Haiti: aid or colonisation

[comrade_bassel]

Haiti: aid or colonisation
Workers Power 342 - February 2010
The numbers of dead in the Haitian earthquake could reach well over 200,000.

The quake measuring 7 on the Richter scale was succeeded by over 30 aftershocks, each over 4.5. The quake crushed houses, schools, hotels, the parliament building, the presidential palace, the United Nations (UN) headquarters and, critically, eight hospitals. It swept away much of the flimsy shanty towns that straggle up the hills surrounding the capital Port-au-Prince, a city of two million people.

Piled up in mounds, bodies are being scooped up by dumper trucks and buried in landfill sites. An even worse fate has befallen thousands of the living, trapped and in agony, under the huge number of collapsed buildings. By now those that could have been saved by an immediate and coordinated international response have most likely perished under the rubble.

For the shocked survivors - many still searching for their loved ones - life is a living hell. The capital city’s open spaces, such as the Champs de Mars, are crowded with ‘tents’, most just pieces of flimsy plastic sheeting stretched over poles. The International Red Cross said that three million of Haiti’s nine million people would depend on emergency aid to survive in the weeks ahead. Millions are without shelter, light, power, food and water.

And yet instead of reports of rescue teams and medical units, the news is filled with the sight of more and more US soldiers and UN military personnel being sent to Haiti. Nine days after the tragedy, the US announced that it is sending another 4,000 marines and sailors to the island. Meanwhile, news agencies report from location after location that the Haitians, busy pulling victims out of the rubble with their bare hands or organising makeshift hospitals and kitchens, have seen no foreign aid as yet.

In fact the US and UN militarisation has hampered aid efforts, according to a number of charities. Nor has the much talked about disorder and looting actually occurred, except in a handful of isolated cases - unless you count as looting starving people taking food from collapsed houses and shops to feed themselves and neighbours.

This malign neglect by the US government, the military and the UN big shots has cost thousands more lives and extending the terrible suffering of survivors. It proves that the first priority of the US is not aid, but in fact the military occupation of Haiti.

US invasion
As the international aid effort began, the US military quickly took control of Port-au-Prince’s sole airport. Several thousand heavily-armed US troops patrol its perimeter, which one reporter, Sebastian Walker (Al Jazeera), described as “more like the Green Zone in Baghdad than a centre for aid distribution”. Inside the airport are vital water and food supplies, yet Haitians are excluded from entry.

Permission to land is granted - or denied - by the US, with priority given to US military aircraft.Six Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) planes with surgical teams, equipment and an inflatable hospital were rerouted to the Dominican Republic, creating a 24 hour delay in their arrival to Haiti. Two Mexican aircraft carrying life-saving equipment were also turned away. The list goes on. Meanwhile, US aircraft bringing in more soldiers are free to come and go.

Patrick Elie, activist and former minister in the Aristide government, which in 2004 was overthrown in a US-backed coup, stated: “There is no war here. We don’t need soldiers as such... The choice of what lands and what doesn’t land... should be determined by the Haitians.”

The UN aid effort doesn’t look much different. “Men in uniform, racing around in vehicles, carrying weapons” is how Walker describes the UN presence. The great majority of UN personnel are clearly not there to rescue or aid survivors, but to enforce the law. Many Haitians were left to dig through the rubble alone, often with their bare hands or the most basic equipment.

Bill Quigley, a US-based advocate of human rights in Haiti, accused the media of looping footage of looting, exaggerating the problem, and giving the impression that Haitians are lawless and beyond help. This in turn ‘justifies’ the use of heavily armed troops, whereas, Quigley says: “Militarisation hinders relief. The goals of humanitarian assistance are radically different from the goals of the military.”

Even the BBC - whose on-the -ground staff have started to talk of the incredible courage, dignity and community spirit of the Haitians - at first also talked of “mobs” and “gangs” and said security had to come before aid. The demonisation of Haitians as ‘looters’ serves the militarisation agenda of the US/UN.

On the BBC World Service an American Jesuit doctor in Haiti reported that he had seen none of the international and US army help whatsoever, nor had he seen any disorder from the Haitian population. Indeed he said they had organised help for themselves, including at his field hospital, forming orderly queues of the injured waiting for treatment and themselves selecting of the worst cases as priorities.

The scale and composition of the US operation is also telling: 9,000-10,000 troops, including 2,000 marines, an aircraft carrier, an amphibious assault ship and assorted amphibious vehicles, dock landing ships, coastguard vessels and helicopters - and one hospital ship. Before the earthquake, the number of US military personnel in Haiti was reportedly just 60. Now, combined with UN forces, there will be around 20,000 foreign troops in Haiti - more per capita than currently occupy Afghanistan!

Troops to stay
These events amount to a re-colonisation of the state. Hillary Clinton announced: “We will be here today, tomorrow and for the time ahead.” Seizing the ‘opportunity’ of the earthquake disaster, the current military operation was begun unilaterally by the US, with the excuse that the Haitian government had collapsed. The chief decision making is in the hands of the military Southern Command (SouthCom), not civilian agencies.

SouthCom has its HQ in Miami and controls US military installations throughout Latin America. Its unspoken mission is to ensure the maintenance of subservient national regimes committed to the neoliberal policy agenda. The presence of US in Haiti creates a base from which to pursue the US’s strategic and geopolitical objectives in the Caribbean basin, largely directed against Cuba and Venezuela.

Haiti’s huge natural wealth is also a motive for colonisation. The former President of the Dominican Petroleum Refinery, Leopoldo Espaillat Nanita, said shortly before the quake that Haiti has - besides major untapped petroleum resources and copper - important uranium, zirconium and iridium deposits. The latter are rare and valuable minerals used in high tech industrial processes. Typically Naninta said that these could be used to pay Haitian foreign debt. Meanwhile Bill Clinton and George Soros have suggested that Haiti could become a site for garment factories seeking cheap labour (sweatshops) or some sort of historical theme park on slavery for US holiday makers.

In the face of this occupation aimed at plundering the country, socialists and internationalists should demand:
• Much larger numbers of rescue teams with all the most modern equipment is dispatched at once. Only tiny rescue forces have been sent, when thousands of doctors, firefighters and nurses would volunteer.
• All armed military personnel to be withdrawn. If they are there to rescue those trapped in building then why do they need their weapons? Disarm or leave now.
• Drop food and medicine all over Haiti
• No use of UN or US troops to “restore order” - independence for Haiti.
• All Haiti’s debts should be written off at once and without strings or conditions.
• Billions should be paid over by the US and the EU countries for reconstruction and development. Not as loans but as reparations for the three centuries of plunder of the country by European and North American powers.
• “Illegal” Haitian immigrants in the US and Europe must be given full citizenship rights and the ability to communicate with their homeland.

And, as the masses recover from the dreadful trauma of the earthquake, socialist workers and youth around the world most be ready to support them as they fight back against the parasites that have oppressed, exploited and impoverished them for so long.

No greater proof of the need for a revolution to overthrow capitalism and imperialism worldwide could be given than the carnage this system has inflicted on Haiti.