30738: Haiti Action (film) "The Ghosts of Cite Soleil" - Don't Believe the Hype by Charlie Hinton (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: haiti action <action.haiti@gmail.com>

http://www.haitisolidarity.net/article.php?id=182

 "The Ghosts of Cite Soleil" - Don't Believe the Hype by Charlie Hinton


 The director is Danish, not German, but The Ghosts of Cite Soleil makes
heroes of the made-in-Washington leaders of Haiti's 2004 coup in a manner
reminiscent of Leni Riefenstahl's adoration for Adolf Hitler in her famous
film from the 1930's, Triumph of the Will. It builds a web of lies - lies of
omission and lies of commission - into the "Big Lie" - a stylized,
decontextualized, post-modern, sexy/violent piece of propaganda disguised as
a documentary, full of guns but signifying nothing.

The Ghosts of Cite Soleil claims to reveal the intimate personal lives of
two gangsters who are brothers, Bily and 2Pac, in the deprived Cite Soleil
neighborhood of Port-au-Prince. When introducing them to several foreign
journalists, filmmaker Kevin Pina (Harvest of Hope, Haiti: We Must Kill the
Bandits) made the following comment, "Billy and I had a falling out over the
question of his accepting money from foreign journalists to hype this
question of Aristide and gangsters. The more they paid the more outlandish
became his claims . . ."

The director, Asger Leth, would have us believe the majority of people of
Cite Soleil don't support President Aristide, and that those who do are
forced to do so by armed gangsters. He ignores the fact that massive
pro-Aristide demonstrations have taken place in Cite Soliel repeatedly since
the coup. In one scene, a Cite Soleil crowd shouts, "Five full years, Five
full years." Leth translates, but does not explain the significance - the
people want Aristide back to finish his full five-year term.

The film doesn't tell us that "Opposition leaders" Andy Apaid and Charles
Henry Baker are also sweatshop owners who hate Aristide because he wanted to
raise the minimum wage and make them pay taxes, which the rich don't do in
Haiti.

We're told President Aristide left voluntarily - no mention of his
kidnapping by the U.S. military and his ongoing banishment from the
continent. We see jubilant crowds of Aristide opponents waving as the coup
makers drive into town, giving the impression most Haitians supported the
coup. We don't see the U.S./French/Canadian soldiers guarding the route and
making the entrance possible. We don't learn that Port-au-Prince was totally
defended the day of Aristide's kidnapping, and the coup leaders would never
have been able to take it over militarily. Instead Uncle Sam came to the
rescue.

We're not told that Louis Jodel Chamblain worked with the Duvalier
dictatorship's brutal militia, the Tonton Macoutes, in the 1980s; that
following a military coup against Aristide in 1991, he was the "operations
guy" for the FRAPH paramilitary death squad, accused of murdering uncounted
numbers of  Aristide supporters and introducing gang rape into Haiti as a
military weapon.

We're not told that Guy Phillipe is a former Haitian police chief who was
trained by US Special Forces in Ecuador in the early 1990s, or that the U.S.
embassy admitted that Phillipe was involved in the transhipment of
narcotics, one of the key sources of funds for paramilitary attacks on the
poor in Haiti. He says the man he most admires is former Chilean dictator
Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Leth portrays both of these men as credible
spokespersons, not gangsters.

Where did the weapons of the coup-makers come from? Who organized and
trained them? Who spent tens of millions of dollars to create an "opposition
movement" in Haiti? The United States is the real ghost in this film - it
simply does not exist, except for its official version of events, scripted
by George W. Bush, which The Ghosts of Cite Soleil follows scrupulously.

The Ghosts of Cite Soleil plays like a manipulative music video, featuring
music by Haitian rapper Wyclef Jean, also the executive producer, who
supported the coup and pushed the State Department line among the conscious
hip-hop community and progressive celebrities in Hollywood. This contrasts
to the principled stand of Danny Glover, Ruby Dee and her late, great
husband Ossie Davis. You can almost hear the violins behind Chamblain, as he
talks about his return to Haiti, but the music becomes dissonant and
menacing behind Aristide or behind 2Pac and Bily, who speak English no less,
but we never learn why. Like we never learn who, or why about anything in
this movie, a piece of soft core propaganda, cleverly, consciously, and
seductively made. It's being distributed by Sony, and may someday show at a
theatre near you. People get ready, the Ghosts are coming.

by Charlie Hinton
Haiti Action Committee