A Memory
On my first visit to Haiti in 1995 I stayed in a "mission house" in Petionville, the rich section of Port-au-Prince, run by a North American couple. In what had been an elegant resort home belonging to a wealthy Haitian family before the dechoukaj, the democratic "uprooting" of 1986, these missionaries welcomed a constant flow of North American visitors, many of them clergy; in our case, a human rights attorney, a college professor-activist, and a translator. The home was elegant, clean, and open on two sides to the bracing Caribbean breezes (though sliding doors could quickly be shut against sudden downpours). A tall concrete wall, stuccoed and brightly painted, separated the leisure of this retreat from the current of human traffic just outside, where ti machann peddled stubs of charcoal, sparse handfuls of vegetables, and pieces of freshly slaughtered goat and boys pressed all their charms into duty to invent entrepreneurial proposals that would have made Horatio Algiers marvel. To call them "beggars," as some blans did, vastly underestimated their creativity.
The house was of necessity a split-level, built onto a steep hillside. To go to dinner each evening we stepped out any of several doors on different levels onto a precarious slope of plastered cement--obviously poured to keep the earth beneath from washing away in the next torrential rain--and loped down to a picnic table set against the lower wall of the property. Looking down over that wall, one saw miles of Port-au-Prince drop away precipitously, making it all too easy for inhabitants literally to look down on millions of their neighbors.
I saw the same dangerous slopes everywhere, dropping away from the wealthy houses that lined paved streets down into ravines and canyons that plunged down into unseen depths. And everywhere beneath those houses I saw the homes of the people who worked in them--cleaning them, cooking food for their owners, selling them fuel and vegetables and lottery tickets. Staring at a particularly terrifying vertical heap of concrete blocks, cardboard boxes, and scraps of tin clinging to the side of a cliff, I asked my guide, "what do you call these?" meaning, I suppose, what's the Kreyol word for "slum"? "That's a neighborhood," she answered. "People have their homes here. They raise their children here." She was trying, I realized, to point out that in Haiti, my perceptions were the anomaly.
There was nothing romantic about those "neighborhoods." To the contrary, one of the principal findings of our investigation was that those scrabbled-together conglomerations of the flimsiest of materials, those "homes" that afforded such poor protection against rainstorms and hurricanes, afforded even less shelter from the organized rampages of FRAPH. That was the name for the armed thugs, culled from police and former Army units and mobilized (at the inspiration of a CIA agent) by "Toto" Constant, who systematically moved through poorer neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince--and yes, even "up here," our guide insisted--by night and sometimes, brazenly, by day. In units of six to eight men they would enter homes, beat and rape women, terrify and torture children, and kill men. Judging by the numbers of rapes and assaults reported the next morning--a scant fraction of actual assaults, since the reports had to be made to police officers who, likely as not, were participants in the assaults--we calculated that each squad would have to move very quickly and methodically through each neighborhood in an eight-hour shift.
The Crisis Today
Now many of those neighborhoods have collapsed as an unprecedented 7.0 magnitude earthquake has shattered Haiti, sending walls of rubble and dirt and iron sheets tumbling down canyon sides, taking families with them. The presidential palace and at least one hospital are in ruins. Hundreds have died and the death toll will surely mount in the coming days. So will official pronouncements of compassion and promises of aid from U.S. government officials.
Talk is cheap. So far as the historical record goes--in Haiti, as for Native American communities (who recently were forced to settle their pathbreaking lawsuit against the U.S. government)--U.S. talk is a tissue of lies. The ten million promised in 1995 to fund an impartial investigation of the 1993-94 terror campaign never materialized; tons of relevant documentation seized by U.S. forces when they invaded Haiti in 1994 have never been returned to Haiti to assist prosecutions. Meanwhile the U.S. has sponsored yet another coup d’état against the democratically elected president (in 2004) and turns a blind eye to massacres carried out by U.N. forces in the slums of Site Soley.
A devastating earthquake provides Haiti--at most--another fifteen minutes of fame; more to the point, it provides U.S. officials a photo opportunity to pose as Haiti's friends. But the disaster of the last two centuries-and-counting was not natural, it was carefully plotted and executed from Washington. From the time of Duvaliers on, Haitians have recognized that they serve as Washington's Caribbean "laboratory" for ever more exotic and inhumane experimentation. The constant exploitation of Haiti's people and resources has forced the country's poor majority to live in the daily jeopardy of those cliffside "neighborhoods" and stymied the most basic efforts at reform.
What Haiti Owes
The World Bank and IMF have added Haiti to their program for "Heavily Indebted Poor Countries," effectively extending Haiti's presumptive international debt--which now consumes up to 45% of the nation's GDP--into an indefinite future. But as the Jubilee 2000 campaign and activist Randall Robinson tirelessly work to remind the world, that "debt" was racked up by the dissolute tyrants "Papa Doc" and "Baby Doc" Duvalier, with the connivance of the United States. And that debt only adds to the accumulated misery of centuries of slavery (under the Spanish, then the French) and punitive economic sanctions (under the U.S., enraged by the effrontery of mere slaves to claim freedom for themselves).
Haiti owes the world nothing. The best way to help Haiti today is to demand an immediate cancellation of all Haiti's presumed debts. Actual delivery of unrestricted aid money--to the elected government, not to U.S.-operated NGOs who continue to profit off the mission industry in Haiti like leeches on a bleeding body--would be a good second step.
Most urgently needed in the present catastrophe is aid from reliable, established, and large-scall aid organizations--like the American Red Cross and UNICEF.
Trustworthy organizations working to support genuine economic development and popular democracy in Haiti include
Partners in Health--Haiti (Zanmi Lasante)
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