[Marxism] Donna Britt: "For Haiti, A Want Of Concern"

[Walter Lippmann <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(Finally, ONE columnist who isn't following
the drumbeat of Aristide-bashing in the
US media. A breath of fresh air here.)
==========================

For Haiti, A Want Of Concern
By Donna Britt
Friday, March 5, 2004; Page B01 
Washington Post

Why don't we care more about Haiti? 

Americans love freedom. Shouldn't we care deeply about its survival in the 
teacup-size country whose greatest general, Toussaint L'Ouverture, helped 
Haiti's citizenry defeat Napoleon's 60,000-man army in 1791, in what some 
historians describe as history's only successful slave revolt?

I'm asking partly out of guilt. In the early 1990s, I had the chance to dine 
with Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti's recently ousted president. Yet I wasn't as 
frantic with worry as I should have been as armed insurgents approached his 
capital last week.

Today, human beings who once were required to care primarily about people in 
their own families and communities are hourly informed of disasters natural and 
man-made thousands of miles away. We ingest endless reports of bombings, wars, 
murders and deadly accidents.

We've become sympathy skinflints, meting out a little concern here, a tiny bit 
there for those who seem blameless for the awfulness that has befallen them.

But Haiti? For weeks, I didn't know what to think about Aristide. At a dinner 
with journalists during his Washington exile, he'd radiated intelligence and an 
enveloping gentleness. His sweetness seemed more appropriate to the priest he 
once was than to the displaced national leader he had become.

Aristide displayed no bluster or hauteur. Over and over, he expressed concern 
for his countrymen, who were being murdered by a military dictatorship that the 
Clinton administration finally deposed in 1994. Aristide was soon restored to 
the office to which 67 percent of his countrymen had elected him -- and I felt 
the country was in good hands.

But last week, as rebels encroached, news reports kept describing Aristide's 
"corruption." How he was "the wrong leader" for Haiti. Had I been blind?

God knows, leading Haiti would challenge a saint. The Western Hemisphere's 
poorest nation, Haiti endures infant and maternal mortality rates more than 10 
times those of its closest neighbors; epidemic disease remains a major killer. 

Harvard Medical School professor Paul Farmer, 44, cares. The author of the 1994 
book "The Uses of Haiti" cares enough to have established five medical 
facilities in the nation. This week, he's returning to Haiti despite the unrest 
and having twice been held at gunpoint while his ambulances were stolen, he 
said, "by the thugs who are now running things."

Farmer asked me a caring question:

"What could be a deeper wrong than the last 200 years of U.S. policy toward 
Haiti?"

Americans would care more, he continued, if they understood the U.S. 
contribution to Haiti's woes. "No one wants to believe that our government 
would block water to the thirsty and food to the hungry. I didn't.

"But we did and we are."

In fact, the same U.S. government that gave aid to Haiti during the brutal 
regimes of Francois Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude blocked money that would 
have fed children, provided clean water to malaria-threatened citizens and 
built hospitals and roads.

On Aug. 7, 2002, Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Kidder wrote in this newspaper: 
"The United States is actively impeding the flow of foreign aid to Haiti's 
government, a total of approximately $500 million, a sum roughly equal to the 
country's annual budget. We are even blocking, illegally, a series of 
already-approved loans from the Inter-American Development Bank totaling $140 
million."

Why would the United States undermine a neighboring democracy that poses no 
threat to it? A democracy whose first "remarkable" constitution, Farmer said, 
stated that "any slave from anywhere in world who came to Haiti would be 
declared free."

Farmer paused. "Skip ahead 180 years and you find 30 coups, a brutal family 
dictatorship and, finally, a democracy movement that promises poor people the 
right to enough to eat, to an education, to a dry place to sleep.

"That movement was begun by the guy who just got overthrown."

The American most famous for caring about Haiti is Randall Robinson, the former 
TransAfrica chief who staged a 28-day hunger strike that embarrassed 
then-President Clinton into stopping the repatriation of Haitian political 
refugees. 

Today, his concern drives him to outrage. Over his belief that the U.S. 
government supplied the M-16s and crisp uniforms sported by rebels. Over 
hearing Aristide -- whom social activist Jonathan Kozol once called "one of the 
morally transcendent leaders of our time" -- dismissed as unscrupulous. Over 
the phone call he received from Aristide in which his friend insisted that he'd 
been forced to resign by American soldiers.

The U.S. State Department vigorously denies those assertions. But shouldn't any 
democratically elected president threatened by demonstrated thugs merit 
America's unqualified support rather than suggestions that he cut and run?

The Bush administration "removed every wherewithal [Aristide] might have had to 
govern," Robinson said. "They blocked loans for safe drinking water, for 
literacy, for building health care clinics. They ensured that democracy would 
not survive."

Was Aristide corrupt? Supporters point out that the "flawed" elections often 
attributed to him involved 10 senators, six of whom offered to resign, whose 
seats were in question after their election during Rene Preval's -- not 
Aristide's -- presidency.

Why would the United States hamstring Aristide?

"Aristide is the voice of the Haitian poor," said Robinson. " He . . . felt he 
belonged to the people of Haiti and to God. Not to the United States."

Everyone who cares about democracy should care about Haiti, at least enough to 
insist on learning what really happened there and why. Anyone who loves this 
nation knows that too many people, in places far more troubling than tiny 
Haiti, believe what Robinson told me he's begun to believe:

"That America is capable of doing anything, to anybody, at any time."




© 2004 The Washington Post Company 




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