The kidnapping of Haiti
John Pilger
http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=564
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 exploted
Haiti comes to mind.
The theft of Haiti has been swift and crude. On 22 January, the United States
secured “formal approval” from the United Nations to take over all air and sea
ports 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. 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.
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 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 pjamas, for 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 jerry-built housing. Years 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 is the US 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
14 December, 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 suppor