18977: John Maxwell: The CARICOM/OAS Minstrel Show (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Randall White <raw@haitiaction.org>

The CARICOM/OAS Minstrel Show

John Maxwell

As I write on Friday morning, an international troupe of  diplomats
is heading for Port au Prince, Haiti, to lay  down the law to Haiti's
President, Jean Bertrand Aristide. The group is not using the
unfortunate words of Trinidad's Patrick Manning -"Shape up or ship
out!' but the intentions are the same.

CARICOM, the Organisation of American States, the United States and
Canada  have now identified President Aristide as The Haitian
Problem.  The US Secretary of State,  Mr Powell says he wouldn't mind
if Aristide were to resign. Earlier, he   had to deny his
subordinates' prior assertions that Aristide had to go.

Mr Powell is now backing the CARICOM-devised "power sharing plan",
under which Aristide's government would effectively be castrated and
power handed over to a Prime Minister appointed ('approved') by the
Opposition. Asked by ABC's Sam Donaldson to clarify his position on
whether  Aristide would be asked to 'step down', Mr Powell said:

"No, it's not a possibility yet. That is up to President Aristide and
the political opposition. [sic!!!] We are not suggesting that. We are
not encouraging that. We are not predicting that. He is the elected
President of Haiti, and we cannot allow these thugs to come out of
the hills, or even an opposition to simply rise up and say, "We want
you to leave," in an undemocratic, non-constitutional manner.

Unfortunately for Haiti, the US government's position is not as clear
as Mr Powell's statement suggests.

In the OAS in Washington, on Friday, US  Ambassador John Maisto
declared  that Haiti's crisis "is due in large part to the failure of
the government of Haiti to act in a timely manner to address problems
that it knew were growing." He said it hadn't fought police
corruption, strengthened its judiciary or restored security. He did
not choose to explain how Aristide could have done those things,
given his circumstances.

In an interview on Cox Television, Mr Powell, reaffirming his belief
that Aristide shouldn't be driven from office by thugs, also said
"But I must say that ten years after we allowed and permitted  [my
italics ]and got President Aristide back into this office, I regret
that we haven't seen more progress than I had hoped we would see when
I was a participant in these events back in 1994."

It's impossible to know how well Mr Powell, or Jamaica's P.J.
Patterson or any of Mr Aristide's detractors might have performed had
they been put in Aristide's  position, asked to create a functioning
modern state out of the moribund corpse of a country pillaged and
raped   for 200 years.

Foreign assistance

In 1994, at the height of the Haitian refugee crisis, I suggested
that  Jamaica and the CARICOM  should set up a programme of
assistance to Haiti since we knew that the country had been so
ravaged that it could not help itself.  The institution for which I
work, part time, the  UWI's Caribbean Institute of Media and
Communication, devised a project funded by the Dutch government,  in
1995 - a training scheme for Haitian journalists.   Six years later,
at the FTAA summit in Quebec, I was recognised by several of our
Haitian  graduates who were accredited to the conference while I was
being tear-gassed outside. It was a poignant moment.

Cuba has sent 700 medical personnel, including more than 300 doctors,
to deal with the diseases that afflict Haitian peasants and to  teach
them and their children  to read and write.  About 1,000 Haitian
children are at school in Cuba.

I don't know of anything useful  done by   the Caribbean hypocrites
who are now so ready to praise democracy and pass resolutions.  There
are, of course,  brigades of  American missionaries - 5,000 of them,
including a battalion  of Mormons.  It wasn't so long ago that the
Mormons taught that black people were cursed by God.

Haiti needed  then and needs now, teachers, doctors, nurses, public
health workers, agricultural instructors, and the  technical
assistance and materials for building  water supplies, roads, houses,
electrical  power distribution systems, telephones and the other
infrastructure which permits nations  to live a quasi-civilised life.
The US, the World Bank, the IMF, the European Union and all the other
responsible adults refused to help unless Haiti conformed to their
image of  capitalist democracy, particularly by  privatising   the
meagre assets still retained by the destitute  Haitian state.

In fact Presidents Rene Preval and Aristide did give way to some of
these foreign pressures including Structural (!!!) Adjustmnent  with
the result that the Haitian peasant became even poorer and more
miserable than he had been. No wonder that many say Aristide has
failed. When it is understood that the government's security largely
depends on strong-arm supporters responsible to no one, it can hardly
be argued that Haiti is a democracy as most people understand it.
Haiti is twice the area  of Jamaica with three times as many people
- but its  police force  is less than half the size of ours.

Zombie Democracy

In Friday's San Francisco Chronicle,  Stephen Dudley reports   an
encounter with some of those who want to take over the government of
Haiti:

"Butteur Metayer is the face of the Haitian revolution.

"The 33-year-old gunman's eyes hide behind dark sunglasses with gold-
plated rims. He wears shorts and a blue shirt with a Nike logo and a
black felt cavalry hat. He sits in a wilted metal chair with a
machete and bottle of rum within reach. His handlers slouch on crusty
couches, with M-4 carbines and Uzi submachine guns lying across their
laps.

"They call themselves the Gonaives Liberation Front. But they are
almost too drunk to say why they are here, at the center of a revolt
that began as an act of vengeance and has turned into a nationwide
uprising that threatens to topple the government of President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide."

According to one of the leading spokesmen for the Haiti Opposition
armed struggle is a legitimate means of opposing Aristide.

  I have been assailed by various people in Haitian communities around
the world, for referring to the Opposition as if it consisted only of
some loud mouthed agitators and various collections of thugs. The
problem is simple: no one that I know of has been able to get any
sensible statement from the trade  unions, student organisations,
community groups and others who allegedly comprise the Haitian
Opposition. All we hear are the vulgar rantings of people like Andy
Apaid and Evans Paul and the gangsters who claim to support them. I
believe the world would welcome some message from the non-violent
opposition.

It is as if the intransigents have captured the  'civil society'
groups and turned them into zombies  -  creatures without volition,
directed by sinister outsiders  for their own benefit.

Writing from Jamaica and depending on a variety of sources, some of
questionable reliability, it is difficult enough to discover what the
Haitian population really feels. One can deduce that most Haitians
still prefer Aristide to his Opposition from the simple observation
that if they did not, Aristide could not remain in  Haiti. The Cite
Soleil - City of the Sun - is a slum in Port au Prince which contains
the equivalent of the population of Barbados.  There is nothing in
Jamaica since 'the Dungle' as miserable, as destitute, as hopeless
and as abandoned by the state as Cite Soleil. Yet, it is the people
there who really control Haitian politics  If they decided that
Aristide should go, Aristide will go. The opposition has been unable
to mobilise Cite Soleil against Aristide.

How Haitians really feel

The twentieth century story of Haiti is one of economic and social
strip-mining, of rapacious exploitation  on a scale that is  almost
incomprehensible. As one of my correspondents says, Haiti is an
international crime scene. For decades the Haitian people have been
driven abroad to seek some sort of dignity,  livelihood  and an end
to suffering. The brightest people including journalists,  have been
murdered or are in voluntary or involuntary exile.

Haiti needs help, not interference. The people of goodwill, in Haiti
or outside, must be brought into a dialogue of respect for each
other, to devise solutions, made by Haitians for Haitians. But they
need help, simply to build the basic infrastructure for dialogue, for
communication,for education and  for health. Haiti is a war zone,
where the rich have  scorched the earth so thoroughly that the
emotional landscape seems to have been sown with salt.

This week, Haitians in the United States were asked for their
opinions on what should happen in Haiti. A poll among Haitians across
the United States was done by  the New California Media Coalition,
an association of ethnic media companies .

Surprise! More than half (52%) of those polled said they believed
President Aristide should stay in office 'in the interest of
democracy'. Just over one-third (35%) believed he should resign. More
than half  - 55% - felt the Haitian Opposition was fighting for
"power";only 22% believed it was fighting for "democracy".

Given these figures and the facts reported elsewhere, it would seem a
little crazy for CARICOM/OAS and the US to be putting pressure on
Aristide to dismantle his government to give power to an opposition
which refuses even to discuss its differences with Aristide.

If CARICOM, the US, Canada, France and the others are serious, they
must first of all prevail on the Opposition to agree to talk and to
disavow or call off the  thugs. Unfortunately, the OAS coalition has
loaded the dice against Aristide in many ways, not least by including
on the delegation to Aristide the notorious Roger Noriega who spent
his formative years as an adviser to one of the leading US racists,
Senator Jesse Helms. If the outsiders are serious it appears to me
that they need to begin from a position of neutrality and respect for
Haitian integrity and dignity and for  the Haitian people's
democratic  choice.

There is no other way.

What, for instance, will Messrs. Patterson, Manning and Powell do if
Aristide is removed from  the scene and Cite Soleil flexes its
muscles?

We really do not need a Caribbean version of Iraq on our hands. or a
Bosnia or a Rwanda

Copyright 2004 John Maxwell

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