Haiti

By the time you read this article, Jean Bertrand Aristide, president of Haiti, may be overthrown by U.S.-trained and supported thugs or dead.

At this writing, Port Au Prince, Haiti’s capital, is in turmoil and being encircled by killers who are intent on dragging Haiti back into an era of terror akin to that of the Duvaliers and the terrorist reaction in the wake of the U.S.-backed coup that first unseated Aristide in 1991.

The current situation in Haiti is a consequence of two crucial factors. One is the absolute hostility of the U.S. government to any semblance of an independent African government any place on Earth. The other is the weakness of the African Liberation Movement that is reflected in a poverty of ideology and organization.

Haiti, where Columbus first landed in 1462 and in short order decimated the indigenous people, is known as the most impoverished place in the world. It has been recognized as such for so long that many have come to believe that poverty and violence are natural to the land and the people. However, such is not the case.

The occupants of Haiti are Africans who are there as a result of being kidnapped from Africa and taken there under the gun and whip for Spanish and French profits. Bringing Africans to the island, then called “Hispaniola,” where both Haiti and the Dominican Republic are today, was part of the overall process of European looting, annexation and slavery that was to give birth to the capitalism and white power that now dominate the world at the expense of the rest of us.

Late in the 18th Century, Haiti became the symbol of the oppressed peoples of the world when the Africans began the struggle that would eventually lead to Haiti’s independence in 1804. Theirs was the first successful slave rebellion and workers’ revolution in the world.

When the African revolution against colonial slavery began in Haiti, the colonial powers of the day, which included the U.S. and France, trembled at the thought of what a successful revolution would mean as an example to all the oppressed peoples of the world, in particular the Africans and Indians throughout the Americas.

Indeed, as late as 1822 when Denmark Vesey was planning a rebellion against colonial slavery in Charleston, South Carolina he encouraged the Africans he was organizing by telling them they would be joined in the rebellion by Africans from Africa and from Haiti.

Napoleon Bonaparte was so concerned about the Haitian uprising that he sent several thousand crack French troops to their defeat at the hands of the Haitian revolutionaries in an attempt to put it down.

Napoleon was quoted as saying during the time that, “The freedom of Negroes, if recognized in St. Domingue [as Haiti was then called] and legalized by France, would be the rallying point for freedom-seekers of the New World.”
For the first 58 years of its existence as a free country the U.S. refused to recognize Haiti’s existence.

To achieve international recognition, Haiti had to pay France 150 million francs in gold as reparations to the slave owners and to cover the cost of the war of liberation. The U.S supported this demand by France.

By the end of the century Haiti was paying more that 80 percent of its budget on this debt and its interests. This is the origin of Haiti’s role as a debtor country. It is not unlike that of Africa today or of the southern U.S. sharecroppers who worked for the landowners all year and at the end of the year found themselves in debt, notwithstanding all they had earned for the owner.

The country had a rocky history of political instability and international intrigue. Much of it was generated by the mulatto elite who, accepting the common ideological assumptions that still exist, saw themselves as superior because they were the light-skinned children of the slave masters.
In 1915, the island was invaded by the U.S. Marines who occupied the country until 1934 when they left after looting the treasury, leaving the people in even deeper poverty and under the authority of a military trained and organized by the U.S.

From 1957 to 1986 the country was ruled by the vicious Francois Duvalier (Papa Doc) and his son and successor, Jean Claude (Baby Doc), both of whom were supported by the U.S.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide played a major role in mobilizing the people against the Duvalier regime. His efforts against the regime, as a priest in some of the poorest parishes around Port-au-Prince, the capital, propelled him into the leadership of the impoverished masses and resulted in several assassination attempts on his life.

Baby Doc was exiled to France in 1986, where he lived off the hundreds of millions of dollars stolen from the Haitian people. Elections were finally held in 1990. The elections were held by the military junta that assumed power after Baby Doc fled and which, on orders from the U.S. intended to legitimize the next era of terrorist rule of the island.

It was expected that CIA-backed Marc Bazin would become the next elected president and would give a democratic cover for the continued oppression and exploitation of the African masses.

When Aristide announced his entry into the presidential race on the last day to apply as a candidate, the impoverished African masses were instantly mobilized. His liberation theology, which was sprinkled with socialist concepts of empowering the laboring masses, captured the imagination of the people and raised their hopes of a better future for themselves and their children.
His election threw a monkey wrench into the plans of the U.S. They immediately went to work to overthrow him. Within seven months of Aristide’s election, a coup by the Haitian military, organized and trained by the U.S., overthrew him, sending him into exile.

The military then went on a murderous rampage that resulted in thousands of Aristide supporters being killed, thousands more going underground within the country and more than 5,000 Africans fleeing the island in rickety boats, often resulting in death and, in the U.S., imprisonment in concentration camps in Miami.

Nevertheless, the U.S. was left with a mess. Because Aristide had been an independent candidate — independent of U.S. support — his base among the poor people, who constitute more than 80 percent of the population, was ungovernable. Additionally, from exile, Aristide was a darling of the liberals and he worked tirelessly to expose the anti-democratic machinations leading to his overthrow.

In 1994, the U.S. deployed 20,000 troops to Haiti to reinstate Aristide. However, his reinstatement was conditioned by his agreement to step down in 1995.The U.S. would give the appearance of a democratic solution with the reinstatement of Aristide, but hoped that replacing him before he could continue with his reforms would allow them to install one of their own. Instead Aristide was replaced as president by Rene Preval who was a member of Aristide’s Lavalas party.
Aristide was re-elected again in 2000. But he accepted neoliberal “free market” reforms dictated by Washington, the supreme imperial white power.

These reforms included opening a free trade zone on the border with the U.S. neo-colony Dominican Republic where most of the U.S. armed thugs now attacking the country were based. This free trade zone is being funded by a World Bank loan that supports sweatshop owners.

He also agreed to pay back debts to the International Monetary Fund that stem from the period of the U.S.-imposed dictatorship.

These conditions led to the growing emiseration of the African masses. In addition, thugs crossing over from the Dominican Republic were carrying out military assaults on police stations in various sections of the country. Some of the assaults were obviously connected to well-known CIA and U.S. Special Forces trained assassins and torturers who played prominent roles in repressing the people after Aristide was overthrown in 1991.

There was a coup attempt in 2001 by former members of the military and growing numbers of anti-government protest that escalated in violence. Claims of election irregularities led to the withdrawal of loans and grants from the government by the U.S. and U.S.-dominated institutions. All of this set the conditions for provocateurs to turn Aristide’s impoverished base against him or, at the least, to undermine their support for the foundering government.

As the U.S.-led assault is meandering toward the capital today, Aristide is calling on the international community to help. France, the former colonizer and darling of the white left because of its self-serving opposition to the U.S. attack on Iraq, has told Aristide to surrender his democratically elected position to the thugs popularly called the “opposition” in imperialist media.

The U.S., currently flexing its muscles worldwide as the new empire, has echoed France’s position, showing the world how meaningless the idea of democratic elections is when African freedom is at issue.

This brings us to the real issue, and that is our weakness as a people dispersed throughout the world, bereft of the organization and philosophy necessary for our liberation and security.

In the real world, none of us should be surprised by the role being played by the U.S., France or any other white imperial power in Haiti or any other place in the world. Our conditions of existence as a people, wherever we find ourselves, are due to the fact that all of European white power propelled itself into power off our enslavement and dispersal throughout the world.

The permanent poverty and dispersal of our people are absolute conditions for the ongoing wealth, power and unity of the white imperialist world. We, therefore, must accomplish our liberation, with no illusions of support by white power.
Nor will we be liberated by any kind of theology — liberation or otherwise. We must embrace a philosophy born of an examination of our real history and place in the world, and that philosophy is African Internationalism.

African Internationalism explains the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be. It teaches us that capitalism, the world system with which we are locked in a life and death embrace, was born of the theft of our resources in Africa and the trade in African bodies that created for the first time in history a world economy that was the condition for the rise of capitalism in the world.

African Internationalism teaches us that our poverty and oppression are due to the fact that wherever we are we have been deprived of our own resources – both human and material. For all of Africa’s wealth, all Africans are poor. For all our labor around the world, Africans are poor. Yet Africa’s resources and our labor have made and continue to make the white world wealthy and secure.

When the U.S. and France function as they do in Haiti or any place else, they do so to protect a system that requires Africans and others to remain as hosts to parasitic white power. We are not poor because our Africa lacks resources. We are poor because white power sucks our blood and must do so as a condition of its own continued existence.

Moreover, regardless of where we are located – in Haiti, the U.S., Africa, Europe or elsewhere, we cannot win our freedom alone. Our condition has a single origin. The slavery and colonialism that impoverishes Africa are responsible for our presence and oppression in Haiti, Brazil, Europe, the U.S. and throughout the world.

Haiti, with a population of slightly more than seven million people, cannot sustain a national economy. Nor can most of the microstates in Africa created for us by white power.
We must organize as one people, recognizing that we are Africans and Africa, the richest continent in natural resources in the world, is central and strategic to our liberation worldwide. Nor must this be understood as the Pan-Africanism that dismisses the need for revolutionary struggle wherever we are.

Africans around the world should be doing all within our means to defend Haiti.

The existence of a genuinely organized and philosophically clear African population would have resulted in Aristide calling on the African working masses, especially in the U.S., but worldwide, to defend Haiti.
A genuinely organized and philosophically clear African population would have forced the U.S. and other imperial white power to pay a price for their interventions in Haiti. We would even send organized military forces to beat back the U.S. supported thugs. It is suggested that the notorious “street gangs” of Los Angeles would be sufficient to defeat the armed aggressors.

African Internationalism teaches us that the only social force we can rely on is the African working class aligned with the poor peasantry. Aristide is in a weak position because he disbanded the army, which had been the base for much of the U.S.-led attacks on the people.

It is true: the State is an organ of repression. Because the army is a part of the State apparatus and was created in Haiti to protect the interests of the mulatto elite and their imperialist masters, the army should have been smashed.
But, in the place of the neo-colonial army, all power has to be seized by the armed masses who become a workers’ State ready to fight and die for the country where they have become the ruling class and the collective owners of the means of producing life’s necessities.

The African People’s Socialist Party is consumed with the intent of becoming a worldwide Party, an African Socialist International, which can give leadership to every struggle we are involved in as a people and a class.

We call on the laboring masses of the world to support their sister and brother workers of Haiti — workers who have heroically done so much for the emancipation of toilers everywhere.

We especially call on the African workers to do all within our means to protest the imperialist attack on our brothers and sisters and to join us of the African People’s Socialist Party in creating the African Socialist International.

In July of this year, Africans will be traveling to London from throughout the African world to participate in the conference of the African Socialist International. We cannot say for certain what will have occurred in Haiti by that time, but we are determined to take the future of our people out of the hands of imperialist white power, to assume our responsibility to rescue Africa and ourselves, and to build a new world where we can have the advantage of the wealth of Africa and our own labor.

African workers and poor peasants of the world, unite!
Izwe Lethu I Afrika!