Aristide Backer Will Appear at Haiti Emergency Benefit

When President Jean Bertrand Aristide was forced out of Haiti Feb. 29, 2004, every township in the nation was touched.

Cote de Fer in southeast Haiti was no exception. Bolivar Ramilus had represented the region in Parliament, but because of his affiliation with Aristide, Ramilus had to flee Haiti for his life. The development work he had been doing for 20 years, first as a community organizer and then as a government official, came to an abrupt halt.

One of the limited number of Haitians to have obtained political asylum since Aristide’s ouster, Ramilus will be in Berkeley Nov. 19 to speak about the turmoil in his home country and to raise money for the Vanguard Public Foundation’s Haiti Relief Fund.

On Feb. 29, 2004, U.S. officials plucked Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide from his home, put him on a plane and sent him into exile, claiming they were saving him from the some two hundred former military men who had taken control of several towns and were planning to march on the Haitian capital. Democratically elected in 2000, Aristide called his removal a “kidnapping” and a “coup d’état.” U.S. officials said Aristide wanted to leave.

Elected to Parliament in 2000, Ramilus broadened the work he had been doing for nonprofits, striving to improve the lives of peasants in the Cote de Fer region. “I needed the political power of the state behind me to advance the work of the community,” he said, speaking in Creole through translator Pierre Labossier, in a recent phone interview from Florida where he is now living.

Ramilus explained why he ran for office as a member of Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas party; “This was the only political organization that was carrying the people’s demands. This is the only organization that would help me implement what the people wanted,” he said.

In Parliament he helped bring electricity and a telephone system to Cote de Fer for the first time; he created an irrigation system for peasant farmers and had 23 miles of new roads built in the area. All of these projects supported local economic development. In addition, he helped start a project raising fish in reservoirs and an industry fabricating briquettes from scrap paper and cardboard to help stop people from cutting down trees for fuel. He also had a hand in extending local schooling through the last year of high school.

The central government didn’t plan these projects. “What is most important to understand is that it wasn’t the government that brought the electricity (and other projects) there, it was the people of the area. What was great was that we had the space to organize under my leadership, to make it happen as a community effort.”

Aristide’s ouster unleashed a powerful backlash against his supporters. The U.S.-backed interim government has incarcerated thousands of Aristide supporters—and people from areas of strong support for him—in putrid, sweltering jail cells; many have been there for more than a year, most not accused of any crime. News reports, Amnesty International and studies from Harvard and Miami University detail extrajudicial executions at the hands of United Nations soldiers, the Haitian police and civilians working for the police. Unknown numbers of people are in hiding within Haiti and still others, like Ramilus, have fled for their lives.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently visited Haiti, underscoring the U.S. position that new elections would reintroduce democracy; election dates, however, have been revised at least three times and there is presently no firm schedule for the vote.

Leaving his country was a difficult decision for Ramilus, who wanted to stay near the people he had worked with for so many years. But after the fourth assassination attempt against him, he was compelled to leave. He said that because he was able to show that the assassination attempts were clearly political, he was able to obtain asylum as a political refugee.

With the country’s leadership in jail, in exile or dead, development projects begun under the Aristide administration have stopped. “Things have gone backwards,” said Ramilus, who maintains regular phone contact with home.

A new school building to house the high school in Cote de Fer had been planned, “but the coup d’etat put an end to that,” he said; the fish-raising program was halted. Plans to expand irrigation have been set aside. An adult literacy project has folded.

Born in 1956, Ramilus was a child of poor peasants in Cote de Fer. Neither of his parents could read or write, but they managed to send him to primary school. He then went to a French-funded trade school where he learned construction and worked building houses in the region.

But he wanted to do more for his community and became an organizer for various nonprofits, including the Red Cross/Red Crescent. His projects focused on sanitation, including building public and individual toilets, providing clean water and dispensing health education, especially for pregnant women. “Doing this work I became very much aware of the situation of the peasants. That led me to be active politically, so that I could change the situation.”

Ramilus’ exile places a personal burden on him. “I would like to be able to go back and see my dad.” His father, Dorestan, is 105 years old. “The worst thing that could happen to me is not to be able to see him in his last moments or attend his funeral.”

The exile also means that his community work has been placed on hold. “The people of Cote de Fer and the people of Haiti for the first time participated in this great opportunity to impact directly on their own development. This coup d’etat was a blow to this movement.”

But Ramilus says the people have not given up: “Their great dream is to start their projects again, to get back into a space where they can develop their own country and have the space to participate in the development of their local community and the country as a whole.”

Addressing the situation in Haiti, Berkeley’s Peace and Justice Commission unanimously passed a resolution Nov. 7 stating, in part, that since the “coup d’etat that toppled the elected government of Jean Bertrand-Aristide in Haiti, Haitians’ human rights have been violated, constitutional government has been dismantled with most of the approximately 7,500 elected government officials forcibly removed, thousands of Haitian civilians have been killed, tens of thousands have been driven into exile, … activists … have been imprisoned in inhumane conditions without due process.”

The resolution directs the city to lobby federal officials to change U.S. policy toward Haiti, exercising its influence to free political prisoners, stop the campaign against Aristide, stop the police and death squad killings, and support the return to constitutional governance.

The fundraiser for the Vanguard Public Foundation’s Haiti Emergency Relief Fund will be 2 p.m.–5 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 19, at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. The fund offers humanitarian relief to Haitian grassroots organizations and individuals impacted by the violence of the coup d’état.