PPN leader: New situation in Haiti
By G. Dunkel
New York
Ben Dupuy, general secretary of Haiti's
National Popular Party (PPN) and co-director of the newspaper
Haïti-Progrès, recently spoke here on the new
situation in Haiti since a Feb. 29 coup removed President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
On April 16 he spoke in English to a Workers World Party
meeting. The next day he spoke in Creole to the Haitian
American Student Association at Medgar Evers College, a part of
the City University of New York, and to the Committee to
Support the PPN.
The talk at Medgar Evers was preceded by the showing of a
documentary film, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," about
the failed 2002 coup in Venezuela during which Venezuelan
President Hugo Chávez was kidnapped and nearly
transported out of the country. A vigorous discussion
followed.
Commenting on the film, Dupuy said that Chávez had
prepared the people of Venezuela ideologically to resist the
coup everyone saw coming by informing them of their
constitutional rights. While Fanmi Lavalas, Aristide's party,
is organized to fight for election victories, the PPN is an
"ideological" party, organized on a community level, then on a
district level. Every four years, the PPN holds a delegated
national conference to select its national leadership and set
policy.
The PPN held several big demonstrations in Port-au-Prince
before and shortly after the coup to support democracy in Haiti
and Aristide's constitutional right to serve out his five-year
term.
Haiti, currently under U.S. and French occupation, is now
seldom in the news. However, an unidentified "top U.S.
official" told the Los Angeles Times of April 15 that U.S.
forces, under a United Nations mandate, will be there for at
least a year.
Dupuy feels that to understand the current class struggle in
Haiti, one must understand the semi-feudal class structure that
came out of the Haitian revolution two centuries ago. In
pre-revolutionary Haiti, there were three major classes:
colons--French who owned the land, the source of wealth in that
society; affranchis--ex-slaves who bought their freedom or were
freed by their masters for personal reasons; and slaves, the
vast majority.
Most of the leaders in the Haitian revolution-- Toussaint
Louverture, Alex andre Pétion, Henri Christophe, Capois
la Mort, and even Jean-Jacques Dessa lines--were affranchis and
had been officers in the French army at one time or another.
Their struggle's main objective was political equality with the
colons.
After Napoleon made a coup in France and decided to
re-enslave Haiti, the affranchis realized they could not win
their struggle with the French without an alliance with the
slaves, whose leader was Jean-Jacques Dessalines. They made the
alliance and drove out the French, but Dessalines, who wanted
to go further, was killed in Haiti's first coup in 1806.
The upper officers in the Haitian army became the large
landowners, or grand ons. Their struggle with the compradore
bourgeoisie, primarily a merchant class, provided most of the
instability in Haitian politics up to the U.S. intervention of
1915. After the U.S. intervention ended in 1934, the United
States backed the brutal Duvaliers, representatives of the
grand ons, until the mid-1980s. Then Washing ton supported a
democratic phase, expecting the candidate it favored and funded
to win, but was dismayed when Aristide, a priest popular with
the very poor, was elected.
The United States trained, supplied and used some of the
most brutal Duvalier supporters in the recent coup. The
"democratic opposition" to Aristide, which represents the
compradore bourgeoisie, has welcomed U.S./French intervention
and violence from the paramilitaries tied to the grandons in
order to oust Aristide.
All of this has made life much harder for the Haitian
people. UN spokesperson Alejandro Chicheri says the 23 health
centers monitored by the World Food Program in Haiti's capital,
Port-au-Prince, can't meet the demands for food. Prices have
shot up by 30 percent since the coup. "Fifty percent of the
population is chronically malnourished," says Chicheri, "and
it's not just food. Many also have no access to clean
water."
Groups like PPN are resisting under difficult conditions
while preparing for the next phase of the struggle.
Reprinted from the April 29, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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