When the U.S. overthrew Haiti’s government in 2004, Washington proclaimed the invasion a “humanitarian” enterprise. Now it turns out that Haiti’s earth and waters are filled with gold and oil. The U.S.-controlled World Bank has volunteered to help rewrite the Haitian constitution, to allow easier access for foreign extraction corporations. Haitians must, as always, “look out for themselves.”
The leech says, “I cling to you because without your blood, I have no life.”
As long as white supremacy paints Haiti as a failed state because of weak public services, when Haiti is prevented by US unfair trade and World Bank/IMF structural adjustments from investing in its own local economy and paints the Clintons, Paul Farmers, UN, World Bank, the NGOs and their three-piece suited Eurocentric-Haiti collaborators with the mark of international distinction and service to humanity, Haiti’s pains will continue to be their cash cow.
“The holocaust in Ayiti continues. The insane imperial narrative and custom of honoring rapists, murderers, torturers, degenerate pedophile maniacs, pillagers, plunderers, enslavers and poverty pimps, starting with Christopher Columbus, who set forth the most prolonged genocides and horrific terrors in recorded human history, continues today. Officialdom honors the UN and UN envoys to Haiti as ‘humanitarians’ or ‘God’ bringing security, stability, peace, law, Christian ethos and ‘Western civilization.’ Too many have jobs, egos, power and prestige invested in the profit-over-people system to see that the current saviors of Haiti extend mostly the same narcissistic, cultural blindness and denials as the initial ‘missionaries/humanitarians’ brought to Haiti in 1492.“–Ezili Dantò of HLLN, Oct. 10, 2011 , Bill Clinton has more power in Haiti than Haiti’s president: The Holocaust Continues.
There’s a new move by the discredited Haiti rescuers, led today by Obama/the Clintons/USAID/UN, the Paul Farmer-led NGOS and their International Financing Institutions to refocus their fundraising scam away from “earthquake reconstruction relief” now to “cholera relief,” or to “local agriculture relief,” and “mining protection relief for Haitians!” It’s a slightly repackaged imperial economic pillage but the same old arsonist/fireman modus operandi. Same failures intended to enrich the global North, impoverish Haiti (UN Capitalizing on Cholera: playing arsonist and fireman and The Pain Rush in Haiti : Clorox Hunger lives in the same space that billions of dollars in “aid” are supposed to have being poured.)
The NGOs carry out US imperial policies in Haiti in exchange for “charity funding” – which means, they money launder US tax payer and donor dollars and put it in their pockets. US imperial policies is about destroying Haiti manufacturing and local economy, expropriating Haiti natural resources and making a larger Haiti market for their subsidized Wall Street monopolies.
Se mèt ki veye kò – The Haiti Population Must Look Out for Itself
Racism continually allows the Haiti perspective and non-colonial narrative to be marginalized. But Ezili’s HLLN has been the voice ahead of all to sound the alarm, to consistently and almost daily provide the tools for Haiti defense for nearly ten years now. We cover all things Desalin, Dantò and about Haiti riches, Haiti epistemology.
Back in 2004, when Ezili’s HLLN noted that the US occupation of Haiti wasn’t because the US wanted to protect Haiti civil rights and stop a supposedly abusive Haiti elected government under Aristide. It was about stopping that popularly elected government from nationalizing Haiti resources. When we pointed this out, not one of the charitable industrial complex organizations today purporting to be helping Haiti protect itself with “good mining” laws would quote our work, not then and not now.
We were called the apologists for Lavalas and most of the foreign Haiti experts announced that Haiti had no resources the US could want. Today, the US occupiers are freely announcing their intent to change Haiti’s mining laws with little public dissent of their nefarious occupation and resource pillages in Haiti. Ezili’s HLLN is still the only voice out here exposing Oxfam, World Bank and the other fake philanthropic folks involved in protecting the interests of the one percenters, re-writing Haiti mining laws.
The invaders in Haiti finally admit Haiti has gold, iridium, uranium. It seems Haiti’s $20 billion in gold exist only when the “discoverers” are ready to proclaim Haiti has riches. They’ve still strategically refuse to acknowledge that the US has built its fifth largest embassy – after Iraq, Afghanistan, China, Germany – in Haiti because Haiti oil is an Olympic pool to Venezuela’s glass of water. (See, Haiti Riches and Haiti rich in unexplored hydrocarbons (with potential oil reserves larger than those of Venezuela) , gold, copper, uranium 238 and 235 and strategic metals and Did mining and oil drilling trigger the Haiti earthquake?)
If you want to be ahead of the corporate lies, there’s a Kreyòl, Lakou New York Interview where HLLN’s Ezili Dantò talks about environmental degradation concerns, Haiti resources and the foreign mining of Haiti resources. It was broadcasted in 2009 before the earthquake, before foreign cholera, before the public pillage of earthquake donor dollars. The English parallel (the text is here) to the 2009 Kreyòl interview may be listened to at Ezili Dantò with Chris Scott- CKUT on Haiti Riches.
At the point we did the interviews, it had just been announced that Haiti was no longer the “poorest” country in the Western Hemisphere, Nicaragua was. This was because of all the billions the foreigners had made in Haiti from 2004 to 2009 during the US occupation of Haiti. The economic elites made billions upon billions before the $9-billion the US “big-hearted humanitarians” would add to their coffers from laundering earthquake relief dollars largely back to US groups.
These interviews on Haiti Riches were done before the UN poisoned the Artibonite river with cholera. Haitians wondered then, in terms of US mining, what happens if mining chemicals poison the Artibonite river? Very uncanny this foreshadowing. For the invaders found another way to poison Haiti waters with greater market effectiveness.
We point to these unheralded Haitianist efforts to defend Haiti because of the current multinational and NGO efforts in Haiti to link mining to Haiti development! (See, Haiti must avoid the resource curse ; Haiti gets $35.5M grant to improve water services and World Bank says its helping Haiti draft mining legislation.)
Our “rescuers’” benevolence is the decoy used for manufacturing consent to the US occupation in Haiti. Period, no comma. OXFAM, the IDB, the UN and the World Bank are simply howling a wolf’s care for the sheep they’re tearing apart.
Neither Oxfam, nor the World Bank are questioning that US Newmont mining, VCS Mining and Canada’s Majescor et al, have managed to get the puppet Haiti president to WAIVE Haiti environmental and mining laws – its Constitutional laws – in order for US mining do open pit mining in areas close to earthquake fault lines in the North, in a country devastated by the last earthquake and with its water already poisoned by UN cholera. But the corporate media – liberal and conservative – are blithely writing PR articles about the World Bank “helping” Haiti draft mining laws. There’s no outrage or concern that mining and oil drilling trigger are known to cause earthquakes.
HLLN on the cholera case
Infecting over 650,000 and killing 8,200 Haitians with cholera in less than 2-years provides the NGO and multinational companies commercializing poverty and their Paul Farmer/Jim Yong Kim ilks with 1) more opportunity to raise funds that will be laundered back to this corporatocracy but called “Haiti aid” 2) the more Haitians die, the better to bring demand down and balance the elites’ capital markets and 3) our deaths provide the multinational companies with the opportunity to privatize all sources of Haiti water under the pretext of cleaning Haiti water for the public’s good health.
In October 2010, the very month that the UN imported cholera to Haiti, before the charitable industrial complex saviors entered the fray as big-hearted humanitarians to delay and defer Haiti justice, HLLN wrote:
“The accused cannot investigate itself. The United Nations being the prosecutor, the judge, the jury and the executioner, all in one, in the Haiti cholera case, is contrary to established traditions as well as established national and international laws. (Listen to Oct 30, 2010 interview with Yves Point Du Jour “HLLN has never subscribed to the callous and profiting-on-misery notion of letting the UN independently investigate itself while Haiti’s people die unmercifully. ” — Excerpt from HLLN complaint against the US occupational forces for bringing cholera to Haiti.
“The Alien Tort Statute (28 U.S.C. § 1350) of the United States Code reads: ‘The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.’ This statute is notable for allowing United States courts to hear human rights cases brought by foreign citizens for conduct committed outside the United States.” — Excerpt from HLLN complaint against the US occupational forces for bringing cholera to Haiti.
Do not be shocked if the UN/PAHO/WHO stealthily concludes and garners public consensus for the proposition that justice for Haiti cholera victims shall be served if a law is passed that makes all sources of Haiti water property of a foreign company like Bechtel and it shall clean Haiti’s water and sell it back to Haitians.
The Bolivian water wars is a good parallel to study in order to understand why Brian Concannon’s Institute for Justice for Democracy (IDJH), a Dr. Paul Farmer affiliate, is “legally representing(?)” the Haiti cholera victims. IDJH like Paul Farmer have glaring ethical conflicts of interests issues that makes it impossible for them to vigorously defend the cholera victims by naming their own funders, employers, business associates and the primary funder of the US occupation – the US government that occupies Haiti, their consulting firms and NGO cohorts as the Respondiat Superior for the destruction of Haiti government and water systems.
A first-year law student readily understands that Haiti needs immediate injunctive relief, restitution and damages. Injunctive relief is not subject to immunity laws. Neither the US government nor the UN are too big to be prosecuted for human rights crimes, tort or gross negligence. As the largest funder and the main orchestrator of the UN presence in Haiti, the US government, is legally, the Respondiat Superior for the cholera wrongdoings in Haiti along with the UN.
But the NGOs and their Hollywood, media and academic cohorts play firemen to the US government’s arsonist role in Haiti and the global south. The professional posers – the white industrial charitable complex – play an underhanded game. For instance “The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) analyzed the $1.15 billion pledged after the January 2010 quake to Haiti and found that the “vast majority” of the money it could follow went straight to U.S. companies or organizations, more than half in the Washington area alone.” (See also US military company DynCorp gets $48.6 million contract in Haiti to staff officers for UN mission ; Capitalizing on Cholera: playing arsonist and fireman and Haiti’s earthquake generated a $9bn response – where did the money go?)
Yet, CEPR and such foreign “policy researchers” on Haiti also claim IDJH/Paul Farmer and their fake cholera “lawsuit” against the UN along with the US/UN non-funded $2 billion proposal for privatizing clean water in 10-years in Haiti is a DIFFERENT, more positive paternal step for Haiti. That this sort of bait and switch, fraudulent Haiti aid and NGO funding always further weakens Haiti’s ability to handle its own affairs is of no consequence.
US to re-write Haiti Constitution, Again
(with change in mining laws)
ARTICLE 36-5 of the Haitian Constitution, states:
“The right to own property does not extend to the coasts, springs, rivers, water courses, mines and quarries. They are part of the State’s public domain.”
So, how is it legally possible for the US to re-write Haiti mining laws? To legally change the Haiti constitution on ownership of Haiti resources at mines, coasts, springs, rivers, water courses and quarries? Who will stop this US occupation forces’ re-writing of the Haiti Constitution to benefit US resource extraction companies and for privatization of Haiti’s water? Ayisyen kote nou ye? – Where are the Haitians? (See World Bank says its helping Haiti draft mining legislation.)
Haiti’s current law doesn’t allow drilling without a signed mining convention. But US Newmont mining got a “waiver” to the current Haiti law without the approval of even the puppet Haiti legislature. Martelly signed it in violation of the Haiti Constitution. (Gold Rush in Haiti: Mining Investment Good for Whom?)
The US companies were offered a friendly, public-private partnership by the Aristide government to exploit Haiti oil, gold, iridium, uranium and other strategic resources. That idea of equitable revenue sharing with Haiti peoples insulted the northern US-Euro monopolies so much, they hired and trained death squads in the Dominican Republic from former Haiti army officials to take down Haiti’s duly elected government. And when the hired jackals and US mercenaries, including Guy Philippe/Louis Jodel Chamblain paramilitaries, could not do the US regime change themselves, US Special Forces along with Canada and French troops landed in Haiti on February 29, 2004, and through extraordinary rendition put President Aristide and the first lady on a plane to Africa. This merciless and shocking malevolence was followed by a brutal 3-months US Marines sweep of Site Solèy, Bel Air, Solino and other dissenting areas and then covered up with US MINUSTAH’s permanent war in Haiti behind NGO imperialism.
Between 2004 to 2006 the US occupation behind UN guns slaughtered 14 to 20 thousand Haitians. If it wasn’t for organizations like Ezili’s HLLN the Wall Street assassination squads in Haiti might have slaughtered more in the same manner the CIA orchestrated paramilitary death squads in Guatemala killed 200,000 Guatemalans on behalf of US United Fruit companies. In Haiti, with former UN employee Gerald Latortue illegally imposed as Prime Minister, the oligarchs urged Brazil commanders to kill more poor Haitians so that Haiti oil and gold can now freely be carted off to service the Northern vampires as Haiti majority die of Clorox hunger, UN cholera, unfair trade, endless debts and World Bank neoliberal death plans. (The Pain Rush in Haiti : Clorox Hunger lives in the same space that billions of dollars in “aid” are supposed to have being poured.)
Today, the US is re-writing Haiti mining laws for its corporations.
“Now that these ghouls think we indigenous Haiti are all infected with vampire blood and dead, it’s no surprise that the NGO OXFAM/World Bank is howling out a wolf’s care for the sheep they’re tearing their fangs into – funding conferences, issuing action alerts with the other wolves guarding Haiti from the mining companies? I would laugh out loud at these media missives if the depravity these hidden war criminal collaborators bring forth wasn’t as evil to the Haiti majority as a Hitler’s holocaust was.” (Excerpt from [ezilidanto] NGO false benevolence manufactures consent for the US occupation in Haiti: OXFAM & World Bank howling a wolf’s care for the sheep they’re tearing apart; or here.)
The global North’s insane sense of entitlement knows no bounds, no law, no morality, no ethics. The US government destroys Haiti farmers, Haiti manufacturing, Haiti water system, Haiti politics, Haiti spirituality in order to reshape, privatize and call Haiti resources their own. (Se mèt ki pou veye kò.)
With respect to this sudden US public effort via coup d’etat NGO, Oxfam USA, purported to be about securing protection for occupied Haiti from US mining giants. This false benevolence is a way to do the mode soufle.
In Haiti, mode soufle (bite and blow) is where the cunning rural rat takes a bite while you’re sleeping, then blows on the injury in order to lessen the pain, keeping you asleep longer so the rat increases its chances for getting a second bite before the peasant awakes from the piercing pain. While the US is destroying the provisions in the Haiti Constitution protecting Haiti from foreign mining companies, Oxfam and its other international cohorts are sent forth to do PR for America’s commitment to protect Haiti’s poor from the giant mining companies!
But keep your eye on the ball Haitians and true friends of Haiti. For they must especially eradicate these protective local Haiti laws that give the local Haiti inhabitants the right to exploit the mines or to participate in mining exploitationbefore the government may legally offer that opportunity to outsiders. To wit:
ARTICLE 39 of the Haitian Constitution, states that the “inhabitants of the Communal Sections have the right of preemption for the exploitation of the State’s land in the private domain located in their locality.”
ARTICLE 36-6 of the Haitian Constitution, states that “law shall establish regulations governing freedom to prospect for and work mines, or bearing earths, and quarries, ensuring an equal share of the profits of such exploitation to the owner of the land and to the Haitian State or its concessionnaires.”
ARTICLE 36-5 of the Haitian Constitution, states: “The right to own property does not extend to the coasts, springs, rivers, water courses, mines and quarries. They are part of the State’s public domain. ”
US occupiers mining on fault lines, stealthily privatizing Haiti water
Peruvian peasants have been struggling against US mining company Newmont’s $5billion Conga gold project which is effectively privatizing certain public lakes:
“Lake Perol is one of several lakes that would eventually be displaced to mine ore from the Conga project. Water from the lakes would be transferred to four reservoirs that the U.S. company (Newmont) and its Peruvian partner, Buenaventura, are building or planning to build. The companies say the reservoirs would end seasonal shortages and guarantee year-round water supplies to towns and farmers in the area, but many residents fear they would lose control of the water or that the mine would cause pollution…’Why would we want a reservoir controlled by the company when we already have lakes that naturally provide us water?’ asked…a peasant patrol group…”– Peru protesters push to stop $5 billion Newmont mine, June 17, 2013.
Where are the Haitians – Ayisyen kote nou ye – concerned with the taking of Haiti water to mine $20 billion in gold for foreigners with open pit mining chemicals known to kill, pollute and cause earthquakes?
Where’s the public outrage when one notes media missives such as, World Bank says its helping Haiti draft mining legislation. Shouldn’t the international community – these self-defined “big-hearted humnitarians” – be shouting that defenseless “Haiti can’t take anymore Made-in-the-USA devastations. That human life and environmental health is more important than Northern profit?”
If Peru’s $5 billion Newmont mine project requires displacing huge amounts of Peruvian water sources, how much more is Haiti’s $20 billion gold mine project going to take of Haiti water sources which are already in grave shortage because of UN cholera poisoning? (Peru protesters push to stop $5 billion Newmont mine.)
It is only possible for the US to re-write Haiti mining laws because Haiti is under US tutelage and might makes right. Who will stand for justice, stop this US occupation force, its rampage and re-writing of the Haiti Constitution to benefit US-Euro resource extraction companies and for privatization of Haiti’s water?Ayisyen kote nou ye? Haiti must look out for itself – Se mèt ki veye kò.
For those foreign charity workers reconciling with injustice like Farmer’s Partnerand Death, for the Haitian technocrats and diaspora collaborators pretending amnesia, proclaiming ignorance or innocence, occupied Haiti runs thus: “Recently, there was a government press conference. There was nothing ‘government’ about it; we organized it and told them what to say, explains the spokesman for one of the largest UN organizations in the Haiti.” (Full article atThe NGO Republic of Haiti).
The hidden US occupation of Haiti
On December 31, 2003 this author was in Haiti to honor the bicentennial of Haiti’s independence. It was very late, I’d already gone up to my room for the night. But my good friend Jafrikayiti (Jean St-Vil) had come to the Montana Hotel in Petion-Ville to meet up. He called from the front desk. I took the elevator down and found a heated conversation in progress with US career diplomat and current member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Luigi R. Einaudi, who was then the Assistant Secretary General at the Organization of American States. Journalist Kevin Pina was arguing with him. What Einaudi said as he exited towards the elevator up to his room was so astonishing, I took out pen and paper and wrote it down. On the eve of Haiti’s 200-year independence, the OAS’s Luigi Einaudi said, “the international community is so screwed up they’re letting Haitians run Haiti.”
One month later, in February 2004, the international community got itself together and started ruling Haiti. The US occupation of Haiti has been going on for nearly ten years now. Its colonial, bipartisan violence is hidden behind a UN and NGO humanitarian cover. (See, 30 U.S. Humanitarian and Advocacy NGOs Encourage Support for Royce-Engel Amendment to Farm Bill to Reform Food Aid to Feed More People, More Quickly, at a Lower Cost.)
The US occupation of Haiti is hidden by the white saviors, their educational and professional institutions and media outlets. These operatives hide the re-enslavement of Haiti by centering the uninformed persons’ attention on the UN or, on their own “good works” in Haiti. Empire’s various celebrity front-men are constantly awarded and elevated with the highest international distinction for their “service to humanity.” When one lifts up the white supremacy visor, the stark reality is that the fake US progressives control the conversation on Haiti to improve the rabid elites’ global feudal system, not to take it down.
Haitians require an end to the US occupation of Haiti, a stop to the mining companies and the NGO republic. If the Haiti government was sovereign and free from US bullying neoliberal World Bank/IFIs policies; if Haiti oil, gold, iridium, marble and uranium resources were not privatized but used for Haiti’s public welfare, there would be no need for food-aid in Haiti.
“These operatives hide the re-enslavement of Haiti by centering the uninformed persons’ attention on the UN or, on their own ‘good works’ in Haiti.”
If the Haitian government would be allowed by Paul Farmer’s partner at the World Bank, President Jim Yong Kim, to invest in its own health care, its own people’s education, water management and to protect its own local economy from unbalanced US trade with protective Haiti tariffs, there would be no need for NGOs in Haiti. There would be no need for a Paul Farmer hospital in Mirebalais, Haiti, not accountable to the Haitian public; no need for food-aid, no need for the NGO pèpè schools and “orphanages.”
USAID just launched its newest money laundering scam – Feed the Future North– to capitalize on the media brainwashing of US tax payers and carry forth its usual extortions in Haiti. Media misinformation on Haitiallows death squad-maker USAID to freely use tax payer dollars and “aid” monies for creating new markets in Haiti for their biotech, pharmaceutical, shipping and big-agribusiness companies.
How much sense does it make to empower NGOs to provide local agricultural aid in Haiti while keeping the Haiti government weak and unable to respond to its farmer constituents. When will the human rights community stop getting funds from the imperialist, divest from the system killing the poor and commercializing poverty. Use their platform to act as real humanitarians to confront subsidized big agribusiness destructions, Monsanto genetic poisons and World Bank/IFS priorities inhibiting local agricultural and manufacturing growth? The current NGO push to “help” Haiti local agriculture is nothing more than another means to further increase NGO capacity and to create more unwilling markets for the US biotech and big agri-business industries instead of increasing Haiti governmental capacity and supporting autonomous Haiti community-based organizations that are the real engines of progress and Haiti’s only hope for sustainable development. (Feeding Dependency, Starving Democracy: USAID Policies in Haiti Grassroots International and Ezili Dantò’ at Foreign Investment means Death and Repression: A Historical Perspective.)
Haiti misery and the general American public’s cluelessness is their cash cow. US false benevolences in Haiti, its fairly uninterrupted corruption, has been going on for over two centuries. But as recently as in 1997 when a similar USAID initiative was analyzed, Grassroots International noted :
“CARE has been ‘helping’ people in the Northwest for decades. But each year, the misery of the people of the Northwest increases. What is the real impact of this aid? To make people more dependent, more vulnerable, more on the margins?…The aid is not given in such a way as to give the people responsibility, to make them less dependent….This is what you call ‘commercializing’ poverty….The people’s misery should not be marketed – Samuel Madisten, Haitian Senator.” (Feeding Dependency, Starving Democracy: USAID Policies in Haiti Grassroots International 6 March 1997.)
Unless Haitians start protesting like the Peruvians, the World Bank, NGOs and US mining companies will gather together as one and with depraved indifference to Black life and environmental health in Haiti successfully amend the Haiti constitution as the US marines did during the first occupation (1915-1934), to destroy more Haiti life than UN cholera, privatize all sources of Haiti water.
Ezili Dantò is an award winning playwright, a performance poet, author and human rights attorney. She was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and raised in the USA. She holds a BA from Boston College, a JD from the University of Connecticut School of law. She is a human rights lawyer, cultural and political activist and the founder and president of the Ezili’s Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN). She runs the Haitian Perspectives on-line journal and the Ezili Dantò Newsletter.
She can be contacted at http://www.ezilidanto.com/zili/contact-us/.
