Capitalism's solution: Making Haitians more exploitable
Kasama received the following materials gathered by Miles Ahead.
Haiti is not simply another “natural” disaster, even if it is viewed as the most “earthshaking” and devastating natural disaster in recent history.
July 12th marked six months since the earthquake hit, mainly in Port au Prince. Not to in any way belittle the fact that 300,000 people (those counted) died, with thousands more still uncovered in the rubble, and that over a million Haitians have been displaced, the situation in Haiti is revelatory of both imperialism’s and colonialism’s heinous crimes and designs, both past and present.
One has to wonder why it is that after Chile’s recent earthquake, which was near to if not surpassing Haiti’s on the Richter Scale, how Chile was able to “bounce back,” relatively speaking, from its disaster?
Why is it that Katrina’s victims are still suffering right here in the good ol’ U.S. of A.?
How is it that in Haiti, 6 mos. later, the likes of Halliburton (!), Carlos Slim (!), or even Blackwater (!!) are being bandied about in terms of Haiti’s “reconstruction”? And in some ways, I couldn’t help but think of Gaza, during some of this discussion.
Kim Ives writes:
“…the principal fault-line in Haiti is not geological but one of class….”
“…So we’re at this moment where that can change, where we could turn back to the Dessalinian model, which was the original Haiti and in fact was the model for all of Latin America. Haiti was the touchstone for those revolutions, and I think that’s where it really needs to go to get out of this traumatic period that it’s in….”
Or go to Democracy Now to read or listen to all of the interviews and discussion.
Excerpts from “Land Ownership at the Crux of Haiti’s Reconstruction”:
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Six months after the earthquake, many Haitians told us they have seen little in terms of recovery efforts, despite the billions of dollars in aid pledged from around the world. In fact, according to the Washington Post, only two percent of promised reconstruction aid has been delivered half a year after the disaster.
Former President Bill Clinton is co-chair of the Interim Commission to Reconstruct Haiti, or CIRH. At a ceremony on Monday marking the six-month anniversary of the quake, Clinton stood alongside Haitian President René Préval and talked about the plans for Haiti’s recovery.
BILL CLINTON: To the private-sector members here, we need your input about what we can do to support more economic growth. We know that 70 percent of the GDP losses of Haiti were from small and medium enterprises. Just in the last few weeks, two of my colleagues announced—Carlos Slim and Frank Giustra—a $20 million revolving nonprofit loan fund to get small and medium enterprises going again. We are working hard on all this economic investment, but let’s not forget, when we come out of this, we want Haiti to have a strong middle class, and we want poor people to own more property and believe they can work themselves into the middle class.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: That’s Bill Clinton saying he and the Haiti reconstruction commission want poor people to own more property.
Well, the issue of land is at the crux of the recovery effort in Haiti. For the more than 1.5 million Haitians left homeless by the quake, plans for permanent housing are, to say the least, remote. Even plans for even just temporary shelters to get them out of the tent camps have not been drawn up. Where will all these people go? Well, at the heart of the matter is the issue of land ownership.
AMY GOODMAN: When we broadcast from Haiti on Monday from the ruins of the Montana Hotel in Port-au-Prince where more than 200 people were crushed to death, we spoke with longtime Haitian democracy activist Patrick Elie. He is now an adviser to President Préval after the earthquake, and he was a former minister in the Aristide government. This is what he had to say about the reconstruction and issue of land….
* * * * * * *
AMY GOODMAN: Patrick Elie, longtime democracy activist in Haiti.
We’re now joined by Kim Ives. He’s a journalist with Haiti Liberté. He traveled with us to Port-au-Prince these past few days to cover this six-month anniversary of the quake. In his latest article in Haiti Liberté, he writes that the earthquake, quote, “reveals that the principal fault-line in Haiti is not geological but one of class.” Kim Ives is now back in Miami.
Kim, welcome to Democracy Now! Lay out this issue of land, which is not being raised very much.
KIM IVES: Well, Amy, as we saw, in fact, the wolves have been put in charge of the chicken coop. The bourgeoisie has been put in charge of resettling the squatters’ camps, and they have the best land in suburban Port-au-Prince, the large tracts of land very suited to building cities of new cities, where people could have good houses. And there’s dozens of proposals of how to build those houses. But the good land is not being given. What they’ve done is give a place like Corail, which they own, too, and they pay themselves handsomely for its use. And so, what they’re doing is keeping their best land; selling, at a high profit, their worst land. And the people are paying the price.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And Kim, when you say “they,” you’re talking about the CIRH, the Interim Commission to Reconstruct Haiti. Can you describe who makes up this commission? And also, it’s really an underreported fact that the parliament in Haiti in mid-March voted to cede power to this commission. Explain.
KIM IVES: Exactly. They essentially committed suicide to give this commission, which is composed of foreign bankers and foreign governments, like the US, France and Canada, which were behind the 2004 coup d’état against Aristide—they essentially control this commission, along with thirteen members. The other thirteen members are members of Haiti’s elite, represented by people like Reginald Boulos, who heads the principal bourgeois family who was behind the ’94 coup—the ’91 coup and the 2004 coup. So these families are now in charge, along with the US and along with the banks, IMF, World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, of Haiti’s reconstruction. And to me, it’s going to be the Haitian equivalent of the US bank bailout, where essentially they’re going to take these billions of dollars and funnel it into their own pockets.
AMY GOODMAN: We spoke with Haitian human rights attorney Mario Joseph at his office in Port-au-Prince. You, Kim, translated for him. He had some strong words about the Interim Commission to Reconstruct Haiti.
But, Kim Ives, take off from where Mario Joseph left off, as he talks about this being a coup without an army.
KIM IVES: Essentially, Amy, it’s the takeover of the government by the international banks and former colonial countries, which are interested in getting the contracts to rebuild Haiti, rebuild the palace, rebuild the roads, rebuild the infrastructure, which was destroyed. Again, these will go to companies like Halliburton, DynCorp, Brown & Root, Blackwater, all the usual suspects, the appendages of the Pentagon, which go into Afghanistan and Iraq after they’ve bombed.
In this case, it was an earthquake. And they want to control this commission to be able to send this money to their contractors. And, of course, the Haitian elite want to get a little cut of the action. Apparently one businessman told Haiti Liberté that 15 percent of the contracts have been earmarked for the Haitian contractors, which will be from bourgeoisie, people like Vorbe, etc.
And these are the same people, by the way, who own the land along places like the—between Tabarre and the Frères Road, where there’s perfect land for resettlement, but they want to keep it for their assembly factories and luxury apartments and office buildings that they want to build there.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And Kim, this issue of the land that, you write, is at the crux of the matter, when we were in Port-au-Prince, that’s what everyone was saying: Where are all these people going to go? These tent cities literally are on every street in Port-au-Prince, just teeming around the city. And from aid activists—from activists to people on the ground, organizers, community organizers are all talking about this issue of land: Where are all these people going to go? And you’re writing about how the bourgeoisie own these large tracts of land that are ideal for relocations, but in fact the government and the Haitian interim commission is taking land away from the commons. Can you explain that division?
KIM IVES: Well, that’s one of the things we saw, Sharif, of course, when we went out to Ganthier. Here was a rural community, 72,000 people, living near the Dominican border. They had tracts of state land, which they’ve used as commons. For the past eighty years, the mayor explained to us, it’s been used to grow food. Now you have businessmen coming out there, laying claim to the land, using false papers, coming with a bulldozer, driving the peasants off the land. The peasants responded by burning the bulldozer, blocking the road. And now the police are hunting them down.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, actually—
KIM IVES: They threw the mayor in jail, because he supported them.
* * * * * *
AMY GOODMAN: —on Sunday to Ganthier, and there, the local mayor, Ralph Lapointe, had just come back from being jailed after he sided with the peasants in a struggle over land. We met him at his home. He explained to us what happened. He allowed us to identify him, but he was afraid. He didn’t want his face to be shown….
That’s Ralph Lapointe. He is the mayor of Ganthier, just released from jail, as he stood with the peasants on a issue that is going to be cropping up more and more, as wealthy men came in, claimed to own the common land, and were trying to take it away, and so the peasants lit fire to the tractors that they had brought in.…
Make this—look at Ganthier in the larger scale of Haiti right now.
KIM IVES: …It’s a microcosm. This is it. Here’s a government official, elected by his community. He is now, as he explained to us, practically a prisoner in his home. He can’t go out, fears for his life. The land grabbers have threatened to kill him if he leaves. The same for his director-general of his office. So, this is a war. This is a war between the classes for the land, the means of production of the country.
This is the prime means that Haiti has had, up until thirty years ago. Haiti could feed itself; now it doesn’t. It can. It is critical that the people not only have land, so they can produce food, so they can eat and aren’t reliant on imports from the US and elsewhere, and also that they have a place to build homes, so that when the hurricanes start to hit the country in the coming months, they’re not going to be—there isn’t going to be an even more horrendous catastrophe than what we saw six months ago.
AMY GOODMAN: And it also is about the violence in these camps, as long as people can’t move out, what they’re facing. Lost in all this coverage of the Haiti earthquake is how people on the ground are organizing in the face of adversity. Rape and violence against women and girls has become increasingly widespread in these tent camps of thousands and tens of thousands of people. While Haitian police and UN forces have done little, women on the ground are organizing to protect themselves. We spoke with Malia Villard Appolon, the coordinator of KOFAVIV, the commission of women victims for victims….
On the one hand, vast criticism of the camps remaining, but then the issue of vanishing camps.
KIM IVES: That’s right. What’s happening is people are being pushed out of these spontaneous settlements at gunpoint at night, and they have nowhere else to go. They are essentially being chased, hounded by—sometimes it’s guys with machetes, sometimes it’s the police and the UN occupation troops pushing them out. So it’s a complete irony. The people who should be being expropriated, who have perfect land, are not being; and those who have nothing, who are just trying to survive, are being expropriated from their tents, from their tarps. It’s just insane.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And Kim Ives, you’ve been going to Haiti for thirty years now. You’ve covered events on the ground there from the coups, from the election of President Aristide, the two coups that ousted him, now this earthquake and the reconstruction now. Where do you see Haiti? Put it in context in history. And is this a moment where things can change? Or is it more of what a Haitian human rights lawyer said, a coup d’état, this time without an army?
KIM IVES: … I think this is really a defining moment for Haiti. After the terribly traumatic thirteen-year independence war, when Haiti gained its independence in 1804, founding father Jean-Jacques Dessalines nationalized all the land in Haiti. He said the land is for the person who works it, who is on it. Two years later, he was given a coup d’état by the land owners of the day who didn’t agree with that. Their descendants are essentially the people who now own this land, which once was commons, which once belonged to all the people. They gained it through either outright intimidation and theft or ruse, using false papers. So we’re at this moment where that can change, where we could turn back to the Dessalinian model, which was the original Haiti and in fact was the model for all of Latin America. Haiti was the touchstone for those revolutions, and I think that’s where it really needs to go to get out of this traumatic period that it’s in.
AMY GOODMAN: Kim Ives, finally, we just have thirty seconds, but the significance of President Bill Clinton being head, co-chair with the Haitian prime minister, of the reconstruction commission? He said he’s going to spend this next seven weeks only marrying off his daughter Chelsea and working on Haiti.
KIM IVES: Right. I think that they’re trying to use Bill Clinton, who has some sort of credibility with the Haitian people because he brought back Aristide in 1994 on the shoulders of 20,000 US troops. But people are fast souring on the Clinton gambit, because they are seeing what the results are, which is essentially expropriation for the people and empowerment for the bourgeoisie.
AMY GOODMAN: We’ll leave it there. Kim Ives, journalist with Haiti Liberté.
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