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MAKING CONTACT Transcript: #02-99 The Peoples Will: Haiti's Peasant Movement Phillip Babich: Welcome to Making Contact, an international radio program seeking to create connections between people, vital ideas, and important information. This week on Making Contact:- Beverly Bell: If the U.S. has an interest in controlling the security apparatus in Haiti, which we know it does, they have been able to do this in part through the new police force. Pierre La Boissiere: It's logical particularly if the Lavalas government is not liked by the U.S. It's not there and everybody knows it. So there are too many opportunities to disrupt and place individuals and people in key positions, to create disruption and cause tension, particularly in the weakened state of the Haitian government where it is right now. Phillip Babich: In 1991 the democratically elected president of Haiti was ousted from power after a coup, tacitly approved by the United States. Three years later the United States helped to re-install Jean Bertrand Aristide, a leader of Haiti's peasant movement, but with economic and political stipulations. On this program we take a look at the social movement in Haiti that is organizing against privatization despite heavy pressure from the United States and international financial institutions. I'm Phillip Babich, your host this week on Making Contact. The three years that followed the 1991 coup in Haiti, led by Generals Raoul Cedreas and Philip Biamby, were brutal. A paramilitary organization known as FRAPH tortured and killed thousand of Aristide supporters and leaders of the Lavalas movement. FRAPH's top commander, Emanuel Constant, was on the CIA payroll. In fact, the establishment of the organization had been aided by the US Defense Intelligence Agency. Allan Nairn is an investigative journalist who has written for the Washington Post, New York Times and The Nation magazine. According to Nairn, who has covered Haitian paramilitary ties to the US, President-in-exile Jean Bertrand Aristide eventually succumbed to US demands for Structural Adjustment Programs prescribed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. These institutions wanted the Haitian government to privatize public sectors of the economy and eliminate import tariffs, a fundamental shift away from Aristide's previous efforts to bring health care and education to the country's poor. Alan Nairn: Aristide was told that before coming back he would have to accept two conditions. One, a US military occupation of Haiti, two, abandonment of his economic program and acceptance of the World Bank, IMF Structural Readjustment Plan involving the mass layoff and the redistribution of wealth upward Aristide resisted. But then the second tool, the paramilitary tool, was brought directly into play. The FRAPH, the paramilitary terrorist group which disappeared, tortured and assassinated thousands of Haitian popular movement leaders, was launched at the behest of the US defense intelligence agency in the person of Colonel Patrick Collins who is the DIA attaché in Port Au Prince. The leader of the FRAPH was placed on the payroll of the CIA, having sometimes weekly meetings with the CIA station chief in Haiti, John Camborian where he would pay Constant, Emanual Constant, in cash. As Lawrence Pesulo, the special envoy to Haiti at the time told me, "The US said to Aristide, 'Look, FRAPH is becoming the dominate force on the ground. You are losing your people, you have no choice but to cut a deal with us.'" And he did. It was called the restoration of democracy in Haiti. Phillip Babich: On September 19, 1994, 20,000 US troops landed in Haiti by order of President Clinton. Generals Cedras and Biamby were offered exile in Panama, and US soldiers secured the country. Aristide signed off on the U.S. conditions for his return, but, as Beverly Bell notes, he never implemented the plan. Bell is a US citizen who has worked for the Haitian democracy movement for 18 years. She served on President Aristide's staff while he was in exile. Beverly Bell: What's interesting to note is that while Aristide was forced to sign off on a plan in order to be allowed to return, this was a condition made by the US government to pave the way for his return, he never allowed that plan to be promulgated. And for the remainder of his term in office, the government effectively blocked that plan. And the government to this day has tried to put a halt on some of the more nefarious elements of the Structural Adjustment Program in Haiti. Another interesting point was that immediately upon the invasion by the US Marines and other forces in Haiti, in September of '94, just prior to Aristide's return home, the Marines, or the US military rather, went in and seized all the documents from FRAPH offices throughout the country. This is extraordinary when you think about it. There were photos of victims, names of victims, testimonies, tapes, names of perpetrators, lists of all the FRAPH members, and the US went in and confiscated this material and stole it. It's a violation of international law, and to this day, now, refuses to turn it back over to the Haitian government, which is desperately pleading for this material because they want to prosecute and bring these people to justice. Phillip Babich: Many activists believe that the documents will also reveal how closely US military advisors were connected to the death squad activity promulgated by the FRAPH. This raises an important question: How could US officials on the one hand claim that they were restoring democracy by reinstalling Aristide, and on the other hand support the violent paramilitary activity that undermined his leadership? Pierre La Boissiere is a Haitian activist based in the United States. Pierre La Boissiere: It was clearly double talk that was going on. And that's why to me, the return of President Aristide is so significant and marks a very important victory from the people's point of view. Because it was the people of the US, the people of the world, who stood up with the Haitian people in solidarity with the Haitian people who were fighting in Haiti. Albeit non-violently, but carrying on an active resistance - that's what led to the return of President Aristide. And so my take on that is that it was something that took place in spite of many powerful forces within the US administration - many powerful forces within the many government, international governments - and the return of Aristide took place in spite of all those forces that were aligned against the Haitian people. Phillip Babich: In 1996, Aristide's hand-picked successor, Rene Preval, was elected president. The Haitian government has managed to stave off some of the demands of the World Bank, the IMF, and the United States. But splits within the country's leadership over economic policy and pressure from foreign investors have led to some changes. Haiti has privatized sectors of the economy that were formerly public: namely, the flour and cement industries. And, the country has eliminated some import tariffs on agricultural products. This, says Bell, is having a devastating effect on Haiti's rural population. Beverly Bell: Haiti is a country where the vast majority of people are illiterate peasants who are living off of the goods of their land. So in villages all over peasants are out with their machete, which is their one tool, working their little plots of land. And then via a series of middle men, that food goes to market, Women who carry the produce in woven baskets on their heads, and they go set up little markets and sell, and the whole economy has been perpetuated in this way. Well, what's happening now is that in a local market people can buy rice imported from Miami for cheaper than they can buy rice that was made in the next province over in Haiti. So that all of those people who supported themselves and survived through that rice production, no longer can. That's just one example, but that perhaps paints it vividly enough that people can understand what it means when tariff controls are lifted such that foreign-made goods are flooding Haiti. Phillip Babich: U.S. farmers often under-cut the prices of Haitian crops because they produce on a much large scale and, in some cases, their crops are subsidized by the U.S. government. Max Blanchet, a Haitian activist who's with the Bay Area Haitian-American Council in California, says that rural farmers are having to abandon their land and seek employment in the country's capital, Port Au Prince. Max Blanchet: When you lift tariffs, it means that imported rice and beans and corn flood the Haitian market. This means that Haitian farmers, that are much less productive than their American counterparts end up not being able to compete. So not being able to eke a living in the countryside, they've got to leave the countryside and look for some form of livelihood elsewhere. This means migrating to the slums of Port Au Prince. When I grew up in Haiti in the ‘50s, Port Au Prince was a fairly pleasant city of 150,000 people. We have had a huge influx of people into Port Au Prince. Today, we have 2 million people in Port Au Prince. And unless the impact of structural adjustment is minimized on the Haitian agricultural sector, I can very well see that we will have 5 million people in Port Au Prince and conditions there will truly become terrible. Already we are having a serious problem with criminality in Haiti. And in part this has to do with the fact that the Haitian rural life is being de-structured and people are forced out. Their whole way of life has been destroyed. Which means that people in a sociological sense loose their mooring completely, and you throw them into the slums in Port Au Prince, and really it's a witches brew for very serious problems. Phillip Babich: Blanchet adds that this flood of people into Port Au Prince is now a desperate labor pool for manufacturers that produce clothing and other goods for multinational companies. Human rights groups report that work conditions and wages are abysmal. Max Blanchet: In some circles, I would not be surprised if a very cynical calculation is being made. These people will migrate to the cities, we'll have a large labor pool of maybe a million-and-a-half people easily manipulated. People that are not typically protected by strong unions, and we will be able to employ them for the 10 or 20 or 30 cents an hour that some transnational companies like to pay in the Third World. Those sweat shops, those companies that are coming in setting up sweat shops in Haiti, those companies are not coming to enjoy the mango trees and the sugar cane and the beautiful sunshine. Phillip Babich: Haitian activist Pierre La Boissiere... Pierre La Boissiere: They are coming in there to actually take advantage of the part of the misery, this is beyond poverty, of the misery of our people. When a company comes in and sets up shop either for baseball manufacturing or to manufacture clothing, what ends up happening is they have maybe a hundred people ready to accept, for every single job that's available, ‘cause people are starving. And they can end up paying people as little as 28 cents an hour. Shereen Meraji: You're listening to Making Contact, a production of the National Radio Project. If you want more information about the subject of this week's program, or you would like to learn how you can get involved with Making Contact, please give us a call. It's toll free. 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tapes and transcript orders. That's 800-529-5736. Phillip Babich: Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world. About 75% of the population lives in poverty. An elite class of land owners and military leaders controls much of the country's resources. Despite harsh economic conditions and lack of formal schooling, Haitian peasants are extraordinarily organized against economic globalization, according to many accounts. Max Blanchet... Max Blanchet: This has always impressed me. I've been to Haiti seven or eight times in the last eight years, and whenever I travel in the countryside, even to the most remote areas, I will run into your most common of peasants and we'll have a discussion about IMF, or the World Bank. And they are well aware of the issues. They are well aware of the policies that these institutions are trying to impose on us. And they are well aware of the pit falls. I think that to sum up, these institutions would like to integrate the Haitian economy in the world economy. And many people opposed to that simply say that this will favor the five or ten percent of the population equipped to play a role in that world economy. The vast majority of people in Haiti are not equipped to play a role. That if you force them into that world economy, you will displace millions of people. And you will destroy a way of life. Phillip Babich: One way Haitians are protecting this way of life is by implementing projects run by community members to fulfill the needs that have been identified by the people themselves. To facilitate some of these projects, Josette Perard founded the Lambi Fund, an organization that funds and consults grassroots groups that work to meet the needs of their communities. Herself a member of the peasant movement in Haiti, Perard started the Lambi Fund during the coup years and worked in secret form her home. Perard says that the Lambi Fund started with 4 projects. Now there are 41. Her co-director, Kati Maternowska, translates. Josette Perard: We have agricultural projects in Haiti, for instance, where we have grain storage projects or we have projects that offer cultivators in Haiti access to tools and to seeds and credit, because planters in Haiti don’t have access to these things, and as a result, they can never plant; they are too poor. We also have irrigation projects that give groups of cultivators the chance to irrigate their land for the first time ever. For instance we have people, delegations, down to Haiti to see our projects, to see with their own eyes the transformation that has occurred in these communities. When people, peasants and cultivators, and women within organizations themselves, change the face of their communities then that's when we can prove that this change is real. We also have community based initiatives and women's projects where we work within small community stores providing infrastructure in the countryside for people who are very isolated. We're providing loans to market women. And we have within all of these projects what we call "formation" which is a unique blend of training and popular education so that people can take on the management and administration aspects of the projects. Beverly Bell: I cannot stress how strong the peasant organizations are throughout the country. People are so aware that it is their actions as citizens which is going to make the difference in Haiti. And they do not again know this theoretically, they do not know it through pulling a ballot in an occasional election. They know it through having seen the results throughout the course of their history, and certainly especially today, of their action -- immediate reaction. And a change in policy or a change in some government direction or land use policy, or even whether an irrigation stream goes 50 feet over farther to the right where it can irrigate the peasants land instead of just the rich landowners land. So they are very, very clear on the importance of their own mobilization. Haitians say, "We are dead already so we have nothing left to lose." This is an expression in Haiti, and they are very clear about it. They say, "We will not die lying down, we will die on our feet." And so it is true, they have very little to lose and they are willing to risk it all to get the justice to which they feel they are entitled. Phillip Babich: Although observers say that political violence is nowhere near the levels experienced during the coup years -- a credit to the organizing efforts of the Lavalas movement -- recent police actions indicate that some repression is still at work. And, says Pierre La Boissiere, there's evidence that the United States military may still have a hand in internal security matters, a continuation of the U.S. Occupation in 1994. Pierre La Boissiere: You have the U.S. coming in with about 20,000 troops, well, the U.S.-- the U.N., We know the leadership of the U.N. And so you are dealing with a situation where the movement has been greatly weakened. And there had to be a police force put in the place of the Haitian military, which was abolished. And you are dealing with a government with no money, no resources, in a very weakened state. And clearly there are all kinds of ways to put pressure to create, particularly when the U.S. could really put pressure in order to train those troops. So when you bring crack police unit here in the U.S. to be trained and you're picking certain people and placing orders, there is too much of a tendency, too much control, and too much, too many opportunities to place elements in there to actually not carry out the will of the people or to carry out the people's agenda. So to me it's not something that really poses a mystery. It's logical according to the logic of -- particularly if the Lavalas government is not liked by the U.S. It's not, and everybody knows it. So there are too many opportunities to disrupt and place individuals in key positions to create disruption, cause tension and particularly in the weakened state of the Haitian government where it's at right now. Phillip Babich: In fact, the U.S. government arranged to train Haiti's new police force, after President Aristide's return, in the United States. Beverly Bell... Beverly Bell: The United States government insisted, through a series of pressures and manipulations, that the police force be trained in Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri in the United States. A lot of CIA recruiting, we know for a fact, was taking place there. So if the U.S. has an interest in controlling the security apparatus in Haiti, which we know it does, they have been able to do this in part through the new police force. So the police force, of course, is a part of the Haitian government. As such the President of Haiti is in control of it, but one could argue that there are other pieces of that control mechanism that is outside of the hands of the government. Phillip Babich: Haiti's elite police unit is the Company for Intervention and Maintenance of Order, or CIMO. Last April CIMO agents raided a women's primary health clinic, claiming that they were searching for weapons. The raid resulted in a quarter of a million dollars worth of damages. No weapons were found. In another incident, CIMO agents destroyed a radio station in the city of Milot. Later they went searching for the city's assistant mayor, roughing up his family and clubbing peasants along the way. The mayor and assistant mayor went into hiding for a period of time following the CIMO raids. Peasants in Milot have been waging direct action campaigns to reclaim their land that they say was wrongfully taken from them in the 1980s. The mayor and assistant mayor of Milot are in support of these actions and oppose privatization. Pierre La Boissiere: When I talk of CIMO, there was a problem here at Milot with the Movement Paysan of Milot where CIMO units went to Milot according to news reports, news accounts. And really destroyed the headquarters and the radio station and even shot the guardian who was at the radio. And there was also an attack by CIMO against a clinic, a woman's clinic under the pretext that weapons were coming in and where equipment was destroyed. And this is according to many news reports. These are organizations that are really part and parcel of the rebuilding of Haiti. These are organizations and they are the ones that seem to be targeted according to many news reports. So this poses a major problem. Phillip Babich: Le Boissiere adds that some components of the paramilitary organization FRAPH are still in operation, adding to the climate of fear peasant organizers face. That's one of the reasons there is an international effort building to try and recover the FRAPH documents that U.S. troops confiscated during the 1994 intervention. Pierre La Boissiere: Many of the FRAPH, of the documents taken from the Haitian military and from FRAPH, which detailed the structure of the organization and who the players were, were taken outside of Haiti and placed here in the U.S. And so the Haitian government, and the police force, never had access to those documents so they could really dismantle that terrorist network. And many of those folks still have their weapons and they are continuing -- albeit at a much reduced level -- but they are continuing their terroristic tactics. Max Blanchet: It's extremely important to recover the documents because you have to put all of this in the right framework. There is a tremendous yearning on the part of the Haitian population to have justice. The Truth Commission has documented that, indeed, there were thousands of serious cases of human rights violations in Haiti following the coup d'etat in September of 1991. And the Haitian population by and large wants justice. It is asking that people be brought to trial so that they can account for the crimes and can be punished for the crimes. But in order to do so properly, you have to be able to document the cases. And we think that the FRAPH documents will be of immense help to the Haitian government in terms of documenting its case against many people responsible for human rights violations in Haiti. The documents in theory are in Port Au Prince in the basement of the American Embassy. They have been sanitized. We don't know to what extent and for what purpose. But the Haitian government, and the Haitian civil society, pretty much backing the Haitian government, is insisting that these documents be returned in their original form. That's where we stand right now. Phillip Babich: So how has the legacy of repression affected the Haitian peasant movement? Josette Perard... Josette Perard: To respond to this I can say that the Haitian people have suffered enormously. They've come out from underneath a dictatorship that lasted for many years, they had the hope of democracy, democratic elections in their country, and that was taken away from them by a brutal coup d'etat. But you know, when you work with popular organizations, when you work with associations of cultivators, and women, and peasants, you begin to see that they grasp their life again. And they have a certain hope, a certain volunteerism within them to change their lives. And in spite of all of the horrible things that have happened to the Haitian people, they remain hopeful. Phillip Babich: Meanwhile, an international movement is taking shape that supports Haitian peasants and their claims for land reform and the return of the FRAPH documents. Journalist Allan Nairn says that there are two fundamental reasons why Americans should support human rights in Haiti and other countries where repression is taking place. Allan Nairn: Most people don't agree with mass murder. Most people don't agree with driving people over the brink. Second, it's also a pocketbook issue. When we back repressive forces overseas, it drives down wages in places like Haiti and Indonesia. That gives an incentive to firms here to shut down production and move overseas in search of repressed labor. It's a bad deal for workers on both ends. Workers at the other end of the gun get terror. Workers here get downward pressure on their wages and lose their jobs. And this is a worldwide system. It's not just American workers who lose their jobs to terror, Haitian workers do too. The H.H. Cutler plant, the sub-contractor for Disney making the Pocahontis pajamas for Disney at 28 cents, paying their workers 28 cents per hour, they recently shut down production, and announced they are moving to Indonesia of all places. Who would have thought Haiti could be undercut? When you have this worldwide system of repression, paramilitary repression on the one hand, economic -- outside economic pressure imposed on poor populations fostered by institutions like the IMF, by trade agreements like NAFTA and GATT, institutions like the World Trade Organizations and the now pending MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investment) you create the system where workers everywhere are played off against each other. So it’s a moral issue, it’s a pocketbook issue, there are all kinds of people who can be pulled together to fight this. I think we can build a real power-base in this country for human rights and economic justice. Beverly Bell: One thing I love so much about the Haitian struggle, is that they show what can be done to others who do not believe that it can be done. And people all over the world can take succor and strength from the fact that this little population of desperately poor people have been able to, not only change their own reality in opposition to all these enormous forces allied against them, but have been able to also create models in world history that no other people have been able to do. And to me, one of the lessons that we can draw form this is a contrast to what one often hears in the Unites States - what can one person do? How can I possibly make a difference. In fact, the Haitian people, among the weakest people in the world, have shown the fallacy of that form of thinking. And I think that one of the lessons that Haitians give to a global movement for a change is not that anything is possible, and that the power of our own will and our own determination makes a tremendous, tremendous difference. Phillip Babich: That's it for this edition of Making Contact, a look at Haiti and its peasant movement. Thanks for listening. Special thanks this week to Sue Supriano and Eric Hamako who provided recorded portions. Susan Celli and Ingrid Deboer assisted with production. Laura Livoti is our Managing Director, Peggy Law is our Executive Director. Our Production Assistant is Shereen Meraji. Norman Solomon is Senior Advisor. Our National Producer is David Barsamian. And I'm your host and Managing Producer, Phillip Babich. If you want more information about the subject of these week's program, call the National Radio Project at 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tapes and transcripts. That's 800-529-5736. Making Contact is an independent production. We're committed to providing a forum for voices and opinions not often heard in the mass media. If you have suggestions for future programs, we'd like to hear from you. Our theme music is by the Charlie Hunter Trio. Bye for now. |