What
You're Missing in Our Subscriber-only CounterPunch Newsletter
Special Investigation: Why Did the
World Trade Towers Fall?
A scientific explanation
at last, from a physicist and mechanical engineer. P. Sainath recalls
Gandhi's 9/11, one hundred years ago; Chris Sands reports from Afghanistan on the rise
of the Taliban.What you just missed, but can still get, in our
last newsletter: Paul Craig Roberts on the Collapse of America. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers
each month! But
remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the
print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription
to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find
anywhere else, or by making a donation towards the cost of this
online edition.
Remember contributions are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now!
As Haiti's recent political history
has swung back and forth between popularly elected governments
and right-wing U.S.-backed dictatorships, the Haitian movement
for popular democracy has maintained its resilience in the face
of horrific odds.
Throughout its resistance to
the U.S.-backed coup regime which ousted democratically-elected
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004, Haiti's grassroots
Lavalas movement has consistently advanced three key demands:
the safe return of President Aristide and other political exiles,
the freeing of all political prisoners, and an end to the brutal
repression of the country's pro-Lavalas poor majority. Since
Rene Preval was elected President earlier this year with the
overwhelming support of the Lavalas base (much to the chagrin
of the Bush Administration and Haiti's tiny right wing elite)
some steps have been taken toward achieving these goals of the
popular movement. But the powerful few who still control the
majority of Haitian media, most ministries, the judiciary and
the police are working overtime to stymie progressive change.
The price inflicted on the
Lavalas base by the coup regime has been horrendous. An August
2006 study in the British journal The Lancet reinforced earlier
documentation by Harvard Law School, the University of Miami
and others of systematic atrocities carried out by coup forces.
The Lancet disclosed that during the twenty-two-month post-Aristide
period of the Washington-backed "interim" Government,
8,000 people were murdered in the greater Port-au Prince area
of Haiti alone. Twenty-two per cent of the killings were committed
by the Haitian National Police (HNP), twenty-six per cent by
demobilized military or armed anti-Aristide groups, and forty-eight
per cent by criminals. Both the HNP and members of the demobilized
army acted against supporters of Aristide and Lavalas. The study
also found that in the same period, a staggering 35,000 women
and girls were raped in Port-au-Prince, fourteen per cent by
members of the Haitian National Police and twelve per cent by
members of anti-Aristide groups. Fourteen per cent of the interviewees
accused "foreign soldiers, including those in UN uniform,
of threatening them with sexual or physical violence, including
death."
The fate of the political prisoners
still behind bars remains a key focus of struggle between Haiti's
privileged few and the millions who are barely surviving.* While
Preval's administration successfully secured the release of some
high-profile prisoners this summer, including Annette Auguste,
the popular singer and organizer, and former Prime Minister Yvon
Neptune, others illegally jailed by the "interim" regime
are still languishing in the country's notoriously squalid prisons.
The August 25 re-arrest of
Rene Civil, a grassroots activist close to Aristide, was a chilling
development, one that many in Haiti fear could signal yet more
arrests of Lavalas figures. Civil, a leader of an organization
called the Solidarity Foundation which is working with families
of political prisoners and helping poor children attend school,
was originally detained while returning from exile in the Dominican
Republic on May 12, 2006. After appealing that illegal arrest,
Civil was released within two weeks.
The Institute for Justice and
Democracy in Haiti noted that Civil's August re-arrest"was
made late at night, without a warrant" and that "one
of the charges, use of a stolen vehicle, involves a car that
Civil has owned for six years, and registered with the police
several times. When Mr. Civil fled Haiti's repression in 2004,
the police themselves took the car (illegally) and used it for
two years, returning it in late June 2006. Another charge involves
illegal gun possession, but the weapons in question, two pistols,
belonged to another passenger in the car when it was stopped,
a police officer. The third charge, "association de malfaiteurs",
is a vague conspiracy charge that has been used frequently to
keep political dissidents (including Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste and
Yvon Neptune) in prison despite an absence of proof of criminal
activity." On August 28 Civil was interrogated by the
new Prosecutor of Port-au-Prince, Claudy Gassant, a prominent
Lavalas critic with strong ties to the pro-coup Washington-based
group the Haiti Democracy Project. Civil is now in Port-au-Prince's downtown penitentiary. I
visited that facility in 2005, and can best describe conditions
there as medieval.
At a briefing to an international
delegation several days before his August arrest, Civil said
of his work:
"We're here to end all
forms of discrimination, we're here to end all forms of violence.
The violence of not being able to afford to buy a meal to eat,
the violence of not being able to have a house to live inthe
violence of not being able to go to school.
"You always hear that
it is the people in Cite Soleil, it's the people in Bel Air who
have all the weapons, but what's actually happening is the people
with the most weapons are the people who have money to purchase
those weapons. They're the people who live up in the hills who
have a house where they can store the weapons, who have cars
to transport the weapons. And yet it's these very people who
carry the weapons who continue to demonize the poor in Cite Soleil
and Bel Air."
Civil asked the delegation
"for your support in making sure that this demonization
of the poor does not continue because the real problems that
they have are not weapons, they are the social problems that
they face. It's that they cannot eat, it's that they cannot have
a roof over their heads. And I ask you to get this message out
to the media, that this is a demonization of poor people, and
actually what's happening is that they're suffering because of
the economic and social problems in this country."
He told the international visitors,
"We are an independent nation, we're free and we have dignity
[but] without the return of Aristide this country can never truly
have those things. This is an integral part of our struggle
for self-determination."
I briefly spoke to Civil at
the Port-au-Prince jail where he was being held on the morning
of August 28. He told me that the people behind his arrest were
also behind the February 2004 coup, and that his detention was
a provocation of the Lavalas base. He said that those forces
"hate Aristide, and they hate me."
Journalist and filmmaker Kevin
Pina, who has lived and worked in Haiti since the late 1990s,
told me he thinks Civil's assessment is accurate.
Pina pointed to Civil's leadership
in organizing a demonstration for the return of Aristide that
drew tens of thousands into the streets of Port-au-Prince on
July 15 of this year: "I think that his key role in organizing
the poor is behind this false incarceration."
Pina has known and respected
Civil for years. He told me, "Rene was part of a Protestant
youth group, and really came to prominence during the first coup
against Aristide in 1991. In that period, Rene took to the airwaves
many times, going in to radio stations to deliver a message of
militant, nonviolent resistance for 10 minutes, then fleeing
for his life, knowing that the U.S.-backed military would send
thugs to come to beat, kill or torture him."
Pina describes Civil as "a
man of tremendous courage, who continued the struggle when the
destabilization campaign against Aristide began around 2000.
He was one of the first to lead demonstrations in the popular
neighborhoods of thousands and thousands of people, demanding
that Aristide be allowed to serve out his term in office."
On May 14, when Kevin Pina
videotaped UN troops opening fire on prisoners in the National
Penitentiary, Civil was inside. The inmates took over the facility
in a demonstration of solidarity with incoming President Preval,
but also to demand an end to detention of political prisoners
and the return of Aristide.
Pina commented, "I think
Rene is in imminent danger in prison and we
need to hold the Haitian government and the U.N., who are overseeing
this nightmare, accountable. Many viscerally hate Civil because
he is a conscious and eloquent symbol of resistance to Haiti's
elite and the coup the U.S., France and Canada supported in Feb.
2004. Remember that Emmanuel Wilme was also a symbol of resistance
and the UN assassinated him with massive force, also killing
more than 20 others, in Cite Soleil on July 6, 2005. People of
conscience should demand Civil's human rights be respected and
that he be unconditionally released from prison."
"The dispute over the
political prisoners, like most national disputes in Haiti, breaks
down along class lines. Lavalas has some support in Haiti's middle
classes, and Preval's campaign successfully reached out to people
across the economic spectrum. Yet the movement's base, in terms
of loyalty and numbers, is among the vast majority of Haitians
who are poor. The opposition to Lavalas comes mainly from people
who are relatively affluent by Haitian standards. They range
from wealthy factory owners and prominent intellectuals to foreign-supported
human rights workers and students, many of whom would be considered
lower middle-class in the United States."
The opposition also includes
numerous violent individuals who continue to attack Lavalas supporters
with impunity, committing far more serious crimes than anything
Civil is accused of. On September 14, the Port-au-Prince based
Haitian Press Agency (AHP) editorialized against the judiciary's
double standard apparent in treatment of rightist forces. AHP
accused Claudy Gassant of treading lightly in negotiations with
Michael Lucius, the anti-Lavalas director of the judicial police
(DCPJ), regarding a warrant issued against Lucius.
AHP wrote:
"The manner in which the
case has been treated is close to an obscenity, above all because
it involves the government prosecutor, chief representative of
the public, defender of society, who sanctioned the obstruction
of the legal proceedings, while all week those around this very
prosecutor made assurances that Judge Napla Saintil had documents
and photos establishing connections between Lucius and police
auxiliaries implicated in kidnappings and other abuses the accusations
are not the result of public clamor but rather are the findings
of an investigating judge, and these accusations fall upon a
man whose position places him in the very front line of the battle
against kidnapping and crime."
Up from the sea, on the other
end of Port au Prince from Cite Soleil, I spoke to residents
of Grand Ravine, who complained that the UN had done nothing
to protect local people from the depredations of Lame Ti Manchet
(Little Machete Army). Haitian police supported Lame Ti Manchet
in carrying out an August 2005 massacre of unarmed civilians
at a USAID-sponsored soccer match. On July 6 of this year the
death squad struck again, killing at least 22 area residents
with shots to the head. Since then they have burned down numerous
homes and killed more civilians.
Many I spoke to in Haiti connected
Lame Ti Manchet to Washington-funded politician Evans Paul, who
visited former Hatian National Police Director of the west region
Carlo Lochard in jail when Lochard was briefly incarcerated for
his involvement in the 2005 soccer massacre. Earlier this year,
all police involved in last summer's killings were summarily
released from jail, with no charges pending against them.
Esterne Bruner, father of six
children and coordinator of the Grand Ravine Community Human
Rights Council (CHRC-GR), was assassinated on September 21 after
he returned from a meeting with Evel Fanfan, a courageous human
rights lawyer defending Lame Ti Manchet massacre survivors. Bruner
had been shot on July 7, and though without resources to support
his own family adequately, took in an eight year old girl who
saw her father, mother, sister and godmother slaughtered on that
day. In correspondence to the U.S.-based Haitian Lawyers Leadership
Network, Evel Fanfan wrote that Bruner "never got discouraged,
never stopped demanding justice and restitution for the Grand
Ravine victims, never stopped protesting the treatment given
the victims by the authorities." Bruner also recently denounced
MINUSTAH, the UN mission in Haiti, for taking over the local
school at Grand Ravin and converting it into a military base.
Fanfan stated that whenBruner asked the UN for protection, a
UN soldier advised him "to find some weapons to fight back
against the men of the Little Machete Army. For this reason
I say that MINUSTAH is a source of insecurity in Haiti, counseling
Haitians to take up arms."
The UN, theoretically committed
to disarming groups with weapons, in reality only takes action
against a handful of armed militants standing up to police and
right-wing death squads in poor neighborhoods (the UN military
operations, employing high caliber weapons in densely-populated
areas, have repeatedly killed civilians who had nothing to do
with any armed group).
Haitian elites and their backers
in the UN mission continue to leverage most of the power in Haiti,
and show no interest in limiting right wing violence. Meanwhile,
Rene Civil and other Lavalas activists, whose only crime is a
commitment to social justice, rot in jail. The only counter to
this awful state of affairs will likely be the grassroots organizing
and mass demonstrations that have been a hallmark of Lavalas
politics. The brave Haitians engaged in this work on the ground
will need all the international solidarity they can get.
*Estimates of the numbers of
political prisoners range from several hundred to more than one
thousand, but documentation is difficult given the lack of transparency
under the coup regime. Also, Haitian police and UN Peacekeepers
have illegally arrested hundreds of young men in countless sweeps,
most for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is fair
to say that the majority were criminalized for being poor, and
given that the poorest are overwhelmingly pro-Lavalas, they can
be described as political prisoners even though they do not necessarily
have an official position or title that can establish them as
Lavalas. A Haitian government employee conceded to me that many
teenagers in Port-au-Prince's children's prison are in effect
political prisoners simply because they do not have money, or
relatives with money, to pay a lawyer or to bribe the right corrupt
official for their release.
Ben Terrall is a San Francisco-based writer and
activist. He can be reached at: bterrall@igc.org
Now
Available
from CounterPunch Books!
The Case
Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.
