21110: Esser: Building Utopia on a Garbage Heap (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

April 3, 2004

Building Utopia on a Garbage Heap
by John Maxwell

In the United States the ship of state sails on. The band plays on
the promenade deck where the Emperor presides, resplendent in his new
clothes. Below decks, however, it is a different story, with the
stokers and the oilers, the spinners and the bilge-men, slaving away
to repair the growing breach in the double-bottomed, gold-plated
hull. Some think they may have hit an iceberg.

Every day, it seems, a new crack appears in the credibility of the
White House. Dr Condoleezza Rice is, after all, to testify under oath
to the 9/11 commission, after it appeared that the Administration’s
refusal to allow her to do so is worrying many Americans.

Then, a few days ago, it was discovered that thousands of pages of
documents which the Clinton Library had wanted the Commission to see,
had been blocked by the Bush White House. Of course, people are
beginning to wonder whether these documents might prove that Richard
Clarke is right when he said that President Bush had taken his eye
off the Al Quaida ball, with disastrous effects.

Then, on Friday, the Independent in London published an interview
with a woman called Sibel Edmonds, a Turkish American translator who
worked briefly for the FBI intelligence office. She says  during her
time at the FBI,documents  she saw made it clear that the US National
Security adviser, Dr Rice, had told an ”outrageous lie” when she said
that there was no intelligence warning the administration that
terrorists were planning to attack buildings in the US with aircraft.

Mrs Edmonds says she has provided information to the panel
investigating the  9/11  atrocity which proved senior officials knew
of al-Qa'ida's plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the
strikes happened. She gave the Commission information that was
circulating within the FBI in the spring and summer of 2001
suggesting that an attack using aircraft was just months away and the
terrorists were in place. The Bush administration, meanwhile, has
sought to silence her and has obtained a gagging order from a court
by citing "state secrets privilege".

Normally, one would expect that such an explosive charge would get at
least as much publicity as has been given to the  transcendentally
significant Grand Jury investigation into the charge of child
molestation against Michael Jackson.  Instead, TV anchors are
apologising for telling the truth when it doesn’t suit the White
House; and people alleged  to be journalists, such as Wolf Blitzer
find it necessary to help the White House smear and discredit people
like  whistleblower Richard Clarke. Another so called journalist,
Robert Novak, having allowed himself to be used as an instrument of
the White House in smearing an earlier whistleblower, Ambassador
Joseph Wilson, is exporting his talents.

Candide  in Haiti

Novak has recently been used to try to embellish the image of the
gunmen now ruling Haiti. According to Novak, the Haitian ‘Prime
Minister’ La Tortue  “is correct in calling the rebels  ‘freedom
fighters’”.

According to Novak “ The radical president's  [Aristide’s] reign left
a country without electricity, passable roads or public schools, with
a devastated economy and, according to LaTortue, a looted treasury.”
((Novak has been to Haiti before, for the same propaganda  purposes,
so he should know the facts)

La Tortue told Novak: "The public finance is in crisis. They (the
Aristide regime) took everything they could from the reserve of the
country." His estimate: "over $1 billion" stolen in four weeks.”
(Emphasis added)

Novak is either the most credulous journalist in history or he is a
willing tool of the thugs now ruling with US protection. Maybe he is
both, because it is difficult to understand how anybody could give
credence to anyone who claims  that “over $1 billion” was stolen from
Haiti. Perhaps Aristide made away with the entire stock of Monopoly
game sets in Haiti, but even that could hardly have provided him with
one billion of anything.

Novak, of course, is meant to lend a gloss to the libels  and
fantasies now creating a storm in certain news media. On Friday the
regime announced that it would seek Aristide’s extradition from
Jamaica for all manners of crimes. Which might be a  good idea, since
the pathetic  pettifoggers who run the country would be forced at
last either to put up or shut up.

That may be wishful thinking, since the Haitian Opposition has been
never been able to produce the evidence of the misdeeds it has
historically charged  against Aristide.

Perhaps the Jamaican government should become interested in this ten
cent opera . The Jamaican government it seems to me, is doing its
level best to find a way around common sense and the law in order to
recognise the bunch of murderers and their accomplices who now say
they rule Haiti. And, of course, the demand for extradition would be
heard in a Jamaican court according to our rules of evidence and with
the press present.

As I said on a television programme a few weeks ago, the only thing
Aristide has not yet  been accused of is cannibalism, But that too,
may be in the offing.

Perhaps the Jamaican government should seek the advice and assistance
of Mr Ira Lowenthal, the head cook and bottlewasher of the Haiti
Democracy Project, who is now stationed  in Jamaica, busily enhancing
our democracy. Apparently, Mr Lowenthal, an expert on voudou,  spent
years on a USAID mission ‘enhancing  Haitian democracy”.

He is on a similar contract in Jamaica. Should we be alarmed?

De-criminalising  Haiti

Haiti’s basic problem is a systemic one. Because of the hostility and
the constant threat of invasion from France, Britain and the United
States in the nineteenth century the Haitian revolutionaries
organised every institution in Haiti along military lines, with
soldiers in charge. everywhere. The mulatto elite found it easy to
co-opt and corrupt this system with their money and it was further
co-opted and corrupted by the US occupation after 1915.

All signs of incipient democracy among the peasants have been
repeatedly and violently aborted – the latest being four weeks ago. 
The best brains have been driven out or murdered  and the power has
almost always been in the hands of the elite and their servant  army.

The Nobel Peace prize winner and former President of Costa Rica 
Oscar Arias has been making impassioned pleas against the
reinstatement of the Haitian army “Like so many Third World
countries, Haiti has suffered not only from a lack of national
security in the sense of borders and territorial integrity but also
an ongoing crisis of human security, the right of each person to live
in peace and with the guarantee of basic rights such as food,
healthcare, education and citizenship. The army, long an instrument
of suppressive authoritarian regimes, has historically deprived
Haitians of these fundamental rights.”

“Isolated and destitute, Haitians have been terrorized not only by
military violence but also by its accompanying legacy of poverty. In
the late 1980s, the army consumed approximately 40 percent of the
national budget [almost as bad as the IMF -jm] even as hunger and
AIDS decimated the population. Haiti could count on one soldier for
every 1,000 citizens, and 1.5 doctors for every 10,000.”

It is clear to most observers except the Bush White House that Haiti
cannot be treated as some foreign relations triumph, as Mr Powell’s 
visit  next week will suggest . The UN Special Envoy to Haiti,
Reginald Dumas,  declared this week that the UN should be committing
itself to a long term mission in Haiti to last about twenty years,

 "We cannot continue with the start-stop cycle that has characterized
relations between the international community and Haiti. You go in,
you spend a couple of years, you leave, the Haitians are not
necessarily involved and the whole thing collapses. This has to
stop," Dumas said he told the council

“ "There has to be a long-term commitment, which I perceive the
council is ready and willing to give," Dumas said.   "It must be
coordinated assistance. It must be sustained assistance, and it must
be assistance that involves the people of Haiti. It cannot be a
situation in which the UN or some other agency goes in a says `I have
this for you.' There has to be discussion. There has to be
cooperation, or else it will fail again,"

This is what Aristide was attempting to do, but he was sabotaged at
every step by the United States CIA and USAID, by the European Union,
by the IMF and the World Bank.  whose ideological commitment cannot
comprehend the development of grass roots democracy and prefer to
believe that select elements of ‘civil society’ will be able to
provide at least a democratic facade.

That facade is intended to provide a mask for the slavery Haitians 
fought so valiantly to extinguish 200 years ago. The most significant
actions of the outside world in the past month have been –

1.    A loan from the World Bank, the first since 1998, to a private
company which intends to produce free-zone manufactures for the US
market and

2.    the US Congress  initiative – “The  Haiti Economic Recovery
Opportunity Act Of 2004”, which will extend   concessions to clothing
and other goods produced in Haiti at starvation wages  in free zones.

Aristide Speaks

“On another day, I walked down another [slum] corridor and three
young girls – wearing second-hand dresses thrown away by nice
middle-class girls in a northern country  and brought here by
profiteering middlemen – these young girls were selling themselves
for quarters and dimes and less, to any man – and that was the new
generation of my beloved country…

“I say to them, come back and make a new Haiti. Spurn comfort. Come
back, live in misery and build a new way … You know how hard it is to
build Utopia on a garbage heap; indeed it is hard to build even a
decent poor man’s home there. But that’s i all we ask, a decent poor
man’s home, and no more corruption, no more inflicted misery, no more
children bathing in sewage.”

“…We are all living under a system so corrupt that to ask for a plate
of rice and beans every day for every man woman and child is to
preach revolution. That is the crime of which I stand accused !” 
Jean Bertrand Aristide:” In the Parish of the Poor”.

Copyright 2004 by John Maxwell
maxinf@cwjamaica.com
.