Haiti Still Struggling After Canada-Backed Coup

Haiti is in shambles and Canada is implicated, according to findings from a human rights delegation.

Roger Annis, a leading member of Haiti Solidarity BC and the Canada Haiti Action Network, traveled to Haiti in August with a coalition of human rights activists. He stopped at Concordia University Thursday night as part of his Canada-wide speaking tour.

Early in their two week-trip in August, delegates from Canada and the U.S. traveled to Gonaïves, the first city that fell to armed rebels in the February 2004 coup that forced then-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide into exile. Six months later, Hurricane Jeanne struck the city, killing 2,500 people – another 1,000 are still missing.

The delegation found that not much had changed in the city since then.

“Today the city looks like a war-zone,” Annis said. “The words that came to my mind were Sarajevo, Dresden.”

He stressed that Gonaïves is not far from the norm across Haiti, as unemployment in Haiti is between 70 and 80 per cent. In the cities, sewage is often dumped on street corners, and it is a daily struggle to locate clean water, he said.

“You get clean drinking water by buying it.… If you can’t afford to buy the treated water, then you take your chances by drinking out of the taps. Bad water is a source of much illness among Haiti’s people,” Annis said.

In Port-de-Paix, the delegation met with the two mayors of the city. Overwhelmed by waves of migrants leaving the countryside to live in urban slums, the city of 200,000 people has a budget for this year equivalent to about $5,000 US.

After unemployment, he said, Haitians were most concerned with prison conditions and the justice system.

The delegation met with a Haitian commissaire – an appointee of the president, roughly equivalent to a Canadian attorney general – who allowed them to tour a prison where about 40 men shared a single cell – conditions so overcrowded that there was standing room only.

The delegates spoke to prisoners, including a 13-year old girl who said she had been arrested for vagrancy, even though it is illegal for minors under 16 to be jailed in Haiti. After the delegation discussed the situation with the commissaire, she was released along with a man who had also been illegally imprisoned.

Annis underscored the role in Haiti of Canada, whose RCMP has helped re-train the police force since Aristide was forced from office. Annis claimed that most of the new officers are “war criminals” from the former military dictatorship and others who opposed Aristide’s policies.

“It became a human rights-violating agency after the coup,” he said.

Aristide was deposed by a rebellion of former soldiers and armed gangs, combined with intense pressure from the U.S. and France. But Annis said it was military intervention by countries including Canada, in addition to paramilitaries, that caused Aristide’s democratically-elected government to fall.

“Ultimately, what was required to overthrow the elected government was a foreign invasion, and that took place on February 29 [2004], with Canada, France, the United States and Chile flying soldiers into the country,” he said.

Asked why Canada would support an invasion of Haiti, Annis said, “The Haitian people, in a sense, they are a threat to the system of economic domination and exploitation that the big capitalist powers of the world represent, and they refuse to quit fighting for a just society.”

Yves Engler, a Montreal-based activist and co-author of Canada in Haiti, suggested that the interests of big Canadian corporations – such as Gildan Activewear – motivated Canada’s actions.

The Canadian clothing company owns factories in Haiti, and after Aristide raised the minimum wage almost twofold in 2003, they had a specific interest in seeing Aristide removed, Engler said.

He also noted that Gildan’s most important subcontractor in Haiti, André Apaid, was also the leader of the anti-Aristide “Group of 184,” one of the main groups involved in the coup.