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Haiti?s Christmas in Hell

By John Maxwell
Created 01/01/2008 - 18:00

by John Maxwell

The transformation of Haiti into a giant "concentration camp" under de facto U.S. and United Nations rule is
motivated by the centuries-old logic of racial oppression. The Christmas season brought no relief to a
people whose ancestors promulgated "the first known declaration of universal human rights, giving legal
equality to all human beings, men, women and children" after liberating Haiti from white rule in 1804. The
Haitians would never be forgiven for their impudence - not by France, which extorted huge indemnities
from the ex-slaves for freeing their own bodies, or from the United States, whose slave-owning leaders
were terrified at the specter of Black liberation. The U.S. and France continue their racist vendetta against
the world's first Black Republic. Freedom, like Haiti's popularly elected President Aristide, is in exile.

Haiti's Christmas in Hell

by John Maxwell

This article originally appeared in Jamaica Observer[1].

"The Haitians, all 8 million of them, live in a concentration camp."

Christmas in Jamaica is bad enough. One good thing about Christmas Day is that it means the end of
weeks of aural assaults by mindless rhymesters perverting songs of worship to paeans of praise for
hucksters of all kinds, from shopkeepers to banks, from autoparts dealers to purveyors of cheap, non-
returnable, eminently breakable, non-biodegradable trash tricked out in plastic, tinsel and lead paint to lure
innocent children and entrap their parents. And, as a bonus, there are the sound-system parties, which
allow you to dance in your own home to music played two miles away.

An Alternative Scenario

If you think this is bad, consider another scenario.

Consider that you are a citizen of another land, one steeped in history - a history of resistance to
oppression, a history which includes the first proclamation on Earth that all people were equal, including
women and children.

This land, which for convenience we'll call Ayiti, was introduced to Christianity by a bunch of marauding
savages bearing swords and caparisoned in the fierce colors of their leader, a Genoese adventurer named
Cristobal Colon, aka Christopher Columbus. This character had induced Queen Isabella and King
Ferdinand, the monarchs of two Spanish kingdoms - Aragon and Castile - to bet their farms on the
discovery of a new route to China, then as now, the fabulous land of magical herbs, spices and other
goods which would make life bearable for the inhabitants of Europe, just emerging from the Dark Ages.

"Of the one million Indians on Ayiti when the Spaniards arrived, less than five hundred remained
half a century later."

Our hero had managed to convince Ferdinand and Isabella on the basis of a map obtained from an African
who claimed to know the way to China, aka Cipangu. If the Spanish got to Cipangu before their European
cousins, great wealth and power would be theirs; all the tea in China would be theirs for the asking, in
addition to carpets, silks and luxuries only dreamt of in Europe.

When Columbus' "doom burdened caravels" hove to in Ayiti, the million or so people who welcomed him
could never have guessed that they would soon be history. Within thirty years the populations of the West
Indies had been so reduced that in the four larger islands (now re-christened the Greater Antilles) less than
a thousand remained alive in 1519. This is according to the testimony of Bartolomeo de las Casas, a
Spanish monk who came with the conquistadors and was an eyewitness to the Conquest. Another
historian, Gonzalo Oviedo, estimated that of the one million Indians on Ayiti when the Spaniards arrived,
less than five hundred remained half a century later- the "natives and ... the progeny and lineage" of those
who first occupied the land.

"They died in heaps, like bedbugs ..."

In the Caribbean and in Mexico, Peru and Colombia smallpox and other diseases introduced by the
Spaniards killed the "Indians" by the millions. Relatively small Spanish expeditions were able to conquer
huge empires because the native populations were swept away by diseases to which they had never been
exposed and for which they had no immunity.

Toribio Motolina, another Spanish priest, wrote that in most provinces in Mexico "more than one half the
population died; in others the proportion was a little less; they died in heaps, like bedbugs."

More than a hundred years after Motolina, a German missionary writing in 1699, said the so-called Indians
"die so easily that the bare look and smell of a Spaniard causes them to give up the ghost."

The destruction of the "American Indian" populations and cultures has meant an incalculable loss to
human ethnic and cultural diversity. It was they who gave us words like barbecue, canoe, hammock and
hurricane and crops like corn, potatoes, cassava and tomatoes. The people of ancient Egypt, the pyramid
builders, seem very far away in time; the Olmecs, Maya, Aztecs, and Incas, who also built pyramids and
played games very much like basketball, soccer and Jai alai, seem much closer.

"Sugar replaced gold as the commodity most likely to make men rich."

To Jamaicans and people of the Caribbean, the sense

of loss is almost palpable in relation to the lost civilizations of Africa, destroyed by the slave trade, which,
like globalization, set brother against brother, tribe against tribe and nation against nation. Africa was
targeted because the Europeans knew that their own people could not survive for long in the hot, humid,
mosquito-ridden Indies and that sugar, replacing gold, as the commodity most likely to make men rich, was
too hard a work for them. Turning to Africa meant the devastation of many ancient civilizations - many
disappearing almost without trace, further impoverishing mankind's cultural diversity and robbing Africa of
the populations and skills it needed for its own development.

Although the Europeans found large quantities of gold, silver and copper in the "New World," gold was
never as lucrative as sugar and the cotton and rubber extracted from the plantations of the Americas. And
nothing was as lucrative as the slave trade
As Sybille Fischer remarks in her book Modernity Disavowed: "Colonialism in the Caribbean had
produced societies where brutality combined with licentiousness in ways unknown in Europe. The sugar
plantations in the new World were expanding rapidly and had an apparently limitless hunger for slaves."

"A wretch like me!"

One of the modern Jamaicans' favorite hymns at funerals is "Amazing Grace" penned by a slave trader
after he retired from the trade, rich and comfortable. It was his way of atoning for his crimes, and perhaps,
of saying thanks to God.

Nothing can atone for the misery and degradation imposed on the 25 million or more people transported
into slavery or the millions more slaughtered when they fought to avoid capture. Nothing can atone for five
hundred years of racist victimization, nor the five hundred years of brutality and dangerous behaviors,
beaten, inculcated and burned into the psyches of the enslaved and their descendants.

The inhabitants of Ayiti, now almost all African, like the people of all the enslaved islands and lands of the
Americas, were engaged in an unending struggle to destroy slavery. In Surinam, in Barbados, and
Grenada, in the United States of America, in Nicaragua and in the Caribbean the slaves rose time after
time to break their chains. In Jamaica they had some success. The Maroons fought the much better armed
British to a standstill and wrested from them a treaty of non-aggression and non-interference in 1739. It
was a treaty soon broken by the British.

Desperation and the will to be free fueled the Tacky Rebellion [2] of 1760. This rebellion dwarfed the
Maroon Wars [3] and was an island-wide conspiracy, which lasted six months. The aims of the leaders
included driving out the white population, and partitioning Jamaica into principalities in the tradition of the
Akan-speaking Koromanti who were at the heart of the rebellion. One of them, a man called Bouckman,
fled to Ayiti when the rebellion was finally crushed. There, in Ayiti, he ignited a struggle for freedom, which
ended with the expulsion of the last foreign soldiers from Ayisien soil.

"The slaves rose time after time to break their chains."

In 1804, after ten years of warfare, the rebel slaves and their free allies defeated the armies of Napoleon
(twice), and of Britain and Spain. Jean-Jacques Dessalines [4] declared Ayiti independent and free and
declared the country a refuge from slavery anywhere. He also pronounced the first known declaration of
universal human rights, giving legal equality to all human beings, men, women and children.

It was a hundred and forty four years later, in 1948 that the world caught up with Ayiti in producing the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights [5].

Next December 10, almost exactly a year from now, the world will celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the
United Nation's proclamation of the Universal Declaration.

The preamble to the Declaration is not very well known. It goes like this:

"Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the
human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

"Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts, which have outraged
the conscience of mankind;

"And the advent of a world, in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom
from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

"Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion
against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,

"Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,

"Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental
human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and
have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

"Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations,
the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,

"Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full
realization of this pledge,

"Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN
RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every
individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching
and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national
and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the
peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction."

The declaration then proceeds to list the basic principles of the declaration beginning with Article 1.which
says that:

"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and
conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."

And it continues to explain in Article 2 that:

"Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any
kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin,
property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political,
jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be
independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty."

The declaration is intended to be universal, as was Dessalines' declaration in 1804. Unfortunately for us
there are billions of people in this world including many in this country, who do not enjoy all the benefits of
this universal declaration. But some are much worse off than others. Among those are the people of Iraq,
of Palestine and right next door to us, the people of Ayiti, that imaginary place where slavery was
abolished by the slaves themselves.

"There are billions of people in this world including many in this country, who do not enjoy all the
benefits of this universal declaration."

In Ayiti, aka Haiti, these rights and the Universal Declaration do not apply. Rather like the captured
Islamists in neighboring Guantanamo Bay, a little to their northwest, the Haitians, all 8 million of them, live
in a concentration camp. The Haitian version is designed to stifle their freedoms and liberties and
engineered to prevent them from being led by leaders of their own choice.
Nearly four years after US Marines were landed there for the third time in a hundred years, the freely
elected president of Ayiti is an exile in South Africa. He was kidnapped from the presidential palace by US
Marines led by the US Ambassador to Haiti and transported, as "cargo" with his family to the Central
African Republic - the American idea of hell on earth. From there he was rescued in a mission led by the
black US congresswoman Maxine Waters and TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson. They chartered a
plane and headed off to the Central African Republic themselves to bring President Aristide and his wife
Mildred and their two daughters back to the Caribbean. It took them hours of negotiating with the country's
dictator to get him to release the Aristides.

President Aristide came to Jamaica where the government felt constrained by tradition and popular
sentiment, to welcome him, but found itself unable to resist US pressure to get him out of the Caribbean.

Aristide's sin was to want to fulfill the mission of his ancestors, to build a paradise on the dungheap left
behind by Haiti's colonizers and exploiters. Nearly four years later a Haitian president is in office but
Aristide's and his people's enemies are in power. The country is ruled by the US Ambassador, and is
policed by a so-called United Nations force - MINUSTAH - whose second commander, a Brazilian General,
killed himself after a friendly chat with leaders of the Haitian elite.

MINUSTAH's only distinctions are killing a large number of women and children in their pursuit of so-called
bandits who seem to be mainly pro-Aristide youth, and the rape and other sexual abuse of young Haitian
children, some as young as ten.

A Dread of Black Freedom

From the earliest days as an independent nation

the Americans have feared and dreaded Haiti. As an asylum for escaped slaves, it threatened the slave
system in the American south. And after France extorted billions of dollars in gold from Haiti in
"compensation" for the loss of capital (slaves) and land, in Haiti, the US lent money to the Haitians to pay
the debt and ruined them with the interest.

As I have said before: while arms never subdued Haiti, it was defeated by the power of financiers in a
sinister preview of the modern tactics of the IMF and the World Bank.

Despite all the harassment, the 10,000 murders of activists and leaders, the Haitian people, united in the
Fanmi Lavalas [6], have continued to support their leaders and their culture. A few months ago one of their
leaders, Dr. Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, was kidnapped after a meeting with some Americans. He has not
been heard from since. A few weeks later another leader, Dr Marlyse Narcisse, was kidnapped but
released when there was a tremendous howl of Haitian and international outrage that apparently
embarrassed the powers that rule Haiti.
 "While arms never subdued Haiti, it was defeated by the power of financiers."

And so the Haitians survive, without rights, at the mercy of a United Nations corrupted and intimidated by
the power of the United States, Canada and France acting in concert.

The United States, Canada, France and Haiti all signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in
1948. They all agreed that "... disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts,
which have outraged the conscience of mankind" and they promised to make the world a more civilized
place.

The spectacle of these three self-styled democracies combining to crush the rights and hopes of 8 million
poor people is obscene, but perhaps not as revolting as the fact that Haiti's relatives and friends in the
Caribbean, Jamaica and the others, but especially Jamaica, can sit and watch the Haitians' sojourn in Hell
as if they were watching a Disney fantasia or a Christmas Pantomime.

John Maxwell
of the University of the West Indies (UWI) is the veteran Jamaican journalist who in 1999 single-
handedly thwarted the Jamaican government's efforts to build houses at Hope, the nation's oldest
and best known botanical gardens. His campaigning earned him first prize in the 2000 Sandals
Resort's Annual Environmental Journalism Competition, the region's richest journalism prize. He is
also the author of How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalists and Journalists
. Jamaica, 2000. Mr. Maxwell can be reached at jankunnu@gmail.com[7].

Copyright©2007 John Maxwell

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Source URL: http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/haiti%E2%80%99s-christmas-hell

Links:
[1] http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacky's_War
[3] http://www.definitivecaribbean.com/GenericArticlePopup.aspx?i=163
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Dessalines
[5] http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanmi_Lavalas
[7] mailto:jankunnu@gmail.com
[8] http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/haiti?s-christmas-hell