Protecting Haiti’s Interest

John Maxwell

It would be ironic, if you like your irony flavoured with blood and disinfectant, to discover that moored off Port au Prince at this moment is the US hospital ship, the USS Comfort, one of two employed in 1994 as floating slave barracoons in Kingston Harbour. Today the Comfort is providing medical care for people injured in the great earthquake of January 12.
In 1994, the Comfort and its consort functioned as temporary 'processing facilities' for Haitian refugees fleeing from a US supported coup and attendant tyranny. The refugees had been picked up either on the high seas or in Jamaican waters, running for their lives from a US-backed hoodlum-state, whose favourite law and order procedures were murder by dismemberment and disemboweling with bodies left in the streets; and women and children, beaten, publicly raped and disfigured and otherwise terrorised to encourage the others. Of those kidnapped either in Jamaican waters or on the high seas, 78.5% were sent back to their murderers while the rest were sent to Guantánamo Bay.
This barbarous triage was a joint venture operated by President William Jefferson Clinton of the United States and Jamaican Prime Minister Percival James Patterson. It was ended by Clinton's deciding he couldn't afford the death of a prominent black American leader on his record, if not on his conscience. Randall Robinson, President of TransAfrica, in one last desperate initiative, began a fast to the death in protest against his President's callous behaviour.
Clinton had inherited "the Haitian problem" from his predecessor who could tolerate any number of fair-skinned Cubans dropping in on Miami Beach, but was revolted by the idea of Haitians doing the same thing. It didn't matter that the Cubans, like Jamaicans and Mexicans were economic refugees while the Haitians were literally in fear of their lives.
This point was made explicit in 2002, by a former US Ambassador to Haiti, Timothy Carney, at the launching of the Haiti Democracy Project, the most important US NGO operating in Haiti. The launching was at the Brookings Institution, one of the most eminent right ring 'think-tanks' in Washington.
Carney said:

"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 … That is a fundamental interest of the United States … 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?"

That was a job for the Haiti Democracy Project and other US backed subversive NGOs whose function was simply to make sure that the President of Haiti, legally elected, would be unable to govern. These NGOs, dozens of them, using tactics honed in the 'peaceful overthrow' of former Communist states, didn't work well in Haiti; violence and provocation were introduced. The most effective weapons against Aristide were the press releases of the NGOs, swallowed whole by a criminally compliant US press. Even now, six years after Aristide was kidnapped by the then US Ambassador, US news agencies are printing garbage about "Aristide, deposed amid a violent uprising.'
These days, the USS Comfort, Bill Clinton and P.J Patterson are back in the organised hypocrisy game, along with new players like Ban Ki Moon who is proving as clueless about Haiti as his predecessor, Kofi Annan. Obama has brought back G. W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice's mouthpiece. No doubt there is room for old Haiti hands like Roger Noriega and Otto Reich. Pity they can't reanimate Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, both eminent authorities on black people. But there's always Luigi Einaudi: "The only thing wrong with Haiti is that it is being run by Haitians"

Encouraging News

There is good news for those people, and there are many, who worried that valuable American cash was being squandered on hapless Haitians who specialise in provoking Acts of God.
The Associated Press reports:
Only 1 cent of each dollar the U.S. is spending on earthquake relief in Haiti is going in the form of cash to the Haitian government, according to an Associated Press review of relief efforts.
Less than two weeks after President Obama announced an initial $100 million for Haiti earthquake relief, U.S. government spending on the disaster has tripled to $317 million at latest count. That's just over $1 each from everyone in the United States.
Relief experts say it would be a mistake to send too much direct cash to the Haitian government, which is in disarray and has a history of failure and corruption.
"I really believe Americans are the most generous people who ever lived, but they want accountability," said Timothy R. Knight, a former US AID assistant director who spent 25 years distributing disaster aid. "In this situation they're being very deliberate not to just throw money at the situation but to analyze based on a clear assessment and make sure that money goes to the best place possible."
The AP review of federal budget spreadsheets, procurement reports and contract databases shows the vast majority of U.S. funds going to established and tested providers, who are getting everything from 40-cent pounds of pinto beans to a $3.4 million barge into the disaster zone."
So, the worry warts can rest.
For one thing the Canadians and Europeans have donated more per capita to Haitian relief than the US and deserve a larger part in the immediate relief works.
Organisations like the Haiti Democracy Project and John McCain's International Republican Institute will make certain that American money is spent on Strengthening American democracy and defeating the populist interests which have made governance in Haiti a problem ever since the peasant rebellion 90 years ago which required the machine gunning of entire villages to restore law and order.
Meanwhile the United States, Canada, France and the rest of the (rapidly diminishing) civilised world met in Montreal a few days ago to devise a plan for developing a Haiti for the Age of Globalisation.
The participants were more or less the same countries who plotted to depose Aristide. "Shortly after Aristide's overwhelming victory in Haiti's first democratic presidential election in 1990, the relicts of the Jim Crow Marine occupation managed to convince the Americans, first John McCain's International Republican Institute and then elements of Bill Clinton's government and various Canadian politico and officials that Haiti under Aristide was a threat to civilisation as they knew it.…"

Denis Paradis, a Canadian Minister, convened a coven of like-minded fascists, "who decided that Aristide must go, and the Canadians and Americans through the Canadian aid agency (CIDA), the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and John McCain's International Republican Institute financed a whole panoply of Haitian francs tireurs, pimps and wannabe-presidents and face-card NGOs to support the programme of the elites which was simply to grab back from the Haitian people, the Universal Human Rights promulgated 200 years earlier for the first time on Earth by Jean Jacques Dessalines and the other illustrious fathers and mothers of the Haitian Revolution." (Common Sense-Canada's Bloody Hands' April 19,2009)
This is the juncture where things get really tricky.
It would appear to me that a people who fought for their freedom incessantly, for 300 years and finally won it 200 years ago deserve to be accorded considerable respect. Moreso, because they fought as slaves, entrapped and circumscribed by the system itself and despite this, defeated three of the world's most powerful armies, one of them twice. They are the only people in history to have broken their shackles themselves. Spartacus who tried valiantly but failed, is revered as a European hero. Bouckman, Toussaint and Dessalines are ignored by the same historians. It is not so odd; TIME recognised Margaret Thatcher but not Fidel Castro as a revolutionary.
Those Haitians whose savagery, indiscipline and general lawlessness the western "press" celebrated in slavering anticipation failed to show. The Haitians who survived behaved as those who know them expected: patient, disciplined, and displaying an exemplary solidarity, sharing their crusts while starving.
It was these same people who declared universal emancipation and universal human rights two centuries ago and who have told anyone who wants to listen that they know what they want and who they want to lead them and speak for them
They know how to develop their nation, if only, for the first time at last, they are allowed to do what they want.
They need help, but help on their own terms.
They want work, real work, not plastic 'jobs' in freezone sweatshops..
They want to go back to feeding themselves. They want to be complete Haitians again; the people who helped Bolivar liberate South America.

The world needs to get out of the way. France, the United States and Canada owe the Haitians billions in damages. It is not for them to tell the Haitians what to spend it on. France used Haitian money to conquer Algeria. Haitians want that money to conquer child hunger and maternal mortality.
If the General Assembly wants to prove its worth it should move quickly to take the Haitian initiative away from the clueless and overtaxed Security Council. The Assembly can – guided by  the Haitians and with the expert help of Cuba, Venezuela,  South Africa, Kerala (India),  Brazil,  China  and other parts of the developing world – map out an agenda and organise help from wherever it is available without strings. The object is not to defend Miami Beach but to protect the vital interests of the Haitians, and, by extension, the vital interests of humanity.
And, if anyone wants to know what to do right now: Land 10 thousand wheelbarrows on the streets handing them over to neighbourhood groups. Let the groups decide how they are going to move the rubble and what they are going to do with it. Give the groups money and supplies to set up 10 thousand street kitchens say about $200 a group. Let the groups pay the wheelbarrow men if necessary. In three weeks the casual journalist would be hard put to find any of the 'usual' stories. Total cost $2 million plus $1 million for wheelbarrows.

Meanwhile the UN can be assembling a real security force to protect the Haitians and particularly their president and under his direction, design and instal the apparatus allowing Haitians to run their own country and to make their own mistakes, for the first time at last.

COPYRIGHT©2010 JOHN MAXWELL – jankunnu@yahoo.com

remembered light

take this and jell it as remembered light

one simple gesture laughing at a joke

in middle afternoon and at one stroke

you've got it down and kept it in plain sight

when all the other moments take their flight

or disappear behind the darkest cloak

of all forgetting where the world is broke

but yet we act to make things come out right

vision is sure and clear when you are young

so slow to fade but still the edges pale

we can't recall the colour of the stone

on the south wall nor where the laundry hung

long years have passed and recollections fail

still there is crystal fire within the bone

Boojum Hunting in the Caribbean

 

John Maxwell

 

When Thor Heyerdahl crossed the Atlantic from Africa to the Caribbean nearly 40 years ago he was shocked by – of all things – a garbage dump in the middle of the ocean.

In the area known as the Doldrums (wonderful word) Heyerdahl's papyrus raft Ra II, was surrounded for days by a wilderness of plastic rubbish from all over the world. The Age of Plastic has bequeathed countless conveniences to humanity as well as new forms of cancer and enormous collections of litter on land, at sea and even in space.

Since Heyerdahl's observations we now know that every ocean in the world has its own garbage dump. The largest by far is the so-called North Pacific Garbage Patch, an area covering most of the North Pacific from Alaska to Japan – twice the size of the continental United States and discovered only in 1997. The gyres are not easily discerned, because most of the plastic rubbish has been macerated by marine forces and is composed of small particles that float just below the surface, killing fish that mistake it for food.

The Atlantic gyre like all others. has formed at the confluence of various ocean currents, an area of slackwater circulating majestically, slowly and almost imperceptibly until you pick up – on a Jamaican or Haitian beach – soft drink containers thrown into the Congo or the Niger.

There is another less well known gyre in the North Caribbean which has quite different effects from the other garbage patches.

This area of existential discombobulation is much more dangerous than its kin. It is, first of all, not composed of material fragments but of abstractions, strange apparitions that do not poison fish or litter beaches but poison minds and litter brave new policies with the toxic detritus of ancient ignorance, hysteria, and unreasonable beliefs.

It is a place where ancient racist libels still hang around, driving US politicians to distraction and the Bible. It is the place where apparitions like Pat Robertson, Roger Noriega, Otto Reich, and Luigi Einaudi flourish and have their being, sustained by vicious fables invented 500 years ago to justify human slavery, revised and updated periodically to deal with black rebellion against slavery, and colonialism, and used today to frighten and confuse US soldiers and journalists.

Baron Samedi Walks again

When I was about 12 years old I borrowed a book from the Institute of Jamaica's Junior Centre library. It was part of a donation by the Carnegie Foundation and was almost brand new.

I cannot remember the name or author but the book was obviously written to sell millions by frightening the wits out of its American readers.

I had up to that time, heard nothing about Haiti or their religious system, Vodun. The novel was populated by zombies – the living dead – as well as other evil spirits presided over by the sulphurous presence of Baron Samedi who seemed to be in charge of everything in Haiti, from cooking to current affairs. If my memory is reliable there were incredible scenes of 'demoniac possession' mostly among the epically bloodthirsty natives but not sparing the fairest flowers of Nordic pulchritude and chastity.

Since the book was written n the first half of the twentieth century, indecencies were suggested rather than made plain and even bloodshed was a lot less indiscriminate than say – the latest dancehall invocation against homosexuals. What was clear was that the narrative was intended to make your skin creep; in my case it certainly succeeded.

The novel was not unusual for American colonial narratives of the time. Non-Europeans could be trusted as far as the front gate, being consumed by lust and crazed by the need to spill blood.

And the 'black magic' was integral to cultures that were brutish, repellent and totally merciless.

The Devil in the Flesh

A few years ago TIME magazine, quite seriously, printed what it said was a recipe for creating zombies. The process was not difficult, if one was not squeamish. It involved among other things, the flowers of the Datura bush (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,952208-2,00.html).

So, I was not surprised by the most recent eructations of Pat (Napoleon III) Robertson, a semi-literate Quack who seems to have a hotline to Satan himself and is always willing to explain the latest demonic manifestations. Nor was I really surprised to learn that the US Army was so terrified of unarmed, starving and wounded Haitians that it needed about ten soldiers to protect one aid person.

Others were not so intimidated by the Haitians.

Partners in Health, a Boston based NGO led by Paul Farmer, was running several field hospitals from its headquarters in Cange, in Haiti's Central Plateau. Tiny Iceland (facing bankruptcy) had search and rescue teams on the ground in Port au Prince within 48 hours of the earthquake. Andri Magnason, a friend in Iceland sent me the following:

"There is an Icelandic team of 20 rescue workers in Port au Prince and Léogane. They have saved a few lives with their special equipment. They have not seen the violence that has been in the news, on the contrary - they see only gratitude and goodwill and cooperation - no hostility - and they have even seen some hope. Strange how the world media wants to paint things black - while they could pick up many stories of human dignity from the ruins."

And, of course, the Cubans ("We Never Closed") had more than 400 medical professionals on the ground before the earthquake and doubled that number with their graduating class of 400 Haitian doctors. Doctors without Borders complained that the US military was preventing medical assistance reaching those who needed it most.

The real problem as I see it, is that the US has scared itself silly with the policy garbage bequeathed by Thomas Jefferson and refined by the like of William Jennings Bryan, Reich, Noriega, Einaudi and their sainted mentors, Joe McCarthy, Strom Thurmond, and Jesse Helms.

If the US Army had thought to drop water, nothing more, they could have saved many lives. Some people drank their own urine. Others, less knowledgeable, may have died of thirst.

The late Hedi Annabi – the UN's man in Haiti, died in the earthquake. He was clearly another who thought Haitians were all terrorists and his way of preparing for democracy involved the UN mission –MINUSTAH – making periodic forays into the slums to slaughter members of Fanmi Lavalas.

The UN secretary general is even more clueless, tolerating René Preval's de-legitimising Fanmi Lavalas and appointing Bill Clinton as his representative in Haiti. Clinton was the man who restored Aristide in 1994 to stem the flood of refugees into Miami Beach and then broke every promise he made and pressured and blackmailed the Haitians by shutting down essential foreign aid.

So, I must confess that my blood ran cold when Barack Obama proved even more clueless than Ban Ki Moon by appointing Haiti's worst enemy, George Bush, to join Clinton to raise funds for Haitian relief. If there is anyone who believes in Haitian zombies and bogeymen, it is Bush. As far as Ban Ki Moon, Clinton and Bush are concerned, the Haitians are only good for mindless 'jobs' in foreign-owned sweatshops.

What is so tragic about the loss of life since the earthquake is that, were it not for the boojums, zombies and Baron Samedi, so much more could have been done.

If you don't believe me read the following:

"However, away from the glare of the international media, a team of Cuban doctors has been working among the quake-affected. The Cuban government offered its medical expertise to the governments of Pakistan and India immediately after the magnitude of the destruction caused by the quake was known. The Indian government did not even acknowledge the offer. Pakistan, where the scale of disaster was humongous, was quick to accept the offer. The first Cuban medical team was in Pakistan on October 14, six days after the earthquake." (Frontline
Vol:22 Iss:26
URL: http://www.flonnet.com/fl2226/stories/20051230000606300.htm)

In short order the Cubans had established 19 field hospitals staffed by more than 700 doctors – half of them women – working 12 hour shifts.

This was in Pakistan in 2005.

Pakistan is 14,000 miles from Cuba and the Cubans were working in foreign conditions, in fierce cold, in a country with which Cuba had no diplomatic relations.

There are now more than 25,000 Cuban doctors working outside their country and an almost equal number of teachers

If you think that boojums are a figment of my imagination, consider this: Three weeks ago the US government identified Cuba as one of the countries exporting terrorism.

After 200 years, the heirs of Jefferson are still hunting boojums in the Caribbean

Copyright © 2010 John Maxwell

narrative constraint

you tell a story made of what's well-known

not just to you but to the whole surround

the human crew the birds the very ground

has understood each laugh and every groan

is analysed from village unto throne

for qualities of both meaning and sound

each fact is weighed to fractions of a pound

since nothing here is yours and yours alone

the common tongue we learn is one more fact

that binds into a whole the world entire

and turns dull life into a blazing art

smashes it up and remakes intact

what first was formed in the refining fire

but glows still secret in each living heart

false dawn

in the damp corner of the morning yard

where grey and quiet many secrets wait

this is the time when nature stand unbarred

 

not yet for us is life or fortune marred

by force of life or family or state

in the damp corner of the morning yard

 

where not a bird or beast now stands on guard

all fast asleep and seeming just to wait

this is the time when nature stands unbarred

 

to wary eyes and life seems not so hard

as we are told and we may now create

in the damp corner of the morning yard

 

a better world with choices not so hard

with sweeter wisdom and a kinder fate

this is the time when nature stands unbarred

 

one lucid moment before light is marred

and all our knowledges begin to grate

in the damp corner of the morning yard

this is the time when nature stands unbarred

No, Mister! You Cannot Share My Pain!

No, Mister! You Cannot Share My Pain !

John Maxwell

 

If you shared my pain you would not continue to make me suffer, to torture me, to deny me my dignity and my rights especially my rights to self determination and self expression.

Six years ago you sent your Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to perform an action illegal under the laws of your country,my country and of the international community of nations.

It was an act so outrageous, so bestially vile and wicked that your journalists and news agencies, your diplomats and politicians to this day cannot bring themselves to truthfully describe or own up to the crime that was committed when US Ambassador James Foley, a career diplomat arrived at the house of President Jean Bertrand Aristide with a bunch of CIA thugs and US Marines to kidnap the President of Haiti and his wife.

The Aristides were stowed aboard a CIA plane normally used for 'renditions' of suspected terrorists to the worldwide US gulag of dungeons and torture chambers.

The plane, on which the Aristides are listed as "cargo" flew to Antigua – an hour away – and remained on the ground in Antigua while Colin Powell's State Department and the CIA tried to blackmail and bribe various African countries to accept ('give asylum to") the kidnapped President and his wife.

The Central African Republic – one of George W Bush's 'Dark Corners of the World' – agreed for an undisclosed sum, to give the Aristides temporary asylum.

Before any credible plot can be designed and paid for – for the disappearance of the Aristides – they are rescued by friends, flown to temporary asylum in Jamaica where the government cravenly yielded to the blackmail of Condoleezza Rice to deny them the permanent asylum to which they were entitled and which most Jamaicans had hoped for.

Meanwhile in Haiti the US Marines protected an undisciplined ragbag of rapists and murderers to allow them entry to the capital. The Marines chased the medical students out of the new Medical School established by Aristide with Cuban help and teachers. The Marines bivouac in the school, going out on nightly raids, trailed by fleets of ambulances with body bags, hunting down Fanmi Lavalas activists described as 'chimeres' – terrorists.

The real terrorists, led by two convicted murderers, Chamblain and Philippe, assisted the Marines in the eradication of 'chimeres' until the Marines were replaced by foreign troops paid by the United Nations who took up the hunt on behalf of the civilised world – France, Canada, the US and Brazil.

The terrorists and the remains of the Duvalier tontons and the CIA-bred FRAPF    declared open season on the remnants of Aristide's programmes to build democracy. They burnt down the new museum of Haitian Culture, destroyed the Children's television station and generally laid waste to anything and everything which could remind Haitians of their glorious history.

Haitians don't know that without their help Latin America might still be part of the Spanish Empire and Simon Bolivar a brief historical footnote.

Imagine, Niggers Speaking French!

About ninety years ago when Professor Woodrow Wilson was President of the USA his Secretary of State was a fundamentalist lawyer named William Jennings Bryan who had three times run unsuccessfully, for President.

The Americans had decided to invade Haiti to collect debts owed by Haiti to Citibank.

General Smedley Butler, the only American soldier to have twice won the Congressional Medal of Honour, described his role in the US Army:

"I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long.

General Butler said: "I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. … My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical in the military service'. Butler compared himself unfavourably to Al Capone. He said his official racketeering made Capone look like an amateur.

Secretary Bryan was dumfounded by the Haitians; "Imagine" he said, "Niggers speaking French.

Smedley Butler and Bryan were involved in Haiti because of something that happened nearly a hundred years before. The French slave-masters, expelled from Haiti and defeated again when they tried to re-enslave the Haitians, connived with the Americans to starve them into submission by a trade embargo. With no sale for Haitian sugar, the country was weak and rundown when a French fleet arrived bearing a demand for repaations. Having bought their freedom in blood, the Haitians were to be oblige to purchase it again in gold.

The French demanded, essentially, that the Haitians pay France an amount equivalent to 90 percent of the entire Haitian budget for the foreseeable future. When this commitment proved too arduous to honour, the City Bank offered the Haitians a 'debt exchange" paying off the French in exchange for a lower interest longer term debt. The terms may have seemed better but were just as usurious and it was not paid off until 1947.

Because of the debt the Americas invaded Haiti, seized the Treasury, exiled the President, their Jim Crow policies were used to divide the society, to harass the poor and finally provoked a second struggle for freedom which was one of the most brutal episodes in colonial history.

Long before Franco bombed Guernica, exciting the horror and revulsion of civilised people, the Americans perfected their dive-bombing techniques against unarmed Haitian peasants many of whom had never seen aircraft before.

The Americans set up an Haitian Army in the image of their Jim Crow Marines and it was these people and the alien and alienated Élite who with some conscripted blacks like the Duvaliers have ruled Haiti for most of the last century.

When I flew over Haiti for the first time in 1959 en route from New York to San Juan, Puerto Rico, I saw for the first time the border between the green Dominican Republic and brown Haiti.

First world journalists interpret the absence of trees on the Haitian side to the predations of the poor, disregarding the fact that Western religion and American capitalism were mainly responsible.

Why is it that nowhere else in the Caribbean is there similar deforestation?

Haiti's Dessalines constitution offered sanctuary to every escaped slave of any colour. All such people of whatever colour were deemed 'black' and entitled to citizenship. Only officially certified 'blacks' could own land in Haiti.

The American occupation, anticipating Hayek, Freedman and Greenspan, decided that such a rule was a hindrance to development. The Assistant Secretary of the US Navy, one Franklin D Roosevelt was given the job of writing a new, modern constitution for Haiti.

This constitution meant foreigners could own land. Within a very short time the lumberjacks were busy, felling old growth Mahogany and Caribbean Pine for carved doors for the rich and mahogany speedboats, boardroom tables seating forty etc etc. The devastated land was put to produce rubber, sisal for ropes and all sorts of pie in the sky plantations.

When President Paul Magloire came to Jamaica fifty years ago Haitians were still speaking of an Artibonite dam for electricity and irrigation. But the ravages of the recent past were too much to recover.

As Marguerite Laurent (EziliDanto) writes: Don't expect to learn how a people with a Vodun culture that reveres nature and especially the Mapou (oak-like or ceiba pendantra/bombax) trees, and other such big trees as the abode of living entities and therefore as sacred things, were forced to watch the Catholic Church, during Rejete - the violent anti-Vodun crusade - gather whole communities at gun point into public squares, and forced them to watch their agents burn Haitian trees in order to teach Haitians their Vodun Gods were not in nature, that the trees were the 'houses of Satan.'

In partnership with the US, the mulatto President Elie Lescot (1941-45) summarily expelled peasants from more than 100,000 hectares of land, razing their homes and destroying more than a million fruit trees in the vain effort to cultivate rubber on a large plantation scale. Also, under the pretext of the Rejete campaign, thousands of acres of peasant lands were cleared of sacred trees so that the US could take their lands for US agribusiness

 

 

After the Flood

Norman Manley used to say 'River come Down' when his party seemed likely to prevail. The Kreyol word Lavalas conveys the same meaning.

Since the Haitian people's decisive rejection of the Duvalier dictatorships in the early 90s, their spark and leader has been Jean-Bertrand Aristide whose bona fides may be assessed from the fact that the CIA and conservative Americans have been trying to discredit him almost from the word go.

As he put it in one of his books, his intention has been to build a paradise on the garbage heap bequeathed to Haiti by the US and the Elite.

The bill of particulars is too long to go into here, but the destruction of the new museum of Culture, the breaking up of the medical school, the destruction of the children's television gives you the flavour. But the essence is captured in the brutal attempt to obliterate the spirit of Haitian community; the attempt to destroy Lavalas by murdering its men and raping its women, the American directed subversion of a real police force, the attacks on education and the obliteration of the community self-help systems which meant that when Hurricane Jeanne and all the other weather systems since have struck Haiti many more have died than in any other country similarly stricken. In an earthquake, totally unpredictable, every bad factor is multiplied

The American blocking of international aid means that there is no modern water supply anywhere, no town planning, no safe roads, none of the ordinary infrastructure of any other Caribbean state. There are no building standards, no emergency shelters, no parks

So, when I write about mothers unwittingly walking on dead babies in the mud, when I write about people so poor they must eat patties made of clay and shortening, when I write about people with their faces 'chopped off' or about any of 8 million horror stories from the crime scene that is Haiti, please don't tell me you share their pain or mine.

Tell me where is Lovinsky Pierre Antoine and ten thousand like him?

If you share my pain and their pain, why don't you stop causing it? Why don't you stop the torture?

If you want to understand me, look at the woman in the picture, and the children half buried with her. You cannot hear their screams because they know there is no point in screaming. It will do no more good than voting.

What is she thinking: perhaps it is something like this – No mister! You cannot share my pain!

Sometime perhaps, after the camera is gone people will return to dig us out with their bare hands. But not you.

 

Copyright©2010 John Maxwell

No, Mister! You Cannot Share My Pain !

John Maxwell

 

If you shared my pain you would not continue to make me suffer, to torture me, to deny me my dignity and my rights especially my rights to self determination and self expression.

Six years ago you sent your Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to perform an action illegal under the laws of your country,my country and of the international community of nations.

It was an act so outrageous, so bestially vile and wicked that your journalists and news agencies, your diplomats and politicians to this day cannot bring themselves to truthfully describe or own up to the crime that was committed when US Ambassador James Foley, a career diplomat arrived at the house of President Jean Bertrand Aristide with a bunch of CIA thugs and US Marines to kidnap the President of Haiti and his wife.

The Aristides were stowed aboard a CIA plane normally used for 'renditions' of suspected terrorists to the worldwide US gulag of dungeons and torture chambers.

The plane, on which the Aristides are listed as "cargo" flew to Antigua – an hour away – and remained on the ground in Antigua while Colin Powell's State Department and the CIA tried to blackmail and bribe various African countries to accept ('give asylum to") the kidnapped President and his wife.

The Central African Republic – one of George W Bush's 'Dark Corners of the World' – agreed for an undisclosed sum, to give the Aristides temporary asylum.

Before any credible plot can be designed and paid for – for the disappearance of the Aristides – they are rescued by friends, flown to temporary asylum in Jamaica where the government cravenly yielded to the blackmail of Condoleezza Rice to deny them the permanent asylum to which they were entitled and which most Jamaicans had hoped for.

Meanwhile in Haiti the US Marines protected an undisciplined ragbag of rapists and murderers to allow them entry to the capital. The Marines chased the medical students out of the new Medical School established by Aristide with Cuban help and teachers. The Marines bivouac in the school, going out on nightly raids, trailed by fleets of ambulances with body bags, hunting down Fanmi Lavalas activists described as 'chimeres' – terrorists.

The real terrorists, led by two convicted murderers, Chamblain and Philippe, assisted the Marines in the eradication of 'chimeres' until the Marines were replaced by foreign troops paid by the United Nations who took up the hunt on behalf of the civilised world – France, Canada, the US and Brazil.

The terrorists and the remains of the Duvalier tontons and the CIA-bred FRAPF    declared open season on the remnants of Aristide's programmes to build democracy. They burnt down the new museum of Haitian Culture, destroyed the Children's television station and generally laid waste to anything and everything which could remind Haitians of their glorious history.

Haitians don't know that without their help Latin America might still be part of the Spanish Empire and Simon Bolivar a brief historical footnote.

Imagine, Niggers Speaking French!

About ninety years ago when Professor Woodrow Wilson was President of the USA his Secretary of State was a fundamentalist lawyer named William Jennings Bryan who had three times run unsuccessfully, for President.

The Americans had decided to invade Haiti to collect debts owed by Haiti to Citibank.

General Smedley Butler, the only American soldier to have twice won the Congressional Medal of Honour, described his role in the US Army:

"I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long.

General Butler said: "I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. … My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical in the military service'. Butler compared himself unfavourably to Al Capone. He said his official racketeering made Capone look like an amateur.

Secretary Bryan was dumfounded by the Haitians; "Imagine" he said, "Niggers speaking French.

Smedley Butler and Bryan were involved in Haiti because of something that happened nearly a hundred years before. The French slave-masters, expelled from Haiti and defeated again when they tried to re-enslave the Haitians, connived with the Americans to starve them into submission by a trade embargo. With no sale for Haitian sugar, the country was weak and rundown when a French fleet arrived bearing a demand for repaations. Having bought their freedom in blood, the Haitians were to be oblige to purchase it again in gold.

The French demanded, essentially, that the Haitians pay France an amount equivalent to 90 percent of the entire Haitian budget for the foreseeable future. When this commitment proved too arduous to honour, the City Bank offered the Haitians a 'debt exchange" paying off the French in exchange for a lower interest longer term debt. The terms may have seemed better but were just as usurious and it was not paid off until 1947.

Because of the debt the Americas invaded Haiti, seized the Treasury, exiled the President, their Jim Crow policies were used to divide the society, to harass the poor and finally provoked a second struggle for freedom which was one of the most brutal episodes in colonial history.

Long before Franco bombed Guernica, exciting the horror and revulsion of civilised people, the Americans perfected their dive-bombing techniques against unarmed Haitian peasants many of whom had never seen aircraft before.

The Americans set up an Haitian Army in the image of their Jim Crow Marines and it was these people and the alien and alienated Élite who with some conscripted blacks like the Duvaliers have ruled Haiti for most of the last century.

When I flew over Haiti for the first time in 1959 en route from New York to San Juan, Puerto Rico, I saw for the first time the border between the green Dominican Republic and brown Haiti.

First world journalists interpret the absence of trees on the Haitian side to the predations of the poor, disregarding the fact that Western religion and American capitalism were mainly responsible.

Why is it that nowhere else in the Caribbean is there similar deforestation?

Haiti's Dessalines constitution offered sanctuary to every escaped slave of any colour. All such people of whatever colour were deemed 'black' and entitled to citizenship. Only officially certified 'blacks' could own land in Haiti.

The American occupation, anticipating Hayek, Freedman and Greenspan, decided that such a rule was a hindrance to development. The Assistant Secretary of the US Navy, one Franklin D Roosevelt was given the job of writing a new, modern constitution for Haiti.

This constitution meant foreigners could own land. Within a very short time the lumberjacks were busy, felling old growth Mahogany and Caribbean Pine for carved doors for the rich and mahogany speedboats, boardroom tables seating forty etc etc. The devastated land was put to produce rubber, sisal for ropes and all sorts of pie in the sky plantations.

When President Paul Magloire came to Jamaica fifty years ago Haitians were still speaking of an Artibonite dam for electricity and irrigation. But the ravages of the recent past were too much to recover.

As Marguerite Laurent (EziliDanto) writes: Don't expect to learn how a people with a Vodun culture that reveres nature and especially the Mapou (oak-like or ceiba pendantra/bombax) trees, and other such big trees as the abode of living entities and therefore as sacred things, were forced to watch the Catholic Church, during Rejete - the violent anti-Vodun crusade - gather whole communities at gun point into public squares, and forced them to watch their agents burn Haitian trees in order to teach Haitians their Vodun Gods were not in nature, that the trees were the 'houses of Satan.'

In partnership with the US, the mulatto President Elie Lescot (1941-45) summarily expelled peasants from more than 100,000 hectares of land, razing their homes and destroying more than a million fruit trees in the vain effort to cultivate rubber on a large plantation scale. Also, under the pretext of the Rejete campaign, thousands of acres of peasant lands were cleared of sacred trees so that the US could take their lands for US agribusiness

 

 

After the Flood

Norman Manley used to say 'River come Down' when his party seemed likely to prevail. The Kreyol word Lavalas conveys the same meaning.

Since the Haitian people's decisive rejection of the Duvalier dictatorships in the early 90s, their spark and leader has been Jean-Bertrand Aristide whose bona fides may be assessed from the fact that the CIA and conservative Americans have been trying to discredit him almost from the word go.

As he put it in one of his books, his intention has been to build a paradise on the garbage heap bequeathed to Haiti by the US and the Elite.

The bill of particulars is too long to go into here, but the destruction of the new museum of Culture, the breaking up of the medical school, the destruction of the children's television gives you the flavour. But the essence is captured in the brutal attempt to obliterate the spirit of Haitian community; the attempt to destroy Lavalas by murdering its men and raping its women, the American directed subversion of a real police force, the attacks on education and the obliteration of the community self-help systems which meant that when Hurricane Jeanne and all the other weather systems since have struck Haiti many more have died than in any other country similarly stricken. In an earthquake, totally unpredictable, every bad factor is multiplied

The American blocking of international aid means that there is no modern water supply anywhere, no town planning, no safe roads, none of the ordinary infrastructure of any other Caribbean state. There are no building standards, no emergency shelters, no parks

So, when I write about mothers unwittingly walking on dead babies in the mud, when I write about people so poor they must eat patties made of clay and shortening, when I write about people with their faces 'chopped off' or about any of 8 million horror stories from the crime scene that is Haiti, please don't tell me you share their pain or mine.

Tell me where is Lovinsky Pierre Antoine and ten thousand like him?

If you share my pain and their pain, why don't you stop causing it? Why don't you stop the torture?

If you want to understand me, look at the woman in the picture, and the children half buried with her. You cannot hear their screams because they know there is no point in screaming. It will do no more good than voting.

What is she thinking: perhaps it is something like this – No mister! You cannot share my pain!

Sometime perhaps, after the camera is gone people will return to dig us out with their bare hands. But not you.

 

Copyright©2010 John Maxwell

 

not misguided

you think we missed the road when we did not

make the right turn and soon were in the corn

a point of loss but she was not forsworn

 

and got us out of there to the right spot

no loss of time nor yet reason for scorn

you think we missed the road when we did not

 

our guide had things to say and just forgot

the proper way you know her heart was torn

but still we passed right by where she was born

you think we missed the road when we did not

Walls Within Walls

John Maxwell

 

First- full disclosure: Butch Stewart has been a friend of mine for a very long time and I was a buddy of his dad's – Gordon Sr – when he was the founding Chief Engineer of the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation. We haven't always seen eye to eye, except perhaps mostly on the environment and even there we have had some serious disagreements. Butch is also the owner of the Jamaica Observer in which my column has appeared for more than a dozen years.

All this to explain that while Butch has never tried to tell me how to write my column, I am presuming to advise him how to run his business. Butch's hotel chain, Sandals has applied for planning permission to erect some over-water rooms on an artificial island off Montego Bay.

Butch had no planning permission to create the island, but that was a long time ago.

It is my considered opinion that these over-water rooms are a bad idea and I hope Butch abandons his application for permission to build them.

•    They provide a bad example to less scrupulous and less intelligent 'developers' who are intent on reworking the geography of Jamaica;

•    They defy logic and wisdom in an area where strong 'Northers' – storms – are prevalent in the winter tourist season and an 'accident' will bathe Sandals and Jamaica in the sort of publicity we cannot afford;

•    Butch should remember Hurricane Allen which came ashore on the north coast shortly after he went into the hotel business. Allen made matchwood out of the Trident, a solidly built hotel on a cliff, not at sea-level. Allen's storm surge wrecked San San lifting the upper story of one house 18 feet above ground level and leaving it on the parochial road to the Blue lagoon

•    At Galina, near Oracabessa, Allen lifted an enormous rock weighing several thousand tons off the seabed and onto the road 30 to 40 feet above sea level. A pretty solid little cottage between the rock and the place it came to rest was atomised and the two old ladies who lived in the house were never seen again.

•    I was a little boy in Duncans when the 1944 hurricane came through. Among that hurricane's feats was the lifting of the perimeter verandah of the Eldon Great House and depositing it hundreds of yards away in a coconut walk in Harmony Hall/Georgia.

Not another Pear Tree Bottom?

    Several years ago some of us noticed that a Company called Tankweld had created an enormous unsightly stone-crushing arena on land at Pear Tree Bottom. A few years later we noticed that the public road was diverted at great expense, apparently on the orders of the Great I-Nyam, and since most of us had said nothing about Tankweld's visual disaster nor about the road, we were soon greeted by news that a Spanish hotel was to be built there by the Pinero Group.

Despite protests and a court case launched by some brave women (mostly) led by Wendy Lee, the hotel was built. The hotel's sewerage was reaching Pear Tree Bottom beach as I documented in these pages. The enterprise was allowed by some lunatic bureaucrats to inject sewage into the limestone aquifer, which means that by the time the hotel's incentives run out the land will be good only for tumble-tu'd' beetles and other coprophagic life-forms.

And then to everyone's surprise, in 2008, Mr Pablo Pinero declared his outrage at the decision of NEPA/NRCA, to stop him from concreting even more of the coastline in the interests of his bank account.

As I said at the time, the NRCA had, up till then, managed to foul up almost every aspect of the regulation of the hotel including – the EIA, the fact that the hotel is built on a public beach, illegally, and the inadequate sanitary arrangements and other environmental protections which ought to have been built into any permit for any hotel anywhere in the world, but especially in an environmentally sensitive and important Jamaican wetland, fronting a world famous and scientifically important coral reef.

Since then on the south coast of Jamaica, largely unspoiled, people are starting to spoil things, with a vengeance

Some time ago elements of the Bicknell family, owners of Tankweld, have built on the south coast, something even more hideous than any of their stonecrushing enterprises on the North Coast.

This excrescence, this wanton insult to civilisation and culture sits athwart the beach at Great Bay, Treasure Beach, about 9,000 tons of river stone (quarried under what licence) and placed to cock a dirty snook at the public interest and whatever else its builders may have chosen to insult.

The problem with this wall is not simply that it desecrates, defiles and devalues one of the last tranquil places in Jamaica; it is that it is so monumentally ugly, so devoid of any hint of an aesthetic sense, so vehemently and virulently hideous that it could provide an icon for some plague, some noxious affliction meant to torment and terrify frail humanity.

Its size is intended to impress, to overwhelm and oppress and if there were two of these monstrosities side by side one could easily imagine oneself in the anteroom to hell itself – "Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here" or, alternatively, "Arbeit macht Frei""

But I don't wish to examine the existential meaning of the wall. What concerns me is the ancient doctrine of prescriptive right.

Under the Prescription Act 1882 as amended by Act 65 of 1955, the Beach Control Act:

"4.1 When any beach has been used by the public or any class of the public for fishing, or for purposes incident to fishing, or for bathing or recreation, and any road, track or pathway passing over any land adjoining or adjacent to such beach has been used by the public or any class of the public as a means of such access to such beach, without interruption for the full period of twenty years, the public shall, subject to the provisos hereinafter contained, have the absolute and indefeasible right to use such beach, land, road, track or pathway as aforesaid, unless it shall appear that the same was enjoyed by some consent or agreement expressly made or given for that purpose by deed or writing."

That seems to me to be perfectly clear, as it should be, having been drafted by N. W. Manley himself.

Although termites have been eating away at the Beach Control Act for years, they fortunately ignored the Prescription Act, possibly out of ignorance.

The situation in my non-lawyer's opinion, is that no land below high-water mark in Jamaica may now be claimed by any private or public entity. That is to say, apart from designated licenced private beaches adjacent to houses, and the public recreational beaches including those attached to hotels with licences older than 1993, there are no beaches in Jamaica over which any entity or person, whether the Universal Devastation Conglomerate or Mr Vin Lawrence or his heirs and successors, can legally claim hegemony of any kind. The UDC's attempt to steal Winnifred Beach or any other attempt to compromise the public interest in any form, is ultra vires and null and void

Now and then I wish I had followed my father's wishes, that I should become a lawyer, like Mr Manley. Even if I hadn't become a lawyer like Manley, but just another lawyer, I would now be making life unbearable for those who trample on the public interest and human rights.

If the Spanish hotels are to attempt to colonise Treasure Beach we now have a new weapon. The EPAs we signed under duress with the EU now allow poor litigants like me access to the European Commission for Human Rights where such enactments as the Aarhus Convention apply. That convention gives us the rights our constitution and laws such as the NRCA act say we have but sometimes can't find.

The Aarhus Convention according to the UN Economic Commission for Europe, " is by far the most impressive elaboration of Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration, which stresses the need for citizens' participation in environmental issues and for access to information on the environment held by public authorities." These principles, believe it or not, are also enshrined in the Jamaican NRCA's guide to the conduct of Environmental Impact Assessments.

"The Convention adopts a rights-based approach. Article one, setting out the objective of the Convention, requires parties to guarantee rights of access to information, public participation in decision-making and access to justice in environmental matters.

It also refers to the goal of protecting the right of every person of present and future generations to live in an environment adequate to health and well-being, which represents a significant step forward in international law." (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe http://www.unece.org/env/pp/contentofaarhus.htm)

Mr Tufton and the Spaniards

    As I reported last week, the Spaniards are handing over to the Minister of Agriculture, about half a million US$ for a Centre of Excellence or perhaps a nice little agronomy lab. As Dr Tufton is also the MP for the Treasure Beach area, I really hope that my criticising the Spaniards has not queered his pitch with these eminent benefactors.

Copyright ©2010 John Maxwell jankunnu@gmail.com

here is the test

what we have managed is to slowly fail

out of the passion where we did not mark

each fallen moment nor discern the stark

announcement of the coming winter gale

and so were lost now this message is stale

lacking all force and having no more spark

than a dead candle yet we must embark

on one more journey out beyond the pale

to where the signal has not ever gone

that says just what we are or who we were

and thus sets limits on what we might do

that way we're told the battle might be won

or ought to be if only we would dare

step out and act as if the world were new

Jamaica? No Problem!!!

John Maxwell

If you've been around as long as I, reading or listening to what passes for recent history can easily provoke the dry heaves. Mr Edward Seaga, a centre of turbulence as a politician, remains a centre of turbulence as an old age pensioner. Some of the claims made by Mr Seaga or on his behalf are bizarre.

A couple of years ago, Martin Henry, while rightly castigating Seaga for his racist, [my word] elitist view that it is "the masses of simpletons who determine election victories and defeats. And since the people are incapable of sophisticated political understanding only simplistic messages can be delivered to them as entertaining sloganeering from the political platform." (Seaga, quashee and campaigning' July 19 2007, Sunday Gleaner)

Mr Henry almost proves Seaga's point by referring to Seaga as "the creator of the first and great Independence Five Year Development Plan, 1963-1968"– apparently blissfully unaware that the plan was the work of Don Mills, Arthur Brown and Raphael Swaby of The Central Planning Unit working to specifications laid down by Norman Manley, David Coore, Vernon Arnett, Allan Isaacs and other members of a PNP Brains Trust.
Mr Seaga has never attempted to publicise the truth. And why should he?

When he now bravely speaks of education it is from his eminence as the pro-Chancellor of the University of Technology and a Distinguished Fellow of The University of The West Indies. Mr Seaga is quoted in a story in the Gleaner of September 2 2009:

"If the IMF is able to address [the budget deficit and the foreign exchange shortfall] and is able to lend other funds to help fund the semi-productive sector, Seaga said, the best way to use that fund is to put it into education.
"That is where I would like to see the funds go, because that is the real resource base of Jamaica that has not yet been fully utilised,"said the former prime minister …' (IMF the only option, says Seaga)
Mr Seaga's concern for education is truly touching. Preening himself on the mistaken belief that he is the only political heavyweight of the fifties still extant, Seaga no doubt forgets the big, bold JLP campaign at the end of the fifties – "Saltfish better than education".
He similarly has no memory space for his government's unremitting campaign against the UWI in the sixties as a nest of intellectuals and subversives; the campaign against the Jamaica Teachers Association which led to wage-freezes for teachers and the desertion of the classroom by male teachers who turned to selling insurance and liquor or else fled to Britain or Brooklyn.

Turn Them Back

Seaga forgets the assaults he led on the PNP in the seventies when that party proposed extended vocational training in sophistication and coverage; and the fact that he destroyed the Vocational Training Institute and turned it into a college for cosmetologists as soon as he got the chance.
He forgets the destruction of the Jamaica School of Agriculture and any other institution created by Norman Manley by himself and others obsessed by the idea of destroying all trace of the Father of the Nation.
He forgets the corruption and destruction of the Social Welfare Commission and of its community integration and development work and the destruction of the Jamaica Youth Corps and the promise it bore for the future of our country
Mr Seaga should also remember his part in destroying the Agricultural Extension system and the network of Agricultural Experimental Stations which helped enthuse and invigorate Jamaican farming, producing, inter alia, Dr Lecky's four world class breeds of cattle, The Jamaica Hope, the Jamaica Black, the Jamaica Red and the Jamaica Brahman.
The loss in brainpower, in expertise, in biological science and in foreign exchange is incalculable. How much to restore the Library at Alexandria?
Seaga forgets the assault he led against free secondary and tertiary education and the fact that as soon as he became prime Minister he reinstated fees for poor children and boasted that these savage cuts in the Jamaican integument were the work of the government, not of the IMF. The destruction of the JBC was a joint venture between himself and Patterson.
Mr Seaga has blamed the PNP for the dreadful state of the economy,
forgetting that within three years of taking power in 1980 he had doubled the debt burden and effectively, put it forever beyond human control.
Mr Patterson, Seaga's only close competitor for the title of worst prime minister in history did his part, playing the Tony Blair to Seaga's Margaret Thatcher. Despite his faults, many and grievous, Patterson was not a patch on Lord Edward of St George's, (Grenada).

Jamaica? No Problem!!

Mr. Martin Henry in his more-or-less paean to Edward Seaga two years ago, noted that
"The one and only time that Edward Seaga led his party to victory in a contested general election was when the critical issues at stake were starkly clear and voters/citizens, understanding those issues and their implications, overwhelmingly took a stand. Despite his participation in pandering to the quashee in Jamaicans, this country, including even Michael Manley, owes Eddie a debt of gratitude for clarifying and communicating those crossroads issues in 1980 and winning the vote which turned back a looming disaster."
It would be nice were Mr Henry to sketch, at the least, the basic parameters of the looming disaster of which he speaks.
I happened to have survived those interesting times and survived Mr Seaga's attempts to starve people like me into submission. In 1980, the election year, that year of transcendental clarity, 889 murders were registered, more than twice as many as the 351 of the year before.
Within three years – according to Carl Stone, the Gamaliel of the revisionists– Mr Seaga would have lost his majority had there been a free and fair election. Which makes one wonder about Mr Henry's 'crossroads' issues, not to speak of the Halfway Tree issues and the Time and Patience issues that bother people like me.
These issues are provoked, as is so much else, by the Gleaner's news that

    Spanish Gov't to help agriculture ministry.

The Spanish Ambassador is to hand over a cheque for $35 million Jamaican (about half a million $US) towards a Centre of Excellence in Agriculture. I can imagine what Sam Motta or Hugh Miller could have done with that or Jerry Bell or any of dozens more – some like Buddha Webster who gave their lives in the service of Jamaican farmers, not to speak of Dr Lecky and his world-class cows.
José Martí was to have been a coeducational boarding school for young farme to send qualified students over to the Jamaica School of Agriculture. Seaga changed José Martí into an ordinary school and turned the School of Agriculture into a "Police Academy"
He sold the Research stations for a song and to build housing schemes.
And now they want to turn the Usain Bolt stadium into a battery-chicken-house for Goldman Sachs.
I tell you! Mr Seaga is FULL of the most wonderful ideas.
Always has been.
I kid you not.

Copyright © 2009 John Maxwell jankunnu@gmail.com