22904: Esser: Disappearing Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

Fromk: D. Esser torx@joimail.com


COMMON SENSE 428

‘Disappearing Haiti’‘

The United States, like Argentina in the recent past, has been
accused of causing some of its ‘enemies’ to disappear. In Argentina
during the dirty war, the army took students, politicians and anyone
it didn’t like – mothers, fathers, sons and daughters and after
torturing them, dropped them from helicopters into the ocean. The US
has now been accused of the “emergency rendering”, as they call it,
of various people it suspects of terrorist inclinations. Rendering in
cooking means heating meat until the fat runs out, and the use of the
word in relations to human beings  is unnerving and repellent, to say
the least. In modern political-speak ‘rendering’ means passing off to
another state, known to practice torture, of prisoners too tough to
crack by ordinary means.  They are made to ‘disappear’  into what is
alleged  to be a worldwide gulag of secret prisons, and from which
they sometimes never emerge.  There are apparently hundreds of
‘enemies of freedom’ who have been’ rendered’ to places where they
can be tortured without any fuss from the neighbour,  the press or 
environmental or other nuisance groups. When their brains have been
reduced to jelly they may or may not be ‘rendered ‘ back to the
wherever they were picked up.  Some simply disappear. Forever.

‘Rendering’ people  is grotesque enough, but we now seem to be seeing
an attempt to ‘render’ an entire nation of some 8 million souls – the
Haitians – transporting them from the consciousness of the world to a
limbo of national nonentity,  where they can be dispensed such rights
and privileges as their captors think fit.

It all seemed to be going swimmingly, until  the Prime Minister of a
very small island decided that he would have none of it.

On Thursday, Ralph Gonsalves of St. Vincent & the Grenadines declared
that he had no intention of allowing Haiti to be rendered – he would
not, he said, sit in any confabulation of Caricom’s at which the
illegal so-called government of Haiti was represented. The lawful
government and the people of Haiti could not be so easily vaporised.

Gonsalves is a brave man.

He says he doesn't care who is displeased.

He refuses to compromise on the principles of democratic procedure
and conduct which are supposed to guide CARICOM. Gonsalves says he
was sent a letter by the Caricom bureau, via the secretariat, in
which he was in effect, asked to tick a box signifying his agreement
that Haiti’s new rulers should be admitted to the councils of
Caricom. The letter suggested that there didn’t really need to be a
Caricom meeting on the matter.

This letter to Gonsalves was the result of a foreign ministers’
visit to Haiti in which they discussed various matters with the
outlaw regime of brigands, bandits and bloodied bureaucrats which now
controls that country. Gonsalves expected that their report would
come before a meeting of Caricom heads at some time in the future. He
could not understand the astounding haste with which the matter was
handled.

It is nothing personal, says Gonsalves. Mr La Tortue may be a very
nice fellow, but since his road to power was by the forcible removal
of a “lawfully elected president, by outside forces aided and abetted
by thugs” he can see no reason to break bread with them.

He says CARICOM must meet and “All must agree”.

I think most of us see Mr Gonsalves’ point, reinforced as it is by
his statement that if Aristide could be removed as he was, the same
thing could happen to Trinidad's Manning,Jamaica's  Patterson or to
Mr Gonsalves himself.

There are others who feel the same way as Dr Gonsalves. Dr Kenny
Anthony, Prime Minister of St. Lucia seems to agreewith him  and it
is possible that Mr Spencer, the new PM of Antigua may harbour
similar sentiments as does perhaps, the President of Guyana, Mr
jagdeo.

What I find inexplicable is that any country  in the Caribbean, with
intimate experience  of numberless illegal interventions  going back
more than a century, can be foolish enough to believe that once they
have legitimised the violent overthrow of democracy, they are safe
from similar attack.  It doesn't occur to them that anyone with
enough money could pay  a couple of the gangs lately in the news to
destabilise things, upset the tourist industry, kidnap one or two
highups and demand that PJ move to, say, Ouagadougou.   

If they don’t understand this perhaps they have got some ironclad
guarantees from somewhere that they are not, at present, on the menu.

Brian Concannon of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti,
www.ijdh.org – has described the situation in an article entitled 
“Si M Pa Rele “ which is Haitian creole for ‘If I Don't Speak Out’

I think his opening deserves to be quoted in full:

“Pastor Martin Niemoller described his journey to a Nazi
concentration camp with a poem.  He had been a respected minister,
and a German national hero as a World War I submarine captain.  As
Hitler's regime became more illegal and immoral, he spoke out against
it, which led to his imprisonment, near execution, and famous poem:

First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out

because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out

because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out

because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me and there was no one left

to speak out for me.”

Brian Concannon gives a catalogue of some who are silent or
otherwise  complicit with the crimes against Haiti and its people.
These include international human rights organisations and powerful
governments

‘A search of the IACHR (InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights)
website (www.cidh.org) for "Haiti and Human Rights" leads to 434
references; but only three documents from after February 29, all from
mid-March, all generalized condemnation of violence on all sides.

‘The "International Community"- the wealthy countries that so often
lecture poor countries about human rights, are more than silent. 
They are actively blocking the efforts of countries like South Africa
and Haiti's CARICOM neighbors, who are insisting on respect for human
rights in Haiti and an investigation into the coup d’etat.”

If Gonsalves and Kenny Anthony and the rest of us are to tick that
box in the Caricom Bureau’s letter, Haiti’s last hope would have died.

We need to recognise our heroes and celebrate them, because they are
not  simply Caribbean heroes, they speak for humanity.

Copyright ©2004 John Maxwell

maxinf@cwjamaica.com
.