The kidnapping of Haiti
In his latest column for the New Statesman,
John Pilger describes the ‘swift and crude’ appropriation of
earthquake-ravaged Haiti by the militarised Obama administration. With
George W. Bush attending to the ‘relief effort’ and Bill Clinton the
UN’s man, The Comedians, Graham Greene’s dark novel about exploited
Haiti comes to mind. - January 28, 2010
The theft of Haiti has been swift and crude. On January 22, the
United States secured ‘formal approval’ from the United Nations to take
over all air and seaports in Haiti, and to ‘secure’ roads. No Haitian
signed the agreement, which has no basis in law. Power rules in an
American naval blockade and the arrival of 13,000 marines, special
forces, spooks and mercenaries, none with humanitarian relief training.
The airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, is now an American
military base and relief flights have been re-routed to the Dominican
Republic. All flights stopped for three hours for the arrival of Hillary
Clinton.
Rescuing victims of Haiti earthquake. Courtesy: Google |
Critically injured Haitians waited unaided as 800 American residents
in Haiti were fed, watered and evacuated. Six days passed before the US
Air Force dropped bottled water to people suffering thirst and
dehydration.
The first TV reports played a critical role, giving the impression of
widespread criminal mayhem. Matt Frei, the BBC reporter dispatched from
Washington, seemed on the point of hyperventilation as he brayed about
the ‘violence’ and need for ‘security’. In spite of the demonstrable
dignity of the earthquake victims, and evidence of citizens’ groups
toiling unaided to rescue people, and even an American General’s
assessment that the violence in Haiti was considerably less than before
the earthquake, Frei claimed that “looting is the only industry” and
“the dignity of Haiti’s past is long forgotten.” Thus, a history of
unerring US violence and exploitation in Haiti was consigned to the
victims. “There’s no doubt,” reported Frei in the aftermath of America’s
bloody invasion of Iraq in 2003, “that the desire to bring good, to
bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now to
the Middle East... is now increasingly tied up with military power.”
In a sense, he was right. Never before in so-called peacetime have
human relations been as militarised by rapacious power. Never before has
an American President subordinated his government to the military
establishment of his discredited predecessor, as Barack Obama has done.
In pursuing George W. Bush’s policy of war and domination, Obama has
sought from Congress an unprecedented military budget in excess of $700
billion. He has become, in effect, the spokesman for a military coup.
Barack Obama |
George W. Bush |
Bill Clinton |
Hillary Clinton |
For the people of Haiti the implications are clear, if grotesque.
With US troops in control of their country, Obama has appointed George
W. Bush to the ‘relief effort’: a parody surely lifted from Graham
Greene’s The Comedians, set in Papa Doc’s Haiti. As President, Bush’s
relief effort following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 amounted to an ethnic
cleansing of many of New Orleans’ black population. In 2004, he ordered
the kidnapping of the democratically elected Prime Minister of Haiti,
Jean-Bertrand Aristide and exiled him in Africa. The popular Aristide
had the temerity to legislate modest reforms, such as a minimum wage for
those who toil in Haiti’s sweatshops.
When I was last in Haiti, I watched very young girls stooped in front
of whirring, hissing, binding machines at the Port-au-Prince Superior
Baseball Plant. Many had swollen eyes and lacerated arms. I produced a
camera and was thrown out. Haiti is where America makes the equipment
for its hallowed national game, for next to nothing. Haiti is where Walt
Disney contractors make Mickey Mouse pyjamas, from next to nothing. The
US controls Haiti’s sugar, bauxite and sisal. Rice growing was replaced
by imported American rice, driving people into the cities and towns and
jerrybuilt housing.
Year after year, Haiti was invaded by US marines, infamous for
atrocities that have been their specialty from the Philippines to
Afghanistan.
Bill Clinton is another comedian, having got himself appointed the
UN’s man in Haiti. Once fawned upon by the BBC as “Mr. Nice Guy...
bringing democracy back to a sad and troubled land”, Clinton is Haiti’s
most notorious privateer, demanding de-regulation of the economy for the
benefit of the sweatshop barons. Lately, he has been promoting a $55m
deal to turn the North of Haiti into an American-annexed ‘tourist
playground’.
Not for tourists the US is building its fifth biggest embassy in
Port-au-Prince. Oil was found in Haiti’s waters decades ago and the US
has kept it in reserve until the Middle East begins to run dry. More
urgently, an occupied Haiti has a strategic importance in Washington’s
‘rollback’ plans for Latin America. The goal is the overthrow of the
popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, control of
Venezuela’s abundant oil reserves and sabotage of the growing regional
cooperation that has given millions their first taste of an economic and
social justice long denied by US-sponsored regimes.
The first rollback success came last year with the coup against
President Jose Manuel Zelaya in Honduras who also dared advocate a
minimum wage and that the rich pay tax. Obama’s secret support for the
illegal regime carries a clear warning to vulnerable governments in
Central America. Last October, the regime in Colombia, long bankrolled
by Washington and supported by death squads, handed the US seven
military bases to, according to US Air Force documents, “combat anti-US
Governments in the region”.
Media propaganda has laid the ground for what may well be Obama’s
next war.
On December 14, researchers at the University of West England
published first findings of a ten-year study of the BBC’s reporting of
Venezuela. Of 304 BBC reports, only three mentioned any of the historic
reforms of the Chavez Government, while the majority denigrated Chavez’s
extraordinary democratic record, at one point comparing him to Hitler.
Such distortion and its attendant servitude to Western power are rife
across the Anglo-American corporate media. People who struggle for a
better life, or for life itself, from Venezuela to Honduras to Haiti,
deserve our support.
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