21906: Lemieux: International Action Center: Delegates Report on Haiti Fact-Finding Trip (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JD Lemieux <lxhaiti@yahoo.com>


New York: Delegates Report on Haiti Fact-Finding
Trip

By G. Dunkel

May 15, 2004--"Before the coup, many workers in
Haiti could afford to eat one meal a day," said
Dave Welsh, a San Francisco Labor Council
delegate, reporting on a fact-finding trip by
labor and religious groups over the May 1
weekend. "Now, since Feb. 29, they can only eat
one meal every other day."

Feb. 29 was the day U.S. forces kidnapped Haitian
President Jean- Bertrand Aristide to the Central
African Republic and completed the coup
Washington had been financing and organizing
since Aristide was re- elected in 2000.

AFSCME District Council 1707, which represents
daycare and home health- care workers, hosted the
report-back May 4. Many of the union's members
were born in Haiti.

Raglan George, DC 1707 executive director,
welcomed the meeting, saying, "It is necessary to
expose the role this country plays in holding
down democracy in Haiti. DC 1707 is opposed to
overthrowing the democratically-elected president
of Haiti."

DC 1707 President Brenda Stokely pointed out the
importance of building a reciprocal relationship
between the labor movement and the movements
struggling for social justice in Haiti, the U.S.
and everywhere.

Sara Flounders, co-director of the International
Action Center, chaired the meeting. She
emphasized the connections between the struggle
against occupation in Haiti and the struggle
against U.S. intervention in the rest of Latin
America, especially Cuba and Venezuela.

Johnnie Stevens, a co-founder of Labor for
Reparations and co-director of Peoples Video
Network, and Sharon Black Ceci, a steward in
United Food and Commercial Workers Local 27,
pointed out that a news whiteout surrounds Haiti.
The major media, with few exceptions, are
ignoring conditions there.

Some 3,600 foreign troops from the U.S., France,
Canada and Chile occupy the country, the
delegates reported. Electricity is available for
two hours a day at most in the capital,
Port-au-Prince. Garbage is piling up in the
streets.

According to Welsh, "Schools, literacy programs,
the medical school, daycare centers, and any
social program associated with Aristide or his
Lavalas party have been closed." None of this has
been reported in the corporate media.

URGENT NEED FOR SOLIDARITY

Paul Loulou Chery, secretary-general of the
Association of Haitian Workers (CTH), is very
concerned with building international solidarity
with the mass movement fighting the occupation,
Stevens emphasized. The CTH invited the
fact-finding delegation to its conference and
helped organize a May Day rally of 15,000 people
in Port-au-Prince.

Stevens explained that because of the urgent need
for solidarity, an emergency demonstration
against the occupation of Iraq in Washington June
5 would also call for ending the occupation of
Haiti.

Ceci also connected the struggles against
occupation in Haiti and Iraq. " Abu Ghraib
[prison]--that is what occupation looks like
everywhere," she said.

Omar Sierra of the Bolivarian Circle of New York
announced a May 8 demonstration to oppose U.S.
intervention in Haiti and Venezuela.

Tom Griffith of the National Lawyers Guild, who
participated in an earlier delegation to Haiti,
described how the morgue in Port-au-Prince had
disposed of at least 1,000 cadavers in a common
grave. Most were bodies of young men with hoods
over their heads and hands tied behind their
backs, which had been shot.

Griffith described how in the small towns and
cities in the south the official police have been
disbanded by militias that spend most of their
time hunting for Lavalas members and supporters.

He said the country's two major "civil-rights
organizations" spend most of their time drawing
up lists of people for the militias to hunt.

For all the repression and hunger in Haiti, every
delegate emphasized that the people's resistance
to the coup and occupation was widespread, firm
and growing stronger.





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