Uruguay's president has apologized for the "outrage" carried out by peacekeepers accused of sexually assaulting a young Haitian man and vowed the "maximum penalty" for anyone found guilty.
The soldiers, who were based in southern Haiti, stand accused of attacking an 18-year-old man in the small coastal town of Port-Salut. Video footage of the alleged attack on a Uruguayan base has been circulated on the Internet.
"I come at this terrible time to offer you and the dear and heroic people of Haiti my apologies for the outrage that some soldiers of my country committed," Uruguay's President Jose Mujica said in a letter released late Tuesday.
"I share your sadness, which I feel as my own," he said, adding that authorities would investigate the matter and apply the "maximum penalty" to those responsible.
Uruguay's defense minister had earlier admitted that the incident had caused "a lot of damage" to the armed forces, which provide around 2,400 peacekeepers worldwide, mostly in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The five peacekeepers accused of sexual assault are to be sent home this week, Defense Minister Eleuterio Fernandez Huidobro said.
The Uruguayan government has opened a case in the matter, as peacekeepers must be tried in their home country for any crimes allegedly committed during their deployments abroad.
Montevideo has also sacked a navy commander with the UN mission in Haiti over the incident.
Haitian President Michel Martelly has condemned the alleged attack and demanded a detailed report on the exact circumstances of the incident, according to his office.
Martelly has also requested a meeting between Haitian officials and UN mission staff so that "measures can immediately be taken to ensure that such acts do not reoccur," his office said in a statement.
On Monday, hundreds of people demonstrated in Port-Salut to demand justice for the alleged victim, while some Haitians have asked for the UN mission -- in the country since 2004 -- to be shut down.
The UN mission -- formed to help maintain peace after chaos erupted at the end of Jean-Bertrand Aristide's presidency -- has also come under fire after a cholera outbreak that could have been transmitted by Nepalese peacekeepers.
Throughout 2004 and 2005, Haiti’s unelected de facto authorities, working alongside foreign officials, integrated at least 400 ex-army paramilitaries into the country’s police force, secret U.S. Embassy cables reveal.
For a year and a half following the ouster of Haiti’s elected government on Feb. 29, 2004, UN, OAS, and U.S. officials, in conjunction with post-coup Haitian authorities, vetted the country’s police force – officer by officer – integrating paramilitaries with the goal of both strengthening the force and providing an alternative “career path” for paramilitaries.
Hundreds of police considered loyal to President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's deposed government were purged. Some were jailed and a few killed, according to numerous sources interviewed. At the same time, former soldiers from the disbanded Haitian Armed Forces (FAdH), who were assembled in a paramilitary “rebel” force which worked with the country’s elite opposition to bring down Aristide, were stationed – officially and unofficially – in many towns across the country. As part of this, an extrajudicial strike brigade was assembled in Pétion-Ville. It carried out brutal raids (sometimes alongside police), often several times a week, in the capital’s coup-resisting neighborhoods, as documented in a November 2004 University of Miami human rights study. The secret U.S. dispatches detailing the police force’s overhaul were part of 1,918 Haiti-related cables obtained by the media organization WikiLeaks and provided to Haïti Liberté.
Following stirring choral offerings ranging from Ave Maria to We Are the World, 19 US medical students were among those awarded their degrees at today’s graduation of physicians, nurses and allied health professions of the Medical University of Havana’s Dr Salvador Allende Health Sciences Faculty. The new US physicians are among 1396 international medical students graduating this week throughout Cuba who were enrolled in the full-scholarship Latin American Medical School (ELAM) program. They all completed a bridging course and another two years of basic sciences study at ELAM’s main Havana campus, before fanning out to health sciences faculties across the country for their final four clinical years.
Here in Havana, Allende is one of the faculties celebrating graduations today, 22 countries represented in its Class of 2011, including Cuba and the USA. In his remarks, Allende’s Dean Dr Jorge Jimenez called them “worthy young men and women ready to do battle for health anywhere in the world.”
ELAM Rector Dr Juan Carrizo noted that, since the first ELAM students received their degrees in 2005, the program has graduated over 9900 MDs from the Americas, Africa and Asia. He praised those who made their medical studies possible, including the students themselves, their parents and professors, and former President Fidel Castro whose idea founded the ELAM program. “We owe ourselves to our vocation,” he reminded the graduates in closing, “to see people as patients, never clients, and to apply our knowledge, skills and commitment to help them.” Dr Carrizo was among various speakers who paid tribute to the late Rev. Lucius Walker, director of the Inter-Religious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO)/Pastors for Peace, whose work was vital to the US contingent of students, calling him a “courageous man of principles.”
MEDICC International Director Gail Reed was a guest at the graduation. She explained that MEDICC provides the ELAM program with latest-edition textbooks and carries out cooperation projects with students from Haiti, Honduras and the USA. MEDICC supports US graduates’ transition into medical practice through the MD Pipeline to Community Service, which awards fellowships to defray the costs of US board exams and preparatory courses, provides students and graduates with US physician mentors, coordinates clinical opportunities for students in US public hospitals and community health centers, and conducts outreach about ELAM to US residency programs. “Our heartiest congratulations go to these wonderful young people from across the United States,” she said. “And we want to let them know how much they are needed back home, where health disparities continue to plague our communities along lines of race, gender and income.”
Portraits of US Graduates, Class of 2011
Kereese Gayle, Atlanta, Georgia
I’ve finally realized my dream; it’s the end of one journey. Now, I’m anxious to get back home and contribute to making change.
In Cuba, I’ve learned perseverance; and my Cuban professors taught me by their example of heartfelt connection with their patients.
I plan to apply for a residency in pediatrics.
Mena Ramos, Chicago, Illinois and the Philippines
The first thing I want to do is see family in Chicago, and then go to the Philippines to work with a community organization there.
In Cuba, I learned how to create, to make opportunities in every situation, to find my own space.
On the heels of my clerkship in Contra Costa County, California—which was an amazing learning experience—I plan to apply for a residency in family medicine.
Michael Woods, Atlanta, Georgia
I’m going home to see family first—I have a sister and a nephew I don’t even know yet! Then I’ll finish the steps of the USMLE exams.
In Cuba, I became a better person, and especially I learned to accept challenges that make you stronger. I learned not to run away, but to step up.
I want to be a primary care physician, either in family medicine or pediatrics. The basic principle I’ll take with me is that we need to go back to those in need: medicine should be free, and I want to contribute ideas that can make that happen.
Akira Jackson, Los Angeles (Compton), California
My 9-month plan starts today: first, finish my exams and then apply for a residency.
In Cuba, I learned that it is your community that makes you who you are. You find that in Cuba, where so many things are lacking, yet people are strong together and love life. It may sound corny, but that’s how I see it.
My plan is to keep the memory of this health system in my mind to help me set up a mobile clinic in Los Angeles, to provide services such as HIV testing, immunization, and scanning for diabetes, with a new spin: accessible to everybody.
Keasha Guerrier, Long Island, New York
I’ve passed all my USMLE steps; I want to become a family practitioner in the Deep South, in the Mississippi Delta region.
In Cuba, I learned perseverance and dedication. It was a long, hard road sometimes but the end result is our degree that allows us to serve almost anywhere in the world, and have an impact on communities that need help.
Before I do anything else, I’m going to Haiti for a few months to work with the Cuban doctors there—my father is Haitian. I had wanted to go as a student, but they asked me to wait until I’d graduated—and so now I’ve graduated, I have my degree, and that’s where I’m headed.
Haitian physicians trained at the Caribbean School of Medical Sciences in Santiago de Cuba now number 731, after 115 new doctors graduated here on Thursday. This beneficial collaboration project with Haiti started 12 years ago as an idea of the leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro.
The first group of Haitian doctors graduated in 2005, 291 students are now enrolled as part of a goal of training 1,000 physicians in a decade, said the school's rector, Dr. Rosa Delia Deconger. Over 100 students are completing their residency, mainly in pediatrics, surgery, cardiology and obstetrics and gynecology, Granma newspaper reported.
In this way, Cuba is making one of the biggest contributions to the Haitian health system, which has 2.7 physicians per 10,000 inhabitants, when the World Health Organization says the ratio should be at least 25 to 10,000. The Caribbean School of Medical Sciences will soon mark its 31st anniversary, with a total of 4,812 graduates. These graduates include 1,051 students from 25 countries, mainly from the Caribbean and Africa, and 2,419 Cubans, in Nursing.
Evidence strongly suggests U.N. peacekeepers from Nepal were the source of a cholera epidemic in Haiti that has killed more than 5,500 people, according to a new report published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The epidemic was one of the most explosive and deadly in recent history, the report said, hitting a country reeling from a January 2010 earthquake that claimed the lives of more than 300,000 and shattered the capital, Port-au-Prince.
Cases of cholera first emerged in central Haiti's Artibonite River region in October and many Haitians said the disease came from the peacekeepers from Nepal, where cholera is endemic.
That belief sparked anti-U.N. riots last year in the poor Caribbean nation and it posed a serious political problem for U.N. authorities who already had a peacekeeping force in Haiti and deployed a massive aid effort after the earthquake.
"Our findings strongly suggest that contamination of the Artibonite and one of its tributaries downstream from a military camp triggered the epidemic," said the report.
"There was an exact correlation in time and places between the arrival of a Nepalese battalion from an area experiencing a cholera outbreak and the appearance of the first cases in Meille a few days after," the report released on Tuesday said.
"The remoteness of Meille in central Haiti and the absence of report of other incomers (newcomers) make it unlikely that a cholera strain might have been brought there another way," said the report, whose authors include French infectious and tropical diseases expert Renaud Piarroux.
The report was published in the July issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases, a journal of the CDC. It appeared on the Atlanta-based agency's website.
CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE DNA evidence suggests the disease was introduced from a distant source by a single event, the report said.
The United Nations is "very concerned" about the outbreak of cholera in Haiti and will study the report's findings, said a statement from Michel Bonnardeaux, spokesman for the U.N. Department of Peacekeeping.
In a separate commentary, CDC scientists Scott Dowell and Christopher Braden said the report provided "circumstantial evidence that fecal contamination of a local stream draining into the Artibonite River initiated the epidemic."
"We have not concluded that Nepalese peacekeepers introduced cholera to Haiti," Dowell told Reuters, adding that the study's conclusions tallied with a U.N. report in May.
That report pointed to fecal contamination by a riverside U.N. peacekeepers' camp as a likely cause. But the four-member U.N.-appointed panel, named by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in January, avoided apportioning any direct blame or responsibility to U.N. peacekeepers, citing "a confluence of circumstances" behind the epidemic.
WikiLeaks Haiti: Country's Elite Used Police as Private Army Source: The Nation.com, by Dan Coughlin and Kim Ives, 22 June 2011.
Haitian business organizations and members of the country's tiny elite used the Haitian police force as their own private army in the wake of the 2004 coup that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, according to a secret US Embassy cable
Then–US Ambassador to Haiti James Foley warned in the cable "against private delivery of arms" to the Haitian National Police (HNP) after learning from a prominent Haitian businessman that "some business owners have already begun to purchase weapons and ammunition from the street and distribute them to local police officials in exchange for regular patrols."
The May 27, 2005, report was in a trove of 1,918 cables that WikiLeaks made available to the Haitian weekly newspaper Haïti Liberté, which is collaborating with The Nation on a series of reports on US and UN policy toward the Caribbean country.
Haiti's private sector elite has been a key US ally in promoting Washington's agenda in the country, from free trade and privatization of state enterprises to two coups against President Aristide followed by US and UN military occupations.
Fritz Mevs, a member of "one of Haiti's richest families and a well-connected member of the private sector elite" with major business interests in Port-au-Prince's downtown and port, was the principal source for Foley's report.
Mevs told the Embassy that the president of the Haitian Chamber of Commerce, Reginald Boulos, had "distributed arms to the police and had called on others to do so in order to provide cover to his own actions." Boulos currently sits on the board of former President Bill Clinton's Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), which controls the spending of billions donated to rebuild Haiti after the January 12, 2010, quake.
The May 2005 cable describes the period after the February 29, 2004, coup d'etat, which not only removed Aristide from power but repressed his Fanmi Lavalas party, set up a US-backed de facto government, and ushered in a 9,000-strong UN military occupation known as MINUSTAH (UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti).
De facto Prime Minister Gerard Latortue's interim government of Haiti and his paramilitary allies had difficulty stabilizing their unpopular regime, despite killing an estimated 3,000 people and jailing and purging from government jobs hundreds of Lavalas militants and sympathizers.
The regime had particular trouble suppressing pro-Aristide strongholds like the slum areas of Bel Air and Cite Soleil, which mounted a fierce resistance to the coup and the occupation. The de facto government, US Embassy and Haitian elite called the resistance fighters "bandits" or "gangs," the terminology used in the cable.
Titled "Haitian Private Sector Panicked by Increasing Violence," the cable relays Mevs' report to the Embassy's political officer that Haitian "business leaders are exasperated by the lack of security in the vital port and industrial zone areas of Port-au-Prince and are allegedly arming local police with long-guns and ammunition in an effort to ensure security for their businesses and employees."
Foley wrote that "Mevs says that of the roughly 150 business owners in the area, probably 30 have already provided some kind of direct assistance (including arms, ammunition, or other materiel) to the police, and the rest are looking to do so soon."
Mevs "defended the idea of the private sector arming the police in general, but he lamented the haphazard manner in which many of his colleagues seemed to be handing out weapons with little control," the cable says. Mevs also worried "that funneling the arms secretly would only serve to reinforce rumors that the elite were creating private armies," which in fact was happening.
Mevs asked the Embassy if "the U.S. would oversee [a] program" under which the private sector could legally buy the HNP's guns because "he did not trust either MINUSTAH or the HNP to properly control the issuance of weapons."
The private army "rumor" was corroborated by "contacts of the Econ Counselor [who] report from time to time of discussions among private sector leaders to fund and arm their own private sector armies."
Security for businesses around the capital's industrial, warehouse and port districts reportedly degenerated after the March 30, 2005, death of Thomas Robenson, alias Labaniere, a onetime Lavalas leader in Cite Soleil's Boston neighborhood. He defected to the forces defending the 2004 coup and provided armed protection to nearby commercial zones. Labaniere was killed "allegedly in a plot directed by rival pro-Lavalas gang leader Dread Wilme," Foley wrote.
After that, the UN force had tried to secure the commercial areas but "was proving to be a poor substitute for Labaniere," an adviser to Cite Soleil's mayor told the Embassy, largely because "MINUSTAH troops (who, he said, rarely set foot outside of their vehicles) were unable to identify the bandits from amongst the general populace as Labaniere had done."
The residents of Cite Soleil did not view Emmanuel Wilmer (aka Dred or Dread Wilme) as a "bandit." They saw him as a hero defending them from pro-coup paramilitaries (who in 1994 burned many houses in the rebellious shantytown) and UN occupation troops. Today, one of the main boulevards through Cite Soleil is named after him, and murals of his face adorn many walls.
Wilme told the Lakou New York program on Brooklyn's Radio Pa Nou station in April 2005 that "MINUSTAH has been shooting tear gas on the people. There are children who have died from the gas and some people inside churches have been shot.... The Red Cross is the only one helping us. The MINUSTAH soldiers remain hidden in their tanks and just aim their guns and shoot the people. They shoot people selling in the streets. They shoot people just walking in the streets. They shoot people sitting and selling in the marketplace."
But for Foley and the Haitian elite, the UN military was not doing enough. "According to Mevs, although MINUSTAH has on occasion parked armored vehicles near the Terminal with some success, he said criminals regularly force the tanks to move (by burning tires or fecal matter nearby), and as soon as the vehicles depart, the rampage continues."
Foley asked the "Core Group" of international donors and the UN military for a "swift, aggressive" response to the business sector's call for action against the "criminal elements" from slums like Cite Soleil.
"Ambassador Foley warned the Core Group that MINUSTAH's stand-down in Cite Soleil put the elections at risk, and that the insecurity around the industrial zone risked undermining what is left of the Haitian economy," said the cable.
The UN mission chief Juan Gabriel Valdes "promised a more robust response from MINUSTAH," which sat down with police leaders to develop a plan in "coordination with the private sector," the cable explains.
"In response to embassy and private sector prodding, MINUSTAH is now formulating a plan to protect the area," concluded the cable.
Weeks later, on July 6, 2005, at 3 am, 1,440 Brazilian and Jordanian soldiers, backed by forty-one armored personnel carriers, sealed off Cite Soleil and attacked. UN troops fired more than 22,000 bullets, leaving dozens of civilian casualties, including women and children.
"It remains unclear how aggressive MINUSTAH was, though 22,000 rounds is a large amount of ammunition to have killed only six people" (the UN's official death toll), wrote Foley in a July 26, 2005, Embassy cable obtained by Professor Keith Yearman of the College of DuPage through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The UN claimed it had killed only "gang leader Dred Wilme and five of his associates," the cable says, while noting, "at St. Joseph's hospital near Cite Soleil, Doctors Without Borders reported receiving 26 gunshot victims from Cite Soleil on July 6, of whom 20 were women and at least one was a child."
By August 1, Foley was praising the Brazilians in another cable (obtained by Yearman's FOIA requests), titled "Brazil Shows Backbone in Bel Air." According to Foley, "the security situation in the capital has clearly improved thanks to aggressive incursions in Bel Air and the July 6 raid against Dread Wilme in Cite Soleil.... Post has congratulated MINUSTAH and the Brazilian Battalion for the remarkable success achieved in recent weeks."
Source: The Nation.com, 16 Jun 2011 by Dan Coughlin and Kim Ives
The United States, the European Union and the United Nations decided to support Haiti’s recent presidential and parliamentary elections even though they believed the country’s electoral body, “almost certainly in conjunction with President Preval,” had “emasculated the opposition” by unwisely and unjustly excluding the country’s largest party, according to a secret US Embassy cable.
The cable was obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to the Haitian newspaper Haïti Liberté, which is collaborating with The Nation on a series of reports on US and UN policy toward the country.
At a December 1, 2009, meeting, a group of international election donors, including ambassadors from Brazil, Canada, Spain and the United States, concluded that “the international community has too much invested in Haiti’s democracy to walk away from the upcoming elections, despite its imperfections,” in the words of the EU representative, according to US Ambassador Kenneth Merten’s cable that month.
Haiti’s electoral body, the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP), banned the left-leaning Fanmi Lavalas from participating in the polls on a technicality. Lavalas is the party of then-exiled former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was overthrown on February 29, 2004, and flown to Africa as part of a coup d’état supported by France, Canada and the United States.
This history made Canadian Ambassador Gilles Rivard worry at the December donor meeting that “support for the elections as they now stand would be interpreted by many in Haiti as support for Preval and the CEP’s decision against Lavalas.” He said that the CEP had reneged on a pledge to “reconsider their exclusion of Lavalas.”
“If this is the kind of partnership we have with the CEP going into the elections, what kind of transparency can we expect from them as the process unfolds?” Rivard asked.
Despite the Lavalas exclusion, the EU and Canada proposed that donors “help level the playing field” -- they could, for instance, “purchase radio air time for opposition politicians to plug their candidacies.” They were presumably referring to “opposition candidates” who would come from parties other than Lavalas.
That plan was nixed by the UN, but when the election finally did take place, on November 28, 2010, followed by a runoff on March 20, Washington and the international donor community played an influential role in determining its outcome.
When the first-round results were disputed, international donors arranged for an evaluation by the Organization of American States, which pronounced that pro-coup candidate Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly, a former konpa musician, should face another neo-Duvalierist candidate, Mirlande Manigat, in the final round. Martelly emerged as the victor in the runoff.
Less than 23 percent of Haiti’s registered voters had their vote counted in either of the two presidential rounds, the lowest electoral participation rate in the hemisphere since 1945, according to the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Furthermore, the second round was illegal because the eight-member CEP could never muster the five votes necessary to ratify the first-round results.
The December donor meeting took place just over a month before the January 12, 2010, earthquake, which derailed the elections originally planned for February 28, 2010.
When the polling was rescheduled, there was even more at stake, primarily how billions of dollars in pledged earthquake aid would be spent and the future of the 11,500-strong UN military force that has occupied Haiti since the 2004 coup.
According to the December 4, 2009, cable, US officials pushed hard for the election. Ambassador Merten urged a minimal donor reaction to Lavalas’s exclusion, saying they should just “hold a joint press conference to announce donor support for the elections and to call publicly for transparency,” because “without donor support, the electoral timetable risks slipping dangerously, threatening a timely presidential succession.”
His cable was classified “Confidential” and “NOFORN,” meaning “not for release to foreign nationals.”
The US State Department declined to comment on the disclosures in this article, citing a policy against commenting on releases of documents that purport to contain classified information.
Merten explained in the cable that he had opposed Lavalas’s exclusion because the party would come out looking “like a martyr and Haitians will believe (correctly) that Preval is manipulating the election.”
The election’s low turnout has been ascribed to Haitians’ sense of futility in the choice between two unappealing candidates, to a grassroots boycott campaign and primarily to popular dismay over the exclusion of Lavalas, the very issue that gave rise to the December 2009 meeting.
Former President Aristide, who returned to Haiti from exile on March 18, two days before the second round, drove the point home when he declared on his arrival, “The problem is exclusion; the solution is inclusion.”
Dan Coughlin covered Haiti for Inter Press Service from the UN and Port-au-Prince between 1992 and 1996. He was formerly the news director and executive director of Pacifica Radio. He is currently executive director of Manhattan Neighborhood Network. Kim Ives is an editor with Haïti Liberté.
WikiLeaks Haiti: The PetroCaribe Files Source: The Nation, 01 June 2011. by Dan Coughlin and Kim Ives
When René Préval took the oath of Haiti’s presidential office in a ceremony at Haiti’s National Palace on May 14, 2006, he was anxious to allay fears in Washington that he would not be a reliable partner. “He wants to bury once and for all the suspicion in Haiti that the United States is wary of him,” said US Ambassador Janet Sanderson in a March 26, 2006, cable. “He is seeking to enhance his status domestically and internationally with a successful visit to the United States.”
This was so important that Préval “declined invitations to visit France, Cuba, and Venezuela in order to visit Washington first,” Sanderson noted. “Preval has close personal ties to Cuba, having received prostate cancer treatment there, but has stressed to the Embassy that he will manage relations with Cuba and Venezuela solely for the benefit of the Haitian people, and not based on any ideological affinity toward those governments.”
Soon, however, it became clear that managing relations with those US adversaries “solely for the benefit to the Haitian people” would be enough to put Préval in Washington’s bad graces—especially when it came to the sensitive matter of oil.
Immediately after his inauguration ceremony, Préval summoned the press to a room in the National Palace, where he inked a deal with Venezuelan Vice President José Vicente Rangel to join Caracas’s Caribbean oil alliance, PetroCaribe. Under the terms of the deal, Haiti would buy oil from Venezuela, paying only 60 percent up front with the remainder payable over twenty-five years at 1 percent interest.
As the press conference rolled on, just a mile away from the National Palace, in the bay of Port-au-Prince, sat a tanker from Venezuela carrying 100,000 barrels of PetroCaribe diesel and unleaded fuel.
Préval’s dramatic inauguration day oil deal won high marks from many Haitians, who had demonstrated against high oil prices and the lack of electricity. But it ushered in a multiyear geopolitical battle among Caracas, Havana and Washington over how oil would be delivered to Haiti and who would benefit.
The revelations come in a trove of 1,918 cables made available to the Haitian weekly newspaper Haïti Liberté by the transparency group WikiLeaks. As part of a collaboration with Haïti Liberté, The Nation is publishing English-language articles based on those cables [1].
The State Department did not respond to a request for comment on the disclosures in this article.
Ex-FAd’H Camp near Port-au-Prince by Jeb Sprague, 27 March 2011.
In March of 2011, Isabeau Doucet (a journalist writing for the Guardian & the Christian Science Monitor) and I located the ex-FAd’H (Forces armées d'Haïti--Haiti's former military) camp that was recently covered in an article by the Associated Press. Below I describe some of what I found and related information:
During the years following the 2004 overthrow of Haiti’s elected government, the ex-military has set up a formalized network of training camps around the country.
Thirty to forty minutes from the center of Port-au-Prince, past Carrefour, between the towns of Mariane and Gressier, members of Haiti’s former military (FAd’H) have a hilltop encampment that they call ‘Lambi 12 Grande Saline’. The camp is made up of between a dozen and twenty tents, with a few small wooden and corrugated tin structures.
Leading the troops is Nestor Appolon, who the ex-FAd’H say was a Lieutenant in Haiti’s army. Second in command of the camp is Jeune Aduen Moniteur, described as a former Captain of the FAd’H (pictured above). An older organizer of the men, Eugene Joseph, an ex-FAd’H and “counceiller” at the camp speaks fluent English, is a U.S. citizen, and smiles but refuses to answer when asked if the U.S. military trained him early in his career.
Some important points:
1. This group of ex-FAd’H and their new recruits claim to have been based at this location for the last 1 ½ to 2 years.
2. They openly claim to be Duvalierists. A Red and Black flag of the Duvalier era hangs in their main HQ tent.
3. Security companies send recruiters often to this ex-FAd’H camp. According to one ex-FAd’H NCO: “They hire many of our men for their [security] companies, so we must always look for others [to join].” My belief is that the leadership of the camp have some benefactors among the business elite and get some sort of kick back payment from security companies after they train and vet new recruits.
4. The Second in Command of the camp asked if we would like to hire a security detachment and that we could have many well-trained men, each with a weapon, for 500 US dollars per man per month.
5. The ex-FAd’H say that similar or smaller camps are also located near Cap-Haïtien (rumoured to be headed by a family member or son of Dany Toussaint), near Jérémie (headed by Guy Philippe), near Croix-des-Bouquets, and half a dozen other locations around the country. Ex FAd’H at ‘Lambi 12 Grande Saline’ say that the leaders of the camps communicate and coordinate with each other regularly.
6. They claim that Haiti’s Ministry of Justice provided them with USAID, UNICEF, and sky blue UN tents (the UN tents at ‘Lambi 12’ are from the Chinese contingent of MINUSTAH). See photos.
7. The ex-FAd’H at the 'Lambi 12' camp say that Haiti’s police chief Mario Andersol will do nothing to hinder their activities.
8. Allegedly, according to well-placed sources, the DEA has “cut deals” with some of the leadership of these camps, as some have been implicated in narco-trafficking (not to mention: numerous killings, armed assaults, etc).
9. The ex-FAd’H at the camp are strongly anti-Aristide/Lavalas but a few said [in response to a question about Aristide’s recent return] that “all Haitians should return to the country,” a widely held sentiment. The ex-FAd’H are strongly supportive of Michel ‘Sweet Micky’ Martelly who has for many years held close ties with members of the military and paramilitaries.
10. According to some of the ex-FAd’H at the camp, Martelly, in a campaign stop, visited them. A worker at the nearby Lambi hotel also told us that Martelly visited the ex-FAd’H camp. This has not been independently confirmed by anyone from the Martelly campaign.
11. While some in the camp appear to live in Port-au-Prince or the nearby area, it appears some live with their families full time at the camp. New recruits undergo military training, including martial arts classes provided by a Haitian-American who has trained police and military personnel in the United States. He was present during our visit.
Conclusion: The camps appear to have three core functions: (A) they serve as a chain of recruitment centers for security companies, (B) they keep up the rhetoric and campaign of the right wing in promoting the return of the Duvalierist military, and (C) they provide a useful site for maintaining a reserve pool of armed and trained men to crush any future attempts by the country’s poor majority to organize democratically.
It appeared to me that some among the ex-military are looking to improve their image in the media, as they hope Haiti’s next government will reinstitute the armed forces. It is true that members of the ex-FAd’H have been running camps off and on for years – and, on a few occasions these have been shut down- training young and unemployed men for jobs in security. However, following the 2004 coup this became a much more widespread, formalized, and hard-line rightist network.
For background on the brutality of Haiti’s military, ex-military, and paramilitary forces (which have often functioned symbiotically) see the University of Miami "Haiti Human Rights Investigation"published in late 2004. As recently as 2007, the main author of that study, Tom Griffin and other human rights investigators found that "Army and various well-known Haitian elites meet on a weekly basis to discuss such matters, often joined by high-level narco-traffickers."For more context see Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containmentpublished by Verso in 2008. The website Haitiancolors has also posted more. A piece by Isabeau Doucet appears here in Haiti Liberte.
Haiti's new president is a friend of coup-plotters, fascists, and armed right-wing groups in his country and abroad. No sooner had Michel "Sweet Micky" Martelly been confirmed the winner in Haiti's deeply flawed presidential election than he jumped on a plane and headed to Washington, where he met with his country's real power brokers: officials from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the US Chamber of Commerce and the State Department.
There, he committed his desperately poor country - where some 700,000 people are still homeless as a result of last year's earthquake - to fiscal discipline, promising to "give new life to the business sector". In exchange, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave him a strong endorsement. "We are behind him; we have a great deal of enthusiasm," she said. "The people of Haiti may have a long road ahead of them, but as they walk it, the United States will be with you all the way," she added.
Martelly, a well-known kompa singer, is an unusual choice to lead Haiti. With no political experience, he represents a clear break with the country's other democratically elected presidents since the island nation ousted the dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier and ushered in an unprecedented era of democracy.
The US press billed his victory as "overwhelming". But with Haiti's most popular political party, Jean-Bertrand Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas, banned from participating in the election, a vast majority of Haitians didn't vote. Martelly took the presidency with just 16.7 per cent of the electorate.
Despite those in power trying to keep him out, the return of Aristide to Haiti has rekindled hope among the poor.
As twice ousted former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his family were escorted out from the airport tarmac in Port-au-Prince, loud chants of "Titid, Titid, Titid" rose from an ecstatic gathering that filled every space of a causeway leading out from the airport.
Sitting on walls, a few climbing a telephone pole, rows of youth jumped in excitement at the return of Aristide from exile in South Africa – a heroic figure for the people whose history is one indelibly rooted in resistance.
As the gates swung open for two police vehicles, an SUV with dark tinted windows and a white van carrying guests, an airport grounds man with a huge smile on his face clasped the hands of a skinny police officer motioning the cars through.
Heavily armed UN soldiers with sky-blue helmets stood in rows some 30 meters away.
The caravan made its way alongside the airport route. In waves, thousands poured in from the slums carrying flags and banners on foot. One man dressed as Jean Jacques Dessalines – the founding leader of Haiti – charged down the street atop a horse, waving the crowd forward. Many were on motorcycles or piled into trucks zooming through the dusty air.
Movement songs rang out. "Nou pap janm trayi san nou, san nou se san Aristide… li menm ki rasanble nou tout, fok nou tout ansanm fe youn" sang the jubilant flood of people, calling for unity in struggle.
A small group of former presidential security men and police provided escort. Around them surged a crowd estimated at between 7,000 to 15,000 strong.
Upon reaching the grounds of Aristide's home, crowds jumbled inside- sitting on trees and opening the side gate to let more in. It was so packed in the area around the front door that the family could barely make its way inside their house.
The return of an icon In recent weeks, rumours swirled of Aristide's return. For decades he has been the most popular figure among Haiti's rural poor and urban slum dwellers.
Even with a resource-starved state his administrations launched a steady stream of social investment programs [PDF]: building more schools than in any time in the country's history, a national literacy ALPHA campaign, constructing and refurbishing medical clinics, the hospital of La Paix, and a university training doctors with the help of Cubans.
The poor have not forgotten this. Even under intense pressure from foreign powers, Aristide was able to disband Haiti's brutal military and refuse to go forward on privatisation sell-offs of state institutions that René Préval, his technocrat predecessor, took up.
Aristide is one of the few living people referred to as a hero by those in the tent cities dotting the capital after the January 11, 2010 earthquake that killed an estimated two hundred and fifty thousand people, possibly more.
On the day of his return, one group of Cité Soleil residents explained that they were unsure of what time Aristide's plane was landing.
The expected day and time of the arrival kept shifting, as powerful forces worked to avert the return. Adding to the confusion, perhaps intentionally, one elite radio station falsely broadcast that his plane would not arrive until March 22nd.
Many in the crowd chanted that the "eleksyon/seleksyon" in the next few days was "fini" – worthless. Maryse Narcisse, official spokeswoman of Aristide's party, Fanmi Lavalas (FL), called for a general boycott. Aristide denounced the continued exclusion of FL from elections just after he landed.
Party time One of the biggest concerns FL now faces is reorganising. FL today remains widely popular among Haiti's poor majority – surviving against all odds – but its infrastructure has been weakened over the years.
Those remaining closest around Aristide are battle-scarred veterans of Haiti's social conflict, who remained steadfastly loyal as Aristide and his movement were relentlessly slandered by media monopolies over the years.
Most of these core leaders are in their 40s or 50s, variously targeted for assassination, thrown in jail, or pushed into exile by the illegal regimes that took office after the coups against Aristide in 1991 and 2004.
Many in the movement fondly remember fallen comrades such as Lovinsky Pierre Antoine, one of many brilliant grassroots organisers of FL who was disappeared – the tell-tale sign of a rightist paramilitary hit job.
Setbacks aside, FL remains the only national level popular movement. It has the potential, in some ways, to be better organised and more effective than it was in the past, to learn from its successes and failures.
No longer dragged down by the opportunistic politicians who attached themselves to Lavalas after it returned to office in 1994 (with international support), which then jumped ship when the US-financed opposition gained strength.
The FL leadership remaining is more principled, committed, and progressive. The legend of the movement's struggle, and Aristide's refusal (alongside others in FL) to bow to elite pressure still has the hearts of many of the capital's impoverished youth and rural families across the countryside.
Yet sectors of Haitian society have become politically apathetic, basically exhausted by years of political violence.
The Michel Martelly campaign, one of two candidates now running for the presidency, has sought to tap into apathy and disillusionment with a massive text and voice message cell phone campaign, propelling a corporatist project through hip rhetoric.
While most appeared disinterested in the elections, Martelly's campaign has had some success.
Problems at the polls It was clear that with the first round of elections on November 28, 2010, many people were either unwilling or unable to vote.
The two final contenders from that round received a total of 10.4% according to the initial results; 4.3% voted for Martelly and 6% voted for Manigat. With an extremely low 27.1% of registered voters taking part, the bar was set low for the second round.
It is not yet clear how the voting for the second round of the (s)election, on March 20, has gone.
Al Jazeera found at one polling station that voting papers were missing. According to independent election monitors and some mainstream media it was a lower turnout but generally peaceful, while USAID and UN officials on the ground claimed it was slightly higher than the poorly attended first round.
In neighbourhoods and tent cities in the capital it was clear that many people were going on with their normal daily affairs.
Two independent journalists, Ansel Herz and Wadner Pierre, and myself, documented at two voting centres (at Building 2004 in central Port-au-Prince and another near the Karade tent city) that the same employees of Martelly's campaign – in official ballot observer T-shirts – were handing out food, illegally campaigning and coordinating voters just yards away.
At another voting centre, election workers told us that a group shouting Martelly's slogan "tet kale" attempted to pressure them into allowing the group to vote without IDs or inking themselves.
At a voting centre in Ti Plaz Kazo, a handful of supporters of Lavalas exclaimed they would vote for Martelly to give him a chance as a political outsider.
Martelly's advertising campaign has been intense. But unknown to many he has also found allies amongst death squad leaders who reliable sources allege have cut deals with the DEA.
This is worrisome: In the past, paramilitary waves of terror were largely overlooked by the media here and the foreign journalists that parachute in for brief stints.
In the coming years, Martelly's camp and a rejuvenated FL may well become the two major political movements.
For now the left has been excluded from elections, and the right remains very divided with a number of big business politicians calling fraud, and an elite former first lady Mirlande Manigat running against Martelly's well-funded top down movement.
Reorganising a movement While it is clear many have jumped on the Martelly bandwagon pumped up by Wyclef Jean and other popular musicians, I also spoke to some who were backing Manigat because of her academic background, or out of pure disgust at Martelly's ultra rightist-affiliations or simply his vulgar public persona.
In Pétionville, the 'green zone' of Haiti's capital – where posters of Martelly and Manigat plaster the walls – some residents will privately acknowledge their fondness for Aristide but cower in public conversations, scared of the reaction it might provoke among those heavily swayed by years of elite media propaganda.
Torn by coups and cataclysmic natural disasters, Haiti's poor majority have successfully struggled for an inspirational victory with the return of Aristide and his family. Some lost their lives for it.
Their stories – such as the trials and tribulations of the late liberation priest Gérard Jean-Juste, a valiant anti-coup pro-democracy fighter until he lost his battle with cancer – are now part of a popular history.
While Aristide will undoubtedly serve as a key figure and strategist to a reorganising popular movement, his stated intention to invest his time in education is important.
His status can bring support and attention to grassroots projects that deserve significant help, such as those being launched on a shoestring budget at the Aristide Foundation for Democracy (Fondasyon Arisitid pou Demokrasi).
Lavalas and its affiliates around this country will need to strengthen their own discipline to avoid scuffles and rogue actions, that elites and the big business media never fail to pin on the movement as a whole or on Aristide personally – a longtime bogeyman who they conveniently blame for pulling all the strings of what is a disparate and truly dirt poor mass movement.
Building collectives within the tent cities, FL's base could work with a new generation of youth alongside more veteran cadre and supporters.
The popular movement can come back stronger, shedding those that held it back and damaged it, while expanding its circle of solidarity. Its organisers know that it will have to navigate carefully the many odd alliances that will likely spring up and the eventual attempts by various opportunists to wiggle their way back into its ranks.
Following a historical and world trend The same resistance that propelled Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Charlemagne Péralte, and Daniel Fignole, in many ways has been one single popular movement that has congealed throughout this country's history – part of what the late anthropologist Eric Wolf described as resistance to 500 years of war against the poor in the Americas.
Crucially, the movement in Haiti, while bounded to its own historical significance, is not alone.
It shares much in common with the movements in the Middle East and the Bolivarian tide that has swept parts of Latin America but run up against an onslaught of destabilisation and its own problems.
Progressives in North America are well aware of Haiti's struggle, as are many in Africa.
Haiti's popular movement can find valuable allies amongst the ALBA bloc or amongst groups organising transnationally through the World Social Forum.
It can build up its training capabilities, able to benefit from its small middle class and socialist wings.
While US and UN officials have done everything in their power to keep Aristide from returning home, he is here now – accomplishing one of the major demands of the popular movement that has proven its resilience time and again.
Jeb Sprague is the author of the forthcoming book Haiti and the Roots of Paramilitarism and was the recipient of a 2008 Project Censored Award, who also regularly blogs and tweets. Also find here a link to Aristide's entire return speech.
The former Haitian president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, today welcomed the work of Cuban doctors, upon his arrival in Port-au-Prince after seven years of exile in South Africa.
In a press conference from the airport, the ex-president referred, in Spanish, to the work of the Cuban Medical Brigade in Haiti.
"I want to thank the Cuban brothers, especially the doctors who are in the fight against cholera," he said. He wondered, moreover, how many people would have died without their help and declared: "I hope their light will shine on others."
The Cuban medical brigade has been working in Haiti for 12 years, but increased its presence following the outbreak of cholera last October, along with dozens of graduates from the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM).
According to official statements, these doctors have treated about 40% of the patients with that disease, which has claimed more than 4,672 lives. Currently, Cubans and ELAM graduates are working in 156 health centers nationwide, 67 of them as part of a joint program with Venezuela.
Until earlier this month, experts had saved 70,890 Haitian cholera patients, with a fatality rate below 1%. (PL)
Aristide returned to Haiti today. I've not seen such genuine happiness on the faces of Haiti's poor in over seven years. Welcome President Jean Bertrand Aristide and family. Today is a good day for the poorest of the poor in the Western Hemisphere. Their struggle and unimaginable sacrifices and sufferings bore fruit and it makes them smile. We thank the universal good for this moment. Blessed be the endless Haiti revolution against the organized tyranny of the "civilized" and "schooled" peoples.
Today, HLLN re-members the blessed Haiti revolution, Janjak Desalin and the indigenous Haiti army of today and yesterday.
On this day of the return, HLLN re-members the sacrifice of the warriors of Site Soley, Bel Air, Solino, Martissant who took up arms in self-defense against the occupation and coup d'etat. We re-MEMBER the most hunter Black man in the Western Hemisphere, who, alone, fought the most powerful armies on earth for two long years before he was assassinated by UN bullets, we remember the lynching and crucifixion of Dred Wilmè.
"On July 6, 2005, Dred Wilmè in his family where assassinated in cold blood by 1,440 heavily armed UN/US troops. With their tanks, helicopters and advanced weapons, 440 UN/US soldiers entered Site Soley in the dead of night (3am) while the community was asleep. One thousand (1000) other UN/US soldiers surrounded Site Soley to make sure no one could leave. Bombs where reported unleashed and dropped on the unarmed civilian community.
All human beings have the right to life and to self-defense, including the poor in Haiti.
Today, we remember and say honor and respect to our fallen and faceless warriors- the beleaguered poor in Site Soley, Solino, Martissant, Bel-Air, Gran Ravine, et al.. ravaged by exclusion and color-coded NGO charitable distribution and allotments that slews human dignity, brings perpetual dependency. We recall the 20,000 slaughtered by the imposed Bush Boca Raton regime from 2004 to 2006, slaughtered with the complicity of UN/US firepower. We pay tribute to Father Gerard Jean Juste, Lovinsky Pierre Antoine and all those who gave their life for this day of return of the people’s voice. We pay tribute to the ten thousands unknown Haitians, in Haiti and in the Diaspora, who never wavered. We lift up Hazel and Randall Robinson for staying true throughout this long road and always, always supporting justice for the people of Haiti against all the odds. We lift up Minister Louis Farrakhan and Danny Glover who stood with the poor majority in Haiti and advocated for the return of Aristide in Haiti when most of the U.S. Black intelligentsia turned away.
We thank all those folks, from all the races and religions, who signed letters and advocated for this return. We pay tribute to all the small Haiti radio programs abroad and in Haiti who stood for justice, Mary at SF Bayview for standing firm and resolute. We remember the unknown fanm vanyans, Haitian women like Alina Sixto who sacrificed so much, for so long without accolades and recognition and who never wavered. We share this day by lifting up the work and life of our beloved John Maxwell. We pay tribute to the Africans, in Jamaica, in South Africa who stood in solidarity with the people of Haiti despite threats of repercussions from powerful international forces, those who this week ignored the frantic calls from Barack Obama and the UN’s Ban-Ki Moon to again delay and destroy the will of the people of Haiti. Thank you.
This historic returns belongs to the poor suffering warriors of Haiti and to bless the spirits of those who perished too soon. Indeed it belongs to Haitian men like father Gerard Jean Juste, to all the women community leaders who where singled out and massacred at the USAID/IOM “Summer for Peace” soccer gathering on August 20 and Aug. 21st where Haitian youths were lured to their slaughter while attending a soccer game sponsored by USAID. Haiti’s young were brutally chopped up by UN/US-sanctioned coup detat police squads, working with their Lame Ti Manchet thugs and mercenaries.
Before his death, the courageous Esterne Bruner provide Ezili’s HLLN with the names of the members who committed the Gran Ravine/USAID-soccer -for-peace massacres, the names of the death squad of Lame Ti Manchet. None of these pro-coup detat enforcers have been brought to justice in UN occupied Haiti because they helped demobilize the pro-democracy Lavalas movement. This return that eases the insult of the bicentennial coup d’etat belongs to the hundreds of Haitians, sealed in containers and dumped off the Coast of Cap Haitian to drown, as US-supported thugs, still roaming Haiti free behind UN protection today, took over the North. It belongs to those forced onto mysterious U.S. ships, off the shores of Haiti, held and tortured in secrecy, some for two years, because they voted Lavalas or held positions in the popular government of President Aristide. It belongs to Haitian men like Emmanuel Dred Wilmè who never left his people, never even left his neighborhood, he never attacked anyone, he simply defended his community from attack from the coup detat overseers, from UN and US guns and sycophants who hired thugs, like Labanye, to kill innocent civilians simply because they voted for Jean Bertrand Aristide and advocated for their country's own domestic interests as opposed to the interests of the internationals, their Haiti billionaire oligarchy and poverty pimping USAID-NGO subcontractors.
Most of all today, we say honor and respect to the Ezili HLLNetwork members, of all the races and nationalities, a 10 thousand strong network against the profit-over-people folks, reaching three million per post, and on our blogs, who stood with the voiceless and disenfranchised in Haiti for these last seven years against all the odds, against all the naysayers.
This historic moment belongs to all of you who stood with the indigenous Haitians at HLLN who work to make a space for Haiti’s authentic voices without Officialdom’s approval. It’s a harsh journey. It could have been a six-hour trip to Brazil and then just a few hours to Haiti. But it took 18 hours because the “benevolent internationals” interested in our “democracy and stability” wouldn’t allow former president Aristide, the symbol of the poor's empowerment in Black Haiti, to travel through their territories. It took 18 hours for Aristide to reach Haiti. Going from South Africa to Northern Africa in Senegal took 10 hours while from Senegal to Haiti took another 8 hours down to Haiti. I hear England wouldn’t allow a landing either. That long, long road is symbolic of the Haitian struggle. That long road Ezili’s HLLN has shared with you and with your support and forbearance. Unlike colonial celebritism with Sean Penn, no one will give us accolades at a mere six months journey in Haiti. Ours is a centuries old long journey. We overstand. The struggle continues. A new era begins for us here at HLLN. We ask you help us define it. For we know the empire will strike back. We expect it and thus avoid the surprise blow. As usual, we shall take the road less traveled towards healing Haiti’s poor majority with dignity, human rights, self-sufficiency, justice and inclusion. We won’t sell out. Haiti and indigenous Haitians want justice not charity, not Clinton/Farmer UN/US paternalism. It’s a desperately humiliating, bumpy, wholly disemboweling, wholly healing and fulfilling ride. Against all odds, Ginen poze. Kenbe la – hold on. (See, Don't be distracted by Aristide in Haiti by Ezili Dantò).
Pierre Labossierre, Jafrikayiti, Guy Antoine, Harry Fouche, Fritz Pean, Yves Point Du Jour, Jean Ristil Jean Baptise and too many others to name, congratulations on this day. Only we know what we’ve withstood in helping to overcome not one but two Bush coup d’etats on the poor majority in Haiti. Sometimes the fierce guilt of surviving, the endless stretch ahead, the soul and psychic wounds wrought on by the shame and humiliation of powerlessness and lack of material resources to do more, are too heavy a load. It’s too ugly and desperate to articulate the bullying and blows metered out by the most educated, most wealthy and most powerful on the most defenseless and non-violent people on earth. Their collective suffering and deaths shall not be in vain. Justice will prevail, beauty will win, eventually. If not in our lifetime, then in the next. We are the Haitians, the indigenous Haitians. From generation to generation, from the womb to the tomb, our lives are about struggle. Today, for a moment, we’ll smile because in this shining and eternal moment that must see us through what will come at us next, we anti-Duvalierist-Haitians managed to survive whole with dignity and to witness that against all odds, we beat back the elite’s rabid rage.
Ayibobo! The Haitian resistance against the Western bicentennial re-colonization of Haiti lives on.
Cuba categorically rejects any attempt whatsoever to take advantage of the tragic situation created in order to occupy Libya and control its oil.
• Statement by Cuba’s Minister of Foreign Affairs to the UN Human Rights Council, Geneva, March 1, 2011.
Mr. President:
Humanity’s conscience is repulsed by the deaths of innocent people under any circumstances, anyplace. Cuba fully shares the worldwide concern for the loss of civilian lives in Libya and hopes that its people are able to reach a peaceful and sovereign solution to the civil war occurring there, with no foreign interference, and guarantee the integrity of that nation.
Most certainly the Libyan people oppose any foreign military intervention, which would delay an agreement even further and cause thousands of deaths, displacement and enormous injury to the population.
Cuba categorically rejects any attempt whatsoever to take advantage of the tragic situation created in order to occupy Libya and control its oil.
It is noteworthy that the voracity for oil, not peace or the protection of Libyan lives, is the motivation inciting the political forces, primarily conservative, which today, in the United States and some European countries, are calling for a NATO military intervention in Libyan territory. Nor does it appear that objectivity, accuracy or a commitment to the truth are prevailing in part of the press reports being used by media giants to fan the flames.
Given the magnitude of what is taking place in Libya and the Arab world, in the context of a global economic crisis, responsibility and a long-term vision should prevail on the part of governments in the developed countries. Although the goodwill of some could be exploited, it is clear that a military intervention would lead to a war with serious consequences for human lives, especially the millions of poor who comprise four fifths of humanity.
Despite the paucity of some facts and information, the reality is that the origins of the situation in North Africa and the Middle East are to be found within the crisis of the rapacious policy imposed by the United States and its NATO allies in the region. The price of food has tripled, water is scarce, the desert is growing, poverty is on the rise and with it, repugnant social inequality and exclusion in the distribution of the opulent wealth garnered from oil in the region.
The fundamental human right is the right to life, which is not worth living without human dignity.
The way in which the right to life is being violated should arouse concern. According to various sources, more than 111 million people have perished in armed conflicts during modern wars. It cannot be forgotten in this room that, if in World War I civilian deaths amounted to 5% of total casualties, in the subsequent wars of conquest after 1990, basically in Iraq, with more than one million, and Afghanistan with more than 70,000, the deaths of innocents stand at 90%. The proportion of children in these figures is horrific and unprecedented.
The concept of "collateral damage," an offense to human nature, has been accepted in the military doctrine of NATO and the very powerful nations.
In the last decade, humanitarian international law has been trampled, as is occurring on the U.S. Guantánamo Naval Base, which usurps Cuban territory.
As a consequence of those wars, global refugee figures have increased by 34%, to more than 26 million people.
Military spending increased by 49% in the decade, to reach $1.5 trillion, more than half of that figure in the United States alone. The industrial-military complex continues producing wars.
Every year, 740,000 human beings die, not only on account of conflicts, but as victims of violent acts associated with organized crime.
In one European country, a woman dies every five days as a result of domestic violence. In the countries of the South, half a million mothers die in childbirth every year.
Every day, 29,000 children die of hunger and preventable diseases. In the minutes that I have been speaking, no less than 120 children have died. Four million perish in their first month of life. In total, 11 million children die every year.
There are 100,000 deaths a day from causes related to malnutrition, adding up to 35 million a year.
In Hurricane Katrina alone, in the most developed country in the world, 1,836 people died, almost all of them African Americans with limited resources. In the last two years, 470,000 people died throughout the world as a result of natural disasters, 97% of them of low income.
In the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti alone, more than 250,000 people died, almost all of them resident in very poor homes. The same thing occurred with homes swept away by excessive rainfall in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo in Brazil.
If the developing countries had infant and maternal mortality rates like those of Cuba, 8.4 million children and 500,000 mothers would be saved annually. In the cholera epidemic in Haiti, Cuban doctors are treating almost half of the patients, with a mortality rate five times lower than those being treated by physicians from other countries. Cuban international medical cooperation has made it possible to save more than 4.4 million lives in dozens of countries in four continents.
Human dignity is a human right. Today, 1.4 billion people are living in extreme poverty. There are 1.2 billion hungry people, and a further two billion are suffering from malnutrition. There are 759 million illiterate adults.
Mr. President:
The Council has demonstrated its capacity for approaching human rights situations in the world, including those of an urgent nature which require attention and action on the part of the international community. The usefulness of the Universal Periodic Review, as a means of sustaining international cooperation, of evaluating the undertakings of all countries without distinction in this context has been confirmed.
The spirit which animated our actions during the review process of this body was to preserve, improve and strengthen this Council in its function of effectively promoting and protecting all human rights for everyone.
The results of this exercise express a recognition of the Council’s important achievements in its short existence. While it is true that the agreements reached are insufficient in the light of the demands of developing countries, the body has been preserved from those whose aim was to reform it to their convenience in order to satisfy hegemonic appetites and to resuscitate the past of confrontation, double standards, selectivity and imposition.
It is to be hoped from the debates of the last few days that this Human Rights Council will continue constructing and advancing its development as an institution toward the full exercise of its mandate.
It would be very negative if, on the pretext of reviewing the Council’s institutional construction and in abuse of the dramatic juncture which is being discussed, it should be manipulated and pressured in an opportunist way in order to establish precedents and modify agreements.
If the essential human right is the right to life, will the Council be ready to suspend the membership of states that unleash a war?
Is the Council proposing to make some substantial contribution to eliminating the principal threat to the life of the human species which is the existence of enormous arsenals of nuclear weapons, an infinitesimal part of which, or the explosion of 100 warheads, would provoke a nuclear winter, according to irrefutable scientific evidence?
Will it establish a comprehensive protocol on the impact of climate change in the exercise of human rights and proclaim the right to a healthy atmosphere?
Will it suspend states which finance and supply military aid utilized by recipient states for mass, flagrant and systematic violations of human rights and for attacks on the civilian population, like those taking place in Palestine?
Will it apply that measure against powerful countries which are perpetrating extra-judicial executions in the territory of other states with the use of high technology, such as smart bombs and drone aircraft?
What will happen to states which accept secret illegal prisons in their territories, facilitate the transit of secret flights with kidnapped persons aboard, or participate in acts of torture?
Can the Council adopt a declaration on the right of peoples to peace?
Will it adopt an action program that includes concrete commitments guaranteeing the right to nutrition in a moment of food crisis, spiraling food prices and the utilization of grain crops to produce biofuels?
Mr. President:
Distinguished Ministers and Delegates:
What measures will this Council adopt against a member state which is committing acts that are causing grave suffering and seriously endangering physical or mental integrity, such as the blockade of Cuba, typified as genocide in Article 2, Paragraphs B and C, of the 1948 Geneva Convention?
The work carried out in Haiti by the Cuban Henry Reeve Medical Brigade has represented saving the lives of over 1,100 citizens of that small and impoverished nation, now affected by cholera. The health facilities where the Cuban physicians are working have not reported deaths as a consequence of this disease over the last 43 days, the National Television Newscast (TVC) reported on Friday [4 March 2011].
Over the last six days, the members of the Henry Reeve Brigade have had reports of less than 150 cases of cholera a day, the TVC special correspondent pointed out. He added that cholera cases have decreased in Haiti, although the most recent reports ofthat country’s Health Ministry show that 245,183 persons have suffered from the disease, added the source.
For Cubans, this change of situation implied the return home of the first 150 members of the Brigade, out of the 477 that will gradually return, explained the television report.
In Haiti, the cholera epidemic has caused the death of some 4,620 people and over 245,000 have caught the disease. Over the last two weeks, the number of cases has decreased considerably and a 0.39 mortality rate has been maintained, the lowest since the outbreak of cholera.
Cuba has been offering medical services in Haiti for 11 years now, and it’s presently one of the nations that has helped Haiti the most with health equipment and staff, which has earned it the respect and admiration of both the Haitian authorities and the population.
by Juan Diego Nusa PEÑALVER, special reporter, Granma, 24 February 2011.
Cuban doctor Dinora Lahera Portuondo will never forget Haiti. A few days short of completing a two-year medical mission in Haiti, this strong-charactered woman, who becomes shy in front of a tape recorder, recalls the overwhelming challenges she has faced like the devastating earthquake on January 12, 2010; something she wouldn’t like to relive. The post-earthquakes emergencies and the cholera outbreak together with diseases she had only seen in medicine books have marked her daily life in the Caribbean island.
Her professional work has been focused on the health of low-income people in the Kenscoff community (52,000 inhabitants), twenty-five kilometers South East of Port-au-Prince. Kenscoff is located on a deforested mountain 1,400 meters above the sea level with a particular climate where very low temperatures prevailed.
When the Granma newspapers team arrived at her office, Lahera was treating Gillen Jean for vaginal infection. Afterwards, she saw children Paul Richarson, 14, and two-month-old Félix Frantz, for acute respiratory infection.
There are 30 or 40 patients in the waiting room as we speak. She explains that medical needs have been mounting in Haiti for years and it is too difficult to solve all of them in a few years.
She is assisted in her office by doctors Niels Alfredo Nastares, from Perú, and local Lourdes Philippeaux, both graduated from the Latin American Medicine School in 2009 and 2010 respectively.
Dinora is in charge of the only welfare facility, a clinic, of Haiti’s Ministry of Public Health Care on that mountain. She can be seen everyday very early in the office or going up and down the hills visiting the humble houses where she relieves the suffering of Haitian families.
She says that Kenscoff has a strong middle class who can pay for treatment in private clinics, but there are many of its inhabitants who cannot afford their basic needs. Sometimes they cannot even pay the 25 gourdes (almost 50 cents of a U.S. dollar), fixed by the Public Health Care Ministry for the clinical record of the patient.
"I’ve experienced the material and existential shortages of the Haitian people," she says.
She recalls the harsh circumstances in which she had to provide assistance to the people displaced by the earthquake in the Bele I and II camps in Port-au-Prince; the long, post earthquake emergency shifts at the camp hospitals, and the medical assistance provided in Ka-Fu-Fey and Fond Verrettes. "Fond Verrettes is a rural zone close to the border with the Dominican Republic, in which I saw extreme poverty, as I’ve never seen before," she says.
She also commented the challenge of learning Creole from the Haitians that work in Dominican territory, and the cholera outbreak in the Archaie community in the West region of the country.
Comforted by her love for her thirteen-year-old son Carlos Alberto Quesada Lahera, now an eighth grader, and for her husband Eusebio Betancourt Pérez, a technician at the ETECSA telephone company in her hometown in Guantánamo; the doctor says that after her work in Haiti she will never be wrong when diagnosing cholera, malaria or typhus, diseases she had previously seen only in books.
She asks this reporter to mention how affectionate the Haitian people can be and her devotion to baseball. Although from Guantanamo, she ended the interview by expressing her support for the Santiago de Cuba baseball team to win the current series.
One year after the 12 January 2010 earthquake that killed 230,000 people and left 1.3 million people homeless, approximately one million people still live under makeshift tents and tarpaulins, close to half of whom are children. Of 180,000 destroyed homes, just 2,074 have been repaired. Of an estimated 1,268 displacement camps at least 29% have been forcibly closed: people are evicted and then search for other camps. Rubble covers much of the capital, Port-au-Prince; less than 5% has been removed, heavy lifting equipment having been withdrawn last summer. Rebuilding the airport remains the only major effort undertaken. Disputes over land ownership and plus property speculation combined with an influx of international aid workers have pushed rents beyond the reach of Haitian people who consequently have no alternative other than to remain in camps. Studies show that 40% of displacement camps do not have access to water, 30% have no access to toilets of any kind, 44% of their inhabitants drank untreated water and over 50% of children in the camps go without any food whatsoever for at least one day a week. Rape is described as ‘endemic’ in the camps.
Haiti before and after the earthquake is an indictment of the entire international order we live under and is a warning for the future of the world.
Hurricane Tomas struck on 5 November 2010. It helped to spread the cholera bacillus. Some 3,500 Haitians have subsequently died from cholera. Cholera is a ‘disease of poverty’, spread through contaminated water, sewage and fecal particles. Corpses remained uncollected for want of sufficient ambulance drivers. The cholera outbreak has been traced by a French epidemiologist to Nepalese troops serving with the UN force in Haiti.
Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said that only a fifth of the $5.6 million pledged by government donors in March 2010 had been received. The World Bank is the sponsor of the Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti whose co-chair is former US President Bill Clinton. The representative of the Organisation of American States in Haiti, Ricardo Seitenfus, said in December that Haiti had lived ‘a low intensity war’ since 1986, when the Duvalier regime was overthrown and, ‘We want to turn Haiti into a capitalist country, an export platform for the US market, it’s absurd.’ He was subsequently recalled from office. For over 200 years since the slaves rebelled against the French occupiers and declared an independent republic, French and then US capitalism have been determined that Haiti is feeble and dependent.
Haiti held presidential and legislative elections on 28 November 2010. Over 12 parties were prevented from running, including Fanmi Lavalas, the party of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide who was ousted by a military coup in 2004, and other progressive parties. The US fears that a free election would result in a government aligned with Cuba and Venezuela. Just 22.3% of the electorate turned out to vote. In Port-au-Prince, Carrefour, Delmas and Petionville, with 20% of Haiti’s electorate, turnout was an average of 12.4%. The electoral list was drawn up before the earthquake and included the names of 250,000 dead people. Many would-be voters were turned away because their names were not recognised on the lists. The head of the United Nation’s mission to Haiti said of the elections ‘everything is going fine’. The front runner of the election results has just 6% of the eligible votes. There was no conclusive result and any run-off is unlikely before March, with only right wing candidates contending. Before the votes were declared barricades had been built, tyres burned and crowds gathered in protest at the electoral fraud. They were met by troops and police from the UN MINUSTAH (UN stabilisation mission) force, led by Brazil and including other Latin American soldiers from Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Guatemala, Peru and Uruguay.
For many Haitians, MINUSTAH is seen as an occupation force. It is currently 13,000 strong, up by half since the earthquake. ‘Four days after the elections, the UN proposed a 2011 budget for MINUSTAH of $853 million, or $2.3 million a day. This amount nearly surpasses total aid distributed by Haiti’s top 30 donors and represents five times the budget the UN requested to combat cholera.’ (Beatrice Lindstrom, Counterpunch, 14 January 2011).
On 9 January 2011 The Observer ran a headline, ‘How an Irish telecoms tycoon became Haiti’s only hope of survival’, about the efforts of Denis O‘Brien, chief executive of Digicel, to help reopen a market in Port-au-Prince. Digicel supplies two-thirds of the mobile ‘phones used in Haiti. This is chauvinism. Two BBC World Service broadcasts by Edward Sturton on Haiti, surveying the country a year on from the earthquake, did not mention the Cuban effort, choosing instead to focus on US evangelical churches’ operations in the country.
With the exception of The Independent on Sunday (‘Cuban medics in Haiti put world to shame,’ Nina Lakhani 26 December 2010), the Cuban medical support for Haiti has hardly been mentioned. Lakhani states, ‘A medical brigade of 1,200 Cubans is operating all over earthquake-torn and cholera-inflicted Haiti...part of the international mission which has won the socialist state many friends, but little international recognition...Figures released last week show that Cuban medical personnel, working in 40 centres across Haiti, have treated more than 30,000 cholera patients since October. They are the largest foreign contingent, treating around 40% of cholera patients.’ Fidel Castro stated, ‘Our solidarity with the people of Haiti has a two-fold root: it is born from our ideas, but also from our history.’
The Haitian people have one way out of the hell in to which they have been thrown: to stand up, fight all those who would design their future for them, be they NGOs or governments, and join the anti-imperialist struggle, led in their hemisphere by Cuba and Venezuela – dawn is rising.
