tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195507092024-02-28T09:32:25.605+01:00Maxwell's House2004Marcushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695028065998590343noreply@blogger.comBlogger31125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19550709.post-1133645769369219942004-12-19T12:00:00.000+01:002005-12-03T22:36:09.386+01:00GutlessnessCommon Sense <br />John Maxwell<br /><br />At least one of my readers is under the misapprehension that last week I was praising the Government's human rights record. I was doing no such thing.<br /><br />When I reported Mr Nicholson's claims it was because I thought that most of us would have been vividly aware of the truth: when it comes to human rights, this Government is nowhere to be found.<br /><br />The record is long and shameful. In 1994 when Haitians were (according to President Clinton) "having their faces chopped off," I was one of those who pleaded in vain for the Government of Mr Patterson to show some backbone and some mercy.<br /><br />Backbone wasn't terribly necessary; the Clinton Administration would not, I believe, have been offended had the Jamaican Government decided to accept Haitian refugees as they were morally bound to do.<span class="fullpost">Instead, the Government decided to fall in with the US plan to capture Haitians at sea, destroy their boats, bring them to Jamaica, "process" them and send them back to be murdered. It was a new birth of Caribbean piracy, if we go by the law.<br /><br />The whole infamous process was not only brutal and wicked, it was doubly illegal, since no human being seeking refuge in Jamaican waters should, in law, be turned over to any other government unless it can be determined - by the courts - that he/she is a fleeing felon.<br /><br />The Government of Jamaica allowed Haitians who 'landed' in Jamaica to be kidnapped and taken aboard the floating barracoons in Kingston Harbour, to languish under the hot sun while 22 per cent of them were selected for transport to the US and the possibility of asylum. The rest were interned, as if they were prisoners of war, at Guantanamo Bay, now famous for its American-run torture camp.<br /><br />While Mr Nicholson boldly spoke about the Government's adherence to the Protocol on Fundamental Rights and Freedoms (part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), he forgot to mention that Jamaica, alone in the world except for North Korea, had resiled from its adherence to the Optional Protocol on Civil and Political Rights which forbids cruel and inhuman treatments, including capital punishment.<br /><br />Not content with that, Mr Patterson declared his intention to denounce our membership in the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights and was dumbfounded by the discovery that he could not weasel out of that one without giving up membership in the Organisation of American States. Rather like Seaga asking the Cuban doctors to stay behind when he had thrown out their embassy.<br /><br />The whole bizarre and abject performance was in pursuit of Mr Patterson's and Mr Knight's desire to hang convicted murderers more expeditiously. There were several things wrong with this lust to resume state murder, as some of us pointed out at the time.<br /><br />First, a major part of the delays in hearing appeals from convicted murderers is the fault of the Jamaican Government. The international commissions on human rights have complained for years that Jamaica did not fulfil its obligations, either at all or in a timely fashion, by providing the necessary documentation for the hearing of the appeals.<br /><br />Second, police work in Jamaica is so threadbare that people who do commit murder have about a 66 per cent chance of getting away scot free. If you want to punish murderers, you first have to catch them.<br /><br />Third, police evidence - as we have lately seen in several notorious cases - is not the most reliable in the world. Most convictions depend on the least trustworthy evidence of all - so-called 'eyewitness' evidence, which is open to purchase or hire. The conviction of Paul Gooden on forensic evidence is the first such conviction that I can remember for many moons.<br /><br />Fourth, because of the police resistance to, and circumvention of the law, coroner's inquests are rarely if ever held - which means that the public interest is subverted at source by lack of transparency, particularly when policemen are accused of murder.<br /><br />Finally, the courts are overcrowded, overburdened, under-equipped and understaffed, and the juries are still - three decades after the law was reformed - selected by the police. Judges' notes, often illegible, are often the only material for appeals because there is an acute shortage of shorthand writers and recording equipment in the courts.<br /><br />When judges transcribe evidence, cross-examination becomes exponentially more difficult as witnesses are given minutes to consider their next lie while lawyers wait on the judge to laboriously write down questions and, hopefully, answers. Perhaps things have changed since I was last in court, but I doubt it.<br /><br />I have been writing about all these questions for more than 40 years. I even assisted the police in solving a couple of murders they found too difficult. The first was the Headless Corpse case of 1953, the second the Milton Cassells murder in 1965.<br /><br />In the second case the police found the investigation very arduous and it was left to my friend Rolly Simms and me, with a little forensic assistance from Dr Ken McNeill, to solve that one. The murderer in that case was a cop.<br /><br />All those factors, coupled with the resistance of the police to change, compound the difficulty of achieving justice in Jamaica. The Government's wholehearted swallowing of the Globalisation gospel means that the dice are loaded against justice in any sector, at any time.<br /><br />By stripping itself naked of revenue, by sweating blood to bribe the rich not to bet against the dollar, by borrowing to meet recurrent expenses, the Government is digging an ever deeper hole for the Jamaican society. Casinos to finance education! There is a diabolic sense of fitness in that. Justice is a lottery.<br /><br />Having castrated our revenue services by recklessly and unfairly destroying the progressive taxation system, the Government has loaded the dice against the poorest in the society. In consequence, the police have abandoned the villages of the poor, as have the education and health systems. The community development programmes which were a model for the world in the 1950s have disappeared without a trace.<br /><br />People who learned from people who learned from people who were taught by people like Tom Girvan, Eddie Burke and others, are now explaining to us what community development means. But unlike Eddie Burke and Tom Girvan, these new experts are paid by NGOs, paid by USAID or the European community.<br /><br />With our Government now so far distanced from the people who elected it, it is no wonder that the travails and tribulations of our neighbours in Haiti go unnoticed. Mr KD Knight, MP QC minister of foreign affairs, can preen himself on his cosy chat with the American ambassador to the OAS, John Maisto. Maisto is outspokenly anti-Aristide and, judging by his speeches, not a terribly serious believer in democracy.<br /><br />According to the Observer on Wednesday, Maisto said the United States wants all democratic institutions in Haiti, including Jean-Bertrand Aristide's Lavalas party, to participate in the country's political process but does not believe that Aristide himself should be part of Haiti's future. Maisto's predecessors are, from the available evidence, dedicated racists like their former boss, Jesse Helms, co-author of the Helms Burton Act.<br /><br />Maisto describes President Bush as a "multilateralist". If you can believe Maisto, you should be in the market for a somewhat used Flat Bridge I have for sale in the Bog Walk gorge.<br /><br />Mr Knight's conversation must have been extremely polite. He suggested that the US do a rethink on the Helms Burton Act. This Act is, in reality, an outrageous affront to all norms of international law and recognised as such by, among others, the Canadian and French governments.<br /><br />Knight must have been even more polite and servile about Haiti than about Cuba, since he was in fact interfering in the internal affairs of that serially molested country. Speaking to a representative of Haiti's most consistent abuser, Mr Knight delivered himself of the thought "that Jamaica remained concerned about the situation in Haiti, pointing to the unstable security situation, arbitrary arrests, unlawful detentions, sham trials and the prominence of rebels who helped to destabilise the country.<br /><br />Whilst calling for adherence to the election timetable, Minister Knight reiterated that the Lavalas Party must be a part of the process". What Mr Knight does not understand is that Lavalas will be a part of the process as soon as the goons now in charge murder enough, rape enough and imprison enough of the leaders of Lavalas to intimidate the population into believing that some Vichy style regime will satisfy their 200-year hunger for justice. Of course, they need to shorten Lavalas, as Procrustes did to his guests, perhaps to "Laval", which would concrete the whole obscene charade and fix it firmly where it belongs, in the annals of fascism.<br /><br />The Haitians know who their leader is. They have elected him twice, which is more than the Americans did for George Bush. But the United States is no doubt following the Jeffersonian doctrine that blacks, especially Haitian blacks, should never get an even break.<br /><br />Thomas Jefferson, that great democrat, averred that Toussaint's army were 'cannibals'. Jefferson led the campaign to blockade and embargo Haitian trade, an embargo that lasted 62 years - a 19th Century version of Helms Burton, and for the same reason: to forestall excitement among those still enslaved.<br /><br />Jefferson's libel against Haiti and his racist attitude have poisoned American images and attitudes toward Haiti for 200 years. It is easy to despise a people who are 40 per cent less than human, as the US Supreme Court decided.<br /><br />It is easy to mock them for behaving just as other 19th century people did. The Emperor Dessalines was far less ridiculous than Maximilian of Mexico, Dom Pedro of Brazil or for that matter, the Empress Victoria of India. Dessalines at least, was family to those he ruled.<br /><br />Haiti has to defend itself against the weight of ignorant prejudice and racism, some of it assumed by the very people the Haitians helped to liberate in the United States, in Latin America and in the Caribbean. It is a heavy burden, and they have carried it for two centuries.<br /><br />Their crime was simple: as slaves inhabiting the world's richest colony, they had no right to overthrow their masters, or to abolish slavery or, most impertinent of all, to defeat the armies of Napoleon, of Britain and of Spain sent to re-enslave them.<br /><br />It does not take any knowledge of history to understand fundamental human rights or to understand that freedom is indivisible. The world cannot be half-slave and half-free. Toussaint and Dessalines and their comrades understood that, two centuries ago. Patterson and Knight should be able to understand it also. At the very least.</span>Marcushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695028065998590343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19550709.post-1133646325871108332004-11-28T12:00:00.000+01:002005-12-03T22:45:25.876+01:00The Abomination of CowardiceCommon Sense<br />John Maxwell<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/images/20041128T170000-0500_70376_OBS_THE_ABOMINATION_OF_COWARDICE_2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 200px;" src="http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/images/20041128T170000-0500_70376_OBS_THE_ABOMINATION_OF_COWARDICE_2.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>A decade ago, when Buju Banton electrified the dancehall community with his paean to murder - Boom! Bye-Bye - I was the replacement for Trevor Monroe at the Annual Awards of the Public Relations Society of Jamaica.<br /><br />In my short address to them I questioned whether in tolerating 'songs' such as Banton's, we were not aligning ourselves on the side of violence and outlawry and on the way to creating classes of people entirely without human rights.<span class="fullpost"><br /><br />My message appeared to be well received; some people came up afterwards to thank me for speaking out and the television cameramen and reporters even asked for copies of my speech.<br />Nothing was reported anywhere, as far as I can remember.<br /><br />And nobody, anywhere else, made any comment about this barbarous piece of incitement to the murder of homosexuals and police informers.<br /><br />Since then, the prime minister and his then minister of national security both set themselves against any reform of the laws against "sodomy". According to Mr Patterson, a Queen's Counsel, he was not going to "legalise homosexuality".<br /><br />Mr Seaga, the leader of the Opposition, has an even more squalid history. It was he who implied in a public speech that the prime minister was homosexual, which, as I have said before, is in this country, the most obvious incitement to murder that can be imagined. It was also a guarantee that our brave PM would do nothing to suggest that Mr Seaga could possibly be right.<br /><br />Now, in answer to a report by Human Rights Watch, the Government has told them to mind their own business, stop bullying Jamaica and, effectively, not pay too much attention to our propensity for killing each other. Especially not if the murdered are homosexuals or suspected to be.<br /><br />Which is why I am troubled by my friend Burchell Whiteman's agreeing to be the official spokesman for the Government's response to the Human Rights Watch report. "We find the approach of the organisation unacceptably insensitive," he said.<br /><br />Meanwhile vigilante posses of gardeners are busy hunting down suspected gays in upscale Norbrook, no doubt with the approval of their employers.<br /><br />Several years ago, various media outlets carried a rumour that homosexuals were planning a march on Jamaica House. I don't remember anyone believing the story, but the media ran with it anyway.<br /><br />On the day appointed, dozens of idiots armed with cutlasses descended on Half-Way-Tree Square prepared to teach the homosexuals a lesson.<br /><br />None, of course, appeared. As I have said in an earlier column, it was a uniquely Jamaican occasion, because I don't believe that anywhere else in the world would the press have been so willing to spread such a plainly ridiculous and dangerous story, given the homophobic environment; nor would there be, anywhere else in the world, people idle enough to assemble for a sporting massacre, as it were.<br /><br />It was a low point in Jamaican civilisation and none of our leaders said a word.<br /><br />Unfortunately, on the question of homophobia and homosexuality, the press is at least as backward as the majority of fundamentalist Jamaica. Reading the advice columns demonstrates just how ignorant and illiterate people - including some counsellors - are about anything concerning sex.<br /><br />Betty Ann Blaine, a very nice lady who is also a well-known social worker, delivered herself of the dictum that homosexuality is 'learned behaviour', and my colleague Mark Wignall is as terrified of homosexuals as some Jamaicans are of lizards.<br /><br />To deal with Ms Blaine first: there is no authority anywhere for anyone to say that homosexual behaviour is learned. On the contrary, controlled experiments with rats under environmental stress produced 'homosexual' intercourse - which surprised the investigators because that was not what they were looking for. And homosexual pairing is well established among certain birds.<br /><br />There is also some evidence that there may be genetic predispositions which may or may not be reinforced by nurture. The fact is that no one really knows, which, I suppose, is as good a reason as any for murder.<br /><br />Mark Wignall has never been shy to expose his super-macho side in his columns, and <a href="http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/html/20041121t000000-0500_69934_obs_what_do_these_homosexual_activists_want_.asp">last week's column was vintage stuff</a>. In it, Mark described how alarmed he became when some men he suspected were homosexuals began to take notice of him in a bank.<br /><br />"It was very obvious from their style of dress and their effeminate gesticulations that they were homosexual. I could not help but be amazed at how open they were with their 'antics'.<br /><br />"Other males in the line were either unconcerned or smiling, while a few of the women were staring at them open-mouthed. In my mind I named the talkative two Daisy and Buttercup."<br />[Strange that men were unconcerned! There must be something wrong here.]<br /><br />"At one stage Daisy playfully slapped Buttercup on a forearm then did a quick pirouette. Buttercup responded by saying, 'Lorks, yu gwan yah, mind yu pap yu line'. They were touching each other but the body contacts were just short of being considered intimate."<br />Holy Cats! Dalliance in a BANK !!! This is depravity of the first order.<br /><br />"As I watched them keenly, searching for a column (sic!), Buttercup grabbed Daisy's hand. Oh, my God, I thought, they are going to kiss. [Ever the dispassionate reporter] But it was even worse. Buttercup was staring at me and pointing."<br />Luckily, not panting.<br /><br />At that stage, Mark did what any red-blooded Jamaican stud would do: he drew his cellphone and dialled his girlfriend, who was sitting a few yards away. Poor 'Chupski'! She was no help at all, laughing at Mark's embarrassment and teasing him: "'It's you he likes, baby,' she said in jest as I saw him alternating between staring at me and playfully touching his friend. Then horror of horrors, he locked his eyes on me, broke out of the line then came towards me smiling. 'Is you name Mark Wignall?' he asked.<br /><br />"I was still on the phone and Chupski was straining to keep from exploding in uncontrolled laughter. I hung up the phone and half-turned to him. 'Yes,' I said. He turned away from me and said, 'Ah him, Sidney, ah him.'"<br /><br />The idea of Mark hiding behind a cellphone is worthy of Groucho Marx imitating "September Morn".<br /><br />" Everyone was now staring at us and my girlfriend was on the verge of hysterics. She was certainly enjoying herself."<br />[In a serious crisis like this, women are utterly undependable]<br />"Under my breath I was saying, make him go away, make him go away."<br /><br />[When threatened by wasps, Jamaicans repeat at top speed 'Our Father, Our Father']<br />"Then, in a surprising language transformation he said, 'Mr Wignall, I buy the Observer just to read you.'"<br /><br />[If you're looking for an anti-climax, look elsewhere.]<br />"Someone needed to have written a book titled 'How heterosexuals should respond kindly to homosexuals without making it seem that heterosexuals like them."<br />The horror! THE ABSOLUTE HORROR!!!<br /><br />I obviously have a problem. Several of my friends are homosexual - or at least I believe they are - but none of them has ever made even the slightest pass at me. Or perhaps I wasn't looking hard enough.<br />What Mark really needs is the sexual equivalent of mosquito repellent.<br /><br />He is obviously convinced that homosexuality is contagious. It is easy to laugh, but homophobia in Jamaica, and elsewhere, carries death in its wake.<br /><br />Long, long ago, I was in a bar when somehow the topic of oral sex came up. One particular fossil, an otherwise likeable fellow, declared at the top of his voice that if he knew that anyone in the bar had ever engaged in such an 'act' he would cease to speak to or drink with him, forever. When one of my more adventurous friends confessed to this abomination, our fossil raised his glass on high, smashed it to the ground and stalked out.<br /><br />Religion has become THE growth industry in Jamaica. Thirty years ago, returning from Montego Bay with David Coore in his car, one of us ventured the opinion that Jamaica seemed to have as many churches as bars; the other suggested that we submit an estimate to the Guinness Book of World Records.<br /><br />Today, structural adjustment has drastically reduced the number of bars, but there has been an exponential growth in the number of churches. If you can't sell hairpins and shoe polish on the sidewalk it seems the next most popular enterprises are driving a taxi or renting a tent to start a church and sell damnation.<br /><br />None of these takes any particular skill. And you need no licence to preach. The result has been a flood, some would say a plethora, of preachers, all up to speed with the Ten Commandments and the rest of the book of Leviticus. For these characters the Bible is - they say - the literal word of God.<br /><br />Which makes me wonder how so many of them appear to survive sexual adventures with their parishioners when it says in Leviticus 22.22 that if a man be caught in bed with another's wife, both shall be put to death.<br /><br />Death, usually by stoning, is decreed for all sorts of abominations, including homosexual behaviour, and for fornication when the woman is engaged to be married to someone else. A woman lacking a provable maidenhead should be stoned to death, regardless of the fact that even then it must have been known that maidenheads can be absent for any number of non-sexual reasons.<br /><br />Some are born without. Bastards shall not be allowed into the priesthood, even unto the 10th generation, although some preachers clearly defy that rule. Re Wignall, it seems particularly hard that Chupski was obviously obeying the Biblical injunction that she should not aid her man in a fight by grabbing the testicles of his opponent. To do that would merit her losing her hand. And of course, "every one that curseth a father or mother shall surely be put to death" Lev. 20 v 9.<br /><br />The problem with the Bible is that it was written by men and transcribed and translated by men and the language of King James is not the same as we use today, nor are our prejudices. Besides which, Leviticus is obviously a survival manual for nomads living off the land on which they were trespassers and subject to attack by the owners of that land.<br /><br />A fierce and brutal discipline was necessary and an overwhelming esprit de corps, to persuade the people to ignore their own hardships and continue to travel for what must have seemed like eternity in pursuit of milk and honey. No one knows if its strictures were actually obeyed.<br /><br />We are not faced with quite the same problems today. Instead, through the triumph of the free market, the disappearance of what used to be called the Public Interest and a general reversion to Survival of the Greediest, we will seek any authority to behave badly toward our neighbours. As Antonio, the Merchant of Venice said: the Devil can quote scripture to his purpose, obviously aware that in his temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, the Devil quoted the Psalms.<br /><br />If Jamaicans were really serious, we would listen to the messengers before stoning them, just in case they made sense, and/or, as in this case, they spoke the truth. We know that. But most of us are too intimidated by the hooligans to say so.<br /><br />And the hooligans have on their side the media, sections of the church and people like the prime minister, the leader of the opposition and the former minister of national security who have done nothing to lead their people out of the darkness into which they have latterly fallen. Norman Manley should be alive at this hour!</span>Marcushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695028065998590343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19550709.post-1133646444170708312004-11-21T12:00:00.000+01:002005-12-03T22:47:24.176+01:00Blood on Their HandsCommon Sense<br />John Maxwell<br /><br />Sometimes I have the strange sensation that I can smell the blood of Haiti from here.<br /><br />The Duvalierists, financed by the elite, protected by the United Nations 'peacekeeping" mission, are methodically murdering men, women and children thought to be supporters of President Aristide, butchering them in the streets and leaving the bodies, maimed and horrific, in the streets as an example to 'les autres'.<br /><br />The others are the overwhelming multitude of Haitians who have somehow got it into their minds that Jean-Bertrand Aristide is their leader.<br /><br />They want him back in Haiti<span class="fullpost">; to lead them out of the mire of their despair, out of their slough of despond, out of the bottomless pit of nonentity into which they have been consigned by the civilised leaders of the world, the United States, France, Canada and the European Union. For a change the British and the Australians are not overtly involved.<br /><br />But other pretenders to world class are there - the Brazilians, for instance, whose history, like Haiti's, has been blighted by US interference, dictatorship and abuse.<br /><br />According to Kevin Pina (http://flashpoints.net) an American reporter living in Haiti: <blockquote>After Bush's election the other night, fireworks went off in some of the wealthy areas of Petionville up in the hills.<br /><br />The very next day, of course, the United Nations and the Haitian police were back at it again in slums like Bel Air and Cité Soleil, in Grand Ravine and Martissant. It's been almost daily now that they enter those communities;<br /><br />I understand that in Bel Air now the majority of the population don't even dare venture from their homes, they're so afraid that they or one of their loved ones will be caught up in one of these sweeps, because most of them are Lavalas supporters and the police know that, so the sweeps are indiscriminate.<br /><br />Anyone in the street can get picked up and caught up in these dragnets and put face first on the ground, and never knowing whether its going to be as it was last.<br /><br />Tuesday, October 26th, when 13 young men were put face down on the ground and each one had a bullet pumped into the back of the head. if you saw any of these photos, you would see that one of those young men in Bel Air last Thursday, his head was completely blown off because they fired at him with a large automatic weapon at close range, and they left the bodies in the street for the community to see.<br /><br />That kind of activity is clearly meant to terrorise people, it's clearly left as a calling card and a message. It's not just murders being done here, this is murder with the intent to terrorise.</blockquote>According to Pina and other Haitian resistance sources, the Haitian elite, led by two implacable enemies of Aristide - Andy Apaid and Reginald Boulos - have been buying support in the slums, financing gang terror against Lavalas supporters. The result of this programme, says Pina, appears in stories in the North American press saying the violence is the result of inter-gang warfare in the slums.<br /><br />In a letter from his jail cell, Father Gerard Jean Juste exhorts sympathisers around the world not to be intimidated by "Hooded men, intimidation, masked gunmen, massacre, masked men attacking the churches, forced entries in our rectories, arbitrary arrests, defamation, character assassination, prison, threats of death".<br /><br />Meanwhile the world turns, imperturbably on, there are rumours of international consultations, investigations and other bureaucratic devices, designed, sometime next year, next decade or next millennium, to stanch the flow of Haitian blood. If there is any remaining.<br /><br />Of course, it's all the fault of the Haitians. It is clear - and has been for 200 years, that these one-time slaves have too high an opinion of themselves and must be put in their places.<br /><br />Having defeated the French, British and Spanish armies to achieve their freedom, they found themselves defeated by trade embargoes, diplomatic isolation, financial blackmail, the US Marines and their black surrogates the Haitian Army, by the Duvaliers - father and son - the Tonton Macoute and the CIA-sponsored FRAPH, not to mention the white death of the World Bank, the IMF and the Inter-American Development Bank and USAID.<br /><br />The prime minister of Canada put it succinctly the other day. On a one-day visit to Haiti two Sundays ago, Mr Paul Martin "warned the island's feuding factions to stop the violence, disarm and make peace, or risk being written off by the rest of the world".<br /><br />Most Haitians thought they had already been written off by The Countries That Count (TCTC) - France, Canada the United States and the European Union. Who are these "feuding factions"?<br /><br />Almost to a man, experienced observers of the Haitian scene have said that whatever faults they have ascribed to Aristide, he still commands the overwhelming support of the Haitian people. So, are they feuding among themselves? It would not seem so.<br /><br />It would seem that the present conflict was instigated by gangsters armed and supported by the United States via the Dominican Republic, whose so-called uprising faltered before they could enter Port-au-Prince, having murdered Haitian policemen and burned police stations to intimidate the countryside. But they couldn't enter Port-au-Prince, it appears, until they were escorted in by units of the US Marines.<br /><br />These Marines, led by the US Ambassador Mr Foley, forced Aristide to sign what the ambassador thought was a letter of resignation. The Americans then spirited the president off (as "air cargo") to another continent whence he was not expected to be able to communicate with his people nor return to his country, or perhaps, not to return at all, except in a coffin.<br /><br />The recent US elections have given the world a lesson in how adept the media is in covering up unpleasant facts, so most people are totally unaware of the roles of President George Bush, the French, the Canadians, the international financial institutions and the Haitian elite in the coup against Aristide.<br /><br />Most people do not know about the financial blackmail by the Inter-American Development Bank, the IDB, which promised Haiti loans to reconstruct its health infrastructure and then refused to hand out the loans until Aristide's Government repaid earlier loans made to the dictators while Aristide was begging the US not to aid them in dismembering Haiti.<br /><br />Aristide paid the usurious demand, but the IDB money never came. It was blocked by the American friends of the elite and their friends in the IDB, World Bank and IMF.<br /><br />Then, they said, Aristide could not govern. He was unable to restore the health system or keep any of the promises he had made, forgetting, of course, that the fulfilment of these promises depended on the funding that Haiti had been promised. Aristide, slandered as a thief and tyrant, now lives on the charity of South Africa, working at a university there.<br /><br />The Canadians, the Americans and the European Union promised to help Aristide rebuild the justice system and develop a new, trustworthy police force. They, too, reneged on their pledges, and said, triumphantly, that Aristide was unable to keep order.<br /><br />They blamed him for the gangs which, as in Jamaica, develop when the forces of law and order disappear. A few days ago, the French president, Jacques Chirac, chided the United States for believing that it could Americanise the world by invading and occupying countries.<br /><br />How convenient that he has forgotten France's initiative in orchestrating the charade which led to the ouster of Aristide in February. How convenient that he has forgotten how offended France is by Aristide's demand that France should repay the money it extorted from Haiti for over a century, in a blackmailer's deal which bled Haiti into destitution Professor Peter Hallward writes (New Left Review 27, May 2004)<blockquote> France only re-established the trade and diplomatic relations essential to the new country's survival after Haiti agreed, in 1825, to pay its old colonial master a 'compensation' of some 150 million francs for the loss of its slaves - an amount roughly equal to the French annual budget at the time, or around 10 years' worth of total revenue in Haiti - and to grant punishing commercial discounts.<br /><br />With its economy still shattered by the colonial wars, Haiti could only begin paying this debt by borrowing, at extortionate rates of interest, 24 million francs from private French banks. by the end of the 19th century Haiti's payments to France consumed around 80 per cent of the national budget; France received the last instalment in 1947.<br /><br />Haitians have thus had to pay their original oppressors three times over - through the slaves' initial labour, through compensation for the French loss of this labour, and then in interest on the payment of this compensation.<br /><br />No other single factor played so important a role in establishing Haiti as a systematically indebted country, the condition which in turn 'justified' a long and debilitating series of appropriations-by-gunboat.</blockquote>Hallward discreetly doesn't mention the payment in blood. The French, always so civilised, decided earlier this year to intervene, as part compensation for their disobedience over Iraq. Hallward remarks that the French initiative guaranteed the US safe entry into, and painless withdrawal from this "Liberia at their gates" as the French investigatory commission put it, allowing the US a measure of protection from the rage of its black constituents. It has all been very civilised; everything is deniable.<br /><br />It makes one wonder why the smell of blood is so strong. Strange, especially from a place Le Monde describes as "The country that doesn't quite exist..." It must be the obverse of the Cheshire Cat. The country disappears, only the sizzle of the branding iron remains, lingering in the air.<br /><br /><h2>American scandal</h2><br />More evidence is being uncovered of irregularities in the vote counting in the presidential elections in the US. In Ohio, the Ohio Election Protection Commission's hearings has revealed, among other things, a widespread and concerted effort to deny the opportunity of voting to black voters and young voters. The hearings have also called into question the validity of the vote counting process.<br /><br />In Florida, some of the evidence is literally stinking, having been retrieved from garbage cans disposed at county elections offices. Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org collected discarded "poll tapes" - the printouts of optical scan machines used to count votes. The whole affair is reported in the Daytona Beach News and commondreams.org. More disclosures are certain to follow.<br /><br />CORRECTION: In my column on "A Lobotomy for Democracy" I made some errors which a reader in Texas wrote me to point out. I managed to lose his e-mail and since I wish to correct any mistakes I may make. I would ask him please, to resend his e-mail.</span>Marcushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695028065998590343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19550709.post-1133646510950578322004-11-14T12:00:00.000+01:002005-12-03T22:48:30.956+01:00Father of His NationCommon Sense<br />John Maxwell<br /><br />Watching the CNN early show, one gets the impression that Jack Cafferty, with his weathered, intelligent face, is there to lend an air of authority lacking in the two main presenters Bill Hemmer and Soledad O'Brien who are both young, beautiful and vapid. Cafferty's style reinforces the impression of serious, conservative and cranky.<br /><br />On Wednesday morning, after the announcement of the death of Yasser Arafat, Cafferty suggested that a Palestinian monument to Arafat should say "here lies a thief who robbed us blind".<span class="fullpost"><br /><br />I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, because most public Americans seem to take it for granted that anybody like Arafat is a murderer, terrorist and thief; the United Nations is a playground for bandits and the rest of the world are nuisances to be avoided as far as possible.<br /><br />As they say, one man's fish is another man's poison, and while Jonas Savimbi was being feted at the White House as a freedom fighter, Nelson Mandela was being denounced in the same quarters as a terrorist.<br /><br />According to British Secret Service (MI5) archives made public last year, two former Israeli prime ministers were notorious terrorists during the Zionist struggle to drive the British out of Palestine. Zionist terror groups planned to set up cells in London to assassinate the British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin.<br /><br />Present Trends in Palestine, an MI5 briefing paper written in August 1946, reported on the activities of the Stern Gang that had assassinated Lord Moyne, the British high commissioner. One leading member of Stern was Yitzhak Shamir, who became prime minister in 1983.<br /><br />Another paper, Threatened Jewish Activity in the United Kingdom, Palestine and Elsewhere, focused on the activities of the Irgun, then led by Menachem Begin who became prime minister of Israel in 1977. In 1947/48, Begin had a 2,000 pounds price on his head, accused of murdering British soldiers and policemen.<br /><br />The MI5 paper was written after Irgun bombed British headquarters in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people - Britons, Arabs and Jews - and injuring scores.<br /><br />The present prime minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, made himself infamous in 1953 by his massacre of the village of Kibya, and by murderous assaults on the Al-Bureij refugee camp and the village of Nahalin. He has several more recent atrocities to his discredit.<br /><br />His assaults on Jenin, Nazareth, Ramallah and other Palestinian targets have merely enhanced his reputation for sadistic brutality.<br /><br />Sharon has said repeatedly that he regrets not having killed Arafat when he had the chance to do so in Lebanon.<br /><br />He and Bush refused to have anything to do with Arafat for the last three years, claiming that Arafat was a terrorist. Two years ago, Sharon's troops came within a few yards of killing Arafat, invading Palestinian Authority headquarters, killing Palestinian policemen and civilians and reducing much of Ramallah to rubble.<br /><br />I remember being copytaster in the BBC World Service newsroom one day in 1970 when Palestinian militants hijacked four planes over the Atlantic.<br /><br />At first, we thought the news agencies had got it wrong, when wildly different reports came in about what we thought was one hijacking. Until then, hijackings were one-off exploits, usually done by lone gunmen. As the day went on it became clear that this was a military operation in scope and execution.<br /><br />The purpose was to put the case of Palestine on the world agenda. The hijackings were carried out by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an affiliate of the Palestine Liberation Organisation which Arafat headed.<br /><br />Arafat was a small person, only 5' 4" tall, but his authority and charisma were immense. His political career began as the leader of the Union of Palestinian Students in Egypt in 1948, when he was 19, shortly after Israel had driven out the majority of Palestinians to establish the Zionist homeland.<br /><br />With his engineering degree, Arafat served in the Egyptian army as a demolitions expert in the Suez War against Israel, Britain and France. In 1959, he formed a small secret organisation called the Palestine Liberation Movement - Fatah.<br /><br />It was at first overshadowed by the umbrella Palestine Liberation Organisation until after the 1967 war when Fatah began commando raids into Israel. By 1969, Fatah had become the biggest component of the PLO, and Arafat had taken charge.<br /><br />It was under his leadership that the PLO affiliates - the PFLP and Black September - began to carry out high-profile activities which earned Arafat and his fellows reputations as terrorists. The Black September murders of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics of 1972 did nothing to burnish Arafat's image, although he always claimed that he did not and could not control the terrorist groups.<br /><br />Arafat was working behind the scenes to unify the Palestinians, getting a reputation for preferring compromise to confrontation. Under him, the PLO provided for the first time, a unified leadership for the Palestinians, all six or seven million of them, scattered to the four winds.<br /><br />By 1975, with support from the Non-Aligned Movement, Arafat made his first appearance before the UN, bearing, he said, "An olive branch and a gun".<br /><br />All this time, Arafat and the Palestinians were still scattered. Many were in Lebanon, where, as they had before in Jordan, they created a state within a state.<br /><br />Jordan's King Hussein had forced them out in the bloody 'Black September' purge. They were attacked in Lebanon by the Israeli army under Sharon, Israel's defence minister. The Palestinian militants, out-gunned and outnumbered, held out for months while Arafat negotiated terms under which they would leave Lebanon.<br /><br />While most of the militants left, hundreds of Palestinian civilians remained behind in refugee camps where, in 1982, the Lebanese Christian militia fell upon them and slaughtered perhaps as many as 3,000, under the eyes of the Israeli army. Sharon was found indirectly responsible for the massacre and forced to resign.<br /><br />From exile in Tunis, Arafat continued his diplomatic efforts. But the Palestinians in Palestine, suddenly inspired, grew impatient and launched in 1987, their first intifada against the Israeli occupation. Arafat seemed to be losing his grip when in 1988 he was forced to agree, publicly, that Israel had the right to exist. It was a significant concession, and it lost him friends and supporters among Palestinians and in many Arab capitals.<br /><br />Turning disaster to advantage, Arafat accepted a Norwegian offer of mediation and began negotiating secretly with Israel. The key to Israel's willingness to negotiate was Arafat's concession in Algiers. In 1993, the Oslo negotiation culminated in an agreement, signed in the presence of President Clinton - with Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli premier, and Shimon Peres, Rabin's coalition partner and foreign minister.<br /><br />Arafat recognised Israel's right to exist and Israel recognised the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. "We are betting everything on the future," he said.<br /><br />"Therefore we must condemn and forswear violence totally, not only because the use of violence is morally reprehensible, but because it undermines Palestinian aspirations to the realisation of peace."<br /><br />The Oslo accords gave the Palestinians recognition as a proto-state, and gave Arafat entrée to the West Bank, where he established the Palestine Authority and began bargaining for greater justice in the sharing of Palestinian land.<br /><br />He reckoned, however, without the Israeli right-wing. Rabin was assassinated. Netanyahu, a less moderate right-winger, had no enthusiasm for the peace process, and when President Clinton tried to extend the Oslo accords, Arafat refused to agree to a Palestinian state which would have been a collection of scattered Bantustans embedded in Israeli occupied territory.<br /><br />Arafat has been roundly condemned in Israel and the West for not accepting the Netanyahu offer. According to its partisans, this offer would have given the Palestinians more than 90 per cent of what they sought. But the Palestinians don't want a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of Palestine.<br /><br />Many people appear to believe that Palestine was unoccupied when the Jews began to settle there.<br /><br />Palestine had been controlled by the Turks until the First World War when the British captured it and ran it as a mandate from the League of Nations. But the Balfour declaration of 1917 had declared Palestine the site of a homeland for the Jews - more suitable obviously than the British first choice, the Kenyan highlands.<br /><br />Jews began to settle in Palestine, buying out Palestinian farmers and gradually establishing a substantial presence. After the war there was massive illegal emigration from Europe while the Zionists fought to take over Palestine forcibly and before the new United Nations Organisation could enforce a 'rational' partition of the country. Collusion between the wartime allies, inspired by guilt, fatigue and hypocrisy, allowed the Zionists to declare the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Arab states, weak, corrupt and disorganised, made an unsuccessful stab at intervention. It was no use.<br /><br />The Palestinians were thrown off their land and into the laps of the Arab states around, orphans thrown among child molesters.<br /><br />Ben Lynfield of Christian Science Monitor quotes Michael Tarazi, legal adviser to the PLO: "Israel's strategy was to disperse the Palestinians and make the problem go away - but Arafat made sure our rights were always on the agenda." Lynfield also quotes a rhetorical question from an Israeli, Uri Avnery, head of the Gush Shalom Peace group: "Who cared about Palestinians before [Arafat]?"<br /><br />The neoCons of the Bush Administration adopted the Sharon pose that Arafat was the only stumbling block to peace in the Middle East. Israel's position has always been clear: it is to absorb all of Palestine and perhaps more of the neighbouring states to become in area what it is already in military power - a super state. Eretz Israel, fufilling its transcendental mandate from God.<br /><br />Moshe Dayan said it: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother. Our armed forces. are not the 30th strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under."<br /><br />The Israeli right-wing speaks of the "transfer" of the Palestinians - a euphemism for ethnic cleansing. Sharon lusted for Arafat's blood.<br /><br />The Israeli nightmare of extinction is fuelled by a thousand years of European anti-Semitism, crowned by the Holocaust. The fundamentalist Christians and Islamists hate the Jews for their disparate reasons; the Christians yearning for an Armageddon which will cleanse the world of Jews and all other unbelievers.<br /><br />The problem is that the victims of Israel's justified paranoia are not the Western Christians who watched idly as they were consigned to the gas chambers, but the Palestinians, who, above all others in the world, gave them sanctuary for more than a thousand years.<br /><br />Injustice breeds terror because terrorism is the weapon of those who feel most helpless and downtrodden. The departure of Arafat challenges Israel and Sharon to find a way to peace. Arafat, they said, was the obstacle. His death makes Palestinians realise what he really meant to them and may in fact be a much bigger obstacle to the designs of Sharon and the neoCons.<br /><br />When President Bush imprudently advised the Palestinians to go get themselves a new leader, he spoke as one who did not understand and could not have understood what Arafat represented, whatever his faults and alleged crimes.<br /><br />Arafat was not simply the embodiment of modern Palestinian history; he was the real expression of his people's dignity and genius. He was the soul of Palestine.</span>Marcushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695028065998590343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19550709.post-1133646585559879892004-11-07T12:00:00.000+01:002005-12-03T22:49:45.566+01:00A Lobotomy for DemocracyCOMMON SENSE<br />John Maxwell<br /><br /><blockquote>"The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery."<br />- Tom Paine</blockquote>In the 1940s, I remember reading an American magazine which was trumpeting a new cure for anti-social behaviour. This now discredited surgical operation was called prefrontal lobotomy or leukotomy, in which the nerves connecting the frontal lobe to the higher centres of the brain were cut. The procedure, invented by a Portuguese surgeon, won him a Nobel Prize. Lots of supposedly anti-social people were 'cured' by this operation.<span class="fullpost"><br /><br />As it turned out, the operation destroyed the personality and left the victims emotional zombies. One woman said that after the operation her daughter was present physically but her soul was somewhere else.<br /><br />Troublemakers among the rich and famous were often subjected to the operation. Rosemary Kennedy, sister of JFK, was given a lobotomy on the orders of her dad, Joseph Kennedy. The result was so awful that she was confined to a mental institution for the rest of her life. Frances Farmer, a famously beautiful actress, was thought by her parents to be too unruly.<br /><br /><br />"She was a radical political activist, communist sympathiser and of a rebellious and aggressive nature. After several squabbles with the authorities, in 1942 she was wrongfully declared 'mentally incompetent' and was committed by her parents to various asylums where all therapies failed to tame her into "normalcy".<br /><br />In 1948, her parents ordered a lobotomy. "She was released in 1953 from the hospital, no longer a threat to society." - Renato ME Sabbatini, PhD, The History of Psychosurgery, Brain & Mind magazine, June 1997.<br /><br />Prefrontal lobotomy cured lots of troublesome ailments, including "nymphomania", socialism and the insatiable thirst for freedom.<br /><br />For me, the defining moment of last week's US Presidential Election came about an hour before midnight. All night the CNN anchor, General Blitzer, had been refusing to reveal the results of the exit polls; CNN didn't want to mislead people. But it was nevertheless becoming clear that John Kerry was going to be the next president of the United States. Robert Novak was a panellist on Blitzer's show. Wan, demoralised, and apparently near to complete collapse, Novak told Blitzer that he had just been in touch with his GOP cronies in Ohio who told him that all appeared to be lost.<br /><br />What Novak did not know was that help was on the way in the shape of the Diebold company, makers of electronic voting machines. Within hours, Kerry was no longer winning but on the road to conceding the election to Mr G W Bush.<br />The Republicans had stolen the presidency of the United States for the second time in a row.<br /><br />The most significant thing about the state of US politics is the compliant posture of the national press. They seem ready to believe anything. They appear to have been lobotomised, physically present but missing their souls.<br /><br />Mark Twain got it right: "Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better that you fear the press, for they will steal your Honour. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse"(Thanks to Tom at (http://www.informationclearinghouse).<br /><br />Exit polls - asking people just after they voted who they voted for - are not precise indicators, because they are sample surveys. But they have always been more precise than the pre-election sampling. For years the networks have depended on them. Only in 2002, in Florida, was there any question of their reliability. And we soon found out why.<br /><br />According to the US media on Tuesday night, the exit polls got it wrong. This, of course, can only mean that people who voted for Bush told the pollsters that they voted for Kerry. A most unlikely event.<br /><br />And it would be interesting to discover why CNN and other news media changed their published exit poll data after Wednesday morning.<br /><br />Jonathan Simon of Alliance for Democracy notes, "Statistical discrepancies were identified in key battleground states that exceeded the margin of error of the exit polls. In Ohio, for instance, a 'shift' of 3.1 per cent toward Bush converted a 52 per cent - 48 per cent exit poll "victory" for Kerry into a 51 per cent - 49 per cent electoral "victory" for Bush. In the group of 12 critical states selected for analysis, exit poll vs tabulated vote shifts exceeded the polls' margin of error in four cases, which, according to statistical analysis, [should] occur only 0.2 per cent (or one five-hundredth) of the time in the absence of significant mistabulation of votes."<br /><br />Simon also notes that exit polling appears inexplicably to have been significantly more accurate in non-battleground states than in the states that were crucial to a Bush victory.<br /><br />Citizens for a Legitimate Government (CLG) (www.legitgov.org) declares: "Rather than objectively exploring reasons for these identified discrepancies, the networks now glibly claim exit polling based on scientific methodology is completely unreliable, and have all but forgotten that there was a deep and widespread concern about the reliability and security of the vote tabulating apparatus leading up to this election."<br /><br />CLG continues: "A statement by Wally O'Dell, the CEO of Diebold, providers of Ohio's electronic voting equipment in August 2003, may have foreshadowed the November 2 results, at least in Ohio. O'Dell, acting as a Republican fundraiser at the time wrote, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president" .George Bush seemed to take O'Dell's pledge at face value, hardly deigning to campaign in Ohio, which was a confusing strategy to many pundits given the state's cliffhanger closeness and critical importance."<br /><br />One crucial statistic made me quite sure that the election was stolen. It is a well-recorded phenomenon that after an election result is known, more people will claim to have voted for the winner than actually did.<br /><br />After this election, is a remarkable fact that only 51 per cent of the US electorate said they were happy Mr Bush had been elected. The post-election bandwagon effect is well documented.<br /><br />"Response error tied to over-estimation of voting is one of the oldest and most persistent types of response error to be documented. [Stanley Presser] reports that such response errors tend to range between 12 and 16 per cent. with the error tending to be larger the closer a survey was done to the election". (Robert H Prisuta, A post-election Bandwagon Effect 1992 and Stanley Presser: Can Context Changes Reduce Vote Over-reporting?; Public Opinion Quarterly, Wier 1990)<br /><br />In this case, and as far as I can discover, only in this case does the percentage claiming to have voted for the winner fall below the percentage actually voting for him.<br /><br />The US press in its cocoon of fantasy, pretends to believe that this result is possible and accurate. No one can - without his consent - be deprived of his rights. It says so even in Third World constitutions.<br /><br />Shortly after he returned from Venezuela in August, former President Carter warned that the voting arrangements in the United States for the Presidential Election could not be considered satisfactory, fair and above board. This was in contrast to Venezuela, where they also used voting machines, made in the USA, but those machines had a paper trail.<br /><br />Many people foresaw the theft of the election. In an article for The Nation earlier in the year, ('How They Could Steal the Election This Time') Ronnie Dagger revealed that five out of every six US voters would be casting votes in machines which could easily be programmed to produce the wrong result. She predicted: "The result could be the failure of an American presidential election and its collapse into suspicions, accusations and a civic fury that will make Florida 2000 seem like a family spat in the kitchen."<br /><br />Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's labour secretary, has written, "Automated voting machines will be easily rigged, with no paper trails to document abuses". Senator John Kerry told Florida Democrats last March, "I don't think we ought to have any vote cast in America that cannot be traced and properly recounted". Pointing out in a recent speech at the NAACP convention that "a million African-Americans were disenfranchised in the last election", Kerry says his campaign was readying 2,000 lawyers to "challenge any place in America where you cannot trace the vote and count the votes" [www.thenation.com/ Greg Palast, "Vanishing Votes", May 17, 2004].<br /><br />The probability that the election was stolen becomes even more likely when it is recalled that GOP majority leader in the House, Tom DeLay, and the speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, have for two years prevented a vote on a bill requiring that all electronic voting machines should have an auditable paper trail. Congressman Rush Holt introduced the bill requiring all electronic voting machines to produce a voter-verified paper ballot. The bill was co-sponsored by a majority of the members of the House of Representatives - GOP and Democrat.<br /><br />There were serious anomalies in the reported Florida vote. According to the results, there were 1,392,639 new voters. There were 7,355,296 votes cast in this election as against 5,963,657 in 2000 when, according to the official results, Bush got 2,912,790 in 2004 to Gore's 2,912,253 a difference of less than 600.<br /><br />The split in 2000 was approximately 50/50. In this election Kerry got 3,459,293 or 47 per cent, while 3,836,216 or 53 per cent voted for Bush. Despite the Democrats outperforming the GOP 60/40 in registering new voters, Kerry got half-a-million more, while Bush got twice as many. Unbelievable.<br /><br />We must believe, contrary to all the known facts, that there was a swing to Bush of eight per cent! Bush got 32 per cent more in 2004 than four years before, while Kerry increased Bush's total by only 19 per cent.<br /><br />But there was no swing. According to one exit pollster, both candidates retained 90 per cent of their party's 2000 voters. So the swing came in the computers. In Florida people complained that their votes were recorded for Bush although they had voted for Kerry.<br /><br />Republicans were so worried about their failure in signing up new voters that they set out to intimidate and disqualify as many voters as possible. Can anyone, even including the US press, believe that these figures are anything but bogus?<br /><br />The real problem is that many people cannot believe that the Republicans could be so arrogant and barefaced to do what it is obvious that they must have done. On KLAS-FM on Wednesday morning, the two presenters initially thought I was being funny when I said the election had been stolen. But it isn't funny, and forecasts horrendous consequences as we shall see in Fallujah shortly, and perhaps Haiti.<br /><br />After the 2000 election I predicted that we were in for a hard time. I didn't think it was going to be this bad. I had no idea that democracy itself and its handmaiden, the press, were scheduled for prefrontal lobotomies.<br /><br />The ultimate irony, of course, was provided by the American media which solemnly pronounced that Bush won the election on moral values, despite Enron, Halliburton, Iraq WMDs, Abu Ghraib, the Patriot Act and the host of other scandals.<br /><br />If that represents morality, perhaps we should all get prefrontal lobotomies. We need to remember though, that nothing is ever over until we give up.</span>Marcushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695028065998590343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19550709.post-1133646683449892972004-10-31T12:00:00.000+01:002005-12-03T23:54:49.310+01:00River Come Down!Common Sense<br />John Maxwell<br /><br />IT will be 50 years ago next January 12. I remember standing with a huge crowd on Vineyard Road listening to Norman Manley, with everybody in the crowd, it seemed, waving a broom.<br /><br />The PNP slogan was "Sweep Them Out", after a cartoon in Public Opinion which called on Jamaicans to get rid of the corrupt and scandal-ridden government of Alexander Bustamante.<br /><br />Norman Manley couldn't be heard for minutes after he reported what he had seen all over Jamaica and ended with the line: "The river come down - from bank to bank!!!"<span class="fullpost">It had indeed, as the next day's election results proved - a rout despite the fact that constituency demarcation favoured the JLP.<br /><br />I am reminded of this by what is happening right now in the United States of America, where the ground is shifting under the feet of the Bush Administration which is displaying unmistakable signs of increasing desperation and panic. In Jamaica, we say "Bad luck wuss dan obeah" and Mr Bush's luck is running out. Why would Osama bin Laden choose this moment to resurface?<br /><br />Mr Bush, I kid you not, has recently been talking about 'principle'. His declared principle after 9/11 was to hunt down and "smoke out from their holes" the authors of the outrage and murderers of 3,000 Americans.<br /><br />Yet, here is bin Laden, as large as life, or larger, offering to talk with Bush about disengagement!!! For most of the last 12 months Bush's basic principle has been to attack the character and integrity of his opponent, to hit below the belt whenever possible, throwing pile-drivers at Kerry's gut, just as George Foreman threw them at Muhammad Ali in Zaire, 30 years ago.<br />And with the same result.<br /><br />Bush and his campaign are now, as Foreman was then, tired and demoralised. After Tuesday, the Bush Administration will have loads of time to attend Grand Jury hearings and similar proceedings. Somebody else will have to deal with bin Laden.<br /><br />For the river to come down - Lavalas, as they say in Haiti - there must be a lot of rain. And the rain-makers of the Bush Administration have made damn sure that the rain falls only on their Just Men. The trouble is that the water doesn't stop there. Injustice is a trickle-down process, and those at the bottom of the hill get lots of filthy, contaminated water. My expectation of a Kerry victory rests on several observations and some hunches.<br /><br />A great many people are resolved not to take the cynical colour-coded manipulation of their fears any longer, and they have enthusiastically heeded the call of those who believe that Americans give away their rights when they don't vote. <br /><br />They watched the process last time round, when George Bush was appointed president by the Supreme Court. Millions of people were disfranchised and they are paying for it in unemployment, deficient education, expensive health care, and record budget and trade deficits. Count in here a majority of the young, the new voters, the foreign-born, Hispanics, Haitians, Jamaicans, some of whom won't be nationally significant but crucial in local contests.<br /><br />Over the last week, the Bush spinmeisters have been producing some of the most elaborate excuses and alternative theories to explain away the inexplicable loss of more than 377 tons of extremely high-explosive material from a sealed bunker at Al Qaqaa in Iraq. Casting a doubt here, scouting a rumour there, fiddling with the facts wherever possible was a game that lasted until Friday, when a Minnesota TV station unearthed footage taken by their news team 18 months ago.<br /><br />The US chief weapons inspector, Dr David Kay, and most other people appear to believe that the video footage proves beyond reasonable doubt that the missing explosives had been found by American soldiers on April 18, three weeks after the war started and at least three weeks after Field Marshal von Rumsfeld thought the explosives might have been spirited away by Saddam Hussein. If not conclusive, the circumstantial evidence proves beyond doubt that the American soldiers in Iraq had not been properly prepared for the war, another major blunder by the Bush-Rumsfeld axis. Then, late Friday night, it turned out that a French journalist had reported a year ago exactly who had looted the munitions store and how and when it happened. <br /><br />If 'Bad luck wuss dan obeah', an FBI investigation is probably even worse than bad luck, and Mr Bush's frightener-in-chief and left-hand man extraordinaire Dick Cheney may soon find himself before a grand jury to explain why his old company, Halliburton, was awarded, against the rules, a 'no-bid' five-year contract worth billions. He won't be able to claim executive privilege this time.<br /><br />A complaint, filed on behalf of the Army Corps of Engineers Chief Contracting Officer, alleges that the $7-billion contract undermines the integrity of the federal contracts process. The complaint alleges that the award of contracts to KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary, to restore Iraq's oil industry and to supply and feed US troops in the Balkans puts at risk "the integrity of the federal contracting programme as it relates to a major defence contractor".<br /><br /><i> Bunnatine Greenhouse</i><br /><a href="http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/images/20041030T220000-0500_68552_OBS_RIVER_COME_DOWN__2.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 100px;" src="http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/images/20041030T220000-0500_68552_OBS_RIVER_COME_DOWN__2.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>The complaint also asks protection from retaliation for the whistle-blower, Bunnatine Greenhouse, an African-American woman with a strong resemblance to Portia Simpson Miller. African-Americans are expected to vote overwhelmingly (more than 90 per cent) for John Kerry. According to Internet journalist/editor Marc Ash, who is NOT an African-American, if American democracy is to be rescued, it will probably have to depend on African-Americans: "For whatever reason, African-Americans won't vote against their own best interests. No matter how much you try to convince them, it's like trying to get a cat to take a bath. We often hear that "our nation is deeply divided". Whose nation? Not the African-American nation - they know perfectly well who to vote for. They will vote for freedom and liberty and they'll kick down the door to do it if necessary."<br /><br />The Republican party obviously understands this. The Internal Revenue Service is to investigate the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) with a view to withdrawing its tax-exempt status, effectively bankrupting the NAACP. The reason? In July the NAACP president, Julian Bond, said: "The election this fall is a contest between two widely disparate views of who we are and what we believe. One view wants to march us backward through history - surrendering control of government to special interests, weakening democracy, giving religion veto power over science, curtailing civil liberties, despoiling the environment.<br /><br />"The other view promises expanded democracy and giving the people, not plutocrats, control over their government." Count in Arab/Americans and most Muslims, Indians, non-Zionist Jews, and others, including some moderate Republicans and others who want to restore their country's reputation for decency.<br /><br />Bush, like George Foreman, had his plan. Play the strong, silent, immovable John Wayne character and push the flip-flopping Kerry around until he collapsed like a rag doll. But, in the debates, Kerry wiped the floor with the president. While Kerry concentrated on the issues that burn Americans, in the background was always the injustice of a war in which hundreds of thousands of poor Americans are sent to a foreign country to kill hundreds of thousands of poor people with whom they had no quarrel.<br /><br />Count here young people afraid of being drafted for Iraq but, more important, medicare recipients and the poor generally. Soldiers' feedback is powerful stuff, and as it percolates through the American consciousness, more and more people are reverting to their pre-war position, when a majority was anti-war. Abu Ghraib has done nothing to reassure them.<br /><br />"Vote or Die" is one of the slogans used by an NGO supported by Sean "P Diddy" Coombs, and he happens to be on the same side as another of the world's richest men, George Soros. Both believe that George Bush is bad for America and the world. And the work of NGOs like MOVEON and Michael Moore's powerful documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, have also changed many minds. The irruption of Osama bin Laden into the campaign will remind many that while the Iraqi city of Fallujah is being obliterated, bin Laden is somewhere else, home, dry and still rich.<br /><br />The Bushies are trying to get Kerry to be a gentleman, to get him to avoid drawing attention to Osama's freedom and liberty while Americans labour under the Patriot Act and other disabilities. For the Bushies, Osama is the invisible 800-pound gorilla on the bow of a boat rapidly shipping water.<br /><br />Americans know Bush lies when he says that his troops are "shrinking the space for terrorists to operate" when they know that even the super-fortified Green Zone in Baghdad is not immune to insurgent attack.<br /><br />Meanwhile, the invasion has converted Iraq into what it emphatically was not before the war: a haven for terrorists as well as resistance fighters. Huge areas of Iraq are now no-go areas for the US troops, and an assault on Fallujah may be as much of a trap as Khe San was during General Giap's Tet offensive in 1968. Count in here all those who couldn't care less about Iraq, the unemployed, the single mothers with school-age children, soldiers' families.<br /><br />No pollster has factored in the millions of new voters, nearly a million in Florida and more than half-a-million in Ohio alone. Bush was having things his own way early on, coasting on the publicity platform of the presidency until the debates, when, Surprise! Viewers rated John Kerry, the 'aloof patrician', as more likeable. That's a hard one to recover from.<br /><br />Kerry has simply seemed more 'presidential' and certainly more mature than Bush and, however stupid Karl Rove thinks the US electorate is, I believe that they are more likely to go for someone who seems more level-headed and balanced than the grimacing, posturing 'Mission Accomplished' president. Count in surprising numbers of well-to-do Americans, who don't see the Bush fantasies or tax giveaways as everlasting and who may be scared of popular retribution, perhaps civil war, plus all those other scared voters who lie or conceal their intentions.<br /><br />And then there are the men surrounding Bush: Ashcroft, the fundamentalist prude with an appetite for shutting up and locking down people outside of the law, the constitution and the country; Rumsfeld, the dashing fly boy on leave from a Douglas Fairbanks war film who thought looting was good clean fun; Colin Powell, the designated adult in the Cabinet, whose patina of credibility has corroded to grimy verdigris; Dick Cheney, who - I have on good authority - is definitely not related to Lon Chaney, the ghoul of early horror movies; (Lon Chaney needed LOTS of make-up to frighten people) and, of course, the Ayatollah, Karl Rove, a spoiled brat with Napoleonic fantasies, the man who brought you the George Bush show originally; the main architect of the electoral skulduggery, the gerrymandering in Texas, the vote-stealing and intimidation in Florida and elsewhere. Will Kerry win?<br /><br />As Sherlock Holmes told Dr Watson: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is likely to be the truth".</span>Marcushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695028065998590343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19550709.post-1133762953518406352004-10-24T00:00:00.000+02:002006-01-15T11:16:44.963+01:00The Man Eaters of HaitiCommon Sense<br />John Maxwell<br /><br />Winston Churchill would be unpleasantly surprised and hugely disappointed. The United States, he said, represented mankind's ascent to the "uplands of history." Churchill seemed to imagine a demi-paradise, basking in the sunny benevolence of democracy, where every prospect pleased.<br /><br />Today, those sunny uplands are in gloom, overshadowed by the dark deeds and malign intentions of a cabal representing greed, ignorance and a full-scale retreat from civilisation. There are now, in Florida alone, more than 25,000 (twentyfive thousand) lawyers and law students on the watch against an anticipated concerted assault on the human and civil rights of voters, to forestall those who intend to steal a Presidential election if they can manage it, for the second time.<br /><br />Former President Jimmy Carter has said that the presidential election process in the United States of America as a whole, does not come up to democratic standards. <span class="fullpost">It is as if the United States has suddenly become a Third World country of the Graham Greene genre, where dictators rule and no one is safe..<br /><br />Serious, sober Americans have written me to say that many of their friends are afraid to speak out, to exercise their democratic rights, fearing some sort of retribution.<h2>Counter-revolution comes home</h2><br /><br />The French Fourth Republic and Portugal discovered, after Churchill spoke, that it is impossible to employ repression abroad while quarantining it so that it does not come home to attack its host. The same instruments used to destabilise nascent democracies in Latin America over the last century have begun to flex their muscles and sharpen their claws in the home of democracy itself.<br /><br />Next door, in Haiti, a similar but much more brutal process is in train; a fascist dictatorship has already been established and the regime is arresting priests, politicians and children and shooting children or anyone else who gets in their way.<br /><br />The two processes depend on each other. It was anticipated by some that a quick decapitation of Haitian democracy would lead to the installation of a new, globalised version of government, run by the rich, for the rich and pacifying the underclass by handing out sweatshop jobs to all and sundry. All the Haitians needed, in this scenario, was a full belly.<br /><br />As Mr Luigi Einaudi, Assistant Secretary general of the Organisation of United States said in January, the only thing wrong with Haiti was that it was being run by Haitians.<br /><br />As former US Ambassador to Haiti, Timothy Carney said at the launching of the US government sponsored Haiti Democracy Project (HDP):<blockquote>"The policies exist to realize the interests. Ambassador Roger Noriega mentioned that one of our interests is to defend human rights, but he didn't mention the fundamental interest, which is to defend Miami Beach. We don't want Haitians on Miami Beach and we have proven that very recently. That is a fundamental interest of the United States — no illegal immigrants. Now that you have realized that interest, you hopefully will have policies by which Haitians can realize their prosperity and their future at home. How do you do that? Well, we haven't figured that out yet, have we?"</blockquote>Carney was speaking at the opening of the HDP in the august surroundings of the leading right-wing think-tank in the US, the Brookings Institution, on September 19, 2002.<br /><br />The raw racism of Carney's speech seemed so innocuous to the Haitian Democracy Project that his speech was published in full on their website and may still be there.<br /><br />The Ambassador Noriega of whom Carney speaks is one of the spawn of the racist US Senator Jesse Helms, father of the Helms Burton Act and intellectual sponsor of any number of bright young fascists, including Otto Reich, who preceded Noriega as the American Assistant Secretaryof State for hemispheric affairs. Reich and Noriega are credibly believed to have been the American point-men in last August-s Panamanian pardon of Luis Posada Carriles and three other notorious Cuban exile terrorists . They had been in jail in Panama for plotting to assassinate President Castro and others at a summit in Panama in 2000. The pardons breached international and Panamanian law, but were delivered by the outgoing President Mireya Moscoso as her parting presidential eructation.<br /><br />Posada Carriles was exposed by the Miami Herald in 1997 in a news scoop which detailed the links between Posada and the Cuban American Foundation of Miami - stout supporters of Bush - and the bombings in Cuba which attempted to disrupt the tourist industry and killed an Italian tourist as well as damaging several tourist properties.<br /><br />Racism and terrorism are a noxious mix. They are evil enough on their own. In Haiti, they are lethal.<br /><br />The Brazilian general in charge of the so-called United Nations contingent in Haiti, one Augusto Heleno, has delivered himself of the profound thought that the trouble in Haiti is the fault of Democratic candidate John Kerry, who, shortly after the February coup, decried the affair and said that Haiti deserved better treatment. Heleno-s bizarre statement statement in my view, makes it patent that not only is the intervention racist and unfair, but that it is directly linked to the presumed prospects of certain candidates in the US general election next week.<br /><br />In this past week I have been on two radio programmes with representatives of the Haitian private sector, following another two weeks ago. In the first programme, one Mr Wedemeyer, head honcho of Radio Metropole in Port au Prince,said he knew nothing about the arrest of Haiti's best known folklorist, the 69 year old ‘So Anne- August. This arrest happened in August, and was particularly brutal, because a hand grenade was used to blow in So Anne-s door at midnight and she and her family, including a six year old granddaughter and another child, were hooded, manacled and taken off to jail without a warrant. The children have been released. So Anne is still in jail. At the time of her arrest she was still recuperating from a serious surgical operation.<br /><br />The President of the American Chamber of Commerce of Port au Prince, one M. Armand, exploded in fury when I asked him on the Breakfast Club what had happened to So Anne? Was she a violent person, as he had alleged about Father Guerarrd Jean-Juste? Armand shouted imprecations and hung up the telephone. That night we met again on RJR's Beyond the Headlines. Somebody must have told him that he had made a fool of himself earlier in the day. He was determined not to be rattled and tried to talk over every question. But he showed embarrassment and confusion when asked about So Anne and Father Jean Juste, declaring that the government was right to arrest So Anne and that she had been charged with an offence. This lie was quickly disproved when a very brave Haitian journalist came onto the programme.. After a few statements which contradicted M. Armand's version, M. Armand counselled the journalist to be very careful because I was entrapping him with my questions. The journalist paid no heed, and at the end of the programme, M. Armand was unable to provide any rational defence for the government which he supports.<h2>Death on the Streets</h2>There is on the Internet a great deal of information about the horror story that is Haiti. Mr Colin Powell can say there is genocide in Darfur, in the Sudan, but he either cannot or will not deign to say what he thinks the situation is in Haiti.<br /><br />The US press is similarly discreet, unlike Mr La Tortue, the resident satrap. I confess that I judged him simply to be seeking publicity when he said last week that President Aristide fomented the violence in Haiti from his temporary residence in South Africa.<br /><br />The outburst demonstrates some of the less intelligent features of the so-called "interim prime minister." La Tortue doesn't think that people are intelligent enough to figure out that it would take an enormous organisation for Aristide to carry out subversion in Haiti, or that people don't know that Aristide is a man of peace, despite the lies spread by his opponents.<br /><br />The South African government gave La Tortue short shrift , while President Aristide responded as I expected he would, in character.<br /><br />"October 1, 2004, one day following a lawful demonstration in Haiti, de facto prime minister Gerard LaTortue acknowledged that he is a killer. In a publicly broadcast radio interview about the demonstration he declared: "We fired on them. Some died others were wounded, and others fled."<br /><br />"A shocking and appalling admission; all the more reprehensible when made by a so-called public official. The statement was confirmed the next day ... LaTortue crossed the line; he unleashed a new torrent of repression in Haiti and is now looking for a scapegoat. He is attempting to bury his self incriminating statements with lies. LaTortue-s lies come after his salute of convicted criminals as "freedom fighters"; his de facto government's exoneration of one in a hasty, overnight trial; his consent in allowing soldiers of the disbanded brutal army to take charge and remain in charge of entire areas of the country; and his sanctioning their use of violence."<br /><br />President Aristide then appealed for a change of course towards peace:<br /><br />"LaTortue, stop the lying, stop the killings. Start paving the way for a dialogue which we have unceasingly invoked these past three and a half years.<br />"True dialogue is the only solution. With the lives of millions at stake, public officials must act responsibly. As we have repeatedly declared: violence and murder are not the answer. During these past eight months thousands of Haitians have been killed in defense of democratic principles. The Haitian people clearly want peace and a return to a state of law. Let us work to bring a tumultuous bicentennial year to a close with a lasting political solution that is imperative to the future of our nation."<br /><br />The world's press does not pay much attention to President Aristide.<br /><br />He is out of Favour with the Lords of the Earth.<br /><br />The world Press does not try to investigate what is happening in Haiti. Like William Jennings Bryan they seem to think that the Haitians are pretending to a position above their station "Imagine! Niggers speaking French!!!"<br /><br />But it was these people who ushered in the modern age, who translated the Enlightenment into reality, by rising up, and by overthrowing and abolishing slavery. Two hundred years ago the Haitians spoke powerfully and decisively on behalf of humanity, on behaalf of all the wretched and enslaved of the earth.<br /><br />It is long past time for us to speak for them.<br /><br />But is Mr Patterson listening? Is Mr Annan paying attention? And where, on this planet, can we locate the conscience of Colin Powell?</span>Marcushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695028065998590343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19550709.post-1133762795541050142004-10-03T00:00:00.000+02:002006-01-15T10:40:30.903+01:00A Toast to the American PressCommon Sense<br />John Maxwell<br /><br />In theory, the Constitution of the United States of America is a perfect instrument for the defence and protection of its citizens' rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.<br /><br />Four years ago, after the process which resulted in the designation of George W. Bush as President of the U.S.A., I remarked "This presents us with several serious problems. We have discovered, if we hadn't suspected it before, that the United States is not, in fact, a democracy, as most people understand it. Second, it is now clear to some of us that the systems which are supposed to provide checks and balances against tyranny do not work and probably cannot work. Third, that no form of voting can guarantee clean elections in the absence of a national will exercisable at the most local and parochial level."<span class="fullpost"><br /><br />Four years after that statement was published the world has witnessed, among other things:<ul><li>The illegal invasion of Iraq, justified by transparent lies about terrorism and weapons of mass destruction;</li><li>Consequent on the illegal invasion, the killing by bombing and other indiscriminate action, of more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians;</li><li>The illegal removal of President Aristide of Haiti on grounds which have not yet been put forward;</li><li>The imprisonment or deportation or 'rendering' without trial or charge of thousands of people distinguished only by the fact that they are not true blue, Americans;</li><li>The disappearance of at least a dozen so-called terrorists who may have been sent to other countries to be tortured and perhaps murdered on the orders of the Attorney General of the United States;</li><li>The torture and illegal imprisonment of an unknown number of Iraqi citizens whose only crime apparently, is that they are suspected of having tried to defend their country against an illegal aggression;</li><li>The rescuing, from a Panamanian jail and the release in the United States of convicted terrorists and assassins who had, in addition to their previous crimes, been preparing to kill President Castro and other heads of state as they met in conference in Panama in 2002.</li></ul>In almost every one of these instances, the spirit if not the letter of the laws of the United States as well as International law and treaties were savaged.<h2>The Fourth Estate</h2>The American Press have long gloried in their depiction as the Fourth Estate of the realm in - the words of Lord Macaulay. Constitutional amendments were passed to protect the Freedom of the Press, without which, it is held, democracy cannot exist. In America, Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press have established beachheads of privilege which give the press more protection than exists in any other country on earth.<br /><br />Despite these protections, the American people are now less free than at any time in their history, including their history as British subjects.<br /><br />Their wealth has been stolen by speculators, criminals in the guise of businessmen, and by the U.S. government itself, to hand over to a 'cognitive elite' who, half a century ago, would have been perfectly happy paying their excess profits taxes.<br /><br />As the American citizens were led like lambs to the slaughter in the last stock market bubble, and as they were led, protesting into Iraq, the Press, privileged and protected, found it impossible to defend their societies against the ruthless predators feeding on their young and their treasure.<br /><br />Today, as the Americans face one of the great watersheds in their history, the Press has found it impolitic to expose and condemn the traps and pitfalls being sedulously laid in their paths.<br /><br />It has taken an 80-year old ex-president of the United States to expose the wholesale corruption of the democratic process now gathering speed in Florida. The Press has dismissed President Carter's exposure as a bagatelle, just as they have the reports which demolish the lies constructed to lead to war. The American Press seems more exercised about the threat of one journalist going to jail than it has been about more than a thousand young Americans and ten times that many Iraqis being slaughtered in Iraq.<br /><br />The theory was that if all else failed, the Press would ride to the rescue of the republic. If the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary had been captured by one party with malign intentions, the press would expose, criticise and make any high crimes and misdemeanours impossible to complete.<br /><br />That was then.<br /><br />Then, if we look back at history, it is apparent that something has been seriously wrong with U.S. democracy for a long time. In the 1950's, President Eisenhower's Chief of Staff, former Governor Sherman Adams was disgraced for accepting an alpaca coat for doing someone a favour. The next republican Administration saw the Vice President going to jail, the forced resignation to avoid impeachment and prosecution of the President, the arrest, trial and imprisonment of the core of the White House administration (Haldeman, Erlichman and Co.) for their part in Nixon's crimes.<br /><br />The next Republican Administration, Reagan's, was distinguished by the illegal invasion of Grenada, by the financing of murderous governments and death squads in Central America (Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Salvador) and by the Iran Contra scandal the conviction of Reagan aides Michael Deaver and Lyn Nofziger and the indictment (and pardon) of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger; nor should we forget the ineffable William Casey, head of the CIA and the man who recruited Osama bin Laden and trained him in terrorism to fight against the Russians in Afghanistan. And George Bush I's Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, helped arm and advise Saddam Hussain in his war against Iran. And lawbreaking and conspiracy to defeat the aims of the constitution continued under both Bush presidencies.<h2>Conduct Unbecoming</h2>So it cannot surprise anyone that the Republican party of George Bush II is riddled with corruption from top to bottom. The Vice President, Mr. Cheney is obviously one of the world's most fluent liars as well as an uncouth bully. The presidential campaign has accepted the character assassination attempts of liars and con-men in an effort to destroy the reputation of the opposition candidate. It is involved in all kinds of underhand conduct, gerrymandering in Texas, intimidation In Florida and a variety of stratagems to subvert the will of the people of the United States.<br /><br />And, like the band on the deck of the Titanic, the Press plays on, unmoved by any outrage, undisturbed by any abuse of the public interest, excited only by direct attacks on their most compliant stooges - flustered and upset that federal judges are threatening to send high class reporters to jail for their part in covering up an illegal conspiracy.<br /><br />You will excuse me if I don't weep as the revolution begins to eat its children. Judith Miller, now threatened with jail, was an integral part of the massive conspiracy to delude the American people and the world. Last year, in April, my column "What can they be smoking?" cited one of Ms. Miller's works of art.<br /><br />The New York Times last Monday came up with a prime piece of hogwash, a dispatch from Judith Miller in Iraq, which claimed that a captured Iraqi scientist to whom she had not spoken, had told unnamed American soldiers that Saddam Hussain had given orders - just before the war began- for the dismantling of all his weapons of mass destruction. The story gave other fascinating hints about Iraqi connections to Al Qaeda, and so on, a veritable rijstafel of propaganda delicacies, designed, it seemed, to confirm all the egregious lies manufactured by the U.S. to provide an excuse for blowing away Saddam. The NYT treated the item as serious news and it was picked up and distributed by all the usual suspects.<br /><br />It seems to me that if a poor, superannuated journalist like me, 5000 miles from the scene of action, can detect such B-S, then other, more eminent practitioners closer to the scene should be able to detect it too.<br /><br />But they did not, and it was only a few months ago that the New York Times saw fit to apologise for some of the hogwash it had been dispensing for so long.<br /><br />It is a waste of time to go over all the instances in which the Press has betrayed its trust, hoodwinked its audiences and soiled the proud traditions of writers and journalsts as disparate as I.F. Stone, H.L. Mencken, Edward R. Murrow, A.J. Leibling, Upton Sinclair, and Ida Tarbell. But Woodward and Bernstein are still writing, still younger than I, but they, like the rest of the delinquent leadership of the American press are all millionaires now and so blinded by self interest, their fates yoked not to the people they are supposed to serve, but to the corporations that employ them and the stock markets that mesmerize them.<br /><br />A recent study by the Los Angeles Times which has not been followed up by anyone else, as far as I can tell, has exposed the myth of the New American paradigm. The LA Times took as its starting point, a 40 year tracking study underwritten by the National Science Foundation and run by the University of Michigan. In brief, what the Times study shows is not only that the American middle class has not prospered over the last 20 years, but that their overall social and economic position has been seriously undermined.<br /><br />The Chicago School of Friedman, Becker aet al coupled with the anti-social policies of Reaganism-Thatcherism, has sent middle class incomes into reverse while exposing them families to much more risk than before.<br /><br />Politicians, conservative and 'liberal/left', starting with German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and continuing through Franklin Roosevelt, Clement Atlee, et al, tried to make capitalism more humane, to make it more 'civilised.' That was the purpose of the now derided Welfare State, the point of which was to contain discontent and to defuse the possibilities for revolution.<br /><br />The Bush counter-revolution is moving quite openly to separate the world again into recognizable haves and have-nots, slaves and slavemasters, to place the elite within the gates and the rest outside the fence modelled in "the Bell Curve".<br /><br />Which is why Haiti was invaded, and why last week, Haitian businessmen were so desperate to get Congress to pass a law which would allow them to establish Haiti as the first country in which human rights would be defined by employers' profits.<br /><br />It is why the Hart Group is closing its factories in Montego Bay, laying off about 700 workers, because they cannot compete with Chinese labour whose wages would buy barely one Jamaican patty a day.<br /><br />And, for all that, we can thank our protectors of the press, the eyes and ears of the public, the protectors of the poor and helpless, the upholders iof public decency, the defenders of the truth and the greatest thing since sliced bread.<br /><br />Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you that paradigm of all the virrtues, that exemplar of best practice and sterling ethical standards, I give you: The American Press...<br /><br />And God Save the Queen!</span>Marcushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695028065998590343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19550709.post-1133761378318762922004-09-26T00:00:00.000+02:002005-12-05T06:42:58.343+01:00The Hapless and the Wretched of the EarthCommon Sense<br />John Maxwell<br /><br />So Kofi Annan has at last discovered that 3 A's (Anglo-American-Australian) attack on Iraq attack was illegal and against the basic premises of the United Nations. Some of us knew it then, and said so. Some of us wondered why Kofi Annan withdrew his UN inspectors from Iraq, giving the US carte-blanche to launch its bombers against an innocent people.<br /><br />But courage was in short supply those days, as it is now, and cowards abound and proliferate. If the war on Iraq was a crime against humanity, what description do we use for the decapitation of the Haitian democracy?<br /><br /><span class="fullpost"><br /><br />The world Press, those brave gladiators for justice and truth, speak about "hapless Haiti" and the "hapless Haitians"; they hide their prejudice and deceit behind euphemisms and euphuisms, behind circumlocution, obfuscations and outright lies to conceal foul crimes. They say President Aristide fled 'amid a popular revolt' of about 500 bandits in a population of 8 million.<br /><br />But the Haitians are "hapless". Our leaders, like the leaders of the United States, France and Canada, the triad behind the criminal enterprise in Haiti, we are all full of hap: hatred, arrogance and prejudice .<br /><br />While we, the hap-filled, are cleaning up and burying the few unfortunates killed by Category Five hurricanes, hapless Haiti is burying, in mass graves, thousands of the hapless killed by extremely heavy rain from a storm whose winds affected Haiti only minimally.<br /><br />It is the second time in less than a year that thousands of hapless Haitians are dying because of rain.<br /><br />History in Haiti has a habit of repeating itself. And history, in Haiti, consists largely of the United States and its assaults on Haitian freedom, all well meant, of course, and obviously intended to reduce Haiti's Haplessness index to manageable levels.<br /><br />Who do they think they are?<br /><br />Haiti's history of haplessness began more than 200 years ago when a Jamaican runaway slave called Bouckman lit the spark that fired the Haitian revolution. Bouckman, despite being a giant of a man, a born leader and probably a Muslim (think terrorist) did not survive to see the fruits of the revolution. He was betrayed, captured and his head stuck on a pike to discourage the others -perhaps a primitive attempt at exorcising demonic ideas of freedom and liberty from the revolutionaries.<br /><br />It didn't work. The Haitians went on to defeat the French colonial forces, then defeated a British expeditionary force and then defeated a French expeditionary army under Napoleon's brother-in-law, killing some 60,000 Frenchmen in the process.<br /><br />Before that the Haitians had fought alongside the American revolutionaries to help them throw the British out of the American colonies. Haitian help was crucial in at least two battles in which British power was broken - at Savannah, Georgia and at Yorktown.<br /><br />In addition to all that, the Haitian revolution made another massive contribution to the new American nation: in defeating France, the Haitians exhausted the French treasury to the point where Napoleon had to sell Louisiana to the US or risk losing it to the British. The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the US.<br /><br />So, if the Haitians contributed so much to American independence and development, why is it that in their extremity of grief and suffering, the United States treats the Haitians so meanly? Originally, when the scale of the current disaster became known, the United States, the richest country in the world, offered about US $60,000 for Haitian relief. Venezuela offered $1 million, Trinidad and Tobago earmarked US $5 million while the European Union pledged US$ 1.8 million. Somewhat abashed, the US raised its pledge to US $2 million. In the US itself, where the damage has been far less severe, the federal government alone is contributing more than $6 billion in hurricane relief.<br /><br />Charity, of course, begins at home or perhaps, it is simply another case of Haitian haplessness. But it must be said, however discreetly, that the United States has had a great deal to do with the current Haitian propensity to catastrophe, by destroying Haitian governments, Haitian infrastructure economic and social, and by policies which have reduced Haiti almost to a desert.<br /><br />The United States and Britain refused to recognise Haiti after it declared independence The US made recognition conditional on the former colonial power, France, recognising Haiti's autonomy. At that time, of course, the United States was busy titrating the humanity of blacks and came to the conclusion that a black was 60% human and therefore not entitled to all the rights of Man. And Liberty was as dangerous then as socialism was in the twentieth century.<br /><br />Three-fifths Human<br /><br />Oddly, the French, the Americans and the Haitians had all been inspired by the Enlightenment and Tom Paine's codification of the Rights of man. But only the Haitian revolution recognised all those rights. In the US blacks and women, for instance, had to wait more than a century to reach the status guaranteed to Haitians. France and the US maintained slavery more than 50 years after Haiti abolished it.<br /><br />With the British and the US playing hard-ball on the recognition question, France felt able to demand that the Haitians should pay cash for their freedom. In Jamaica and other British colonies, the state paid the slaveowners compensation. In Haiti the former slaves paid twice, in blood and in treasure. When they had trouble paying back the French the kindly American bankers came to Haiti's rescue. We will lend you the money to pay off your debt, they said, and Haiti achieved another first becoming the first Third world debtor nation.<br /><br />That debt was eventually paid off more than a century later- the last payment was in 1947. In the meantime it had caused Haiti the most extreme distress, wrecked her infrastructure and destroyed her independence. What the metropolitan countries could not achieve by conquest, they achieved by compound interest.<br /><br />Early in the last century, the Americans became a little dissatisfied with Haitian repayment of their debt, and that led to an immediate increase in Haitian haplessness. The US invaded, changed their constitution, took away their land, chopped down their trees to plant sisal, logwood, coffee and pineapple and destroyed the agricultural base of the country. After they left officially in 1935, however, the Americans bequeathed Haiti an armed force which was corrupt, cruel, ungovernable and in thrall to the US. It guaranteed that any Haitian President either obeyed Washington or went into exile. In 1947 Dumarsais Estimé, said to be a socialist ,was deposed after a couple of years. That began a period of dictatorship distinguished chiefly by American support for the ruthless Duvalier and his inane son, Baby Doc.<br /><br />During the US occupation (1915 to 1935) the Haitians tried to throw the occupiers out, only to be bombed and strafed in a eerie foretaste of the fascist bombing of Guernica during the Spanish civil war. Nobody made much of the Haitian version, because, after all, what were they but a bunch of "Niggers speaking French" as they were described by William Jennings Bryan, one of Colin Powell's predecessors as US Secretary of State. The Haitian resistance leader, Charlemagne Peralte, was like Bouckman, betrayed, murdered and his head exhibited to discourage the others. History repeats itself in Haiti, but never as farce.<br /><br />The Congo redux<br /><br />Today, we watch as the United States leads its partners France and Canada, in an adventure in Haiti which already resembles King Leopold's so-called "humanitarian" incursion into the Congo over a century ago. That enterprise, described by the King of the Belgians as rather like "a Red Cross scheme" left between ten and twenty million Congolese dead or with their hands and feet chopped off for misbehaviour. Four of them went to university.<br /><br />The American adventure in Haiti has not so far been identified by anyone as an illegal enterprise. It would seem to be, on the face of it, an illegal trespass into the affairs of another country, an illegal complicity in the illegal removal of a duly elected head of state and an illegal interference in the sovereign rights of Haitians -for a start.<br /><br />Mr Kofi Annan, who has now condemned the American adventure in Iraq may yet find time to condemn the one in Haiti, but probably not before the US elections. He is the chief guardian, it is alleged, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.<br /><br />In the meantime, however, it is clear that the intervention has had some catastrophic consequences. The bandits let loose and sanctioned by the Americans, French and Canadians, have destroyed the health, educational and democratic systems of Haiti - such as they were. More important for the latest disaster, they destroyed the Civil Defense structure, the network which would have warned Haitians of impending disaster and which would have at least attempted to rescue those worst affected. It is likely that had this organisation been in existence instead of in hiding from the interim government's murderous heroes, so many would not have died.<br /><br />But it is also clear that the Americans, Canadians and French do not believe that the Haitians are entitled to the same rights as other human beings. Perhaps, using their renowned scientific expertise and prowess, they have once again figured out what precise degree of humanity is possessed by each Haitian, and perhaps by each Jamaican and Trinidadian also.<br /><br />That, of course, would explain why it is not necessary for anyone to discover what really happened on February 29, when President Aristide was posted to the central African Republic as "cargo" in a CIA plane which just happened to be on hand when the US Ambassador, Mr Foley, decided to pay a call on the President before dawn one morning.<br /><br />Perhaps it may explain why various Caribbean leaders are content to watch the Haitians die without being able to organise to help themselves, because of course, the Haitians are "hapless" and not 100% human.<br /><br />It may not have occurred to our leaders that in condemning the Haitians to 'haplessness', they are in fact, recognizing that the United States has the right to legalise a new class of human being, one without rights - like the thousands locked away in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and a host of secret dungeons round the world.<br /><br />It may not have occurred to our leaders that in acquiescing to this foul doctrine they are not only condemning Haitians to death but they are condemning themselves and us. It may not have occurred to them that in their acquiescence they are occupying the same moral ground once inhabited by such as Pierre Laval, Vidkun Quisling, Pol Pot and the Africans who sold their brothers into slavery .<br /><br />But, as the West Indies cricket team has proved, in some cases, leaders are expendable. When the Laras, the Pattersons and the Owen Arthurs fail us, there may be others on whom we can depend to defend the hapless and the wretched of the earth.</span>Marcushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695028065998590343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19550709.post-1133762025601584912004-09-12T00:00:00.000+02:002006-01-15T10:33:35.876+01:00Under the GunCommon Sense<br />John Maxwell<br /><br />For me, nothing better epitomises the inter-connectedness of everything than a hurricane. A small weather system which began life as a localised area of low pressure somewhere in West Africa ends up devastating Florida and flooding subways in New York. Most of our hurricanes start as low pressure areas somewhere in the Sahara or the Sahel; cooler air rushes in to fill the low pressure zone and those winds will be deflected to the right (in the northern hemisphere by forces driven by the rotation of the earth. The spin imparted to the drifting column of air and water vapour helps it move over the sea As it drifts out into the Bight of Benin it gathers heat and more water vapour from the ocean and begins a leisurely drift across the Atlantic.<span class="fullpost"><br /><br />Soon, the rotating column of hot air picks up more heat and water vapour from the sea, becoming a towering column – a whirligig or gig as we as schoolboys called spinning tops – thousands of metres high. Nourished by the warm currents of the Atlantic drift it soon becomes much bigger and more energetic, wheeling thousands of tons of water vapour round its developing centre. It releases the heat picked up from the ocean as the water vapour condenses into rain and it vents its now cold exhaust into the troposphere – 12 km (8 miles) above the surface of the ocean. You could think of a hurricane as a sort of air conditioner for the Atlantic, cooling the water, extracting heat as it passes and transferring the heat energy to the winds which begin to accelerate as more heat (fuel) is ingested.<br /><br />As the Earth moves beneath this giant heat engine and the ocean's currents steer it like Columbus' doom-burdened caravels, the rotating storm makes its way across the Atlantic, becoming bigger and more destructive by the hour. By the time it becomes worthy to be called a tropical depression it disposes of more power than small nuclear bombs, albeit not as concentrated. But it does become more concentrated as it picks up more heat and mass from the water below and it moves, an enormous, blind and voracious monster, searching for its food – the warmer waters trapped in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. The monster's first hurdle is usually the Windward Islands, so called for the very reason that they are the cyclones main gateway into the hurricane feeding grounds of the Caribbean.<br /><br />Steered by currents of water below and currents of air above – jet streams and high pressure zones, the little breath of hot air from the Sahara has becomes a ravening omnivore, unstoppable by any human force, tossing enormous passenger liners and cargo carriers about like toys, throwing rocks the size of houses out of the sea, swamping boats and low-lying coasts and their puny man-made constructions, moving whole beaches from one place to another, altering the geography of the sea bottom as well as the land.<br /><br />And as it chews its way through the Antilles it kills and lays waste, drowning some in floods and in the swelling of the sea – the storm surge created by its lower atmospheric pressure. It strips hillsides of soil, vegetation and human habitation indiscriminately, sweeping away, crushing and maiming with landslides and roads scoured and destroyed by wind and water which carve and cut more greedily than any pride of bulldozers and draglines,<br /><br />Hurricane Frances, which threatened us two weeks ago is, as I write, making life miserable for subway travellers in New York. Sometimes hurricanes re-cross the Atlantic; hitching a ride on the warm Gulf Stream: it was probably an errant Caribbean hurricane that altered history by scattering the Spanish Armada five centuries ago, shipwrecking Spaniards and black sailors and soldiers onto coasts as foreign as Ireland and Northeastern England.<br /><br />All hurricanes are erratic and unpredictable but some are more wilful than others. The so-called paperclip or hairpin hurricane of the twenties, pirouetted north of Cuba – from Caribbean to Atlantic and back again, or like Flora, which in its leisurely circumambulation of eastern Cuba in 1963, provoked some of us to speculate that the United States was responsible, because we had heard that the Americans were experimenting in the use of weather as a weapon.<br /><br />That is possible, according to Popular Mechanics magazine, which a few years ago reported on US military projects which would put the Pentagon in the position of owning the weather using sophisticated cloud seeding techniques, powerful lasers and microwave transmitters to steer hurricanes and create instant floods – among other divertissements..<br /><br />I was reminded of this outlandish story by an advisory from the Tropical Hurricane Centre on Wednesday. The staff proudly announced that they had been graced by a visit from President George Bush. My slightly queasy response to this news was, of course, the paranoid reaction of one who, living in the Caribbean, feels menaced both by hurricanes and by the armies of the mighty and the ungodly. This is so especially when the scientists of the US Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFLD) predict that global warming will precipitate bigger, more destructive and more frequent hurricanes by warming the seas and so increasing the store of hurricane fuel. Mr Bush, on the other hand, dismisses the idea that there is any such thing as Global Warming.<br /><br />By the time you read this, in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica and Cuba, we will be digging ourselves out from under whatever Ivan has chosen to throw at us. If the hurricane proceeds as was forecast on Thursday night, Portmore may be a disaster area. Nearly 30 years ago, some of us warned that the area was unsuitable for mass housing because, for a start, most of it was at or near sea level, with the highest point being just 3 meters (18 feet) above. If a hurricane Allen had struck Portmore – as it threatened to do – storm surge and over-topping waves might have killed a great number. And, with only two constricted avenues out of Portmore, a huge number would be trapped because they could not get out. (Which is the reason for the Doomsday Highway.)<br /><br />In Jamaica, we have a functioning Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management – which some of us began to develop back in the much maligned seventies. One night in 1980, with the help of Prime Minister Michael Manley, we managed to move much of the population from Portmore in advance of hurricane Allen. We couldn't do it now; there are just too many people.<br /><br />In neighbouring Haiti the slightest storm is likely to kill hundreds of people, because their landscape has been stripped and there is little vegetation to restrain the waters. Additionally, since February, the Haitians are leaderless, their society decapitated by the ouster of their President, their social networks disrupted by gangs of criminals who have been allowed by the moribund conscience of the world to assume hegemony over the poorest and proudest people of the hemisphere.<br /><br />I won't go into the causes of their poverty nor the justification for their pride, We've been there before. But when so-called statesmen, Caribbean statesmen, can imagine turning over any group of human beings to the mercies of the thugs now ruling Haiti, one wonders not how their minds work, but whether their minds work at all. If there is an Ivan-precipitated disaster in Haiti the effects will be compounded by the fact that the leadership of the country is in the hands of people whose only skill is in mayhem and whose consciences are as dead and buried as the victims of their massacres going back three decades.<h2>The Head bone connected to...</h2>Thinking about Haiti is particularly poignant because, as I write, one of the main 'statesmen' agitating for the continuing gang rape of Haiti is the Prime Minister of Grenada, whose residence, I understand, has been destroyed by Hurricane Ivan on its way to the Greater Antilles. All of us will be licking our wounds, all of us would wish to welcome assistance from abroad, but the Haitians alone will have no say in how their land and nation is resuscitated and repaired. In Grenada and in Jamaica, in the Dominican Republic, in Barbados and Jamaica and in Cuba, neighbourhood committees will see to the distribution of relief, will try to ensure fairness, will attempt to protect the weakest and to enlist the strong in their assistance.<br /><br />That will not happen in Haiti.<br /><br />Government is not simply a mechanism to pass laws and to run police forces. The main function of a government is to minister to the welfare and happiness of its constituents enlisting the constituents in the fulfilment of those purposes. In Haiti, the so-called government is an assemblage of bandits, murderers, greedy businessmen and their camp-followers. All over Haiti, so-called 'rebels' – armed to the teeth, remnants of the murderous and corrupt Duvalierist army and its auxiliaries, the Tontons, are busy taking over police stations and painting them in the colours of the hated army abolished by President Aristide. They are demanding ten years back-pay and recognition as official peace keepers. All over Haiti, the leaders of the communities, the people who worked for the welfare of their neighbours, however well or however ineptly, are in hiding or in prison or dead.<br /><br />Questions of life and death, questions of whether children will get milk in preference to gangsters getting money will be subject to the arbitrament of the cutlass and the M-16.<br /><br />Here, and no doubt in Grenada, Barbados, the Dominican Republic and certainly in Cuba, food, building supplies and welfare will be distributed with some modicum of fairness. In Haiti, the devil will take the hindmost – the youngest, the weakest, the oldest, the most helpless and of course, the majority who support Lavalas and Jean Bertrand Aristide, the democratically elected leader of the Haitian nation.</span>Marcushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695028065998590343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19550709.post-1133646760353824812004-09-05T12:00:00.000+02:002005-12-03T23:57:04.146+01:00Rumble in the JungleCommon Sense<br />John Maxwell<br /><br />Nearly 10 years ago, I happened to be on the Winnifred Beach at Fairy Hill in Portland when my ears were assaulted by a boombox, pumping out a song I'd never heard before. As I listened, I heard the most alarming lyrics, inciting people to kill informers and homosexuals.<br /><br />A few weeks later, I was invited to replace Trevor Munroe as keynote speaker at the annual bash of the Public Relations Society of Jamaica (PRSJ). At the lunch, having in the interim got further and better particulars, I launched an attack on the author Buju Banton and producers and promoters of the song Boom, Bye Bye because it was, in my opinion, not only anti-social and uncivilised, it was also against the Jamaican law and constitution. In the most basic sense of the phrase, "Boom, Bye Bye" was a dangerous public mischief.<span class="fullpost"><br /><br />Photographers and reporters were present at the PRSJ bash and everything that happened there was reported at length in the papers and on radio and TV; everything except my remarks, not a word of which made news.<br /><br />Since then, the Jamaican media has continued to develop its unholy alliance with the dancehall community, one now characterised by extreme homophobia and anti-law and order sentiments. At the same time, the media is awash with fevered speculation about what to do about crime and violence and most are busy arguing for greater firepower and more repression.<br /><br />It has taken various homosexual rights groups to bring this contradiction to the attention of most Jamaicans. In fact, it has now even made TIME magazine, which has noted this week that while "dancehall reggae may be one of the hottest things thrumming in the US club scene. the genre's current headline act Beenie Man is also taking heat from gay activists for his violently homophobic lyrics".<br /><br />In fact, it isn't only Beenie Man. Other noted artistes like Vybz Kartel have gone into precipitous retreat as their international sponsors learn - or are forcefully reminded - that inciting people to kill other people is an indictable offence almost everywhere in the civilised world. "Murder music", as the London gay rights group, Outrage rightly terms it, is on the way out and not a moment too soon.<br />The cancellation of shows by Beenie Man and other offenders is costing them and their promoters millions. Since the Jamaican police won't intervene at home, loss of foreign exchange may be a salutary reminder that we live in a world in which each of us is his brother's keeper.<br /><br />The rise of violent and depraved dancehall lyrics has been celebrated by some who speak of it as authentic Jamaican culture. It didn't seem to become authentic until the 1980s when it seemed to be promoted as an antidote to the reggae of the '70s, strong music to reflect, no doubt, strong government and strong IMF medicine. It certainly flourished as the structural adjustment programmes gutted the Jamaican working class society with its resizing, retrenchment, redundancy and redeployment processes in which gainfully employed and skilled men suddenly became entrepreneurs selling shoe polish and guineps on the street, their children grew up increasingly fatherless and their women became whores.<br /><br />And the lines of the dancehall music reflected these realities, as 'brownings' became the rage and women generally were seemingly valued per pound. While some people celebrate dancehall, I am afraid that to me it repsesents a depraving of the public taste and of the nation's general level of musical ability. To imagine these 'artistes' as successors to Marley, Tosh and the others is a bad joke.<br /><br /><h2>Rope a Dope</h2>It's been 30 years since Muhammad Ali regained his world heavyweight boxing title from George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire. Ali hadn't lost his title in the ring. It had been taken away from him because he stood up against the Vietnam war, refusing to put on the American uniform to kill people who, he said, "Never called me nigger".<br /><br /><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 5px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 150px;" src="http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/images/20040905T020000-0500_65708_OBS_RUMBLE_IN_THE_JUNGLE_2.gif" border="0" />Ali is now perhaps the most popular human being - a status he was well on the way to achieving 30 years ago - except in the United States where the establishment reviled him for his choice of Islam and his rejection of the war. When he fought Foreman, he was on the comeback trail and few people thought he could do it.<br /><br />Everybody now knows how Ali beat Foreman at his best game. Foreman is probably the strongest man ever to be a boxing champion, with biceps the size of most athletes' thighs.<br /><br />Ali started the title fight with what seemed like dubious, or more likely, suicidal tactics. He dared Foreman to hit him as hard as he could, and Foreman, never a man to shirk a challenge, obliged, pounding every legally accessible part of the body, except Ali's head, which was never an easy target. The blows sounded as painful as they looked. But Ali, to almost universal surprise, absorbed Foreman's sledgehammering until Foreman's arms became tired. Then Ali, who, by all normal standards should either have been in hospital, or on the way to it, proceeded to beat the daylights out of George Foreman, leaving him senseless under the Congo stars.<br /><br />I am reminded of this fight by the US Republican party's tactics in the current election. Like Foreman, they are going to batter John Kerry in all the obvious places. I am convinced that the media and the Republican party propaganda were the most potent forces influencing the democrats to choose John Kerry, believing that in a presidential campaign Kerry would be positioned by the Democrats as a Vietnam veteran against a man who went absent without leave from his safe sinecure in the National Guard. I am almost convinced that the Swift Boat veterans were prepared long before John Kerry became the Democratic candidate. Karl Rove figured he could deal with a Kerry, while I feel sure he would not want to have dealt with a Howard Dean.<br /><br />How to deal with Kerry? Attack him where he seems strongest, attack his character. Even if the attacks are lies, remember that mud, once thrown, tends to stick; there is no smoke without fire and a hundred other cliches including the Jamaican: If it don't go so, it nearly go so. Keep him off balance, defending himself while the voters forget their real troubles and the dead bodies coming home from Iraq.<br /><br />The problem for Bush is that the American people will, sooner rather than later, become as disillusioned over the anti-Kerry slanders as they have become over the failing economy, the failing war in Iraq, the fact that whatever Bush and his apologists say, there is still a huge job deficit, four million more people now live below the poverty line than in 2000. That is the rope against which John Kerry can lean while Bush and his Rovers beat their knuckles bloody against Kerry's character.<br /><br />When Bush enrols a bitter loser like Zell Miller to rave against the party in which he still claims membership, to denounce and scandalise John Kerry, it is, in my view, the politics of desperation, a policy with a very limited shelf-life. Bush can deny that he endorses Miller, or the Swift Boat Liars for Truth, but nobody believes him, even if it mattered.<br /><br />As the real Bush deficits continue to nag at the pocketbooks and minds of the electorate, perhaps the only thing that may yet save Bush is the head of Osama bin Laden on a platter.<br /><br />Who knows? Perhaps it is already in a deepfreeze somewhere. But does that make the world safer?<br /><br />Like the Dancehall DJs, the US rightwing believes in the politics of revenge and division. It too is anti-gay, and in order to polarise support, the GOP wants to put initiatives against gay marriage on as many state ballots as possible, believing that in their deepest souls, Americans will vote against gays.<br /><br />And while that plan is going forward in certain areas, in places like Florida, work is proceeding apace in depriving blacks of the possibility of voting. Since blacks are 90% likely to vote against Bush, it doesn't matter whether the blacks you disfranchise are Republicans or Democrat. The GOP must gain. But hurricane Frances may make all those plans moot.<br /><br /><h2>Dancehall rules for Haiti</h2><br />The US Administration speaks about progress in Afghanistan and Iraq, but never about Haiti. It appears to be ashamed of what has happened there. The Organisation of American States is being pressed to do what the UN does in Europe, Asia and Africa - clean up the mess after the Americans. That is why our eminent Caribbean boobies are doing their damnedest, undercover, to sell out the Haitians and the cause of Haitian liberty.<br /><br />While Mr Bush boasts about taking Liberty to the world and his right to Liberate anywhere he thinks needs it, eight million Haitians languish in a situation in which even the most anti-Aristide of the Haitian civil rights groups feels uncomfortable. The National Council for Haitian Rights has now issued warnings about the return of the attachés, the old Tontons Macoute. If they can see the signs, perhaps Mr Patterson and Mr Knight might be able to see them too, if there is anyone who can wake up these worthies and the premiers of Barbados and Trinidad.</span>Marcushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695028065998590343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19550709.post-1133762491105407862004-08-15T00:00:00.000+02:002006-01-15T10:23:31.630+01:00Invisible MenCommon Sense<br />John Maxwell<br /><br />"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fibre and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind.<br /><br />I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me - you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's minds - a phantom in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy." <br />From the Prologue, The Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, Copyright © by Ralph Ellison.<br /><br />On July 15 an American corporation signed an agreement with the Cuban Centre for Molecular Immunology to mark the formal transfer of technology from a poor southern country to a rich northern country.<br /><br />The Americans were buying Cuban expertise in the design and manufacture of anti-cancer vaccines.<span class="fullpost"><br /><br />You heard me right.<br /><br />Anti-cancer vaccines? You still don't believe me?<br /><br />Vaccines against Cancer!? Vaccines against the great, almost omnipotent killer?<br /><br />Surely, had such a vaccine been developed in the metropolitan world the empyrean would have echoed and re-echoed until we were deaf! Had it been developed in the US it would have been big enough News to wipe even the US presidential election from the headlines for a day or two!<br /><br />The Cuban breakthrough is not just one vaccine, but several, one of them a vaccine which is also a treatment for advanced lung cancer, one of the most dreaded manifestations of the disease<br /><br />On July 15, Fidel Castro attended the signing of a cooperation agreement, the first in 40 years, between Cuban and US companies for the transfer of biotechnology directed at testing, licensing and manufacture of the vaccines worldwide.The agreement was signed between the CancerVax Corporation of the US and the Center for Molecular Immunology in Havana.<br /><br />Dr. Donald Morton, US professor, outstanding cancer specialist, medical director and chief surgeon at the John Wayne Cancer Institute in Los Angeles, California, described as unique and unprecedented the new Cuban approach - designing vaccines to stimulate the immune system.<br /><br />The Cuban vaccine development began during the special period, during the 90s, after the Soviet Union had collapsed and Cuba was on its own and very nearly destitute.<br /><br />The vaccine agreement is a paradoxical development because Cuba has come increasingly under the American gun. A year ago the Bush Administration made it a criminal offence for Americans to edit or even be involved in the editing of Cuban scientific papers. New restrictions were placed on travel by scientists between the two countries and, even more ironic, two weeks before the vaccine agreement was signed, the United States fined an American company $168,500 for selling vaccines for childhood diseases to Cuba. Another company, based in Panama, was fined nearly $200,00 for a similar offence.<h2>No Black Victimhood</h2>Colin Powell - only the second person ever to have been head of the US Armed Forces and US Secretary of State, has been speaking about the principles which guide his life. During a recent interview the black TV journalist, Armstrong Williams reported, "the four-star general kept wandering back to the territory of shame and self-defeat." For Powell, shame seems reserved for anyone who shirks his duty. For Powell, avoiding shame was a virtue learned young:<blockquote>"Both of my parents showed up here on boats - one in Philadelphia and one in New York," Powell told Williams, "And they worked hard. They worked in the garment industry. They worked for minimum wage and it was simply unthinkable that the children of these immigrants would not do better. Nobody in my family dropped out of school. It would have been unheard of, unthinkable, and that was drilled into us and it was these expectations and these tribal rituals, family rituals that every family has, every culture has, were what kept us all in playing, kept us all going. . . . You were not allowed to shame the family."</blockquote>That's exactly what some others of us think, which is why we make such a fuss about that part of our family that lives in Haiti or Cuba or anywhere else in the world. All 6 billion of us.<br /><br />As Powell says "those people who spend their days ranting about how all blacks are victims have already given up. They have excused their own failures. Standing outside of society and simply pumping your fists in righteous indignation doesn't change a thing. It just makes it easy for those in control to label and dismiss you."<br /><br />Which is precisely why people like myself stand inside of the society and work to make damn sure that all of us are inside the society and that none of us is invisible.<br /><br />We are not going to give up.<br /><br />I remember 40 years ago, being probably the only editor in the world outside of the London Observer's who published Nelson Mandela's speech at his Treason trial. It did not seem possible then that Mandela would have made it out of prison either alive or sane. Most of the world had no idea who he was. This week, Mandela's successor as President of South Africa, made it explicit that South Africa recognises Juan Bertrand Aristide as the President of Haiti.<br /><br />The Haitian people have been in prison far longer than Mandela. They were the nineteenth century equivalent of today's Cubans, with a philosophy which was so threatening that they were quarantined, like Cuba today, and pressured and attacked and finally invaded and subjugated because they dared to assert that all humanity was equal in rights.<br /><br />We do not 'excuse' Haiti by claiming victimhood. Haiti is and has been a victim of great power prejudice, hostility and oppression. And Haiti didn't ask to be a victim. She did not provoke her rape.<br /><br />Contrary to the opinion of Bishop Herro Blair and many other male chauvinists, people who are raped rarely bring it on themselves. Rape is an expression of power, it is not an expression of sexual desire. It is a tool for degrading and humiliating another, to take control of their bodies because you cannot take control of their souls.<br /><br />In the sixties and seventies, when many of us, including the present Prime Minister of Jamaica were "Young, gifted and black" we thought that we would change the world and make it into a civilised place, one which we inhabited by right and not by sufferance. That is why I and forty other West Indians were arrested in London in 1968 protesting against the expulsion of Walter Rodney from Jamaica in "Human Rights Year", and it is why some of us today still refuse to bow either to superior force or to seductive blackmail.<br /><br />When Thabo Mbeki, Ralph Gonsalves, Kenny Anthony, Bharaat Jagdeo and the rest of us are united in our rainbow coalition in defence of Haiti it is not because we espouse victimhood but because we are determined to ensure that Haiti is returned to the freedom and autonomy to which it is entitled and for which our ancestors fought 200 years ago and for which we still struggle. And we cannot endorse the transfiguration of bloody assassins into national heroes, as the La Tortue regime is planning to do this very week with a mock trial for the leader of the terrorists, Louis Jodel Chamblain.<br /><br />If Mr Powell is serious - and since his parents were Jamaican I believe he must be - he must understand that a spuriously 'democratic' Haiti cannot be a trophy to be displayed on anyone's election mantelpiece, nor can such a cuckoo be part of our family.<br /><br />What the Haitians fought for was not one man one vote, but all rights for all people.<br /><br />It should by now be clear that what has been happening in Haiti over the last century is a form of constructive genocide, in which attempts have been made to obliterate the Haitian personality, deny the Haitian genius and to reduce the Haitian nation to the status of a maimed beggar on the side of the highway to civilised development<br /><br />Professor Sibylle Fischer contends in her recently published work "Modernity Denied" (UWI Press 2004) - that Haiti has been penalised for its radical anti-slavery politics, its importance suppressed and ignored in historical and cultural records over the past two centuries. The story of Haiti has been told as one "outside politics and beyond human language, as a tale of barbarism and unspeakable violence." Unable to come to grips with the larger meanings of Haiti, a racist civilisation has simply written Haiti out of history.<br /><br />Fischer points out that much of the prejudice against Haiti 200 years ago originated in the Caribbean itself: Between 1791 and 1805, the foremost Havana newspaper "the Papel Periodoco makes no mention of the revolutionary events in Saint Domingue: neither the abolition of slavery, nor the defeat of Napoleon at the hands of former slaves, nor the establishment of an independent black state in 1804."<br /><br />Nothing. Not one word.<h2>Verdant Ignorance</h2>Judging by today's news, some of our Caribbean leaders and journalists are still in a comparable state of verdant ignorance.<br /><br />Fischer writes:<blockquote> "It might turn out that it is not enough to simply insist that Haiti be included in our accounts of the Age of Revolution and that the gaps in the historical and cultural records be filled. What would be needed is a revision of the concept of modernity itself so that the past struggles over what it means to be modern, who can claim it and on what grounds can become visible again.<br /><br />"The suppression and disavowal of revolutionary anti-slavery and attendant cultures in the Caribbean was, among other things, a struggle over what would count as 'progress' what was meant by 'liberty' and how the two should relate.<br /><br />"Sibylle Fischer's book is, she says, an attempt to think about literature, culture and politics transnationally, as forms of expression that mirrored the hemispheric scope of the slave trade, to think of what might have been lost when culture and emancipatory politics were finally forced into the mould of the nation state; and to think what might have happened if the struggle against racial subordination had carried the same prestige and received the same attention from posterity as did the struggles against colonialism and other forms of political subordination."</blockquote>Taking Prof. Fischer's thought to a perhaps extreme conclusion, I might theorise that had the struggle against racial subordination received the same importance as political freedom, we might never have had Adolph Hitler and we might never have had 9/11.<br /><br />Had it been otherwise we might have developed vaccines against HIV/AIDS years ago and nobody would now know what affirmative action meant.<br /><br />But, even now, some of us - even some who used to be 'young, gifted and black' - still believe that culture can be preshrunk, history can be segregated and freedom can be rationed. </span>Marcushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695028065998590343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19550709.post-1133762616966971162004-08-08T00:00:00.000+02:002006-01-15T10:22:07.506+01:00The Anti-Bouckman LeagueCommon Sense<br />John Maxwell<br /><br />The gang now running Haiti seem to have tired of their 'Democracy' game. The charade is over, they seem to say, we can now display our true colours - because we know that the most important members of CARICOM are going to recognise us and legitimise us.<br /><br />In the slaughter-house that is Haiti there aren't too many people to protest against the proposed actions of the governments of Jamaica, Trinidad, the Bahamas, Barbados, the bureaucrats of CARICOM to 'engage' the criminal conspiracy which calls itself the government of Haiti. I wrote a little song for them:<span class="fullpost"><br /><br />The Press is squared,<br />P.J's prepared,<br />It's time to end<br />Our Masquerade<h2>Treacherous and Cowardly</h2>In deciding to 'engage' with Haiti the Jamaican government, as I see it, is guilty of unspeakable cowardice and treachery - the more revolting because we could see it coming months ago - as I warned in this column. Messrs. Patterson and Knight held in their hands a large portion of whatever hope for Justice the Haitian people may have had. That hope was singed this week.<br /><br />In the same week that the Haitians should have been celebrating the spark that lit the fire of their independence, their close friends and relatives silently, stealthily, were preparing to make a zombie out of Haitian autonomy, independence and hope of Justice.<br /><br />'wa Kayiman celebrates the occasion on August 14, 1791 - 213 years ago, when the Jamaican escaped slave. Bouckman presided at a meeting to plan the rebellion against the French. At a place called Bwa Kayiman (Crocodile Forest) delegates from all over the north of Haiti pledged to throw off their chains and throw the French out of Haiti forever.<br /><br />Bouckman is said to have invoked the God of the Africans, who he said,<blockquote>takes us by the arm and guides us.<br />He will give us assistance.<br />Throw away the white God's image<br />Who is thirsting for the water in our eyes!<br />Listen to the call of freedom in our hearts!"</blockquote>The delegates returned to their plantations. On D Day, August 22, 1791, the orders discussed and adopted on the night of August 14, were implemented. Thus started the great saga that culminated in the independence of the first black nation in our hemisphere. Boukman was killed in November 1791, in a French counteroffensive. His severed head was exposed with this caption: "Head of Boukman, the rebel leader!" - (Max Manigat)<br /><br />There is controversy about whether Bouckman was a voudou priest/ obeahman, or a literate Moslem. In a monograph, Max Manigat reports: "It has been said that he had been given the name 'Book man' as was the custom in the English colonies of the Caribbean, in the case of many slaves who knew how to read the Koran."<br /><br />The only facts that are well established about Bouckman are that he was a Jamaican and a very tall, big man of enormous strength.<br /><br />Max Manigat says: Boukman gave the kick-off, others followed whose names now belong to universal history, and slowly but inexorably, from 1791 until 1803, the triple Haitian Revolution - anti slavery, anti-colonial, and social - of the "wretched of the earth" of Saint Domingue triumphed and became a reality.<br /><br />It is a raw and savage irony that Bouckman's compatriots in Jamaica should now be about tto betray Boukman's heirs in Haiti.<br /><br />Jamaica's Prime Minister, Mr Patterson, made his intentions clear even before President Aristide arrived in Jamaica in April. I read between the lines then, but I was told that I was being alarmist. We should praise Mr Patterson, I was told, instead of attacking him. This is what the Prime Minister said at the time:<br /><br />I want to emphasise that Mr. Aristide is not seeking political asylum in Jamaica. His stay in Jamaica is not expected to be in excess of eight to ten weeks. He is engaged in finalising arrangements for permanent residence outside of the region.<br /><br />CARICOM remains committed to the goal of restoring and nurturing democracy in its newest Member State as well as to social and economic development of the people of Haiti.<br /><br />It was not true that President Aristide was finalising arrangements for permanent residence outside of the region. Aristide regards himself and is still regarded by most Haitians, by South Africa and other nations, as the only legitimate President of Haiti, and neither Mr Patterson nor Mr Knight, nor the US State Department can change that.<br /><br />If Jamaica were to obey international law the question would not even arise. But Patterson and Knight a couple of years ago followed the example of North Korea, and resiled from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights/Optional Protocol on Civil and Political Rights. With that track record we can hardly expect them to take a principled view of the Haitian Affair.<h2>The Mask is off, the Masque is On</h2>In Haiti in the same week of Bwa Kayiman, the so-called government of Haiti staged an elaborate masquerade as part of its continuing effort to rehabilitate the noisome collection of murderous drug-dealing bandits who gave certain foreigners an excuse to intervene to depose Aristide in order "to save his life" and to "prevent a bloodbath".<br /><br />While the world press is busy spreading flimflam about Aristide's "resigning amid a popular revolt" it should be remembered that the "popular revolutionaries" were able to enter Port au Prince only under the auspices of foreign troops. While they had employed their brand-new military issue M-16s to terrorise and murder unarmed policemen in Gonaives add Cap Haitien, they were unable to take Port au Prince - fearing that the so called 'chimères' who supported Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas were waiting to greet them with their ancient muskets and soul force.<br /><br />Foreign intervention made it possible for Louis Jodel Chamblain and various other criminal gunslingers to enter Port au Prince without challenge.<br /><br />Now that perhaps as many as 3,000 Fanmi Lavalas supporters have been murdered, hundreds illegally jailed,and thousands more on the run or in hiding since March 1, - the Zombie government and its leaders, Messrs. La Tortue and Gousse, can set about restoring 'respectability' to convicted assassins like Chamblain and bring them into the bosom of the Zombie regime.<br /><br />And all will be 'legitimised' when their fellow Zombies across the Caribbean get into serious 'engagement' with them. The cowardly and treacherous attitude of the major Caribbean governments cannot have been better or more diplomatically expressed than in an editorial this week in the Barbados Nation: IT WOULD be most ironic should the historic unity of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) be jeopardised because of disagreements among some Heads of Government on the basis for the interim Haitian regime participating in the business of CARICOM pending the restoration of constitutional governance.<br /><br />I wonder if they or Messrs. Knight, Patterson, Arthur, Manning and Knowles would consider 'ironic' what happened in the Haitian Palace of Justice this week.<br /><br />In the early hours of August 17, a sham trial in Port-au-Prince acquitted notorious Haitian rights abusers Jackson Joanis and Jodel Chamblain of the 1993 murder of businessman Antoine Izmery. Neither the judiciary nor the prosecution made even the minimum effort required by law to pursue this important case. The absence of effort combined with top Haitian officials' public support for Chamblain and his colleagues compels the conclusion that Haiti's interim government staged the trial to deflect criticism of its human rights record without alienating its military and paramilitary allies. The trial is an affront to the thousands of people who have worked and sacrificed for justice in Haiti over the last fifteen years.<br /><br />Brian Concannon, an American lawyer who had been one of those helping Aristide restore democracy and law and order in Haiti, continues:<br /><br />Antoine Izmery, a prominent supporter of President Aristide, was murdered on September 11, 1993, during Haiti's de facto military dictatorship (1991-1994). Mr. Izmery had organized a mass at Port-au-Prince's Sacre Coeur church, to commemorate the anniversary of the 1988 St. Jean Bosco Massacre.<br /><br />Soldiers and paramilitaries dragged Izmery out of the packed church, in full view of the Haitian and international media, the diplomatic community in Haiti, and UN/OAS Human Rights Observers, and shot him on the sidewalk outside. Both Joanis and Chamblain were convicted, in absentia for murder at the 1995 trial of the Izmery killing.<br /><br />Anyone convicted in absentia, under Haitian law, is entitled to a formal retrial whenever he returned to Haiti. The so-called trial was a travesty. The procedure itself was illegal in several respects.<br /><br />The trial began on Monday, August 16, and ended before dawn on Tuesday, August 17. Only one prosecution witness appeared, and he admitted that he was not, in fact, an eyewitness. The prosecutor was obviously unfamiliar with the file, and appeared to be going through the motions, with no attempt to present a convincing argument to the jury. Many observers and journalists left the trial in the early evening, afraid of venturing out on the capital's streets after dark.<br /><br />Amnesty International referred to the trial as "an insult to justice" and a "mockery."<br /><br />It would be interesting to hear the comments on this case by two of our leading legal luminaries. Messrs. Patterson and Knight, are both Queen's Counsel, and Mr. Patterson a member of Her Majesty's Privy Council and therefore an adviser to her Majesty.<br /><br />If they ever give their opinions, it would be educational to hear what the rest of the Privy Council, especially the Judicial Committee, would have to say.<h2>A Busted Trifecta</h2>Somebody, somewhere, must be 'tearing up' - in the American sense of the word - for a busted Trifecta.<br /><br />In Venezuela, President Chavez was overwhelmingly endorsed - for the third time straight, by his people. In Iraq. Mokhtada El Sadr is still alive and on the loose - as I write, having apparently escaped martyrdom - so the civil war is postponed, and nearer home, Caricom has so far been prevented by three brave men, Ralph Gonsalves, Kenny Anthony and Bharaat Jagdeo - from certifying the regime of the Turtle and the Goose.<br /><br />How sad, especially since I hear there is a big party convention next week in New York at which these developments, had they gone the other way, would have been greeted with rapturous applause and would have made big news, at least on CNN and Fox.<br /><br />Such a pity.</span>Marcushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695028065998590343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19550709.post-1133763077983048422004-08-01T00:00:00.000+02:002006-01-15T10:03:02.516+01:00Is There Oil in Haiti?Common Sense<br />John Maxwell<br /><br />'Ten years from now, 20 years from now, you will see, oil will bring us ruin. It's the devil's excrement. We are drowning in the devil's excrement.' <br />- Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso, former Venezuelan oil minister and a founder of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), speaking in the early 1970s.<br /><br />The Sudan is the largest country in Africa, one of the largest countries in the world, about a quarter the size of the United States. It is really several nations, cobbled together into a national entity to suit the administrative conveniences of the British Raj.<br /><br />Most of the population is black, including many of those described as Arabs. Sudan has been at war with its people almost as soon as it gained independence from Britain in 1956.<span class="fullpost"><br /><br />"In the oilfields of Sudan, civilians are being killed and raped, their villages burnt to the ground. They are caught in a war for oil, part of the wider civil war between northern and southern Sudan that has been waged for decades. Since large-scale production began two years ago, oil has moved the war into a new league. Across the oil-rich regions of Sudan, the government is pursuing a 'scorched earth' policy to clear the land of civilians and to make way for the exploration and exploitation of oil by foreign oil companies." - Christian Aid, 2003.<br /><br />The depopulation of the countryside began when Chevron first discovered oil in 1980. The genocide has continued under the auspices of several oil companies, including companies from the US, the UK, Canada, China, Austria, Britain, Sweden and Malaysia.<h2>The Real Price of Oil</h2>The attitude of the oil companies may be summed up by the comment of US Vice President Dick Cheney, when he was CEO of Halliburton six years ago: "You've got to go where the oil is. I don't think about [political unrest] very much."<br /><br />There are several civil wars in progress in the Sudan but the major struggle is between the government of the Sudan -;Arab, and its black citizens in the south of the country. Without going into the political details, it is enough to say, and accurately, that the Sudanese government has for several years pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing in which over 2 million poor people have died, more than a million made homeless, while famine and misery stalk the burned and devastated land.<br /><br />It isn't as if the Western world has not known about the real price of its oil.<br /><br />Republican US Senator Sam Brownback told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2000 that "Sudan's bombing of churches, refuge centres and other civilian targets is one of the worst cases of religious persecution in the world, and the Clinton administration is not doing enough to stop it."<br /><br />Senator Brownback said then that the US should intervene, giving development assistance to the people in the south or break diplomatic relations with the Sudan.<br /><br />A spokesman for the State Department responded that Sudan's war is so complicated that its "difficult at times to take sides". The spokesman, one Mr Seiple, said that concerted international effort would be ncessary to stop the slaughter.<br /><br />Earlier this year, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and the NGO, uman Rights Watch, released reports revealing the extent of atrocities committed by the government of Sudan. Two years ago, Christian Aid, another NGO, released even more damning reports on the bloody slaughter of the innocents being conducted under the auspices of oil companies. Christian Aid said that oil companies, in building the Sudanese oil industry, offered finance, technological expertise and supplies. The government, employing its new riches, is emptying the land of its people, killing and displacing hundreds of thousands. Oil industry infrastructure - roads and airstrips - are used by the army and its allied militias in their campaign of murder, torture, rape and starvation.<br /><br />Christian Aid says that the oil companies, including one from high-minded Sweden, remain largely silent. "Those directly engaged in production claim they have no knowledge of oil-related human rights violation on their land and that, however deplorable, human rights violations are not linked to their activities<br /><br />According to Christian Aid: "Government forces and militias have destroyed harvests, looted livestock and burned houses to ensure that no-one, once displaced, will return home. Since the pipeline opened, the increased use of helicopter gunships and indiscriminate high-altitude bombardment has added a terrifying new dimension to the war. 'The worst thing was the gunships,' Zeinab Nyacieng, a Nuer woman driven hundreds of miles from her home, told Christian Aid late last year. 'I never saw them before last year. But now they are like rain.'"<br /><br />The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), a Trotskyist outfit, reported in May that "Khartoum is backing an Arab militia known as Janjaweed (or Fursan or Peshmerga) for the purpose of terrorising the local settled black African population." It has also encouraged the region's nomadic Arab tribes, the Baggara, to do the same.<br /><br />Africa Analysis reports that at a recent meeting of the Baggara it was resolved to "empty the province" of its majority African population, and even to erase the name of Darfur, literally "home of the Fur", the largest African group comprising approximately four million of the region's six million people.<h2>Rape as Policy</h2>According to WSWS:<blockquote> "The Janjaweed, armed with automatic weapons, ride in to the peasant villages on horseback. They burn the huts and round up the young men who are often executed. Parents are sometimes forced to watch whilst their daughters, some as young as six, are gang raped. Many are subsequently branded or executed along with their parents. Bodies are often dumped into village wells in order to poison the water.<br /><br />"Mosques are often torched, with Korans desecrated and religious leaders killed. All livestock, food and possessions are taken and the village left uninhabitable.<br /><br />"The Sudanese military follows afterwards to mop up. Alternatively it carries out bombing raids beforehand. Sometimes the Janjaweed and the military arrive together and set up a command post at the local police station prior to instigating a reign of terror."</blockquote>According to an African Union delegation,earlier this month the Janjaweed militia had chained people together and set them on fire.<br /><br />In the south of the Sudan, a peace agreement was being negotiated between the non-Muslim opposition led by John Garang and the government under which Khartoum would remain under Muslim Shari'ah law but religious rights would be guaranteed to the rest of the population. "A secret rider had been thought to exist between Washington and Khartoum which undertook to remove the Shari'ah from the constitutional basis of government in Sudan. This was to be a potential vote winner for the religious right in the US elections - to be trumpeted as the first time that a radical Muslim country has converted into a secular democracy." - WSWS<br /><br />Whether such a rider exists, in April, the United States opposed a resolution by the European Union in the UNCHR referring to the concern about the scale of human rights abuses and the humanitarian situation in Darfur. The resolution passed by 50 votes to one, with two abstentions. The only negative vote was that of the US.<br /><br />On Friday this week, the UN Security Council passed a resolution, backed by the US this time, calling on Khartoum to disarm the Arab militias and halt the genocide in Darfur.<br /><br />Incidentally, according to the Associated Press on Friday, "ChevronTexaco Corp.'s second-quarter profit more than doubled as high energy prices extended a recent roll that is shaping into the most prosperous stretch in the oil giant's 125-year history."<h2>Is there Oil in Haiti?</h2>On July 19, the Institute of Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) released a nineteen page report: Human Rights Violations in Haiti: February-May 2004 and on July 26, the IJDH issued an update paying particular attention to the direct human rights violations by the so-called "interim Government" of Haiti. Another report by the Haiti Accompaniment Project, corroborates and reinforces the findings of the IJDH.The reports are published at haitiaction.net.<br /><br />Briefly, the various reports disclose that the interim government and its criminal satraps and accomplices have begun a second wave of repression against the political majority in Haiti - the Fanmi Lavalas (Lavalas Family) the movement supporting President Jean Bertrand Aristide.<br /><br />The IJDH report documents in grisly detail the horror that is Haiti now. It corroborates earlier reports about massacres immediately following the overthrow of President Aristide.<blockquote>"The Director of the State Hospital Morgue in Port-au-Prince reported that the morgue had disposed of over 1000 bodies in the month of March alone. Although some of these may have died of natural causes, in a normal month the morgue disposes of 100 cadavers. The Director said that many of the 1000 disposed bodies arrived with hands tied behind the back and bullet holes in the back of the head.<br /><br />"The Catholic Church's Justice and Peace Commission reported finding 300 cadavers in the street in February and March, most with bullet holes, and estimated that the total number of killings could be as high as 500."</blockquote>Lavalas supporters as prominent as Mayors and Haiti's best known folklorist have been summarily arrested without charge. In the case of folklorist Anne Auguste, even her six year-old granddaughter was brutally taken into custody when the 69 year-old woman was arrested at midnight some weeks ago. The child has since been released.<br /><br />The IJDH report includes photographs in colour of mutilated bodies piled in the morgue on May 20, after another massacre, pictures of other victims, including one beheaded by his murderers. Among other victims of the repression are two Lavalas activists rounded up and killed at night by a detachment of US Marines in Belair - one of Haiti's largest slums and a stronghold of the Lavalas.<br /><br />The repression is no respecter of age, sex or condition. Young and old are murdered, women, young and old, and children are shot or beaten or otherwise abused.<br /><br />"Victims' families report that hundreds of less prominent Lavalas supporters have been arrested throughout the country, often in violation of several constitutional provisions. These reports cannot be confirmed, however, because the prison authorities do not allow independent human rights groups full access to the prisons and prison records. Preliminary investigations do indicate that significant numbers of supporters of the Constitutional government are incarcerated without a warrant or judicial order in Port-au-Prince, Les Cayes and Gonaïves. In addition, there have been persistent reports of police conducting large, sweeping arrest operations in poor neighborhoods that are considered Lavalas strongholds. The police claim that the arrestees are common criminals, but as there are no warrants or subsequent judicial action, it is impossible to confirm this claim."<br /><br />The reports can tell only of those cases about which informants will speak. Very many people refused to speak because of fear of reprisals and many others were unreachable because they are hiding from the terrorists.<br /><br />Radio stations are shut down, journalists, professors and members of parliament arrested, and there is no news about these activities from the corporate press either in the United States or elsewhere. And Norway, as high-minded as Sweden, is busy arranging a conference between the various actors in the debacle, to prepare, it is said, for "free and fair" elections!<br /><br />It is impossible for the facts not to be known to the United Nations or the United States, but, as in the case of the Sudan, they seem to be waiting for the horrors to age, like good wine, before they can contemplate action.<br /><br />The Barbadians and Trinidadians are reported to be in favour of recognising the government of the face-choppers and rapists. I wonder what their reaction would be if the same things were happening in Jamaica or Guyana?<br /><br />Once upon a time I heard that Freedom and Liberty are indivisible, that Justice must be universal, and that compassion was not only a virtue but a duty.<br /><br />I was misinformed. </span>Marcushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695028065998590343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19550709.post-1133646837711757472004-07-04T12:00:00.000+02:002005-12-04T00:00:03.120+01:00In Defence of the DisinheritedCommon Sense<br />John Maxwell<br /><br />There is a rape in progress next door. We know; we saw the rapist enter the house, we heard the shouts of alarm, the calls for help, the screams of the tormented victim echo through the neighbourhood. Our neighbours go about their business as usual. What do they care if, like Kitty Genovese so many years ago, the victim is slaughtered in full sight and sound of her neighbours. It is not our business, they say. We don't want to get involved.<br /><br />And we are closing our windows and drawing the curtains, because the rapist's brother is coming to tea with us. We don't want him to be unduly discountenanced, to be upset although he is one of those who set up the attack.<span class="fullpost"><br /><br />At this moment eight million Haitians are languishing under the rule of killers, torturers and 'face-choppers'. Many are in hiding, as was the prime minister, Yvon Neptune, who last Sunday gave himself up rather than be murdered as a "fleeing felon". Some are in exile, as are the president of Haiti, his wife and children, with their human and political rights torn from them by gangsters and terrorists.<br /><br />And we, Caribbean people, are preparing to entertain Gerard LaTortue, an absentee businessman/bureaucrat, who now claims to be the prime minister of Haiti.<br /><br />This is the 200th anniversary year of Haitian independence, and once again the Haitians are voiceless, bereft of their rights, disinherited of their history and their dignity and abandoned by their neighbours, their soi-disant friends - some of the very people they help rescue from miserable bondage. <br /><br />As UNESCO says: "The uprising in Saint-Domingue. which began on the night of August 22 to 23, 1791, played a decisive role in the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. August 23 is celebrated each year as the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition."<br /><br /><h2>A Gothic Obscenity</h2>This year is the International Year to Commemorate the Struggle Against Slavery, declared so by the United Nations on January 10, 2004. Haiti's slaves abolished slavery in 1793, the only slaves ever to achieve that distinction. In this international year commemorating the struggle against slavery, the fact that Haiti is in a cage should put all Earth in a rage. It is an obscenity.<br /><br />The so-called civilised world, like the Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan, is about to delicately draw up its skirts and pass by on the other side, leaving eight million human beings to languish and die, all because their ancestors 200 years ago decided to make concrete the idea that every human being should have the same rights as every other.<br /><br />The Haitian revolution was the only one of the three great revolutions of the 18th century which implemented all of The Rights of Man. They have been paying the price ever since. As the cynics say - No good deed ever goes unpunished.<br /><br />It is our duty to come to the aid of Haiti. As the Cubans have said: "We Cannot Abandon Haiti!"<br /><br />Haiti has suffered for 200 years from the lies, obfuscation and deliberate misrepresentation of people, organisations and states motivated by an atavistic racism, by a deep-seated fear of real human freedom and a profound inability to appreciate the real genius of a people driven by the urge to bring freedom to all.<br /><br />The Haitians have managed to survive in the face of the most long-lasting and purposeful genocidal campaign in history. They suffered because they helped Bolivar, because they were bold enough to offer soldiers to help Lincoln free the American slaves, because they understood the indivisibility of freedom and liberty.<br /><br />They suffer because they defeated and repudiated slavery. Had they been Europeans, their valour and nobility would be celebrated in song and story, in legend and myth.<br /><br />One of my e-mail correspondents recently described Haiti as an international crime scene, and he is correct. The United Nations secretary-general, Kofi Annan, and the UN Security Council are attempting to licence the latest attempt to return Haiti to unfreedom. We, who claim to be democrats, to love freedom and liberty, will be accomplices in this latest crime if we do not do everything in our power to set Haiti free once and for all.<br /><br /><h2>Is freedom really Indivisible?</h2>If Haiti is not free, none of us is free.<br /><br />When Haiti helped Bolivar - alone and friendless - she gave him all the arms, money and support that she could. She asked only one thing of him - that in freeing Latin America he should also free its slaves.<br />I suggest that this gesture bequeaths to us an inescapable duty - to free Haiti from its bondage, to allow Haitians to decide their future for themselves, to give Haiti back its freedom.<br /><br />We have no arms and we do not need arms. What we have is more potent than arms.<br /><br />We have the power to move the conscience of the world, of humanity. We have the power to make a big difference to the lives of the Haitian people and of the oppressed all over the world.<br /><br />What we need to do is to bring to bear the pressure of world public opinion, to relight the fire that the Jamaican Bouckman lit in 1793, to make it impossible for Haiti to be subjugated once again by stealth, by deceit and double dealing and treachery in the service of racism and greed.<br /><br />We don't have to do anything spectacular. All we need to do is to try to keep the attention of our neighbours focused, on the reality of Haiti. And we need to keep on doing it.<br /><br />We can start by circulating factual information on Haiti to our friends, to people of influence in whatever society we live, to journalists, commentators, columnists and editors, most of them prating grandly about democracy and freedom but doing nothing either to advance or defend them.<br /><br />I have long been stirred by the history of the Haitians, particularly since I read C L R James' Black Jacobins nearly half-a-century ago. Since then, I have had many Haitian friends, most of them refugees from the persecutions of the Duvaliers. I went to Haiti in 1964 in an unsuccessful attempt to interview Papa Doc. I returned in 1996 when the Caribbean Institute for Media and Communication and the PANOS Institute began a programme to train journalists after the first restoration of President Aristide.<br /><br />I have met President Aristide twice and I have read two of his books - his autobiography and In the Parish of the Poor. I have a tremendous respect for this man and for his country and the movement which he leads, all unmercifully libelled by the so-called Free Press of the Free World.<br /><br /><h2>Paul Farmer</h2>In one of my earliest columns about Haiti this year, I quoted a report by David Gonzalez about on an American doctor named Paul Farmer who founded a clinic in Haiti in 1980 and had been there ever since.<br /><br />"One of the world's most powerful countries is taking on one of the most impoverished," Farmer was quoted as saying about the United States' decision to withhold aid. "I object to that on moral grounds. Anybody who presides over this blockade needs to know the impact here already."<br /><br />I was fascinated by the sound of Dr Farmer and I quoted him again the following week:<br />". . .there's no topsoil left in a lot of the country, there are no jobs, people are dying of AIDS and coughing their lungs out with TB, and the poor don't have enough to eat. These are problems in the here and now. Something has to be done. Haiti is flat broke." This quotation came from an American writer named Tracy Kidder whose piece on Haiti I read in The Nation.<br /><br />A few weeks later, Tracy Kidder sent me by airmail, his book on Paul Farmer - Mountains Beyond Mountains - which won a Pulitzer Prize a year ago. As Kidder says, Farmer is not only out to heal Haiti, but the world. Now that I am in touch with both men by e-mail I can say that my life has been immeasurably enriched by my contact with them, even though we have never met, physically.<br /><br />Farmer's clinic is not in Port-au-Prince, the capital, but out in the bush - in a place that seemed to Tracy Kidder like "the end of the earth, in what was in fact one of the poorest parts of the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. I felt I'd encountered a miracle". Indeed he had, as became clear to him over days and months and years in which he and Paul Farmer have become close friends and allies.<br /><br />"In Haiti, I knew, per capita incomes came to a little more than one American dollar a day, less than that in the central plateau [site of the clinic] .And here, in one of the most impoverished, diseased, eroded and famished regions of Haiti, there was this lovely walled citadel, Zanmi Lasante. I wouldn't have thought it much less improbable if I'd been told it had been brought by spaceship." Kidder described the policies of the clinic: "Everyone had to pay, that is, except for almost everyone. And no one - Farmer's rule - could be turned away."<br /><br />It would be insane to attempt to try to condense Kidder's wonderful book, or the facts of Paul Farmer's life and work. But you may gauge some of Farmer's effect. Zanmi Lasante built schools, houses, communal sanitation and water systems throughout its catchment area. It vaccinated all the children, greatly reduced malnutrition and infant mortality, launched programmes for women's literacy and the prevention of HIV/AIDS, reduced the rate for HIV transmission from mother to child to four per cent - about half the current rate in the US. "In Haiti, tuberculosis killed more adults than any other disease, but no one in Zanmi Lasante's catchment area had died from it since 1988."<br /><br />I am moved by the story of this man - a white American - who set out to help a few poor, black villagers and started an unstoppable movement. Because, not content with his work in Haiti, Farmer is on a more or less successful campaign to reduce the cost of drugs for the treatment of intractable diseases in the Third World. He has this revolutionary belief that every human being, no matter how poor, is entitled to adequate medical treatment.<br /><br />And with all the time he spends walking up hills and down gullies in Haiti and travelling the world to influence drug companies and governments, Farmer still has time to be a very effective professor of medical anthropology at Harvard. Most of his salary, plus money he begs from people and foundations, goes into his work. He was thrown out of Haiti when President Aristide was first deposed a decade ago, and despite the attentions of the army, his clinic survived, though most of its programmes, literacy, vaccination, etc were seriously interrupted.<br /><br />They were again interrupted by the latest usurpation of power. But Farmer and his Haitian and Cuban doctors and staff believe that they can overcome even that, even after the recent killer floods.<br /><br />In Peru, where Farmer has had a great deal of influence, his students and others have gone a long way to obliterating multi-drug resistant TB. <br /><br />With all this, Farmer finds time to write learned articles helping to revolutionise the treatment of dangerous diseases all over the world, and also to be an unabashed partisan of justice for Haiti. He is the author of many books, including The Uses of Haiti and most recently, Pathologies of Power. He was awarded the American Medical Association's 'Outstanding International Physician Award' in 2002. <br />I believe that his story, and his writings about Haiti, demonstrate one incontrovertible fact: one person, one man or woman, armed with a true sense of duty can change the world.<br /><br />Margaret Mead said it well: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world, Indeed it's the only thing that ever has."</span>Marcushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695028065998590343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19550709.post-1133646927558142492004-05-09T12:00:00.000+02:002005-12-04T00:01:33.453+01:00Trickle down RacismCommon Sense<br />John Maxwell<br /><br />Nations are supposed to get the governments they deserve. I am not sure that any country deserves George Bush; the Americans didn't elect him president, and the Iraqis, over whom he is attempting to rule, obviously don't want him.<br /><br />In Jamaica there is a saying: "wha' start bad a mawning, can't come good a evenin'".<br /><br />The American air is filled with protestations about the essential goodness of the American resolve to bring FreedomT (Reg US Pat Off) to the 'darker parts of the world', an unfortunate phrase, which suggests that Mr Bush may have been thinking of some of the hapless people he spoke of last week. Then, apropos of nothing, he blurted some gibberish about his not believing what some people felt - that dark-skinned people are unable to govern themselves.<span class="fullpost"><br /><br />That this was rubbish is demonstrated by Bush's own behaviour and by the US foreign policy establishment which has directed forcible interference with dozens of darker skinned peoples over the years, the most recent being Haiti. And within the last few days the US president has declared his renewed intention to sabotage and bring down the government of Cuba.<br /><br />The aim, of course, is quite simple and humane: to instal US FreedomT wherever the lesser breeds without the law pullulate in obvious menace to the United States of America and world peace.<br /><br />Mr Bush at the moment, is in the grip of his latest and most severe crisis, although in typical fashion, he appears not to understand this fact. Speaking about the torture of Iraqis by US servicemen he has stated a few elementary truths, which we must accept: "Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people. That's not the way we do things in America. I didn't like it one bit." He was unable to say he was sorry when he tried to explain his position on two Arabic language television networks. It was only the next day, in a meeting with the King of Jordan that he told the King - obviously in reply to a direct question - that he was sorry for what had happened. King Abdullah, one expects, will dutifully carry this message back to the Arab and Muslim worlds.<br /><br />"This is not America," Mr Bush told the Arabic language audiences, "America is a country of justice and law and freedom and treating people with respect." Unfortunately the Arab world and much of the rest of the world, including his own countrymen, don't believe him.<br /><br />After having 'spanked' Mr Rumsfeld on Thursday, Mr Bush offered a pathetic defence of his defence secretary. Apparently searching for words he said of Mr Rumsfeld: "A really good secretary of defence" who had been with him through two wars and would "stay in my Cabinet".<br /><br />Rumsfeld, too, didn't appear to understand the need for an apology until some days after the political Krakatoa exploded in the Administration's face. Men of character, which is what they claim they are, don't need to be told when to apologise.<br />Al Jazeera used a cricketing metaphor to describe Bush's dilemma: he was, the station said, "on the back-foot".<br /><br /><h2>The Usual Suspects</h2><br />Watching the Senate Armed Forces Committee interviewing Mr Rumsfeld and his aides, one got the impression that not all members really wanted to get at the facts. Among those who did were Lindsey Graham, John McCain, Ted Kennedy and Carl Levin. Some others, including two of the women, senators Dole and Collins, were convinced that this was a local difficulty, an outrage obviously, but perpetrated by one or two (or maybe a dozen or two) bad apples.<br /><br />Others were concerned about whether the rot was systemic, whether the military was covering up and why it took so long for the investigations to be communicated to the president and to the Congress. General Myers, the chairman of the chiefs of staff, was very comforting. His belief in the US constitution, the effectiveness of military justice and his desire not to prejudice the trials of the accused malefactors were the reasons the Congress didn't get the story. And while the president had been told about the atrocities toward the end of January, no one explained how it came about that, according to him, he didn't know what was happening until last week.<br /><br />It was all apparently a matter of the pictures of the abuse, and General Myers had called Dan Rather at CBS to ask that the pictures not be shown just now because of the outrage they would produce and the probability that they would have inflamed Arab opinion. Not to worry, apparently some even more incendiary videos are still to come.<br /><br />The poor are over-represented in US prisons and in the US military. One of the most prominent accused, Lynndie England, is a girl of 20 who joined the army to pay her way through college.<br /><br />The relatives of Lynndie England, Ivan Frederick and Charles Graner all profess surprise at the charges against them, although Graner is a former prison officer with a bad record.<br /><br />Clearly, however, the army inquiry is likely to find that the accused enlisted men and women were guilty of a peculiar and isolated depravity and when they are found guilty, the whole miserable affair will be over, they hope.<br /><br />Unfortunately, the Arab and brown-skinned world, and much of the world, brown-skinned or not, do not quite see things that way. They believe that the torture is a predictable expression of American culture.<br /><br />The perspective outside of the US is that the United States believes that:<ol type="1"><li>It can do what it bloody well likes;</li><li>It can call on the rest of the world to clean up when it makes a mess of things.</li></ol>The first principle is exemplified by the US disdain for treaties and international conventions like the Kyoto Protocol, the ABM Treaty, the International Criminal Court, the Hague and Geneva conventions and others.<br /><br />The second is exemplified by Iraq, and Haiti most recently. In both of these, when the US has accomplished its primary objective, gaining control or the appearance of control, the rest of the world is invited to repair the damage.<br />In Iraq, that scenario is looking less and less likely.<br /><br />The Iraqis are tired of being misrepresented by Americans as a bunch of uncouth savages. It was Rumsfeld, remember, who stood by while organised gangs stole and destroyed priceless artefacts of civilisations going back 8,000 years. "Freedom is untidy," he said then.<br /><br />The Iraqis are being blamed for the rundown state of their country after 10 years of UN sanctions and American and British bombing of the infrastructure. Senator Dole, and I imagine many Americans, appear to be under the impression that Iraqi women had no rights under Saddam. People like Dole and Rumsfeld, not to speak of the 'Great Non-Intercontinental' George Bush, see the US presence in Iraq as a civilising mission and one that can be contracted out to mercenaries.<br /><br /><h2>The importance of honour</h2><br />Part of the problem with the American perspective is that they have objectified everyone but themselves. The French are lazy, erratic winebibbers; the Germans are a plodding lot addicted to dictators; and the Swedes a have a predilection for socialism and suicide.<br /><br />In the real world, the hapless Iraqis, lacking freedom, are, along with the Cubans, and contrary to US perceptions, among the best educated people in the world, a fact unknown in the North Atlantic world.<br /><br />When the US speaks of fanatics and Saddam 'bitter-enders', they are not conscious that they have, in just one year, managed to provoke the enmity of almost the entire population of Iraq, radicals and moderates alike, and the people on whom they came to bestow freedom have an entirely different concept of what freedom is.<br /><br />An American serviceman may see no harm in a woman ordering a man to masturbate in front of her, but one Iraqi said the acts were so offensive to him that he could not bring himself even to speak about them.<br /><br />Mr Rumsfeld, who feels that such acts were "terrible" is, however, the man who professed no great concern for the way detainees were treated in the law-free zone of Guantanamo Bay. The tortures at Abu Ghraib may have happened 'on his watch' but so, too, did the massacre of more than 2,000 men in Afghanistan at Shebargan, where people were suffocated in freight containers and buried by American bulldozers, while a thousand or so were simply gunned down at the Qala al Jangi fort outside Mazar al Sharif during the war against the Taliban. No one has ever been held responsible for these war crimes. The system does work.<br /><br />The culture of revenge is now so cold-blooded and depraved that honour can be satisfied by contract killers.<br /><br />As one Arab told the Al Arabiya, network, it is true perhaps, that the American atrocities were carried out by 'only a few people', but that was also true of September 11 and clearly "only a few" were involved in the desecration of American bodies in Fallujah. And since the American punishment of Fallujah was not only illegal but also disproportionate, it would appear to licence any overreaction by anyone to whatever insult he decides must be avenged.<br /><br />As someone once said, an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. And old William Shakespeare, or whoever, said: "O, It is excellent to have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant."<br /><br />That is a thought which has obviously not occurred to the American Press, who are, in my opinion, responsible for inducing Americans to view life as a kind of video game. According to my bete blanc, Wolf Blitzer, "Mr Rumsfeld made a robust apology."<br /><br />That apology and all the others are meant for American consumption, as far as Arabs and Muslims are concerned.<br /><br />What is needed is something more profound, but apparently, unattainable in this age: it is that the United States should be able to recognise other people - Haitians, Iraqis, Nigerians, Cubans and the rest of us - as human beings, not perhaps part of the American dream, but at least, entitled, inalienably, to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness however we choose to define it.<br /><br />What we want, in a word, is respect.</span>Marcushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695028065998590343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19550709.post-1133647095621413442004-04-25T12:00:00.000+02:002005-12-04T00:04:26.176+01:00Blood-Soaked BureaucratsCommon Sense<br />John Maxwell<br /><br />Nowhere is it more true that the pen is mightier than the sword than in an efficient bureaucracy. Millions more were killed by Adolf Eichmann, the dispatcher, than by the armies of Rommel or Timoshenko.<br /><br />But the machete wielders and the pistoleros are not to be despised as they do the work of the often faceless placemen who sign the orders, or like Henry II, simply express the wish to be rid of turbulent priests, journalists or human rights agitators.<br /><br />The Guatemalan government has just admitted its responsibility for the 1991 slaughter of an American anthropologist. She had angered the then government by reporting that the government was massacring civilians, indigenous Mayas, in what it called a counter-insurgency campaign backed and financed by the United States.<span class="fullpost"><br /><br />In Haiti, on January 24, 1991, the family of 24 year-old youth leader, Yvon Desanges, found his body just outside their gate. They knew him by the clothes he was wearing, his face too badly mutilated to be recognised. There was a rope around his neck. His hands were tied. His eyes had been gouged out. His tongue had been cut out. He had been stabbed so many times it was impossible to count the wounds. He had been shot several times. His abdomen had been slit so that his guts spilled out onto the street.<br /><br />Ten years later, youths like Yvon Desanges are still being slaughtered for the same reason, sometimes by the same people. Their mothers, sisters and girlfriends are being raped, their houses burnt.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/images/20040425T000000-0500_58952_OBS_BLOOD_SOAKED_BUREAUCRATS_1.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px;" src="http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/images/20040425T000000-0500_58952_OBS_BLOOD_SOAKED_BUREAUCRATS_1.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>On Thursday, one of Haiti's most notorious terrorists, Louis Jodel Chamblain was escorted to the Justice Ministry in Port-au-Prince by the justice minister himself, one Bernard Gousse, so Chamblain could surrender on camera, to officials of the Ministry of Justice.<br /><br />Chamblain's stately surrender came against the glittering background of an international donors' conference from which Haiti expects lots of aid from such as the United States, France, the IMF and the World Bank, all of whom refused to help the lawfully and overwhelmingly elected President Aristide when he was in office.<br /><br />The assassin's surrender was heralded as a "noble gesture" by Mr Gousse. Mr Gousse is not to be confused with Mr Latortue (Turtle), the prime minister, who a few weeks ago saluted Chamblain's gangsters as "Freedom Fighters".<br /><br />In the weeks since, Mr Chamblain has been holding court (literally) in the rural areas of Haiti, where, according to reports, people accused of various offences against the new "Freedom" are summarily shot or beaten or otherwise abused.<br /><br />"I am ready to give myself up as a prisoner - to give Haiti a chance so we can build this democracy I have been fighting for," Chamblain announced. The former army sergeant ran death squads for dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier and was a leader of the Front for the Advancement of Progress of the Haitian People - a paramilitary terrorist group which killed some 3,000 civilians in the 1990s. He fled to the Dominican Republic in 1994, was tried in absentia for several murders and found guilty as charged. Under Haitian law, people tried in absentia are entitled to a new trial if they return to the country. They can also be pardoned. <br /><br />An American lawyer who visited Haiti earlier this month said he'd been told: "Right now anyone can get on the radio stations and accuse anyone else of a crime or with being associated with violent Lavalas gangs. It means that without proof they can say this about you and immediately you have to go into hiding, and immediately you have to be concerned with your own welfare; and immediately the death threats begin."<br /><br /><h2>Neither principle nor honour</h2>The assistant secretary-general of the OAS, one Luigi Einaudi, made a revealing comment to a number of people gathered at the Hotel Oloffson on New Year's Eve last, as Haiti was about to begin the celebration of its bicentennial years as an independent republic.<br /><br />"The real problem with Haiti is that the international community is so screwed up that they're actually letting Haitians run the place," Einaudi said, as reported by Margaret Laurent, a leading Haitian lawyer who was one of those within earshot. Laurent was here last week to give thanks on behalf of the Haitian people to the Government and people of Jamaica for hosting President Aristide and the refugees who have fled Haiti to avoid the tender mercies of Mr Chamblain's Freedom Fighters.<br /><br />It may be less unpleasant to deal with the ruthless Freedom Fighters than with a diplomatic Canadian named David Lee, special representative of the OAS secretary-general and head of the OAS Special Mission to Haiti. He was on the platform at Gonaives when Mr Latortue hailed the gangsters as "Freedom Fighters".<br /><br />Mr Lee, in an address to the OAS, said: "Events on the day were confused. It was clear that the crowds were large and enthusiastic. But from our location within the security bubble it was not evident who was present. Nor could we hear what was being said on the podium at the large public meeting in the main square. The various speakers did not have prepared texts and were in the presence of an exuberant crowd. The OAS, and I personally, certainly did not "approve" (as a press article claimed yesterday) of what was reported in the press to have been said and done on that occasion. I left immediately thereafter for meetings here in Washington." Or, as the News of the World used to say when investigating prostitutes: "We made our excuses and left."<br /><br />According to The Associated Press, the crowd was between 2,000 and 3,000 - small by any standards.<br /><br />"Rebel leaders who still run Haiti's fourth-largest city sat on a platform alongside Latortue, Organisation of American States representative David Lee, recently installed interim Cabinet ministers Bernard Gousse and retired General Herard Abraham, and new Haitian Police Chief Leon Charles."<br /><br />Mr Lee obviously, had no idea where he was, no idea who was next to him on the platform and, in fact, was probably not even aware that President Aristide had been overthrown or that Mr Latortue was pretending to be prime minister. I wonder what he was smoking? But perhaps, like so many others in Haiti, he had simply been kidnapped.<br /><br /><h2>Security in Port-au-Prince</h2>According to the Haitian Press Agency, Port-au-Prince is in a state of paralysis at the moment, trembling in insecurity. Well-known businessman and leading free-zone operator, Michel Handal (who has Jamaican connections), was abducted on Saturday a week ago, in the central business district. Several other business people have been abducted but the families prefer to deal privately with the kidnappers, with whom, no doubt, they are on familiar terms.<br /><br />Meanwhile, prices for staple foods have almost doubled. A bag of rice which cost about J$1,700 less than two months ago, now costs nearly J$2,500. Outside of Port-au-Prince the prices are even higher, and the security situation worse.<br /><br />People in the capital told a visiting American lawyers' group two weeks ago that they are now afraid not only of the Duvalierist criminals like Chamblain's men, but also of the American Marines. According to some witnesses, the international forces led by the US Marines undertook targeted killings of Aristide supporters in the poorest areas in and around Port-au-Prince.<br /><br />Anthony Fenton reports: ". we were . told that the US Marines had recently slaughtered, in one night, 78 people in the Belair neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince. Reportedly, the US [and "other foreign occupiers"] had brought ambulances with them in anticipation of a bloodbath. All but two of the people murdered were carried away in these ambulances. Now no one will know the identities of those killed. We were told that the interim government, led by the US, has the "intent to destroy popular organisations."<br /><br />'Popular organisations', of course, means Aristide's Lavalas Family.<br /><br />Meanwhile, the world's official Samaritan, the UN's Kofi Annan, has continued his expert dithering. Having passed by Haiti in January - like the Levite on the Jericho Road - he is now speaking grandly of a UN force of 6,700 soldiers and 1,600 policemen to "turn Haiti into a functioning democracy".<br /><br />The transfer from the US to the UN force is to take place by June 1 and will no doubt proceed with the process of "nation building", as patented by George W Bush and employed so effectively in Iraq. I am personally offended by the idea of 'nation building" because I believe the term was invented in Jamaica by Norman Manley and his people at Jamaica Welfare, and that it properly means that the people of the country are the ones who consciously mould themselves into a nation. It is not a political brain transplant nor a transfer of technology.<br /><br /><h2>Nor Grace nor Shame</h2>A nation was being built in Haiti, but not according to American neo-liberal specifications. It encompassed things like literacy and 150 new high schools, more built in 10 years than in the previous two centuries; it encompassed improved health care, with a little help from Haiti's friends, such as Cuba and Dr Paul Farmer, a Harvard professor, who almost single-handedly at first, pulled Haiti back from the brink of surrender to rampaging HIV/AIDS. Farmer believes treatment for HIV/AIDS is a human right, which puts him beyond the pale for the bureaucrats. He deserves to be known and recognised across the world as a true poor people's hero.<br /><br />In an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Professor Farmer reports simply and eloquently, the savage disruption the putsch has had on the health of poor Haitians. He speaks of the advances made over the past 10 years, noting inter alia, that Haiti's government had US$300 million for all the public services it provided, and contrasted that with the revenues of just one of Harvard's 17 hospitals with revenues of US$1.3 billion. There was general disregard for the neutrality and immunity of health institutions during conflict; several hospitals were the targets of violence, including Farmer's own hospital in the Central Plateau where two patients were murdered. The university hospital is at a standstill for lack of personnel; vehicles belonging to Dr Farmer's clinic were stolen, halting the movement of patients and medicines, and, in early March Haiti's newest medical school - Tabarre - for the training of poor people's children to be doctors, was taken over by the US Army as a military base.<br /><br />Dr Farmer asks: "What will become of its faculty, composed in large part of Cuban public health specialists, but also including Haitian, US and European teachers? More to the point, what will become of its 247 medical students? .what will happen to the only medical school in Haiti whose top priority is the development of a cadre of physicians to serve the nation's poorest and most vulnerable people?<br />Perhaps we should ask these questions of Kofi Annan, Colin Powell and P J Patterson, all of whom come from the same sort of background that most Ghanaians, Jamaicans and Haitians share. Part of that background, of course, is the struggle for liberty led 200 years ago by Haitian and Jamaican slaves dying so their children could be free.</span>Marcushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695028065998590343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19550709.post-1133763482492787762004-04-11T00:00:00.000+02:002006-01-15T11:25:43.023+01:00The Circular World of Colin PowellCommon Sense<br />John Maxwell<br /><br />On a chatboard to which I subscribe, one subscriber recently excoriated Mr Butch Stewart for allowing people like me to criticise the new Haitian regime. Another subscriber came to Butch Stewart's defence: Mr Stewart, she said, was a publisher who does not interfere in the editorial direction of his newspapers, preferring to let democracy take its course. "That Mr. Stewart allows his editors to publish articles that seem not in line with the business interests of his social strata speaks positively for him".<br /><br />That is a fact for which I am personally grateful and proud because the trend has been, as A.J. Liebling said half a century ago, "Freedom of the Press belongs to those who own one."<span class="fullpost"><br /><br />In our world, our fundamental rights and freedoms are becoming more and more, part of international commerce, they are being globalised, and the rights no longer belong to the people but to corporate entities, who have bought media properties and in practice, the rights which belong to human beings.<h2>'No-news' is Good News!'</h2>The public interest is now for sale to the highest bidder. Human rights are privatised and traded and a collection of corporate interests are increasingly becoming the 'civil society' which run things - a monstrous incarnation of faceless entities imposing their fundamentalist and authoritarian prejudices on the rest of us.<br /><br />Morris Cargill in 1962 stopped writing for the Gleaner for several years, because the then editor, Theodore Sealy, refused to allow Cargill to defend me (and the freedom of the press) in his column. Cargill actually disagreed with what I had said but was fiercely defending my right to say it.<br /><br />"No-news" has become "good "news. The US media have successfully obscured for nearly two years, the lies and obfuscations which led that country into war with an Iraq already divided by no-fly zones, bled white by a decade of strategic bombing, sanctions, malnutrition , depleted uranium and cancer. Today, they are fighting in Fallujah.<br /><br />It was John Stuart Mill who said more than a century ago, that the time for uncomfortable questions, the occasion for the most serious dissent, was on those occasions when, like the Gadarene swine, humanity took it upon itself to stampede over cliffs of ignorance and incomprehension in almost unanimous hysteria.<br /><br />And Tom Paine, the man in whose memory this column is named once said "You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine." -Age of Reason: Tom Paine, 1776<br /><br />Freedom of speech is as essential to human life as air and water. But, as US Supreme Court Justice Holmes said nearly a century ago, "Freedom of Speech does not include the right to shout 'Fire' in a crowded theatre."<br /><br />My rights are bounded and butted by yours. And the world since 1945, has agreed to recognise that human rights belong to all human beings, and that no person or nation has rights that are superior to those of any other.<h2>Aristide and Lumumba</h2>Mr Colin Powell, despite the evaporation of his celebrated argument for the Bush invasion of Iraq, is still one of the most trusted people on the planet and certainly one of the most highly regarded in his native land. His native land, by an accident of history happens to be the USA and not Jamaica, where his parents were born. Everybody in Jamaica owes his or her freedom in part, to the Haitian revolution, and every black American owes a similar debt. The United States itself owes nearly half its territory to the Haitian revolution.<br /><br />Ethnic minorities advance their development in many ways, one of which is by helping each other. In their separate diaspora the Jews, the Irish, the Italians, the Jamaicans and everybody else you can think of does it. In hostile territory you stay close to your compatriots - all for one and one for all - as Alexandre Dumas, (a Caribbean black born two years before Haitian independence) wrote in a somewhat different context.<br /><br />It is Mr Powell's perceived failure to take up his black man's burden which so enraged Harry Belafonte, another Jamaican-American, that he denounced Mr Powell as a 'house-slave'.<br /><br />But Mr Powell did get help on his way to eminence. He was mentored by another immigrant, a second generation Italian named Frank Carlucci. Carlucci was Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration and is now chairman of the Carlyle Group, a giant investment firm in which the Bush family has interests. Forty years ago, Carlucci was second secretary in the US Embassy in the Congo, at the time when the US was convinced that the Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, was taking the Congo - perhaps all of Africa - into the Communist fold. Lumumba, a film made by a Haitian, Raoul Peck, identifies Frank Carlucci as the embassy official who transmitted President Eisenhower's approval of the Embassy's plan to remove or kill Lumumba, thus decapitating the Congo's hope of democratic development and instituting the 36 year kleptocratic tyranny of Mobutu Sese Seko. The filmmaker, Raoul Peck, had fled Haiti to the Congo, to escape the murderous attentions of Papa Doc Duvalier who reigned in Haiti contemporaneously with Mobuto in Zaire. (Based on: Carlucci can't hide his role in 'Lumumba': Lucy Komisar, Pacific News Service, Feb 14, 2002.)<br /><br />And it is now Carlucci's protege, Colin Powell, who bears the responsibility for the decapitation of Haitian democracy.<br /><br />Sometimes the world is not an oblate spheroid; sometimes it is perfectly circular.<h2>Caricom and Mr Powell</h2>On Monday last, Colin Powell celebrated his 67th birthday in Port au Prince. Mr Powell was there, he said, to "demonstrate [US] support for Haiti" and "to help the leadership of Haiti make a new beginning and to build a future of hope for the Haitian people."<br /><br />Mr Powell was last in Haiti in 1994 to negotiate a soft landing for American troops At that time Mr Powell was sure of the integrity of an agreement he had made with General Raoul Cedras the tyrant then in charge. Powell said he trusted the 'soldier's honour' of Cedras. As it proved, Cedras' soldier's honour was purely a figure of speech. One hopes that Mr Powell will have better luck this time with La Tortue and his 'ninja tortues', some of whom are convicted torturers and mass-murderers.<br /><br />Mr Powell says he and Mr La Tortue spoke about a 'truth and reconciliation' commission and Mr La Tortue even invoked the names of Tutu and Mandela, but gave no further indication that he was serious about this proposal. If he is, a substantial component of his support will probably be forced to seek asylum in Miami.<br /><br />Mr Powell reported: "I also said to the prime minister that I will be working hard to reintegrate Haiti into the CARICOM community in the months ahead. I assured the prime minister that all the issues that he has mentioned to you today, the United States will be providing him full support." Obviously, the full support of the United States will trump any puerile cavilling by the Caricom group who want an inquiry intothe circumstances of Aristide's departure.<br /><br />"I don't think any purpose would be served by such an inquiry, but the facts are very well known. On that evening, the situation was deteriorating rapidly in the country, especially in Port-au-Prince. We were on the verge of a bloodbath, and President Aristide found himself in great danger. He got in touch with our ambassador, and arrangements were made at his request for him to depart the country É and now I think it is important for all of us to focus on what the Haitian people need now."<br /><br />In an interview on Haiti's Radio Metropole (conducted by Rothchild François, Jr., a Haitian stringer for the Voice of America) Mr Powell said: "I think we succeeded in preventing a great loss of life by President Aristide's resignation and by the introduction of multinational forces" If Mr Powell's "We" means what it seems to, it would appear that President Aristide was not involved in the transfer of power on February 28.<h2>Character Assassination</h2>In relation to CARICOM, here is an exchange from Mr Powell's interview:<br /><br />MR. FRANÇOIS: Secretary Powell, politically, this government is facing a problem with CARICOM; you know CARICOM doesn't want to recognize this government, so what do you think about that and how will the US help this government to obtain recognition from CARICOM?<br /><br />SECRETARY POWELL: I will be working with CARICOM and with the individual nations of CARICOM to let them come to the realization that this government now here is legitimate and represents the desire of the Haitian people. And I hope that over the next couple of months that CARICOM will change its position and welcome Haiti fully into the CARICOM consensus.<br /><br />Caricom's wish to discover the truth of Aristide's removal is dismissed. Let's move on - they will get over it. So too no doubt, will the Haitian people who have stubbornly persist in electing Jean Bertrand Aristide, despite all American warnings<br /><br />And perhaps we will get over it too, since in the arbitrament of realpolitik what really counts is that Jamaica's debt repayments are consuming 76% of our revenues. That statistic destroys courage, resolve and principle.<br /><br />We need to get over our legalistic, moralistic, humanistic perhaps even socialistic preoccupation with principle, honour, declarations, treaties, conventions and solemn undertakings.<br /><br />Murderers, torturers, rapists and other depraved hooligans now walk the streets of Haiti free, dispensing "justice' to their enemies-;according to the news agencies. They are, says Mr La Tortue, not criminals, but 'freedom fighters'. There will be impunity for the murderers, but for the former President, character assassination is what he deserves and at the hands of Colin Powell.<br /><br />At the joint press conference with La Tortue, Mr Powell answered a question about a rumoured 'investigation' by suspiciously anonymous 'prosecutors' in Miami.<br /><br />"There are inquiries being made by our judicial authorities in the United States to see if there is any evidence of wrongdoing on his part. I will have to wait until our legal authorities and our investigators are finished before offering any comment on whether he might be charged with anything or what action the Haitian government might take. My principal focus and the principal focus of the United States government are on the future, not on the past."<br /><br />Two things are being said here:<br /><br />One: Aristide is a very bad man and we don't like him; and<br /><br />Two: While there is absolutely no evidence that Aristide is a bad man we still don't like him.<br /><br />Case closed.<br /><br />We need to move on! The turtles are getting hungry!</span>Marcushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695028065998590343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19550709.post-1133647261113145382004-03-28T12:00:00.000+02:002005-12-04T00:12:24.853+01:00Our Debt is Long Past DueCommon Sense<br />John Maxwell<br /><br />The Caribbean has now proven that it is even more hopeless at diplomacy than it is at cricket. And, as in cricket, those who are considered guilty are not those at the top but the foot-soldiers.<br /><br />Our gutless leaders - unable to look a principle in the face - are, as I write on Friday, busy selling the Haitian people down the river. . .again.<span class="fullpost"><br /><br />Meanwhile, the bombastic Latortue, fresh from embracing a choice assemblage of bloody-handed murderers, desires to sit at the table with people who consider themselves upright, law abiding and above all, respectable. The Bahamas put our position best: We simply have no choice but to deal with whatever Haitian regime is there. Of course, if we don't, the US might just find it necessary to issue a travel advisory about Bubonic Plague or Ebola fever in Nassau or Negril.<br /><br />Condoleezza Rice has apparently threatened Jamaica directly, telling Patterson to get rid of Aristide or face unspecified consequences.<br /><br />But, even as we speak, the Bush Administration is beginning to unravel, unconscionable lie by unconscionable lie. But we do not understand that the slavemaster is in deep trouble and that we need not follow illegal orders.<br /><br />I have been re-reading some of the columns I wrote 10 years ago and what surprises me is that some of them might have been written last week.<br /><br />"We know that a corrupt army, representing a corrupt ruling class, has for 80 years enslaved the people of Haiti, shot them down in cold blood, tortured and beaten them, burnt them alive, raped them, flogged them to death, and tried by every means to reduce a once proud and defiant and independent people to the status of zombies, lesser than animals, things without souls . We know that there are many Americans who are ashamed of their government's complicity in these high and stinking crimes, we know that there are many others of all races in this world, who, if they knew, would be in the struggle to restore Haiti to its peace and dignity." ('Accomplices to Murder' - Jamaica Herald, June 5, 1994).<br /><br />Now, listen to someone else, a man who is now a judge at the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. He too is a Jamaican; his name is Patrick Robinson. In 1994, he was a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. On the very day my words above were published, Robinson was in Belem, Brazil, presenting a report by the Commission. I quoted him in a later column ('The New Slave Trade' - Ja Herald, June 26, 1994)<br /><br /><h2>Rape as an instrument of policy</h2>"The people in Haiti have the same emotions and aspirations as the citizens of any other state in the organisation. They have within themselves an enormous capacity for warmth and love and friendship and endurance and a great yearning for peace, justice and democracy. But a people do not endure the hardships, the deprivation, the violence, the victimisation and the enormous disappointments that the Haitians have experienced over the past 32 months without their faith in humanity and their expectations of decency and justice being challenged in a serious way."<br /><br />Mr Robinson then goes on to detail just how seriously the Haitians were challenged. As you read his words, please remember that Mr Robinson is speaking about some of the same people embraced last week by Mr Latortue: "[We] received information of severely mutilated bodies deposited on the streets, and a member of the delegation actually saw one such body. . .the purpose of these acts is to terrorise the population. . .human corpses are being eaten by animals. . .numerous reports of arbitrary detentions routinely accompanied by torture and brutal beatings. . .55 cases of political kidnapping and disappearances during February and March ."<br /><br />Robinson's report told of the actions of the so-called Haitian army and its assistants, the 'attaches' or tontons in their campaign of terror against ordinary people who supported Aristide. Rape, he reported, was used as an instrument of policy.<br /><br />"The Commission received reports of rape and sexual abuse of the wives and relatives of men who are active supporters of President Aristide. . .women are also raped, not only because of their relationship to men who support President Aristide, but because they also support President Aristide; thus, sexual abuse is used as an instrument of repression and political persecution."<br /><br />Patrick Robinson is now doing in The Hague what he and his fellows should have been asked to do in Haiti. In the court across the Atlantic, they are trying people accused of very serious crimes, but few as noisome and depraved as those committed against the men, women and children of Haiti.<br /><br />The world thinks it necessary to punish those in Yugoslavia who warred like savages against their own people for two and three years, but they forgot about those who had oppressed, murdered, maimed, raped, tortured and otherwise terrorised millions in 'peacetime' in Haiti for more than 30 years.<br /><br />I don't believe that people were killed in Bosnia simply for trying to escape the country. As I reported in 1994, "the Haitian Goonocracy obviously regard escaping from their island prison as a capital offence. Yet the American authorities, operating from Jamaican territory, continue to send back to Haiti, men, women, children and babies who have committed this 'offence' and are therefore likely in President Clinton's words, "to have their faces chopped off".<br /><br />And the men who were doing the chopping were, last weekend, on a platform in Gonaives glorying in the embrace of the newly anointed prime minister of Haiti. Latortue was brought to the scene in US Army helicopters and accompanied by the resident representative of the Organisation of American States.<br /><br /><h2>A Miasma foretold</h2>That the assassins are still there was foreseen by me in 1994. I had listened to the words of two top US policymakers and drew my conclusions.<br /><br />James Woolsey, then head of the CIA, said that the political problem in the Haitian military was that it was the rank and file hooligans who were the engine of change in the military. "It presents a very difficult situation for the policymakers."<br /><br />Defence Secretary William Perry told the Canadian defence minister that opposition to Aristide extended deep into the lower ranks of the Haitian military. Yet, Mr Perry told Meet The Press that the United States "would want to use as much of the existing military and military police as is capable".<br /><br />I said at the time: "This would seem to suggest that the Pentagon, and by extension the CIA and the State Department), wish to preserve their assets in Haiti and to build into any new Aristide government an American capacity for subversion and destabilisation on demand." ('Imagine That!' - Ja Herald, July 24, 1994).<br /><br />I said at the time that the interests of the Haitian Bourbons clearly coincided with the interests of the American right. <br /><br />I wrote then: "Aristide and his people agreed to allow an amnesty to the murdering hoodlums in the military and the private sector who had supported the Duvaliers and the Generals who had followed them. Aristide and his people could have made government impossible in Haiti, army or no army. They tried, instead, to work within the system." ('When You Sup with the Devil' - Ja Herald Sept 25, 1994.)<br /><br /><h2>Liberating the Vampire</h2>In 1994, the Americans were intervening for the 29th time in Haiti. It was my opinion that their latest mission had "liberated the vampire from its coffin and made it an officer and a gentleman. They have legitimised the illegitimate and promised impunity to the raging lumpen who feast on blood, pain and the physical and sexual abuse of women and children. They have sanctified the fanatical band of nigger-hating mulattos who prey parasitically on the Haitian body politic and call themselves the elite. The American white power structure is making its peace with its natural allies, and as in 1915-1934, when Jim Crow reigned in Haiti, hell is going to break loose". (Sept 25, 1994).<br /><br />When Aristide was at last restored, in October 1994, I watched the proceedings on television and I wrote about them in a column entitled "A Love Song for Haiti". It began by reporting Jean-Bertrand Aristide's words to his people: 'Look at us; We are a great people, we are a grand people .don't be surprised that I am in love with you. I love all of you.' Against all odds, Jean-Bertrand Aristide is back in Haiti and as far as his people are concerned, everything is going to be beautiful, 'Isolated we are weak,' he told his people, 'Together we are strong'.<br /><br />I commented: "They need to be both optimistic and cautious. Shortly before Aristide and his entourage landed in Haiti, CNN interviewed a pretty young mulatto woman, a member of the Haitian elite. In her looks and her attitudes she seemed almost Jamaican. "It is the Aristide supporters who need to reconciliate," she said, and she did not say that she and her ilk are the 'civilised' - the masters - at least in their own minds. She had no intention, it was clear, of admitting any fault, any responsibility for the thousands of Haitians, slaughtered, raped, beaten and driven into exile by the elite and their myrmidons over the generations."It is people like Meyrelle Bertin with whom Aristide's supporters will have to walk hand in hand. In South Africa there is a Mandela and there is a de Klerk. In Haiti there is only Aristide."<br /><br />Sadly, Meyrelle Bertin was herself assassinated a year later, and her murder was blamed on Aristide. Everything was blamed on Aristide.<br /><br />As I reported in 1994: "Aristide was generous in his gratitude to the Americans and all the others who helped him get where he is. He did not worry about the political and journalistic wars which brought his cause to the brink of disaster. His message was acceptance and discipline. He was generous to his enemies, to those who want to kill him. He offered them love, reconciliation. To his people he said: 'Be patient once again; you will find your dignity and your pride once again.'"<br /><br />As I commented: "The Haitian people's indomitable courage won them their independence, and their pride and their dignity are about all that kept them alive through generations of oppression; [Now] they are counselled by 'Titide' to be patient once again."<br />I urged our Caribbean people to come to the assistance of Haiti. "We cannot provide economic assistance - that anyway, is the responsibility of those who have profited from Haiti's misfortunes for so long. We can provide trained manpower to patch some of the holes in the Haitian body politic ."<br />"Our debt to Haiti cannot be defined in material terms. It is a debt of honour and of love, among other things. We may not be able to define it at all, but it is immense and past due." ('A Love Song for Haiti' - Jamaica Herald Oct 16, 1994)<br /><br />But that was 10 years ago.</span>Marcushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695028065998590343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19550709.post-1133647326546375312004-03-21T12:00:00.000+01:002005-12-04T00:13:04.690+01:00'We Ugly! But We Here!'Common Sense<br />John Maxwell<br /><br />It's the Haitian equivalent of "You-ah go tired fi see mi face". In Haitian Creole it is "No lèd, Men Nou La!".<br /><br />The Haitian people are the facts on the ground, and whoever pretends to be ruling Haiti has to deal with eight million of them.<br /><br />It does not really matter that Mr Patterson has assured the Americans that President Aristide will not use Jamaica as a launching pad to overthrow the so-called government of Haiti; or that Mr Aristide promises that he will not interfere in the politics of Haiti.<span class="fullpost"><br /><br />It does not matter, because President Aristide is the politics of Haiti - until the Haitian people decide otherwise. No one else has that competence.<br /><br />The so-called new prime minister of Haiti is one monsieur Latortue, who has a lot of chat for someone without a mandate from anyone except the US ambassador and his bosses. He is, he says, going to unite Haiti, so he has begun by boldly leaving out of his 'government' any representative of the people of Haiti. I give him three weeks.<br /><br />My attitude to the farce now being played out in Haiti has drawn fire from a fellow columnist in this newspaper, who has described my columns as "Anti-American dissertations".<br /><br />It would be easier to treat Lloyd Smith seriously if he could get even a few facts right, but when he says that it was Mr Loren Lawrence who was declared persona non grata by the Jamaican Government, he is 10 years and four or five ambassadors out of joint. He forgets that Mr Lawrence was thought by many to be Mr Seaga's manager. It was Vincent de Roulet who was asked to leave.<br /><br />"No lèd, Men Nou La!" or as Michael Manley said one day in 1975, "We are not for sale".<br /><br /><h2>Lectured on Democracy</h2>I am personally tired of being lectured on democracy by the representatives of a government whose citizens gained universal adult suffrage 20 years after we did. It seems that I am not alone. The most recent Pew international poll suggests that the rest of the world does not endorse the Bush administration's policies.<br /><br />I have nothing to apologise for when the world should know that the United States and France bear the major responsibility for the predicaments in which Haiti now finds itself. It is a savage irony, that two of the three nations founded at the end of the 18th century on the ideals of the Brotherhood of Man should continue to hypocritically dismiss the third on no other visible basis but that Haiti is black.<br /><br />Racism is Racism is Racism. To describe Haiti as a 'failed state", to say that Aristide misgoverned his country, to allege that the mulatto elite in Haiti are capable of operating a democracy are sick jokes. The mulatto elite and the military have been the junior partners in the franchised predation of Haiti for most of its history.<br /><br />Aristide was not perfect. Nobody ever claimed that he was. But is George W Bush perfect? or Jacques Chirac? The money misappropriated when Chirac was mayor of Paris could feed a great many Haitians. Does that make Chirac unfit to lead France? Does the fact that Ken Lay of Enron was the largest contributor to President George Bush, or the fact that Vice-President Cheney's company is accused of overcharging the US army for food make either Mr Bush or Cheney unfit to govern the United States and the world?<br /><br /><h2>Whose Failure?</h2>"His failure to adhere to democratic principles has contributed to the deep polarisation and violent unrest that we are witnessing in Haiti today... His own actions have called into question his fitness to continue to govern Haiti. We urge him to examine his position carefully, to accept responsibility, and to act in the best interests of the people of Haiti" - Colin Powell, secretary of state, USA.<br /><br />"I am the chief, the military chief.. The country is in my hands" - Guy Philippe, 'rebel leader', convicted coup plotter, reputed cocaine baron.<blockquote>"Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and one of the poorest countries in the developing world. Its per capita income - $250 - is considerably less than one-tenth the Latin American average. About 80 per cent of the rural Haitian population live in poverty. Moreover, far from improving, the poverty situation in Haiti has been deteriorating over the past decade, concomitant with a rate of decline in per capita GNP of 5.2 per cent a year over the 1985-95 period.<br /><br />"The staggering level of poverty in Haiti is associated with a profile of social indicators that is also shocking. Life expectancy is only 57 years, compared to the Latin American average of 69. Less than half of the population is literate. Only about one child in five of secondary-school age actually attends secondary school. Health conditions are similarly poor; vaccination coverage for children, for example, is only about 25 per cent. Only about one-fourth of the population has access to safe water. In short, the overwhelming majority of the Haitian population are living in deplorable conditions of extreme poverty" - The World Bank - Challenges of Poverty Reduction.<br /><br />"The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations announced that the poorest nation in Latin America was undergoing a 'silent' food crisis. The organisation implies that the crisis is 'silent' because the people somehow survive despite the dire food situation" - Foreign Aid Watch.<br /><br />"The task facing this nation of eight million people is enormous.<br /><br />"About 30,000 new cases of AIDS were diagnosed in Haiti last year. And though the spread of the disease has stabilised somewhat in recent years, about 4.5 per cent of the population - some 360,000 people - is infected, the highest rate in the region, according to the Ministry of Health.<br /><br />"We have a detailed plan for fighting AIDS from 2002 through 2006," said Public Health Minister Henri Claude Voltaire. "It's a plan that was created by experts, not government ministers, although they are certainly involved."<br /><br />But the plan is being stymied by a political quagmire stemming from disputed parliamentary elections in May 2000 that led to the suspension of some $500 million in foreign aid - Michael Deibert, Associated Press.</blockquote><h2>A quagmire and its sponsors</h2>People are starving to death in Haiti, thousands are dying of AIDS. Thousands of children and adults are dead, dying or unable to function in any adequate sense because of polluted drinking water, lack of food and AIDS. The situation is dire, and it has been for years - long before Aristide. The High Panjandrums of the USA, France, Canada and the UN know all that and have known it for years.<br /><br />Yet, the plans were "being stymied by a political quagmire". The political quagmire, according to the US and its clients, is entirely due to Aristide, except that the disputed senatorial seats were vacated three years ago and offers made for a new election. The Opposition refused. They refused as they have refused every single attempt by President Aristide to make peace and develop Haiti. One fundamental demand of the 'democratic opposition' was non-negotiable. There would be no democratic dialogue with Aristide!<br />But, according to the US, it is Aristide that is the problem.<br /><br />The democratic opposition is almost entirely financed by USAID and by a far-right US Government outfit called the National Endowment for Democracy, which some describe as the human face of the CIA.<br /><br />So while Mr Powell was urging Mr Aristide to make concessions, Dr Condoleezza Rice's people were presumably telling their clients not to speak to him. I am not sure what the Americans mean by "a zero sum game", but this sure sounds like one. The US Government was telling Aristide to play Russian Roulette, with bullets in all chambers.<br /><br />Former US Congressman Ron Dellums has been working on behalf of President Aristide. According to him, a day or two before the president's departure from Haiti, Colin Powell told him (Dellums) to give Aristide a message. It was that Guy Philippe was coming to his palace to kill him and that the United States would do nothing to prevent it.<br /><br /><h2>Patterson & Powell</h2>Under various international laws and conventions people like Aristide and his family are specially protected persons. Officials of foreign governments such as Powell and Patterson are obliged to accord them a special duty of care. Additionally, according to custom, tradition and law, Patterson is obliged to offer as much aid, comfort and assistance to President Aristide as possible, since he is the democratically-elected head of a friendly state - removed by unconstitutional means, whether by threats, menaces or any other illegal procedure is immaterial.<br /><br />The behaviour of Kofi Annan and the UN Security Council was barbaric. They refused to help a UN member in good standing when his country was threatened by the most disreputable, bloodthirsty assassins. Yet, two days later, when Aristide had been overthrown, kidnapped or whatever, the same group felt impelled to send a 'peace-keeping' force to Haiti. And a few days ago, the World Bank held a donors meeting to consider aid for Haiti. The hypocrisy runs like blood in an abattoir.<br /><br />The problem for Aristide's enemies was that neither Plan A nor Plan B worked. Plan A was to starve the Haitians into submission. Despite starvation they stood firm. Plan B was to intimidate and overawe the president and his people by capturing some soft targets, police stations in rural areas with populations starving and unable to protect themselves. The people did not flinch, nor did Aristide.<br /><br />Plan C then came into play, a last desperate option. It seemed to work, and since the world Press was prepared by hogsheads of propaganda about Aristide's wickedness, there would be no trouble, no backlash.<br /><br />As the Haitian slaves said 200 years ago: "No lèd, Men Nou La!"<br /><br />They're still there. No longer slaves. And they are not for sale.</span>Marcushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695028065998590343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19550709.post-1133647393817874232004-03-14T12:00:00.000+01:002005-12-03T23:03:13.823+01:00Sold Down the RiverCommon Sense<br />John Maxwell<br /><br />When I discovered a few years ago, that Colin Powell's roots were in St Elizabeth, I had already remarked his resemblance to my stepfather and to my Uncle Harry, my mother's brother. Since the parents of all three were born within five miles of each other, I wondered if they were related, since, the scientists say, people who resemble each other are likely to be kin.<br /><br />I never pursued the inquiry and I now know I never will.<span class="fullpost"><br /><br /><h2>Brothers & sisters from all over</h2>A few columns ago I mentioned meeting some former Haitian students of mine at the Quebec Summit of the Americas. In four weeks it will be two years since I walked down from the Heights of Abraham where the summit was, having been turned back at the checkpoint by soldiers goggled and suited like creatures from Star Wars. <br /><br />My former students, now practising journalists, were accredited to the summit and passed through the checkpoint with no problem. When they recognised me they mobbed me, wanting to know why I wasn't inside with them.<br /><br />I was one of perhaps 200,000 demonstrators - "Raging Grannies", miners, nuns, schoolteachers, maquiladora workers from Mexican sweatshops, French farmers and all kinds of people from all over. As I got to the bottom of the hill I heard the whoomp, whoomp of exploding tear-gas canisters. The first volley was directed at anarchists who were trying to tear down a fence between them and the summit.<br /><br />But it soon became apparent that we were all targets - saints, sinners and anarchists alike were all soon enveloped in an acrid miasma of 'tear-smoke' and CS gas. It drifted across the whole quarter, engulfing people who were perfectly peaceful. We were the overwhelming majority, despite what the kennelled press claimed. At the bottom of the hill I ran into a melee of Haitians, mainly older people in their Sunday best come to greet their President "Titid" as they called him - two bus-loads of them, in various stages of respiratory distress, gasping for breath on the pavement, some retching, others in a state of collapse. <br />They came to greet Aristide and met democracy masked, goggled and jack-booted.<br /><br />They had intruded unknowingly into what the Canadian Government had decided was to be a cordon sanitaire - a democracy-free zone - round the summit. The purpose of the summit, of course, was to lock the countries of the western hemisphere into the famous Free Trade Area of the Americas - a monolithic construction which promised to impoverish the hemisphere's workers in the interest of multinational corporations.<br /><br />Now, two years later, the Americans themselves are waking up to the fact that Free Trade is destroying their own economy, taking away well-paying jobs from Americans and decimating the middle class.<br /><br />The jobs exported from the United States end up in some of the poorest quarters of the world - in Bangladesh, in Indonesia, in China and even in Haiti. <br /><br />In Haiti the leading Haitian Opposition spokesman, the multi-millionaire Andy Apaid, operates factories making goods for American multinationals with famous brand names like Walmart, in factories which pay their workers less than a dollar (US) a day or about one-tenth the Jamaican minimum wage.<br /><br /><h2>Suffer the little children</h2>In my e-mail on Friday morning was a report made by a former youth reporter with the Haitian children's radio station, Radyo Timoun. <br /><br />Here is part of it: <blockquote>I was living in the gutter, dressing in old clothes and begging at the airport when President Aristide took office in 1990. One of the first things Titid did when he moved into the National Palace was invite a group of children who sleep in the streets to visit the palace and speak out about the conditions of the street children.<br /><br />When Titid became president, he told the world that we street children were people, we had value, that we were human beings.<br /><br />Many adults didn't like this message. They said we were dirty and should be thrown out like the trash that we are. But Titid loved us, and when I met him, he kissed me and put his hand on my face and told me he loved me. And they were not the empty words of a politician.<br /><br />During the first coup in 1991, the street kids were attacked and Lafanmi Selavi [a shelter for homeless children started by Aristide when he was a parish priest] was burned.<br /><br />I was just a little child at that time, but with Titid I felt important. We went to Titid and told him that we wanted to have a voice in democracy, to have a voice for children and he gave us Radyo Timoun. We were the first children's radio station in the world, run by children and promoting the human rights of all Haitians. . .Adults all over the country heard our voices and were forced to accept that we children are people too. <br /><br />Yesterday, at the [Aristide] Foundation I saw gangsters and criminals in army uniforms destroy the hopes and dreams of the Haitian people. They destroyed the building, burned books and killed many people. A new government run by these people will surely be bad, not only for the children, but for all the people of Haiti. <br /><br />I do not believe that President Aristide has abandoned us to this misery. .He would never leave us willingly. Last week Titid said on the radio he would die before he would give up the struggle for democracy in Haiti.<br /><br />We are fearful of the old army because they are those who killed the street children of Lafanmi Selavi. They killed the peasants in the North who wanted to have democracy and supported Aristide.<br /><br />A new government has no hope for the children of Haiti. I am scared, I think the criminals will try to kill me too because I am one of Titid's boys. But I am not just scared for myself. I am scared for all the children of Haiti. And today I cannot stop crying.</blockquote><br /><br />As they did in Baghdad, one of the first buildings pillaged by the terrorists in Haiti was a museum - the brand new Museum of Haitian Culture. As it burned, a fundamentalist preacher danced round the flames, denouncing the priceless collection as the work of the devil.<br /><br /><h2>The sell-out</h2><br />I should have known better. Last week I congratulated Patterson and Caricom for their principled stand on Haiti, which seemed to redeem much of their earlier stupidity. I spoke too soon.<br /><br />As the Most Honourable Prime Minister of Jamaica announced on Thursday in not so many words, Aristide and the people of Haiti have been samfied, mugged and sold-out.<br /><br />It doesn't matter that the US Government and the French have several different stories about the kidnapping of Aristide, it doesn't matter that the Lima and Santiago Declarations and Caricom itself proclaimed that we will not recognise usurpers, people who overthrow democratic governments. Of course, this "new" Haitian Government can claim that it is not a usurper; it was installed by the Bush Administration, itself installed by the Supreme Court of the United States of America. How much more legitimacy do you need?<br /><br />If Patterson speaks about the "new president" and the "new prime minister" and says the new prime minister is to visit him before the next Caricom meeting, it means that Patterson and Caricom have decided to de-legitimise Aristide. And that they have told President Aristide so.<br /><br />Patterson said: "I want to emphasise that Mr Aristide is not seeking political asylum in Jamaica. His stay in Jamaica is not expected to be in excess of eight to 10 weeks. He is engaged in finalising arrangements for permanent residence outside of the region." <br /><br />Clearly the powers that be have made Aristide an offer he can't refuse. I suspect that unless Aristide accepted that offer, whatever it was, he would find himself a man without friends, at least without anyone to stand up for him except, of course, Cuba. And, if he accepted any Cuban offer of asylum and help that would, of course, give Mr Bush even more propaganda to use to discredit him. "See! He's a Communist!! Just like I told you!!!" And that would be that. <br /><br />Of course, Cuba was the only country to offer Haiti any assistance when the Americans, the Canadians, the Europeans and the multilateral institutions were starving Haiti in order to smoke out Aristide.<br /><br /><h2>Be careful what you wish for</h2>I can imagine the arguments that persuaded Patterson. Perhaps it was a telephone call from Colin Powell - <blockquote>P J, my old mate, the president and I need your help. Haiti is a disaster about to happen. The international community needs to get in there fast and heavy to avoid a real catastrophe [not to mention an immigration and electoral disaster in Florida]. We can't allow this to happen. Unless we straighten out this Aristide thing we're going to have hundreds of thousands of deaths on our hands. And it will be all because of Aristide's non-co-operation, and your supporting him. France, Canada and ourselves are prepared to pump in shiploads of supplies, food, medicine, water purification kits, you name it. But we can't do that if you guys don't co-operate.<br /><br />And you know what? We'll need your guys to do the administration - we'll need all sorts of people, security, nurses, teachers, the works, and you can supply them. I understand you have a bunch of unemployed skilled people in Jamaica. This will ramp up your remittances and everybody will come out smelling like roses. And you won't have any problem with a fifth term!!!<br /><br />And - if you don't support Aristide in the UN, nobody else will. So that solves THAT problem. Trust me; we've worked out all the angles; you can't lose!<br /><br />Okay compadre? By the way, I'm thinking of spending a little time in Treasure Beach this year. that sounds good? Alma and I would love to see you. Ciao.</blockquote></span>Marcushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695028065998590343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19550709.post-1133647719890939992004-03-07T12:00:00.000+01:002005-12-03T23:08:39.896+01:00Washington's Tar BabyCommon Sense<br />John Maxwell<br /><br />Those of us old enough to remember children's stories before Dr Seuss and J K Rowling, may remember Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus stories. One of them, the only one I remember, is about Brer Fox and the Tar Baby.<br /><br />Brer Fox had been trying to catch Brer Rabbit for a long time and was ever being outfoxed (or perhaps out-rabbited) by the hip hopster. One day, Brer Fox had an idea. He made a doll out of tar and dressed it up like a girl, seating her by the roadside where Brer Rabbit was sure to pass.<br /><br />Since Brer Rabbit could not mind his own business, Brer Fox was hopeful. He just sat and waited. <br />Along came Brer Rabbit. He saluted the lady by the roadside. She did not answer, nor did she answer when he continued his blandishments, and, like most bullies, <span class="fullpost">he decided to teach her a lesson.<br /><br />"I'm going to teach you how to talk to respectable folks," he said. If she didn't take off her hat and say howdy, he would bust her one.<br />She didn't take off the hat. <br />So, he busted her one.<br />And his fist stuck fast in the tar.<br />Brer Fox watched and waited.<br /><br />"If you don't let me loose, I'll knock you again!"<br />And so said, so done. <br />So his other fist was now stuck in the tar.<br />Incandescent with rage, Brer Rabbit began to shout and scream imprecations and threats, and finally, exasperated, he butted the tar baby. <br />So his head was now stuck! Brer Rabbit was immobilised, securely trapped and helpless for Brer Fox - or some other predator - to come and make a leisurely meal of him. The story ends before the gory.<br /><br /><h2>The Truth is a Terrible Thing to Waste</h2>The laws of probability tell me that for sure, one of these days, the Bush White House will be detected speaking the absolute truth about something important. Few of us are holding our breaths for that day.<br /><br />Since any criticism of US policy is now considered anti-Americanism, let me get two zingers off right away, so that the God squad can go consult with its enforcers without having to read the rest of the column.<br /><br />Zinger #1: Almost nobody understands that today's chaos was made in Washington - deliberately, cynically and steadfastly. History will bear this out. In the meantime, political, social, and economic chaos will deepen, and Haiti's impoverished people will suffer.<br /><br />Zinger #2: The US State Department, which is seeking to foster the lie that the president and his aides have clean hands, claims that Aristide asked to be taken to safety. Aristide says he was forced to go, by US operatives on the ground in Haiti. Considering the fact that the State Department's point man has a long history of defending Haitian dictator, Jean-Claude Duvalier, while attacking proponents of democracy and economic justice such as Aristide, reasonable people will be disinclined to believe the State Department.<br /><br />If that isn't enough, here is Zinger #3: There are several tragedies in this surrealistic episode. The first is the apparent incapacity of the US Government to speak honestly about such matters as toppling governments. Instead, it brushes aside crucial questions: Did the US summarily deny military protection to Aristide.? Did the US supply weapons to the rebels.? Why did the US cynically abandon the call of European and Caribbean leaders for a political compromise, a compromise that Aristide had already accepted? Most importantly, did the US in fact bankroll a coup in Haiti, a scenario that seems likely based on present evidence?<br /><br />The US Ambassador to Jamaica, Mrs Cobb, is disturbed by the tone of statements made by Caricom and its chair, P J Patterson. She thought that certain statements and innuendoes were unnecessary.<br /><br />What on earth will she say about the three statements above? The first and the third are by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, a card-carrying capitalist; the second is from the editor of the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin in the heartland of America.<br /><br />American efforts to wash off some of the sludge through which they walked have ranged from the simply incredible to the preposterous. President Bush, February 29: "President Aristide has resigned. He has left his country. The Constitution of Haiti is working. This Government believes it essential that Haiti have a hopeful future. This is the beginning of a new chapter in the country's history."<br /><br /><h2>The Tar Baby</h2>Aristide is not the first Haitian leader to have been kidnapped by the US. In 1915, they arrested and exiled (to Jamaica) Dr Rosalvo Bobo, who was not only a noted physician but also the leader of the Haitian majority party, and was scheduled to be formally elected as president by the Haitian Parliament.<br /><br />This was in 1915, when the Americans decided to take over Haiti in order to teach its hapless Negroes some discipline. People speak of this intervention as if it were the first US interference in Haiti's internal affairs.<br /><br />As Mary Renda points out in her book, Taking Haiti (2001; University of North Carolina Press), before 1900, the US had already intervened nearly a dozen times, each time to cure some defect in the Haitian democracy and create an advantage for the United States.<br /><br />For the first part of the 19th century, the slave-based society to the north wanted nothing to do with the free blacks to the south, until it became clear that Haiti would be a serious market for American goods. Later, when Haiti was in financial distress because it insisted on paying off the evil French levy of 25 million gold francs - reparations to the slave owners - US banks stepped in to 'help out' the Haitians and ended up taking over the joint, in the interest of fiduciary responsibility and all those other virtues so lacking in black, independent peoples. Shades of the IMF.<br /><br />We won't even consider the atrocities committed by the marines, but we need to remember a few sociological facts. One is that in treating the 'high-yaller' Creoles as 'niggers' (their word) they drove a wedge between the Creoles and the Blacks which plagues Haiti to this day.<br /><br />As we in the Anglophone Caribbean have seen, our masters have sedulously cultivated ethnic preferment as a means of social control. When Jagan rose to power in Guiana in 1948, one of the first things that Hindu did was to destroy the Hindu apparatus of separateness in order to politically integrate the subject populations. When the British took over five years later, their first move was to raise up the Blacks against the Indians, creating division and hatreds which have lasted to this day - 50 years later.<br /><br />Similarly in Haiti, the US discrimination effectively split off the 'elite' forever from the Blacks, creating two Haitian communities, each claiming to represent Haiti. And last week, the US showed which side it preferred.<br /><br />The Americans ruled for 15 years, for 14 of those by martial law. They instituted censorship, hitherto unknown, and intellectuals went to prison or into exile for criticising their masters. The Haitian Army was a microcosm of the US Marines - in blackface, an engine of the privilege for the domination of the ordinary people. And US commitment to that army continues to this day, although the army, as an army, no longer exists.<br /><br />When the Americans drove the peasants from the land, they not only made sure that Haiti would have to import its food, they removed the one social class which could have become the basis for a real middle class, non-racial and entirely Haitian. They also ensured that long before Kingston and Port of Spain metastasised, Port-au-Prince was filled with unemployed dependent and increasingly unemployable people who had to be ruled by bribery, force or starvation.<br /><br />The Americans changed the Haitian Constitution to allow foreigners to own land in Haiti. This resulted in what I call the economic strip-mining of Haiti, with stolen land planted in every imaginable tropical export crop organised into plantations - a system the Haitians had abolished a century before. The poverty of the landless urbanised peasants helped accelerate the destruction of those forests which were not being exported to make expensive coffins, speedboats and wall panelling for the houses of rich Americans.<br />When the trees came down, the land was washed away, the weather changed, floods devastated the land and the people got even poorer and hungrier.<br /><br />Haiti is the world's most explicit example of what globalisation really means. It was the unwitting test bed for the current lunacies.<br /><br /><h2>An Offer He Could Not Refuse</h2>It's been a long time since I had any reason to be proud of my prime minister. He, and his Caricom colleagues began their Haitian adventure disastrously, but they have almost made up for their failure. I am really proud of them. So are lots of others in many places round the world.<br /><br />Caricom failed to arrange a peaceful resolution in Haiti because it refused to understand that the real political dynamic was not with Blacks in Haiti, but with fundamentalists and honorary 'elites' in Washington. Mr Bush's record on things like the death penalty and affirmative action are widely known. Not so well known is the effect his tax cuts for the rich are having on the education of poor children, mostly black, and on the health and mortality of these poor people. I am not surprised that with his domestic record, Bush thought it was OK to starve Haiti into submission, hoping to provoke a revolt against Aristide. <br /><br />Professor Jeffrey Sachs reports that after visiting Aristide in 2001 he was impressed by the man and by the support he had from his people.<br /><br />"When I returned to Washington, I spoke to senior officials in the IMF, World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and Organisation of American States. I expected to hear that these international organisations would be rushing to help Haiti.<br /><br />"Instead, I was shocked to learn that they would all be suspending aid, under vague "instructions" from the US. Washington, it seemed, was unwilling to release aid to Haiti because of irregularities in the 2000 legislative elections, and was insisting that Aristide make peace with the political Opposition before releasing any aid.<br /><br />"The US position was a travesty. Aristide had been elected president in an indisputable landslide. He was, without doubt, the popularly-elected leader of the country - a claim that President George W Bush cannot make about himself."<br /><br />And when the starvation did not work, they brought back the Tonton Macoute and FRAPH. And when those couldn't take Port-au-Prince, the Marines took Aristide.<br /><br />And then, they talk about a war on Terrorism! And the US press genuflects.</span>Marcushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695028065998590343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19550709.post-1133647791630170212004-02-29T12:00:00.000+01:002005-12-03T23:09:51.636+01:00With Friends Like TheseCommon Sense <br />John Maxwell<br />Sunday, February 29, 2004<br /><br />There is something positively Nixonian about the tribulations of Haiti. 'Benign Neglect' may be applied to the malign but covert subversion of Haitian democracy; President Aristide may be seen in Washington as 'twisting slowly in the wind" and the Haitian people may be described in that deathless aphorism of Charles 'Chuck' Colson: "when you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow."<br /><br />Colin Powell, secretary of state, speaks glibly about not recognising thugs or any thuggish overthrow of the Haitian Government, but his hands-off attitude suggests that he would rather be in Bosnia. President Bush has, in his usual statesman-like fashion, announced that he has made sure that the Coast Guard clearly understands that no Haitian refugee is to be allowed to set foot in the United States. The UN Convention on Refugees - like most international law, is not something he allows to worry his pretty head. <span class="fullpost"><br /><br />The UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, who felt it preferable to take a holiday in Tobago than to attend the Haitian bicentenary and find out what was going on, is, like an old colonial civil servant, dithering for all he is worth. His masterly inactivity would have made any Jamaican colonial secretary proud.<br /><br />And of course, there are the three mouseketeers, Patterson, Manning and Knight.<br /><br />Haiti, with its long, heroic, honourable and mostly unknown history, is once again to be sacrificed on the altar of greed, expediency, ignorance and racism.<br /><br />Behind everything said about Haiti by the major players one gets the feeling that out of an abundance of ignorance they don't want to soil their hands on Haiti. Rather like Simon Bolivar, who, having been fed, watered, financed and armed by Haiti in his quest to liberate South America, promptly forgot his promises to Haiti that having freed the slavemasters from the Spanish yoke, he would free their slaves.<br /><br />In the whole constellation of stars in this Grand Guignol minstrel show, the only person to emerge with any honour is President Jean-Bertrand Aristide himself.<br /><br />He is perfectly prepared to die, to defend Haitian integrity and sovereignty, as Henri Christophe declared: "We will never become a party to any treaty, to any condition, that may compromise the honour, or the independence of the Haitian people; that, true to our oath, we will sooner bury ourselves beneath the ruins of our native country, than suffer an infraction of our political rights."<br /><br />Aristide says the only way he leaves the Presidential Palace before his term is up is if he is dead.<br /><br />That, of course can be arranged. And, watching the progress of the psychopathic face-choppers and torturers this last week, it may very well have already been arranged.<br /><br />The press has been squared, the world prepared for Aristide's unfortunate demise, and you may be sure that the entire ignoble cast of characters will have their representatives at his funeral. <br /><br />What Caricom and the Organisation of American States and the United States have made out of Haiti is an ungovernable mess.<br /><br />When Aristide was elected first in 1991, there was no democratic tradition in Haiti. The politicians and intellectuals had been killed or driven into exile, and after 20 and 30 years, they were not likely to return, having made lives elsewhere.<br /><br />Haiti in 1991 was rather like Germany after the Second World War, its dictator gone, but gone too were the working appurtenances of a democratic state, political parties, trade unions, a judicial system etc, because Hitler destroyed them. Aristide had to play the cards he was dealt. A parish priest - a slum priest as the Western press prefers to call him - is unlikely to develop statecraft ministering to an oppressed and desperate flock while trying to escape assassination.<br /><br />Aristide was always a symbol - with big ideas, it is true - but without the praxis, without the experience and network of contacts to put his ideas into place. He was surrounded by people who depended on patronage, whether rich or poor, and since old habits tend to linger, they proceeded to behave exactly as they had before.<br /><br />It was Aristide who appointed Cedras who deposed him. And it was because he knew he couldn't trust the army that he dissolved it when he returned to power. Without an army and with a laughably small and half-trained police force, it was always in the cards that gangs would develop in Haiti, as they have in Jamaica, Brazil and other countries, to fill the hiatus left by the state's armed forces. To describe such a situation as an example of Aristide's corruption is not only self-serving, it is dishonourable.<br /><br />The Americans never liked Aristide. The CIA circulated a rumour in 1993 that he had been treated in a Montreal mental hospital. It was easy for the Americans to decide to withdraw aid when Aristide refused to hand over his Government completely to the World Bank and the IMF. It was easy for his opponents to paint everything that followed as Aristide's fault.<br /><br />It is almost incredible that Caribbean politicians, reputed to be intelligent, can have fallen for the warmed-up mess of propaganda pottage served up by Aristide's enemies, demanding that he should yield, when it was plain that it was the Opposition which was always intransigent, unreasonable and anti-democratic. Before Aristide was re-elected, the Opposition was saying that it would not recognise him. On the day of his inauguration they decided to inaugurate a president of their own. The situation has only gone downhill from there.<br /><br />Complicating the equation is the American decision to channel whatever aid they were giving Haiti through NGOs. This, in effect, established a new stream of patronage which, it was obvious, would soon create its own arena of anti-Aristide claimants who could logically blame Aristide for the lack of economic activity and then add rumour, insult, slander or whatever to the mix. <br /><br />The murder of Haiti's most prominent journalist has been ascribed to Aristide supporters - which in Haiti covers a great deal of ground. Since politics is either pro- or anti-Aristide, Aristide must be the author of any lunacy perpetrated by anyone who claims to support him. On the other hand, the so-called Opposition does not claim that the armed gangsters who support their programme have anything to do with them.<br /><br />But since the gangsters now appear have superiority of arms, it will be interesting to see what accommodation Messrs Apaid and his fellows make with the Front for Advancement of Progress in Haiti (FRAPH) face-choppers and their assorted hoodlums if they ever ride into Port-au-Prince in their SUVs. <br />The Haitians clearly saw themselves as their brothers' keepers when they exported revolution in the 19th century. Having gained their own freedom, they decided that it was their duty to help all others in slavery to gain theirs. And in some ways they did, if only by putting pressure on the British by their incendiary example. And to them, the issue of freedom was not a racial issue, but a moral one.<br /><br />Sad therefore, that 200 years later, in the bicentenary year of the Haitian revolution, the people they helped free have betrayed them for the second time in 10 years, abandoning Haiti to its predators. <br />In 1994, when Cedras and FRAPH terrorised Haiti, I wrote suggesting that we had a duty to go into Haiti with armed force to chase out the face choppers and restore to the Haitians some semblance of their dignity and rights. Tanzania did a service to Uganda and the world when Nyerere finally decided that Idi Amin needed to go.<br /><br />In 1994, after months of pressuring Aristide, then in exile, the Americans worked out the 'Governor's Island accords' which, among other things, undertook the reformation and retraining of the army and the police and the peaceful retirement of Cedras with an enormous pension. As the first earnest of this undertaking, the USS Harlan County, a tank-landing ship, was supposed to land the first US troops. Unfortunately for them, FRAPH organised a small mob who fired off some ancient blunderbusses, made 'monkey-faces' at the US ambassador and made the Americans so uncertain about their reception that they weighed anchor, made their excuses and left.<br /><br />According to an account in the Military Review by Lieutenant Commander Peter J A Riehm, US Navy officer who was part of the expedition: "Television cameras captured the Harlan County turning and steaming out of Port-au-Prince harbour. CNN broadcast the tape of the unceremonious withdrawal with the commentary that the ship had been thrown out of Haiti. The Front for Advancement of Progress in Haiti, an anti-Aristide political organisation, celebrated the first-ever Haitian repulse of the US Navy."<br />Lt Cmdr Riehm has some further comments on the affair:<blockquote>One curious dimension to this incident was the identity of the unruly mob. FRAPH had organised the protesters. According to its leader, Emmanual Constant, the anti-Aristide political organisation had been formed in mid-1993 at the urging of the Defence Intelligence Agency and was paid by the CIA to balance what some US agencies perceived as pro-Aristide-Lavalas extremism. . .It thus appears that FRAPH was intended to be a counterpoise to Aristide's liberation theology.<br /><br />By October 1993, the nascent FRAPH was still without any real political clout. It needed a vehicle to shape an image and establish credibility. Fearing retribution should Aristide return, many protesters were reluctant to seek publicity. Persuaded and bribed with whiskey, FRAPH members were thrilled when they realised they had successfully thwarted the US Navy's attempt to enter Port-au-Prince. The Harlan County's departure signaled the solidification of FRAPH as a viable political entity in Haiti.<br /><br />As Constant stated, "My people kept wanting to run away. but I took the gamble and urged them to stay. Then the Americans pulled out! We were astonished. That was the day FRAPH was actually born. Before, everyone said we were crazy, suicidal, that we would all be burned if Aristide returned. But, now we know he is never going to return."</blockquote>Sounds familiar?<br /><br />And now, you do understand democracy, don't you!</span>Marcushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695028065998590343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19550709.post-1133647922656143972004-02-22T12:00:00.000+01:002005-12-03T23:12:02.663+01:00The Caricom/OAS Minstrel ShowCommon Sense<br />John Maxwell<br /><br />As I write on Friday morning, an international troupe of diplomats is heading for Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to lay down the law to Haiti's president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The group is not using the unfortunate words of Trinidad's Patrick Manning - "Shape up or ship out!" but the intentions are the same.<br /><br />Caricom, the Organisation of American States (OAS), the United States and Canada have now identified President Aristide as The Haitian Problem. The US secretary of state, Mr Powell, says he wouldn't mind if Aristide were to resign. <span class="fullpost">Earlier, he had to deny his subordinates' prior assertions that Aristide had to go.<br /><br />Mr Powell is now backing the Caricom-devised "power sharing plan", under which Aristide's Government would effectively be castrated and power handed over to a prime minister appointed ('approved') by the Opposition. Asked by ABC's Sam Donaldson to clarify his position on whether Aristide would be asked to 'step down', Mr Powell said:<blockquote>No, it's not a possibility yet. That is up to President Aristide and the political opposition. [sic!!!] We are not suggesting that. We are not encouraging that. We are not predicting that. He is the elected President of Haiti, and we cannot allow these thugs to come out of the hills, or even an opposition to simply rise up and say, "We want you to leave," in an undemocratic, non-constitutional manner.</blockquote>Unfortunately for Haiti, the US Government's position is not as clear as Mr Powell's statement suggests.<br /><br />In the OAS in Washington on Friday, US Ambassador John Maisto declared that Haiti's crisis "is due in large part to the failure of the Government of Haiti to act in a timely manner to address problems that it knew were growing". He said it hadn't fought police corruption, strengthened its judiciary or restored security. He did not choose to explain how Aristide could have done those things, given his circumstances.<br /><br />In an interview on Fox Television, Mr Powell, reaffirming his belief that Aristide shouldn't be driven from office by thugs, also said: "But I must say that 10 years after we allowed and permitted [my italics ] and got President Aristide back into this office, I regret that we haven't seen more progress than I had hoped we would see when I was a participant in these events back in 1994."<br /><br />It's impossible to know how well Mr Powell, or Jamaica's P J Patterson or any of Mr Aristide's detractors might have performed had they been put in Aristide's position, asked to create a functioning modern state out of the moribund corpse of a country pillaged and raped for 200 years.<br /><br /><h2>Foreign assistance</h2>In 1994, at the height of the Haitian refugee crisis, I suggested that Jamaica and the Caricom should set up a programme of assistance to Haiti since we knew that the country had been so ravaged that it could not help itself. The institution for which I work part-time, the UWI's Caribbean Institute of Media and Communication, devised a project funded by the Dutch Government, in 1995 - a training scheme for Haitian journalists. Six years later, at the FTAA summit in Quebec, I was recognised by several of our Haitian graduates who were accredited to the conference while I was being tear-gassed outside. It was a poignant moment.<br /><br />Cuba has sent 700 medical personnel, including more than 300 doctors, to deal with the diseases that afflict Haitian peasants and to teach them and their children to read and write. About 1,000 Haitian children are at school in Cuba. <br /><br />I don't know of anything useful done by the Caribbean hypocrites who are now so ready to praise democracy and pass resolutions. There are, of course, brigades of American missionaries - 5,000 of them, including a battalion of Mormons. It wasn't so long ago that the Mormons taught that black people were cursed by God.<br /><br />Haiti needed then and needs now, teachers, doctors, nurses, public health workers, agricultural instructors, and the technical assistance and materials for building water supplies, roads, houses, electrical power distribution systems, telephones and the other infrastructure which permit nations to live a quasi-civilised life. The US, the World Bank, the IMF, the European Union and all the other responsible adults refused to help unless Haiti conformed to their image of capitalist democracy, particularly by privatising the meagre assets still retained by the destitute Haitian state.<br /><br />In fact, presidents Rene Preval and Aristide did give way to some of these foreign pressures, including Structural (!!!) Adjustment with the result that the Haitian peasant became even poorer and more miserable than he had been. No wonder that many say Aristide has failed. When it is understood that the government's security largely depends on strong-arm supporters responsible to no one, it can hardly be argued that Haiti is a democracy as most people understand it. Haiti is twice the area of Jamaica with three times as many people - but its police force is less than half the size of ours.<br /><br /><h2>Zombie Democracy</h2>In Friday's San Francisco Chronicle, Stephen Dudley reports an encounter with some of those who want to take over the Government of Haiti:<blockquote>Butteur Metayer is the face of the Haitian revolution.<br /><br />The 33-year-old gunman's eyes hide behind dark sunglasses with gold-plated rims. He wears shorts and a blue shirt with a Nike logo and a black felt cavalry hat. He sits in a wilted metal chair with a machete and bottle of rum within reach. His handlers slouch on crusty couches, with M-4 carbines and Uzi submachine guns lying across their laps.<br /><br />They call themselves the Gonaives Liberation Front. But they are almost too drunk to say why they are here, at the centre of a revolt that began as an act of vengeance and has turned into a nationwide uprising that threatens to topple the Government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.</blockquote>According to one of the leading spokesmen for the Haiti Opposition, armed struggle is a legitimate means of opposing Aristide.<br /><br />I have been assailed by various people in Haitian communities around the world, for referring to the Opposition as if it consisted only of some loud-mouthed agitators and various collections of thugs. The problem is simple: no one that I know of has been able to get any sensible statement from the trade unions, student organisations, community groups and others who allegedly comprise the Haitian Opposition. All we hear are the vulgar rantings of people like Andy Apaid and Evans Paul and the gangsters who claim to support them. I believe the world would welcome some message from the non-violent Opposition.<br /><br />It is as if the intransigents have captured the 'civil society' groups and turned them into zombies - creatures without volition, directed by sinister outsiders for their own benefit.<br /><br />Writing from Jamaica and depending on a variety of sources, some of questionable reliability, it is difficult enough to discover what the Haitian population really feels. One can deduce that most Haitians still prefer Aristide to his Opposition from the simple observation that if they did not, Aristide could not remain in Haiti. The Cité Soleil - City of the Sun - is a slum in Port-au-Prince which contains the equivalent of the population of Barbados. There is nothing in Jamaica since 'the Dungle' as miserable, as destitute, as hopeless and as abandoned by the state as Cité Soleil. Yet, it is the people there who really control Haitian politics. If they decided that Aristide should go, Aristide would go. The Opposition has been unable to mobilise Cite Soleil against Aristide.<br /><br /><h2>How Haitians really feel</h2>The 20th century story of Haiti is one of economic and social strip-mining, of rapacious exploitation on a scale that is almost incomprehensible. As one of my correspondents says, Haiti is an international crime scene. For decades the Haitian people have been driven abroad to seek some sort of dignity, livelihood and an end to suffering. The brightest people, including journalists, have been murdered or are in voluntary or involuntary exile.<br /><br />Haiti needs help, not interference. The people of goodwill, in Haiti or outside, must be brought into a dialogue of respect for each other, to devise solutions, made by Haitians for Haitians. But they need help, simply to build the basic infrastructure for dialogue, for communication, for education and for health. Haiti is a war zone, where the rich have scorched the earth so thoroughly that the emotional landscape seems to have been sown with salt.<br /><br />Last week, Haitians in the United States were asked for their opinions on what should happen in Haiti. A poll among Haitians across the United States was done by the New California Media Coalition, an association of ethnic media companies.<br /><br />Surprise! More than half (52 per cent) of those polled said they believed President Aristide should stay in office 'in the interest of democracy'. Just over one-third (35 per cent) believed he should resign. More than half - 55 per cent - felt the Haitian Opposition was fighting for "power"; only 22 per cent believed it was fighting for "democracy".<br /><br />Given these figures and the facts reported elsewhere, it would seem a little crazy for Caricom/OAS and the US to be putting pressure on Aristide to dismantle his Government to give power to an Opposition which refuses even to discuss its differences with Aristide.<br /><br />If Caricom, the US, Canada, France and the others are serious, they must first of all prevail on the Opposition to agree to talk and to disavow or call off the thugs. Unfortunately, the OAS coalition has loaded the dice against Aristide in many ways, not least by including in the delegation to Aristide the notorious Roger Noriega, who spent his formative years as an adviser to one of the leading US racists, Senator Jesse Helms. If the outsiders are serious, it appears to me that they need to begin from a position of neutrality and respect for Haitian integrity and dignity and for the Haitian people's democratic choice.<br />There is no other way.<br /><br />What, for instance, will Messrs Patterson, Manning and Powell do if Aristide is removed from the scene and Cité Soleil flexes its muscles?<br /><br />We really do not need a Caribbean version of Iraq on our hands, or a Bosnia or a Rwanda.</span>Marcushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695028065998590343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19550709.post-1133648000346411602004-02-15T12:00:00.000+01:002005-12-03T23:13:20.350+01:00Killing Them SoftlyCommon Sense<br />John Maxwell<br /><br />Many people speak of poverty as if it is a sacred responsibility to be assumed by certain people in the same way the British 'nobility' assume their titles and honorifics at birth. Some of us, it seems, are called to poverty, as holy men are called to the service of God. This concept has made its way into a hymn about "All things bright and beautiful":<blockquote>The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them each and every one <br />And ordered their estate.</blockquote>We know better. And the church now knows better. It has erased that verse from modern hymn books.<span class="fullpost"><br /><br />Even if we have never heard of Karl Marx, the annual reports of the IMF and World Bank make it plain that poverty is the result of deliberate policy and action by people who have seized the power to extract tribute from the rest of us. Structural Adjustment Programmes, overseen by the IMF and the World Bank, are the main engines of this unjust reallocation of resources from poor to rich. The theory behind this malignant behaviour is that 'wealth' will trickle down from 'investors' to those lucky enough to catch the crumbs which escape the rich man's grasp.<br /><br />But since wealth is created by labour, why is it that it has to go up before it comes down? In the long run, we are told, wealth will trickle down so well that poverty will disappear. In the long run, as Lord Keynes said, we are all dead. But most of us will not perish in miserable slavery to utopian fantasies.<br /><br /><h2>'God made them - every one.'</h2><blockquote>For most of its history, the Haitian state, its military and a small elite class have ruthlessly extracted what wealth they could from the country's poor majority. The result is massive inequality, with one per cent of Haitians controlling 50 per cent of the country's wealth and over 75 per cent of the population living in severe poverty.<br /><br />The burden of inequality has fallen particularly hard on the agricultural sector, where 70 per cent of the population makes its living. . .more than 80 per cent of government revenue has historically been drawn from the peasant farmer, while over 90 per cent of government expenditures have been made in the capital city, Port-au-Prince.<br /><br />(Lisa McGowan, Structural Adjustment & the Aid Juggernaut in Haiti. The Development Gap, 1997)</blockquote><br /><br />As McGowan points out in her paper, the foreign programmes of aid to Haiti, when they were actually working, made it impossible for the Preval government to respond to the expressed (and obvious) needs of the poor people of Haiti. The result in 1997, before Aristide's return, was that "popular frustration and cynicism are palpable and the deepening polarisation of Haitian society increasingly evident".<br /><br />Now, under Aristide, the trickle of aid has been stanched, because the Haitian Government is unable to provide the US State Department and foreign investors with the level of comfort and confidence they require in order to go to the rescue of the only people who managed to abolish slavery on their own and make themselves into free men.<br /><br />As I have said before, they have never been forgiven for their temerity and their military success, and the Western capitalist democracies have spent the last 200 years re-ordering their estate and putting them, explicitly, outside the gated community of modern democracy.<br /><br />Ira Lowenthal, an authority on Haitian voodoo and politics, explains the problem as seen by the Opposition (which he advises): ". a populist demagogue, his cronies and his clients - all apparently quite willing to pervert the nation's fledgling transition in the interest of consolidating their own personal powers and privilege - emerged as the greatest threat to Haitian democracy. Surely, there is precious little comfort to be drawn from noting that at least this time, the leader of this ongoing assault has been 'duly elected'." (Ira Lowenthal, The US Policy Imperative in Haiti, and How to Achieve It. wehaitians.com)<br /><br />Democratic Convergence leader and Aristide opponent, Evans Paul, recently declared "We are willing to negotiate through which door he [President Aristide] leaves the palace - through the front door or the back door." (This vulgar sentiment should be eerily familiar to Jamaicans who lived through the 70s).<br /><br />Of more immediate concern is the fact that the recent insurrection by armed gangs has cut off important sectors of population from the rest of the country. Haiti's infrastructure is almost non-existent. The few roads are hellish obstacle courses even without the gangsters. <br /><br />A Jamaican Red Cross plan to deliver food to Cap Haitien has been aborted and the United Nations a few days ago issued a warning that the violence was shutting off deliveries of necessities to thousands of needy Haitians, threatening a broad humanitarian crisis. Bertrand Ramcharan, the acting UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, urged "all concerned to stop the violence and resolve the political crisis in a peaceful and constitutional manner".<br /><br />This warning will, like most others, fall on deaf ears. After all, the North Atlantic powers have been perfectly at ease watching Haiti starve, watching the rapacious progress of AIDS as it decimates the Haitian population, and perfectly happy to wait until starvation, violence and abject misery force the Haitians to capitulate to the American Imperative, which is, after all, more important than Haitian lives and welfare.<br /><br /><h2>' . . .and ordered their estate'</h2>The result of the failed Structural Adjustment Programmes, combined with the embargo on further financial aid has had predictable results. "Nutt'n nah gwaan", as I've pointed out before, and, as might be expected, many who thought that Aristide heralded a new day for Haiti have been turned against him and his Government because they cannot deliver the goods. "Old-time people used to sey 'yu cyan mek brick widout straw'". You can't provide drinkable water without filter plants and pipes. <br /><br />Unfortunately for Democratic Convergence, the Committee of 184 and their associated gangs, their patron, the illustrious President George Bush, has new troubles of his own which seem to preclude his making any new adventures in the area of nation building.<br /><br />If confidence in Aristide has dropped in Haiti, confidence in Bush has plummeted in the United States. And while Aristide began from a much sounder electoral base and good title to his presidency, President Bush's legitimacy is questionable and his fellow citizens no longer overwhelmingly consider him a trustworthy person, according to the latest polls.<br /><br />There is no way of measuring support for Aristide expect by the wholly empirical evidence that the Opposition has been unable to hold a rally in Port-au-Prince because of the 'intimidation' of pro-Aristide people.<br /><br />Since both sides depend on 'gangs' it should be easy for the majority to impose its will. In Gonaives, where a small but well-armed gang ousted the public administration recently, people are reported to have fled from the tender mercies of the Opposition forces. A website sympathetic to the Cannibal Army (since renamed) was displaying pictures this past week of rebels brandishing the severed leg of a dead policeman and another of a dinner plate on which lay the severed ear and thumb of another dead policeman.<br /><br />So much for civil disobedience.<br /><br /><h2>All things bright and beautiful </h2>Meanwhile, it is reported that the pro-Aristide militias are retaking some of the towns interdicted last week by the rebels.<br /><br />The American secretary of state was forced on Wednesday to hurriedly deny his underlings' promise that Aristide must go. Instead, like the true, sea-green incorruptible democrat he is, Colin Powell affirmed that usurpation of authority was not, just now, on the democratic order paper.<br /><br />The Democratic Convergence, and the Group 184 financed by the European Union and USAID, now appear to be gradually disabusing themselves of the idea that they might be rescued by the intervention of the US Marines. Instead, they are seeking terms of surrender for their supporting cast in the countryside, as Powell retreats and the militias of Aristide advance.<br /><br />But, no matter who comes out on top in the latest skirmish, the war against Haiti's poor will continue, despite, as Ira Lowenthal contends, a convergence of interest between the US and the Haitian poor in getting rid of Aristide: "Not incidentally, of course, such progress is expected to relieve the pressure of illegal emigration to the United States, whether by economic or political refugees, and to reduce the threat of another mass exodus, as occurred in the early 1990s.<br /><br />"Yet, this US interest also broadly (and happily) coincides with that of Haiti's poor majority, for whom the delivery of even minimal government services and a marginal increase in real incomes would be an enormous advance over their current desperate - and deteriorating - straits."<br /><br />Meanwhile, Haitians can wait for democracy, while happily dying (in their own best interest, of course) from officially sanctioned starvation, AIDS and communal violence. And the English-speaking Caribbean people will 'wait for Grandma to cough'.<br /><br />The US, obeying the Precautionary Principle enunciated in Agenda 21, is preparing Guantanamo Bay for a reprise of the 1994 exodus from Haiti, just in case some Haitians resume the habit of 'chopping off other people's faces' - as Bill Clinton graphically described it 10 years ago. <br /><br />In these circumstances it may be instructive to remember that: "Deliberately inflicting on [any] group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part" is one of the definitions of genocide enunciated in the Convention Against Genocide. That convention, not incidentally, was signed the day before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was promulgated by the United Nations.</span>Marcushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695028065998590343noreply@blogger.com0