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Haiti: A Victim of Naked Imperialism (2)
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By Ghali Hassan
The estimated death toll from the January earthquake remains at over 230,000, with many more wounded and some two million left homeless. Around three million Haitians – more than a third of the country’s population – have been affected by the earthquake. Some 500,000 people will be moved to camps outside the capital of Port-au-Prince.
The UN estimates that at least two million Haitians need immediate food assistance and shelter. The UN says it will need enough food to feed some two million people for at least fifteen days. Distribution of food aid has been limited. The World Food Program (WFP) had reached about 200,000 in Port-au-Prince and 113,000 in other areas. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians are still in need of food and shelters. Displaced Haitians living in tent cities around the capital Port-au-Prince say they have nothing to eat. Media reports reveal dire shortages of food and medical supplies amidst fears the conditions will encourage the outbreak of preventable diseases. Meanwhile, Brazilian forces with the UN mission to Haiti (MINUSTAH) fired tear gas at desperate Haitians crowding a relief centre with scarce food aid.
Bill Quigley of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, who was in Haiti recently, said: “You can walk down many of the streets of Port-au-Prince and see absolutely no evidence that the world community has helped Haiti. Twenty-three days after the earthquake jolted Haiti and killed over 200,000 people, as many as a million people have still not received any international food assistance. Over a million people are displaced. About 10,000 families are in tents, the rest are living under sheets, blankets and tarps [...] Haiti and the United Nations estimate 250,000 children under the age of 7 are living in temporary housing. Most need vaccinations”.
The U.S. response to the earthquake disaster has been another case of American hypocrisy. A few hours after the earthquake struck Haiti, the right-wing think-tank American Heritage Foundation declared: “Amidst the Suffering, Crisis in Haiti Offers Opportunities to the U.S. In addition to providing immediate humanitarian assistance, the U.S. response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti earthquake offers opportunities to re-shape Haiti’s long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the image of the United States in the region”. In other words, the earthquake disaster is an opportunity for the U.S. ruling elites to reshape Haiti in the way they want to see Haiti, as an impoverished nation with labour costs still lower than those in Bangladesh. James Robbins, a special envoy to Haiti under President Bill Clinton, suggested “breaking up or at least reorganizing the government-controlled telephone monopoly. The same goes with the Education Ministry, the electric company, the Health Ministry and the courts”.
It is important to remember that Haiti remains an American plantation and a giant sweatshop. Haitians have been exploited to the point of starvation to produce products for the U.S. market. As reporter John Pilger writes: “When I was last in Haiti, I watched very young girls stooped in front of whirring, hissing, binding machines at the Port-au-Prince Superior Baseball Plant. Many had swollen eyes and lacerated arms. I produced a camera and was thrown out. Haiti is where America makes the equipment for its hallowed national game, for next to nothing. Haiti is where Walt Disney contractors make Mickey Mouse pyjamas, for next to nothing. The US controls Haiti’s sugar, bauxite and sisal. Rice-growing was replaced by imported American rice, [destroying domestic rice farming], driving people into the cities and towns and jerry-built housing. Year after year, Haiti was invaded by U.S. marines, infamous for atrocities that have been their specialty from the Philippines to Afghanistan”. American ruling elites think they own Haiti. They see Haiti as part of U.S. “sphere of influence” and must remain oppressed and poor.
The U.S. government response to the earthquake disaster was to send in the U.S. Marines, the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, and other military forces to occupy the country for the fourth time since 1915, using so-called “security” as the pretext to justify an outright illegal invasion of a defenceless and traumatised nation. The military occupation of Haiti is an illegal military occupation and cannot be justified by natural disaster and security. It is an assault on the nation’s national sovereignty. Moreover, the full-scale U.S. naval blockade is designed to prevent Haitian refugees from reaching U.S. shores. It makes the U.S. argument of “providing aid” to Haiti ring hollow.
The media response to the disaster in Haiti is normal and consistent with Western media role in perpetuating Western propaganda. In the case of Haiti, the media overlooked the man-made disasters and the struggle of the people of Haiti against ongoing Western interference in their nation’s affairs. Instead, Haitians are portrayed by the media only from the side they did not cause, and as if they are responsible for the situation they are in today. Demonising Haitians and painting “Haiti as a tinderbox ready to explode” is an outright racism and part of Western imperialism. The Western cliché of “we are good-hearted and they [Haitians] are looters and criminals” is devoid of moral responsibility and truthfulness. As always, the Zionist-controlled BBC takes the credit. “Anything will do as a weapon: a hacksaw, a stick, and of course all the machetes and guns that you cannot see. Patience is running out and all the ingredients for unrest now exist: a whole city of destitute people hoping for help, and at the same time you have a substantial criminal element and a history of violence. None of this bodes well for Haiti. If the anarchy spreads, the US troops may soon find themselves patrolling the streets in what will look like a full-scale military operation”, wrote the BBC’s most bigoted and warmongering journalist, Matt Frei (BBC News, 19 January 2010). Frei is a chronic liar and lacks moral principles to expose his own country’s (Britain) criminal role in perpetuating and aiding violence around the world.
Natural disasters have become one of the major pretexts for U.S. military invasions and for U.S. capitalist corporations to move in to profit from the disasters in what is described as “Disaster Capitalism”. In other words, disasters provide the opportunity to impose Western neoliberal policies and spread poverty. It is important to remember that in 2008, Myanmar (Burma) – devastated by Cyclone Nargis – refused to allow the Western military to infringe on its sovereignty disguised as “humanitarian aid”. The Myanmar regime rightly accused Washington and its Western allies of using the disaster as a pretext to seize the geostratigicaly important and resources-rich nation. The “humanitarianism” pretext failed because Myanmar was not a defenceless nation and therefore did not qualify for Western “humanitarian” invasion. In 2003, Iraq did qualify, and was deliberately destroyed in the most barbaric fashion by the Anglo-American fascist forces.
The U.S. military occupation of Haiti’s main airport (Toussaint L’Ouverture Airport) in Port-au-Prince hampered serious humanitarian traffic and needlessly caused the death of thousands of people trapped beneath the rubble of collapsed buildings in Port-au-Prince and Léogane. Only a few search and rescue teams from Cuba, Iceland, Venezuela and China were able to move swiftly to provide aid to the people of Haiti and entered Haiti before the occupation of the airport and the U.S. decision to re-route relief flights to the Dominican Republic. Indeed, more than 400 Cuban doctors and healthcare professional are working in 227 of Haiti’s 337 communes, offering free health services to the Haitian people. Assistance from these and other small nations remains underreported in Western media.
A large number of rescue organizations and charities accuse the U.S. military of denying them landing rights to provide necessary medicines, food and water to the millions of Haitians stricken, injured and homeless. Haiti’s capital “looks more like the Green Zone in Baghdad than a centre for aid distribution”, reported Al-Jazeera on 17 January 2010 from Port-au-Prince. “These weapons they bring, they are instruments of death. We don’t want them. We don’t need them. We are a traumatized people. What we want from the international community is technical help. Action, not words”, an unidentified Haitian citizen told Al-Jazeera.
The Geneva-based charity Médecins Sans Frontières criticised the U.S. takeover of Haiti’s main airport, saying hundreds of lives were being put at risk as planes carrying vital medical supplies were being turned away by American air traffic controllers. The Spanish aid group, Intervención, Ayuda y Emergencias, in Port-au-Prince, denounced the U.S. militarisation of the earthquake. The UN World Food Programme (UNWFP) plane carrying food, medicine and water for three days was blocked from landing because the U.S. military gave priority to flights ferrying U.S. troops and equipment and evacuating Americans living in Haiti.
The label “humanitarian” was used even when the U.S. and British governments were murdering innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Haiti’s earthquake is another example of a disaster as an opportunity for Western governments to claim the moral high ground. The corporate media concentration on rescued individuals by Western-based charities and NGOs is nothing more than PR designed to mislead the public at home.
To accept Western “humanitarian aid” as valid is to be deluded to the point of mental incapacity. Western aid in time of disaster has become a propaganda instrument. While most Western governments and corporate media are using the Haiti earthquake disaster to claim the moral high ground, they are supporting Israel’s murderous regime besieging and terrorising 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza. In addition, during the Israeli criminal attack on Gaza last year when more than 1,400 innocent Palestinians (a third of them children) were viciously and brutally murdered by Israeli forces, most Western governments not only turned a blind eye, they applauded Israel’s “right to defend itself” against a defenceless population. The Zionist propaganda organ, the BBC, refused to air an appeal by the Disasters Emergency Committee to aid the Palestinians because it will offend Israel.
Finally, the appointment of former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to head the fundraising “efforts” in Haiti is an insult to human morality. Both Clinton and Bush played their parts in Haiti’s man-made disasters. How can they be trusted to help black Haitians? Both war criminals were responsible for the premeditated murder of more than 2 million innocent Iraqi men, women and children. Clinton, in particular was responsible for the death of more than 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five, callously justified by his administration as “a price that was worth it”. In addition, Clinton and Bush were responsible for the wanton destruction of the nations of Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. Their appointment to help earthquake-stricken Haiti is mind-baffling.
The January earthquake is just the latest of natural disasters compounded and worsened by man-made disasters to devastate Haiti. While the people of Haiti showed resilience, courage and a capacity to survive, ongoing Western interference in Haiti’s affairs undermines Haiti’s ability to recover from the earthquake disaster.
The situation in Haiti today is the result of centuries of imperialist domination, isolation, occupation and economic strangulation by the U.S. and France. “Haiti is a net product of the colonial, capitalist and imperialist system imposed on the world. Haiti’s slavery and subsequent poverty were imposed from abroad”, writes former Cuban President, Fidel Castro. In 2008, Haiti’s total foreign debt was $1.4 billion, or 40% of its GNP. In 2009, Haiti debt service payments to its creditors amounted to $50.9 million. These payments are hindering Haiti’s ability to build an adequate education system, healthcare services, and vital infrastructure. This odious debt is the primary factor in Haiti’s ongoing poverty.
“It is uncontested that poverty is the main cause of the horrific death toll: the product of teeming shacks and the absence of health and public infrastructure. But Haiti’s poverty is treated as some baffling quirk of history or culture, when in reality it is the direct consequence of a uniquely brutal relationship with the outside world — notably the US, France and Britain — stretching back centuries”, writes Seumas Milne (Guardian.co.uk, 20 January, 2010).
Thirty years ago, Haiti was self-sufficient in stable rice and exported surplus rice and sugar. Today, Haiti is not only importing all of its rice and sugar, but unable to feed its people. The U.S. uses Haiti as a dumping ground for cheap U.S. subsidised agricultural products, which has destroyed Haiti’s agriculture and forced its farmers into destitution. According to a 2008 study by UNWFP, about 75% of Haiti’s population (4.5 million people) lives on less than $2 per day, and 56% live on less than $1 per day. In other words, the majority of the Haitian people (80%) live in abject poverty.
“The collapse of the Haitian nation resides at the feet of France and America, especially. These two nations betrayed, failed, and destroyed the dream that was Haiti; crushed to dust in an effort to destroy the flower of freedom and the seed of justice […] The sudden quake has come in the aftermath of summers of hate. In many ways the quake has been less destructive than the hate”, writes Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, principal of the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies.
In a time of desperation, Haiti needs all the aid it can get. The first action must start with the abolition of Haiti’s multi-billion dollar odious debt. Haiti is in need of grants to build its healthcare services, its education and its civilian infrastructure.
The capability of the people of Haiti to surmount the aftermath of natural disasters and build their nation can only be strengthened by the withdrawal of U.S. and other foreign military forces from Haiti. Support to the people of Haiti must include opposing Western governments’ use of humanitarian aid in natural disasters as a pretext to enforce U.S. imperialist domination of the region.
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