Following brazen diplomatic arm-twisting, Haitian President René Préval and
his Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) have caved in to U.S.-instigated
pressure to change the Nov. 28 presidential election results.

They are not formally adopting the Organization of American States’ (OAS)
demand that the CEP change its results so that the front-runner, former
first lady Mirlande Manigat, faces pro-coup konpa musician Michel “Sweet
Micky” Martelly in a presidential run-off rather than Jude Célestin of
Préval’s Unity party. Instead, Unity decided to withdraw Célestin’s
candidacy after a late night closed-door meeting on Jan. 25. The party’s
leadership had been split about the move.

This past week, US, UN, and OAS officials made many statements threatening
Préval’s government with dire consequences if it did not follow their
dictates.

“Having officially received the report of the OAS technical mission, the CEP
must now honor its commitment to fully take into account the report’s
recommendations,” UN Under-Secretary General Alain Le Roy said last week,
meaning the CEP must follow the OAS “recommendations.”

“Should the CEP decide otherwise,” he continued, “Haiti may well be faced
with a constitutional crisis, with the possibility of considerable unrest
and insecurity. At this critical juncture, it is vital that the CEP be
allowed to carry out its work without political interference,” not counting
his own, of course.

The climax came on Jan. 24 when US, French, Brazilian, Spanish, and European
Union ambassadors and embassy officials, along with UN Mission to Stabilize
Haiti (MINUSTAH) chief Edmond Mulet, bypassed Préval and directly delivered
an ultimatum to the CEP to announce “definitive results” by Feb. 2 or they
would cut off reconstruction aid and not recognize Préval’s government after
Feb. 7, the constitutionally set limit on Préval’s term. But before it
expired last year, the Unity-dominated Parliament passed a measure extending
Préval’s mandate to May 14, five years after he was sworn in belatedly due
to delays caused by the 2004 coup d’état.

Over the weekend, the US government also yanked the travel visas of 12
Préval associates as well as current and former government officials: Social
Affairs Minister Gérald Germain, former Interior and Health Minister Jean
Joseph Moliere, former Commerce and Industry Minister Jean Francois
Chamblain, former Finance Minister Fred Joseph, West Department Senator John
Joel Joseph, businessman Dimitri Vorbe, Presidential spokesman Assad Volcy,
popular organization liaison René Momplaisir, and Lionel Calixte.

“Washington and its carefully selected allies are telling Haiti what the
results of their election should be,” said Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the
Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in a Jan. 23
Sun Sentinel op-ed. “Of course, the election was illegitimate to begin with
because the country’s most popular political party, Fanmi Lavalas, was
excluded from appearing on the ballot. Mostly as a result of this exclusion,
only about a quarter of Haiti’s voters went to the polls… [The US and
allies']Great Fear is that if the election were to re-run – as it obviously
should be – this arbitrary exclusion… might be called into question.”

At the same time, Washington has been working to stop Aristide’s return from
exile in South Africa. “Haiti needs to focus on its future, not its past,”
tweeted State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley.

But the South African Times reported this week that the South African
“government has been negotiating with Haitian authorities, with the help of
the Cuban government, since last year for Aristide’s departure” from exile.
“But his return has been delayed by US concerns that the former Catholic
priest would destabilize the country,” that is, his own, Haiti.

But the popular calls for Aristide’s return have only multiplied since
former Haitian “President-for-Life” Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier
unexpectedly arrived in Haiti on Jan.16. The California-based Haiti Action
Committee put a full-page ad in the Jan. 23 Miami Herald, calling “on the
Haitian government to immediately renew President Aristide’s passport as he
has requested, and to facilitate his return, without any conditions, to the
country of his birth” as well as “on the international authorities,
particularly the United Nations and the United States government, to end
their opposition to President Aristide’s return.” The ad was signed by
dozens of activists, lawyers, journalists, religious figures, artists,
scholars, and celebrities, including actors Harry Belafonte and Danny
Glover, authors Randall Robinson and Eduardo Galeano, filmmaker Oliver
Stone, former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark, Dr. Paul Farmer, Bishop
Thomas Gumbleton, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

Meanwhile, on Jan. 21, Duvalier finally held his long awaited press
conference. Saying he had landed at the “Francois Duvalier International
Airport,” as the Toussaint L’Ouverture International Airport had been called
prior to his 1986 departure in the face of a nationwide uprising, Baby Doc
said he had returned “to pay homage to the numerous victims of the
devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010″ and was prepared for “all sorts
of persecution” and “harassment.”

While he offered “condolences to my millions of partisans” who he claimed
were persecuted, brutalized and killed after his departure, he expressed no
apology but only “deep sadness to my compatriots who recognize, rightly,
that they were victims under my Government,” not “of” his government.

Duvalier may find that his “sadness” increases as four former political
prisoners – Michele Montas, Alix Fils-Aimé, Nicole Magloire and Claude
Rosier – filed charges against him on Jan. 19 for “arbitrary imprisonment,
exile, destruction of property, physical and psychological torture, and
violation of civil and political rights,” said their complaint.

This past week, it also came to light that Duvalier may have returned to
Haiti in an effort to get his hands on some $7.6 million that Swiss
authorities have withheld from him. It is due to be returned to the Haitian
government, but under a Swiss law that takes effect on February 1, Duvalier
can reclaim the money if he manages to enter Haiti and leave again without
being prosecuted and convicted of embezzlement.

Even more alarmingly, after Duvalier’s press conference three North
Americans – former Georgia congressman Bob Barr, longtime Duvalier family
adviser and lawyer Ed Marger and lawyer Mike Puglise – took questions from
reporters.

“Marger, who handled most of the queries, said they were there to help
Duvalier collect undelivered reconstruction funds promised by the United
States and other countries at the March 31, 2010, U.N. donors’ conference,”
reported Jonathan Katz of the AP. “He said Duvalier could manage them more
effectively than former U.S. President Bill Clinton and distribute them more
justly than current Haitian President René Préval.”

So Duvalier is not satisfied with the $800 million that he and his cronies
embezzled in the 1980s. He has come back to Haiti to see if he – with Barr &
Company’s help – can make off with some of the $10 billion that other
nations have promised for Haiti’s reconstruction.

Sourced from: Google User’s shared items in Google Reader

Related articles

• Haiti president: Duvalier should face justice (msnbc.msn.com)
• Pressure mounts over Haiti vote (bbc.co.uk)

The big question Haitians are asking is: who is behind Jean-Claude “Baby
Doc” Duvalier’s surprise arrival in Haiti with an expired Haitian passport
on Jan. 16 aboard an Air France flight from Paris? “I have come here to see
how I can help my country,” he announced, stepping off the plane.

Yeah, right. It is inconceivable that Baby Doc, 59, would return to the
country where there are outstanding criminal proceedings against him without
knowing that some powerful foreigners have his back.

With dozens of Haitian SWAT team police outside and a helicopter hovering
overhead, Haitian government prosecutor Aristidas Auguste and investigating
magistrate Gabriel Ambroise met for about an hour with Duvalier in his suite
at the posh Hotel Karibe in Pétionville on Jan. 18 and then took him
unhandcuffed to their offices downtown for more questioning, before allowing
him to return to his hotel. Ambroise will now weigh the evidence, which
sources say is solid and massive, that Duvalier, his former wife Michelle
Bennett, and other cronies embezzled over $300 million (and by some counts
almost triple that) during the course of his rule from 1971 to 1986.
However, Judge Ambroise’s ruminations might take as long as three months,
which lends the whole episode an air of “grimas,” as they say in Kreyòl, a
face-saving show. Duvalier should have been arrested immediately at the
airport, most Haitians say. Instead, he was escorted by Haitian police and
United Nations occupation troops to his hotel.

“Usually in Haiti a thief gets unceremoniously dumped into a pickup and
carted off to a stinking cell to await trial in a few years or never,”
quipped author and journalist Amy Wilentz on Twitter. Duvalier will await
his improbable indictment dining on grilled conch at the Karibe.

He has this luxury because he has surely received a wink and a nod from
powerful government sectors, even if not the official ones, in either the
U.S. and/or France, the two nations which helped prop up his regime with
economic and military aid. The U.S. also flew Duvalier out of Haiti on Feb.
7, 1986 on a C-130 loaded with his sports cars and motorcycles and his wife’s
furs, while France has hosted his golden exile and protected him from
prosecution ever since.

DUVALIER’S LAWYER IS GERVAIS CHARLES, the head of the Haitian Bar
Association. He makes the dubious claim that the files pertaining to the
charges against Duvalier were all destroyed in the earthquake and that,
anyway, the statute of limitations on the embezzlement proceedings,
undertaken by several governments against Duvalier since 1986, has run out.

But Brian Concannon of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti
(IJDH) says this is unlikely. “The statute of limitation on these financial
crimes is something like five years after the last instance of investigation
by a judge into the case,” he said, noting that “a July 3, 2009 order from
the First Court of Public Law of the Federal Court of Switzerland said the
Haitian government had informed it of criminal proceedings against Duvalier
as late as June 2008.”

On Jan. 17, the IJDH along with the International Lawyers Office (BAI) in
Port-au-Prince issued a statement urging the Haitian government “to comply
with Haitian law” by arresting Duvalier for embezzlement on the basis of
rulings and investigations in both Haiti and the U.S..

The statement also pointed to “Duvalier’s human rights violations, including
the torture and disappearances of political dissidents at the Fort Dimanche
prison and other crimes committed by organizations under his control,
including the Armed Forces of Haiti and the Volunteers for National Security
(Tontons Macoutes). Mr. Duvalier is not protected against prosecution by any
statutes of limitations” for these violations because they are “crimes
against humanity, which are imprescriptible under international law.”

Meanwhile, former political prisoners and other victims like youth sports
trainer Bobby Duval and former journalist Michelle Montas (Duvalier’s thugs
destroyed her husband’s radio station in 1980) expressed their outrage that
Duvalier was in Haiti without being immediately arrested and vowed
prosecution.

THE STANDARD STORYLINE BEING REPEATED TODAY IS THAT BABY DOC inherited
Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s repressive dictatorship in 1971 and continued
it until the Haitian people rose up and chased him out of the country 15
years later.

History is, of course, a good deal more complicated than that, and between
the elder and younger Duvalier regimes there are important differences, an
analysis of which can help us decipher, or at least make an educated guess
about, what lies behind Duvalier’s sudden return.

Throughout most of its 207 years, Haiti has had two ruling classes: the
grandon, Haiti’s big landowning class, and the comprador bourgeoisie, an
import-export merchant class based in the coastal cities, primarily the
capital, Port-au-Prince. These two ruling groups carried out a bitter
rivalry for political power in the capital, control of which gave one an
upper hand over the other. This rivalry explains why Haiti’s history is
checkered with at least 32 coups d’état. The grandon often organized rural
militias which would run bourgeois presidents out of the capital, and the
bourgeoisie often ousted grandon presidents with the standing city-based
Army.

Papa Doc, a former country doctor who came to power in a military sponsored
election in 1957, was a classic representative of the grandon, who extract
surplus value from peasants through a form of semi-feudal share-cropping
called the two-halves system or de mwatye. The arch-reactionary grandon were
often hostile to encroaching foreign capitalists, who sought to turn peasant
sharecroppers into starvation-wage-earning workers. This put Papa Doc at
odds with Washington officials, but they needed him as a bulwark against the
spread of communism from revolutionary Cuba, only 60 miles west across the
strategic Windward Channel.

To offset the bourgeoisie’s and Washington’s influence over the Haitian
Army, Francois Duvalier, a student of Machiavelli, established his own
militia, the infamous Tonton Macoutes. Their reign of terror and violence is
legendary, immortalized in Graham Greene’s novel The Comedians and Bernard
Diederich’s and Al Burt’s exposé Papa Doc: The Truth about Haiti Today.

The elder Duvalier used the Macoutes to beat back several
Washington-sponsored (and ratted on) invasions during the Kennedy and
Johnson administrations. But there was a sea-change in 1969 when Papa Doc
received President Nixon’s envoy, Nelson Rockefeller. Shortly afterward,
cheap labor U.S. assembly factories began setting up in Haiti.

When Papa Doc died of natural causes in 1971, he passed the title of
“President for Life” (won in a 1964 referendum that some 2.8 million people
voted for and only 3,234 against) to then 19-year-old Baby Doc, and the
sweat-shop sector began to take-off.

Jean-Claude had gone to Haiti’s finest schools with the bourgeoisie’s
children, developing a taste for fancy women, fast cars, and a less brutish
reputation. He began to offer a “reformed” Duvalierism, called
“Jean-Claudism,” in response to the Carter administration’s call for “human
rights” in Latin America. Carter’s crusade was actually the beginning of a
U.S. policy shift away from strong-arm and corrupt dictators like Duvalier
to facade democracies which were backed by so-called multinational
peace-keeping forces.

The push to reform the Duvalier dictatorship did not stop with Reagan’s
election in 1980 as the old guard Duvalierists had hoped. Jean-Claude did
crack down on journalists that year, exiling many of them. He also married
archetypal bourgeois princess Michelle Bennett. That marriage begat an ugly
new offspring, a kind of Macoutized bourgeoisie, which would become more
familiar to the world during the 1991 and 2004 coups d’état against
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

At the same time, the comprador bourgeoisie was transforming into a more
assembly industry variant, typified by “Jean-Claudiste” and later
coup-backing families like the Apaids, the Bouloses, the Brandts, and the
Mevs.

WASHINGTON BECAME PEEVED AS JEAN-CLAUDE AND HIS CREW SKIMMED OFF MILLIONS of
development aid dollars into Swiss bank accounts, money that was supposed to
build a better roads, water systems and electrical networks to serve
expanding U.S. sweatshops and other foreign investments. Even the Pope
visited Haiti in 1983 and warned that “Things must change here.”

Finally, in 1986, the U.S. decided to give Jean-Claude the boot, fully
expecting they could easily install a puppet in post-Duvalier elections.

Among the democratic activists fighting for that change a quarter century
ago was René Préval, now Haiti’s president. Like activist businessman
Antoine Izméry and radio journalist Jean Dominique, Préval came from Haiti’s
“enlightened bourgeoisie,” which was inspired by the anti-imperialist
struggles of the 1960s and 1970s and dreamed of a democratic Haiti. Préval
along with Izméry were the two who pushed Aristide , a former parish priest,
into the electoral ring for president in 1990 against the neo-liberal
U.S.-backed candidate, former World Bank economist Marc Bazin.

Six years later, Préval himself was Haiti’s president, thanks to Aristide’s
long coattails. But over the past 15 years, he has compromised repeatedly
with the U.S. empire he once vowed to fight, bowing to their demands that
Haiti privatize its state enterprises, lower its tariff walls, and allow
U.S. military aircraft and vessels to enter Haitian airspace and waters any
time they please.

Préval has gradually been turned into a Washington’s patsy, often happily
but sometimes grudgingly, doing its bidding. Until now.

Washington and Préval are presently at loggerheads over the disastrous Nov.
28 elections, which Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council claims should go
to a second round between neo-Duvalierist former First Lady Mirlande
Manigat, who supposedly came in first, and Jude Célestin, the candidate of
Préval’s party Unity.

But the Organization of American States (OAS), acting on Washington’s
behalf, has issued a report that orders Préval to change the second-place
candidate to neo-Duvalierist former konpa musician Michel “Sweet Mickey”
Martelly. “There is nothing to negotiate

in the [OAS] report,” said US ambassador to Haiti Kenneth Merten. But Préval
is resisting. And this is where Duvalier, his old nemesis, comes in.

Manigat and Martelly are essentially the old and young faces of resurgent
Duvalierism, of which Baby Doc is the living symbol. Célestin is not that
much different; he was, after all, escorted to enlist as candidate by Rony
Gilot, an infamous Duvalierist crony who is today escorting Baby Doc around
Haiti. But Célestin is suspect because “sources in the American government
know that Préval recently sought $25 million from [Venezuelan president
Hugo] Chávez to bankroll [Célestin's] runoff campaign,” complained the
American Enterprise Institute’s Roger Noriega, who as President George W.
Bush’s Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, was an
architect of the 2004 coup against Aristide.

Also among the former dictator’s current escorts is Jodel Chamblain, the
former No. 2 of the death-squad FRAPH during the first coup against Aristide
and a leader of the “rebels” who terrorized Northern and Central Haiti
during the second coup against Aristide.

So we have come full circle. For the first time in 20 years, the
bourgeois-grandon alliance, along with the U.S. and France, have a chance to
install one of their preferred puppets through an election, however patently
bogus, rather than a coup. This is likely why Duvalier is now in Haiti.

Sourced from: Google User’s shared items in Google Reader

By Kevin Pina of Haiti Information Project (HIP)

The United Nations has been sitting on evidence that implicates a powerful
Haitian senator in the assassination of a popular priest in 1994. The only
known video testimony of an eyewitness to the brutal killing of Father
Jean-Marie Vincent was recorded by a UN official in 2005 and has not seen
the light of day since. HIP recently received a copy of the video in an
anonymous package that included a note stating: “The UN has no interest in
pursuing this case or revealing this evidence despite the statements of this
eyewitness that Youri Latortue was the triggerman that shot and killed
Father Jean-Marie Vincent on August 28, 1994.” The note concluded, “It is a
travesty of justice that the UN has been withholding this testimony from the
public. They are supposed to be impartial but Latortue has powerful friends
in the US Embassy who view him as an asset since his role following the
ouster of Aristide in 2004.”

In the video testimony, the eyewitness is interrogated by a UN official and
explains why she was falsely arrested in 2004 and shuttled from prison to
prison until discovered by the same official. The witness also explains that
she lived in the United States on and off for several years, which is why
she preferred to provide the testimony in English.

The witness tells how the Haitian police were holding her for Latortue until
he could figure how to “get rid of me.” When asked why she feared Latortue
she responds “because the 28th of August 1994, I witnessed Youri Latortue
murder the priest by the name of Jean-Marie Vincent.” She follows with a
recounting of the incident and details of the murder. The Haiti Information
Project (HIP) has released an excerpt from the video testimony where the
image and voice have been digitally altered to protect the identity of the
witness (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JXHzfn28UA).

Youri Latortue is a blood relative and former security chief of the
US-installed Prime Minister Gerard Latortue who took control of Haiti in
2004 following the coup that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Elected in 2006, Senator Latortue has most recently been serving as the
powerful head of the Haitian parliament’s Justice and Security Commission.

According to Haitian law, senators enjoy immunity from prosecution for
crimes and are not required to testify unless a senator himself or herself
waives their immunity, or the Senate votes to lift it. Latortue’s
parliamentary immunity is due to expire with the swearing in of the next
parliament following elections scheduled for Nov. 28 in Haiti.

Many Haitians suspected that Latortue ran for office in 2006 for the
expressed purpose of claiming immunity from prosecution given previous
allegations made against him of human right abuses following Aristide’s
ouster. A Freedom House report on Haiti released May 3, 2010 stated “a
number of lawmakers elected in 2006 have reportedly been involved in
criminal activities, and they sought parliament seats primarily to obtain
immunity from prosecution.”

Father Jean-Marie Vincent was fatally shot at point-blank range in front of
his rectory at Montfortain in the Port au Prince neighborhood of Christ-Roi
on Aug. 28, 1994. At the time of Vincent’s assassination, then Lt. Youri
Latortue was a leading member of the Anti-Gang Unit of the Haitian army.
Witnesses at the time described two vehicles carrying members of the unit as
those responsible for opening fire on Vincent’s vehicle.

A report released by a delegation of the Center for the Study of Human
Rights in 2004 stated “a former high-ranking police official from the USGPN
(palace security), Edouard Guerriere… claims that Youri Latortue
participated in the 1994 murder of catholic priest Jean-Marie Vincent (as
did eyewitnesses in 1995), and that he assisted in the 1993 murder of
democracy activist Antoine Izméry. From 1991 to 1993, Latortue was an
officer in FADH’s [Haitian army] Anti-Gang Unit, the army’s most notorious
unit for human rights violations.”

The video testimony reportedly suppressed by the UN would represent the
first time an actual eyewitness to Vincent’s assassination has stepped
forward to identify Senator Youri Latortue as the man that pulled the
trigger.

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT OF WITNESS TO YOURI LATORTUE’S KILLING OF FATHER JEAN-MARIE
VINCENT
[Names have been removed to protect the witness's identity- HL]

WITNESS: Then, Richard (name removed) said, you know something, I’m gonna
call a friend and they’re gonna come and see you because from the
information I’ve got, they want to kill you.

But I saw Youri Latortue going back and forth on the staircase [at the
police station] in Pétionville so that’s when I said…it clicked. I said oh
my God. I’m being set up.

UN OFFICIAL: So while you were in Pétionville you saw Youri walking around?

WITNESS: Not walking around, going up and down the staircase from the
Commissioner’s down to where I was. But he didn’t come towards me. When I
saw him, that’s when things clicked. I said, okay, that’s it… I know why I
am here.

UN OFFICIAL: Now let me ask you about that. Why would Youri have something
against you? Why would you want to be….

WITNESS: Because the 28th of August 1994, I witnessed Youri Latortue murder
the priest by the name of Jean-Marie Vincent.

UN OFFICIAL: Where did you see this?

WITNESS: In Christ Roi by Turgeau.

UN OFFICIAL: And was this on the side of the road? A restaurant?

WITNESS: No. He was getting into the place where he lives. The priest was
getting into the gate.

UN OFFICIAL: What? He got out of vehicle to open to the gate?

WITNESS: No, they were opening the gate for him

UN Official: Uh huh.

WITNESS: That’s when I saw a pickup… a double white pickup with a bunch of
men in black. And uh…I saw Youri. The reason why I remember Youri…. I
don’t remember the other ones. But the reason why I remember Youri because
he used to come to (name removed) house. And I saw him getting out of the
car and shooting at the car. But at that time, I didn’t know he was a
priest, the man they were shooting at. I didn’t know he was a priest. And I
didn’t know the person who was in that car.

UN OFFICIAL: Right

WITNESS: It’s when I went back to my uncle’s house and I was explaining what
I witnessed. Then I found out when he said “you know (unintelligible) who
they shot?” I said: “Who they shot?” He said, “Jean-Marie Vincent.” I said:
“Who is Jean-Marie Vincent?” He said: “It’s a priest.”

Sourced from: Google User’s shared items in Google Reader

Nearly nine months after the earthquake, more than a million Haitians still live on the streets between piles of rubble. One reason: Not a cent of the $1.15 billion the U.S. promised for rebuilding has arrived. The money was pledged by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in March for use this year in rebuilding….

Source : Breaking News

Explore : Americas, Caribbean, Haiti earthquake, World

Sourced from: Google User’s shared items in Google Reader

by Gina Magloire and Kim Ives

On Thursday, Sep. 16, about 200 people crowded into Room 209A at the
Washington Convention Center for a panel on Haiti during the 40th Annual
Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) Legislative Conference, which was held in
Washington, DC from Sep. 15-18.

Two Haitian presidential candidates were there: Leslie Voltaire of the
Together We Are Strong party (Ansanm Nou Fò) and Eric Smarcki Charles of the
Party of Haitian National Evolution (Parti de l’Évolution Nationale
Haitienne or PENH). Michel “Sweet Mickey” Martelly of the Peasant’s Response
party (Repons peyizan) also showed up, but late, so he stood at the door
outside the meeting.

The meeting was chaired by Ron Daniels, the founder of the Haiti Support
Project and organizer the ill-fated 2004 “Cruising into History” fiasco.

Congressman John Conyers (D-Mich.), the House Judiciary Committee Chairman,
urged more U.S. black leaders to get involved in helping Haiti’s
reconstruction.

Former New York Republican Congressman Benjamin Gilman, once chairman of the
House International Relations Committee, who retired in 2003, also spoke of
his 30 years of experience working in the U.S. Congress for Haiti. He
sharply criticized the reconstruction efforts in Haiti, saying they were
riddled with corruption and ineffective in getting people shelter and other
aid. Gilman had been a fierce critic of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide
while in Congress but did not say anything negative about Aristide at the
CBC panel.

Other speakers included entertainer and activist Harry Belafonte;
TransAfrica President Nicole Lee, a human rights attorney; Paul Weisenfeld,
Senior Deputy Assistant Administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean at
the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID); and Rick Wade, Senior
Adviser and Deputy Chief of Staff at the U.S. Commerce Department.

Two NGOs were also represented. Angela Bruce Raeburn, Senior Policy Advisor
for Humanitarian Response in Haiti at Oxfam America talked about agriculture
in Haiti, from which she had just returned. Also Charisse Espi Glassman, a
legislative assistant with Catholic Relief Services, said that CRS had been
working in Haiti for 30 years and was now selling houses for $1,400.

There were several speakers who represented the Lavalas position,
particularly on the subject of the exclusionary presidential and legislative
elections being organized for Nov. 28. Toussaint Hilaire, the director of
the Aristide Foundation for Democracy, spoke in Kreyòl with translation
provided by Prof. Frantz Jerome. Brian Concannon of the Institute for
Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) talked about the legal work of his
office and colleagues in Haiti. Walter Riley, executive director of the
Haiti Emergency Relief Fund (HERF), spoke about his foundation’s work for
peace and justice in Haiti. He is a California-based lawyer and a leader of
the Oakland-based Haiti Action Committee.

Finally, filmmaker Avi Lewis, who anchors Al Jazeera’s show “Fault Lines”
spoke, as did Ed Schultz, host of “The Ed Show” on MSNBC.

Although the audience was mostly foreigners, a number of Haitians, some who
had traveled from New York and Miami, also attended. They were largely of a
Lavalas persuasion and cheered speakers who spoke about the return of
Aristide from exile in South Africa.

Sourced from: Google User’s shared items in Google Reader

By Ansel Herz

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Nov 20 (IPS) – Under a beating sun in the grassy field where two U.N. helicopters landed in Grand Goave last week, 19-year-old Benson Blanc moved his hands as if rapid-firing a gun into the ground in front of him and made a “tok-tok-tok-tok” sound. This is how the soldiers opened fire, he said.

Residents of this quiet seaside town an hour west of Port-Au-Prince were awoken at about 1 a.m. on Nov. 10 by the sound of helicopters flying low overhead. A curious crowd amassed around the aircrafts.

One of the helicopters had mechanical trouble and had to make an emergency landing, said U.N. spokesperson Sophie Boutaud de la Combe. To lighten the load on the damaged helicopter, the Chilean crew moved white boxes of supplies into the other helicopter for several hours.

She also said, in a radio interview broadcast here in the capital city, that troops only fired once into the air in attempt to disperse the crowd. They had called for backup from the local platoon of Sri Lankan U.N. troops.

“When the backup came they started shooting, the population ran away and hid behind the bushes,” Blanc said. “Their chief, Mr. Rodriguez, said that he is not playing with nobody’s ass. He said if anybody wants to cross the field they need to tell him first or he’ll shoot them.”

Over a week later, Rinvil Jean Weldy, 50, is still nursing a bulging wound on his right shoulder. He can’t use his right arm much because of the pain, as he tends to his family’s small beachside home. He said he’s a health worker who has worked for the Haitian government and the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF.

“I was home then I heard a strange noise and I saw people running,” Weldy told IPS. “I wanted to give my help in case something bad happened. The crowd was too close to the helicopters so I wanted to move away. That’s when they opened fire and hurt me. I want justice and reparations.”

Haitians interviewed Sunday in Grand Goave said U.N. troops, known by their acronym MINUSTAH, fired several rounds into the ground at around 5 a.m. They said the soldiers would not let anyone, including farmers who wanted to reach the beach to go fishing, cross the field. A piece of a bullet struck Weldy, who was rushed to the hospital by Haitian police.

“When they saw the crowd getting big, they shot on the field,” said Louis Natacha, a woman who lives nearby. “There would have been more victims if we didn’t run away. Anybody could be a victim. Weldy was there like everybody, he wasn’t doing anything wrong. We want MINUSTAH to leave.”

Boutaud de la Combe, the U.N. spokesperson, told IPS there is an ongoing internal investigation into the incident. She said if troops fired into the ground, not in the air, that was a mistake. If Weldy wants reparations for his injury, she said, he needs to file an official complaint. Guatemalan U.N. military police visited him Monday, but Weldy said he did not feel comfortable speaking with them.

International officials and the Haitian government credit MINUSTAH with improving security in Haiti. But some Haitians see the foreign troops as prone to using reckless force with impunity.

When last summer massive crowds attended the Port-Au-Prince funeral of Father Gerard Jean-Juste, a popular priest, U.N. troops were seen on state television opening fire. A 22-year-old man was killed. MINUSTAH claimed he died from a thrown rock.

Brazilian U.N. troops arrested Franki Maze, a social leader in the Port-Au-Prince slum of Bel-Air, on the night of Sep. 9. While a medical exam from that night did not validate Maze’s claim that he was sodomised, it found bruising and inflammation on his face and body. He was released later that day.

The U.N.’s internal investigation cleared the troops of any wrongdoing and charged Maze with fabricating parts of his story. It said he was caught in possession of marijuana and tried to run away.

Mario Joseph, a human rights lawyer with Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, is frustrated with how the peacekeeping force handles accusations of abuse. “It’s their tactic: ‘All people in Haiti are liars for MINUSTAH’,” he said. “I filed two complaints in Cite Soleil cases. All the time they make their own inquires. We need to have independent inquires.”

The U.N. Security Council extended MINUSTAH’s mandate another year last month, marking its fifth year in Haiti. The Brazilian military commander, Gen. Floriano Peixoto Vieira Neto, told Reuters in a recent interview that the force is not likely to leave anytime soon.

“The strides we’ve made in security haven’t been matched by the socioeconomic gains we hoped for, and so that’s why we say that the status in Haiti is extremely fragile,” he said.

On Wednesday, the 206th anniversary of Haitian general Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ crushing victory over French colonial troops in the Battle of Vertières, two university professors and twelve students were arrested by Haitian police after protesting the presence of foreign troops on Haiti’s soil, according to the Haitian news agency AlterPresse. It is not clear why they were taken into custody.

*Ansel Herz can be contacted at ansel.herz@gmail.com. (END/2009)

Source: http://www.haitianalysis.com

by Kim Ives

Slowed by political wrangling and mysterious bureaucratic deliberations, Haiti’s elections have historically taken months and even years to organize. Suddenly, the electoral schedule, announced on Nov. 11, just two days after the new prime minister’s record-fast ratification, is moving at warp speed.

The new Provisional Electoral Council (CEP), reconstituted in October, has set nationwide elections for 99 deputies and 11 senators for Feb. 28, 2010. (The Center Department, where voting was cancelled in April due to violence, will hold its elections three days after everywhere else, on Mar. 3, 2010).

Parties have to register for the election this week, in a short five-day period from Nov. 16 to 20. One of those days, Nov. 18, is a national holiday commemorating the 1803 Battle of Vertieres. Politicians across the political spectrum are denouncing the curtailed and rushed schedule as impossible to meet and “suspicious,” including Chavannes Jeune of the Union party and Clark Parent of the Konbit to Remake Haiti.

“It takes time for the parties to collect the 100,000 gourdes [$249] to register a Senate candidate,” Parent said.

In addition to the relatively hefty fees, registering parties have to submit a pile of paperwork, including a notarized founding charter, state approval papers, the party’s emblem on an 8 ½ by 11 inch sheet, and a national identification card. It takes time to get some of the necessary documents from Haiti’s incredibly-slow state agencies, and “this might cause the deadline to be missed,” Jeune complained.

Even Steven Benoit, a deputy from President René Préval’s Lespwa (Hope) coalition, has called the proposed schedule a “hold up,” saying he might not run, or if he does, it will be as an independent.

But Gaillot Dorsainvil, the CEP’s new president, is adamant. “The dates will definitely be maintained,” he said on Nov. 16.

The same day, new Prime Minister Jean Max Bellerive signed an accord with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to finance the elections with $25 million, only $7 million of which the Haitian government will provide.

After this week’s registrations, the CEP will publish its list of approved parties on Nov. 24. Candidates can then register from Nov. 25 to 30. There is then a 10 day period from Nov. 30 to Dec. 9 for parties and candidates to challenge their exclusion. Finally on Dec. 11, the CEP will publish its final list of approved candidates.

A civic education campaign about elections will be launched on Dec. 12, and the actual election campaign will last for one month from Jan. 27 to Feb. 26, 2010.

After the elections, preliminary results are to be released Mar. 8 with challenges sorted out from Mar. 11 to Mar. 22, when final first round results will be published. The CEP said it will not schedule run-offs until after the first round results are in, so as to preserve its “serenity.”

Many parties were invited to a meeting at the CEP’s headquarters on Nov. 13 for a sort of orientation. After the meeting, the CEP apologized for not inviting the Political Parties Convention (CPP), a new party born from Lespwa party dissidents and the Progressive Parliamentarians Concertation. The CEP claimed it was an oversight.

The question on everyone’s mind is whether former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s Lavalas Family party (FL), Haiti’s largest, will try to participate, and if it does, whether the new CEP will try to exclude it on technicalities as the old CEP did last February (see Haiti Liberté, Vol. 2, No. 31, 2/18/2009). That exclusion provoked a massive nationwide boycott of partial Senate elections in April and June.

Aristide remains in exile in South Africa, almost six years after the Feb. 29, 2004 coup that ousted him.

Annette Auguste (So An), Dr. Maryse Narcisse, Lionel Etienne, and Jacques Mathelier, who make up the FL’s Executive Committee that runs the party in Aristide’s absence, attended the Nov. 13 meeting at the CEP, although the CEP’s Nov. 9 invitation asked for only “two duly mandated representatives.”

The FL leadership was split for many months between two factions, one led by Narcisse and the other by Auguste. But on Nov. 3, the party held its 13th anniversary congress at the Aristide Foundation for Democracy in Tabarre, where a new unity was forged. Narcisse and Auguste publicly embraced and held up each other’s hands in a victory clasp.

“We are going to register,” Maryse Narcisse told Haiti Liberté. “In fact, we are already registered. All our papers are already with the CEP. We just have to renew the registration.”

In the last election, however, the CEP raised questions about the validity of Aristide’s mandate to the party’s representative. Narcisse insists that the mandate question has been resolved.

“The last letter we received from the [last] CEP told us that there is no longer any problem of mandate,” Narcisse said. “Furthermore, we have built unity in the party. Of course, they might look for some other way to try to exclude us. Thus we are working in concert with President Aristide to anticipate problems.”

Wilfrid Lavaud, alias “Ti Do,” So An’s close companion and collaborator, also expressed apprehension about the “games” the CEP might play.

“Today, So An, Maryse Narcisse and Lionel Etienne met to weigh how we should go about registering before the Friday deadline,” Lavaud said on Nov. 17. “We have to be ready for tricks.”

The election’s fast-track certainly suggests that Préval’s Lespwa coalition, which dominates the parliament and the CEP, has an agenda it is trying to achieve.

“I think Préval’s main goal before he leaves office in Feb. 2011 is to change the 1987 Constitution,” said Haiti Liberté director Berthony Dupont. “According to the Constitution, changes are drawn up by one parliamentary session, and then ratified by the next. So the extended session of the 48th Legislature from January to May 2010 will make Constitutional changes, and the new congress that emanates from these elections that Lespwa is hoping to sweep, will ratify them. They have to ram things through fast to eliminate challengers and to keep a semblance of legality on an election which is basically undemocratic, just like the boycotted elections of April and June .”

ERRATA

In last week’s article, “Jean Max Bellerive Ratified as Haiti’s New Prime Minister,” we incorrectly stated that Promobank, an investment bank, was founded by Texas-based Haitian businessman and unsuccessful presidential candidate, Dumarsais Siméus. In fact, Promobank was founded in 1974 and functioned until June 1994 as the Banque Nationale de Paris (BNP) Haiti, a branch of the French bank. In 2004, PromoBank contributed to the development and launch of PromoCapital, an investment bank in which Siméus was a major partner.

Source: http://www.haitianalysis.com

by Kim Ives

Haiti’s Senate dismissed Prime Minister Michele Pierre-Louis on Friday, Oct. 30, 2009 at half past midnight. The vote came after a raucous debate that began at about 1:00 p.m. the day before. Senators opposed to Pierre-Louis’ dismissal – Rudy Hériveaux, Youri Latortue, Evaliere Beauplan, Edmonde Supplice Beauzile and Andris Riché, among others – stormed out of the Senate chamber. The remaining senators voted to remove the Pierre-Louis’ government by a vote of 18 in favor with one abstention. Most of the remaining 10 senators claim that the vote was “illegal” and plagued by procedural irregularities.

The campaign to remove Pierre-Louis’ government was mounted quickly. Sen. Jean Hector Anacacis, a leader in President René Préval’s Lespwa coalition, told the Miami Herald that a group of senators held “three days of meetings at a hotel near the palace” and then decided to summon the Prime Minister for a no-confidence vote.

“We are the ones on the ground who hear the people’s cry, who hear them criticizing us, the government, saying nothing has been done,” Anacasis said. “We have to replace the woman.”

Most of the Senator’s leading the charge were from Lespwa, prompting suspicion that the move to oust Pierre-Louis originated with Préval himself.

After the Senate issued its summons and word of the impending ouster spread through alarmed diplomatic circles, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Préval on Oct. 23. A State Department spokeswoman would not give details of the call but told the Associated Press: “We have made it known to the Haitian government that the perception of instability could be very damaging to Haiti at this time.”

Clearly, the U.S. and Europe liked working with Pierre-Louis, formerly the head of a large NGO heavily funded by billionaire financier George Soros. “Clinton spoke of her concerns and reiterated U.S. support for Pierre-Louis, according to several sources privy to the conversation,” the Herald reported. “Préval, in turn, told Clinton that he was not behind the move to oust Pierre-Louis and has no control over the lawmakers.”

But many observers think that Préval feared Pierre-Louis was beginning to supplant him as the Haitian leader to whom the “international community” was turning to have their agenda carried out.

“Préval was threatened by the growing power and connections of Pierre-Louis, particularly after the visits of [U.N. Special Envoy] Bill Clinton,” said Mario Joseph, Haiti’s foremost human rights lawyer with the International Lawyers Office (BAI). “She was becoming the darling of the donors, who called her capable, and I think he felt she was getting too big for her britches.”

Furthermore, Pierre-Louis may have been an obstacle for the political agenda Préval is trying to push through Parliament and with elections before he leaves office in February 2011, Joseph speculated.

The ousting senators, including Anacacis, Yvon Buissereth, Wencesclass Lambert, and Joseph John Joel, played on popular anger over the lack of transparency in the spending of $197 million taken from Venezuela’s PetroCaribe fund for Haiti last autumn after four storms devastated the country.

“Prime Minister Pierre-Louis proved she did not have the capacity nor the leadership to meet the population’s expectations and satisfy its basic needs,” said Lespwa Sen. Joseph Lambert. “She doesn’t have social and economic policies. It’s the Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank that are making economic decisions.”

The Lespwa senators made it known before the Oct. 29 session that they would vote Pierre-Louis out. “She is like an animal being led to the slaughterhouse,” said Lambert, who also declared he would resign if she were not removed.

Pierre-Louis, however, did not attend the session, responding to the summons with an Oct. 28 letter to Senate president Kely Bastien. Saying the senators “lacked elegance,” she touted her government’s accomplishment in finding international funding during her 14 months in office and concluded that “my government decides not to participate in this hearing,” saying she would leave her post with her “head high.” She proposed two national and one international audit of her government’s books.

On Oct. 30, Préval nominated Pierre-Louis’ Planning Minister, Jean Max Bellerive, to be Prime Minister. He is a veteran of previous Préval governments and of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s second coup-shortened administration. Senate president Kely Bastien predicted that Bellerive, whom both houses of the Parliament must approve, would be installed in office before Nov. 18, the 206th anniversary of the Battle of Vertieres, where Haitians won their independence from France.

“The ouster of the Pierre-Louis government does not signify any change in political or economic policy,” writes Haiti Liberté political analyst Hervé Jean Michel. “The new government will be formed by the Lespwa majority and will pursue, without a doubt, a neoliberal line.”

Haiti’s masses greeted Pierre-Louis’ ouster with indifference. She was viewed as an Aristide opponent for signing a petition of the Collective Non! in 2003 which called for a boycott of Haiti’s bicentennial celebration, presided over by Aristide, on Jan. 1, 2004.

By: Kim Ives

About a week ago, an IPS story reported that Amnesty International called for the release of Ronald Dauphin and described his continued detention as “politically motivated”.

In response, Elizabeth Roebling accused IPS of becoming an “outlet for spin” and directed members of the corbett list to a bitter response on Michael Deibert’s blog. Deibert is the author of “Notes from the Last Testament,” an account of President Aristide’s second term, which was cut short by the February 29, 2004 coup.

Normally, I wouldn’t bother responding to a mere political difference. But Deibert makes several personal attacks on the IPS piece’s authors Wadner Pierre and Jeb Sprague that warrant correction.

Deibert’s allegations are irrelevant to the accuracy of the IPS article. Readers can check the facts reported (most importantly, Amnesty’s appeal on Dauphin’s behalf ). Good journalism, like good scholarship, relies to the greatest extent possible on sources that readers can check.

Deibert wrote that Sprague “…works as a teaching assistant at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Sociology Department, focusing on crime and delinquency, subjects with which his past behavior [sic] no doubt gives him a close familiarity.”

This is a baseless ad hominem attack. Sprague’s PhD studies are not focused on crime and delinquency, and, if they were, would not justify Deibert’s nasty insinuation.[1] Furthermore, teaching assistant duties are not the same thing as a graduate student’s area of study, and, much less, evidence of a criminal background.

Deibert also claims that Sprague sent him an email containing “intimations of violence against my person”. I asked Sprague to forward me the email from 2005. In it, Sprague merely questions the accuracy of Deibert’s writings. Observing that thousands of people were being killed in post-coup Haiti, Sprague attached what he called a “photo of the suffering,” which showed victims of one UN-PNH raid [2]. To say that the e-mail “intimated” a threat against Deibert is absurd.

Deibert then accuses Haitian journalist Wadner Pierre of having a “stark conflict of interest” and that “when writing about the IJDH [The Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti], Wadner Pierre is quoting his former employer without acknowledging it.”

Pierre has never worked for IJDH. Pierre has provided IJDH and many other organizations in Haiti and around the world with photos taken during his time living in and visiting some of the poorest and most victimized Haitian communities. He has often done so for free or for sums barely adequate to live on in Haiti. Providing freelance photographic evidence of human rights abuses to organizations does not make him an employee or former employee.

Moreover, the ideal of an “objective” reporter or source for news does not and cannot exist. Journalism is not science. It is permeated with value judgments.

Pierre and Sprague have both been open about their sympathy for the poor’s mobilization for democracy in Haiti. The IPS article cites a number of sources, such as AUMOHD, IJDH and also well-known Lavalas opponents such as RNDDH and Haiti’s Ambassador to the US, Raymond Joseph. Moreover, the article was not “about” IJDH. It highlighted Amnesty International’s appeal on behalf of Dauphin and reported facts that are mentioned in that appeal. In contrast, Deibert’s recent IPS article on the case does not cite a single source critical of his viewpoint. [3]

Revealingly, Deibert makes no mention of Amnesty’s appeal for Ronald Dauphin, one of the most balanced accounts of the alleged “massacre” in St. Marc. Does Deibert wish to bury the Amnesty report under his spurious allegations against Pierre and Sprague? Does he wish that IPS had buried it as well?

To close, I direct readers to a few critiques of Deibert’s bias in recent years.

a) Justin Podur. 2006. “Kofi Annan’s Haiti”. New Left Review.

b) ___________. 2006. “A Dishonest Case for a Coup”. Znet.

c) Patrick Elie. 2006. “A Few Notes about ‘Notes from the Last Testament’”.

d) Mark Weisbrot. 2006. “Response to Michael Deibert”. The Nation.

e) Diana Barahona. 2007. “U.S. Reporting on the Coup in Haiti: How to Turn a Priest into a Cannibal”. Counterpunch.

f) Tom Luce. 2007. “The Proxy War in Martisant and Gran Ravine”. HaitiAnalysis.

g) Peter Hallward. 2008. “Response to Michael Deibert’s Review of Damming the Flood”. Monthly Review.

Readers can weigh the bias of all sources and draw their conclusions about the facts.

Notes:

[1] Jeb Sprague University Website.

[2] The photo that Sprague attached to the e-mail had been taken by grassroots photojournalist Jean Ristil who lives in Cite Soleil and has himself been harassed and jailed illegally in the past (for taking photographs) by Haiti’s UN-trained police. See Eric Feise, Jeb Sprague. 2006. “Persecuted Haitian Photojournalist Speaks Out: Jean Ristil & Cite Solely”.

[3] Michael Deibert. 2009. “Haiti: ‘We have Never had Justice’”. IPS.

For further reading:

Hallward, Peter. 2008. Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment. Verso.

Macdonld, Isabel. 2007. “The Freedom of the Press Barons”. The Dominion. http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/976

Sprague, Jeb. 2006. “Invisible Violence: Ignoring murder in post-coup Haiti”. Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.

Griffin, Thomas M. 2004. “Haiti: Human Rights Investigation: November 11-21, 2004″ University of Miami School of Law.

By: Kevin Pina – Haiti Liberte

Without question, the Lavalas political movement opposed the neo-liberal economic model of development that is unfolding in Haiti today. Lavalas militants and spokespersons called International Monetary Fund, World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank dictated structural adjustment the “death plan.” It included eliminating tariffs, selling off State-owned enterprises, keeping the minimum wage low, and relying on the private sector as the motor for economic development.

The major obstacle to the plan of the international financial institutions (IFIs) for Haiti was democracy itself. It took the form of the Lavalas movement, representing the poor majority’s interests, and the president they twice elected, Jean Bertrand Aristide. His government refused to privatize key industries like TELECO, the state telephone company, and EDH, the electricity company. While the IFIs insisted that social programs be cut, Aristide’s government took profits from these State-owned companies to invest in a universal literacy program and to provide millions of subsidized meals for the poor. For the first time in history, Haiti had the beginnings of a safety net in place to insure against widespread hunger and malnutrition. Over the objections of the IFIs and Haiti’s predatory economic elite, the minimum wage for the lowest paid work force in the hemisphere was doubled twice during Aristide’s first and second terms. Not so coincidentally, both of Aristide’s terms were cut short by coups.

This challenge to the IFI program was a major factor in the Feb. 2004 coup that not only ousted the democratically elected president but also drove out more than 7,400 elected officials from municipal and parliamentary posts throughout Haiti. It was an attempt to destroy the movement of Haiti’s poor majority and their right through elections to establish their own priorities for economic development based on the pillars of national sovereignty and social justice. The Bush administration and the Republican Party backed Haiti’s elite in overthrowing the constitutional government and orchestrating the “transition.”

Far from the “popular rebellion” concocted by the corporate media’s well-paid reporters, Haitian democracy’s overthrow in 2004 was a violent affair perpetrated by former military and death-squad commanders on a killing spree. The wealthy elite’s paid minions took to the streets to give the illusion of a “popular rebellion” but they could not take down the government, so the vile dogs of war were unleashed after being nurtured in the neighboring Dominican Republic. Not unlike recent events in Honduras, this coordinated campaign resulted in a president being taken from his home against his will under the cloak of darkness and forced onto a plane as the killing began in earnest to insure the success of the plotters.

The two years following the 2004 coup in Haiti would make the intentions of the Organization of American States, the United Nations and the so-called “international community” clear as glass. They all gave their blessings to the US-installed regime that took power even as it unleashed an unprecedented campaign of summary executions, the gunning down unarmed protesters, and arbitrary arrests. All of this was done in the name of “restoring democracy.” It was a period of gross human rights violations committed under UN aegis that remains successfully cloaked and obscured to this day.

Faced with thousands killed, jailed and forced into exile, the Lavalas movement elected René Préval their new president in 2006. People hoped he would stop the repression, free the political prisoners, and allow Aristide to return to Haiti. What they could not know was that he had already signed onto the cynical project to destroy the poor’s popular movement as preparation for bringing Haiti back into the camp of neo-liberal economic development and the “death plan” they had fought so hard against.

Despite more than $4 billion of international assistance since the 2004 coup, life has only become worse for most Haitians as the predatory elite squeezes as much profit as they can out of a desperate population. With little business investment to speak of, this elite has used their monopoly on the importation of food staples to steal away the more than $1.5 billion in remittances sent annually by thousands of families and friends to their loved ones in Haiti in an effort to keep them alive. These monopolists kept filling their pockets even as protests broke out against the growing misery and hunger in April 2008.

Throughout, the Lavalas movement and the poor kept demonstrating against the coup, demanding justice and that Aristide be allowed to return to Haiti. Their leaders were disappeared as in the case of Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine on August 12, 2007, forced to rot away in prison like the still-imprisoned Ronald Dauphin, or eventually succumbed to the ravages of harsh treatment as happened to Father Gérard Jean-Juste on May 27, 2009. Still others were courted by Préval and offered well-paid positions of authority within his government if they would turn their backs on their own history and the Lavalas movement.

Then came the much-delayed senatorial elections in April and June 2009, where the final blow was to be delivered to Lavalas. The Fanmi Lavalas party was excluded from participating on a cooked-up technicality. But the Lavalas waged a massively successful boycott of both rounds of the elections, a clear and collective rebuff of Préval and the international community.

Kill, imprison, exile, divide, exclude, and buy-off as many as you can: this became the strategy to destroy Lavalas and pave the way for Haiti’s re-emergence as a neo-liberal success story in the Caribbean. Still, Haiti’s poor majority are a resilient and hopeful force. They hoped that the election of Barack Obama, the first US president with African blood coursing through his veins, would change the trajectory of US-foreign policy in Haiti since 2004. It did not. They hoped that Hillary Clinton’s appointment as Secretary of State would make a difference until she visited the sweatshop of coup-backer Andy Apaid to tout the neo-liberal model in June. They hoped that Bill Clinton’s appointment as UN Special Envoy to Haiti would signal a change, but he ignored their pleas at every turn during his two brief visits over the last two months. Instead he spoke of coordinating NGO aid in preparation for instituting the new “death plan” as postulated by UN economic advisor Paul Collier, which is really the same old neo-liberal “death plan” first rolled out under Reagan’s Caribbean Basin Initiative in the 1980s.

The IFIs announced in late June that they had forgiven $1.2 billion of Haiti’s debt, most of which was racked up by former US-sponsored dictatorships.

Finally, last week, the Haitian parliament voted in closed session to double the minimum wage to a whopping $3.75 a day or about $0.46 per hour for an 8-hour day. Haiti still has the cheapest labor in the hemisphere off which US manufacturers and their Haitian elite partners can still turn a handsome profit.

This past weekend in Miami Beach we saw Haiti’s former mistress of the NGO sector and current Prime Minister, Michele Duvivier Pierre-Louis, take the stage with Bill Clinton to formally announce that the new-old “death plan” has given birth to renewed hope in Haiti. The corpses have been buried and the blood has been washed away so now Haiti can turn the page on the Lavalas movement and those upstarts in the poor majority who had the audacity to think that elections meant they could choose an alternative. Still, this struggle for Haiti’s future is not over, not by a long shot.

It’s only fitting to give Aristide, who remains in exile in South Africa, a few words here. “Pep pa achte libete ak demokrasi nan mache,” he once said. “The people do not buy liberty and democracy at the market.” Some feel that anything is possible with Democrats controlling the White House and Congress. They succeeded on a platform of “Change we can believe in.” The lesson for the world’s poor remains the same: when it comes to the Democratic Party, don’t confuse hope with change, especially if $3.75 is all you’re going to be paid for an 8-hour day.