by the IMF and the World Bank, are the main
engines of this unjust reallocation of resources from poor to rich.
The theory behind this malignant behaviour is that 'wealth' will
trickle down from 'investors' to those lucky enough to catch the
crumbs which escape the rich man's grasp.

But since wealth is created by labour, why is it that it has to go up
before it comes down?
In the long run, we are told, wealth will trickle down so well that
poverty will disappear.
In the long run, as Lord Keynes said, we are all dead. But most of us
will not perish in miserable slavery to utopian fantasies.

'God made them - every one.'

"For most of its history, the Haitian state, its military and a small
elite class have ruthlessly extracted what wealth they could from the
country's poor majority. The result is massive inequality, with one
per cent of Haitians controlling 50 per cent of the country's wealth
and over 75 per cent of the population living in severe poverty.

"The burden of inequality has fallen particularly hard on the
agricultural sector, where 70 per cent of the population makes its
living. .more than 80 per cent of government revenue has historically
been drawn from the peasant farmer, while over 90 per cent of
government expenditures have been made in the capital city,
Port-au-Prince." (Lisa McGowan, Structural Adjustment & the Aid
Juggernaut in Haiti. The Development Gap, 1997).
As McGowan points out in her paper, the foreign programmes of aid to
Haiti, when they were actually working, made it impossible for the
Preval government to respond to the expressed (and obvious) needs of
the poor people of Haiti. The result in 1997, before Aristide's
return, was that "popular frustration and cynicism are palpable and
the deepening polarisation of Haitian society increasingly evident".

Now, under Aristide, the trickle of aid has been stanched, because
the Haitian Government is unable to provide the US State Department
and foreign investors with the level of comfort and confidence they
require in order to go to the rescue of the only people who managed
to abolish slavery on their own and make themselves into free men.
As I have said before, they have never been forgiven for their
temerity and their military success, and the Western capitalist
democracies have spent the last 200 years re-ordering their estate
and putting them, explicitly, outside the gated community of modern
democracy.

Ira Lowenthal, an authority on Haitian voodoo and politics, explains
the problem as seen by the Opposition (which he advises): ". a
populist demagogue, his cronies and his clients - all apparently
quite willing to pervert the nation's fledgling transition in the
interest of consolidating their own personal powers and privilege -
emerged as the greatest threat to Haitian democracy. Surely, there is
precious little comfort to be drawn from noting that at least this
time, the leader of this ongoing assault has been 'duly elected'."
(Ira Lowenthal, The US Policy Imperative in Haiti, and How to Achieve
It. wehaitians.com)
Democratic Convergence leader and Aristide opponent, Evans Paul,
recently declared "We are willing to negotiate through which door he
[President Aristide] leaves the palace - through the front door or
the back door." (This vulgar sentiment should be eerily familiar to
Jamaicans who lived through the 70s).

Of more immediate concern is the fact that the recent insurrection by
armed gangs has cut off important sectors of population from the rest
of the country. Haiti's infrastructure is almost non-existent. The
few roads are hellish obstacle courses even without the gangsters.
A Jamaican Red Cross plan to deliver food to Cap Haitien has been
aborted and the United Nations a few days ago issued a warning that
the violence was shutting off deliveries of necessities to thousands
of needy Haitians, threatening a broad humanitarian crisis. Bertrand
Ramcharan, the acting UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in
Geneva, urged "all concerned to stop the violence and resolve the
political crisis in a peaceful and constitutional manner".

This warning will, like most others, fall on deaf ears.
After all, the North Atlantic powers have been perfectly at ease
watching Haiti starve, watching the rapacious progress of AIDS as it
decimates the Haitian population, and perfectly happy to wait until
starvation, violence and abject misery force the Haitians to
capitulate to the American Imperative, which is, after all, more
important than Haitian lives and welfare.

' . and ordered their estate'

The result of the failed Structural Adjustment Programmes, combined
with the embargo on further financial aid has had predictable
results. "Nutt'n nah gwaan", as I've pointed out before, and, as
might be expected, many who thought that Aristide heralded a new day
for Haiti have been turned against him and his Government because
they cannot deliver the goods. "Old-time people used to sey 'yu cyan
mek brick widout straw'". You can't provide drinkable water without
filter plants and pipes.
Unfortunately for Democratic Convergence, the Committee of 184 and
their associated gangs, their patron, the illustrious President
George Bush, has new troubles of his own which seem to preclude his
making any new adventures in the area of nation building.

If confidence in Aristide has dropped in Haiti, confidence in Bush
has plummeted in the United States. And while Aristide began from a
much sounder electoral base and good title to his presidency,
President Bush's legitimacy is questionable and his fellow citizens
no longer overwhelmingly consider him a trustworthy person, according
to the latest polls.
There is no way of measuring support for Aristide expect by the
wholly empirical evidence that the Opposition has been unable to hold
a rally in Port-au-Prince because of the 'intimidation' of
pro-Aristide people.

Since both sides depend on 'gangs' it should be easy for the majority
to impose its will.
In Gonaives, where a small but well-armed gang ousted the public
administration recently, people are reported to have fled from the
tender mercies of the Opposition forces. A website sympathetic to the
Cannibal Army (since renamed) was displaying pictures this past week
of rebels brandishing the severed leg of a dead policeman and another
of a dinner plate on which lay the severed ear and thumb of another
dead policeman.
So much for civil disobedience.

All things bright and beautiful .

Meanwhile, it is reported that the pro-Aristide militias are retaking
some of the towns interdicted last week by the rebels.
The American secretary of state was forced on Wednesday to hurriedly
deny his underlings' promise that Aristide must go. Instead, like the
true, sea-green incorruptible democrat he is, Colin Powell affirmed
that usurpation of authority was not, just now, on the democratic
order paper.

The Democratic Convergence, and the Group 184 financed by the
European Union and USAID, now appear to be gradually disabusing
themselves of the idea that they might be rescued by the intervention
of the US Marines. Instead, they are seeking terms of surrender for
their supporting cast in the countryside, as Powell retreats and the
militias of Aristide advance.

But, no matter who comes out on top in the latest skirmish, the war
against Haiti's poor will continue, despite, as Ira Lowenthal
contends, a convergence of interest between the US and the Haitian
poor in getting rid of Aristide: "Not incidentally, of course, such
progress is expected to relieve the pressure of illegal emigration to
the United States, whether by economic or political refugees, and to
reduce the threat of another mass exodus, as occurred in the early
1990s.

"Yet, this US interest also broadly (and happily) coincides with that
of Haiti's poor majority, for whom the delivery of even minimal
government services and a marginal increase in real incomes would be
an enormous advance over their current desperate - and deteriorating
- straits."
Meanwhile, Haitians can wait for democracy, while happily dying (in
their own best interest, of course) from officially sanctioned
starvation, AIDS and communal violence. And the English-speaking
Caribbean people will 'wait for Grandma to cough'.

The US, obeying the Precautionary Principle enunciated in Agenda 21,
is preparing Guantanamo Bay for a reprise of the 1994 exodus from
Haiti, just in case some Haitians resume the habit of 'chopping off
other people's faces' - as Bill Clinton graphically described it 10
years ago.
In these circumstances it may be instructive to remember that:
"Deliberately inflicting on [any] group conditions of life calculated
to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part" is one
of the definitions of genocide enunciated in the Convention Against
Genocide. That convention, not incidentally, was signed the day
before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was promulgated by
the United Nations.

Copyright 2004 John Maxwell
maxinf@cwjamaica.com