24035: Chavraux (discuss) Jean Juste and foreign attitudes towards Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Serge Chavraux <sergechavraux@hotmail.com>

Terrall’s post  seems to speak of an American who has adopted a foreign
country’s cause as their own without ever taking the time to get to know the
country itself from the ground up, deferring actual debate on the issues as
they are being presented to positing that those whose ideals differ from his
own as “stooges.”  To those of us with some historical memory in Haiti,
there was a reason Father Gerard Jean Juste was forbidden from saying mass
in Miami, just as there was a reason the Catholic church in Haiti found his
long-time links and championing of Dany Toussaint so disturbing and held him
at such a distance.

You know why people often post things anonymously, Terral? Because it’s
often physically dangerous to voice your opinion or to point out malfeasance
in Haiti, as Jean Dominique, Brignol Lindor and any of the litany of
journalists then attacked and exile under the Aristide government can
attest. It was then, and it continues to be so when you have the former
regime’s foreign supporters arriving at Port-au-Prince airport with
briefcases full of money to continue to arm and fund a campaign of murder
and insurrection not only against Haiti’s police force, who seem to have
gotten it coming and going both from the Guy Philippe and Aristide people
over the last year, but against the poor in the slums who might dare speak
out against it  Ask Rosemond Jean about the former government’s commitment
to the well-being of the poor majority. His reward for commitment to that
cause was beating and illegal detention. It must be nice to be safe in San
Francisco, in New York, in St. Kitts and lecture poor Haitians such as the
university students in the capital and the provinces the peasant groups in
the Plateau Central and the Artibonite and others about how they should have
just continued to behave like good blacks to make Aristide’s supporters
abroad feel good about themselves and not speak up against a government that
was killing them, that was re-invigorating the attaché phenomenon in a
completely politicized police force as in no time since the coup years,
bulldozing the judiciary (the Metayer jailbreak was too perfect a metaphor)
and cutting the legs out from every institution in a naked scramble for
lucrative drug transshipment routes and loot. Hopefully, some day, not only
“Ti Jocelyn” Privert, Harold Severe and their ilk will be held accountable
for their crimes against the poorest of the poor in Haiti, but also the
foreign lobbyists, corrupt officials and lackeys whose salaries Aristide
paid so lavishly over the years. As the “Haiti Information Project,” which
Terral is part of, affiliated with the Aristide-funded Institute for Justice
and Democracy in Haiti, runs all of their propaganda pieces anonymously, the
fearless people‘s champions there are in no shape to cast stones in anyone’s
direction, I would say.

SC

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