Empty bellies and empty elections
By
G. Dunkel
Published Nov 19, 2005 11:11 AM
The desperate situation of the people of
imperialist-occupied Haiti has grown worse. Hunger and random brutality,
according to a report produced by the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights
and the Latin American office of UNICEF, are the daily fare of children and
teenagers in Haiti.
Of course, UNICEF didn’t put its conclusions so
bluntly. It merely reported that, in 15 percent of the zones included in its
nationwide survey, children were killed by gunfire. In one-third of the zones
children were either injured by gunfire or beaten. In urban areas, where
violence is most common, rapes of children have increased markedly.
Fewer
and fewer children are going to school in this country where the illiteracy rate
is more than 50 percent because schools and the streets leading to them are too
dangerous. In about 70 percent of the zones UNICEF surveyed, families had fled
to safer areas.
Much of the burden of the current situation in Haiti is
falling on its children. Hunger affects them more severely since they are still
growing and they are less capable of resisting violence. But their parents and
other adults have also suffered. An estimated 10,000 people throughout Haiti
have been killed by violence since the U.S.-backed coup began in early 2004 and
more than 3,000 supporters of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide are currently
political prisoners.
UNICEF is pleading for compassion and mercy and aid
from the very countries that created, deepened and intensified the misery of
Haiti: the United States, Canada and France, with the assistance of Brazil.
The U.S. government, with some technical and political cooperation from
France, organized and implemented the coup that removed from office
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s democratically elected president. U.S.
Marines from the ambassador’s bodyguard then put Aristide on a U.S. plane
that took him to the Central African Republic.
When the U.S. and France
had to pull back a bit from Haiti in order to fulfill more pressing
commitments—the U.S. in Iraq, France in the Ivory Coast—Canada
stepped up its role, spending at least $100 million to prop up the current,
illegitimate government that Washington imposed on Haiti.
The current UN
approach to “solving” Haiti’s problems is a
“selection/election” of a president and parliament that will do what
they are told and certainly not challenge the U.S.’s political control in
the Caribbean and Latin America or demand reparations from France for imposing a
crushing debt on Haiti. In 1825, France forced Haiti to pay French plantation
owners 150 million gold francs in compensation for freed slave laborers.
According to an estimate by the Aristide government, this would amount to $21
billion today. The Aristide government was actively seeking this amount as
reparations when it was overthrown.
Currently the Provisional Electoral
Council (CEP) claims to have registered 3 million Haitians for the proposed
elections, but only a handful of its fancy identification cards—which
require thumb prints and photos—have been distributed. The CEP has been
forced to postpone the first round of elections, which was scheduled for Nov. 17
but has been pushed back to Dec. 11 and Dec. 18, despite the fact that de facto
Prime Minister Gérard Latortue made a round of international visits at
the end of October to the UN Security Council and various bodies in Europe
swearing up and down that the next president of Haiti would take office as
constitutionally mandated on Feb. 7, 2006.
The CEP has removed three
candidates from the roster of 39 who are running for president because they have
foreign passports, which under Haitian law means they are no longer citizens.
The CEP assigned identification numbers to the 43 parties and political groups
running in the elections. Some of the concerned parties registered loud
protests, charging the draw was rigged because their numbers weren’t in
the box.
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
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