21459: Antoine Re: 21416: Of genocide and human rights organizations (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Guy S. Antoine <webmaster@haitiforever.com>


Funny how Du Tuyau's English varies, post to post, from good
to very bad.  Do we have a psycholinguistics analyst in the house?

Language appears to be a major problem on the Corbett List lately.
First, we needed dictionary definitions of the word "coup", as though
we had lost our ability to recognize a coup in the making or the results
of a coup.  Next we'll have to define or redefine the words "de facto",
militia, rebels, freedom fighters, military occupation, democracy,
electoral mandates, resignations, nationality and citizenship, et cetera
as the world turns or as we go along, just as surely as we now have
more fluid notions of imminent attacks and weapons of magical
disappearance, pardon, of mass destruction.

We have also learned that some French and Haitian Creole conditionals
should, in proper English, be translated in confidently assertive and
condescendingly affirmative fashion.  And thanks to La Higbie's legal
research, abetted by years of desk editing experience, we are confronted
with a daily multiplicity of genocides, given that any multiple killing
of individuals sharing the same gene pool or cultural characteristics
can be classified as such.  Sorry to say that this argument, however
correct it might be on legalistic grounds, debases (at least my own)
previously held notions of genocide, which applied to such grim cases
as the killing fields of :
- the Native people of North, Central, and South America (Europeans)
- The transatlantic slave trade and the Middle Passage (European settlers)
- The Armenians in 1915 (Ottoman Turks)
- The Jews and Soviets during WWII (Hitler / Stalin)
- The Cambodians in late 1970's (Khmer Rouge / Nixon-Kissinger)
- The Rwandans in 1994
- The Bosnian Muslims and Kosovar Albanians (Bosnian-Yugoslav
Serbs), though validation of those charges of genocide against Milosevic
is dubious due to the fact that "For a genocide conviction to be secured,
the court has to be satisfied the defendant deliberately set out to remove
an entire ethnic group." and in an ironic twist, participants in the NATO
campaign are themselves accused of genocide against Serbia.

If memory serves me right, the charge of genocide has generally been
considered, both in layman's terms and by the standards of international
courts, the most serious of "crimes against humanity",  though the
application of that label has always been culturally biased in view of
exonerating certain groups and incriminating others.  In the first six
examples of genocide I listed above, Hitler and the Nazis, Pol Pot
and the Khmer Rouge, and the Hutus are most positively identified
with genocide (with the Jewish Holocaust, a particularly effective
reminder of man's capacity for endless cruelty) while we have often
celebrated the genocidal conquests of Western Europeans, including
the civilizing impulses of a Christopher Columbus or a Las Casas,
the military campaigns of a Napoleon Bonaparte, the imperialistic
aims of the British in endlessly partitioning the world to their liking
(India/Pakistan, Israel/Palestine, Iraq/Kuwait, Rhodesia/...), the
Belgians in Congo and Rwanda (accentuating the differentiation
between Hutus and Tutsis, and their resulting competition), the
Afrikaners in South Africa, and we certainly could go on.  However,
those examples should suffice to show that while a "genocide" is
usually conceived as a deliberate attempt to exterminate a racial or
ethnic group, for reasons that are not necessarily attributable solely
to racism but also to other forms of supremacy such as religious
movements (crusades, for instance) and socio-economic systems,
the label does not stick as readily on Teflon Americans and Western
Europeans as it does on other groups of people.

It is terribly shocking to me to see the levity in which the label is now
toyed with by opposing parties in the most recent Haitian conflicts,
and defended on the Corbett List, particularly when the labeling is
done by NCHR-Haiti, the well-established and best-known human
rights organization in Haiti, with obvious ties to (the parent?) U.S.
NCHR organization, that was ably directed by Jocelyn McCalla to
its position of prominence among all Haitian or Haitian-American
groups advocating the rights of Haitian Refugees, of Haitian Braceros
in the Dominican Republic, of Haitian Restaveks, and one would
assume, ALL HAITIANS, regardless of their political affiliation.
In fact, given their stellar reputation, I am very much puzzled by
NCHR's seeming insouciance vis-a-vis the barrage of charges that
have been leveled in public forums and by common people in Haiti
and elsewhere that NCHR has intricated itself so one-sidedly in the
struggle against Aristide and Lavalas that it cannot be considered
an honest broker in the defense of Haitians that have been unfairly
victimized due to their affiliation to the Lavalas party.  This is a
grave matter and I do not understand the feeble responses so far,
as I wonder about the viability of a human rights organization that
becomes so strongly associated with a political movement, that one
would come to think of them as "the human rights advocates for
the opposition", though they may no longer be in opposition.

I know perfectly well that Pierre Esperance of NCHR-Haiti and
Jocelyn McCalla of NCHR (US) will be reading my words.  They
are two gentlemen that I have many reasons to respect, for the
tremendous body of work they have accomplished on behalf of
Haitians everywhere, and I hope that they will recognize in the
expression of my thoughts the gravity of the charges and the
resulting precariousness of NCHR's ability to represent Haitians
regardless of status and political affiliation, and in the performance
of their goals beyond any material success that may be achieved in
fund-raising activities.  On behalf of many, I would be gratified if
they take the time to clarify their respective positions on these
issues.

The Summary Report of Haiti Human Rights Delegation "March
29 to April 5, 2004" by the National Lawyer's Guild is particularly
alarming in that respect, though hardly unrepresentative of the
current discourse on the effectiveness of rights organizations
in Haiti.

Considering that the label of genocide has not been applied to
the Piatre and Jean-Rabel massacres, or even consistently to
the horrific 1937 Trujillo massacre of Haitian workers in the
D.R., I think that NCHR can more beneficially contribute to the
human rights situation in Haiti, than lending itself to debasing
forms of speech, however they fit narrow legalistic definitions
which are demonstrably not applied universally in any case.
If the United States and the United Nations have so much trouble
building their case of genocide against Slobodan Milosevic,
which after all was their justification for NATO's intense
bombardment of Serbia, it behooves all of us not to be flippant
in our rhetoric about the Haiti situation.  The prejudice is there,
it is palpable, let us not unnecessarily inflame the passions.

As for Du Tuyau's observation that the killing of Lavalas members
could be construed as pesticide while the killing of non-Lavalas
members, could be termed a genocide, I would hesitate to belabor
the point.  "Pests" is not far from the mindset of anti-immigration
extremists in America who consider Haitian immigrants "garbage"
regardless of political affiliation.  It is not purely coincidental that
the U.S. has enforced a "dry foot, wet foot, haitian foot" policy, nor
that we have had a very popular video game urging its protagonists
to "Kill the Haitians!"  When we Haitians do not learn to value the
lives of our own brothers and sisters, regardless of their social
status and political affiliation, we unwittingly give other peoples
the presumption of innocence when engineering our carnage.  We
should be smart enough to realize that, regardless of elite status or
favor with those in power in the U.S., Haiti and elsewhere, we are
putting our own lives at risk, as long as we can be remotely
considered as Haitians.  Let us learn the lessons of Rwanda.  Let
us learn the lessons of the River Massacre, and consider that a
reparation price of twenty-nine dollars was affixed to each Haitian
head.  How much has this been inflated in today's world markets?

It is time that we embrace our own and reject the condescension
of our enemies who have a knack of dissimulating themselves as
friends of Haiti.


Guy S. Antoine
Windows on Haiti
http://haitiforever.com