21545: radtimes: PPN leader: New situation in Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: radtimes <resist@best.com>

PPN leader: New situation in Haiti

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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the April 29, 2004
issue of Workers World newspaper
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PPN LEADER: NEW SITUATION IN HAITI

By G. Dunkel
New York

Ben Dupuy, general secretary of Haiti's National Popular Party (PPN) and
co-director of the newspaper Haďti-Progrčs, recently spoke here on the
new situation in Haiti since a Feb. 29 coup removed President Jean-
Bertrand Aristide.

On April 16 he spoke in English to a Workers World Party meeting. The
next day he spoke in Creole to the Haitian American Student Association
at Medgar Evers College, a part of the City University of New York, and
to the Committee to Support the PPN.

The talk at Medgar Evers was preceded by the showing of a documentary
film, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," about the failed 2002 coup
in Venezuela during which Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez was kidnapped
and nearly transported out of the country. A vigorous discussion
followed.

Commenting on the film, Dupuy said that Chávez had prepared the people
of Venezuela ideologically to resist the coup everyone saw coming by
informing them of their constitutional rights. While Fanmi Lavalas,
Aristide's party, is organized to fight for election victories, the PPN
is an "ideological" party, organized on a community level, then on a
district level. Every four years, the PPN holds a delegated national
conference to select its national leadership and set policy.

The PPN held several big demonstrations in Port-au-Prince before and
shortly after the coup to support democracy in Haiti and Aristide's
constitutional right to serve out his five-year term.

Haiti, currently under U.S. and French occupation, is now seldom in the
news. However, an unidentified "top U.S. official" told the Los Angeles
Times of April 15 that U.S. forces, under a United Nations mandate, will
be there for at least a year.

Dupuy feels that to understand the current class struggle in Haiti, one
must understand the semi-feudal class structure that came out of the
Haitian revolution two centuries ago. In pre-revolutionary Haiti, there
were three major classes: colons--French who owned the land, the source
of wealth in that society; affranchis--ex-slaves who bought their
freedom or were freed by their masters for personal reasons; and slaves,
the vast majority.

Most of the leaders in the Haitian revolution-- Toussaint Louverture,
Alex andre Pétion, Henri Christophe, Capois la Mort, and even Jean-
Jacques Dessa lines--were affranchis and had been officers in the French
army at one time or another. Their struggle's main objective was
political equality with the colons.

After Napoleon made a coup in France and decided to re-enslave Haiti,
the affranchis realized they could not win their struggle with the
French without an alliance with the slaves, whose leader was Jean-
Jacques Dessalines. They made the alliance and drove out the French, but
Dessalines, who wanted to go further, was killed in Haiti's first coup
in 1806.

The upper officers in the Haitian army became the large landowners, or
grand ons. Their struggle with the compradore bourgeoisie, primarily a
merchant class, provided most of the instability in Haitian politics up
to the U.S. intervention of 1915. After the U.S. intervention ended in
1934, the United States backed the brutal Duvaliers, representatives of
the grand ons, until the mid-1980s. Then Washing ton supported a
democratic phase, expecting the candidate it favored and funded to win,
but was dismayed when Aristide, a priest popular with the very poor, was
elected.

The United States trained, supplied and used some of the most brutal
Duvalier supporters in the recent coup. The "democratic opposition" to
Aristide, which represents the compradore bourgeoisie, has welcomed
U.S./French intervention and violence from the paramilitaries tied to
the grandons in order to oust Aristide.

All of this has made life much harder for the Haitian people. UN
spokesperson Alejandro Chicheri says the 23 health centers monitored by
the World Food Program in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, can't meet
the demands for food. Prices have shot up by 30 percent since the coup.
"Fifty percent of the population is chronically malnourished," says
Chicheri, "and it's not just food. Many also have no access to clean
water."

Groups like PPN are resisting under difficult conditions while preparing
for the next phase of the struggle.

.