18658: Simidor re Dorce, Chamblain (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Daniel Simidor <karioka9@mail.arczip.com>


Dorce’s claim that I’m intellectually aloof is ironic on two levels.  1) The only label I’ve ever claimed for myself is that of a community activist – an unlikely platform for aloofness.  2) This is a time when Haiti’s most prominent intellectuals are descending from their ivory towers to assist the people (la Cité) in their search for truth.

In any case, if my ultimate allegiance is to kan pèp la, or like Marta Harnecker would have it, “to a societal project that opposes the capitalist logic of profit-making and that seeks to build a society with a humanistic logic,” I wholly support the broad based Dec. 5th democratic movement, led as it is by a vanguard of students, intellectuals and activists, and even by a section of the bourgeoisie.  Only the broadest possible democratic upsurge can rid Haiti of its “Somalia syndrome” – a delinquent and corrupt state overrun by rival militias and gangs. The latter is a situation that could have been avoided had Aristide resigned a year ago, or even a month ago after his pathetic bicentennial performance.

The Bogeyman Factor.  Lavalas is so exposed these days that they need a bogeyman like Jodel Chamblain to spook people into rallying once again behind Aristide.  This is Roger Lafontant redux.  Maybe Dorce doesn’t know, or she has forgotten that the 67% vote for Aristide in 1990 was also a panic reaction against Lafontant and his Tonton-Macoutes.  Chamblain and his men are not the seasoned soldiers or guerilla fighters the media are making them to be.  They are low-level executioners who can terrorize the civilian population in Gonaives, just like the Lavalas Bale Wouze militia is terrorizing innocent people in St. Marc.  But that would only  hasten a reaction by the Gonaives masses against the Gonaives front.  Hence another irony: Aristide needs Chamblain more than the Front does.

Daniel Simidor