Aristide No "Ghetto Priest"

By Aduku Addae

Aristide is no "ghetto priest" as the world capitalist media and his bourgeois competitors in Haiti have described him. Aristide is a a highly educated and very accomplished man with very refined tastes who has risen to the very pinnacle of wealth and power in Haiti. You saw that frigging PALACE he lives in! And you saw that, as befitting his station in life, they moved him to a PALACE in the central African Republic. He is the Prime Minister of Haiti - a bourgeois politician to boot - and in this respect is no different from George Bush and Jacques Chirac. As it concerns Aristide the US/EU intervention in Haiti is a falling out among thieves. As such, for me, the Aristide episode is closed.

What remains important is the repression unleashed on the workers in the slums in Haiti. We have to get our heads out of our behinds and understand that Aristide's plight is not our concern. (He has almost all the influential negroes rooting for him already anyway.)  Our real concern should be for the workers who are left behind by Aristide to face the wrath of Guy Philippe and the US/EU interventionist. Kevin Pina spells it out for us in the most graphic of terms:

"Every night I get frantic calls from friends and contacts I have met and interviewed in the past.  In the background I hear the thunder of heavy automatic weapons and the screams of terror as they describe to me the carnage being met upon them. The calls come from places like Bel Air, Cite Soleil, La Saline and Martissaint.  The poorest of the poor who supported President Aristide and democracy are being slaughtered by the former military and FRAPH.  There is a 6 p.m. curfew imposed by the international forces but it does not seem to apply to these killers" (Black Commentator).

It is to the cause of our brother workers in these ghettos in Haiti that we should rally, not to Jean Bertrand Aristide in his PALACE in the Central African Republic. We need to get it right!

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updated 29 September 2007