23952: Hermantin (Pub)Listen to the people for a different view (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Sun-Sentinel


Listen to the people for a different view



By Ethan Casey

December 16, 2004

"Do you believe you're a political prisoner?" I asked Father Gerard
Jean-Juste at a prison in Port-au-Prince, a few days before he was released.

Jean-Juste is a popular Roman Catholic priest who runs a feeding program for
children at his parish outside the Haitian capital. He was arrested Oct. 13
after a siege by police and released Nov. 29 following international
pressure.

"Yes," he told me. "Some hours before my arrest I was talking to President
Aristide," the former Miami resident went on. "I told him I was going to
spend a month in Florida, to be with the Haitian community. The phone [call]
was intercepted. You should ask the American government about that."

Jean-Juste was suggesting he was arrested to keep him from mobilizing
Haitian-Americans in South Florida to vote for John Kerry on Nov. 2.

"Is Pere Jean-Juste going to be in danger again after this?" I asked his
lawyer, Mario Joseph.

"They put him in prison because they're afraid of him," he said. "If they
put him in prison, they can kill him, too. I also could be in danger because
I work with him."

I asked Joseph if he thought Gerard Latortue, the longtime Boca Raton
resident who is now Haiti's U.S.-installed interim prime minister, was
mechant, or wicked.

"It's not Latortue himself," he said. "It's the system. It's like asking if
Bush is mechant because he went into Iraq. In Haiti we have to say there's a
dictatorial government now. This government has all the characteristics of a
dictatorial government."

Such views may seem overheated to many on what Haitians call l'autre bord de
l'eau -- the other side of the water. But Bay kou blie; pote mak sonje goes
a Haitian saying: He who gives the blow forgets; he who bears the bruise
remembers. Americans, even in Florida, might forget how intimately our
country's history is entwined with that of our poorest neighbor. Haitians
don't have that luxury, as they struggle to find some pattern in the onrush
of chronically urgent events.

Jean-Juste's friend Dr. Paul Farmer, the Harvard Medical School professor
whose work in central Haiti is the subject of Tracy Kidder's book Mountains
Beyond Mountains, taught me to listen respectfully to what ordinary -- which
is to say, poor -- Haitians say, even if to an American ear it sounds
ridiculous. "Bush -- unelected -- overthrows Aristide -- elected," Farmer
told me in August. "Haitians see symmetry: Bush I overthrows Aristide I,
Bush II overthrows Aristide II. What incentive do the Haitian people have to
vote again?"

"When I see you writing, it doesn't make me hate you," Farmer's co-worker Ti
Jean Gabriel told me. "When I see Paul with a stethoscope, it doesn't make
me feel bad. But when I see an American soldier in Haiti, it makes me want
to kill myself."

"This must be a lot like what you heard in the Islamic world," remarked
Farmer. "These are the people I work with, and this is how they talk to me."

On Aug. 14, I spent several hours following a pro-Aristide demonstration in
Port-au-Prince. In the confused minutes after police killed a man outside
the National Palace, I recorded one Haitian's oracular words, translating
for another eyewitness:

"When Aristide asked to have help in the country, George Bush preferred to
send people in the Dominican Republic to be trained. So they say that
they're fighting against terrorism, but they're kind of the father of
terrorism. All that the United States is suffering right now in terrorism is
because of the policy of the United States over all the world. … The threat
is clear on the United States, and if George Bush doesn't stop, maybe it
will be worse every day."

Marc Bazin was the candidate supported by the first President Bush in
Haiti's historic 1990 election won by Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Perhaps it's a
sign of the times that when I asked Bazin whether the Bush administration
had been involved in the Feb. 29, 2004, overthrow of Aristide, he did not
dismiss the suggestion, but instead replied: "Whether they put the train in
motion, whether they engineered the whole thing, is not clear to me. But you
are not going to have things taking place here without the U.S. saying yes
or no. No way."

Ethan Casey is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan and of Haitian
Revolutions: Two Decades on the Ground, to be published in April. E-mail:
ecasey@blueear.com.


Copyright © 2004, South Florida Sun-Sentinel