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After a 7.0 earthquake hit the
Haitian capital of Port au Prince on Jan. 12, U.S.
President Barack Obama
solemnly told the Haitian people two days later, “In this hour of need
you will not be forsaken.” The quake was a catastrophe that may
rival the deadly tsunami of 2004. At press time, the death toll is
estimated at 200,000, and the number of affected or displaced persons
is perhaps as high as 3 million to 3.5 million out of Haiti’s population of nine million.
Yet, for all the
media hype, U.S. aid came with big strings: a U.S./United Nations military
occupation and the prospect of more U.S.-led World Bank economic misery
for the masses. In short, it’s a continuation of a 200-year war by U.S. imperialism against the world’s first successful slave
revolution. The intention of Washington’s so-called relief effort is not the long-term welfare of
the Haitian masses but their compliance with U.S. policy at the point of a gun. In response, socialists
say, “Food In, Troops Out!” “U.S./UN Troops
Out of Haiti!”
As Time magazine
described it, “Haiti for all intents and purposes, became a 51st state at 4:53 p.m. Tuesday in the wake of its deadly earthquake. If not a
state, then at least a ward of the state.”
Thus far, the Obama administration has pledged $100 million in
aid to Haiti. That amounts to slightly over $11 per person. In
comparison, the U.S. has spent nearly $1 trillion on wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan; 10,000 times as much as the U.S. pledge to Haiti. U.S. banks alone gave $150 billion to its employees last year,
1500 times larger than Obama’s pledge.
As stated by U.S. officials, the first priority in Haiti was military “security,” but against whom or what was
unclear. On Jan. 17 Navy Rear Admiral Michael Rogers said, “We have
seen nothing to suggest to us widespread disorder.” Marine Major
General Cornell Wilson, in charge of Marine operations in Haiti, refused to outline its “rules of engagement,” as bursts
of gunfire are being heard around the capital.
Most reports on
the ground revealed not only a relative calm but widespread
cooperation, as ordinary Haitians met the incredible challenges of
saving lives with their bare hands.
Nicaraguan
President Daniel Ortega said, “There is no logic that U.S. troops
landed in Haiti. Haiti seeks humanitarian aid, not troops. It would be
madness [if] we all began to send troops to Haiti.” Former Cuban
President Fidel Castro said in his denunciation of the U.S. occupation of Haiti, “We send doctors, not soldiers.”
The rhetoric of U.S. officials, reinforced by corporate media, honed in on the
so-called threat of riots and looting over supplies, without much
evidence. The endlessly repeated racist image of Haitian culture as
somehow responsible for the poverty in Haiti—most live on less than $2
a day—ignores the reality of Haiti. Haiti is undergoing its fourth U.S.
occupation in the last century. The capitalist media ignores decades of
U.S. support for Haiti’s dictators and the imposition of U.S.-dominated World
Bank policies based on slave-labor assembly
sweatshops.
The U.S. puppet regime of Haitian President Rene Preval and the U.S. surrogate forces of the United Nations were exposed as
incompetent and criminally negligent, despite having experienced four
deadly hurricanes in 2008. Under U.S. pressure, Preval
signed an agreement relinquishing control of its badly managed airport
to the United States. Once in charge, the U.S. quickly gave landing priority to military transport.
Jarry Emanuel, the
air logistics officer for the World Food Program, complained, “There
are 200 flights going in and out every day. … But most of those flights
are for the United States military. Their priorities are to secure the
country.”
Obama has ordered
some 16,000 U.S. troops to Haiti with de facto control of the entire “relief” effort. The
despised occupation forces of the United Nation’s Mission to Stabilize
Haiti (MINUSTAH), which had taken over for U.S. imperialism when
Washington needed more troops for its slaughter in Iraq, announced it
was adding 3500 troops to its 9000 total, and 1500 more cops to its
2100 international force.
As Dan Beeton writes in NACLA, a left-of-center magazine on Latin America and the Caribbean, "The UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH),
which began its mission in June 2004, has been marred by scandals of
killings, rape and other violence by its troops almost since it began."
Meanwhile, U.S.
Coast Guard cutters surround Haiti to intercept Haitians attempting to reach South Florida. The prison at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba, originally scheduled by President Obama
to close on Jan. 11 over human rights abuses, was fitted with 1,000
cots for Haitians captured at sea.
In a victory for
immigrant-rights advocates, Homeland Security Secretary Janet
Napolitano announced Jan. 15 that some 30,000 Haitians would receive
Temporary Protective Status (TPS) for those in the U.S. who face deportation. TPS, which has been granted
immigrants who face natural disasters at home, will give Haitians an
18-month reprieve on deportation, with the right to seek work permits.
Napolitano warned Haitians that those caught seeking refuge in the U.S.
after the Jan. 12 will immediately be sent back to Haiti.
“NEW ORLEANS ALL OVER AGAIN?”
And what of
getting food, water and medical care to Haiti’s earthquake victims?
Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a Bush-era hold-over in the Obama administration, said, “Without having any
structure on the ground in terms of distribution … an airdrop is simply
going to lead to riots.”
Six days after
the quake, the Miami Herald reported,
“Thousands of Haitians living in tent cities around the capital and
awaiting medical aid outside hospitals show little sign of having
received any international aid. An eight hour drive through the capital
on Monday produced three sightings of water trucks but no widespread
aid distribution.”
The BBC reported
on Jan. 21, “The US and UN World Food Programme
insist the distribution of food and water is well under way, but the BBC’s
Adam Mynott in Port-au-Prince says many people have still seen no international relief
at all.” The Miami Herald reported on
Friday, Jan. 22, that ”U.N. and humanitarian agencies reported visiting
350 of the camps as of late Thursday and reported that only six of
those had access to drinking water.”
So profound is
the crisis that “the United Nations estimates that two million Haitians
need immediate food assistance. As of Saturday, the [UN’s] World Food
Program had reached 207,392 people in Port au Prince and 113,313 in
other areas” (The New York Times, Jan. 26).
In a report
filed on Jan. 21, the legal director of Doctors Without Borders,
Francoise Saulnier, said a plane carrying
over 12 tons of aid was turned back from Port au Prince airport three
times that week. “Now everything has been mixed together, and the
urgent and vital attention to the people have been delayed, while
military logistic—which is useful, but not on day three, not on day
four, but maybe on day eight—this military logistic has really jammed
the airport and led to this mismanagement, real mismanagement of vital
issues,” said Saulnier. Their plane was
diverted to the Dominican Republic, delaying the medical aid three
days. In addition, teams of Cuban, Nicaraguan, Venezuelan, Mexican, and
French teams, and a delegation of Caribbean nations in CARICOM were also turned back at the airport.
A searing
opinion piece, authored by three surgeons at the Cornell Medical Center in New York City, appeared in The Wall Street Journal on Jan. 26,
which highlighted the gun-crazy priorities of U.S. imperialism. The three assembled a medical team the day
after the earthquake in cooperation with the U.S. State Department and
the Boston-based Partners in Health. “We wanted to reach the local
hospitals in Haiti immediately—but were only allowed by the U.S.
military controlling the local airport to land in Port au Prince
Saturday night. We were among the first groups there.”
“This delay
proved tragic. Upon our arrival at the Haiti Community hospital we
found scores of patients with pus dripping out of open fractures and
crush injuries. Some wounds were already infested with maggots.
Approximately one-third of the victims were children.”
“Our operation
received virtually no support from any branch of the U.S. government. …
As we were leaving Haiti we were appalled to see warehouse-sized
quantities of unused medicines, food and other supplies at the airport,
surrounded by hundreds of U.S. and international soldiers. … For all the outcry about Katrina, our nation has fared
no better in this latest disaster.”
CNN’s Karl Penhaul reported on Jan. 20 from Port au Prince General Hospital, where U.S. paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne
Division had just taken up positions. Doctors there said that there was
no security problem at the hospital—until troops arrived. Penhaul wondered aloud, “Will this be New Orleans all over again?”
The reporter
interviewed a Haitian woman trying to visit her daughter who had been
told that she couldn’t enter the hospital by a U.S. soldier. “What are you white people in here for? What are
you white people coming in and occupying Haiti for?” she told the
reporter.
Penhaul said he spoke
with other Haitians who accepted the intervention but others who
definitely did not. “They say the last thing we need right now is guys
with guns; we need medicine, we need food, we need water, and fewer
guys with guns.”
Already on the
ground and without guns were some 300 Cuban doctors who are part of a
permanent mission in Haiti. The Cubans reopened three hospitals in Port au Prince
and set up field hospitals. Cuban-operated clinics, according to Dr.
Evan Lyon of Partners in Health and the present administrator of the
General Hospital in the capital, have already served 40,000-50,000
quake victims. In addition, Cuba has trained 400 Haitian doctors at
Cuba’s Latin American School of Medicine. The young Haitian doctors are
in Haiti responding to the crisis.
The Palestinians
in occupied Gaza also showed their solidarity with Haiti by collecting funds. The Gazans
themselves were victims of an Israeli bombing campaign that claimed the
lives of 1400 civilians in December 2008. Said Jamal Al-Khudary of the Committee to Break the Siege, “We
are here today supporting the victims of Haiti. … We feel for them the
most because we were exposed to our own earthquake during Israel’s war
on Gaza.”
THE THREE AMIGOS: OBAMA-BUSH-CLINTON
President Obama selected former Presidents Bill Clinton and
George Bush to work jointly to coordinate relief efforts for Haiti, symbolizing the continuity of imperialist policy toward Haiti.
The bitter irony
for many Haitians was George Bush’s support for a brutal CIA-backed
coup in 2004, which ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s second presidency
with the aid of paramilitary thugs, often called “Tonton
Macoutes,” as the death-squad backers of the
former Duvalier family dictatorships
(1957-1986) are known. Aristide and the Democratic Party’s Black
Congressional Caucus begged for international help, that is
intervention. Bush obligingly sent in the Marines, who exiled Aristide
aboard a U.S. Air Force plane.
Aristide, now
living in South Africa, says he wants to return to Haiti. Previously,
the U.S. has cited security concerns over the still popular
president’s return.
Today, Bill
Clinton is defending the criminal pace of the U.S. relief effort. In the past, President Clinton intensified
a racist naval blockade around Haiti designed to seize and return
Haiti’s “Black Boat people” back into the clutches of a CIA-backed
military regime (1991-1994). Clinton’s “interdiction” policy violated
U.S. and international asylum law. As a candidate, Clinton had condemned as “racist” the same policy when
campaigning against George Bush I.
In 1994, in
exchange for agreeing to a U.S.-led U.S./UN
military occupation that would restore Aristide to the presidency, Clinton persuaded Aristide to sign the Governor’s Island Accords,
which included adherence to World Bank economic reforms in Haiti, including “free-trade zones” for the slave-wage
international assembly industry and “reconciliation” with CIA-backed
killers behind the 1991 coup.
Said Christian,
a Haitian activist living in New York City, “One of the legacies of Aristide’s capitulation to
imperialist interests is the legalization of the framework of ‘humanitarian
intervention.’ It set a precedent for the use of UN and other
multilateral efforts in contravention of existing laws. It justified
the favorite means used by the imperialists to intervene in cases of
‘failed states.’”
OBAMA’S “SHOCK DOCTRINE?”
At the heart of
the Obama administration’s military
intervention is the policy of securing Haiti for what author Naomi Klein has dubbed in the title of
her book, “The Shock Doctrine”—that is, exploiting a political crisis
or a natural disaster by massively restructuring the economy toward
pro-U.S./World Bank objectives, often by the use of military force.
A key example
was New Orleans after the Katrina hurricane of 2005. About 67% of New
Orleans residents were African American, 28% of whom
were living in poverty. Democratic and Republican politicians worked
hand and glove with powerful capitalist investors to drastically change
the economic and racial composition of that mostly African-American
city. Rep. Richard Baker (R-La.) said, “We finally cleaned up public
housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”
Following the Haiti earthquake, the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation
posted on its website an entry entitled, “Amidst the Suffering, Crisis
in Haiti Offers Opportunities to the U.S.”
“In addition to
providing immediate humanitarian assistance,” said the article, “the U.S. response to the tragic earthquake offers opportunities to
reshape Haiti’s long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to
improve the public image of the United States in the region.” This was quickly replaced by more
diplomatic language, though the posting reflects the real thinking of
ruling-class policy makers.
Similarly,
Raymond Joseph, Haiti’s ambassador to the U.S., who also held the same post during the 2004 CIA-backed
coup, told C-SPAN, “There is a silver lining. What was not politically
possible was done by the earthquake. We will rebuild differently.”
At a large
meeting of international donors and investors in Montreal after the quake, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
praised Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive
for talking about “decentralizing” the Haitian economy. Clinton continued, “As part of our multilateral efforts to assist
Haiti, we should look at how we decentralize economic
opportunity and work with the Haitian government and people to support
resettlement, which they are doing on their own as people leave Port-au-Prince and return to the countryside from which most of them
came.”
Referring to her
husband Bill’s efforts as UN envoy to Haiti, “He had just had a conference with 500 businesspeople,” Clinton said. “They were signing contracts, they were making
investments.”
THE WORLD BANK IN HAITI
Beginning in the
1980s, the U.S.-led World Bank tightened its grip on the Haitian
economic policy. Essentially, it decided that the dysfunctional Haitian
elite should encourage international investment in export-oriented
assembly sweatshops. Called the “Structural Adjustment Program,” Haiti’s trade tariffs on foreign goods were to be removed, public
utilities privatized, and all state subsidies removed—including on
essential items like gasoline, subject to sharp price fluctuations that
can greatly increase transportation costs for workers and street
vendors.
Assembling the
goods, of course, would be the super-exploited Haitian worker,
considered by World Bank experts to be Haiti’s greatest asset. The ideal was to make Haiti “the Taiwan
of the Caribbean.” Today, textile assembly plants now produce 90% of
exports.
Today, Haiti’s
10,000-20,000 assembly workers make about 20 cents an hour, about 70
Haitian gourdes a day (about 40 gourdes equals $1). A study by the Haitian
government showed that a subsistence salary would be closer to 300-400 gourdes a day.
Despite
sustaining heavy quake damage to assembly plant buildings, Haitian
workers in some plants have been ordered back to work. Said Laurance Merzy, 32, a
worker at DKDR Haiti in Port au Prince, “The walls are still standing,
but they are cracked. It is not safe in there.” The New York Times reports that the
Palm Apparel T-shirt factory in Carrefour, a few miles outside of the
capital and at the epicenter of the quake, collapsed, killing at least
500 people.
An essential
player in maintaining the virtual plantation system in Haiti is Obama asset Bill Clinton,
who, in addition to promoting tourism and sweatshops in Haiti, successfully campaigned for passage of the Hope I and
Hope 2 legislation. Hope I and II require yearly U.S. certification under guidelines that mirror World Bank
policies, that is, super-low wages that attract foreign investors.
Last summer a
struggle erupted for passage of a minimum-wage increase to 250 gourdes a day (slightly over $6). Tens of thousands
of workers took to the streets last August, but a massive deployment of
UN troops blocked their entry to the assembly sector. In the end, Preval bowed to pressure from Bill Clinton to
increase the minimum wage from 125 gourdes in
2009 to just 200 gourdes ($5) in 2012.
Incredibly, assembly workers are exempt from the new wage levels and will
receive the new minimum only in 2012.
In reality, 125 gourdes is worth less than half of the minimum wage
in 1980 under the U.S.-backed dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. Annual inflation in Haiti is about
12-14%.
Another key goal
of the World Bank plan was to redirect food production away from
satisfying the nutritional needs of Haitians to producing food for the
export market. A 1982 document of the US Agency for International
Development (USAID), a federal “aid” agency often linked to the CIA,
proposed the “gradual but systematic removal” of domestic crops from
30% of all tilled land, whose products can then be exported.
The result was
the massive migration of Haitian rural farmers and workers from the
countryside, where most Haitians live, to already overcrowded urban
centers like Port au Prince, where unemployment stands at 70-80%.
Rice, a staple
of the Haitian diet used to be produced in quantities that would
satisfy domestic needs. However, World Bank economic policy meant
dropping tariffs on imported goods. Within a few years cheaper “Miami rice” flooded the Haitian market, resulting in the
destruction of domestic rice farming.
In 2008, after a
45% jump in the price of Miami rice in two years, there were “food riots,” as thousands
poured into the streets in the capital shouting, “We’re hungry. Feed
us!” Some described their hunger pains as “swallowing Clorox.” UN
troops killed about a dozen protesters throughout Haiti. The practice
of eating mud laced with sugar is not uncommon in Haiti.
Keeping Haiti politically dependent on the World Bank and Western
capital are loans from the World Bank and imperialist governments that
come with political strings attached, like Structural Adjustment
Programs. Today, over 50% of the just under $1 billion Haitian budget
originates from so-called foreign aid.
Foreign debt had
multiplied 17.5 times between 1957 and 1986, the years of the Duvalier family dictatorship. In 2001, the yearly
debt servicing alone was $321 million.
However, last
June the WB, IMF, and Paris Club reduced the current debt by $1.2
billion out of $1.4 billion to make payments “bearable” as part of the
Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative (HIPC), after years of
delay. New loans will increase the debt again unless a genuine debt
cancellation is enacted. In order to qualify for HIPC, however, Haiti had to be certified by imperialist institutions as being
in compliance with World Bank/IMF policies of “Structural Adjustment,”
the privatization of public utilities, the elimination of tariffs on
foreign goods, and the elimination of all price subsidies, etc.
A government
study of the public phone company found that its annual revenues
amounted to approximately $600 million, an amount lost to the Haitian
people for schools, roads, and medical care, as well as debt repayment,
under privatization.
Although in the
wake of the crisis there has been an international call to cancel Haiti’s debt, much of it originating with dictatorships, Haiti is still on the hook for about $764 million to
U.S.-dominated lending institutions, which constitute about 80% of all
Haitian debt.
Activists in the
Jubilee USA network and author Naomi Klein launched a campaign that
pressured the World Bank’s International Monetary Fund into restructuring
a recent $100 million loan into a no-interest loan, with the
possibility that the IMF might decide that it does not have to be
repaid at all.
What is needed
is a powerful workers movement in Haiti that will challenge the entire system of vulture capitalism
and imperialism and reconstruct Haiti under the democratic control of Haiti’s working masses. It would enforce the cancelation of all foreign debts. That would
require building a revolutionary party and working for a socialist
revolution in Haiti and building a powerful solidarity movement in the U.S.
As the early 20th-century
revolutionary leader Rosa Luxemburg once put it, the choice faced by
humanity is a choice between “socialism and barbarism.”
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