21918: radtimes: Delegates report on Haiti fact-finding trip (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: radtimes <resist@best.com>

Delegates report on Haiti fact-finding trip

http://www.workers.org/ww/2004/haitimtg0520.php

Reprinted from the May 20, 2004, issue of Workers World newspaper
By G. Dunkel

"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. Elec tricity 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.

.