Marise et Lovenski: Historique des enlevements.

Disappearing Democracy in Haiti

Two prominent Haitian activists have disappeared in recent months, signaling an attack on Haitian social activists
By Sam Urquhart
Published: Thursday November 1st, 2007


Three years after their elected president Jean Bertrand Aristide, was overthrown by a band of U.S.-trained adventurers, Haitians continue to deal with the consequences. Violence persists, both within desperately impoverished communities and directed at those who resist the UN-supported government, with frequent raids being undertaken by UN forces on opposition strongholds like Port au Prince’s Cite Soleil.

Thousands have died since Aristide was deposed, mostly under the two-year dictatorship of Gerard Latortue. A study published by The Lancet reported in 2006 that in the 22 months after Aristide’s removal, over 8,000 people died violently with over 35,000 women and girls being raped. The whole country was essentially raped, with the connivance of the UN mandated MINUSTAH security forces, leaving a trail of fear, resentment, psychological scars and, with the police now staffed by many ex-participants in the 1991 coup (which also targeted Aristide), a budding police state. It’s been quite an intervention, and it’s completely off the rails.

The government has little control over right-wing paramilitaries and the police, while UN forces bludgeon impoverished communities into obedience. As journalist Ben Terrell has reported, “Though elected by the country’s poor majority largely because of his past association with Aristide (he was Prime Minister in the first Aristide administration which ended in the 1991 coup), most activists I spoke to now see Preval as at best ineffectual in standing up to rightist forces.”

Yet despite this, the resistance shown by Haitian civil society against the return of paramilitaries and foreign intervention has demonstrated that Haiti can’t be shocked into docility. Lavalas, far from melting away and disintegrating, has bounced back. In 2006, when popular protests brought a round of elections, it was a Lavalas old-hand, Rene Preval who took the presidency. That was despite massive corruption in favor of candidates more closely aligned with the U.S.-Canadian-French co-ordinated occupation.

Political activism also spread from Lavalas, and fed into it again, via a range of civil society organizations which developed in direct response to disappearances, massacres, corruption, poverty and the trauma of sexual assault. One of the most prominent has been the September 30 Foundation which has worked in the poorest areas of Port au Prince, with rape and torture victims, with the so-called “chimeres,” with the relatives of those killed in the brutal interventions carried out by MINUSTAH in Cite Soleil and by the Haitian “police.”

But that was decimated in recent months by the abduction in August of the September 30 Foundation’s inspirational leader, Pierre-Antoine Lovinsky (also known as Lovinsky Pierre Antoine). Haitian democracy and society took another blow last week when it emerged that another inspirational Lavalas activist and humanitarian worker, Maryse Narcisse, had disappeared.

With elections on the horizon and resistance rising, Lavalas and Haitian activists are under attack. MINUSTAH does nothing. Foreign governments too have done nothing. Their silence betrays a complicity in Haiti’s torment that needs to be reported.

Why Pierre and Maryse?

It’s not hard to see why powerful people might want to remove Pierre-Antoine from Haiti’s political map. A long-time Lavalas organizer and radical psychologist (he worked for years with the victims of the 1991 coup and the Duvalier dictatorship), Lovinsky never hid his allegiance to the Haitian poor and his commitment to activism. He also never hid his opposition to the removal of Aristide and the subsequent UN-backed regime.

As he told Democracy Now! in December 2006, “What happened in Haiti is a continuation of a war of genocide against the poor population. And that is an expression in fact of the class struggle in Haiti. What happens is that the United Nations by what is called the MINUSTAH (United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti) is an accomplice of this war against the poor in Haiti.” Speaking after MINUSTAH troops had mounted a deadly operation in Cite Soleil, supposedly in pursuit of gangsters, he railed against “what happens every day in Cité-Soleil where soldiers kill the poor for nothing, and what happened this past 21st, 22nd of December of this year. This campaign against the poor in Haiti where they give them some kind of pejorative name” adding that “the presence of the United Nations forces is just an expression of the continuation of the 2004 coup d’ etat.”

Never afraid to make dangerous enemies, he then told Juan Gonzalez that “Because all the people who were doing crimes at the end of 2003 and all the former military, they don’t have any problem. They are just circulating freely in the country.”

Lovinsky has consistently defended the poor of Port au Prince against accusations of lawlessness and criminality, preferring to argue that the poor have been deliberately represented as sub-human “chimeres” – the easier to then shoot them down when they resist. In the Democracy Now! interview he even accused the UN and the government of staging kidnappings to create an atmosphere of crisis (“precisely so that they could target Cité-Soleil, to give the impression that they were trying to fight against insecurity” he told Gonzalez).

This year, he moved into even more dangerous territory when he began to link together police brutality, the UN occupation and U.S. “democracy promotion.” As he said in an interview with the human rights group Haiti Action, the U.S. has been seeking to detach an 800-strong contingent of loyal police to form a new Haitian “army.” This would be a disaster for Haitian democracy, Lovinsky argued, noting that it was “The absence of the army prior to the 2004 coup [that] made the completion of the coup impossible, so the US had to get openly involved in order to finish the job, even though they wanted to keep their involvement covert.”

It wasn’t just that Lovinsky said things which upset the powers that be in post-coup Haiti, however. The problem was that he then acted upon his own analysis. As he told Haiti Action, “we in the 30th of September Foundation will be campaigning against the creation of this parallel security force.” Before his disappearance, he had registered as a Senatorial candidate for Lavalas and had been leading demonstrations against the continuation of the MINUSTAH deployment.

Coupling that energetic activism with an uncompromising loyalty to the poor made Lovinsky a marked man. A man who could tell foreigners that “It’s always the poor who rise up to defend national sovereignty [and] that is why in the eyes of the Bourgeoisie, in the eyes of the intellectual elites, these people are no different than the “va-nou-pieds,” nothing but criminals, whereas in my opinion these people are the protectors of our sovereignty” would be a danger to authority and elite rule in any country.

Maryse Narcise comes from the same tradition – the defense of Haitian democracy, a commitment to the poor and a willingness to alienate the rich and powerful. In her capacity as Jean Bertrand Aristide’s spokeswoman, it has been Maryse who has relayed many messages of support back to Haitians from their exiled president. Just like Lovinsky, Narcise has coupled her politics with humanitarianism, working as a medical doctor “in the forefront of efforts to provide community-based health care and education for all Haitians” according to Haiti Action and risking a return to Haiti in 2006 “to restore democracy.”

Who cares about Pierre?

If Pierre-Antoine and Maryse have been disappeared and the worst has transpired, then these are intolerable, disgusting violations of human rights and basic decency. This is, however, made doubly intolerable as they have occured under the supposedly humanitarian eyes of a UN mission. But it’s worse than that, at least from a Canadian perspective.

Lovinsky was abducted in the middle of the visit of a human rights delegation which was investigating abuses committed by the Haitian police and MINUSTAH forces. Roger Annis, a Canadian, was one of the members of that delegation, and as he wrote in a piece for Znet on 27 September, “On August 15, I and another Canadian member of the delegation visited the Canadian embassy to urge Canadian ambassador Claude Boucher to make a public statement of concern about Lovinsky’s disappearance. That request was refused by the embassy, and it has made no such statement to date.”

Annis also told the Hour that he suspected the Canadian silence was far from coincidental. As he told journalist Christopher Scott, “Canada is playing a very decisive role in…financing the Haitian judicial system [while] the RCMP are the training force for the Haitian National Police.” The official line remains that Canada “doesn’t get involved” in Haitian politics, according to Annis. Human rights activists can expect no help from that quarter, to Canada’s shame.

Like the Haitian people rebuilding their democracy, campaigners looking for official support for human rights in Haiti will have to work on their own, and petitions have begun to circulate across the world to demand action and end impunity for Haiti’s political classes and the multi-national occupation. There may still be time to derail the occupation and prevent the remilitarization of Haitian society along U.S.-approved lines. There may be time to rebuild a social justice movement in Haiti. Yet there is a brutal right-wing assault under way on Haitian activism and whether the people of Haiti can respond, only time will tell.

http://gnn.tv/articles/3371/Disappearing_Democracy_in_Haiti

Ces enlèvements n'ont rien à voir avec une supposée lutte interne au sein du camp populaire.

Ils font partie intégrante d'un plan qui se propose d'empecher l'avancement des classes défavorisées d'Haiti.