Tag: Jean-Bertrand Aristide

Confirman presencia del ex presidente Jean Bertrand Aristide en Cuba (Aristide in Cuba)

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30 January, 2011 — El Brollo.com

aristide-cuba.jpgEl ex presidente haitiano, Jean Bertrand Aristide, quien permanece en exilio forzoso desde 2004 se encuentra en Cuba por razones médicas, según confirmó Inmácula Nervil, directora de la Casa de Hermandad Haitiana Bolivariana y miembro del Movimiento Unido Socialista Haitiano que presiona por el regreso del ex presidente a la nación caribeña en febrero.

“Se encuentra en Cuba por razones de la visión. Los médicos sudafricanos ( donde se encontraba hasta su viaje a Cuba) aconsejaron que debía recibir tratamiento en un clima tropical”, aseveró Nervil, quien dijo haberse comunicado con los asesores del ex presidente.

La activista haitiano-venezolana aseveró además que los movimientos sociales aprovecharán su estancia en un país miembro de la Alianza Bolivariana de los Pueblos de Nuestra América (ALBA) para instar a los gobiernos pertenecientes al bloque a que exijan al presidente haitiano, René Préval, que renueve el pasaporte de Aristide, permitiendo así su regreso a Haití.

“La Constitución proclamada en 1987 dice que ningún haitiano puede permanecer en el exilio”, aseveró Nervil, quien considera que Préval “tiene la obligación de permitir la renovación del pasaporte de Aristide, que es la única razón que impide su regreso”.

Semanas atrás el mandatario expresó que se encontraba listo para regresar, cuando se lo permitieran.

My partial translation:

Jean Bertrand Aristide is in Cuba for medical treatment according to Immaculate Nervil, director of the Haitian Brotherhood House Bolivarian Socialist Movement as well as getting his passport renewed so that he can return to Haiti.

“The Constitution proclaimed in 1987 says that no Haitian can remain in exile,” said Nervil, who believes that Préval “has the obligation to allow the renewal of the passport of Aristide, who is the only reason that prevents his return.”

Weeks ago the president said he was ready to return, when permitted.

Letter to Haiti by M. Nourbese Philip

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7 February, 2010 — Possessionsessions.com

Photography by Leah Gordon

Photographer: Leah Gordon

Haiti, I weep for you. I hide my tears because I’m on a flight from Kelowna, British Columbia, to Toronto, and who knows, with all the heightened security I fear they may think something’s amiss. That I’m weeping as a prelude to joining my ancestors. So paranoid have we become. But I weep for you, Haiti, for your people, for the shit — the unmitigated shit — that life seems to throw your way. Again and again. And, to adapt the words of one of your warrior daughters, Maya Angelou, “still you rise,” to greet another green, tropic day that holds hope ransom, as you tear your people limb by painful limb from a hell that eschews fire and opts instead for the hardface, stoneface indifference of concrete that, Medusa like, seems to have frozen all of your magnificent history into slabs of cement. Now fragmented they litter your landscape as if some giant, angry at us mortals, had decided to stamp on your already precarious country. There was a time when our Caribbean houses kept faith with wood, whether one-room homes — some call them chattel houses — or larger, more graceful estate houses. Time was when the thatched Ajoupa bequeathed us by Taino, Arawak and Carib would have swayed to the groans of the earth as she eased her suffering, opening herself along her wounded fault lines to the ever blue skies, the constant love of the sun, to release all her pent up grief for us, birthing we don’t yet know what. Time was when hands steeped in skills of building homes brought from a homeland a slap, kick and a howl away, across a roiling ocean, would have gently patted mud over wattle, weaving branches to create cool interiors, shaping shelters from the earth that would not, could not, betray the safety in home to crush, obliterate, to fall down around your ears. Like the third little pig in the nursery rhyme, Haiti, you built your home of brick — it was supposed to protect you.

Help Haiti: The Unforgiven Country Cries Out By Chris Floyd

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13 January, 2010 — Empire Burlesque

haiti-earthquake-2.jpg

Via Mark Crispin Miller, the Center for Constitutional Rights points to some venues for getting help to the people of Haiti: Partners in Health and the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund. You can find several more in this listing from the New York Times.

I.
The relentlessly maintained, deliberately inflicted political and economic ruin of Haiti has a direct bearing on the amount of death and devastation that the country is suffering today after the earthquake. It will also greatly cripple any recovery from this natural disaster. As detailed below, Washington’s rapacious economic policies have destroyed all attempts to build a sustainable economy in Haiti, driving people off the land and from small communities into packed, dangerous, unhealthy shantytowns, to try to eke out a meager existence in the sweatshops owned by Western elites and their local cronies. All attempts at changing a manifestly unjust society have been ruthlessly suppressed by the direct or collateral hand of Western elites.

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Season of Travesties: Freedom and Democracy in mid-2009 By Noam Chomsky

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9 July, 2009 — chomsky.info/

June 2009 was marked by a number of significant events, including two elections in the Middle East: in Lebanon, then Iran. The events are significant, and the reactions to them, highly instructive.

The election in Lebanon was greeted with euphoria. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman gushed that he is “a sucker for free and fair elections,” so “it warms my heart to watch” what happened in Lebanon in an election that “was indeed free and fair — not like the pretend election you are about to see in Iran, where only candidates approved by the Supreme Leader can run. No, in Lebanon it was the real deal, and the results were fascinating: President Barack Obama defeated President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.” Crucially, “a solid majority of all Lebanese — Muslims, Christians and Druse — voted for the March 14 coalition led by Saad Hariri,” the US-backed candidate and son of the murdered ex-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, so that “to the extent that anyone came out of this election with the moral authority to lead the next government, it was the coalition that wants Lebanon to be run by and for the Lebanese — not for Iran, not for Syria and not for fighting Israel.” We must give credit where it is due for this triumph of free elections (and of Washington): “Without George Bush standing up to the Syrians in 2005 — and forcing them to get out of Lebanon after the Hariri killing — this free election would not have happened. Mr. Bush helped create the space. Power matters. Mr. Obama helped stir the hope. Words also matter.”

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Michael Deibert interviews Haitian Prime Minister MICHÈLE PIERRE-LOUIS

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6 July, 2009 — “The Elites Are Like a Huge Elephant Sitting on Haiti”

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jul 3 (IPS) – Haitian Prime Minister Michèle Pierre-Louis assumed office in September 2008. Born in the southern city of Jérémie in 1947, she left Haiti with her family in 1964 following a pogrom by dictator François Duvalier against his perceived enemies in her town.

Studying in the United States and France before returning to Haiti in 1977, she has been a close confidante of Haitian President René Préval for over 40 years. After having worked in a variety of private and public sector jobs in Haiti, she and Préval opened a bakery which catered to the poor in Haiti’s capital in 1982.

Active in the first government of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Pierre-Louis was among the first to denounce the 1991 military coup against Aristide during an interview with Radio France Internationale.

After Aristide’s return by a U.S.-led multinational force in 1994, Pierre-Louis opened the Fondasyon Konesans Ak Libète (Knowledge and Freedom Foundation or FOKAL) in 1995 with support from businessman and philanthropist George Soros’ Open Society Institute.

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The blood pours: UN soldiers shoot at Haitian mourners outside church funeral of Father Jean Juste in Haiti by Marguerite “Ezili Danto” Laurent

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19 June, 2009 – San Francisco BayView

shoot-1.jpg“According to witnesses, UN troops on the scene began shooting indiscriminately at the crowd killing a young man identified only as ‘Junior’ from the neighborhood of Solino,” reports Kevin Pina for The Dominion. – Photo: © 2009 Haiti Information Project

Today, June 18, U.N. soldiers gunned down Haitian mourners outside the church, Port au Prince Cathedral in Haiti, the largest church in the country, during the funeral for Father Gerard Jean Juste.

But undeterred by U.N. guns, Haitians continue to run towards the darkness, using their bodies, breath and soul to light the world – liberty or death!

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U.S. behind fraudulent election in Haiti

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19 April, 2009

The U.S. government has a new strategy to stop Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his Fanmi Lavalas party from winning elections in Haiti.

Keeping Aristide in exile and Fanmi Lavalas off the ballot in Haiti is easier than arranging another coup, like the two Washington administrations previously pulled off against Aristide.

Of course, the U.S. foreign policy operatives will never admit that this is U.S. policy. Even though it was U.S. security agents that forced President Aristide onto a U.S. plane on Feb. 29, 2004, and flew him to Africa.

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Electoral Exclusion in Haiti By KEVIN PINA

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16 April 16, 2009

Obama’s First Foreign Policy Disaster?

The Obama administration and the international community have largely remained silent the past two weeks concerning a decision by Haiti’s election council to move forward with controversial Senate elections scheduled for April 19. A visit in early March by former president Bill Clinton and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to ‘draw attention to Haiti and promote development,’ an international donors conference on Haiti held in Washington D.C. yesterday, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to Haiti today, have only temporarily distracted attention away from the controversial election.

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Ortega murdered by US Marines in Haiti: A Reporter's Notes By Kevin Pina

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The family of slain Spanish journalist Ricardo Ortega recently held a press conference in Madrid, Spain where they presented evidence that he was killed by U.S. Marines in Haiti and not by gunmen associated with ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The organization Reporters without Borders (RSF) immediately seized upon the opportunity to release the following statement, “The investigation at first focused on armed supporters of Jean-Bertrand Aristide but in addition to the autopsy carried out in Spain, witness accounts gathered by a journalist colleague on Antena 3, Jesus Martin, who was sent to Haiti six months later, confirmed the thesis that the shooting had come from US troops…”

I found this utterly disingenuous and contemptible given that RSF had been the main proponent of the theory that gunmen associated with ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide were responsible for Ortega’s killing. RSF’s assertion would be uncritically repeated ad nauseum in the international press, and ultimately used by the U.S.-installed government that replaced Aristide, to justify a wholesale campaign of slaughter and mass arrests against his supporters in the following months and years.
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