John Pilger
: The Kidnapping of Haiti
U.S. Navy helicopter in front of the National Palace in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, January 19, 2010. Photo by Ramon Espinosa / AP.
U.S. troops take
control:
The kidnapping of Haiti
By John Pilger / February 1, 2010
[In this article, which originally appeared in the British New Statesman
on January 28, 2010, John Pilger describes the "swift and crude" appropriation
of earthquake-ravaged Haiti by the militarized Obama administration. With George
W. Bush attending to the "relief effort" and Bill Clinton the UN's man, The
Comedians, Graham Greene's dark novel about exploited Haiti comes to mind.]
The theft of Haiti has been swift and crude. On January 22, the United States
secured “formal approval” from the United Nations to take over all air and sea
ports in Haiti, and to “secure” roads. No Haitian signed the agreement, which
has no basis in law. Power rules in an American naval blockade and the arrival
of 13,000 marines, special forces, spooks and mercenaries, none with
humanitarian relief training.
The airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, is now an American military base and
relief flights have been re-routed to the Dominican Republic. All flights
stopped for three hours for the arrival of Hillary Clinton. Critically injured
Haitians waited unaided as 800 American residents in Haiti were fed, watered and
evacuated. Six days passed before the U.S. Air Force dropped bottled water to
people suffering thirst and dehydration.
The first TV reports played a critical role, giving the impression of widespread
criminal mayhem. Matt Frei, the BBC reporter dispatched from Washington, seemed
on the point of hyperventilation as he brayed about the “violence” and need for
“security."
In spite of the demonstrable dignity of the earthquake victims, and evidence of
citizens’ groups toiling unaided to rescue people, and even an American
general’s assessment that the violence in Haiti was considerably less than
before the earthquake, Frei claimed that “looting is the only industry” and “the
dignity of Haiti’s past is long forgotten.”
Thus, a history of unerring U.S. violence and exploitation in Haiti was
consigned to the victims. “There’s no doubt,” reported Frei in the aftermath of
America’s bloody invasion of Iraq in 2003, “that the desire to bring good, to
bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now to the Middle
East... is now increasingly tied up with military power.”
In a sense, he was right. Never before in so-called peacetime have human
relations been as militarized by rapacious power. Never before has an American
president subordinated his government to the military establishment of his
discredited predecessor, as Barack Obama has done. In pursuing George W. Bush’s
policy of war and domination, Obama has sought from Congress an unprecedented
military budget in excess of $700 billion. He has become, in effect, the
spokesman for a military coup.
For the people of Haiti the implications are clear, if grotesque. With U.S.
troops in control of their country, Obama has appointed George W. Bush to the
“relief effort”: a parody surely lifted from Graham Greene’s The Comedians,
set in Papa Doc’s Haiti. As president, Bush’s relief effort following Hurricane
Katrina in 2005 amounted to an ethnic cleansing of many of New Orleans’ black
population.
In 2004, he ordered the kidnapping of the democratically-
When I was last in Haiti, I watched very young girls stooped in front of
whirring, hissing, binding machines at the Port-au-Prince Superior Baseball
Plant. Many had swollen eyes and lacerated arms. I produced a camera and was
thrown out. Haiti is where America makes the equipment for its hallowed national
game, for next to nothing. Haiti is where Walt Disney contractors make Mickey
Mouse pajamas, for next to nothing.
The U.S. controls Haiti’s sugar, bauxite, and sisal. Rice-growing was replaced
by imported American rice, driving people into the cities and towns and
jerry-built housing. Year after year, Haiti was invaded by U.S. marines,
infamous for atrocities that have been their specialty from the Philippines to
Afghanistan.
Bill Clinton is another comedian, having got himself appointed the UN’s man in
Haiti. Once fawned upon by the BBC as “Mr. Nice Guy... bringing democracy back
to a sad and troubled land," Clinton is Haiti’s most notorious privateer,
demanding de-regulation of the economy for the benefit of the sweatshop barons.
Lately, he has been promoting a $55 million deal to turn the north of Haiti into
an American-annexed “tourist playground."
Not for tourists is the U.S. building its fifth biggest embassy in
Port-au-Prince. Oil was found in Haiti’s waters decades ago and the U.S. has
kept it in reserve until the Middle East begins to run dry. More urgently, an
occupied Haiti has a strategic importance in Washington’s “rollback” plans for
Latin America. The goal is the overthrow of the popular democracies in
Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, control of Venezuela’s abundant oil reserves and
sabotage of the growing regional cooperation that has given millions their first
taste of an economic and social justice long denied by U.S.-sponsored regimes.
The first rollback success came last year with the coup against President Jose
Manuel Zelaya in Honduras who also dared advocate a minimum wage and that the
rich pay tax. Obama’s secret support for the illegal regime carries a clear
warning to vulnerable governments in central America. Last October, the regime
in Colombia, long bankrolled by Washington and supported by death squads, handed
the U.S. seven military bases to, according to U.S. air force documents, “combat
anti-US governments in the region”.
Media propaganda has laid the ground for what may well be Obama’s next war. On
December 14, researchers at the University of West England published first
findings of a ten-year study of the BBC’s reporting of Venezuela. Of 304 BBC
reports, only three mentioned any of the historic reforms of the Chavez
government, while the majority denigrated Chavez’s extraordinary democratic
record, at one point comparing him to Hitler.
Such distortion and its attendant servitude to western power are rife across the
Anglo-American corporate media. People who struggle for a better life, or for
life itself, from Venezuela to Honduras to Haiti, deserve our support.
[Australian-
Source
/ johnpilger.com