A piece I wrote on China and Haiti for the International Solidarity Day on May 18 was just put up on ZNet... check it out by following this link, if you can!
UPDATE: Pictures from the May 18 demonstration in Port-au-Prince are up at this location. You can see some shots of the demo, of journalist Kevin Pina being prevented from filming and being threatened by Brazilian UN troops, of SWAT teams, and the body of Sanal Joseph, murdered on his way home that day...
To Pope John Paul II...
OK, I really really didn't want to waste more web space talking about dead pontiffs and their dirty cassocks... but in none of the obituaries that I read, even the ones which mentioned
the darker realities of JPII and the Cold War Vatican, was the word
Haiti ever mentioned. I thought that someone should add to their canon of sins and point that the Vatican was one of the first (or the first?) states to recognize the post-coup regime in Haiti after the bloody overthrow of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991...
It was a fact that enraged and frustrated Aristide into giving a direct statement at the United Nations in 1992:
"What scandal is this? What would the attitude of Pope John Paul II have been if Haiti had been Poland?"
Hmmm... well the article linked above also mentions Poland, briefly:
Reagan and John Paul II found another area of common interest in Poland when the Solidarity trade union movement burst into prominence in 1980. Vast sums were funnelled through the church into the Polish movement.
The Vatican encouraged an activist priesthood in Poland that it moved heaven and earth to destroy in other areas of the world. According to Time magazine, a grateful Reagan agreed in 1984 to alter the US foreign-aid program to comply with the Catholic Church's teachings on birth control, specifically abortion and birth control.
The capitalist news media has created John Paul II personal popularity in Poland with the “collapse of communism” there in 1989. More than a decade after John Paul II's blessed the restoration of capitalism in Poland, a public opinion survey in 2002 by the Public Opinion Research Centre (CBOS) found that 56% of Poles said their lives were “better” under the 1970s Stalinist regime of Edward Gierek than they are today.
Ugh. Well, now the Pope is dead and Reagan is dead, but the institutions they represented live on. To sum things up, forget the former(s) and fight the latter.
And that is way too much space I've dedicated to this topic.
I was doing some research for an article on Haiti and happened upon this picture of UN troops from t
he People's Armed Police standing around in the streets of a city there... clearly holding sniper rifles! A while ago there was a report that the troops were giving sniper training to Haiti's US-backed coup government, but this is the first picture I've seen where they are holding such weapons...
Looks a lot like the PLA's Type 88 sniper rifle to me. Exactly how sniper skills will help bring about peace and security, the UN's stated mission in Haiti, is beyond me... especially since the Haitian National Police (PNH) have already used much cruder means of violence against peaceful demonstrators and residents of poor suburbs.
And while we're on the subject of weapons for the brutal coup government of Gerard Latortue, check out this interview with Kevin Pina, where he talks about his investigation into drugs, money, and US arms sales to Haiti...
Late last year some stories appeared in the Chinese press saying that the contingent of People's Armed Police in Haiti was to be increased by April 2005. I happened to come across a more recent report which seems to confirm this increase, along with more specific details (that the troops involved are based not too far from me, in Guangdong, for example).
China's troops are there, if you will remember, to assist the US-UN consolidate the coup government that toppled Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and which has since embarked on a campaign of "extermination" against the country's majority political party, Lavalas. Just last month a demonstration in the poor neighbourhood of Bel Air was attacked and at least 12 people were reported killed by the Haitian National Police, with the UN standing by.
Many of the reports linked above are from interviews with the US filmmaker and independent journalist Kevin Pina, who has spent a good part of the last 4 years in Haiti, and whose eyewitness and investigative reports on the situation on the ground have been invaluable. Also last year I blogged on a report from Pina talking about Chinese troops helping Haitian counterparts with their sniper techniques (apparently using a demonstration in Bel Air as an instructional).
Well, I've managed to get in touch with Kevin, and he has been very helpful, even working on an interview piece for China Watch... in light of this latest increase in troop numbers, it would be good to get such information translated, printed and circulated around here.
A great deal of pomp has been bestowed on China's involvement in this UN mission, both from Chinese and other sources, who generally link it to China's 'rise to superpower status'.
Around the time of the original PAP deployment, for example, Vice Minister of Public Security Meng Hongwei said that "China's active involvement in peacekeeping missions of the United Nations, especially in Haiti which has not set up a diplomatic relationship with China, fully exhibits a peace-loving and responsible image of the country."
And a source no less crusty than the Times from the UK noted that "the deployment is seen as a major step in China’s efforts to enhance its global role."
Well, the situation in Haiti is all the more telling and tragic for this very reason... if we're to follow this 'superpower' theme and link it to the facts, we have the world's imperial superpower and the one of the world's "rising superpowers"-- at times hailed by some 'leftists' as a potential countervailing force to US hegemony no less-- finding a common interest in the liquidation of a popular political movement in an impoverished country.
Superpower is as superpower does, I guess. And the "threat of a good example" remains a threat to all concerned.
A few people have written to me asking for sources on the Chinese sniper trainers in Haiti that I mentioned in the last post. Thanks to ZNet, you can now read the full transcript of the Kevin Pina report for Flashpoints. Here is the relevant section I was referring to:
Reed [referring to journalist Reed Lindsay], in our interview live from Port au Prince, he was telling me how he was on a rooftop with snipers who were working with the Brazilians, but they weren't Brazilians they were Chinese, from the People's Republic of China, who were on top of the rooftop with Haitian police, training them in sniping, and what was it they were looking at while they were on that roof? What was it that they were training them, using as an example of training? It was a peaceful demonstration in Bel Air, exactly the kinds of demonstrations that the Haitian police down in the streets [during which] have already been shooting at unarmed demonstrators, have already been killing people in the streets. And now, snipers from the police of the People's Republic of China are going to teach the Haitian police sniping techniques from rooftops? It's outrageous Dennis, I can't imagine anything that more clearly demonstrates the duplicity of the United Nations, calling this a peacekeeping mission.
I'm trying to contact Kevin Pina myself, but this is proving to be pretty difficult. I'll at least try and follow this piece of info up with Flashpoints producer Dennis Bernstein and let you know the results in subsequent posts...
I often cite the Indian journalist-extraordinaire P. Sainath’s quote that the corporate media reports on events and spectacles rather than processes, "and the belief that only events make news, not processes, distorts understanding."
If there is a better example of this than the media reporting around Haiti, I’d be hard pressed to find it. Seeing the few events we have been presented with over the last couple of decades, we can see one picture: of AIDS-ridden refugees in rickety boats scrambling for US borders, of wretchedly poor, hopeless people suffering the effects of hurricanes, or some generic and omnipresent 'street violence'. The events of a cursed, black country that would be doomed but for the enlightened actions and interventions of the ‘international community’.
When we really look at the processes, however, we see quite another picture: the first independent black republic in the world, doomed from its revolutionary birth in 1804 by fear and imperial arrogance, continuously used and denied a chance to live through the centuries by the orchestrated violence of the world’s political and economic elites.
As Dr. Paul Farmer from Partners in Health says:
"…[L]et me say that I admire the Haitian people more than any other. When I think about their struggle, all alone, in the late 18th century, and then I reflect on the bitter 'welcome' that greeted their announcement of their Haitian Republic, I am humbled.
Two hundred years later, the Haitian people are still seeking the same things they were in casting off their chains in1804 - justice, fairness, respect, freedom from tyranny. That the Haitian people still refuse to lose hope is a constant source of inspiration to me. I see this in my clinic on a daily basis.
It is my view that the mainstream US media have consistently misrepresented Haiti and Haitians. When I say "consistently" I mean for centuries! The old forms of misrepresentation are now easy to dismiss vulgar racism. But the new forms are no better.”
Kevin Pina is a journalist who has spent a lot of time in Haiti, before, during, and after the latest coup earlier this year. He describes what has been going on there since the latest coup, and what continues to happen there daily, as nothing short of a US- and UN-supported “campaign of extermination against the majority political party”, an empowerment of elite classes, former military rulers and death squad members which has left many, many bodies in its wake.
"The level of repression, the number of killings, the number of incarcerations has strained the system to the breaking point... " Pina said in an October 2004 interview. "...I have never seen a Haiti so bereft of freedom of expression; I have never seen a Haiti so bereft of civil liberties, as I see today. I never saw during those years that they claimed Aristide was a dictatorship a campaign of repression anything like what I am seeing being mounted today against Lavalas. And I think people who have followed this can hear it in my voice, it's indescribable to talk about this reality in terms of sanity. It's reality turned on its head..."
Large, funded ‘human rights professionals’ such as Amnesty International have so far been mostly blind to the painful stories of state-sponsored torture and executions that journalists such as Pina have managed to present to the world through their interviews with people in the country.
In October 2004, China sent a “peace-keeping” force of 125 People’s Armed Police troops under these same UN auspices.
The right-wing press in the US cited cautious administration officials as being “not happy” because "Beijing's communist rulers" might not have the correct, "benign intentions" of the other nations involved.
Such fears are ridiculous, of course, a point which has been emphatically proven by Pina’s most recent report for the Flashpoints program on KPFA radio in the US.
Earlier today, Pina reported that Chinese troops were giving sniper training to members of the Haitian armed forces. Of course, just how endowing criminals and former death squad members with sniping skills is part of the delegation’s professed “peacekeeping” and “crowd control” activities, we can only imagine in our nightmares.
But at least Bush administration officials can rest assured. It seems Chinese troops, like all UN troops involved, will not get in the way, but rather contribute to the mass slaughter in Haiti. They have, no doubt, sufficiently displayed whatever “benign intentions” are appropriate to the “extermination of a mass political party.”
Pina’s articles and broadcasts don’t make it out to the presses in Hong Kong or China. Indeed, there is not a lot of reporting on Haiti at all over here. Perhaps it’s time to change this, and let people know what we are contributing to, and what we’re therefore also responsible for.
