THE MERCURY: http://www.themercury.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=5327902
January 27, 2010 Edition 1 by Imraan Buccus

A MESSAGE OF SOLIDARITY FROM SOUTH AFRICA:

HAITI is not, as a newspaper recently claimed, "the island of the damned". In fact, Haiti is the island of the oppressed.

For a long time Haiti was the most prosperous of all French colonies. But just over 200 years ago slaves in Haiti rose up against the slave owners and three European governments and successfully fought for their freedom.

The revolution was literally incomprehensible even to the most radical European intellectuals - just as much of academia today is often unable to comprehend the political agency of poor black people.

But when the reality of the slave revolution finally sunk in, the response of Europe, later joined by the US and Canada, was to do everything that they could to undermine the first black republic in the modern world.

The French went so far as to send in their warships to demand that the Haitian government pay back the "value" of all the slaves that had liberated themselves. This "debt" of 150 million gold francs was only paid off by 1947.

The US first took over the job of containing Haiti when it sent in the Marines to occupy the country in 1915.

Since then the US government, in alliance with local elites, has run the country in the most brutal and oppressive manner. The violent alliance between the US state and Haitian elites turned Haiti into one of the poorest countries in the world.

The first glimmers of hope since the slave revolution began to shine with the formation of a poor people's movement called Lavalas (the flood) in the 1980s.
In 1990, that movement reached the point where it was able to elect a radical priest and scholar, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to power.

The US, then under George Bush sr, promptly organised a violent coup following which more than 4 000 Lavalas members were murdered.
In 1994, partly as a result of the euphoria around our own transition to democracy, Clinton decided to restore Aristide to office.

But although he had been elected in 1990 on a huge majority, the Americans restored him to office on the strict condition that he followed neo-liberal economic policies.

Aristide stuck to the agreement but still managed to make some progress. For instance, he built more schools in his term of office than had ever been built in the entire history of Haiti.

But George Bush jr would not stand for a radical priest elected to office by a mass movement and Aristide was kidnapped and deposed from power by a second US-backed coup. Once again, the country was occupied and thousands of Lavalas supporters killed.

The US justified its regime change by trying to present it as a popular uprising against a repressive government.

This was just straightforward propaganda. Aristide is as much the credible and popularly elected leader of Haiti as Allende was in Chile or Lumumba was in the Congo - before they were removed from power by the US state and local elites.
All of this has been scrupulously documented by people like Noam Chomsky, Paul Farmer, Peter Hallward and others.

And yet much of the South African media keeps reporting the lies of the Bush regime as if they are fact.

One would think that after the lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, journalists would have learnt to be sceptical of any claims made by the Bush regime about countries that they had taken over.

But here, in a democratic South Africa, the forces of imperialism, together with some think tanks, are taken much more seriously by much of our local media than the Haitian people - or first-class independent scholarship.

In recent years, the SA government's support for the right of the people of Haiti to choose their own leaders was a position that we can all be proud of and one that resonates strongly with our own history.

But of course it must be remembered that at the same time Mbeki was supporting the Lavalas in Haiti, he was repressing poor people here in South Africa.

Haiti was so vulnerable to this earthquake because of years of domination and violence from authoritarian US-backed regimes.

It is time for Haitians to be allowed to elect their own leaders and to chart their own future. In the midst of the disaster, large crowds in Haiti have been demanding that Aristide must be allowed to return.

This is a demand that we should all support. Charity is important in times of crisis. But democracy and the right of a people to elect their own leaders and to make their own decisions is also important.