23375: Esser: Titrating mercy, distilling justice? (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser <torx@joimail.com>


The Jamaica Observer
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/

COMMON SENSE

October 03, 2004

Titrating mercy, distilling justice?
by John Maxwell

Our electricity came back Friday, three weeks after Hurricane Ivan
blew out our lights. For a few days I had thought - looking at our
neighbours' lights - that we were getting 'special' treatment. It
turned out that a small connection on the pole had been broken, as it
had been broken by Gilbert, but so cunningly that the technicians had
missed it. The pole carries a high tension array, so it is very tall.
They needed a bucket-truck to fix our problem.

Over the three weeks I've again been amazed at how much of our lives
depends on electricity. Even if you don't cook with electricity, it's
difficult to cook by the light of an oil lamp. Our houses and our
offices are even more dependent, mortgaged to fossil fuels. I wonder
what happens on the day, fast approaching, when fossil fuels are
simply too expensive for most people.

And I wondered about the thousands of idle hands scrabbling for
survival on disintegrating hillsides, scraping an existence by easing
even more topsoil into the gullies, the rivers and onto the corals.
Especially, I wonder why it is impossible for an agrarian reform,
which would transform idle lands from portfolio assets into working
fields of food plants.

As I considered my deprived situation, buying food and ice every day,
it occurred to me that my privations were inconsequential. My friends
in Portland Cottage and other parts of Vere had lost houses and
everything in them, some had lost family and friends. All my friends
were safe, however, all those I knew had survived. My mind then
jumped the water to Haiti, where the privations even of Portland
Cottage are inconsequential compared to those of the people round
Gonaives. On Thursday, experimenting with hunger, I was on the verge
of vertigo by late afternoon. I considered those who had not eaten
for days, instead of a few hours. The pangs of hunger are less sharp,
I recalled, after a few days - unless, of course, you are a woman
with an exhausted infant at your exhausted breast and with a foetus
kicking you silly, inside a belly distended also from malnutrition
and churning with hunger.

What do you do if your child is swept from your hands by floodwater
or mudslide and you do not know whether its little corpse is that
object you just stepped on in the mud or whether it lives somewhere,
caught by another before the flood carried it away for ever?

As you stand waiting patiently for the soldiers to hand you a little
food parcel, do you think perhaps, this disaster was not necessary.
Were you perhaps, one of these who took part in the community drills
for emergency preparedness?

Portland Cottage and Gonaives will forever be linked in my mind
because of what they say about the use of state power.

The government of Jamaica has decided to stop people rebuilding at
Portland Cottage because although it has been inhabited for hundreds
of years, it is prone to storm-surge and flooding.

While the government stops building at Portland Cottage, it does not
stop those building on unstable hillsides and in riverbeds and swamps
if those people are in an electorally marginal constituency. The
state will not stop the rich from capturing public beachland or
public botanical gardens or areas designated for special protection
for ecological and environmental reasons.

And our government cannot stop the wholesale importation of assault
weapons or the entry of Colombian drug dealers. But our government
can stop the settlement of a few dozen Haitian refugees on the ground
that they have not made a case that they have a well-founded fear of
persecution in their homeland.

In Portland Cottage and in the case of the Haitian refugees, the
Patterson regime has proved its cojones.

The refugees are a particularly poignant case because they are
undergoing the same passage de tabac which some of their compatriots
were forced to undergo a decade ago. Ten years ago I was sought out
by Paul Robertson, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, and roundly
denounced for condemning the government's illegal and uncivilised
treatment of Haitian refugees. In 1994, with Jamaican government
approval, the US had parked two enormous hospital ships in Kingston
Harbour where, quite illegally, refugees picked up in international
waters and in Jamaican waters were taken aboard, forced to remain on
deck, under canvas in the broiling sun, and considered never to have
landed either in Jamaica or the USA. They were then processed on
these factory ships, or floating slave barracoons as I called them,
and 80 per cent of them sent back to Haiti where their murderers were
waiting.

This time, according to Gilbert Scott, permanent secretary in the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the refugees were put through all the
legal niceties and all were found wanting in that essential
ingredient - a well-founded fear of persecution. In an interview on
radio with Mr Scott, I lost my temper and told him that his was a
Pontius Pilate's answer. How could a group of semi-literate peasants,
unrepresented by a lawyer, really understand the point of their
ordeal by civil servant? Especially by a civil servant who refuses to
come close to the Haitian for fear of some dreadful, as yet
undiscovered plague?

When a government holds an inquiry into refugee's status, it is in
effect guaranteeing the refugee that if he is sent back he will be
safe. Otherwise there is no point in the exercise. How can the
government of Jamaica guarantee the safety of any returning Haitian
refugee in light of what it must know about Haiti now? Mr Scott says
that the UNCHR tracked all those who went back before now and none
had been molested. The UNCHR has better informants, obviously, than
the Haitian grassroots organisation, Lavalas, which has no idea of
the whereabouts of thousands of its adherents and is not sure how
many of them are even alive.

As in 1994 so it is today; the refugees are to be returned to the
tender mercies of the machete-wielding, M-16-bearing murderers and
torturers who had overthrown the president once before and who were
used this time as a mask for the American-Canadian-French usurpation
of Haitian autonomy, dignity and independence.

The people waiting for the refugees are the same killers from whom
they fled. One group who arrived in Jamaica about the time of the
coup were the survivors of a terrorist attack on the Gonaives police
station in which policemen were dismembered and some burned to death,
locked in the police station.

The people in charge in Haiti now are the remnants of the corrupt and
savagely brutish Haitian army and its murderous auxiliaries, the
Tontons - Duvalierist gangsters - and FRAPH, an anti-Aristide
terror-commando group founded and funded by the US Central
Intelligence Agency and armed by the United States.

Aristide was restored in 1994, thanks largely to pressure from
American blacks spearheaded by Randall Robinson of TransAfrica. The
restoration was supposed to transform Haiti - introducing a real
police force, clean drinking water and other such Haitian
working-class luxuries. It didn't happen, because the US withdrew its
support from Aristide and persuaded other international 'donors' to
do the same. Promised aid from European countries and the World Bank
was blocked and the propaganda war against Aristide resumed in
earnest.

The refrain was the same as a hundred years before. The Haitians are
going to make a mess of things. When the Haitians were exporting
revolution to South America via Bolivar they were dangerous and had
to be contained. After embargoes, financial chicanery and bribery had
reduced Haiti to the status of a comic opera republic, the refrain
changed: Haitians were no longer dangerous, just hapless; they would
make a mess of anything. Poor clueless Haiti!!! Let's go in and
civilise them. As I said last week, the 1915 US intervention was a
civilising mission akin to King Leopold's mercy mission to the Congo.
The only difference was that in this 'Heart of Darkness' there were
no administrator's houses ringed by the bleached skulls of his
victims.

For 200 years, by a mixture of blockades, diplomatic pressure,
bribery and military intervention, the US and its allies made it
impossible for Haiti to govern itself.
To the Americans of the 19th and 20th centuries, a free black
republic was an oxymoron as well as a standing reproach to the United
States under slavery and after Reconstruction. And in the US right
now, when the GOP is sedulously trying to disfranchise blacks in
Florida, the idea of free blacks is just as unfashionable. Although
since 1965, black Americans nominally enjoy the same rights Haitians
have since 1804 and Jamaicans have since 1944, nearly one-third of
young black men are either in prison or under some kind of state
supervision and most of them are unable to vote.
The obvious question for some people is: why should eight million
blacks be allowed to run around loose just offshore the United States
when inside the US such matters were better ordered? They could be
providing for US manufacturers what Cayman provides for US finance
capital - an offshore, company-country, nominally free but actually
among the first in a collection of gated colonies providing cheap
labour and captive markets.

The new takeover of Haiti is clearly aimed at a makeover of Haiti by
transnational elites. The end result will be the globalised version
of a slave plantation where eight million hapless Haitians will be
put to work as indentured labour in free zones producing impressive
foreign exchange returns for a new, privatised Bank of Haiti, and
riches beyond the dreams even of 18th century Jamaican planters, for
the Haitian elites and their sponsors in companies like Nike, J C
Penney and Levi's. In the globalised world, these behemoths will not
compete in a fair market where the labourer is worthy of his hire and
unions flourish.

As in the 17th and 18th centuries, the cognitive elite is expert at
recruiting in-country stooges and Judas Goats to lead the natives
into the corral. Today, the cognitive elite has recruited such as
Colin Powell, Kofi Annan, Latortu e, P J Patterson and K D Knight in
concealing a monstrous crime against the people of Haiti by the
governments of the US, Canada and France.

When Patterson and Knight send back the Haitian refugees, they are
certifying to the world that Latortue and his goons are sanitised and
'clubbable'. It will be a sign that all is well with Haiti and that
the world should not heed the wild-eyed pinkos and other
over-educated riffraff saying otherwise.

Two weeks before Jeanne swamped Haiti, I forecast in this column the
disaster which now distresses Haiti.

The thugs shepherded into Port-au-Prince by the US Marines intend to
eliminate all signs of the Aristide democratic initiative. Radio
stations and a new museum were burnt, a new teaching hospital was
seized by the Marines for a base. The thugs began to eliminate all
leadership structures of the Lavalas movement supporting Aristide.
They were so intent on destroying all elements of popular democracy -
the bureaucracy, the legal framework, the social movement, community
action, community initiative and solidarity that they trashed the
Civil Defence system and left Haiti once more, defenceless against
all its natural and unnatural enemies.

The more things change .

Copyright©John Maxwell
maxinf@cwjamaica.com
.