by Ezili Dantò
“If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” — Lilla Watson, the Aboriginal activists group, Queensland, 1970s
Haiti: A time bomb which must be defused immediately
Ezili Dantò of HLLN – Transcending the 2002 Ottawa Initiative for Haiti
There’s a reason to recall the efforts responsible Haitians make to survive the Western rabid rage hidden behind the do-gooders’ benevolence.
Few in power want to hear that the World bank and the International Monetary Fund contain the poor in war, poverty, disease so to save them with Paul Farmer pharmaceuticals, USAID tied-aid, the Clintons’ subsidized Arkansas rice and Monsanto GMOs-hybrid seeds. Not when this is the age where Barrack Obama nominates Paul Farmer’s partner, Jim Yom Kim, co-founder of what some from Haiti call “Partners in Death”, to head the World Bankers fleecing Black and poor countries worldwide.
It’s not news that the post-World War II alliance, use the World Bank, the IMF, the IFIs and the UN to pillage poor countries and continue the old colonial lines of domination.
Addicted to power and white privilege in poor countries, the large NGOs are funded mostly to make way for the imperialist and global corporatocracy stealing natural resources, destroying , for instance, Haiti’s food sovereignty, water, public health, democratic governance. All, the better to make a market and jobs for foreigners, their vaccines, fertilizers, pesticides and pharmaceuticals behind the mask of “development.”
Certainly in this age, the Nobel Laureates won’t be lining up to honor and give prizes to the homeless street boys in Haiti who dug up the earthquake victims, lifting steel and concrete, saving lives with bare, bleeding hands. Won’t be lining up to honor Haitians battling to end the US occupation. Won’t be lining up to honor and give those, like Rea Dol, Jean Ristil Jean Baptise, Jean Jafrikayiti Saint-Vil, Yves Point Du Jou, Dahoud Andre, Pierre Labossiere or Ezili Dantò a peace prize for saving lives, battling tyranny. The neocolonial narrative on Haiti won’t allow it.
We don’t exist. Whitemen speak for us. Mr-lets-hoard-it-all wants everything.
He forgets. We reMEMBER. Laugh. Do battle. Walk with honor.
Sean Penn is saving us along with Paul Farmer and his acolytes. We who have made no dishonorable alliances and stood, from the beginning, against the return to dictatorship, oppression, re-colonization of Haiti, don’t exist. In fact, they say they treat Haitians well. You know, as well as the godly Thomas Jefferson was treating 14-year old Sally Hemings nightly at Monticello. As well as the slaveholders who provided food and shelter to their slaves and only really beat them senseless when they were not working hard enough on the plantation, or were so ungrateful as to speak for themselves, or escape.
He forgets. We reMEMBER. Laugh. Do battle. Die with honor. Suffer humiliating pains, defeats. Endure.
Constantly under fire. But made of fire. Unborn. Never burn. We roll with it. Handling seismic shifts. Freestyling to murder Tarzan, Jane and their Uncle Toms.
Acid and Clorox hunger we know. Stigmas we know. World Bank structural adjustment policies we know. IFM death plans we know. We’re never filled with the humiliating defeats. Our sorrows run deep. Yet and still, Ibo granmoun lakay Ibo.
We don’t exist. We’re the Haitians who save ourselves. We keep honor. We reMEMBER, always. The Ancestors. Don’t forget their traditional enemies. Never. Bay kou bliye pote mak sonje.
“Cut your chains and you are free. Cut your roots and you die” –Haitian Proverb
What is the Ottawa Initiative?
Haitians and those still blind or in denial and who are participating in the International crime and travesty going on in Haiti right now are urged to recall the Ottawa Initiative .
What is the Ottawa Initiative? Why is there a UN, Chapter 7 peace enforcement mission in Haiti for 8 years? A country not at war, without a peace agreement to enforce and with less violence than most countries in the Western Hemisphere? (See the UN’s own Global Study on Homicide at page 93 ).
Why is Haiti the only place in the world where the UN has a Chapter 7 peace enforcement mission without a peace agreement amongst warring parties to enforce? Why is the third largest UN peacekeeping mission in the world really in Haiti?
What’s the secret behind the rush of the international mining and oil companies to Haiti?
Why the amazing strings of catastrophes in tiny Haiti these last 8-years of occupation? During the period since US regime change in 2004, the US managed to build, in “corrupt” and “resource-less” Haiti, the largest US Embassy in the Western Hemisphere and the 5th largest US Embassy in the world after Iraq, Afghanistan, China, Germany. (See Haiti’s Riches, and Oil in Haiti – Economic Reasons for the US occupation.)
The majority in Haiti have not been allowed to vote in elections since the US occupation began. Haitians suffer Clorox hunger, yearly floods and drownings, no development. The US military closed schools when they landed in 2004, which still have not reopened. The UN’s personnel sodomize a Haiti child daily. The UN mission in Haiti is getting paid nearly one billion dollars per year by the Western powers.
Haitians abroad have not been spared either. A puppet government is in place doing what an authentic government would never be able to get cooperation from the world bankers and financing houses to do.
The powerful bankers and global politicians have finally found a way to tax the poor majority by unilaterally, without accountability, authorizing taxing Diaspora phone calls and remittances. The $2billion,360million per year in Diaspora remittances is the only real direct and aid-with-dignity the people actually get.
But the world turns away, marginalizes Haiti and other voices who tell the truth.
Paul Farmer and his UN and World Bankers continue to “heal” Haitians from the “threat” we pose to ourselves they advertise, not to the white predatory system. They’ve brought us “healing” with UN guns, (37,000?) NGOs , foreign diseases, vaccinations, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, pedophiles, priests, charity workers and such.
What is the Ottawa Initiative? In 2002, high level Western officials secretly got together in Ottawa, Canada and made plans for Haiti because Haiti with popular democracy was a “threat to North American countries. “
The expressed and reported concern was that “Haiti might have, by some estimates, a population of 20 million by 2019…It is a time bomb, the high level Canadian diplomat said, ‘which must be defused immediately.’” (The Ottawa Initiative; and Transcending the 2002 Ottawa Initiative.)
We are the Haitians
We shall overcome this latest US occupation and subjugation. We are the Haitians. The first to put liberty into application in the Western Hemisphere. The first to help liberate five “Latin” American countries.
The first to bring the music now called Jazz into being in the West. The first to beat all the European powers and their white settle derivatives in combat and end slavery, direct colonialism, the slave trade, forced assimilation. The first to defeat the Western bankers attempts at taxing the labor of the peasants through control of the foreign-backed Bank of Haiti.
The first, in the 1946 Haiti Revolution, to successful overthrow a U.S.-backed regime in the Americas. The first to reject bourgeois democracy. The first to refuse to make taxable income for the bankers, mulatto elites and politicians to enrich themselves, preferring a peasant ownership economy pursuing balance, Viv, family stability, Lakou sufficiency, not wealth, not profit to become taxable income. Haitians work to live, not live to work.
Haiti was the first to reject wage-slavery – the Western serf-like system of valuing and turning the human body/soul into a commodity useful solely for its labor for making profit for some bigmen’s enterprise, or to improve someone else’s land and life. Haitians prefer to be small business entrepreneurs on their own plot of land, living the sunny ocean, small farmers Island life without government interference or taxation without representation.
Haitians suffer the agony of endless debt, domination, starvation, imported diseases and all sorts of other deprivation to deny the Western inhuman economic and value systems.
In 1990 with the election of Aristide, the Haitians were the first to thwart US imperialism hidden behind the pretense of bringing democracy through sham elections and the false promises of tied aid.
The Haitians see through the current US occupation behind UN guns and shall again successfully overcome all US-backed puppet regimes, until the subjugation of the voice of the Haitian peasant and patriot stops, sovereignty regained, the foreigners, white saviors and their NGOs and World Bank bankers are gone.
He forgets. We reMEMBER. Laugh. Do battle. Live with honor. The Haitian union forged at Bwa Kayiman has never wavered. Nou se Ginen, nou fè yon sèl kò.
The Bwa Kayiman call is still our call.
Ezili Dantò,
Li led, li la
March, 2012
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“Si nou fè silans,
Y’ap fè l pou nou,
Y’ap fè l sans nou
Y’ap fè l kont nou…Ki vle di, pran peyi Ayiti lan men nou…”–Alina Sixto , Sept. 2007
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