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Books on Haiti and the
Caribbean
Hubert Cole. Christophe: King of Haiti. New
York: The Viking Press, 1967.
C.L.R. James.
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
(1938)
Edourad Gissant.
Caribbean Doscourse (2004)
/ Barbara Harlow.
Resistance Literature (1987)
Josaphat B. Kubayanda.
The Poet's Africa: Africanness in the Poetry of Nicolas Guillen and Aime
Cesaire
(1990)
Myriam J. A.
Chancy.
Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (1997)
Paul Laraque and Jack Hirschman.
Open
Gate An Anthology of Haitian Creole Poetry
(2001)
David P. Geggus, ed.
The Impact of the
Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World.
University of South Carolina Press, 2001.
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Haiti after the Press Went Home
By Thabo Mbeki
There was
another important July birthday that passed in our country
without public notice. But no so in Haiti, where thousands of
people took to the streets bearing placards carrying the words
– “Bonne Féte President Titid” – Happy Birthday
President Titid.
The birthday demonstrators also demanded the
return of Titid – President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, an
honoured guest in our country. Titid, “little Aristide”, is
the affectionate Creole nickname given to President Aristide by
the poor of his country. He quietly celebrated his 51st birthday
in our country on July 15.
Where our people did not join him in these
celebrations because they did not know it was his birthday, the
people of Haiti did not forget. But they could not join him
because circumstances had taken him and his family far away from
his beloved motherland.
On July 15, CNN reported that, “Aristide
supporters, singing ‘happy birthday’, marched with empty
plates and spoons to show they were hungry.
“If Aristide was here, we would be
celebrating with him and eat with him at the national palace on
his birthday today,” said Michele Sanon, a resident of the Cité
Soleil slum.”
Reuters reported that on the very day that
President Aristide quietly celebrated his 51st birthday and the
slum dwellers marched in protest at his absence, gunmen killed
two policemen in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, having fired
on a group of police officers standing in the street. The
authorities said the attack was politically motivated.
Port-au-Prince Police Commissioner Harry
Beauport said, "We firmly believe the police are being
targeted, because we have noted a series of attacks against our
policemen, several of them deadly.”
The news agency said, “With rebel forces
still in control of many areas of the country, tensions between
police and rebels have been rising in recent weeks. Rebel
leaders have criticized government plans to disarm their
soldiers, a move that would leave Haitian police and United
Nations peacekeepers in charge of security in the country. The
rebels, many of whom are former members of the Haitian army
disbanded by Aristide in the mid-1990s, have demanded the
creation of a new army.”
As much as they did not know of President
Aristide’s birthday, our people will be ignorant of all this
and much else that is happening in Haiti. They will not have had
access to the June 21st article written by a Haitian, Lucson
Pierre-Charles, entitled “Haiti After the Press Went Home:
Chaos Upon Chaos”.
Evidently the US and other journalists, who
had come to Haiti in the period preceding the removal of
President Aristide on February 29th, went home soon after the
President was taken out of his country.
Pierre-Charles writes that, “The country is
descending into chaos and to have a better understanding of what
lies ahead, one needs to look no further than to the latest
travel warning for Haiti issued by the Bureau of Consular
Affairs at the State Department.
“According to that statement, the situation
in Haiti remains unpredictable and potentially dangerous despite
the presence of foreign security forces. This warning followed a
report issued in early May by the United Nations reaching a
similar conclusion.”
He continues,
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“The security apparatus is on the
verge of collapsing due to the proliferation of small
arms, the mere presence of the heavily armed rebels and
Aristide loyalists, the increasing gang activities, the
rampant rise in kidnappings and the release of 3,000
prisoners by Guy Philippe and his squads following the
ouster of Mr. Aristide. Some of the rebels will be
integrated into the police force despite the fact that
they killed a great number of policemen and burned down
police headquarters in the lead up to the coup.
“In most parts of the country, they
appointed themselves as mayors, police chiefs and
judges. (One report says 6,000 elected officials have
been removed and replaced by self-appointed
individuals.) Under Mr. Aristide’s leadership, the
police force was often criticized for being too heavily
politicised. Under (the) technocratic administration
(installed after the removal of President Aristide), the
police force will consist of convicted human rights
abusers, murderers, rapists, thugs and death squads who
have committed some of the worst atrocities during the
first coup in 1991.” |
On May 4th, a 9-person Labour/Religious/Community
Fact-Finding Delegation visited Haiti. Sent by the San Francisco
Labour Council, it included US and Canadian trade unionists,
religious leaders and human rights activists. It reported that:
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The coup which deposed President
Aristide has led to a serious wave of attacks and
persecutions of supporters of President Aristide and his
Fanmi Lavalas Party. The delegation heard testimony from
an elected Member of Parliament for the Fanmi Lavalas
who is living in hiding, having been driven out of his
town under gunfire. Other political leaders and known
activists have also been forced into hiding, living
underground, fearing the death threats and violence
directed at supporters of the ousted government. Despite
its obvious popularity, the Fanmi Lavalas movement is
not currently able to have political demonstrations or
otherwise take open political action due to the threat
of attack.
The (new administration)…has not
provided security for those currently most at risk. The
names of Lavalas supporters - and even those suspected
of being Lavalas supporters - are being read off on
right-wing radio stations as an implicit threat. Neither
the coup regime nor its international backers have taken
action to contain what many Haitians refer to as an
anti-Lavalas "witch hunt" that continues to
this day. |
A US human rights activist and College
Professor who has been visiting Haiti since 1977, Tom Reeves,
wrote on May 5, “The very same para-military and former Army
officers who terrorized Haiti during the previous (1991) coup
are doing so today. Their victims are mostly the poor and their
popular organizations who supported (and still support)
President Aristide and Fanmi Lavalas. We interviewed many of
these victims who said they recognized their tormentors (and in
one case rapists) as the same men who had victimized them a
decade ago. Among those terrorizing Haiti today are many common
criminals who were let out of the National penitentiary by the
"rebels," as well as major convicted human rights
abusers and mass murderers like Jodel Chamblain and Jean "Tatoune."
The “previous coup” to which Reeves
refers took place in 1991, when the Haiti military seized power
and forced the elected President Aristide into exile. The then
US government, opposed to unconstitutional changes of
government, assisted him to return to power in 1994. On resuming
his term as President, he dissolved the Army, leaving the
civilian police to be responsible for national security.
Oscar Arias, the former President of Costa
Rica, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987. Disturbed by
the reappearance of the soldiers who had carried out the 1991
coup d’etat, and the demands that the Haitian army, dissolved
in 1995, should be reconstituted, he spoke out on March 15.
He observed that one Guy Philippe had been
quoted by “The Washington Post” saying, "I am the
chief, the military chief. The country is in my hands." He
wrote:
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Nothing could more clearly prove why
Haiti does not need an army than the boasting of rebel
leader Guy Philippe the other day in Port-au-Prince. The
Haitian army was abolished nine years ago during a
period of democratic transition, precisely to prevent
the country from falling back into the hands of military
men.
Like so many countries in the Third
World, Haiti has suffered not only from a lack of
national security in the sense of borders and
territorial integrity but also from an ongoing crisis of
human security, the right of each person to live in
peace and with the guarantee of basic rights such as
food, health care, education and citizenship.
The army, long an instrument of
suppressive authoritarian regimes, has historically
deprived Haitians of these fundamental rights.
The abolition of the army makes as
much sense today as it did in 1995. The Haitian people
still need their government to spend its precious few
resources on fighting poverty, not buying arms. They
need a professional, depoliticised police force to
maintain order, not an army that attacks its own people
with impunity. They need a say in their country's
destiny, not subjugation to the rule of men with guns.
Were the international community now
to stand by as the rebels reinstated the army, it would
surely destroy the seeds of peace and self-rule that
have been planted with great sacrifice by the Haitian
people. |
Guy Philippe was a death squad leader under
the Duvaliers and a member of the FRAPH we mention below. He was
taken into the police when the army was dissolved in 1995. Human
Rights Watch says that police under his command summarily
executed people they arrested. Discovered to be planning a coup
d’etat in 2000, he fled to the neighbouring Dominican
Republic.
Here he linked up with other killers of the
Duvalier period, including Louis Jodel Chamblain, Jean Pierre
Baptiste, who calls himself General Tatoune, and the leader of
the 1991 coup d’etat, Emmanuel ‘Toto’ Constant.
Of Chamblain and Baptiste, the February 29
edition of the “San Francisco Chronicle” (SFC) said
Chamblain is “a former army officer who later headed the Front
for the Advancement of the Haitian People or FRAPH, a
paramilitary organisation responsible for thousands of murders
of Aristide followers in the early 1990s.
“Baptiste and Chamblain were convicted in
absentia for massacring 25 Aristide supporters in a seaside slum
known as Raboteau in the northern city of Gonaives in 1994.”
As he and his fellow “rebels” marched on
Port-au-Prince in February, Chamblain, as quoted by the SFC,
said: “The army was demobilised. Now the army has been
remobilised and is a constitutional army. Aristide has two
choices: prison or execution by firing squad.”
Concerned at what might happen when they
succeeded to overthrow the democratic government of Haiti,
Deputy Director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch,
Joanne Mariner, said: “These men, notorious for killings and
other abuses during the military government, must not be allowed
to take violent reprisals against government loyalists.”
The SFC also reported that while Guy Philippe
served in the leadership of the Haiti police, he and his
colleagues from the former Duvalier army “began collecting
bribes for the drugs that easily pass through this nation of 8
million people. Internal reports from foreign observers found
that the ‘Latinos’ routinely gave gifts to politicians and
once squeezed the government into exiling its former inspector
general after the seizure of more than three-quarters of a ton
of cocaine implicated the men.”
It is no wonder that Tom Reeves even in 2003,
after Philippe and others had started their violent campaign
against the Aristide government, could quote a young man of Cap-Haitien
as saying, "It's the army I really despise. At least now I
can sit here with my friends and complain. Under the military, I
would be shot. When I saw Himmler leading the demonstration by
the Convergence last November, I was really scared."
Reeves wrote that, “The aptly named Himmler
is Himmler Rebu, a former army officer who has been involved in
several coup attempts.”
Those, like Rebu, who prepared the putch that
led to the removal of the government of Haiti in 2004, carried
out a violent provocation at a university on December 5, 2003,
which they proceeded to blame on Lavalas.
The US journalist and documentary filmmaker,
Kevin Pina, Associate Editor of “The Black Commentator”
wrote: “In the wake of the fabricated events of December 5,
the Haitian government and Lavalas endured weeks of clandestine
attacks, while the opposition demonstrated under heavy police
protection.
|
Then, on December 26, the great
silent beast of Haiti’s poor, portrayed as violent and
anti-democratic by the Haitian press and their friends
in the international corporate media, awakened. Tens of
thousands of Lavalas supporters hit the streets with a
singular purpose and objective: that Haiti's
constitution be respected and President Aristide be
allowed to fulfil his five-year term in office.
“The real battle had just begun, as
Haiti’s long-oppressed millions prepared to celebrate
the 200th anniversary of the world’s only successful
slave revolution and the first black republic. |
Michele Sanon who demonstrated in
Port-au-Prince on July 15 to celebrate her President’s
birthday and demand his return, carrying an empty plate and a
spoon, is part of “the great silent beast of Haiti’s poor”
of which Pina wrote. She, like many among Haiti’s urban and
rural poor, see President Aristide as their very own Titid.
One other of her Lavalas leaders is Annette
Auguste, who was arrested on May 10, on the pretext that she was
involved in the December 5 events. She sent out a message on May
23 from Pétionville Penitentiary, where she was detained.
For us, her words recall a time, which is not
so long ago, when we too had to fight for our liberation. She
wrote:
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While I have been forced to sit in
this jail cell I have also seen the cynicism of some
within our party, brought about by this campaign of
repression, intimidation and assassination. I understand
their fear, as I am myself a victim of this campaign
whose purpose is to destroy our hope and aspirations for
building a Haiti where the poor are not simple tools
upon which to build dreams of personal empire and
wealth.
I send you all my love and gratitude
for remaining strong in separating the lies from the
truth in Haiti's current situation. I send you all my
blessings as a free Haitian woman fighting for the
rights of the impoverished majority in my homeland.
They may imprison my body but they
will never imprison the truth I know in my soul. I will
continue to fight for justice and truth in Haiti until I
draw my last breath. |
Annette Auguste’s moving message draws
attention to the real nature of the struggle in Haiti, which the
working people of that country, the slum dwellers who demand the
return of President Aristide, understand very well.
From his election in 1990, President Aristide
and other patriots have been engaged in a complex and difficult
struggle to establish the stable democratic system that has
eluded the First Black Republic since its birth 200 years ago.
They have also sought to ensure that this new democracy should
address the interests of the majority of the people, the black
urban and rural poor.
An adherent of Liberation Theology, together
with such outstanding progressive thinkers within the Roman
Catholic Church as Helder Camara, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Oscar
Romero, Ernesto Cardenal and Erwin Kräutler, President Aristide
would have been inspired by such Biblical teachings as:
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He hath shewed strength with his arm;
he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their
hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seats,
and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the
hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty
away. (Luke 1: 51-53.) |
Opposed to the related political and social
outcomes President Aristide sought are sections of the
population of Haiti, which have historically been the
beneficiaries of successive systems of dictatorship that have
guaranteed the privileges of the few and the impoverishment of
the many, keeping the mighty in their seats and subjugating
those of low degree. The privileged few have consistently
depended on state repression to protect this social order, as
Oscar Arias said.
The Duvalier regimes of “Papa Doc and Baby
Doc” developed this repression into open state terrorism
against the masses of the people, relying on the police, the
Army that was disbanded in 1995 and the “tonton macoutes”.
Agents and practitioners of the Duvalier state terrorism led the
counter-revolution of 2004, which resulted in the overthrow the
Aristide government.
The central purpose of the counter-revolution
is to halt and reverse the long-delayed democratic revolution in
Haiti, guarantee the positions of the privileged few, and ensure
the continued oppression, disempowerment and impoverishment of
the millions of poor Haitians. In many respects, the 2004
counter-revolution in Haiti was not dissimilar to the
counter-revolution in Chile in 1973, which resulted in the
overthrow of the Allende government, the death of the President,
and the installation of the Pinochet military dictatorship.
In his July article, “Haiti’s Cracked
Screen: Lavalas Under Siege While the Poor get Poorer”, Kevin
Pina described Haiti today in the following terms:
|
Former Haitian military leaders
prance hand in hand with Haiti's traditional economic
elite, intellectuals and artists. The poor black
majority, who cannot read or write and continue to
support the constitutional government of President
Aristide, has been deliberately made indescribably
poorer in an effort to force them to turn against their
own interests.
Going to bed hungry is not uncommon
in Haiti. The greatest violence here is the violence of
hunger and poverty. It permeates and consumes everything
in its path. Haiti's phantom "middle class"
– the relative few who have something such as an
education to cling to – can be easily manipulated
against a government that has declared itself to be
working on behalf of those who have nothing save for the
conviction that tomorrow may yield a better future for
their children. This is especially true when the media
inside and outside of Haiti do everything possible to
make it so. |
On February 29th, the day President Aristide
was flown out of his country, the UN Security Council adopted a
Resolution on Haiti. Among other things, it decided to establish
an intervention force and directed this UN contingent to:
contribute to a secure and stable environment in the country,
“as appropriate and as circumstances permit”; assist the
police and Coast Guard to establish and maintain public safety
and law and order and to promote and protect human rights;
support “the constitutional political process under way in
Haiti.”
What was and is strange and disturbing about
this Resolution is that it is totally silent on the central
issue of the unconstitutional and anti-democratic removal of the
elected Government of Haiti. It says nothing about the notorious
figures who achieved this objective, arms in hand, killing many
people.
Seemingly to avoid the obligation to disarm
and punish those who took up arms against a democratic
government, it even directed that the UN forces should discharge
these obligations “as circumstances permit”.
However, it is perfectly obvious that a safe
and secure environment in Haiti, respect for human rights, and a
return to constitutional legality cannot be achieved without
defeating the criminal forces of counter-revolution that
necessitated the deployment of UN troops and other international
interventions. The declared purposes of the UN cannot be
realised while those schooled in the brutal practices of the
Duvalier’s occupy the centre-stage in Haiti.
The UN will not achieve its goals if it does
not guarantee the safety and security and the democratic rights
of the leaders and members of Fanmi Lavalas, other democrats and
the poor of Haiti who demand democracy and development.
Time will tell whether the UN is ready and
willing to live up to its obligations to the poor of Haiti, as
well as respect the binding principles contained in its Charter
and the Declaration of Human Rights. Time will tell whether what
Oscar Arias warned against will be avoided – the destruction
of “the seeds of peace and self-rule that have been planted
with great sacrifice by the Haitian people.” What has been
allowed to happen in Haiti After the Press Went Home raises
serious concerns in this regard.
As the African slaves of Haiti fought for
their liberation more than two centuries ago, among other things
the counter-revolution opposed to the French Revolution tried
hard to restore the slavery in Haiti that Jacobin France had
abolished, propelled by the heroic struggle of the risen slaves.
At that time, the outstanding leader of the
revolutionary African slaves, Toussaint L’Ouverture, wrote to
the French Directory and, speaking of the counter-revolution,
said:
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Do they think that men who have been
able to enjoy the blessing of liberty will calmly see it
snatched away? They supported their chains only so long
as they did not know any condition of life more happy
than that of slavery. But today when they have left it,
if they had a thousand lives they would sacrifice them
all rather than be forced into slavery again…We have
known how to face dangers to obtain our liberty, but we
shall know how to brave death to maintain it. |
Annette Auguste has sent the same message to
the counter-revolution of 2004. In her heart burns the same
unquenchable desire to build “a Haiti where the poor are not
simple tools upon which to build dreams of personal empire and
wealth”, which inspired her forebears to defeat the mighty
European powers and establish the First Black Republic.
The risen slaves achieved their liberation
even though their brilliant and renowned leader, Toussaint
L’Ouverture, was imprisoned far away in a French jail. The
poor of the slums of Bel Air, Cité Soleil and elsewhere in
Haiti will achieve their liberation even though their brave and
beloved leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, is an honoured guest far
away in South Africa.
Knowledge of that past, and this future, was
the best birthday present that Titid received, to celebrate his
51st birthday. Bonne Fête President Titid.
Source: African
National Congress Website www.anc.org
* * * *
*
The Impact of the
Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World
Reviewed by Mimi Sheller
Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804
A Brief History with Documents
By Laurent
Dubois and John D. Garrigus
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies. As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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A Wreath for Emmett Till
By Marilyn Nelson; Illustrated by
Philippe Lardy
This memorial to
the lynched teen is in the Homeric
tradition of poet-as-historian. It is a
heroic crown of sonnets in Petrarchan
rhyme scheme and, as such, is quite
formal not only in form but in language.
There are 15 poems in the cycle, the
last line of one being the first line of
the next, and each of the first lines
makes up the entirety of the 15th. This
chosen formality brings distance and
reflection to readers, but also calls
attention to the horrifically ugly
events. The language is highly
figurative in one sonnet, cruelly
graphic in the next. The illustrations
echo the representative nature of the
poetry, using images from nature and
taking advantage of the emotional
quality of color. There is an
introduction by the author, a page about
Emmett Till, and literary and poetical
footnotes to the sonnets. The artist
also gives detailed reasoning behind his
choices. This underpinning information
makes this a full experience, eminently
teachable from several aspects,
including historical and literary—School
Library Journal |
* * * * *
The White Masters
of the World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* * *
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Ancient African Nations
*
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If you like this page consider making a donation
* * *
* *
Negro Digest / Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * *
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The
Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
* * * *
*
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding
of Haiti
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update 13
January 2012
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