New York: Delegates Report on Haiti Fact-Finding Trip

By G. Dunkel

May 15, 2004--"Before the coup, many workers in Haiti could afford to eat one meal a day," said Dave Welsh, a San Francisco Labor Council delegate, reporting on a fact-finding trip by labor and religious groups over the May 1 weekend. "Now, since Feb. 29, they can only eat one meal every other day."

Feb. 29 was the day U.S. forces kidnapped Haitian President Jean- Bertrand Aristide to the Central African Republic and completed the coup Washington had been financing and organizing since Aristide was re- elected in 2000.

AFSCME District Council 1707, which represents daycare and home health- care workers, hosted the report-back May 4. Many of the union's members were born in Haiti.

Raglan George, DC 1707 executive director, welcomed the meeting, saying, "It is necessary to expose the role this country plays in holding down democracy in Haiti. DC 1707 is opposed to overthrowing the democratically-elected president of Haiti."

DC 1707 President Brenda Stokely pointed out the importance of building a reciprocal relationship between the labor movement and the movements struggling for social justice in Haiti, the U.S. and everywhere.

Sara Flounders, co-director of the International Action Center, chaired the meeting. She emphasized the connections between the struggle against occupation in Haiti and the struggle against U.S. intervention in the rest of Latin America, especially Cuba and Venezuela.

Johnnie Stevens, a co-founder of Labor for Reparations and co-director of Peoples Video Network, and Sharon Black Ceci, a steward in United Food and Commercial Workers Local 27, pointed out that a news whiteout surrounds Haiti. The major media, with few exceptions, are ignoring conditions there.

Some 3,600 foreign troops from the U.S., France, Canada and Chile occupy the country, the delegates reported. Electricity is available for two hours a day at most in the capital, Port-au-Prince. Garbage is piling up in the streets.

According to Welsh, "Schools, literacy programs, the medical school, daycare centers, and any social program associated with Aristide or his Lavalas party have been closed." None of this has been reported in the corporate media.

URGENT NEED FOR SOLIDARITY

Paul Loulou Chery, secretary-general of the Association of Haitian Workers (CTH), is very concerned with building international solidarity with the mass movement fighting the occupation, Stevens emphasized. The CTH invited the fact-finding delegation to its conference and helped organize a May Day rally of 15,000 people in Port-au-Prince.

Stevens explained that because of the urgent need for solidarity, an emergency demonstration against the occupation of Iraq in Washington June 5 would also call for ending the occupation of Haiti.

Ceci also connected the struggles against occupation in Haiti and Iraq. " Abu Ghraib [prison]--that is what occupation looks like everywhere," she said.

Omar Sierra of the Bolivarian Circle of New York announced a May 8 demonstration to oppose U.S. intervention in Haiti and Venezuela.

Tom Griffith of the National Lawyers Guild, who participated in an earlier delegation to Haiti, described how the morgue in Port-au-Prince had disposed of at least 1,000 cadavers in a common grave. Most were bodies of young men with hoods over their heads and hands tied behind their backs, which had been shot.

Griffith described how in the small towns and cities in the south the official police have been disbanded by militias that spend most of their time hunting for Lavalas members and supporters.

He said the country's two major "civil-rights organizations" spend most of their time drawing up lists of people for the militias to hunt.

For all the repression and hunger in Haiti, every delegate emphasized that the people's resistance to the coup and occupation was widespread, firm and growing stronger.