by: Paul Rosenberg
Fri Jul 16, 2010 at 11:00
http://www.openleft.com/diary/19467/haiti-earthquake-aftermath-the-shock...
On Wednesday, Democracy Now! completed three days of coverage of Haiti six months after the earthquake. One segment served as a capstone: "Land Ownership at the Crux of Haiti's Stalled Reconstruction". Although it drew on other material, it was primarily an interview with Kim Ives, journalist with the newspaper Haiti Liberté. And what do you know, it turns out to be just one more example of the Shock Doctrine in action
First we start with the conditions people face, and how land is being used to funnel even more money to the haves:
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS:.... Well, the issue of land is at the crux of the recovery effort in Haiti. For the more than 1.5 million Haitians left homeless by the quake, plans for permanent housing are, to say the least, remote. Even plans for even just temporary shelters to get them out of the tent camps have not been drawn up. Where will all these people go? ....
AMY GOODMAN: .... We're now joined by Kim Ives.... In his latest article in Haiti Liberté, he writes that the earthquake, quote, "reveals that the principal fault-line in Haiti is not geological but one of class." Kim Ives is now back in Miami.
Kim, welcome to Democracy Now! Lay out this issue of land, which is not being raised very much.
KIM IVES: Well, Amy, as we saw, in fact, the wolves have been put in charge of the chicken coop. The bourgeoisie has been put in charge of resettling the squatters' camps, and they have the best land in suburban Port-au-Prince, the large tracts of land very suited to building cities of new cities, where people could have good houses. And there's dozens of proposals of how to build those houses. But the good land is not being given. What they've done is give a place like Corail, which they own, too, and they pay themselves handsomely for its use. And so, what they're doing is keeping their best land; selling, at a high profit, their worst land. And the people are paying the price.
Then we move on to how the anti-democratic emergency governance structure is overseeing everything. It's classic shock doctrine, "a coup without an army":
Paul Rosenberg :: Haiti earthquake aftermath: The "Shock Doctrine" in action
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And Kim, when you say "they," you're talking about the CIRH, the Interim Commission to Reconstruct Haiti. Can you describe who makes up this commission? And also, it's really an underreported fact that the parliament in Haiti in mid-March voted to cede power to this commission. Explain.
KIM IVES: Exactly. They essentially committed suicide to give this commission, which is composed of foreign bankers and foreign governments, like the US, France and Canada, which were behind the 2004 coup d'état against Aristide-they essentially control this commission, along with thirteen members. The other thirteen members are members of Haiti's elite, represented by people like Reginald Boulos, who heads the principal bourgeois family who was behind the '94 coup-the '91 coup and the 2004 coup. So these families are now in charge, along with the US and along with the banks, IMF, World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, of Haiti's reconstruction. And to me, it's going to be the Haitian equivalent of the US bank bailout, where essentially they're going to take these billions of dollars and funnel it into their own pockets.
AMY GOODMAN: We spoke with Haitian human rights attorney Mario Joseph at his office in Port-au-Prince. You, Kim, translated for him. He had some strong words about the Interim Commission to Reconstruct Haiti.
MARIO JOSEPH: [translated] The commission is in fact a coup d'état without an army, because it's a group of foreigners put together with Haitians. It's the same system like when the bourgeois and the foreigners make a coup d'état. It's a coup d'état to keep the same system, which kept them in this bad situation in Haiti. They're here to make a reconstruction, they say, but without the Haitian people. They give the right to seize land and give land without dealing with us. It's a legal coup d'état, you could say, because there was a decree that put it there. They was a lot of pressure coming from Clinton and others to do it in the parliament to legalize this coup d'état. But in reality, the Haitian people don't believe in them, because they didn't participate, there wasn't any transparency at all, and they don't have any accountability to anybody. The parliament, which should have control of the government, they are expired. ....
AMY GOODMAN: .... Kim Ives, take off from where Mario Joseph left off, as he talks about this being a coup without an army.
KIM IVES: Essentially, Amy, it's the takeover of the government by the international banks and former colonial countries, which are interested in getting the contracts to rebuild Haiti, rebuild the palace, rebuild the roads, rebuild the infrastructure, which was destroyed. Again, these will go to companies like Halliburton, DynCorp, Brown & Root, Blackwater, all the usual suspects, the appendages of the Pentagon, which go into Afghanistan and Iraq after they've bombed. In this case, it was an earthquake. And they want to control this commission to be able to send this money to their contractors. And, of course, the Haitian elite want to get a little cut of the action. Apparently one businessman told Haiti Liberté that 15 percent of the contracts have been earmarked for the Haitian contractors, which will be from bourgeoisie, people like Vorbe, etc. And these are the same people, by the way, who own the land along places like the-between Tabarre and the Frères Road, where there's perfect land for resettlement, but they want to keep it for their assembly factories and luxury apartments and office buildings that they want to build there.
Finally, an example of how the aftermath of the earthquake is being used to steal land from the poor:
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And Kim, this issue of the land that, you write, is at the crux of the matter, when we were in Port-au-Prince, that's what everyone was saying: Where are all these people going to go? These tent cities literally are on every street in Port-au-Prince, just teeming around the city. And from aid activists-from activists to people on the ground, organizers, community organizers are all talking about this issue of land: Where are all these people going to go? And you're writing about how the bourgeoisie own these large tracts of land that are ideal for relocations, but in fact the government and the Haitian interim commission is taking land away from the commons. Can you explain that division?
KIM IVES: Well, that's one of the things we saw, Sharif, of course, when we went out to Ganthier. Here was a rural community, 72,000 people, living near the Dominican border. They had tracts of state land, which they've used as commons. For the past eighty years, the mayor explained to us, it's been used to grow food. Now you have businessmen coming out there, laying claim to the land, using false papers, coming with a bulldozer, driving the peasants off the land. The peasants responded by burning the bulldozer, blocking the road. And now the police are hunting them down.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, actually-
KIM IVES: They threw the mayor in jail, because he supported them.
AMY GOODMAN: Kim, let us go to the mayor. We went out-
KIM IVES: OK.
AMY GOODMAN: -on Sunday to Ganthier, and there, the local mayor, Ralph Lapointe, had just come back from being jailed after he sided with the peasants in a struggle over land. We met him at his home. He explained to us what happened. He allowed us to identify him, but he was afraid. He didn't want his face to be shown.
MAYOR RALPH LAPOINTE: [translated] I'm Ralph Lapointe. I'm the mayor of Ganthier. AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us why you were jailed? MAYOR RALPH LAPOINTE: [translated] It's a very long story. Myself, as mayor, there's some land here in the county that the state owns, but I'm here to defend the interests of the state in the county. There are people who came to sell the state land, and myself, I'm not agreed with that. They recently took some land that peasants were on for the past eighty years. And recently there was a confrontation between them and the peasants, and the peasants burned one of their tractors, one of their bulldozers, because they weren't agreed that they take their land from them. And they called me to go to the court, and the minute I got to the court, they put me in jail. Those people, along with the judicial authorities, they're together. That is, these people trying to take over the land are together with the judicial authorities. But thanks to the support of the population of Ganthier and the support of the Association of Mayors, they had to release me after a few hours. AMY GOODMAN: And which side are the police on? MAYOR RALPH LAPOINTE: [translated] Generally, the police are on the side of the people who have money, and they're not on the side of the peasants.
AMY GOODMAN: That's Ralph Lapointe.... Kim, you were translating for him. Make this-look at Ganthier in the larger scale of Haiti right now.
KIM IVES: Yes, Amy. It's a microcosm. This is it. Here's a government official, elected by his community. He is now, as he explained to us, practically a prisoner in his home. He can't go out, fears for his life. The land grabbers have threatened to kill him if he leaves. The same for his director-general of his office. So, this is a war. This is a war between the classes for the land, the means of production of the country. This is the prime means that Haiti has had, up until thirty years ago. Haiti could feed itself; now it doesn't. It can. It is critical that the people not only have land, so they can produce food, so they can eat and aren't reliant on imports from the US and elsewhere, and also that they have a place to build homes, so that when the hurricanes start to hit the country in the coming months, they're not going to be-there isn't going to be an even more horrendous catastrophe than what we saw six months ago.
This is the news that you're not hearing out of Haiti, six months after the earthquake. And although it's obviously more extreme, and the death toll from the earthquake was horrendous, more and more the structure of power relations and how the wealthy profit from catastrophe while everyone else suffers is becoming the common theme of politics all across America, as well as most of the globe-with the notable exception of South America, as discussed a few weeks ago in my diary about Oliver Stone's new documentary, South of the Border.
