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Book by John Maxwell
How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalist and Journalists
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The Cannibal Army
By John Maxwell My
columns on Haiti have drawn more feedback than any before. Most
of my respondents agree with me, as may be expected, but I have
received some reasoned arguments against my position.
My
position, briefly, is that Haiti is too important to the cause
of Liberty and to black people all over the world for
anyone to be allowed to hijack the nation for any reason
whatever. Haiti must be Haitian, ruled by Haitians for Haitians.
As Lou
Dobbs plaintively said of the USA this week on CNN –
"this is not just a market, this is a nation."
Haiti
needs help, to constitute itself into the dream of all
those who fought and won Haitian independence, for those
inspired by Haiti to throw off the chains of imperial Europe,
for all those who understand the significance of slaves freeing
themselves, a feat never before accomplished in human history.
Haiti
needs help just to survive.
This
week, US Congresswoman Maxine Walters denounced those who said
Haiti had nothing to celebrate in this bicentennial year.
“We must understand that this ‘nothing to celebrate’ talk
is consistent with the long-standing attitudes of those who
never supported the Haitian people, and never wanted Haiti to be
owned by Africans. It is consistent with those who have
always had their hands deep in the Haitian economy, and who are
determined to deny the Haitian people pride in themselves and
pride in their spectacular history.”
‘An
International crime-scene’
One of
the people from whom I got feedback suggested that President
Aristide is a ‘rightist authoritarian’ who appeared to be
behind an ‘orchestrated campaign’ which included the
‘brutal repression' of the student movement by gangs paid
for and organized by the Aristide government. He suggests that I
should go to Haiti to see for myself that what he says is true.
On the
other hand I have got letters from people, including an
expatriate civil rights lawyer working in Haiti for several
years. He wrote “ …Your recent column was one of the most
lucid and perceptive accounts I have seen. Keep up the
good work, Haiti's poor need (and have always needed) more
people like you.”
Another
of my correspondents eloquently described Haiti as an
'international crime scene', a nation hijacked and sequestered
from its freedom by forces outside of its control.
I have
received responses from people inside and outside of Haiti,
residents, citizens and non-citizens, from journalists and
others, most of whom feel that the present situation in Haiti
has been engineered to curtail Haitian freedom, and to deny the
ordinary Haitian the chance to become a free citizen of the
world.
On
Friday, the news agencies announced that a gang describing
itself as “the Cannibal Army” had taken control of Haiti’s
fourth largest municipality, Gonaives. Gonaives is a city of
about 60,000 in the north east of the gulf formed by the two
peninsulas which stretch out towards Cuba. Gonaives is
significant for two reasons: first is that it is the site where
Haitian Independence was proclaimed 200 years ago; second, it is
the site of a murder which Aristide’s enemies attribute to
forces controlled by Aristide.
According
to the anti-Aristide forces, a former Aristide supporter named
Amiot Metayer was murdered by Aristide forces because he had
turned against Aristide. Metayer was a popular hero, an
Aristide strongman who had been serving time in prison. He
was also the leader of the Cannibal Army gang. A
jail-break by forces still unidentified released Metayer
and several other people. Metayer was shortly afterwards
murdered.
The
pro-Aristide forces maintain, however, that the ‘springing’
of Metayer from jail was a cover for the freeing of a number of
anti-Aristide gangsters, members of the FRAPH – a right-wing
terrorist force allied to the Cedras dictatorship. According to
the pro-Aristide side, Thursday’s capture of Gonaives by the
“Cannibale Armee” completed the second part of a plot to
free the FRAPH gunmen remaining in prison after the prison
break which freed Metayer.
Intransigence
and Obfuscation
I do
not pretend to be an authority on Haiti and particularly not on
what is happening on its streets at this moment. It should be
clear, however, to anyone who has followed what’s been
reported about Haiti over the past few years that the
Haitian Opposition is a collection of people who do not appear
to care what damage they do to Haiti as long as they get their
way. In the 1970s the Jamaica Labour Party behaved in
somewhat the same fashion but never went as far as saying that
it did not recognise the government or in attempting to set up a
parallel administration, in say, May Pen.
Three
years ago – on February 7, 2001 – on the eve of the second
inauguration of Jean Bertrand Aristide as President of Haiti,
the opposition coalition announced that it was forming an
alternative government. The coalition, calling itself the
Democratic Convergence, announced that it had selected a
President, Geffrard Gourgue, a law professor who had in 1987
been briefly part of the junta which succeeded Jean Claude
Duvalier.
At
that time the government (of President Rene Preval) and the
Opposition had been negotiating about various differences
between them, mainly to do with the disputed elections of seven
senators Essentially, the dispute was about a technicality.
The
Opposition had first proposed installing a provisional
government, then a three member junta and finally what it called
a Government of National Consensus. To them, Aristide was simply
unacceptable, despite his getting – legitimately – 67%
of the votes cast.
The
Aristide Fanmi Lavalas ( Lavalas Family – Lavalas meaning
Landslide, Avalanche or Cloudburst) rejected the oppositions
demands as unconstitutional.
Congresswoman
Maxine Walters believes that the opposition in Haiti is
trying to foment a coup d’etat.
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They
claim that they are staging peaceful protests, but that
is not what they are actually doing. It is my
impression that the opposition, led by Andy Apaid, is
simply involved in a power grab. They want to
place a council of their choosing in charge of the
government and the country, instead of accepting the
will of the people and respecting Haiti’s
democratically elected president.
And
they want to make sure that the governing council
represents only their interests as members of Haiti’s
bourgeoisie. They want their group, 'the elite',
to totally control Haiti. The opposition’s
protests are becoming increasingly violent and the
United States Government, my government, is not
providing the required leadership. It is not
meeting its responsibility to help de-escalate the
crisis in Haiti. The situation there is serious. |
The
Congresswoman wants the US to 'get tough', with the Haitian
Opposition.
In all
the negotiations over the years the Opposition has simply
refused to have any dealings with the country’s lawfully
elected President Aristide – who has a much better title to
his office than President George Bush.
The
leader of this Opposition, André Apaid, is a millionaire
businessman of Middle Eastern extraction whose family has been
in Haiti for decades. He is the leader of the elites, the
unreconstructed class of light-skinned and white Haitians who
have never forgiven the blacks for defeating France, Spain, and
Britain on their way to independence. They were extreme racists
200 years ago, and some of them still are today, although one
imagines that like the elites in Jamaica, many would have
accommodated themselves to reality.
Cheap
Labour the only Resource?
Haiti
is one of the world's poorest countries and Dr Paul Farmer, who
I mentioned last week, was reported by Tracy Kidder in the Nation
(Oct 2003) as saying "… there's no topsoil left in
a lot of the country, there are no jobs, people are dying of
AIDS and coughing their lungs out with TB, and the poor don't
have enough to eat. These are problems in the here and now.
Something has to be done. Haiti is flat broke…"
According
to some businessmen, cheap labour is Haiti’s only resource.
Opposition
leader Apaid owns several factories of the free-zone kind –
maquiladoiras in which Haitians work for low wages. In 1997 the
American anti-sweatshop NGO – the National Labour Committee
– described his operation:
|
Alpha
Sewing produces industrial gloves for Ansell Edmont of
Coshocton, Ohio, which is owned by Ansell International
of Lilburn, Georgia, which in turn is owned by Pacific
Dunlop Ltd. of Melbourne, Australia.
Ansell
Edmont boasts in its promotional literature that it is
the world's largest manufacturer of safety gloves and
protective clothing, but the workers at Alpha Sewing do
not have even the most basic safety protection.
They
produce Ansell Edmont's "Vinyl-Impregnated
Super-Flexible STD" gloves with bare hands;
Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC), the chemical that toughens the
glove, also takes off layers of skin. And the dust
from the production of the "Vinyl-Coated Super
Comfort Seams-Rite" gloves gives many workers
respiratory problems.
Hours
at the plant are from 6 am to 5:30 pm, Monday through
Saturday, and often from 6 am to 3:30 pm on Sunday as
well -- a 78-hour work week. Approximately 75% of the
workers make less than the [Haitian] minimum wage.
In
April, 1995, a worker who refused to work on Sunday so
that he could go to church was fired. When he
returned to pick up his severance pay, the manager
called the UN police and reported a burglar on the
premises. The UN police arrived and promptly
handcuffed the worker.
After
protests from the other employees, the UN police finally
let the worker go. The next day, management began
firing, three at a time, four at a time, all those
workers who had protested the arrest. |
According
to the National Labour Committee
|
Apaid
is a notorious Duvalierist. When asked at a
business conference in Miami soon after the coup in 1991
what he would do if President Aristide returned to
Haiti, Apaid replied vehemently, 'I'd strangle
him!'
At
the time, Apaid was heading up USAID's PROMINEX business
promotion project, a $12.7 million program to encourage
US. and Canadian firms to move their businesses to
Haiti. |
Apaid
reportedly has US citizenship, having been born in the US.
It is,
of course, perfectly possible that a businessman-politician who
owns sweatshops is a die-hard democrat. Whatever Apaid’s
ideology, for the Haitian Opposition to attach itself to
an organisation calling itself the Cannibal Army would not
seem to encourage confidence. As Congresswoman Walters
asks: why can’t the Haitian Opposition submit itself to
elections like any other party in this democratic world? What
makes them so special?
It is
a question Caricom should be asking.
Copyright 2002 John Maxwell
maxinf@cwjamaica.com
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update 16 June 2008 |
