22 November 2010. A World to Win News Service. As cholera deaths rise, Haitians are angrier than ever. They have good reason.
Protests have targeted the government and especially the main pillar of public order, the UN troops who have occupied the country since 1993.
A series of violent protests began 15 November in the country's second largest city, Cap-Haitien in the north, where the the disease struck almost overnight and quickly killed hundreds of people. According to the Agence Haitienne de Presse, thousands of residents came into the streets. Demonstrators blockaded roads with coffins, along with burning tyres, large rocks and debris. When they attacked two UN troop bases with rocks and bottles, they were met with automatic weapons fire, killing at least two protesters.
UN troops and Haitian police shot volleys of tear gas into a university faculty, and some of the canisters fell into the adjoining tent camps. The independent journalism Web site in Haiti Mediahacker.org recounts that the troops ignored families' pleas to stop firing. In response to claims by the authorities and foreign-based media that the protesters were young gang members, it reported that "all elements of society are participating."
The demonstrations after that were not violent, and there were no reported attacks on NGO health workers who operate out of a single encampment in a sports stadium in the centre of the city. But these personnel were ordered confined to their living quarters. All emergency work and supplies ceased for almost a week.
Over the next few days fighting also took place in Grande Riviere du Nord, Limbe and especially the town of Hinche in the central plateau region, where demonstrators burned down two police substations and UN troops wounded 15 people. Everywhere calls went up for the withdrawal of the the Minustah (UN Mission for the Stabilization of Haiti).
On 18 November demonstrations scheduled in the capital on the anniversary of the Haitian slave revolution's decisive battle with the French colonial army also turned into a clash with police and soldiers from the UN. At protests the next day, people chanted "Minustah and cholera are twins" and carried signs saying "Minustah = Kolera".
Whether or not the UN troops are the source of the epidemic, the way these officials and other authorities have handled the situation has proven that they are a plague on the people.
Although a cholera epidemic has been spreading around the world over the last decades, Haiti has not seen a single case for a very long time, if ever. This means that unlike South Asia, no one in Haiti has acquired any natural immunity to the disease. Before it broke out in October UN officials refused to pay attention to complaints from people living along the Artibonite River that sewage from a UN camp was fouling their drinking water. (Jonathan Katz, Associated Press, 19 November 2010) When cholera hit, shortly after a contingent of troops was transferred in from Nepal, officials refused to look into the local people's suspicions that the infection came from UN latrines. It was along this river's banks that the cholera storm started and gathered much of its early deadly force.
Since the start of the epidemic each statement from the UN Mission has turned out to be a lie or misleading. The camp's sewage system which they claimed was safely sealed and recently checked for compliance with U.S. and international UN sanitation standards was revealed to be a stinking cesspool. It overflowed into a nearby stream, filling it with what an Associated Press journalist said looked and smelled like excrement. It was not until he came on the scene, five weeks into the health crisis, that anything was done to fix it.
The claim that the soldiers couldn't have been the carriers of the disease because none were sick was exposed as scientific rubbish – experts say that three-quarters of contagious people never show symptoms. The claimed environmental testing of the camp for cholera was botched. For a month it was claimed that the soldiers had tested negative for the disease, then it came out that they have still not been tested. It seems that Minustah considers its mission to maintain political stability more important than the survival of ordinary Haitians.
The same pattern repeated itself with the deaths of three demonstrators during the third week in November. At first UN mission officials said that they had been killed by stones from other demonstrators and then that Haitian police had shot them, before finally conceding that they were brought down by UN automatic weapons fire. (Haiti Liberte)
For a great many Haitians, suffering brought by the UN is old news. There have been constant reports of UN troops killing demonstrators and especially acting with murderous brutality against youth in the Port-au-Prince shanty towns. Three years ago an entire contingent of 114 "Blue Helmets" was sent home for sexually abusing women and girls.
Even before that, an investigation published in the internationally reputed medical journal The Lancet (2 September 2006) charged that "police, paramilitaries [armed bands linked to the now-dissolved army], and foreign soldiers were implicated" in the wave of rapes and murders that plagued the people since the U.S.-sponsored coup that overthrew elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In the 8,000 murders that took place in the capital in this 22-month period, "almost half of the identified perpetrators were government forces or outside political actors." In a survey of Port-au-Prince inhabitants, "14 percent of the interviewees did accuse foreign soldiers, including those in UN uniform, of threatening them with sexual or physical violence, including death."
This is not something particular to any one contingent of UN soldiers from any particular country. Brutalizing the people is inherent in their mission. The U.S. has repeatedly sent tens of thousands of troops into Haiti for almost a century, including when Aristide was overthrown and most recently after the earthquake last January, and they are ready to step in again when needed. But now Washington has brought in the UN as the main armed force to police the Haitian people. No wonder that for countries like Nepal providing troops to UN missions is a form of counterinsurgency training.
What evidence has there ever been that the UN troops have come as part of an international effort to help the people? Only about a third of the total amount pledged for reconstruction aid after the earthquake has actually shown up. So far the U.S. has not delivered a single penny of its promised reconstruction funds (well into the current crisis, after this fact became a scandal, it promised to soon release a tenth of the money). Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland and the Caribbean Development Bank have also been shown to be liars. (Associated Press, 11 November 2010) But as Haitians point out, there's no hesitancy to spend 51 million dollars a month to pay for the 12,000 UN soldiers and police.
Appeals for emergency aid have gone all but totally unheeded as the disease has spread from the Artibonite River basin to all of the country's regions and deaths and the need for treatment, supplies and facilities is rapidly mounting. The countries sending troops have only bothered to send five or six million of the 210 million dollars UN medical people say is immediately necessary. It is certain that the worst is yet to come. A 21 November press release from Doctors without Borders pointed to the stark contradiction between the "huge presence of international groups" and the "inadequate" response to the emergency: "We have been trying to fight a fire with a glass of water."
It is literally water that is being given out by the glassful when a fire hose is needed. If people are promptly given enough clean drinking water with salts and sugar in it, very few, if any, will die. Haitians have already seen cholera take away almost 1,500 of their loved ones for no reason that could every be justified.
The director of the Pan-American Health Organisation pointed out that it may never be possible to pinpoint the source of the infection, and anyway, that is a secondary question. "You have cases of cholera showing up in countries around the world every year, including here in the United States. Some are acquired, some are imported. What is important is that the disease does not spread if there are adequate health public conditions."
The simple lack of disinfectant and pipes to carry clean water in and sewage out is enough to explain the cholera epidemic. Standing between the people who ache to work and save lives and the laying of those pipes and other infrastructure is a capitalist profit system and an imperialist world order where a handful of countries fatten further off the rest of the world.
The U.S. has dominated and bled the country for a century. Now rules it more nakedly than ever, even though its hand sometimes comes out of the sleeve of a UN uniform. Nowhere is this more obvious than in its response to the Haitian health emergency, where its main concern seems to be that the unrest might trouble the presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for 28 November. The American ambassador has said that the U.S. can "work with" any of the 19 presidential candidates. Banned from the elections is the party of someone the U.S. decided it couldn't "work with", former President Aristide whom the U.S. had kidnapped and shipped off to Africa. Haitians expect that the UN forces organizing and supervising these elections will act according to the same standards they have maintained so far. In the last two elections only about ten percent of potential voters saw any point in casting ballots.
One of the first priorities of the "international community" after the earthquake was to rebuild the main prison in the capital, which now houses 2,000 inmates (few have ever seen a judge). So far about 13 inmates have already died of cholera and all of the rest may be in danger. The situation has been even more horrendous at the prison in the Artibonite region where the epidemic first broke out. This is symbolic of the whole country, with the UN troops as the guards trying to maintain order and the people desperate to break free of that same world order.
Posts mit dem Label Haiti werden angezeigt. Alle Posts anzeigen
Posts mit dem Label Haiti werden angezeigt. Alle Posts anzeigen
Donnerstag, 25. November 2010
Donnerstag, 11. November 2010
Cholera in Haiti: a foreseeable result of a criminal system
8 November 2010. A World to Win News Service. Unlike the earthquake that hit Haiti last January, the cholera outbreak was predictable and preventable. The danger is far greater because of the earthquake, but the disease might have struck even without that destruction. People have known for many years that this was possible unless serious sanitation measures were taken.
Already many thousands of people have fallen ill with acute diarrhoea and more than 540 have died of it. So far most of the confirmed cases have occurred in the Lower Artibonite river, in the rural Central Plateau region north of the capital. The river is believed to have recently become infected with the bacteria that causes the disease.
Just after the cholera epidemic struck, Hurricane Tomas made the Artibonite overflow. The floodwaters have further isolated some people from medical help, forced others to flee and may spread the contamination. There is fear that the disease may reach the crowded capital. Suspected cases have appeared in Cité Soleil, a huge shantytown that lies in the direction of the Artibonite Valley.
No one knows how rapidly this disease will spread. Even if efforts to contain it succeed, it is likely to become yet another affliction for Haiti's people for some time to come.
Most often cholera spreads through water contaminated by human excrement. There is a cruel irony to the fact that infected drinking water causes people to die of dehydration, the emptying of the water in their bodies due to a diarrhoea so intense it can kill in a few hours. The key to preventing or containing it is clean drinking water. It's that simple. That's what people are dying for lack of, in a world marked by unprecedented riches and scientific and technological progress.
The Artibonite region was not heavily damaged by the earthquake, although the situation there has been made more difficult by the influx of homeless people forced to return from the capital. The dangers created by the people's dependence on river water have been known for a long time. This beautiful river is central to people's lives. People live alongside it, bath in it, wash their clothes and themselves in it and drink it. They can't afford the fuel to boil water before they drink it. No matter how careful they try to be about sanitation and cleanliness, everything they do in their daily lives with the only plentiful water at hand can kill them and spread the disease.
Most people infected by the disease don't fall ill, although they can spread it anyway. Malnutrition can make them more vulnerable. Treatment should be simple: water with a little salt and sugar will keep the majority of people alive even without hospitalisation, and intravenous fluids can help almost all of the rest to survive. In some cases antibiotics are needed to save people, and they can help prevent the infection from spreading.
Cholera first appeared in the nineteenth century and has spread around the globe six times before. The current pandemic began in South Asia a half century ago and spread from there. Scientists believe that this disease can never be wholly eradicated, because the bacillus that causes it can live outside of human beings, but it can be contained and treated effectively, and recently a vaccine has been developed. Once a recurring curse in European cities like London, it was quickly eliminated by putting disinfectants in public water supplies and improving sewage, not only in the better-off countries, but even many others.
Cholera epidemics are often associated not just with poverty, but changes in how people live due to natural disasters, population displacements, unplanned rapid urbanization and especially the kinds of large-scale social breakdowns that make it impossible for communities to keep up their sanitary conditions.
For instance, one of the world's worst recent outbreaks hit Zimbabwe two years ago and is now spreading to neighbouring countries. It occurred when the rainy season coincided with the collapse of the urban water supply and sanitation systems amid an economic crisis due to UK and U.S. pressure on the Mugabe government. The trigger factor came when Zimbabwe could no longer obtain chlorine to purify piped water.
The question of whether people who get sick with cholera will live or die is also associated not only with poverty in a general way but other, not necessarily directly connected, particular social issues. For example, when asked if the percentage of Haitian cholera victims who have died is "standard", a doctor who formerly worked in Bangladesh said that he had treated thousands of patients for cholera there and had never lost a single one, even in one of the world's poorest countries. One reason cholera victims in Haiti need hospital treatment is that the amount of clean water they need to drink to avoid dying of dehydration, about 20 litres a day, just isn't available anywhere else. And what are people supposed to wash with to prevent spreading and catching the disease? What toilets can they use? They can and should take precautions, but on the whole there isn't much they can do in this context. The health crisis reflects a social crisis.
Some of the reasons why clean water is missing in Haiti were documented by several U.S. and Haitian-based groups, including Partners for Health, an organization that has been working in Haiti for decades. They issued a report entitled "Woch nan Soley: The Denial of the Right to Water in Haiti" two years before the cholera outbreak.
One detail in that report has suddenly claimed people's attention. In 1998, the Inter-American Development Bank decided to lend the Haitian government 54 million dollars to improve the water system nationally. Specific upgrading projects included the city of St. Marc and the surrounding Artibonite department where today's outbreak first occurred. Later the U.S. got the IADB to block this loan as part of a covert programme to destabilize the elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The U.S. first backed Aristide as a possible source of political stability in a period of tumultuous popular upheaval. Then, when he seemed to imperil some American interests, he was eventually kidnapped and sent into exile by a U.S. and UN-backed coup in 2004.
The continuing lack of any public spending on water since then has created a deteriorating situation where the only clean water available is provided by private companies, and most people can't afford to buy enough of it no matter how much they love their children. Even before the cholera outbreak, other kinds of infectious diarrhoea and gastrointestinal infections, highly preventable diseases that need not exist anywhere in today's world, became the leading cause of death of young children. Among the countries ranked by a world survey of "water poverty", Haiti ranked last long before the earthquake.
In other words, during the last 16 years that Haiti has been occupied by various combinations of UN and U.S. troops – and not just since the earthquake – most people's lives have gotten much worse. The U.S. responded to last January's catastrophe by setting up a commission led by former American President Bill Clinton to oversee the decisions of a regime brought in under the wing of the U.S. in the first place. Clinton is said to have some credibility in Haiti because his administration backed Aristide, but this even more direct American intervention has led to nothing positive for the people.
In March 2010, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised 1.15 billion dollars to reconstruct the country's infrastructure. Not a single penny of this has been delivered. (Associated Press, 4 November 2010). The excuse is that Clinton's State Department wants to be sure that the money won't be wasted or stolen. Given her husband's role in Haiti, this is ridiculous. Corruption may be rife there, but the responsibility lies at the top. The U.S. been the biggest corrupter, both by buying people and influence and indirectly because of what it has done to Haiti.
Most of the money promised by international organizations and other countries also never appeared.
Many plans were drawn up to put up housing, install solar power and building roads. But since then not even the rubble left by the earthquake has been cleared. Land ownership issues have contributed to a deadlock in which nothing has been done to restore even the impoverished infrastructure that once existed.
The U.S. and others have provided emergency humanitarian assistance. This and private charity has paid for emergency medical programmes, tents, a little food and a few other things to keep people from dropping dead in such large numbers as to cause violent social unrest (which the UN troops are still there to prevent) with possible global implications. But this situation is not sustainable. Ever since last January conscientious NGO workers and others have been saying that without a fundamental turn in the situation, further disaster was inevitable, including possibly cholera.
It is particularly damning that most of the suspected cholera cases in the crowded capital so far have appeared not among the homeless stuck in temporary camps but in Cité Soleil, where people are living under the same conditions as before the earthquake.
Cholera has not been present in Haiti or anywhere else in the Caribbean for many decades. Some people inside and outside the country have tried to blame the UN troops for the October outbreak, charging that the infection originated from Nepali UN soldiers who have a base near the Artibonite river. Pro-Aristide forces have especially focused on this idea (see the newspaper Haiti Liberté), although a few lesser government figures have found it convenient to repeat it. In protest rallies people have chanted, "Down with the occupation! Down with imported cholera!"
This slogan has gained popularity because the UN troops are hated for repressing protests and raping, brutalizing and even murdering people in the shantytowns. But no matter what tests may or may not reveal about the immediate trigger, Haiti has long been a country where cholera or something other epidemic was waiting to happen. Casting the blame on some underpaid mercenaries misses the bigger picture, especially the collapse of the Haitian economy and the social crisis brought about by U.S. imperialist domination.
In fact, the underlying problems can't even be reduced to particular criminal political decisions, even though as in Zimbabwe, the outbreak of this disease can sometimes be linked to specific imperialist acts of disregard for human life. More fundamentally, what we are seeing is the inexorable grinding of a system that cannot function any other way.
Haiti's plantation slaves played a significant role in the early accumulation of capital that led to the development of the capitalist system in France and elsewhere. Theirs was the world's first successful slave revolt. After a long period of contention over which major power would turn the country into a colony again, the U.S. won and has crushed Haiti for more than a century. U.S. troops invaded to protect American investments from a peasant rebellion. They occupied the country for almost two decades, and the U.S. kept direct control of the country's finances until 1947, a situation which exists in another form today.
Before the U.S. military went home it organized a Haitian army that was to be the main pillar of the country's economic, political and social life and the main instrument of U.S. domination. That military gave birth to the presidencies of the infamous tyrant "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his successor son, known as "Baby Doc". Washington kept the Duvaliers in power until 1986, until popular upheaval brought the regime down and eventually the U.S. had to let the Haitian army be disbanded. (See AWTWNS100118)
It has not been the U.S.'s wilful decision to keep the country undeveloped. It tried to bring about the kind of development in agriculture and industry that would make the country a greater source of profits. The opening up of the Haitian economy to the world market ruined its peasants (leading, among other things, to massive migration into Port au Prince and other cities, and an enormous number of immigrants abroad whose cheques are the main source of income for their families back home). But international capital has not flocked to exploit the Haitian people. In fact, despite drooling in American business publications about a "Bangladesh next door", efforts to encourage the establishment of low-wage factories for export products have not prospered. One important reason is the U.S.'s inability to set up the kind of politically stable regime foreign capital investment requires. This is largely a result of both the fact and the form of the U.S.'s own long-standing political domination, including the feelings this has created among the people.
Haiti is imprisoned in a criminally insane situation where people are dying of diseases other countries wiped out a century and a half ago. There is so much work crying out to be done to save the people, so many ditches to dig, pipes to be laid and homes, schools and hospitals to be built, even if rubble were the only building material and arms the only machinery. So many people are crying out for work and a chance to rescue themselves and their country. Yet nothing will be done if it doesn't profit some capitalist and especially U.S. imperialist capital.
For the imperialists and their Haitian henchmen, the people of Haiti are a big problem. But in reality they are the only possible solution. When revolution frees Haiti's people from imperialist political and military domination and the tyranny of the profit system, when a revolutionary regime can put the welfare of the people first and increasingly enable the people to become the conscious masters of all spheres of society, Haitians could rapidly free themselves from scourges like cholera as they take their first steps toward a world worthy of human potential.
Already many thousands of people have fallen ill with acute diarrhoea and more than 540 have died of it. So far most of the confirmed cases have occurred in the Lower Artibonite river, in the rural Central Plateau region north of the capital. The river is believed to have recently become infected with the bacteria that causes the disease.
Just after the cholera epidemic struck, Hurricane Tomas made the Artibonite overflow. The floodwaters have further isolated some people from medical help, forced others to flee and may spread the contamination. There is fear that the disease may reach the crowded capital. Suspected cases have appeared in Cité Soleil, a huge shantytown that lies in the direction of the Artibonite Valley.
No one knows how rapidly this disease will spread. Even if efforts to contain it succeed, it is likely to become yet another affliction for Haiti's people for some time to come.
Most often cholera spreads through water contaminated by human excrement. There is a cruel irony to the fact that infected drinking water causes people to die of dehydration, the emptying of the water in their bodies due to a diarrhoea so intense it can kill in a few hours. The key to preventing or containing it is clean drinking water. It's that simple. That's what people are dying for lack of, in a world marked by unprecedented riches and scientific and technological progress.
The Artibonite region was not heavily damaged by the earthquake, although the situation there has been made more difficult by the influx of homeless people forced to return from the capital. The dangers created by the people's dependence on river water have been known for a long time. This beautiful river is central to people's lives. People live alongside it, bath in it, wash their clothes and themselves in it and drink it. They can't afford the fuel to boil water before they drink it. No matter how careful they try to be about sanitation and cleanliness, everything they do in their daily lives with the only plentiful water at hand can kill them and spread the disease.
Most people infected by the disease don't fall ill, although they can spread it anyway. Malnutrition can make them more vulnerable. Treatment should be simple: water with a little salt and sugar will keep the majority of people alive even without hospitalisation, and intravenous fluids can help almost all of the rest to survive. In some cases antibiotics are needed to save people, and they can help prevent the infection from spreading.
Cholera first appeared in the nineteenth century and has spread around the globe six times before. The current pandemic began in South Asia a half century ago and spread from there. Scientists believe that this disease can never be wholly eradicated, because the bacillus that causes it can live outside of human beings, but it can be contained and treated effectively, and recently a vaccine has been developed. Once a recurring curse in European cities like London, it was quickly eliminated by putting disinfectants in public water supplies and improving sewage, not only in the better-off countries, but even many others.
Cholera epidemics are often associated not just with poverty, but changes in how people live due to natural disasters, population displacements, unplanned rapid urbanization and especially the kinds of large-scale social breakdowns that make it impossible for communities to keep up their sanitary conditions.
For instance, one of the world's worst recent outbreaks hit Zimbabwe two years ago and is now spreading to neighbouring countries. It occurred when the rainy season coincided with the collapse of the urban water supply and sanitation systems amid an economic crisis due to UK and U.S. pressure on the Mugabe government. The trigger factor came when Zimbabwe could no longer obtain chlorine to purify piped water.
The question of whether people who get sick with cholera will live or die is also associated not only with poverty in a general way but other, not necessarily directly connected, particular social issues. For example, when asked if the percentage of Haitian cholera victims who have died is "standard", a doctor who formerly worked in Bangladesh said that he had treated thousands of patients for cholera there and had never lost a single one, even in one of the world's poorest countries. One reason cholera victims in Haiti need hospital treatment is that the amount of clean water they need to drink to avoid dying of dehydration, about 20 litres a day, just isn't available anywhere else. And what are people supposed to wash with to prevent spreading and catching the disease? What toilets can they use? They can and should take precautions, but on the whole there isn't much they can do in this context. The health crisis reflects a social crisis.
Some of the reasons why clean water is missing in Haiti were documented by several U.S. and Haitian-based groups, including Partners for Health, an organization that has been working in Haiti for decades. They issued a report entitled "Woch nan Soley: The Denial of the Right to Water in Haiti" two years before the cholera outbreak.
One detail in that report has suddenly claimed people's attention. In 1998, the Inter-American Development Bank decided to lend the Haitian government 54 million dollars to improve the water system nationally. Specific upgrading projects included the city of St. Marc and the surrounding Artibonite department where today's outbreak first occurred. Later the U.S. got the IADB to block this loan as part of a covert programme to destabilize the elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The U.S. first backed Aristide as a possible source of political stability in a period of tumultuous popular upheaval. Then, when he seemed to imperil some American interests, he was eventually kidnapped and sent into exile by a U.S. and UN-backed coup in 2004.
The continuing lack of any public spending on water since then has created a deteriorating situation where the only clean water available is provided by private companies, and most people can't afford to buy enough of it no matter how much they love their children. Even before the cholera outbreak, other kinds of infectious diarrhoea and gastrointestinal infections, highly preventable diseases that need not exist anywhere in today's world, became the leading cause of death of young children. Among the countries ranked by a world survey of "water poverty", Haiti ranked last long before the earthquake.
In other words, during the last 16 years that Haiti has been occupied by various combinations of UN and U.S. troops – and not just since the earthquake – most people's lives have gotten much worse. The U.S. responded to last January's catastrophe by setting up a commission led by former American President Bill Clinton to oversee the decisions of a regime brought in under the wing of the U.S. in the first place. Clinton is said to have some credibility in Haiti because his administration backed Aristide, but this even more direct American intervention has led to nothing positive for the people.
In March 2010, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised 1.15 billion dollars to reconstruct the country's infrastructure. Not a single penny of this has been delivered. (Associated Press, 4 November 2010). The excuse is that Clinton's State Department wants to be sure that the money won't be wasted or stolen. Given her husband's role in Haiti, this is ridiculous. Corruption may be rife there, but the responsibility lies at the top. The U.S. been the biggest corrupter, both by buying people and influence and indirectly because of what it has done to Haiti.
Most of the money promised by international organizations and other countries also never appeared.
Many plans were drawn up to put up housing, install solar power and building roads. But since then not even the rubble left by the earthquake has been cleared. Land ownership issues have contributed to a deadlock in which nothing has been done to restore even the impoverished infrastructure that once existed.
The U.S. and others have provided emergency humanitarian assistance. This and private charity has paid for emergency medical programmes, tents, a little food and a few other things to keep people from dropping dead in such large numbers as to cause violent social unrest (which the UN troops are still there to prevent) with possible global implications. But this situation is not sustainable. Ever since last January conscientious NGO workers and others have been saying that without a fundamental turn in the situation, further disaster was inevitable, including possibly cholera.
It is particularly damning that most of the suspected cholera cases in the crowded capital so far have appeared not among the homeless stuck in temporary camps but in Cité Soleil, where people are living under the same conditions as before the earthquake.
Cholera has not been present in Haiti or anywhere else in the Caribbean for many decades. Some people inside and outside the country have tried to blame the UN troops for the October outbreak, charging that the infection originated from Nepali UN soldiers who have a base near the Artibonite river. Pro-Aristide forces have especially focused on this idea (see the newspaper Haiti Liberté), although a few lesser government figures have found it convenient to repeat it. In protest rallies people have chanted, "Down with the occupation! Down with imported cholera!"
This slogan has gained popularity because the UN troops are hated for repressing protests and raping, brutalizing and even murdering people in the shantytowns. But no matter what tests may or may not reveal about the immediate trigger, Haiti has long been a country where cholera or something other epidemic was waiting to happen. Casting the blame on some underpaid mercenaries misses the bigger picture, especially the collapse of the Haitian economy and the social crisis brought about by U.S. imperialist domination.
In fact, the underlying problems can't even be reduced to particular criminal political decisions, even though as in Zimbabwe, the outbreak of this disease can sometimes be linked to specific imperialist acts of disregard for human life. More fundamentally, what we are seeing is the inexorable grinding of a system that cannot function any other way.
Haiti's plantation slaves played a significant role in the early accumulation of capital that led to the development of the capitalist system in France and elsewhere. Theirs was the world's first successful slave revolt. After a long period of contention over which major power would turn the country into a colony again, the U.S. won and has crushed Haiti for more than a century. U.S. troops invaded to protect American investments from a peasant rebellion. They occupied the country for almost two decades, and the U.S. kept direct control of the country's finances until 1947, a situation which exists in another form today.
Before the U.S. military went home it organized a Haitian army that was to be the main pillar of the country's economic, political and social life and the main instrument of U.S. domination. That military gave birth to the presidencies of the infamous tyrant "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his successor son, known as "Baby Doc". Washington kept the Duvaliers in power until 1986, until popular upheaval brought the regime down and eventually the U.S. had to let the Haitian army be disbanded. (See AWTWNS100118)
It has not been the U.S.'s wilful decision to keep the country undeveloped. It tried to bring about the kind of development in agriculture and industry that would make the country a greater source of profits. The opening up of the Haitian economy to the world market ruined its peasants (leading, among other things, to massive migration into Port au Prince and other cities, and an enormous number of immigrants abroad whose cheques are the main source of income for their families back home). But international capital has not flocked to exploit the Haitian people. In fact, despite drooling in American business publications about a "Bangladesh next door", efforts to encourage the establishment of low-wage factories for export products have not prospered. One important reason is the U.S.'s inability to set up the kind of politically stable regime foreign capital investment requires. This is largely a result of both the fact and the form of the U.S.'s own long-standing political domination, including the feelings this has created among the people.
Haiti is imprisoned in a criminally insane situation where people are dying of diseases other countries wiped out a century and a half ago. There is so much work crying out to be done to save the people, so many ditches to dig, pipes to be laid and homes, schools and hospitals to be built, even if rubble were the only building material and arms the only machinery. So many people are crying out for work and a chance to rescue themselves and their country. Yet nothing will be done if it doesn't profit some capitalist and especially U.S. imperialist capital.
For the imperialists and their Haitian henchmen, the people of Haiti are a big problem. But in reality they are the only possible solution. When revolution frees Haiti's people from imperialist political and military domination and the tyranny of the profit system, when a revolutionary regime can put the welfare of the people first and increasingly enable the people to become the conscious masters of all spheres of society, Haitians could rapidly free themselves from scourges like cholera as they take their first steps toward a world worthy of human potential.
Mittwoch, 21. Juli 2010
Haiti six months after the earthquake – the deadly realities of imperialist aid
19 July 2010. A World to Win News Service. Following is an abridged version of an article that appeared in the issue dated 25 July 2010 o f Revolution, newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Party , USA (revcom.org) .
It has been six months since a catastrophic earthquake hit Haiti in January. The city of Port-au-Prince is still literally buried in rubble, making transportation difficult and rebuilding nearly impossible. There is little recovery and rebuilding. Why?
First of all, this reflects the fact that Haiti is an impoverished country that has been economically and politically stunted because it has been dominated by imperialism, especially U.S. imperialism. Experts estimate that it would take 1,000 trucks three years to remove all the rubble. So far only 2 percent has been cleared. But the media reports that Haiti only has 300 trucks [working on clean-up].
And then there are the rules of capitalism – in which nothing gets done unless there is a profit to be made. So millions of trucks and other heavy equipment in the U.S. , including tens of thousands of pick-ups and SUVs sitting unsold on car lots because of the depressed economy, are not used to help hundreds of thousands of people in Haiti who are suffering.
There are the huge roadblocks thrown up by capitalist relations of ownership and production in Haiti itself. There have been frequent reports in the media that plans to build better camps are stymied by the failure to get permission from large landowners who control possible sites. In fact, there are many reports of people being evicted from encampments set up after the earthquake because landlords thought they could put even rubble strewn land to more profitable use.
The following is from The New York Times: "[D]ebris… also has a potential monetary value if it is to be reused. 'It's not just the rubble, it's the question of rubble ownership,' Mr Scales [of the International Organization for Migration] said. Most [people on the land to be cleared] are renters, but the rubble technically belongs to the property owners. And sorting out who owns what land, and getting their permission to excavate has proved difficult."
Think about what is being said here: "It's not just the rubble, it's the question of rubble ownership." What is happening here speaks volumes to the utter insanity and brutality of the rules operating in the capitalist system – and the complete inability of this system to even address, much less meet, the basic needs of the people. Some 1.6 million people must live in the streets during hurricane season while the propertied classes determine who should gather profits from the ruins of their former homes!
Only 28,000 people have been placed in permanent or stable temporary shelter. Most people have not even received tents. By official figures, only 97,000 tents have been put up since the earthquake – one for every 16 homeless people – and most of these are now falling apart. Tens of thousands of people do not even have tarps. Most of those who lost their homes still remain in the roughly 1,200 camps around the earthquake zone. Only one fourth of these camps are even being run by organized agencies – which are more likely to provide latrines, lights and perhaps clean water. The rest are pulled together by the masses of people, usually led by a committee of residents, fending for themselves to get food, water and sanitation. Said Menmen Vilase, a nine-months pregnant woman: "I'd love to live under a plastic sheet, but I can't afford it."
The NYT (10 July 2010) described one of these camps built single file along the median strip of a busy highway. Dozens have been injured when cars crashed into their shanties. Latrines were finally built in March by the French group, Islamic Aid, but they are across the road, so many people who are sick with diarrhoea have to dart through traffic to get to bathrooms. A Revolution reporter visited this same shantytown in January – in all this time these latrines are the only substantial aid they have received.
Faced with all this, tens of thousands of people have moved back into homes badly damaged and unsafe, living daily with the terror of being buried alive if the unstable structures collapse, if another earthquake hits. Others have moved into cemeteries, a municipal dump, flooded sports fields. People live amidst rubble still containing human remains; one man said, "It is better to be here with the smell of the dead bodies than to be down at that camp where it stinks of pee."
The NYT reported that UN officials "urge patience… They point to accomplishments in providing emergency food, water and shelter and averting starvation, exodus and violence." Nigel Fisher, deputy special representative of the United Nations secretary general in Haiti told the Times that "What hasn't happened is worth noting. We haven't had a major outbreak of disease. We haven't had a major breakdown in security." (7/10/10)
Now, when people like this talk about "violence" and "breakdowns in security," they are not talking about the security of the masses. They are not talking about the increasing levels of rape of women in the camps or the stealing and selling of children into the international sex trade, or attacks on "squatters" by machete-wielding thugs of large land-owners – all of which has been happening.
What they mean is that there has not, so far, been a major political uprising of the Haitian people against the U.S./UN occupation or against the failure of the imperialists and the subservient Haitian government to meet the most basic needs of the people. When they speak of "avoiding exodus", they are bragging that they have prevented large numbers of Haitians from escaping the desperate conditions there and coming to the United States . To the U.S. and other imperialists (including the UN) millions living on the edge of death is quite fine as long as people are kept from the point of either rising up or flooding into the U.S. where they might be a source of social instability.
What about all those billions of dollars of aid pledged to Haiti ?
There are three realities to look at here. The first reality is that when you read the fine print, the aid pledged to Haiti came with "conditions" , which were basically that Haiti officially give up its national sovereignty.
The "justification" for this outrageous imposition of foreign control is the history and present reality of widespread corruption and "incompetence" of the Haitian government. There is a racist and colonialist sub-text here – the imperialists imply that Haitian people are just too ignorant to handle their own affairs, so it is up to the great powers to "pick up the white man's burden" (as the pro-imperialist British writer Rudyard Kipling once called it) of running their society for them. This "native" corruption and incompetence is a prime justification for imperialist intervention of all kinds, and a prime way of covering up the enormous failures of their system.
Now it has to be said that in the wake of Katrina, the Wall Street debacle, the housing collapse, and the capitalist oil catastrophe in the Gulf, the U.S. should shut up about other nations' incompetence and corruption!
But more importantly, governmental corruption in Haiti (and elsewhere) is very real, but it is directly a product of U.S. domination.
To put it bluntly, the U.S. has been the primary force shaping – often violently – the Haitian state and social and economic structure. And very specifically, the U.S. worked to overthrow any regime that was not thoroughly "corrupt". Why? Because the people the U.S. wants as local power structure in Haiti are those willing to sell out the interests of the people and nation of Haiti to the U.S., in return for prestigious titles, connections and a fat salary.
Yet even so, Haiti now confronts a second reality – that the vast majority of aid that was promised hasn't come through.
The third reality here is that the U.S. plan for Haiti – should it ever actually materialize – is to rebuild it to better serve the needs of U.S. imperialism, and not to help the Haitian people.
According to Ansel Herz writing on HaitiAnalysis. com, "[Hilary] Clinton, along with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, are touting a plan devised by Oxford economist Paul Collier to expand tariff-free export zones around Haiti. Their plan calls for Haiti to lift urban slum-dwellers out of poverty through jobs in textile factories, like the Inter-American Garment Factory…"
In July demonstrations of thousands took to the streets in Port-au-Prince and other Haitian cities. While there were many diverse forces and demands, the unifying theme was to demand the resignation of the government of President Rene Preval. Annessy Vixama, a leader of Tet Kole, one of the major peasant organizations in Haiti , has raised the just demand that "the state has to change from attending to international businesses that are acting against the majority of the people and start attending to the peasants."
The state, in Haiti or anywhere else, is never "neutral"; it does not represent "the people" or "the nation" in general – it arises on the basis of, reflects and serves the underlying economic and political system in a given country. In Haiti the basic system is exploitation and domination by the imperialists (mainly the U.S. ) and by the imperialists' allies within Haiti amongst the large landowning and capitalist classes. This is the system, these are the class forces, that the state was built to serve and which it can only serve. And in fact, if the Haitian state is weak, that is mainly because the imperialists have repeatedly opted to rule directly, through coups, invasions and occupations; in fact, Haiti has been under U.S./UN occupation since President Aristide was kidnapped and taken out of the country in 2004, and most aid and investment bypasses the government and is funnelled through NGOs (generally pro-imperialist "non-governmental organizations" ).
The mounting struggle against this government and demands that it meet the needs of the people are completely just and should be supported by people everywhere. And such struggle has the potential to strengthen and push forward a movement for revolution that is aimed at the fundamental problem of U.S. imperialism and its stranglehold domination of Haiti .
It has been six months since a catastrophic earthquake hit Haiti in January. The city of Port-au-Prince is still literally buried in rubble, making transportation difficult and rebuilding nearly impossible. There is little recovery and rebuilding. Why?
First of all, this reflects the fact that Haiti is an impoverished country that has been economically and politically stunted because it has been dominated by imperialism, especially U.S. imperialism. Experts estimate that it would take 1,000 trucks three years to remove all the rubble. So far only 2 percent has been cleared. But the media reports that Haiti only has 300 trucks [working on clean-up].
And then there are the rules of capitalism – in which nothing gets done unless there is a profit to be made. So millions of trucks and other heavy equipment in the U.S. , including tens of thousands of pick-ups and SUVs sitting unsold on car lots because of the depressed economy, are not used to help hundreds of thousands of people in Haiti who are suffering.
There are the huge roadblocks thrown up by capitalist relations of ownership and production in Haiti itself. There have been frequent reports in the media that plans to build better camps are stymied by the failure to get permission from large landowners who control possible sites. In fact, there are many reports of people being evicted from encampments set up after the earthquake because landlords thought they could put even rubble strewn land to more profitable use.
The following is from The New York Times: "[D]ebris… also has a potential monetary value if it is to be reused. 'It's not just the rubble, it's the question of rubble ownership,' Mr Scales [of the International Organization for Migration] said. Most [people on the land to be cleared] are renters, but the rubble technically belongs to the property owners. And sorting out who owns what land, and getting their permission to excavate has proved difficult."
Think about what is being said here: "It's not just the rubble, it's the question of rubble ownership." What is happening here speaks volumes to the utter insanity and brutality of the rules operating in the capitalist system – and the complete inability of this system to even address, much less meet, the basic needs of the people. Some 1.6 million people must live in the streets during hurricane season while the propertied classes determine who should gather profits from the ruins of their former homes!
Only 28,000 people have been placed in permanent or stable temporary shelter. Most people have not even received tents. By official figures, only 97,000 tents have been put up since the earthquake – one for every 16 homeless people – and most of these are now falling apart. Tens of thousands of people do not even have tarps. Most of those who lost their homes still remain in the roughly 1,200 camps around the earthquake zone. Only one fourth of these camps are even being run by organized agencies – which are more likely to provide latrines, lights and perhaps clean water. The rest are pulled together by the masses of people, usually led by a committee of residents, fending for themselves to get food, water and sanitation. Said Menmen Vilase, a nine-months pregnant woman: "I'd love to live under a plastic sheet, but I can't afford it."
The NYT (10 July 2010) described one of these camps built single file along the median strip of a busy highway. Dozens have been injured when cars crashed into their shanties. Latrines were finally built in March by the French group, Islamic Aid, but they are across the road, so many people who are sick with diarrhoea have to dart through traffic to get to bathrooms. A Revolution reporter visited this same shantytown in January – in all this time these latrines are the only substantial aid they have received.
Faced with all this, tens of thousands of people have moved back into homes badly damaged and unsafe, living daily with the terror of being buried alive if the unstable structures collapse, if another earthquake hits. Others have moved into cemeteries, a municipal dump, flooded sports fields. People live amidst rubble still containing human remains; one man said, "It is better to be here with the smell of the dead bodies than to be down at that camp where it stinks of pee."
The NYT reported that UN officials "urge patience… They point to accomplishments in providing emergency food, water and shelter and averting starvation, exodus and violence." Nigel Fisher, deputy special representative of the United Nations secretary general in Haiti told the Times that "What hasn't happened is worth noting. We haven't had a major outbreak of disease. We haven't had a major breakdown in security." (7/10/10)
Now, when people like this talk about "violence" and "breakdowns in security," they are not talking about the security of the masses. They are not talking about the increasing levels of rape of women in the camps or the stealing and selling of children into the international sex trade, or attacks on "squatters" by machete-wielding thugs of large land-owners – all of which has been happening.
What they mean is that there has not, so far, been a major political uprising of the Haitian people against the U.S./UN occupation or against the failure of the imperialists and the subservient Haitian government to meet the most basic needs of the people. When they speak of "avoiding exodus", they are bragging that they have prevented large numbers of Haitians from escaping the desperate conditions there and coming to the United States . To the U.S. and other imperialists (including the UN) millions living on the edge of death is quite fine as long as people are kept from the point of either rising up or flooding into the U.S. where they might be a source of social instability.
What about all those billions of dollars of aid pledged to Haiti ?
There are three realities to look at here. The first reality is that when you read the fine print, the aid pledged to Haiti came with "conditions" , which were basically that Haiti officially give up its national sovereignty.
The "justification" for this outrageous imposition of foreign control is the history and present reality of widespread corruption and "incompetence" of the Haitian government. There is a racist and colonialist sub-text here – the imperialists imply that Haitian people are just too ignorant to handle their own affairs, so it is up to the great powers to "pick up the white man's burden" (as the pro-imperialist British writer Rudyard Kipling once called it) of running their society for them. This "native" corruption and incompetence is a prime justification for imperialist intervention of all kinds, and a prime way of covering up the enormous failures of their system.
Now it has to be said that in the wake of Katrina, the Wall Street debacle, the housing collapse, and the capitalist oil catastrophe in the Gulf, the U.S. should shut up about other nations' incompetence and corruption!
But more importantly, governmental corruption in Haiti (and elsewhere) is very real, but it is directly a product of U.S. domination.
To put it bluntly, the U.S. has been the primary force shaping – often violently – the Haitian state and social and economic structure. And very specifically, the U.S. worked to overthrow any regime that was not thoroughly "corrupt". Why? Because the people the U.S. wants as local power structure in Haiti are those willing to sell out the interests of the people and nation of Haiti to the U.S., in return for prestigious titles, connections and a fat salary.
Yet even so, Haiti now confronts a second reality – that the vast majority of aid that was promised hasn't come through.
The third reality here is that the U.S. plan for Haiti – should it ever actually materialize – is to rebuild it to better serve the needs of U.S. imperialism, and not to help the Haitian people.
According to Ansel Herz writing on HaitiAnalysis. com, "[Hilary] Clinton, along with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, are touting a plan devised by Oxford economist Paul Collier to expand tariff-free export zones around Haiti. Their plan calls for Haiti to lift urban slum-dwellers out of poverty through jobs in textile factories, like the Inter-American Garment Factory…"
In July demonstrations of thousands took to the streets in Port-au-Prince and other Haitian cities. While there were many diverse forces and demands, the unifying theme was to demand the resignation of the government of President Rene Preval. Annessy Vixama, a leader of Tet Kole, one of the major peasant organizations in Haiti , has raised the just demand that "the state has to change from attending to international businesses that are acting against the majority of the people and start attending to the peasants."
The state, in Haiti or anywhere else, is never "neutral"; it does not represent "the people" or "the nation" in general – it arises on the basis of, reflects and serves the underlying economic and political system in a given country. In Haiti the basic system is exploitation and domination by the imperialists (mainly the U.S. ) and by the imperialists' allies within Haiti amongst the large landowning and capitalist classes. This is the system, these are the class forces, that the state was built to serve and which it can only serve. And in fact, if the Haitian state is weak, that is mainly because the imperialists have repeatedly opted to rule directly, through coups, invasions and occupations; in fact, Haiti has been under U.S./UN occupation since President Aristide was kidnapped and taken out of the country in 2004, and most aid and investment bypasses the government and is funnelled through NGOs (generally pro-imperialist "non-governmental organizations" ).
The mounting struggle against this government and demands that it meet the needs of the people are completely just and should be supported by people everywhere. And such struggle has the potential to strengthen and push forward a movement for revolution that is aimed at the fundamental problem of U.S. imperialism and its stranglehold domination of Haiti .
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