Book by John Maxwell

How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalist and Journalists

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Our Debt is Long Past Due

By John Maxwell

The Caribbean has now proved that it is even more hopeless at diplomacy than it is at cricket. And, as in cricket, those who are considered  guilty are not those at the top but the foot-soldiers.

Our gutless leaders – unable to look a principle in the face –  are, as I write on Friday, busy selling the Haitian people down the river … again.

Meanwhile the bombastic La Tortue, fresh from embracing a choice assemblage  of bloody-handed murderers, desires to sit at table with people who consider themselves upright, law abiding and above all, respectable. The Bahamas put our position best: We simply have no choice but to deal with whatever Haitian regime is there. Of course, if we don’t, the US might just find it necessary to issue a travel advisory about bubonic plague or Ebola fever in Nassau or Negril.

Condoleezza Rice has apparently threatened Jamaica directly, telling Patterson to get rid of Aristide or face unspecified  consequences.

But, even as we speak, the Bush Administration is beginning to unravel, unconscionable lie by unconscionable lie. But we do not understand that the slavemaster is in deep trouble and that we need not follow illegal orders.

 I have been re-reading some of the columns I wrote ten years ago and what surprises me is that some of them might have been written last week.

Now, listen to someone else, a man who is now a Judge at the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. He too is a Jamaican; his name is Patrick Robinson. In 1994 he was a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. On the very day my words above were published, Robinson was in Belem, Brazil,  presenting a report by the Commission. I quoted him in a later column (The New Slave Trade - Ja. Herald, June 26, 1994)

Rape as an instrument of Policy

“The people in Haiti have the same emotions and aspirations as the citizens of any other state in the organisation. They have within themselves an enormous capacity for warmth and love and friendship and endurance and a great yearning for peace, justice and democracy. But a people do not endure the hardships , the deprivation, the violence, the victimisation and the enormous disappointments that the Haitians have experienced over the past thirty-two months without their faith in humanity and their expectations of decency and justice  being challenged in a serious way …”

Mr Robinson then goes on to detail just how seriously the Haitians were challenged. As you read his words, please remember that Mr Robinson is speaking about some of the same people embraced last week by Mr La Tortue:

Robinson’s report told of the actions of the so-called Haitian army and its assistants, the ‘attaches’ or tontons in their campaign of terror against ordinary people who supported Aristide. Rape, he reported, was used as an instrument of policy.

‘The Commission received reports of rape and sexual abuse of the wives and relatives of men who are active supporters of President Aristide …women are also raped  not only because of their relationship to men who support President Aristide but because they also support President Aristide;  thus sexual abuse is used as an instrument of repression and political persecution.’

Patrick Robinson is now doing in the Hague what he and his fellows should have been asked to do in Haiti. In the court across the Atlantic, they are trying people accused of very serious crimes, but few as noisome and depraved as those committed against the men, women, and children of Haiti.

The world thinks it necessary to punish those in Yugoslavia who warred like savages against their own people for two and three years, but they forgot about those who had oppressed, murdered, maimed, raped, tortured and otherwise terrorised millions in ‘peacetime’ in Haiti  for more than 30 years.

I don’t believe that people were killed in Bosnia simply for trying to escape the country. As I reported in 1994, “the Haitian Goonocracy obviously regard escaping from their island prison as a capital offence. Yet the American authorities, operating from Jamaican territory, continue to send back to Haiti, men, women, children and babies who have committed this ‘offence’ and are therefore likely in President Clinton’s words, “to have their faces chopped off.”

And the men who were doing the chopping were, last weekend, on a platform in Gonaives glorying in the embrace of the newly anointed Prime Minister of Haiti. La Tortue was brought to the scene in US Army helicopters and accompanied by the resident representative of the Organisation of American States.

A Miasma foretold

That the assassins are still there was foreseen by me in 1994.  I had listened to the words of two top US policy makers and drew my conclusions.

James Woolsey, then head of the CIA said that the political problem in the Haitian military was that it was the rank and file hooligans who were the engine of change in the military. “It presents a very difficult situation for the policy-makers’ Defence Secretary William Perry told the Canadian Defence Minister that opposition to Aristide extended deep into the lower ranks of the Haitian military. Yet, Mr Perry told Meet The Press that the United States  “would want to use as much of the existing military and military police as is capable.”

 I said at the time “This would seem to suggest that the Pentagon, and by extension the CIA and the State Department) wish to preserve their assets in Haiti and to build into any new Aristide government an American capacity for subversion and destabilisation on demand.” (Imagine That!  – JH,  July 24, 1994).

I said at the time that the interests of the Haitian Bourbons clearly coincided with the interests of the American right, “which, to put it very delicately, has always been to turn back the poor and to keep the niggers in their place”

I wrote then:  ‘Aristide and his people agreed to allow an amnesty to the murdering hoodlums in the military and the private sector who had supported the Duvaliers and the Generals who had followed them. Aristide and his people could have made government impossible in Haiti, army or no army. They tried, instead, to work within the system. (When You Sup with the Devil –  JH Sept.  25, 1994.)

Liberating the Vampire

In 1994, the Americans were intervening for the 29th time in Haiti. It was my opinion that their latest mission had “liberated the vampire from its coffin and made it an officer and a gentleman. They have legitimised the illegitimate and promised impunity to the raging lumpen who feast on blood, pain and the physical and sexual abuse of women and children. They have sanctified the fanatical band of nigger-hating mulattos who prey parasitically on the Haitian body politic and call themselves the elite. The American white power structure is making its peace with its natural allies, and as in 1915–1934, when Jim Crow reigned in Haiti, hell is going to break loose” (Sept. 25 1994).

When Aristide was at last restored, in October 1994, I watched the proceedings on television and I wrote about them in a column entitled “A Love Song for Haiti.” It began by reporting Jean Bertrand Aristide’s words to his people:

I commented :

Sadly, Meyrelle Bertin was herself assassinated a year later, and her murder was blamed on Aristide.  Everything was blamed on Aristide.

As I reported in 1994: 

As I commented:

I urged our Caribbean people to come to the assistance of Haiti

But that was ten years ago.

Copyright©2004 John Maxwell  maxinf@cwjamaica.com

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update 16 June 2008