Over
10,000 US troops are in Haiti right now. That's at least one US soldier
for every 100 Haitians. If these soldiers were actually distributing
food and water, every Haitian could be nourished. But the military
didn't send food and water. It sent soldiers.
That's because our US troops are not really on a
humanitarian mission in Haiti. They are protecting the current
US-friendly regime of Haitian President Ren� Pr�val, and seeking to
ensure that supporters of the twice-democratically-elected former
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, pro-democracy political prisoners who
were freed by the earthquake, do not bring Aristide to power again.
That's the real " http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Haiti-Earthquake-Diary/2010/0122/Haiti-earthquake-diary-Haiti-s-leaders-speak-finally - risk of instability " that Pr�val is referring to in his speeches.
The news media is mostly allowing the presence of US
troops in Haiti to go unquestioned, implying that gun-wielding soldiers
are needed due to http://www.truthout.org/when-media-is-disaster-covering-haiti56251 - incidents
of what they call "looting" or due to fighting over resources. But all
accounts on the ground seem to indicate that Haitians have been
overwhelmingly peaceful. The troops are really there to respond in case
there is a pro-democracy political movement that could rattle the
US-friendly presidency. The news media is harming Haiti by
misrepresenting this security concern, and is allowing politics to get
in the way of aid.
The Safe Streets of Port-au-Prince
"I'm living here in the neighborhood [in
Port-au-Prince] ... There is no security. The UN is not out. The US is
not out. The Haitian police are not able to be out. But there's also no
insecurity ... You can hear a pin drop in this city. It's a peaceful
place. There is no war. There is no crisis except the suffering that's
ongoing," said Dr. Evan Lyon with Partners in Health, a physician
working at the main hospital in Haiti who was http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/20/devastated_port_au_prince_hospital_struggles - interviewed by "Democracy Now!" earlier this week.
Kirk Noonan, an aid worker with Convoy of Hope, acknowledged in an http://www.news-leader.com/article/20100121/NEWS01/1210388/1007 - article
with the Springfield News-Leader that there have been instances of
looting and of people hurting others. "But there's also just tens of
thousands of great people who are doing everything they can without
breaking the law ... to eke out survival," he said.
Even government officials acknowledge that there has been no major unrest. So, why so many soldiers? Why all the guns?
Why All the Guns? What Is the "Risk of Instability"?
To understand the military response, we must
understand Haiti's 2004 military coup, which overthrew the
twice-democratically-elected President Aristide. In a http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=344 - bizarre international incident
that has gone largely unquestioned by the mainstream press, Aristide
was kidnapped in the night and flown to the Central African Republic.
US troops assisted in the kidnapping. Someone smuggled a cell phone to
Aristide, and he was able to call a number of US officials he had a
close working relationship with, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5794.htm - such as US Representative Maxine Waters . He tried to tell the world that he had been kidnapped, and that he was being overthrown by a coup. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5794.htm - Except for a handful of progressive press, such as "Democracy Now!", the news media reported that Aristide had resigned.
There is plenty of http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/mar2004/hait-m01.shtml - evidence
that the US backed the 2004 coup. Aristide himself identified the
soldiers who kidnapped him as US forces, and one of Aristide's
caretakers said that http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=344 - US troops
came to take Aristide at two o'clock in the morning. US officials had
prohibited Aristide from reinforcing his personal security team in the
days just prior to the coup. US diplomats had also refused to send
forces to protect Aristide from the armed rebel forces when he
requested it. Oh yeah, and then there's the fact that some of the
leadership of the rebels was trained in the United States through http://www.soaw.org/ - a special program ,
then called the School of the Americas, which has trained all sorts of
aspirational young military leaders who, oddly enough, wind up leading
US-backed military coups in their home countries.
Immediately afterwards, supporters of Aristide and
those who protested the coup were hunted down, rounded up and thrown
into the main jail in Port-au-Prince. One of those rounded up was
Annette Auguste, Haitian folksinger and pro-democracy activist, who was
http://www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/5_12_4.html - seized at her home by US Marines in May 2004. Her only crime was singing pro-democracy folk songs. Another http://www.haitisolidarity.net/article.php?id=274 - well-known supporter of Aristide, Ronald Dauphin, was imprisoned one day after the coup. Many more were seized.
These political prisoners stayed imprisoned until the earthquake freed them twelve days ago.
The Earthquake Brings Freedom to Political Prisoners
As reported this week by "Democracy Now!," the http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/21/earthquake_frees_haitian_prisoners_from_port - main jail
in Port-au-Prince was destroyed by the earthquake. There were 4,000
prisoners inside, 80 percent of whom had never even seen a judge and
had not been charged with a crime. The prisoners who were not killed in
the quake fled from the jail. Mario Joseph, Haitian human rights
attorney for Dauphin and other political prisoners, said that his
client Dauphin escaped from the prison. http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/21/earthquake_frees_haitian_prisoners_from_port - Speaking t o "Democracy Now!," Joseph said:
"They say in French, "For some things, bad things
are good." And I think this catastrophe, which did a lot of damage in
Haiti, this earthquake, it gave justice to the people in the prison -
above all, the political prisoners like Ronald Dauphin. And this will
make six years since Ronald Dauphin has been in prison without charges,
without ever being charged.
... The other thing I can say, in Haiti, we have a
symbolic - the palace that went down, the Palace of Justice, the
Haitian IRS, and the whole power of the state. This is like a message
that was sent, because it wasn't just the people in prison who were
suffering injustice, but the poorest in the country, the excluded in
the country. Thus I think it was a clear message."
This is the context in which President Ren� Pr�val
commented on foreign security at a press conference, translated from
French by a reporter for Christian Science Monitor:
"He says that to ensure the security of his people
he needs to understand the dimension of the problem. Aid has to be
mobilized, coordinated, and well distributed. And finally, he says that
he understands the risk of instability - with all the prisoners in
Port-au-Prince on the streets (the prison collapsed), an already weak
police force of 3,500 needs to be bolstered by external forces."
If the streets are peaceful, and 80 percent of those
in the prison were never even charged with a crime, what "risk of
instability" could result from the jail being destroyed? A threat to
the current system of power that Pr�val presides over.
This Misrepresentation Is Harming Haitians
The news media's misrepresentation of the potential instability is harmful because they are inhibiting the distribution of aid.
Discussing how the delivery of aid to Haiti's main hospital has been slowed, http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/19/doctor_misinformation_and_racism_have_frozen - Dr. Lyons explained to "Democracy Now!":
"One thing that I think is really important for
people to understand is that misinformation and rumors and, I think at
the bottom of the issue, racism has slowed the recovery efforts of this
hospital ... Quote 'security issues' over the last forty-eight hours
have been our leading concern. And there are no security issues ...
There is no insecurity."