25621: Simidor (reply) Re: Simeus' Open Letter to Bush; Simidor responds to Auguste and Durban (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Daniel Simidor <danielsimidor@yahoo.com>

In the first year of his second term in office, I
called on President Aristide to resign, in order to
save the country a bloodbath and the shame of a second
US intervention under his rule.  Three and a half
years later, Haiti is near collapse, with Haitians
fleeing every which way from starvation or from
Lavalas gangs and other equal opportunity criminals.
Lance Durban in that context suggests it is time I and
the entire GNB movement start eating some crows.  JR
Auguste, for his part, wants to know what ?particular
national interest is being betrayed? by calling on the
US to put out the fire in Haiti.

Beyond Lavalas? brazen corruption, my primary
objective in calling for Aristide?s resignation had to
do with preventing the consolidation of fascist rule
in Haiti.  The 2005 elections may or may not take
place at this point.  In either case the results will
be less than desirable.  But with Aristide still in
power, those elections would have been systematically
undermined, in order to provide a democratic veneer to
his regime -- for the next 20 years or for life!
Aristide?s method for achieving this goal was to
abandon all economic and foreign policy decisions to
the ?International,? while focusing every energy and
resources on breaking opposition and independent
forces, and on building an all-powerful militia
alongside a weakened and corrupted police force.  Sort
of the same blueprint Papa Doc used for bringing the
country to heel.  Those who recoil from the
destructive violence of the Lavalas gangs in the
capital should ponder how much more powerful those
gangs would be today with the kind of impunity,
firepower, recruitment and training that would be at
their disposal with Aristide still in office. Yes, the
situation is even worse than it was in 2001 or 2002.
The question is whether things would be better today
or in the long run with Aristide still in power.

Now for the sake of keeping Homeland Security off my
doorstep, I must clarify one thing: I?m opposed to
US/foreign occupation and domination in Haiti, but I?m
emphatically not ?anti-US? (Durban?s opening
paragraph). If there were any reason to suppose that
another US military intervention would save us from
our own demons, I too would be on my knees or on the
phone calling on Uncle Sam to send in the Marines.
But that?s not what the record shows.  Let?s face it,
the politics of empire are such that what?s good for
the all-powerful center (G-8) is seldom beneficial for
the poor countries of the periphery who must generally
submit to an economic order that is very much against
their best interests.  In Haiti?s case, from 1980
onward, this has meant the loss of near
self-sufficiency in agriculture, sweatshops over local
industry, the privatization of public assets, and the
pursuit of a comparative advantage (cheap labor) that
spells disaster for the working class and the economy
as a whole.  Haiti?s abysmal performance in the last
two decades is not entirely of its own doing.  The US
and the international financial institutions it
controls have contributed more than their share to
that sorry situation. It is well known that for every
dollar the US gives or invests abroad, it gets back
four times that amount.  It is not always clear just
who is helping whom.

Haiti needs help but it also needs to disengage from
this logic of dependency.  Maybe, given a chance, the
Haitian people would overwhelmingly vote for US
status, whatever that means.  But it?s not a choice,
is it?  Unless maybe the rumors of fabulous wealth in
oil and gold, just off the coast of the southern
peninsula, that Haitians console themselves with,
should prove magically true, we are tied to this
Promethean rock of ours alone, until we can devise the
means of our salvation.

The best way to help Haiti is to help her develop her
own institutions and infrastructure, probably at a
fraction of the cost of all those rescue and
peacekeeping missions.  Above and beyond ideology,
Cuba?s modest bilateral aid to Haiti is the model of
development assistance that the world needs, in order
to reduce poverty and the widening gap between rich
and poor nations.  Please keep your Rambo saviors and
their weapons from out of space away from our already
devastated country. It is always a fool who invites
home a stranger or potential rival he or she doesn?t
have the means to invite out.



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