22874: This Week in Haiti 22:21 08/04/04 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

"This Week in Haiti" is the English section of HAITI PROGRES
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                           HAITI PROGRES
              "Le journal qui offre une alternative"

                      * THIS WEEK IN HAITI *

                        August 4 - 10, 2004
                         Vol. 22, No. 21

HISTORY EXCURSION APPEARS TO BE CRUISING FOR A BRUISING

Controversy has flared around a cruise that proposes to bring
some 500 tourists to Haiti on Aug. 19 to pay tribute to the
Haitian people for the vanguard role their ancestors played in
winning the nation's independence 200 years ago.

But Haiti pro-democracy groups are warning that, unless its
organizers take a clear political stand, the cruise will help the
public relations of Haiti's current illegal government, which
Washington set in place after U.S. Marines kidnapped
constitutional president Jean-Bertrand Aristide on Feb. 29 and
militarily occupied the country.

Worse yet, a key coup leader represents the cruise in Cap
Haïtien.

Called "Cruising into History," the project is the brain-child of
political activist Ron Daniels, the executive director of the
Center for Constitutional Rights and founder of the Haiti Support
Project. Sailing from Miami on Royal Caribbean from Aug. 14-21,
the cruise has received the endorsement of prominent celebrities
like actor Danny Glover, singer Harry Belafonte, and congressman
John Conyers (D-MI). Conceived over two years ago in concert with
erstwhile Aristide ally Leslie Voltaire, who was the
constitutional government's Minister for Haitians Living Abroad,
the cruise seeks, according to its website, to "foster
relationships between people of African descent and Haitians to
build a strong and vital solidarity network in support of the
contemporary struggle for democracy and development in Haiti."

However, that "contemporary struggle for democracy" received a
giant setback five months ago when the constitutional government
was overthrown by a U.S.-backed destabilization campaign.

One of that campaign's leaders was Frandley Denis Julien, the
coordinator of the Citizens Initiative, which organized the
Haitian opposition's first successful march of about 8,000 in Cap
Haïtien on Nov. 17, 2002. Funded by Haiti's businessmen, led by
former Col. Himmler Rébu (closely linked to the dreaded Tonton
Macoute paramilitary force under the Duvalier dictatorship),
endorsed by the National Endowment for Democracy's International
Republican Institute (IRI), and hyped by anti-Aristide media in
Haiti and the U.S., that march heralded the "macouto-bourgeois"
offensive which, with Paris and Washington's aid, eventually
unseated Haiti's democratically elected government.

Today, Mr. Julien is the public face of "Cruising into History"
in Haiti's north, where cruise participants are scheduled Aug. 19
to visit historic sites from the 1804 Haitian revolution or just
lounge around the secluded resort of Labadie, 10 miles west of
Cap Haïtien.

Mr. Julien went on to become a leading member of the IRI-
concocted Group of 184, a "civil society" front and principal
chariot of the "unarmed opposition" to Aristide, headed by U.S.
citizen and sweatshop magnate André Apaid. Today Mr. Julien is a
defender and ally of the de facto government of Gérard Latortue,
who was installed as Washington's puppet prime minister after
Aristide's removal.

Having an occupation facilitator as its representative renders
meaningless the cruise's stated mission of saluting Haiti for
being "berated, belittled, denigrated, invaded/occupied and
exploited by the forces of Europe and America" over the past two
centuries, anti-coup groups say.

"If Ron Daniels' cruise arrives in Haiti to join and celebrate
the coup d'état and its supporters, especially on the anniversary
of Bwa Kayiman [the Aug. 14, 1791 voodoo ceremony that launched
the slaves' revolt] and the Haitian Revolution, it defiles
Haiti's revolutionary legacy,  disrespects Boukman [the leader of
the Bwa Kayiman ceremony] and the founding fathers and mothers of
Haiti while reinforcing the Haitian people's current oppression
and shall be denounced both in Haiti and abroad by freedom loving
people," wrote Marguerite Laurent of the Haitian Lawyers
Leadership Network in an Aug. 1 press release.

Participants in a Jul. 27 anti-coup "teach-in" at Roxbury
Community College in Boston during the Democratic National
Convention "expressed concerns about the mission" of the cruise
to Rep. Conyers, Laurent said. Mr. Daniels was also in Boston and
held a meeting with certain Lavalas Family party leaders about
the cruise.

Mr. Voltaire is also billed to be on the cruise. But Haiti's
Lavalas masses view him with contempt for his role in helping to
usher in the coup administration and military occupation. He
worked with the U.S. Embassy to help nominate the "seven sages"
who appointed Latortue unconstitutionally. In his Mar. 8 press
conference from Bangui, Central African Republic, Aristide
characterized Voltaire's role as "a continuation of the coup
d'état," without naming him.

Haiti's anti-coup forces want to make sure that "Cruising into
History" will be a gesture in support of justice and democracy in
Haiti, not the counter-revolution. Ms. Laurent warned cruise
organizers to disassociate from Mr. Julien and not to allow
Latortue's coup regime to "kidnap their agenda."

"There is no doubt that the Haitian people's struggle in 2004
against former colonists and slave holders, against the Latortue
dictatorship and Haitian economic elites,  and against U.S.-
supported ex-Haitian army officers, death-squad leaders and
mercenaries, is a continuation of the Haitian Revolution," she
concluded.

PPN DELIVERS MESSAGE OF STRUGGLE AND HOPE

Benjamin Dupuy, the secretary general of the National Popular
Party (PPN), was warmly received at two well-attended events in
Canada last weekend.

On July 24, the Committee of Haitians in Ottawa for Haiti's
Reconstruction (CHORHA) held a meeting of over 100. The following
evening, several hundred people responded to the call of Konbit
Vérité in Montreal.

At both events, the organizers projected a half-hour video
depicting the spirited marches of thousands of PPN militants in
Port-au-Prince on Mar. 27 and Sep. 30, 2003. Following the
projections, Dupuy offered an historical analysis of the
different stages that led to the Feb. 29 "coup-napping" and exile
of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

At the Montreal event, Dupuy rapidly traced the roots of Haiti's
most recent coup back to the 1806 assassination of Jean-Jacques
Dessalines, the general who led Haiti to independence.
"Dessalines said that all those who had fought deserved to have a
plot of land," he explained. But a formerly propertied class
the freedmen or affranchis   were opposed to this first-ever land
reform. "They betrayed the pact of May 18, 1803 which gave us our
national flag because they wanted to get their hands on the only
wealth the devastated colony had left: land," Dupuy continued.
"So they plotted to assassinate Dessalines and there emerged our
grandon [big landowning] class, which up until today exploits the
peasantry."

Meanwhile, a comprador bourgeoisie emerged in the cities. These
two ruling classes have feuded for power throughout most of
Haitian history but united in a counter-revolutionary block when
the people elected Aristide 1990 and 2000.

Dupuy noted that Aristide was a disciple of Toussaint Louverture,
who led the struggle to abolish slavery in the French colony of
St. Domingue. And just like Toussaint, "Aristide believes in
diplomacy, in bargaining," Dupuy explained. "We in PPN told him
on many occasions over the course of the last three years that
these people were organizing themselves across the border [in the
Dominican Republic], and that former soldiers only know how to
handle one tool. I said that we had to prepare the people. We
couldn't sit on our hands waiting for the assassins to attack.
But even if Titid didn't want to betray the people, his diplomacy
and the lessons he learned in Washington induced him into error,
because the people believed in him and that confused them about
the true nature of imperialism... So we know the rest of the
story. Aristide was kidnapped just the way that Toussaint was.
But finally we are at the moment, just like after the kidnapping
of Toussaint, where the true struggle starts. That was the moment
that the people started their struggle for independence. So there
is no question of despair. The struggle has just begun!"

The speech was interrupted several times by sustained applause
and was followed by a many questions from the audience, which
allowed Dupuy to further develop his analysis.

On July 26, Dupuy held a press conference in Montreal that was
attended by both the Haitian and Canadian press and television.

Participants and organizers of both events were enthused by the
message from and response to mini-tour of Ben Dupuy and the
promise of PPN's continued resistance to the Feb. 29th coup
d'état.

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Please credit Haiti Progres.

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