[News] Haiti - Update on Jean Juste & Maxine Waters
Anti-Imperialist News
News at freedomarchives.org
Fri Dec 2 11:02:01 EST 2005
ezilidanto at lists.riseup.net
Update on Fr. Jean-Juste 12.1.05
We wound our through the hills of Port-au-Prince up
the road that Father Jean-Juste calls Gologotha to the
Annexe Pententiare Nationale, where he has been
incarcerated the last several months. The Haitian
National Police and U.N. soldiers from Senegal patrol
the prison. Father's health condition continues to be
serious and, in fact, has worsened since September,
according to Dr. John Carroll who examined Father then
and also today (12-01-05). Father is need of a
complete medical work up and a surgical intervention.
As to his legal and ecclesiastical situations, he is
waiting to hear from authorities on both. A judge in
Haiti has his dossier and is reviewing the
information. This "review" has been going on for
months now. As there is no evidence that Father has
committed a crime of any kind, we can only believe
that he is being kept in jail until after the
elections, which keep being postponed. They are currently scheduled for
January 8.
Though Father is eager to leave jail, he hopes to hear
from Rome first about his status as a priest. He was
recently told by the bishops of Haiti that he could no
longer officially act as a priest. "It would be a
great hardship on me if I couldn't say Mass after I am
released from prison," Father said. He has little
support from Catholic priests and bishops in Haiti or
abroad. "Many of the Haitian priests who would be
supporters of mine are dead," he said. Bishop
Gumbleton from Detroit has visited Father and
advocates for Father Jean-Juste's release.
Father's spirits continue to be strong; no one can
keep him from God.
The feeding program at his parish, St. Clare's is
going strong, four days a week, feeding 750 people
each time possibly the only meal they will eat that
day. If you would like to donate to this absolutely
vital cause, contact Margaret Trost at
margarettrost at yahoo.com or visit the What If
Foundation website at www.whatiffoundation.org.
Father appreciates the support he receives from people
in Haiti and all over the world.
*******
PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate
Release Contact: Mikael Moore
December 1,
2005 (202) 225-2201
CONGRESSWOMAN WATERS DEMANDS TO KNOW
HOW THE INTERIM GOVERNMENT OF HAITI
IS PAYING FOR ITS LAWSUIT AGAINST PRESIDENT ARISTIDE
Washington, D.C. - Today, Rep. Maxine
Waters (CA-35) sent a letter to Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice, asking her to explain how
the interim government of Haiti is financing the
civil lawsuit it filed in a U.S. District Court
against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and
several co-defendants for allegedly stealing money from the Haitian treasury.
"I want to know how the interim
government of Haiti is financing this lawsuit,"
said the Congresswoman, "and I want to know
whether the interim government's allegations
against President Aristide have been investigated
sufficiently by the U.S. Government to justify
the expenditures for this lawsuit."
President Aristide, the
democratically-elected president of Haiti, was
forced to leave Haiti in a coup d'etat on
February 29, 2004. The interim government of
Haiti is in the process of organizing elections,
but these elections have been postponed several
times. The elections are currently scheduled for January and February of 2006.
"The interim government of Haiti has
promised to hold elections," said Congresswoman
Waters. "Why can't these allegations be
investigated by a government that has been freely
elected by the people of Haiti?"
Congresswoman Waters' letter
specifically asked Secretary of State Rice
whether any U.S. government funds, such as grants
from the Department of State, the Department of
Justice, the U.S. Agency for International
Development (USAID), or the National Endowment
for Democracy, are being used to finance the
lawsuit against President Aristide.
"Foreign aid is in demand for programs
ranging from reconstruction in Afghanistan to
AIDS in Africa," said the
Congresswoman. "Meanwhile, the United States is
facing record deficits, and Congress is
considering major budget cuts in both domestic
and international programs. We should not allow
an un-elected government to use our foreign aid
to pursue legal challenges to the elected government it replaced."
###
********************
Notes on our four-hour chat with a former Lavalas minister
by Anna and Kirsty Andrews
On November 25, we met with Patrice* ___, a
former minister in the Fanmi Lavalas (FL), who
played an important role in the FL’s
ground-breaking 1995 disbandment of the
notoriously murderous Haitian armed forces — an
army that had only ever served to wage war on the
Haitian population. Patrice had recently traveled
into the Port-au-Prince shantytown of Site Soley
— the battleground in a present-day war against
civilians. An already impoverished
neighbourhood, Site Soley has been particularly
hard hit by the US, Canada and France-backed
February 2004 coup d’etat. One of the first moves
of the defacto government of Gerard Latortue was
a large-scale purge of the public sector; some
4000 workers who had been hired under Aristide,
many of whom inhabited the impoverished slums
around Port-au-Prince, were fired in the immediate aftermath of the coup.
Site Soley is a longstanding stronghold for FL
support, and its residents have played an
important role in organizing demonstrations
against the coup government. Meanwhile, the
residents’ acute impoverishment, particularly
since February 2004, has prompted others to rely
more on petty criminal activities to survive
(although these crimes often pale in comparison
with those of business leaders and the defacto
government—which have played a major role in a
number of high profile kidnappings since the
coup). In Haiti, many people carry firearms, and
in Site Soley, some residents have started using
guns to defend their neighbourhoods against the
increasing repression waged by the Haitian
National Police (HNP) and MINUSTAH. The defacto
government has tried to conflate the criminal
activities — including the kidnappings they
themselves have had a hand in--with the political
organizing going on in Site Soley.
Former MINUSTAH commanding General, Brazilian
Heleno Ribeiro, had emphasized that violence in
Site Soley had social and economic roots.
However, after Ribeiro was replaced, the focus
has shifted: Site Soley is now a “law and order”
problem to be treated by military means — namely
by sending Jordanian soldiers into the
neighbourhoods to assassinate residents. The late
night MINUSTAH raid that attracted world media
attention on July 6, when tens of civilians,
including children, were shot in Site Soley, is part of an ongoing pattern.
MINUSTAH refers to this as targeting gang
leaders. Residents’ movements are restricted by
checkpoints guarded by MINUSTAH soldiers.
The residents have not had any water supply or
electricity since over a year ago, when water was
cut in what Patrice notes is a “punitive measure”
by the defacto government. From what Patrice has
gleaned from recent visits to the neighbourhood,
“It’s being transformed into a concentration
camp”. The population of the city has dropped
down dramatically as a result of the occupation;
“people are fleeing”, Patrice stated. The weekend
before last, he had heard lots of shooting coming
from the shantytown, which he noted was
significant because “from my place to hear
something means that there are some serious
weapons” being used by MINUSTAH. A lawyer with
BAI we recently spoke with told us that last
weekend, entry into the neighbourhood had been
blocked off by MINUSTAH. When we spoke to
journalist Jean*_____, who lives in the
neighbourhood, on Saturday, he told us that he
himself had been shot at. Four bullets had hit
his motorcycle. He also reported that MINUSTAH
appeared to be expanding its base inside Site Soley.
Patrice is extremely critical of MINUSTAH’s shift
from a social-economic to military discourse
about the “problem” of Site Soley — especially
because it is evident from all the conversations
that he has had with folks in the neighbourhood
that desperate poverty is playing a huge role in
much of the crime and violence.
“This comes back continuously in my conversations
with [the residents of Site Soley]’”, Patrice
told us; “people say ‘the first time I was hired
was under Aristide’. Now they can’t send my kids
to school, or their kids are dying from lack of
25 goudes to buy medicine or food. He added that
sometimes people only have a choice between two
kinds of violence: that of robbing some bourgeois
driving by on the nearby highway, or of watching one’s child die of hunger.
In Patrice's analysis, MINUSTAH’s Disarmament,
Demobilization and Reinsertion Programme (DDR)
has been fundamentally flawed. Instead of
offering a means of social reintegration to both
sides, it has in fact at no point and in no way
been applied even-handedly. One side—the
resurgent (and insurgent) militaries and the
delinquent police — was offered a good deal; for
the other side — the armed young men in the
slums, whether criminalized gangs, Lavalas
loyalists or community self defenders — there has been nothing but repression.
DDR seems well-named indeed, an odd bow to the
notorious state of East Germany (but without the
social welfare that the Soviet regime bestowed
along with its apparatus of Party and Stasi). In
fact, this was the second time on Friday that
East Germany had come to mind. Rereading Kirsty’s
notes on Georges Michel, Anna recalled Brecht’s
famously mordant poem on the occasion of the 1953
workers’ revolt against the Party state to the
effect that the people having lost the confidence
of the Party, perhaps the Party should elect
another people. Professor Michel certainly seems
to be of that opinion. We wonder: is the
“international community” inclined to think the same?
AKA are freelance journalists who traveled to
Haiti on November 23rd, to document and report on
the nefarious activities of the international
community in undermining Haiti’s democracy. The are keeping a blog...
(*Real Names altered by HLLN as a precautionary measure)
************************************************
Forwarded by the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network
************************************************
The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20051202/6ca32bb7/attachment.html>
More information about the News
mailing list