A very brief thumbnail history of Haiti, going back to 1804

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A very brief thumbnail history of Haiti, going back to 1804

text, audio and video at: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/20/journalist_kim_ives_on_how_decades

AMY GOODMAN: Kim, you know, unfortunately, at times like these, in global catastrophes, that’s when the world pays attention, and in this case, it’s attention to Haiti. You started in 1991 with the two coups against Aristide. A very brief thumbnail history of Haiti, going back to 1804, if you will?

KIM IVES: OK, thumbnail—1804, the first and last slave revolution in history, the first black republic in the world, the first independent nation of Latin America, which became the touchstone of all the other revolutions. It wasn’t until sixty years later that it was recognized by the government of Abraham Lincoln after the Civil War.

Then, in 1915, US Marines invaded the country and took control of the bank, took control of the government. They stayed there for nineteen years, ’til 1934. After that, they put in place an outfit called the Garde d’Haiti, the Guard of Haiti, which acted as a proxy force to maintain US interests in Haiti. And then that finally gave birth in 1957 to the dictatorship of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. He became president for life, passed on his title of president for life to his son Jean-Claude Duvalier when he died in 1971.

AMY GOODMAN: And the role of US in that?

KIM IVES: And the US was essentially supporting those governments all the time, for geopolitical reasons. Haiti was the principal bulwark against the eastward push of, quote-unquote, “Communism” coming from neighboring Cuba. And so, therefore, the Duvalier regimes, hugely unpopular, were propped up, given military support by and economic cooperation from the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: A kleptocracy, the dictators getting richer and the people getting poorer?

KIM IVES: Exactly. And then, in 1986, they started to see that this particular paradigm was creating too many Che Guevaras, too many revolutions in Latin America, and they switched over to these facade elections of putting supposedly democratic leaders in, but they were purchased elections.

Haiti was the first country in Latin America to foil this US-engineered election scenario by electing a poor parish priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to the presidency. And at the time of his inauguration on February 7, 1991, he declared the second independence of Haiti, because Haiti was going to become independent of the imperial domination of the United States and France. And they quickly responded with a coup d’état eight months later. He was sent into exile. And again, the earthquake centered in Washington and Paris of the past twenty-four years began.

AMY GOODMAN: So you have the first coup against Aristide. He’s kept out for three years. The coup happened under George H.W. Bush, but continued through President Clinton. By the way, one of the major platforms of President Aristide when he first came to power was to increase the minimum wage.

The second time he was elected, in 2004, immediately pushed out, taken out by US military and security, this was a story Democracy Now! listeners and viewers might remember well, because I followed a delegation to the Central African Republic, where he and Mildred Aristide were dumped, were essentially being held. And Maxine Waters, Congress member from Los Angeles, Randall Robinson, founder of TransAfrica, I covered them going to the Central African Republic, and they brought back the Aristides to this hemisphere nearby Jamaica. Ultimately they ended up in South Africa, where they are today. They could not come back to this country. Tremendous pressure from the United States, the officials. It was Secretary of State Colin Powell at the time, Condoleezza Rice, saying he was not to return to this hemisphere.

Now, from exile in South Africa, President Aristide held a news conference. He issued a statement saying he wants to return. I’ve put this question to a number of people here in Haiti. In Washington, President Obama immediately appointed President Clinton and President George W. Bush to spearhead the fund-raising effort to help the people of Haiti—three presidents, a united front, saying this is not partisan. And so, here in Haiti, the question of Aristide’s return now. I mean, the US controls the airport. Prime Minister Préval ceded the control of the airport to the United States. But Aristide has asked to return. What about that image of, not to mention the resources of Prime Minister Préval, prime minister—previous prime minister Aristide—both presidents, rather—standing together and saying, this is beyond politics, we have to rebuild our country?

KIM IVES: Well, that’s exactly it. I was standing in front of the General Hospital yesterday after we went through and saw the horrors there, and I was speaking to a crowd of people outside on the corner. And that very question came up. Why can’t President Aristide come back? He wants to. He has said so. The government hasn’t given or renewed his diplomatic passport, which has expired. They haven’t given him a laissez-passer to come to the country. That’s all that’s needed.

If the government of Barack Obama or any other government wanted to really provide support here, even maybe more than all the C-130s we see offloading not just food and medical supplies, but guns, and lots of them, this would be—to send a plane to South Africa and bring Aristide here, it would create such a tremendous groundswell, a counter earthquake, if you will, of popular hope and pride and victory, that it would go a long way to rebuilding the necessary moral balance needed to weather the storm.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Kim Ives, I want to thank you very much for being with us and ask one last question, and that’s about popular organizations in this country. Who has the power here? How are people organizing? This whole issue of security that has been raised over and over again to explain why aid hasn’t come from this area—we’re in the area of the airport where there is so much aid that has been stockpiled—and gone out to communities, so why the UN has said, for example, Léogâne, epicenter of the earthquake, that they would only come there after they could guarantee security.

KIM IVES: Like you said, Amy, this is the nub of the question. Security is not the issue. We see throughout Haiti the population themselves organizing themselves into popular committees to clean up, to pull out the bodies from the rubble, to build refugee camps, to set up their security for the refugee camps. This is a population which is self-sufficient, and it has been self-sufficient for all these years.

It’s not now that a bunch of Marines have to come in with big M-16s and start yelling at them. Watching the scene in front of the General Hospital yesterday said it all. Here were people who were going in and out of the hospital bringing food to their loved ones in there or needing to go to the hospital, and there were a bunch of Marine—of US 82nd Airborne soldiers in front yelling in English at this crowd. They didn’t know what they were doing. They were creating more chaos rather than diminishing it. It was a comedy, if it weren’t so tragic.

Here is—they had no business being there. Sure, if there’s some way where you have an army of bandits, which we haven’t seen, on any mass scale going and attacking, maybe you might bring in some guys like that. But right now, people don’t need guns. They need gauze, as I think one doctor put it. And this is the essence of—it’s just the same way they reacted after Katrina. It’s the same way they acted—the victims are what’s scary. They’re the other. They’re black people who, you know, had the only successful slave revolution in history. What could be more threatening?

AMY GOODMAN: And the community organizations in place here?

KIM IVES: Oh, and the community organizations, we saw it the other night up at Matthew 25, where we’re staying, the community. A shipload—a truckload of food came in in the middle of the night unannounced. It could have been a melee. The local popular organization, Pity Drop , was contacted. They immediately mobilized their members. They came out. They set up a perimeter. They set up a cordon. They lined up about 600 people who were staying on the soccer field behind the house, which is also a hospital, and they distributed the food in an orderly, equitable fashion. They were totally sufficient. They didn’t need Marines. They didn’t need the UN. They didn’t need any of these things, which we’re being told also in the press and by Hillary Clinton and the foreign ministers that they need. These are things that people can do for themselves and are doing for themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: Kim Ives, thanks very much. Kim Ives writes for Haiti Liberté.
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