Confronting the Occupation: Haiti, Neo-liberalism, and the US Occupation
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Written by Kali Akuno
National Organizer, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement
Sunday, April 11, 2010
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Three months have passed since the earthquake devastated Haiti. The passage of this three-month milestone is especially significant to the enemies of the Haitian people � not to the people of Haiti themselves.
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According to Milton Friedman and the intellectual gurus of neo-liberalism, those who aim to capitalize on catastrophe to radically mold a country into total submission have a deadline. In the words of Friedman himself � a new administration has some six to nine months in which to achieve major changes; if it does not seize the opportunity to act decisively during that period, it will not have another such opportunity.�[1]
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Based on experiences in Iraq, Sri Lanka, and New Orleans over the past ten years several things must be in place at the three-month marker in order for the catastrophe to be fully exploited. These include: sufficient military force to contain the population, the dispersal and fragmentation of the affected population to limit its ability to mobilize resistance, and the legislation and implementation of a new policy regime that seeks to privatize all public services and enterprises and eliminate all financial controls.
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Today�s neo-liberal theoreticians and policy hacks control Wall Street, the US Federal Reserve, the Bretton Woods institutions � the IMF, World Bank, and WTO, and most of the central banks of the world since the 1990�s.� They rely on a script, drafted in the 1970�s to exploit catastrophes, natural and human created, not only for material gain but radically regressive social transformation. General Augusto Pinochet�s dictatorship in Chile during the 1970�s was their test run. This neo-liberal script is in fact nothing new. Karl Marx called it �primitive accumulation� and David Harvey calls it �accumulation by dispossession�. This process is becoming popularly known via the works of Naomi Klein as �disaster capitalism� and the �shock doctrine�.
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A key ideological and strategic tool of this neo-liberal script is the concept of �humanitarian interventionism.� Despite how well intentioned this concept sounds, it is a tool developed through the auspices of NATO, under the guiding hand of the US government, to be executed through the UN to allow the imperialist powers to legally and morally interfere in the domestic affairs of weaker nations. Stated plainly, it is colonialism dressed in fine linen. As a practice it gained legitimacy after the imperialist induced atrocities in Rwanda, Burundi, and the former Yugoslav republic in the 1990�s to allegedly put an end to crimes against humanity such as ethnic cleansing and genocide. In the wake of these atrocities the UN under the direction of the US and its European allies has executed the doctrine of humanitarian intervention in the Congo, Iraq, Somalia, and Haiti.�
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The latest imposition of humanitarian interventionism in Haiti was in 2004, after the US overthrow of President Aristide and the Lavalas government, allegedly to restore order and maintain peace. But, this cut was just a deeper penetration of the affliction of neo-liberalism imposed upon Haiti by US imperialism with the willing aid of Haiti�s own decadent ruling class beginning in the 1980�s under the regime of �Baby Doc� Jean-Claude Duvalier.
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The current US occupation of Haiti - the third since 1915 - removes the mask of the UN occupation in place since 2004, and is promoted in the US and throughout the world, as a �humanitarian operation�.� The claim to humanitarianism � allegedly to stabilize the situation in Haiti in order to provide quake relief� - is sadly unquestioned. However, the claim is nothing more than a perpetuation of the long-standing racist myth, perpetuated by the US government that the Haitian people are incapable of adequately presiding over their own affairs. The fact is, with the advancements and refinements in the application of the �shock doctrine� stemming from the occupation of Iraq, the political transformation of Sri Lanka following the Tsunami of 2004, and the social and demographic transformation of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the US government and transnational capital are seeking to apply a �coup de grace� on the people�s movement in Haiti in order to clear the way to remake it as a neo-liberal paradise.
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High Stakes
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The stakes at play in the US occupation couldn�t be much higher for the people�s movement and the working and peasant masses of Haiti. Under US military rule the overwhelming bulk of the international relief aid (materials and finances) is centrally controlled by a handful of relief agencies hand picked by the US and the UN. They, along with the Haitian elite, control who gets anything and when they get it. Thus, they have turned relief aid into a weapon of social and political control. US control of the major ports of entry major ports of entry and main transportation arteries restrict people�s ability to organize and mobilize. Potential routes of refuge to the US via the sea and the Dominican Republic via land have been effectively closed and legally barred. And the political repression unleashed after the 2004 coup by the Haitian ruling class, former military and Tonton Macoute forces, and MINUSTA (the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti) is intensifying, particularly with the ongoing banning of the Fanmi Lavalas Party from running in upcoming elections. During the January 12th earthquake, the collapse of several prison facilities liberated a number of political prisoners associated with the Lavalas Movement and Government.� Since then, the US military and mercenary forces have been hunting them down. To top it all off, the rainy season has begun and hurricane season is approaching rapidly. The client government in Haiti has begun the forced expulsion of �homeless� people from Port-au-Prince, and no one, not the US military, the UN and NGO relief agencies, or the Haitian government is prepared to face the calamities the rains will bring: further displacement, the deepening of food insecurity, and the spread of infectious diseases.�
Over the long term, US imperialism is seeking to do no less to Haiti than it did with the occupation of 1915 � 1934, and that is to impose permanent structures of dependency, to remove the threat of social revolution in Haiti and rebuild the Haitian military to serve as a repressive instrument against it in the service of transnational capital.
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The US occupation of Haiti also serves to further the rollback of progressive social transformation that has swept large parts of Latin America and the Caribbean since the late 1990�s.� The first major rollback initiative under Obama�s command was the Honduran coup that successfully ousted President Manuel Zelaya. The second, albeit with far less US intervention, was the election of a right wing government in Chile, under the leadership of billionaire President Sebastian Pinera. The occupation of Haiti is the third and by far the most deeply penetrating of these rollback initiatives. With it US imperialism is seeking to contain initiatives like ALBA, which in English translates into the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America, initiated and principally led by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to challenge US hegemony. ALBA, through the solidarity initiatives of the Cuban and Venezuelan governments, was making significant headway in Haiti prior to the earthquake with the creation of rural hospitals and schools and the provisioning of subsidized oil and low-interest development loans. The US occupation is stunting the growth of the ALBA initiatives. The bottom line is that the occupation of Haiti is a stark reminder to the aspiring progressive governments and social movements in Latin American and the Caribbean. It announces that as far as US imperialism is concerned the Monroe Doctrine is still in full effect over its historically claimed �backyard�, and that there are limits to the progressive reforms it is willing to tolerate.
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Solidarity and Joint Struggle: What is to be done?
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The US occupation is not just a problem for Haitians, and social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, it is and must be understood as a problem for the progressive social movement within the US itself. Sadly, the Black Liberation Movement (BLM) has been divided and largely demobilized in relation to Haiti since the 2004 coup, in large part due to differences over how to view, understand, and relate to Fanmi Lavalas and President Aristide. Many have succumbed to accepting the grave distortions and outright lies perpetuated by the US government and right wing and ultra-left Haitian forces against President Aristide, Fanmi Lavalas and the Lavalas Movement. This position ignores the popular will of the Haitian masses and distorts the significant contributions of the Lavalas movement and government towards the realization of a participatory democracy and a people-centered path of economic and social development as an alternative to neo-liberalism. And for the most part Haiti and the UN, and now, US occupations hardly register at all within the largely white dominated anti-war movement (gaining even less attention than the ongoing occupation of Palestine). Undoubtedly, racism, particularly the long-standing specter of the Black hoards of Haiti, is at play in this sad scenario.
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This situation must change, and the varied forces of the Black Liberation Movement must lead the way. The Haitian masses and popular movement without question are and will continue to fight valiantly to end the US occupation, but they cannot be left to fight on their own. It is incumbent upon the forces of the Black Liberation Movement to organize a multi-national and/or racial anti-imperialist initiative and coalition within the US that fights for the immediate end of the US occupation and the neo-liberal impositions. We must also take a committed stand in support of the demands of the Haitian popular movement that call for the return of Aristide, freedom for political prisoners, reparations and restitution (particularly from France for the brutal Indemnity imposed in 1824), and the cancellation of foreign debt and the negation of their requirements of austerity and privatization. In short, we must seize the opportunity to create our own script to counter neo-liberalism and humanitarian interventionism in support of the people�s struggle for self-determination and sovereignty in Haiti.
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This initiative must be conceived as one of joint struggle. In the context of the ever increasing interrelated and interdependent capitalist world-system we live in, a joint movement serves the mutual and reinforcing interests of the social movements in Haiti and the US. Our actions should not be contingent on charity or (worse) pity. But a firm grasps that as the social movement in Haiti goes, so goes the potential for the social movement in the US, for the entrenchment of one tyranny spawns more. As we gather our forces to support the resistance of the Haitian people, and join with it in common struggle against imperialism, we will appear as a new defiant spirit and a force to be reckoned with.
Kali Akuno is based in Atlanta, GA and works as the Director of Education, Training and Field Operations at the US Human Rights Network (USHRN) and is in the process of writing a book about his experiences organizing in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina tentatively called �Witness to a Cleansing�.
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[1] Co-written with Rose Friedman, from �Tyranny of the Status Quo�, printed in 1984, and quoted from Naomi Klein�s �the Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism�, printed in 2007.�
