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Haiti and Humiliation: Gauze Not Guns
Sun, January 31, 2010 11:00:49 AMFrom: swaneagle harijan View Contact
To: wononorb@gmail.com

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Haiti and Humiliation: Gauze Not Guns by swaneagle harijan

February 29, 2004, i lived in Berkeley working as a gardener with my companera of Women In Black, Jane Welford. We heard the story on KPFA about the kidnapping of President Jean Bertrand Aristide by US Marines. Democracy Now! journalist, Amy Goodman, accompanied him on his exile flight to Central Republic of Africa. It was atrocious to realize the only democratically elected president in the history of Haiti was taken out. A few days later, we were able to attend an event in Oakland featuring Piere La Bossiere, a Haitian living in the Bay Area, Representative Barbara Lee and Kevin Pina, a longtime documenter of Haitian resisters. It was informative and enraging. In the aftermath of the coup, several thousand Haitians were killed with activists supporting Aristide being targeted. Racist demonization and labeling resisters as gangs continues to this day. The degrading manner in which Haitians are treated is portrayed as justified in
mainstream media.

The attitudes of some people i talk to about the current earthquake fiasco are startlingly ignorant, tho Bob's Bakery here on Vashon raised $12,000 on 2 Sundays to go to organizations the owners are familiar with due to their many trips to Haiti. Several organizations and businesses are following suit and musicians all over the northwest have benefits lined up for months to come, including a student organization my daughter is part of at Seattle Central Community College planning an all ages evemt at Vera March 13. My son's reggae band is involved already in performing at a number of these..

Haiti's desperate poverty is legendary; the poorest country in the western Hemisphere. Few Americans bother to educate themselves about Haiti, so few know it was the only successful slave rebellion overthrowing the French. Since that day in 1804, Haitians have fought French, English and US colonizers.
Their defiant resistance has cost them basic human rights as corporate colonizers continually punish those who do not submit.

Starvation, 80 % illiteracy, intentional US suppression of infrastructure, Free Trade rice (cheap import that ruined Haitian rice farmers similar to free trade corn that ruined 2 million Mexican farmers) have kept the people scrambling to survive deplorable conditions. Mothers were forced to make cookies from dirt as recent as last year in an effort to stave off hunger among their children. When the global economic downturn began it's spiral, Haiti was one place when people became frantic in their struggle to attain food as was the case in many countries worldwide where the wealthy hoard irregardless of hunger among their less fortunate neighbors. Ah, such are the times of unfettered greed, compassion fatigue and jaded privilege.

Once again, brave Amy Goodman made her way to do eye witness reporting from the ground in Haiti. She conveyed with simple clarity the truth of Haiti's crisis: from the clueless US Marine with his big gun perched on a tripod in front of the heavily damaged hospital in Port au Prince; to the rubble where she went searching for Eve Ensler's dear friend,Myriam Merlet, only to find her dead; to the rural community where a helicopter landed with no one getting out, then taking off to dump bread on the heads of injured, hungry and thirsty people below. The doctor in the hospital described the horror of amputating people's limbs using a hardware store hack saw with no anesthetic or antibiotics while the US military was busy taking over the airport and hoarding food, water and medical supplies. He said that we need gauze not guns. His disgust at US and UN ineptness was evident.

Amy saw signs placed all over in English,not Creole: We need water. We need food. Help us.

Daily i hear reports that further my shame of being Amerikkkan. The golf course in Port au Prince was made into a camp with 60,000 people. Food and water were given to 10,000 for several days. Understandably, the remaining people were upset. The US 82nd Airborne, occuppying the Port au Prince airport with 20,000 troops, polices food and water. Lieutenant Brad Kerfoot said that the people had misbehaved the day before, so no one would receive food or water in the camp. He said the Haitian victims acted ungrateful. Two Mexican planes loaded with medical supplies were turned back by US troops. Now hundreds of critically injured patients are being denied evacuation, again by US military. The stories of ineptness in distributing food, water and medical aid is astounding. Seems it is more important to control it than give it. The scope of the idiocy rivals the FEMA, National Guard and Blackwater debacle after Hurricane Katrina. This racist military control freakism at the cost of human life is a global display of the US value of humiliating destitution rather than acting effectively with compassion.

When my teenage daughter heard of this tragedy, she told me she wants to go to help in Haiti after graduation. One of my clients already has begun donating weekly to a fund to make that possilbe. We will find an organization known among progressives for addressing immediate need over bureacracy. We must intervene where possible to truly direct effort and aid to those most in need. IMMEDIATELY! Humiliating those in such life threatening circumstances is simply the need for unjustified power to keep itself blind to true solution. Until those who are excessively wealthy spread it, until those who are overarmed lay them down, until petty tyrants cease perpetrating corporate mentality, until the disease of racism is uprooted, we will continue to see the US military and it's concept of aid entrenched with the genocidal attitudes that enforce humiliation. Such depraved behavior is what the world now associates with Amerikkkans....

In peaceful struggle,

swaneagle harijan