The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (43 page)

Haiti’s first democratically elected president was Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Catholic priest committed to the poor. He was elected in 1990, then ousted in a military coup in 1991. In 1994, with Haitian refugees flooding into Florida, the Clinton administration was forced to restore Aristide to power, but only with additional structural-adjustment demands. Aristide was re-elected in 2000, only to be deposed again in a U.S.-backed coup in 2004, Haiti’s bicentennial.

The destruction of Haiti’s rice industry, which was replaced with U.S. government-subsidized rice that Haitians refer to as “Miami rice,” as well as the sale of critical state-owned enterprises, like Haiti’s sole flour mill and cement factory, have left the country dependent on foreign trade and aid, keeping Haiti at a permanent disadvantage. It is critical now to cancel Haiti’s ongoing foreign debt, so that the country can devote its scant resources to rebuilding and not to repaying debt. The G-7 finance ministers met in Canada this week and announced the forgiveness of the bilateral debt between member states and Haiti. But the World Bank, IMF, and IDB debts remain (the IMF controversially promised a $100 million loan after the earthquake, eliciting condemnation, and has since pledged to convert it to a grant).

Earthquakes alone do not create disasters of the scale now experienced in Haiti. The wealthy nations have for too long exploited Haiti, denying it the right to develop in a secure, sovereign, sustainable way. The global outpouring of support for Haitians must be matched by long-term, unrestricted grants of aid, and immediate forgiveness of all that country’s debt. Given their role in Haiti’s plight, the United States, France, and other industrialized nations should be the ones seeking forgiveness.

July 14, 2010

Haiti, Six Months After the Earthquake

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti—July 12 marked the six-month anniversary of the devastating earthquake here in Haiti that killed as many as 300,000 people and left much of the country in ruins. Up to 1.8 million people are living in squalid tent cities, with inadequate sanitation, if any, no electricity and little security, or any respite from the intense heat and the worsening rains. Rape, hunger, and despair are constant threats to the people stranded in the camps. Six months ago, the world seemed united with commitments to help Haiti recover. Now, half a year later, the rubble remains in place, and misery blankets the camps, layered with heat, drenched by rain.

After landing in Haiti, we traveled to one of the more than 1,350 refugee camps, Camp Corail. It is right near Titanyen, which was used as a dumping ground for bodies during the first coup against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and which, after the earthquake, was used for makeshift mass graves.

Corail is on a flat expanse of white gravel, with orderly rows of tents. During the day, the camp becomes searingly hot, with no trees for protection.

Corail resident Romain Arius told me: “In the situation we’re living here in the tents, we can’t continue like that anymore. We would ask them as soon as possible to give us the real houses that they said they were going to give us so that our situation could improve.”

Soon after we left, we heard that a storm collapsed at least ninety-four tents and sent hundreds of residents fleeing to find shelter.

Haitians are angry, questioning where the billions of dollars donated in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake have gone. The Disaster Accountability Project found that of the 197 organizations that solicited money following the earthquake, only six had publicly available reports detailing their activities.

From the “international donor community,” the wealthier nations, more than $9 billion was pledged, but to date, only Brazil, Norway, and Australia have paid in full. Most of the U.S. pledge of $1.15 billion is now being held up in Congress.

Patrick Elie, a longtime Haitian democracy activist and Haiti’s former secretary of state for public security, spoke with me about land ownership and the earthquake’s enormous toll: “Land tenure in Haiti is in total chaos. This is also the result of the behavior of the Haitian elites over centuries. They appropriated land, especially after independence and the end of slavery, which would have been common property. And now, there is a lot of discussion about who owns what piece of land.”

Elie said that in this time of emergency that gives the government the power of eminent domain, the key question is whose land will be seized—communal land that peasants have used for centuries, or the vast tracts of land owned by the elites.

I also spoke with Sean Penn. The two-time Oscar-winning actor came to Haiti after the earthquake. Having just been through a medical crisis with his own teenage son, who underwent major surgery, he was horrified at the stories he was hearing about the amputations being performed in Haiti without anesthesia. Penn founded the J/P Haitian Relief Organization (jphro.org) and has been in Haiti for five of the past six months, managing a refugee camp at the Petionville Club golf course with 55,000 Haitians displaced by the earthquake. Sitting in a large tent, Penn was frustrated. Comparing the U.S. resources being spent in Afghanistan (which he called “a ludicrous exercise”) with the U.S. spending in Haiti, he said, “You have a war here, you’ve got a surge coming with storms, but no face to hate, no country to rail at, no natural resources, and the faces here are black.”

Penn says J/P HRO will be in Haiti for the long haul: “We plan to adapt, to adjust. I think our next major new push for us will be rubble removal and working with partners to get people returned into neighborhoods and to again work with partners. Take camp management into community management and advocacy.”

Patrick Elie advocates for popular Haitian leadership in the reconstruction: “We are a people who can fend for ourselves. We have a vision of where we want to go. So we do need friends, but we don’t need people to think for us, or to pity us.”

According to the
Washington Post
, only 2 percent of promised reconstruction aid has been delivered. The hurricane season is upon Haiti, and millions there are counting on all of us making good on our pledges.

March 23, 2011

Aristide’s Return to Haiti: A Long Night’s Journey into Day

The United States did its damnedest to prevent the return of the elected president it helped oust in 2004. That it failed is a turning-point.

Late at night on March 17, 2011, former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide boarded a small plane with his family in Johannesburg, South Africa. The following morning, he arrived in Haiti. It was just over seven years after he was kidnapped from his home in a U.S.-backed coup d’etat.

Haiti has been ravaged by a massive earthquake that killed more than 300,000 people and left a million and a half homeless. A cholera epidemic carried in by United Nations occupation forces could sicken almost 800,000. A majority of the population lives on less than a dollar a day.

Now, Aristide, by far the most popular figure in Haiti today, and the first democratically elected president of the first black republic in the world, has returned home.

“Bon retou, Titid”
(“good return, Titid”—the affectionate term for Aristide) read the signs in Port-au-Prince as thousands flocked to accompany Aristide from the Toussaint L’Ouverture airport to his home. L’Ouverture led the slave uprising that established Haiti in 1804. I was able to travel with Aristide, his wife, Mildred, and their two daughters from Johannesburg to Haiti on the small jet provided by the government of South Africa.

It was my second flight with them. In March 2004, the Aristides attempted to return from forced exile in the Central African Republic, but never made it back to Haiti. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other U.S. officials warned Aristide to stay away from the Western Hemisphere. Defying such pressure, the Aristides stopped in Jamaica before traveling to South Africa, where they remained until last weekend.

Just before this Sunday’s election in Haiti, President René Préval gave Aristide the diplomatic passport he had long promised him. Earlier, on January 19, then U.S. State Department spokesman PJ Crowley tweeted, referring to Aristide: “today Haiti needs to focus on its future, not its past.” Mildred was incensed. She said the U.S. had been saying that since they forced him out of the country. Sitting in the plane a few minutes before landing in Haiti, she repeated the words of an African leader who criticized the historic abuses of colonial powers by saying, “I would stop talking about the past, if it weren’t so present.”

Mark Toner, the new State Department spokesman, said last week: “Former President Aristide has chosen to remain outside of Haiti for seven years. To return this week could only be seen as a conscious choice to impact Haiti’s elections.”

Aristide did not choose to leave, or to remain outside Haiti, and the Obama administration knows that. On February 29, 2004, Luis Moreno, the No. 2 man in the U.S. embassy in Haiti, went to the Aristides’ home and hustled them off to the airport. Frantz Gabriel was Aristide’s personal bodyguard in 2004. I met him when he was with the Aristides in the Central African Republic then, and saw him again last Friday as the Aristides arrived home. He recalled:

It was not willingly that the president left, because all the people that came in to accompany the president were all military. Having been in the US military myself, I know what a GI looks like, and I know what a special forces [soldier] looks like also . . . when we boarded the aircraft, everybody changed their uniform into civilian clothes. And that’s when I knew that it was a special operation.

The U.S. continued to prevent Aristide from returning for the next seven years. Just last week, President Barack Obama called South African President Jacob Zuma to express “deep concerns” about Aristide’s potential return, and to pressure Zuma to block the trip. Zuma, to his credit, ignored the warning. U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks reveal a concerted drive, over years, to hamper the return of Aristide to Haiti, including diplomatically punishing any country that helped Aristide, including threatening to block a U.N. Security Council seat for South Africa.

After landing in Port-au-Prince, Aristide wasted no time. He addressed the people of Haiti from the airport. His remarks touched on a key point of the current elections there: that his political party, the most popular party in Haiti, Fanmi Lavalas, is banned, excluded from the elections. He said: “The problem is exclusion, and the solution is inclusion. The exclusion of Fanmi Lavalas is the exclusion of the majority . . . because everybody is a person.”

Looking out on the country he hadn’t seen in seven years, he concluded: “Haiti, Haiti, the further I am from you, the less I breathe. Haiti, I love you, and I will love you always. Always.”

June 1, 2011

Hope and Resistance in Honduras

While most in the United States were recognizing Memorial Day with a three-day weekend, the people of Honduras were engaged in a historic event: the return of President Manuel Zelaya, twenty-three months after he was forced into exile at gunpoint in the first coup in Central America in a quarter century. While he is no longer president, his peaceful return marks a resounding success for the opponents of the coup. Despite this, the post-coup government in Honduras, under President Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo, is becoming increasingly repressive, and is the subject this week of a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, signed by eighty-seven members of the U.S. Congress, calling for suspension of aid to the Honduran military and police.

As the only U.S. journalist on Zelaya’s flight home, I asked him how he felt about his imminent return. “Full of hope and optimism,” he said. “Political action is possible instead of armaments. No to violence. No to military coups. Coups never more.”

When Zelaya landed in Honduras, he kneeled down and kissed the ground. He was greeted by tens of thousands of people cheering and waving the black-and-red flag of the movement born after the coup, the FNRP, or National Front of Popular Resistance, “the resistance” that Zelaya now leads. His first stop: a massive rally at the memorial for nineteen-year-old Isis Obed Murillo, who was killed one week after the 2009 coup when Zelaya first attempted to fly back into the country. Murillo was with tens of thousands awaiting Zelaya’s return at the airport. The military blocked the runway and dispersed the crowd with live fire, killing the teenager.

Since then, violence and impunity have been constant. Farmers, journalists, students, teachers, and anyone else in Honduras daring to dissent face intimidation, arrest, and murder. At least twelve journalists have been killed there since the coup, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Scores of campesinos—small farmers—have been killed. High-school students protesting teacher layoffs and the privatization of education were violently attacked by police this week, with tear gas and live ammunition.

At the rally, Zelaya, memorializing Murillo, said, “Blood was not shed in vain, because we’re still standing . . . resistance is today the cry of victory.”

The current Honduran government agreed to allow Zelaya’s return to gain readmission into the Organization of American States in an attempt to shed Honduras’ pariah status in Latin America for the coup.