Haiti, Violated

By Clancy Nolan

PORT-AU-PRINCE—When the earthquake struck Haiti last January, a lanky 26-year-old woman, who asked to be called Rolonda, gathered her belongings and moved with her mother, her brother and her five-year-old daughter into a field where they would be safe from the aftershocks and falling debris of the capital’s crumbling buildings. Rolonda strung up a pair of bed sheets for shelter.

It was 7 o’clock in the evening, two days later, when the gang of men passed through her camp, armed with guns. Her family watched in horror as Rolonda was dragged away, screaming. No one tried to help. They forced Rolonda into an abandoned building and tied her up. At least a dozen men raped her that night, and every day after, for four days.

“I can recognize 10 of the men who raped me,” she says. Sitting in an office at a small law firm in Port-au-Prince, Rolonda speaks at barely a whisper, her almond-shaped eyes locked on the floor. “I wasn’t the only woman in that building,” she says. “I could hear other women screaming.”

When the men finished with her, Rolonda was released. She walked through the horror show that was Port-au-Prince in the weeks following the quake. She didn’t go to the hospital. She was too ashamed. And anyway, the hospitals were crumbling wrecks. She didn’t try to find a doctor. Doctors were amputating people’s limbs in the street. She didn’t go to the police. What police?

The men who raped her bragged about escaping prison when the walls started to shake. She had no place to go but the very same camp she had been taken from four days earlier, where she now found herself a spectacle. People pointed as she walked past.

By December, almost a year later, Rolonda and her daughter had settled into a small home in Grand Ravine, one of the hillside slums on the south side of Port-au-Prince, in an area known as Martissant. Life was getting better, she says. A week before Christmas, Rolonda’s boyfriend brought food and money to help with their daughter’s care. While he played inside with their daughter, Rolonda stepped out to shower. She threw a towel over her shoulder, grabbed a bucket of water, and headed outside. It was dark, so it took a moment to notice the two men standing on either side of the front gate. She assumed they were from one of the gangs that operate with impunity inside Grand Ravine. She didn’t run. If she fled, she reasoned, they might think she was hiding a rival gang member. Rolonda asked quietly if she could pass. “Yeah, it’s okay,” said one of the men. “Go ahead.”

She walked to the spot where she usually bathes, in a secluded area behind a nearby staircase. She quickly poured a few cups of water from the bucket over her body, but she was nervous and picked up her bucket to go home. She realized the men were still lurking around the corner. Then she noticed a third man. One grabbed her by her panties, and stuck a gun into her waist. “If you scream, I will shoot you,” he said.

“The whole time he was holding me with the gun, he was touching me, sticking his fingers inside me,” Rolonda says. “They didn’t wait to reach my house before they started using me for sex.”

The men took turns raping her. Then they forced their way inside her house, ordering the small family onto the ground. They ransacked the place, stealing everything of value: cell phones, a portable DVD player, and the odds and ends Rolonda peddled for a living.

She doesn’t know how long she laid facedown on the floor. Her daughter eventually fell asleep next to her.

Afterward, she sought help. She went to a hospital, where she received a course of antibiotics and an HIV prophylactic. There’s no DNA database in Haiti, no rape kit. But Rolonda asked for a medical certificate. Signed by a doctor, the certificate details the attack and the victim’s age and injuries—sometimes noting whether she was a virgin or not prior to the rape. Most of the time, victims wait days or weeks before receiving the medical certificate, which is needed before prosecuting a rape in Haiti.

Rolonda says she doesn’t know the men who raped her in December. She says she doesn’t recall their faces. But their voices haunt her. She has moved to a new neighborhood since the rape, where she is staying with friends, but she doesn’t know how long that arrangement will last. Strange men have threatened members of her family in recent months. Don’t go to the police, or you will pay. “I feel like God is punishing me,” Rolonda says.

VIOLENCE, PAST AND PRESENT

 “That is the point where most cases stall,” says Annie Gell, a lawyer with the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, a human-rights law firm in Port-au-Prince. Practically speaking, if a woman cannot or will not identify her attacker, she has little recourse. Gell, a young, Columbia University-educated lawyer, sits next to Rolonda in the dim office with cracked walls. The firm, which is backed by the Boston-based non-profit Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti, started its Rape Accountability and Prevention Project in June. Since then, Gell and other lawyers have opened more than 60 cases.

Six have resulted in an arrest, but none have gone to trial. In each of these cases, the victim identified her attackers or the police captured them during or immediately after the assault.

“Ninety five percent of the time, these kinds of cases do not get solved,” says Sandy François, director for the defense of women’s rights for the Haitian Women’s Ministry. “No justice is done for these women, and if these people don’t find justice, then why should they talk?”

This is not a new problem in Haiti, where it seems as though rape has been committed with astonishing impunity for decades—even becoming a relatively common method of political leverage during the country’s frequent periods of upheaval. Ironically, it was after women finally gained equal suffrage, in the 1950s, that they faced the cruelest state-sanctioned violence. Among his many terror tactics, including murder and torture, the dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his Tonton Macoutes militia used rape to silence opponents of his regime. His son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, who ruled until 1986, continued this practice. Later, during the coup d’états that forced Haiti’s President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from office in 1991, and again in 2004, rape was used by the military, police and the paramilitary group Front pour l’Avancement et le Progrès Haitien, or FRAPH, to intimidate and silence Aristide supporters.

The scenario was always the same: “Armed men, often military or fraph members, burst into the house of a political activist they seek to capture,” a U.N. report reads. “When he is not there and the family cannot say where he is, the intruders attack his wife, sister, daughter or cousin.” Former Haitian Supreme Court president André Cherilus said in 1994 that it was “not worthwhile for the victim of rape to go to the police to report the crime….given the extremely high probability of retaliation.”

Still, it’s impossible to separate rape from the broader context of gender inequality in Haiti, argues Gina Ulysse, a Haitian-born professor of anthropology at Wesleyan University. “Women have secondary status, and that goes all the way back to pre-independence,” she says. In fact, until 1979, married women in Haiti were considered legal minors.

Today, women have less access to Haiti’s costly education system, as parents choose to send their sons to school before their daughters. All this means that women are exposed to higher rates of poverty and violence, says Mark Schuller, an anthropologist at the City University of New York.

Until recently, rape was defined in Haitian law as a “crime against morals,” an attack on a woman’s honor. Rapists were more likely to face a financial settlement than jail time. Sometimes a judge would order an attacker to marry his victim. Even the United Nations, which has played a major role in governing the country since 2004, has not been immune to allegations of abuse. U.N. peacekeepers were accused in 2005 and 2006 of raping young women in the cities of Gonaïves and Léogâne.

“We don’t have a culture of denunciation, because we don’t have victim or witness protection,” says Florence Elie, Haiti’s ombudsman. “People are very uncomfortable about going to the justice officials, so most of these girls go back home with no solution.”

Rape finally became the equivalent of a felony in the summer of 2005, by presidential decree. The change was thanks largely to the activism of women’s rights groups in Haiti that pressured the U.N. and the Haitian government to adopt stricter laws against rape. During domestic violence and rape trials, rights groups filled courtrooms with women who sat in silent protest of the status quo.

Their tactics worked. Those found guilty of rape or sexual assault can be sentenced to 10 years in prison. Penalties are more severe when the victim is 15 or younger.

Later in 2005, the Women’s Ministry published a national action plan for strengthening Haiti’s laws against sexual violence and improving treatment for victims. It also eventually established a database of sexual assaults.

But this modest progress was wiped out by the earthquake. Since the quake, the sexual-assault database has not been used. Many of the police officers trained in gender-based violence procedures died during the quake, as did the founders of prominent women’s rights organizations. And, like most government agencies—including the Police Nationale d’Haïti—the Women’s Ministry is still largely operating out of temporary trailers in its front yard.

NO RULE OF LAW

Haiti’s population was in crisis long before the earthquake, with an estimated 70 percent unemployment rate and more than half the country living in abject poverty. When the earthquake hit, roughly two million of Haiti’s 10 million inhabitants were left homeless, and the estimated damages exceeded the country’s GDP. The poorest Haitians ended up in relief camps with few options. Government-funded food aid ended in April 2010. A year later, the tents and tarps are beginning to unravel. And the Geneva-based agency that presides over the camps, the International Organization for Migration, has conceded that “hundreds of thousands” of Haitian will remain in these camps at least into 2012.

These conditions are an all-too-familiar recipe for widescale sexual violence. After the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, hundreds of Sri Lankan women and girls were raped by the very people who rescued them, and later by men in relief camps. In the United States, at least 50 women and girls in New Orleans reported being sexually assaulted in shelters and public places during the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Non-profits and aid agencies have produced reams of reports about the epidemic of rape in post-earthquake Haiti. Amnesty International, the International Rescue Committee, UNICEF and others have sent researchers and lawyers to Haiti’s sprawling tent cities to investigate. Like similar reports from conflict zones such as Darfur, Liberia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, they return with horrendous stories: two-year-old rape victims, 70-year-old rape victims, men slashing their way through tents with box cutters and raping daughters before their mothers’ eyes. Last summer, part of a woman’s tongue was bitten off during an attack in a Port-au-Prince camp.

“In whatever situation—whether it’s a cyclone or a coup d’état—out of all these disasters the first people to feel a backlash is women,” says Sandy François of the Women’s Ministry. “The women go to camps, often they’ve lost their husbands, or a valuable man in their family, and that makes them more vulnerable. In some sense, rape becomes a crime of opportunity.”

But the rape crisis in post-earthquake Haiti seems particularly severe, owing primarily to the almost total lack of security or rule-of-law mechanisms. There is no security force patrolling the 1,150 camps in and around Port-au-Prince on a daily basis. Although the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) has a presence in some camps, they rarely patrol. Officers of the Police Nationale d’Haïti reportedly stay mainly on the perimeter of the camps. Both organizations have said they lack the manpower to police the camps reliably. Police chief Mario Andresol says he has reinforced police units to combat gender-based violence, but admits it’s not enough. “As no security effort is 100 percent effective, it is more than probable that rapes will continue to be reported despite our efforts,” he says.

Security is further compromised by the fact that basic services for Haiti’s homeless are almost non-existent. Schuller, the anthropologist, conducted a survey that found that 30 percent of the camps had no toilet facilities. Another survey found that the average of number of people sharing a toilet in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area was 273. Toilets are often set apart from camps, and at night men often hide inside or near the latrines, lying in wait. Separate bathing facilities for men and women are even rarer, and most people must take bucket baths well in view of other camp residents.

Conditions of this sort have contributed to what most experts agree is a rape epidemic in Haiti. Yet the evidence is largely anecdotal, and reliable statistics are scarce. From January to June 2010, the group Haitian Women’s Solidarity (Solidarité Fanm Aysiyen, or SOFA), documented 718 cases in its Port-au-Prince clinics. This January, the grassroots women’s group Komisyon Fanm Viktim pou Viktim (The Commission of Women Victims for Victims, or KOFAVIV), had counted 640 cases of rape since the quake. According to Refugees International, the number of sexual assaults has tripled in the past year. Police chief Andresol, however, says that only 181 women reported a rape in 2010. Out of those cases, 64 attackers have been arrested, he reports.

Sian Evans directs a U.N. committee on gender-based violence that is supposed to coordinate efforts between Haitian agencies, grassroots organizations and various international groups. She grimaces when asked how to find accurate data on the level of sexual violence.

“I don’t think you’re going to find any,” she says.

Indeed, one reason for the lack of data is that most victims have little contact with the criminal justice system. “Of the rapes that I know about personally—meaning I have spoken with the family, seen the victims—none of those have entered the legal system,” says Aleda Frishman, an attorney and executive director of We Advance, a Port-au-Prince-based non-profit focused on women’s issues. Frishman says she’s worked with about two dozen victims. One of them was a four-year-old girl who Frishman recently helped place in a hospital. The girl was raped months ago. She has not spoken since, and recently reverted to diapers.

EVERYTHING LOST

Delourdes Joseph is 38 years old, tall and thin, with graying hair and a broad smile. She grew up in Grand Ravine. She was raped at the age of 17 and shipped off to the provinces to give birth to a son. She returned and was raped again two years later, in 1991.

“Where are the photos of Aristide?”

That’s what the men asked when they burst into her home, suspecting her of supporting the deposed President. They beat her and raped her. “It didn’t matter whether you had any photos,” she says.

When the earthquake hit Haiti last January, Delourdes was living with her husband, Samuel, and her five children in a home near Grand Ravine. The afternoon of the quake, she was feeding her two youngest children under an awning of her home. Her husband was inside napping. All of a sudden she heard a rumbling: da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Her first instinct was to grab the children and run. But as soon as she became conscious of what has happening—earthquake!—she started back into the house to wake her husband. She took a few steps toward the modest home before it collapsed. She can’t afford to have the rubble removed.

“To this day my husband is still in that house,” she says.

Shortly after the earthquake, Delourdes was raped for a third time. She was camping in a field in Martissant. She heard a man behind her, and opened her mouth to scream just as he clamped a hand over it.

Delourdes has lived in a tent for the past year. She volunteers for KOFAVIV, an organization formed in 2004 by a group of Port-au-Prince women who were raped during the 1991-94 military dictatorship that deposed Aristide. KOFAVIV dispatches volunteer “agents”—women who help rape victims get to the hospital, to the police, to a lawyer, and to KOFAVIV for group therapy. Men have harassed some agents, threatening them with retaliation for helping victims.

Last June, a prominent Haitian women’s-rights activist testified at a hearing about the rape crisis held by the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva. When she returned to the relief camp where she lived, she was harassed and threatened by men who demanded money, assuming she had resources because of her travel. She and several other activists in that camp eventually fled, sleeping for a time in the driveway of the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux.

Many KOFAVIV agents now work “undercover” in the camps where they live. If an agent hears that a woman has been raped nearby, she discretely texts a contact at KOFAVIV, who then reaches out to the victim.

Delourdes acts as KOFAVIV’s agent in Grand Ravine. On a recent visit to the area, she wears a simple red-and-white polka dotted dress, her fingernails tipped with red polish. As soon as she climbs out of the car, at the end of a cobblestone road, an elderly woman grabs her and kisses her. This is Delourdes’ neighborhood, and although she doesn’t live here, she’s still a community leader.

A mostly dry riverbed runs alongside the base of the neighborhood. PVC pipes pump water out onto the ground, where children bathe and residents fill up five-gallon buckets to lug up dirt paths to their homes. Survivors of the quake have cobbled together small structures by scavenging from the rubble. Three or four families will crowd into a windowless 200 square-foot space at night to sleep. Others sleep outside, under improvised lean-tos.

In Grand Ravine, there are few of the USAID and UNICEF tarps that blanket much of the capital. Because of rampant violence, Doctors Without Borders has a temporary no-go policy for this neighborhood. Two days earlier, violence erupted and at least one man was killed in a shootout with police.

In 2008, the United Nations estimated that almost half of the young women living in violent slums like the Cite Soleil and Martissant had been raped. And a year into the earthquake crisis, the line between “slum” and “relief camp” is increasingly blurry. Gang members, including many of the estimated 4,000 prisoners who escaped during the quake, have moved into various relief camps, which often provide a higher level of anonymity than their old neighborhoods.

Delourdes comes here two or three times a week, holding community meetings, passing out whatever supplies she has, and searching for rape victims. When she hears about an attack, she’ll find the woman or girl, and take her—via tap tap, the elaborately painted pickup trucks that serve as public transportation—to a clinic, to a lawyer, and to KOFAVIV for psychological counseling, usually in the form of group meetings.

“I tell them that their life is not over,” Delourdes says. “I say, ‘You are young and you are here, and life goes on.’”

Delourdes and I walked to the top of one hill and into a small one-room building where more than 30 people have gathered. Grand Ravine doesn’t see many journalists, so an occasion has been made out of our visit. We are directed behind a long table at the front of the room. Someone has placed a flawless white crepe paper tablecloth over it. Obviously meant for a little boy’s birthday party, big orange basketballs make their way around the edges.

The building has served as both a church and a schoolhouse. Paint peels off the two-tone green and pink walls. One by one, people stand up to talk about life since the earthquake.

 “I used to be a merchant, and I lost all my merchandise in the quake,” one woman tells the group. “Now I have nothing.”

“I have nothing to eat,” a man says. “At night, if I cannot find food, I pour salt into some water and feed it to my children.”

Everyone complains about the gangs. It’s too dangerous at night to sleep, they say. There are no schools where they can send their children. They want to rebuild their homes, but they have no money to do so.

After a few minutes, Delourdes opens her purse. She pulls out a cheap, red plastic flashlight and a handful of water purification tablets. She hands the flashlight to a woman in the front row.  “I’m giving this flashlight to her, ‘cause I know she really needs it,” Delourdes says, smiling apologetically. She passes out the tablets to the group, but there aren’t enough to go around.

“I just bring whatever I have,” Delourdes says.

WHISTLES AND FLASHLIGHTS

When you ask what will prevent rape in Haiti’s camps, people usually say two things: lights and security. A flood light, one aid worker says, is as good as 40 policemen.

But even where lights exist, electricity in Haiti is unreliable, and camps must run generators to keep the lights on overnight. On a recent visit, one American non-profit found plenty of lights in the Place Sainte-Anne camp, in the heart of Port-au-Prince, but the camp managers had no fuel to keep them running. The U.N., Sian Evans says, has helped erect at least 125 lights in camps over the past year. It’s a start, but there are 1,150 recognized relief camps in and around the capital, and this number does not include the smaller, informal groupings of tents in the medians of roads, between buildings and in backyards. Other initiatives focus on training camp managers, police and grassroots organizations on how to deal sensitively with gender-based violence and how to shepherd women through the medical and legal system.

Grassroots groups like KOFAVIV, as well as international NGOs, have passed out thousands of rape whistles. Based on the idea of safety in numbers, women are supposed to blow the whistles if they are attacked. Other women hear it, blow their own whistles and start running. By the time a large group shows up, a rapist will be frightened off. It’s a strategy proven to work, say aid groups.

In the absence of reliable security, camp leaders and NGOs have organized their own makeshift patrols.

In Grand Ravine, Delourdes says, community members recently organized a group of 20 men into an ad hoc security force. With help from KOFAVIV, she gave each man a flashlight, and they agreed to patrol at night. They have already saved one girl from rape, running off her attackers. The men would like food, or rum, or some kind of payment for their patrolling, Delourdes says. But, right now, they’re doing it for free. Another group plans to recruit men who live in a downtown relief camp and who would be willing to work in return for a flashlight, a small monthly stipend, and maybe even pink spray paint—to mark a rapist if they find him attacking a woman.

These tactics work, and are easily implemented on a small budget. But it’s clear that Haiti’s poorest men, women and children will not be safe until they are out of camps and into their own homes. And that is not likely to happen soon. Only about 43,000 temporary shelters (of a planned 111,000) have reportedly been built. And the international NGOs that plan to build such shelters have been criticized for holding onto money raised for Haiti. The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported in January, for instance, that the Red Cross has raised $1 billion worldwide, but has spent less than $300 million so far.

MOVING IN

The choking, gridlocked drive to Delourdes’ new home takes more than an hour, even though it’s only a few miles from the city center. Down a narrow, pot-marked dirt road, her home is a single-story concrete house behind a concrete wall. A spare metal gate in front bears a green stamp that means it’s habitable, that it survived the earthquake. Inside, Delourdes shares two simple rooms with her five children, her sister, and her sisters’ children. They are living together for the first time in a year.

It’s been a week since she moved in, but the inside is nearly empty, aside from a few clothes neatly hung on a wooden rack. In one room are three white plastic chairs borrowed from a neighbor, and a single cot. This is where Delourdes sleeps. In the second room, a folded carpet provides bedding for the rest of the family, unrolled over the concrete floor each night. There’s no indoor plumbing, but there’s a well just a block away, not too onerous a walk with the bucket. And the house is wired for electricity; a bare light bulb is bolted to a two-by-four ceiling beam.

Even after a year of living in tents—flooding when the rains came, baking in the heat the rest of the time—moving into a real home was painful for Delourdes. “It brought back memories of my husband,” she says. “He was my whole life.” To make peace with herself, she walked back to the collapsed home they shared. “I said a prayer, and now I feel more comfortable about living in the house,” she says. “When I entered the house the first time, I told him, ‘Whatever happens, it was written by God.’”

Delourdes is lucky. A group of American lawyers helped pay for this home. But she is literally one in a million. There is no immediate hope for the estimated one million people living in Port-au-Prince’s tent cities. The government and many aid groups want to move people to their old neighborhoods, and build new homes in empty spaces around the city. But most such efforts have been stymied by the difficulty of proving land ownership. Owners of the land used for relief camps are increasingly asking for compensation or for the squatters to leave.

Haiti’s reconstruction has barely begun. Despite the $1.4 billion that private American donors pledged to Haiti last year, and the estimated $10 billion the country expects to receive in global support, poor women find themselves with few resources to protect themselves and their families.

At dusk, Delourdes rides back into town, heading to a job laundering clothes. It’s unclear whether the electricity is out (as it is most every night) or whether there are simply no streetlights (there rarely are) on the stretch of road she takes into town. But there are plenty of lights blazing around the ruined National Palace. Along the chain-link fence in front of the palace, the government has fastened huge posters with computer-rendered images of public works projects and tony apartment buildings they claim will be built in a nearby neighborhood. They have that too-good-to-be true look of advertisements for luxury apartments. Across the street is the Champ de Mars camp, probably the most photographed of the camps, thanks to its proximity to government buildings and a couple of hotels where journalists stay.

Just past the camp, Delourdes climbs out of the car. She did the wash yesterday, now she’s going to iron. “If the power comes on tonight,” she says, eyes rolling, and slips into the night.

*****
*****

Clancy Nolan is a journalist based in Toronto whose work been published in Condé Nast Portfolio, the Wall Street Journal, and New York magazine.

 

(Photograph by Clancy Nolan)

Spring 2011

 

Almost three years since the financial crisis upended the global economy, it still seems possible that the Great Recession will define this century, just as the Great Depression defined the previous one. Lately, however, hopes for Recovery have replaced the darkest fears of Recession. Paths have begun to appear out of the deep wilderness of despair. How fragile is our recovery? How vulnerable is it to new shocks—and how might those be prevented? With stories and analysis from China, Russia, Brazil, Australia, India, Spain and elsewhere, the Spring 2011 issue of World Policy Journal looks around the world for green shoots that could lead to a promising future, while at the same time considering some cautionary tales.

Elsewhere in the magazine, feature articles explore the interactions between Afghan villagers and Americans soldiers in the Korengal Valley; a rape epidemic in post-earthquake Haiti; the growing power of Russia’s intelligence services; a land grab in Africa; the ongoing conflict in Cyprus; the battle for the Amazon; and the future of Europe.

•••
•••

UPFRONT

Big Question: Paths Out of the Wilderness
World Policy Journal asks a panel of global experts to weigh in the most innovative approaches to spurring or sustaining the global economic recovery. Featuring Esther Duflo, Emmanuel Asmah, Timothy A. Wise and other leading thinkers.

Map Room: China in Africa
Surveying the breadth and depth of China’s often-controversial investments in Africa

We Are What We Measure
The financial crisis revealed, and was in part due to, the limitations of the economic data we have relied on since the Great Depression. Matthew Bishop (the New York bureau chief of The Economist) and Michael Greenargue that we need statistics that contribute to a richer debate about the state of our societies and the choices we face—not numbers that reduce reality to the point of distortion.

Anatomy of a Crisis: Ireland’s Agony
Unpacking the financial collapse of the Emerald Isle

Recovery Under the Banyan
Gandhi would have understood our current mess—and some of his ideas could help us out of it. Econo-philosopher Rajni Bakshi explores what Gandhian thought might tell us about the true meaning of “recovery.”

RECOVERY

New Capitols of Capital
Do Shanghai, Moscow, and São Paulo have what it takes to become global financial centers? Andrew Galbraith, Miriam Elder, and Jeb Blount weigh the strengths and weaknesses of their respective cities, each of which is positioning itself as a potential rival to New York, London, and Tokyo.

A Conversation with Justin Yifu Lin
China’s Justin Yifu Lin, the first chief economist of the World Bank to hail from a developing country, believes the world must move beyond Keynesian models of economic growth and stimulus. He explains his vision in a conversation with the editors of World Policy Journal.

The Luckiest Country 
How did Australia avoid the global recession? In a word: China. Australia’s natural resources—especially its coal—fueled China’s growth for the past decade. Michael Stutchbury, economics editor of The Australian, considers whether the rewards Australia reaped are sustainable, and whether the country’s increasingly divisive politics will threaten its economic good fortune.

The Pain in Spain
Nearly five million Spaniards—20.3 percent of the workforce—were unemployed in 2010. Among them are the 15 percent of those between the ages of 16 and 24 who neither work nor study. Yet this ni-ni generation—short for ni estudian, ni trabajan (“they don’t study, they don't work”)—is just one casualty of Spain’s unemployment crisis. Borja Bergareche, the digital editor of Spain's ABC, reflects on how joblessness is corroding the very character of the nation.

PORTFOLIO

Into the Korengal
Photojournalist Tim Hetherington chronicles what happened when American soldiers built a small outpost deep in Afghanistan's isolated Korengal Valley. As the lines between combatant and civilian blurred, American efforts to build trust were undermined by civilian casualties and culture clashes.Restrepo, a film on this topic produced and directed by Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, was nominated last year for an Academy Award for Best Documentary.

 

FEATURES

Long Division
During the past three decades, as Europe came together, Cyprus stayed divided. Nicholas Bray reports on Cyprus's uncertain path to unity, reminding us that the island is also a fault line—between East and West, Christianity and Islam, atavistic nationalism and borderless globalization.

Russia’s Very Secret Services
Aided by the rise of Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB officer, Russia’s intelligence agencies have become increasingly influential. Investigative journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan examine the often violent results of these agencies’ efforts to reassert Russian power in the former Soviet sphere of influence—from extra-legal renditions to assassinations.

Haiti, Violated
“I feel like God is punishing me,” says a woman who was repeatedly raped in the aftermath of last year’s earthquake in Haiti. As Clancy Nolan reveals, it’s a sentiment shared by many Haitian women as they confront an epidemic of rape in a country still reeling from the quake’s destruction—a country that also has a troubling history of tolerating sexual violence. Nolan reports on some innovative approaches to stopping the violence, and some heroic Haitians and international NGOs who have set out to help victims. Yet without progress on the larger problems of funding the reconstruction and establishing rule-of-law, it seems unlikely that even the best-intentioned efforts can solve this particularly gruesome form of aftershock.

African Land, Up For Grabs 
Ashwin Parulkar reports on a 21st-century land grab in Africa. Prior to 2008, foreign investors acquired an average of 10 million acres of farmland each year. In 2009, they acquired 111 million acres, nearly 75 percent of it in sub-Saharan Africa. It’s a transfer of control unprecedented in the postcolonial era. Many claim it is leading to the displacement of tens of thousands of poor, rural villagers.

The Devil’s Curve 
Last summer, a road leading to a remote Amazonian village was the site of an intense clash between Peruvian security forces and an alliance of activists and indigenous people opposed to the government’s plan to open the rainforest to oil exploration and mining. Thirty-four people died in the violence. As Emily Schmall explains, the showdown may prove to be a prelude to a regional conflict pitting the need for economic growth against environmental preservation and the rights of indigenous peoples.

Coda: Europe’s Last Word
The nations of Europe “have become less sure of precisely what they represent anymore, to themselves and to the world,” writes David A. Andelman, Editor of World Policy Journal, in his column. Nowhere is this clearer than in France, an increasingly divided country where, Andelman reports, one no longer hears the dynamic social and political dialogue that defined French political culture in earlier eras.

>via: http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/spring2011

Whistleblower: Libya "Vampire War" is About Oil, Lockerbie and CIA Heroin Op

 

By Susan Lindauer, former U.S. Asset who covered Libya at the United Nations from 1995 to 2003

Who are we kidding? The United States, Britain and NATO don't care about bombing civilians to contain rebellion. Their militaries bomb civilians every day without mercy. They have destroyed most of the community infrastructure of Iraq and Afghanistan before turning their sights on Libya. So what's really going on here?

According to the CIA, the following never happened"

Last October, US oil giants-- Chevron and Occidental Petroleum-- made a surprising decision to pull out of Libya, while China, Germany and Italy stayed on, signing major contracts with Gadhaffi's government.  As the U.S. Asset who started negotiations for the Lockerbie Trial with Libyan diplomats, I had close ties to Libya's U.N. Mission from 1995 to 2003. Given my long involvement in the Lockerbie saga, I have continued to enjoy special access to high level intelligence gossip on Libya.

Last summer that gossip got juicy!

About July, I started hearing that Gadhaffi was exerting heavy pressure on U.S. and British oil companies to cough up special fees and kick backs to cover the costs of Libya's reimbursement to the families of Pan Am 103. Payment of damages for the Lockerbie bombing had been one of the chief conditions for ending U.N. sanctions on Libya that ran from 1992 until 2003. And of course the United Nations forced Gadhaffi to hand over two Libyan men for a special trial at The Hague, though everybody credible was fully conscious of Libya's innocence in the Lockerbie affair. (Only ignorant politicians trying to score publicity points say otherwise.)

 

Knowing Gadhaffi as well as I do, I was convinced that he'd done it. He'd bided his time until he could extort compensation from U.S. oil companies. He's a crafty leader, extremely intelligent and canny. That's exactly how he operates. And now he was taking his revenge. As expected, the U.S. was hopping mad about it. Gadhaffi wasn't playing the game the way the Oil Bloodsuckers wanted. The Vampire of our age--the Oil Industry--roams the earth, sucking the life out of every nation to feed its thirst for profits. Only when they got to Libya, Gadhaffi took on the role of a modern-day Robin Hood, who insisted on replenishing his people for the costs they'd suffered under U.N. sanctions.

Backing up a year earlier, in August 2009 the lone Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people, Abdelbasset Megrahi, won a compassionate release from Scottish prison. Ostensibly, the British government and Scottish Courts granted Megrahi's request to die at home with dignity from advance stage cancer--in exchange for dropping a legal appeal packed with embarrassments for the European Courts. The decision to free Megrahi followed shocking revelations of corruption at the special Court of The Hague that handled the Lockerbie Trial. Prosecution witnesses confessed to receiving payments of $4 million each from the United States, in exchange for testimony against Megrahi, a mind-blowing allegation of judicial corruption.

The Lockerbie conviction was full of holes to begin with. Anybody who knows anything about terrorism in the 1980s knows the CIA got mixed up in heroin trafficking out of the Bekaa Valley during the hostage crisis in Lebanon. The Lockerbie conspiracy had been a false flag operation to kill off a joint CIA and Defense Intelligence investigation into kick backs from Islamic Jihad, in exchange for protecting the heroin transit network.

According to my own CIA handler, Dr. Richard Fuisz, who'd been stationed in Lebanon and Syria at the time, the CIA had established a protected drug route from Lebanon to Europe and on to the United States. His statements support other sources that "Operation Corea" allowed Syrian drug dealers led by Monzer al-Kassar (also linked to Oliver North in the Iran-Contra scandal) to ship heroin to the U.S. ON Pan Am flights, in exchange for intelligence on the hostages' whereabouts in Lebanon. The CIA allegedly made sure that suitcases carrying heroin were not searched at customs. Nicknamed the "Godfather of Terror," Al Kassar is now serving a prison sentence for conspiring with Colombian drug cartels to assassinate U.S. nationals.

Building up to Lockerbie, the Defense Intelligence team in Beirut, led by Maj. Charles Dennis McKee and Matthew Gannon, suspected that CIA infiltration of the heroin network might be prolonging the hostage crisis. If so, the consequence was severe. AP Reporter Terry Anderson got chained in a basement for 7 years, while 96 other high profile western hostages suffered beatings, mock executions and overall trauma. McKee's team raised the alarms in Washington that a CIA double agent profiting from the narco-dollars might be warning the hostage takers whenever their dragnet closed in. Washington sent a fact-finding team to Lebanon to gather evidence.

On the day it was blown out of the sky, Pan Am 103 was carrying that team of CIA and FBI investigators, the CIA's Deputy Chief assigned to Beirut, and three Defense Intelligence officers, including McKee and Gannon, on their way to Washington to deliver a report on the CIA's role in heroin trafficking, and the impact on terrorist financing and the hostage crisis. In short, everyone with direct knowledge of CIA kickbacks from heroin trafficking died on Pan Am 103. A suitcase packed with $500,000 worth of heroin was found in the wreckage. It belonged to investigators, as proof of the corruption.

The punch line was that the U.S. State Department issued an internal travel advisory, warning that government officials should get off that specific flight on that specific day, because Pan Am 103 was expected to get bombed. That's right, folks! The U.S. had prior knowledge of the attack.

Unforgivably, nobody told Charles McKee or Matthew Gannon. But other military officials and diplomats got pulled off the flight--making room for a group of students from Syracuse University traveling stand by for the Christmas holidays.

It was a monstrous act!  But condemning Megrahi to cover up the CIA's role in heroin trafficking has struck many Lockerbie afficiandos as grossly unjust. Add the corruption of purchased testimony-- $4 million a pop-- and Megrahi's life sentence struck a nerve of obscenity.

It struck Gadhaffi as grievously offensive, as well--The United Nations had forced Libya to fork over $2.7 billion in damages to the Lockerbie families, a rate of $10 million for every death. Once it became clear the U.S. paid two key witnesses $4 million each to commit perjury, spook gossip throughout the summer was rife that Gadhaffi had taken bold action to demand compensation from U.S. (and probably British) oil corporations operating in Libya. More than likely, Libya's demands for kick backs and compensation extended to other European oil conglomerates as well--particularly France and Italy--who are now spearheading attacks on Libya.

 

I knew last summer there would be trouble. Payback would be a b--tch on both sides. You don't lock an innocent man in prison for 10 years on bogus charges of terrorism, and expect forgiveness. The United States and Britain had behaved with remarkable selfishness. You've got to admit that Gadhaffi's attempt to balance the scales of justice demonstrated a flair of righteous nationalism.

Alas, Gadhaffi was playing with fire, no matter how justified his complaint. You don't strike a tyrant without expecting a tyrant to strike back.

And that's exactly what's happening today.

Don't kid yourself. This is an oil war, and it smacks of imperialist double standards. Two articles by Prof. Chossudovsky at the Global Research Centre are must reading: "Operation Libya and the Battle for Oil: Redrawing the Map of Africa" and "Insurrection and Military Intervention: The US-NATO Attempted Coup d'Etat in Libya?" 

There is simply no justification for U.S. or NATO action against Libya. The U.N. charter acknowledges the rights of sovereign nations to put down rebellions against their own governments. Moreover, many observers have commented that plans for military intervention appear to have been much more advanced than U.S. and European leaders want to admit.

For myself, I know in my gut that war planning started months before the democratization movement kicked off throughout the Arab world--a lucky cover for U.S. and European oil policy. Perhaps too lucky.

As Chossudovsky writes, "Hundreds of US, British and French military advisers arrived in Cyrenaica, Libya's eastern breakaway province" on February 23 and 24-- seven (7) days after the start of Gadhaffi's domestic rebellion. "The advisers, including intelligence officers, were dropped from warships and missile boats at the coastal towns of Benghazi and Tobruk." (DEBKAfile, US military advisers in Cyrenaica, Feb. 25, 2011) Special forces on the ground in Eastern Libya provided covert support to the rebels."  Eight British Special Forces commandos were arrested in the Benghazi region, while acting as military advisers to opposition forces, according to the Times of London.

 

We're supposed to believe the United States, Britain and Europe planned, coordinated and executed a full military intervention in 7 short days-- from the start of the Libyan rebellion in mid-February until military advisers appeared on the ground in Libya on February 23-24!

That's strategically impossible.

Nothing can persuade me that Gadhaffi's fate wasn't decided months ago, when Chevron and Occidental Petroleum took their whining to Capitol Hill, complaining that Gadhaffi's nationalism interfered with their oil profiteering. From that moment, military intervention was on the drawing board as surely as the Patriot Act got stuck in a drawer waiting for 9/11.

The message is simple: Challenge the oil corporations and your government and your people will pay the ultimate price: Give us your oil as cheaply as possible. Or die.

Don't kid yourself.  Nobody gives a damn about suffering in Libya or Iraq. You don't bomb a village to save it. The U.S., Britain and NATO are the bullies of the neighborhood. The enforcers for Big Oil.

Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan have something in common. They have vast and extraordinary oil and mineral riches. As such, they are all victims of what I call the Vampire Wars. The Arab Princes get paid off, while the bloodsuckers pull the life blood out of the people. They're scarcely able to survive in their own wealthy societies. The people and the domestic economy are kept alive to uphold the social order, but they are depleted of the nourishment of their own national wealth.

The democratization movements are sending a warning that I don't think Big Oil, or their protectors in the U.S. and British governments understand or have figured out how to control. The Arab people are finished with this cycle of victimization. They've got their stakes out, and they're starting to figure out how to strike into the heart of these Vampires, sucking the life blood out of their nations.

And woe to the wicked when they do!

### END####

Susan Lindauer was a U.S. Asset and one of the very first non-Arab Americans indicted on the Patriot Act, accused of acting as an "Iraqi Agent" for opposing the War. She was imprisoned on Carswell Air Force Base for a year without a trial, while the U.S. government reinvented Pre-War Intelligence and the success of anti-terrorism policy, which had been the focus of her work.

Former U.S. Intelligence Asset, Susan Lindauer covered Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria/Hezbollah from 1993 to 2003. She is the author of "Extreme Prejudice: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq."

 

 

U.S. Considers Ground Troops In Libya As War Reaches Stalemate

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Kevin Douglas Grant | April 7, 2011
Executive Editor

The U.S. may resort to sending ground forces into Libya to aid rebels who have been unable to break Moammar Gaddafi's stronghold despite extensive Western air support.

NBC reported: "The use of an international ground force is a possible plan to bolster the Libyan rebels, [Army General Carter] Ham said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

Asked whether the U.S. would provide troops, Ham said, 'I suspect there might be some consideration of that. My personal view at this point would be that that's probably not the ideal circumstance, again for the regional reaction that having American boots on the ground would entail.'"

President Obama has consistently said that American troops are not an option, though the general's testimony clearly undermines those statements. It has been reported for weeks, however, that Libyan rebels do not have the equipment or the training to overcome Gaddafi's army.

The New York Times reported: "The rebel military, as it sometimes called, is not really a military at all.  What is visible in battle here is less an organized force than the martial manifestation of a popular uprising."

With battle reaching a plateau, diplomacy offers a way out of a protracted war, the AFP reported:

The key Western powers involved in the Libyan conflict were throwing their energies Wednesday into negotiating a solution, as the war between government and rebel forces dug deeper into a stalemate.

The United States, France and Britain are reaching out to both the rebels and, indirectly, to officials in Moamer Kadhafi's regime, looking for a way to bring them together in talks, officials for both sides said.

Envoys from those countries were in the opposition stronghold of Benghazi holding talks with rebel leaders, and Turkey -- the only Muslim member of NATO -- was maintaining communication with Kadhafi's circle.

But there was as yet no agreement on opening negotiations, with both sides imposing conditions.  

The Wall Street Journal said the rebels have bolstered their credibility on the international stage by pursuing diplomatic relationships with the U.S. and others:

U.S. envoy Chris Stevens, a former deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, met with members of the rebels' provisional government in talks both sides said were aimed at giving the Americans a better sense of the opposition leadership and how the U.S. can help them.

Hafiz Abdel Goga, a member of the Transitional National Council in Benghazi, said the council hoped the talks would lead to U.S. recognition of the rebel government, which has been formally recognized only by France, Qatar and Italy. 

Rebel leaders have criticized NATO for its handling of the aerial attacks, especially now that evidence has emerged that multiple convoys of rebel troops have mistakenly been bombed by NATO jets.  NATO, meanwhile, has continued to request American assistance in its Libya operations.

It appears the U.S. is being drawn deeper and deeper into a conflict that had been billed as a few-day endeavor.

>via: http://current.com/1knn94c

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Libya: the mission keeps on creeping

There is a whiff of panic about Cameron and Hague's strategy on Libya. To say it has been clueless is almost to be too kind

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• • Peter Beaumont
  • guardian.co.uk, Thursday 7 April 2011 13.08 BST
  • Article history

'David Cameron and William Hague have rushed into a potentially drawn-out air campaign with a principal partner – the US – which has little interest in fighting this war.' Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Since the beginning of the crisis in Libya there has been a whiff of panic about the diplomatic, humanitarian and military strategy pursued by the government of David Cameron. Acting on media reports of the bombing of peaceful demonstrations and widespread atrocities allegedly carried out by mercenaries – not all of which proved to be true – Britain pushed for sanctions against Colonel Muammar Gaddafi at the UN.

What followed next was a half-baked and ill-conceived air campaign to protect civilians, officially, but unofficially to ensure the removal of Gaddafi and his regime.

In purely military terms, it was ill-considered for several reasons.

Analysis of the stability of the regime, applied by officials and politicians to the crisis, has been woefully lacking. People have bought into the hype that the regime – particularly in the country's west – is more fragile than it is.

The same analysts have bought into another kind of hype as well – that which has described the rebels as a politically and militarily coherent entity that was nationally representative.

Now, confronted with the prospect of stalemate on the battlefield between the regime's forces, which have begun guarding their military assets from coalition air attacks, and a weak and disorganised opposition stalled in the desert, the same officials are pushing another bright idea.

This time the notion is that ex-British special forces trainers can – in perhaps no more than a month – transform the rebels into a proper fighting force. Not to win on the battlefield, it has to be said.

Certainly not to conquer Tripoli, which even Whitehall's bright sparks now recognise is a pipe dream.

No, their function would be to help the rebels break out of their power base in the east to apply sufficient pressure so that the ceasefire, when it comes, would be a ceasefire not on Gaddafi's terms – an increasing risk – but one that would insist on his departure.

To add to the sense of unreality surrounding the latest proposal to emerge from out of Whitehall, these British mercenaries would be paid for by Arab countries so as not to give the impression that somehow British soldiers – or ex-soldiers – were fighting Gaddafi loyalists at the British government's behest.

While it is clear that the serious events in Libya, where the regime targeted civilians demanding a more open and representative society, requires a strong international response, the tactics employed so far have been incoherent and muddled, the coalition riven by dangerous disagreements.

Amid all this, to say British strategy has been clueless is almost to be too kind. Cameron and William Hague have rushed into a potentially drawn-out air campaign with a principal partner – the US – which has little interest in fighting this war, and which has now removed most of its military assets from the battle.

With the aircraft necessary to prosecute the campaign – US Warthogs and Spectre gunships – departed, the air strategy, effective at first in grounding Libya's airforce and halting its armour, suddenly looks increasingly toothless. This not least because the coalition's allegedly "protective" campaign does not allow it to take measures to force the regime change that it really desires.

With a real lack of appetite for the use of foreign ground forces and no great enthusiasm either for arming the rebels, the room for manoeuvre for breaking any stalemate was always going to be tiny.

What is required now is realism, not least in the weak justification of the training plan through comparisons with the support given by the west to the Afghan Northern Alliance before the fall of the Taliban. The Northern Alliance, unlike Libya's rebels, was a reasonably cohesive, well-motivated and experienced force.

There is another comparison that has occasionally emerged in the last few weeks in support of the training argument. In November 1994, a then little-known organisation took on the contract – encouraged by the US government – to train Croatia's demoralised armed forces, which had been badly mauled by Serb opponents.

That company was MPRI and 10 months later – not a month, it should be noted – Croatian forces routed the Serbs in the Krajina duringOperation Storm, which led both to a huge refugee crisis and saw human rights abuses committed.

There is an expression for what is happening in Libya today – it is "mission creep" – in a mission that is dangerously ill defined and ambiguous, that with each move appears to throw its hand in ever more closely with a fractured opposition whose ability to govern meaningfully, even in Benghazi, remains open to question.

It is right that we protect those who cannot protect themselves.

What has not been debated is whether, as is increasingly becoming obvious, we should be taking sides in a civil war, and clumsily at that.

>via: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/07/libya-cameron-hague

 

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SECRET HISTORY OF

THE LIBYAN UPRISING

Posted on Apr 4, 2011

 

U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. Marc I. Lane

By Barry Lando

What you’re probably going to read someday: U.N. Resolution 1973 authorized action to create a no-fly zone in Libya. It did not authorize the use of foreign troops on the ground. President Barack Obama seemed to accept that limitation when he made his famous “no U.S. boots on the ground” declaration—a statement that has been repeated by every U.S. spokesman since. Since Obama’s declaration however, it has been learned that, in fact, for several weeks CIA operatives have been active in Libya. They are there supposedly to find targets for the missile and rocket attacks of the U.S. and its allies, as well as to get some idea of who the opposition is that Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy et al. have chosen to support.

The joke was those CIA types are not wearing boots, but sneakers.

Recently we learned, via Al-Jazeera English, that there is a secret training site in eastern Libya where U.S. and Egyptian special forces are giving basic weapons training to selected rebels. Those rebels are also now receiving more sophisticated weapons. You can be sure those U.S. advisers are wearing boots.

That report was long expected. For when the secret history of this current struggle is written (there are already several books in the works), we will almost certainly learn that, despite Obama’s public protestations, he was advised before launching his Libyan adventure that U.S. “advisers” would more than likely also be needed.

Revelations will probably also make it clear that President Obama was told that those U.S. advisers could not just be limited to instructing the rebels how to fire their weapons, but would also have to train them and give them basic military skills. And it probably won’t stop there.

Those advisers are probably also—behind the scenes—already filling key command roles: advising the rebels when and how to advance, either directly or in liaison with special forces from other countries with boots on the ground in Libya, everyone doing his best to maintain the fiction that those “advisers” aren’t there. And that the rebels are calling their own shots.

For those American spooks and troops are not alone.

According to other reports, special “Smash Squads” from Britain’s famed SAS have also been on the ground in Libya for several weeks now pursuing similar missions.

Perhaps they’re the same SAS teams that Britain supposedly dispatched to train Moammar Gadhafi’s special forces a year or so back—part of the warming of relations between the two countries.

And considering the determination of Sarkozy to push for the original attacks, reports that elite French troops are also on the ground in Libya are almost certainly true as well.

The above would mesh with an unconfirmed report from a Pakistani newspaperclaiming: “According to an exclusive report confirmed by a Libyan diplomat in the region, the three Western states have landed their special forces troops in Cyrinacia and are now setting up their bases and training centres to reinforce the rebel forces who are resisting pro-Gadhafi forces in several adjoining areas.

“A Libyan official who requested not to be identified said that the U.S. and British military gurus were sent on Feb. 23 and 24 through American and French warships and small naval boats off Libyan ports of Benghazi and Tobruk.”

Which brings us to the declaration of an American military official briefing the press. When he was asked whether the coalition forces communicate with the rebels in Libya, he said no. “Regarding coordination with rebel forces, nothing. Our mission is to protect civilians,” said the official. “It’s not about the rebels, this is about protection of civilians,” he added.

 

>via: http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/secret_history_of_the_libyan_upri...

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The Libyan Stalemate

Anonymous:

There was not that kind of widespread support for the protests in Benghazi, and even Zintan. If there had been so, we would not be in this kind of military stalemate, where the West is even considering a proposal for some kind of Saif [Gaddafi] type government. That is intolerable. There was not the kind of revolutionary turn in Libya [as opposed what happened in Egypt and Tunisia], and the leadership in Benghazi hastened a script that was written in a different accent. Of course Gaddafi said he would use violence. All States do that. That was to be expected. It is what happened in Yemen yesterday, with snipers killing at least 15 in Sanaa. The question is not what the State promises but who the leadership of a rebellion reads the tea leaves. I’m afraid they read it prematurely, and then in desperation had to call for air strikes–at the same time as their own leadership was usurped by CIA assets and so on. A very sad situation.

Separately also click here, here, here and here for more analyses.

>via: http://africasacountry.com/2011/04/05/the-libyan-stalemate/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Knocking and Kicking (Kugonga Na MaTeke)

Witness African Martial Arts disguised as dance in the United States (The African American Foot Fighting or Knocking and Kicking [Kugonga Na MaTeke]) of the African American Martial Art of "Kwa or Ya Asilia Avita Sanaa", Brazil (Capoeira), and Martinique(Ladja). Notice the simularities!!!

http://www.africanmartialarts.8m.com
http://www.facebook.com/africanamericanshadowboxing

Flashback To 1989 – “Who Is Chris Rock?” (Short Documentary Starring Chris & His Mother)

By Tambay, on February 25th, 2011

A 13-minute short film directed by then-NYU student Michael Dennis., starring a 23 year old Chris Rock, and his disappointed mother

a journal for women, about women

Call for Submissions

Guest Editor: Diane Lockward, author of four collections of poetry, Temptation by Water (Wind Publications, 2010), What Feeds Us, which received the Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize, Eve’s Red Dress, and a chapbook, Against Perfection. Her poems have been published in several anthologies, including Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the World’s Most Popular Poetry Website, Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times, and The Poet's Cookbook. Her poems have also appeared in such journals as Beloit Poetry Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Poet Lore, and Prairie Schooner.

 

Why Adanna?

 

Adanna, a name of Nigerian origin, pronounced a-DAN-a, is defined as “her father’s daughter.”  This literary journal is titled Adanna because women over the centuries have been defined by men in politics, through marriage, and, most importantly, by the men who fathered them. Today women are still bound by complex roles in society, often needing to wear more than one hat or sacrifice one role so another may flourish.

 

While this journal is dedicated to women, it is not exclusive, and it welcomes our counterparts and their thoughts about women today. Submissions to Adanna must reflect women’s issues or topics, celebrate womanhood, and shout out in passion. 

Submission Information:

 

The reading period for this first issue begins on January 31^st and closes April 31^st. 

Send submissions as a single file attachment to adannajournal@yahoo.com

Adanna accepts poetry, short stories, essays, and reviews of books and visual arts. Adanna welcomes both National and International submissions in English.

 

• Please submit only unpublished pieces. 
• For poetry submissions, please send a minimum of 3 poems, a maximum of 6.
• Please limit prose works to a maximum of 2000 words, no more than one piece in a submission.
• Simultaneous submissions accepted. 
• Please notify us as soon as possible of any accepted work.
• Submit in one file as a single document, Word or rtf. No pdf files, please.
• Include contact information on your document.  

Adanna will be a perfect bound print book publication, Summer 2011.  

 

Contributors will receive one complimentary copy.      

 

Visit us on Facebook.         

 

 

 

Amazwi Ethu South African Tales

Creative Writing Contest

Deadline: 19 June 2011

King Pie has today announced the launch of the ‘Amazwi Ethu South African Tales’ Literature Talent Search. The Campaign calls for South African youth of all ages to write and submit their favourite South African stories for competition entry. Top stories will be compiled and published by Penguin Books.

‘Amazwi Ethu South African Tales’ is an initiative to fuel interest in literacy amongst the youth, and is proudly partnered by Heart 104.9FM in the Cape and Kaya FM in Gauteng. The campaign will roll out on a national level from the 16th April and will call for entries until the 19th June 2011.

“South Africa is a culturally rich and diverse country, and the campaign aims to tap into the heritage of storytelling” notes Nicholas Kühne, Marketing Manager of King Pie. “A competition such as this not only allows a record of our culturally diverse stories, but also to invest in individuals who have the talent but not necessarily the means to develop further”.

“Kaya FM is proud to support the Amazwi Ethu initiative and continues to espouse the importance of education as well as the value of understanding one's cultural heritage and rooting. The revival and preservation of undocumented or untold South African stories is important in understanding more about ourselves, our respective histories and cultural perspectives. It is also essential in inspiring a culture of reading and writing with children of all ages.” Adds Mark Mdlela, Marketing and Sales Manager Kaya FM.

As interest literature is a key area amongst youth, as is the preservation of cultural roots through literature, the Campaign holds core importance for all involved partners. Story telling is inherently part of the South African community heritage, and this campaign aims to records a current generation’s story.

Youth are encouraged to submit short stories, or poems from 50 words up to 800 words, via entry boxes at King Pie or via email at king.pie@ydx.co.za. These stories/poems should be their favourite South African tales, as narrated by themselves. The competition is open to ages 12 and up and entries will be accepted in all languages. Various prizes are up for grabs for laptops, cash for schools and tertiary institutions and other spot prizes.

Help and further information can be found via the dedicated helpline number: +27118068061 or on the King Pie Facebook page. http://www.facebook.com/kingpiebrand

The panel of Judges will comprise a celebrity judge, Radio Station representatives, King Pie and penguin books with final Judging of all submitted stories taking place over the end of June and early July 2011. Winners will be announced at via the telephone and at an event.

The published book with will be available in all King Pie stores, from October 2011

More information here.

 

 

Yusef Komunyakaa

"Facing It"

georgem287 on Apr 26, 2007

A visual interpretation of Yusef Komunyakaa's famous Vietnam inspired poem "Facing It".

 

Yusef Komunyakaa grew up in the deep South during the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. He served a tour of duty in Vietnam, where he was also a writer and the managing editor for the military newspaper, the Southern Cross. He began writing poetry several years after he returned to the United States. By 1979, at the age of 32, Komunyakaa had earned a BA, an MA, and an MFA, and had published two collections of poems, Dedications & Other Darkhorses and Lost in the Bonewheel Factory. The poet Toi Derricote wrote of Komunyakaa: "He takes on the most complex moral issues, the most harrowing ugly subjects of our American life. His voice, whether it embodies the specific experiences of a black man, a soldier in Vietnam, or a child in Bogalusa, Louisiana, is universal. It shows us in ever deeper ways what it is to be human." Komunyakaa won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Neon Vernacular. He is the Senior Distinguished Poet in the Graduate Writing Program at NYU.

For classroom resources related to this poem, please visit the Teachers' Domain Web site.

To read this and other poems by Yusef Komunyakaa, as well as biographical information about the poet, please visit the Poetry Foundation Web site.

7Apr2011 Filed under: Activism, Arts and Film, Black History, Black in America, Documentary, Race, Racial Segregation, Racism, Youth Activism, Youth Empowerment Author: drjelks

Laura Flynn

Writer, Activist, and Board Member of the Aristide Foundation for Democracy

 

You Would Have to

Put Your Hand on My Heart:

Aristide's Return to Haiti

Two weeks ago, on the morning of March 18, I was in Haiti to witness the return of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti's twice democratically elected, former president, who was coming home after seven years in exile in South Africa. I waited in the courtyard of his home in Tabarre, along with friends and supporters mostly Haitian, a few foreigners like myself who had come to celebrate. When word came that the plane had landed, a hush fell among us.

Twenty minutes or so later, Aristide's voice came over the radio; the country fell silent. I leaned into the open window of friend's car to listen. In Les Cayes, and Cap Haitian, in Gonaives, and Petit Goaves, in Jeremie people who'd gathered in the streets to celebrate the return stopped and held up their radios. Tout moun Fremi, said my friend Jorge later, shaking with emotion as they heard Aristide's voice come over the radio from Haitian soil for the first time in seven years. Haitian TV later showed scenes of young people, market women, people in tent camps, crying as they listened.

"My sisters and brothers," Aristide said, "you would have to put your hand on my heart to feel how fast and strongly it is beating right now."

In fact, the emotion was clear in his voice, the relief, the joy, the warmth, as he sent greetings out to his people. The country breathed a collective sigh of relief; the weight of a seven-year stone lifted. The plane had landed safely, Aristide was on Haitian soil, and he had not changed. "When you hear Aristide's voice on the radio," someone once told me, "it is like he's pouring honey in your ear."

After the earthquake, after the cholera, after the November 28th elections, which made a mockery of democracy, after the unimaginable suffering the Haitian people have endured this last most terrible year of Haitian history, a little honey in the ear was desperately needed.

"Since the earthquake," Aristide said, "Since the goudougoudou (an onomatopoeic Creole term for the earthquake), I've felt that if I could, I would transform the chambers of my heart into the chambers of a house, where each victim would find a home and no longer have to sleep in the streets, in the mud, under these torn and tattered, scraps of plastic, sheets, or cardboard of humiliation."

When the speech ended, the car carrying President Aristide and his family left the airport amid a crush of gathering crowds who filled the roads, mobbed the car, slowed the motorcade to a crawl. At a construction site in Port-au-Prince workers were filmed throwing down their tools and running in the direction of the airport to see with their own eyes.

Standing on the steps of Aristide's house as we waited -- it took over an hour and a half for Aristide's car to make the two-mile of so trip from the airport to his home -- I spoke with Venel Ramarais, one of Haiti's most distinguished journalists. In the late 70's and early 80's Ramarais was the director of Radio Soleil, the church radio station that was a leading voice in the movement to overthrow of the thirty-year Duvalier regime. Ramarais confessed that over the past seven years, since the coup and kidnapping, there had been times when he'd doubted if a lifetime dedicated to the struggle for democracy and freedom of speech had been worth it. The lowest point had come in January, when an already broken country had been subjected to the return of former dictator, Jean-Claude Duvalier. To all those who participated in the movement to overthrow Duvalier and the birth of democracy in Haiti, Duvalier's return was a kick in the teeth. The final blow. As if to say: you are nothing, Haiti is worse off now then when you began. Your movement, your labor, your life amounts to nothing. Which was perhaps the point, the intended impact of whoever engineered or allowed Duvalier's return.

Since January I'd had similar conversations with several other lifelong activists, leaders of the Lavalas movement. For each of them Duvalier's return raised the same question: could they really go on with the struggle?

A few days after Duvalier's return, I also spoke with Aristide by phone in South Africa. I feared he too would be devastated. But his voice was light, perhaps because he saw immediately that Duvalier, sick and bumbling in Haiti most likely as a pawn of others, had just unwittingly cracked open the door for his own return.

When the car finally arrived at the gates of the house we heard sirens muffled by a thunderous crowd. The gates were pulled open, and thousands of people streamed into the yard. Within minutes the whole courtyard was pounding with joy, people surrounding the car, and pressing towards the house. I found myself crushed between revelers, the relatively small security team, a few well-dressed Haitians who'd been expecting to receive the former president with a bit more formality, plus a smattering of journalists. After ten or so minutes of smashed feet, of moving with the wild undulations of the crowd, of security frantically pushing back, with everyone struggling to stay calm as they said, calm, calm, calm, to each other, someone pulled me in through the front door of the house.

Later on TV, I saw the images of hundreds of people scaling the walls around the property. Streaming over is more accurate, up a thirteen-foot wall, over a huge roll of barbwire, they went, boosting one another up, extending a hand down, while a massive, joyous crowd danced along the whole road leading to the gates. The image, shown repeatedly on Haitian television over the next few days, of all those bodies going up over the walls, right through the barb wire, must have put terror in the hearts of all Haitians who live behind walls that are not supposed to be scalable.

"Exclusion is the problem, inclusion is the solution," Aristide said from the airport, in what would become the defining refrain of the day. He referred both to the exclusion of Fanmi Lavalas, Haiti's largest political party from the elections, which were set to take place in two days, and the fundamental exclusion of the Haitian poor majority from the benefits of citizenship.

It took another thirty minutes for the security team to open up enough space for the Aristide family to emerge from the car. First came the girls, Michaelle, twelve-years-old, dashing head down through the crowd, then fourteen-year-old Christine. The girls' little white dog, Blanco, who they'd carried on the plane all the way from South Africa (and who somehow had already made it into the house), came running out to meet them.

A few minutes later Mildred Aristide appeared, half-walking, half-carried into the house, glasses askew, hair messed, dress rumpled, but looking instantly happy as she landed in the living room of the house she hadn't seen in seven years.

A while later a huge roar from the crowd, and Titid was delivered in through the door, one shoe coming off, glasses on his forehead, and his hair all mussed by the many hands that run over his head. And then laughing, as he too touched home.

The two of them looked as if their return had required all the travail of being born, as if it had taken every ounce of self and energy they possessed to get back to this home from which they had been kidnapped seven years earlier. And it had.

I was in Haiti for Aristide's return in 1994 as well. That too was a joyous day. But this return was far sweeter, far more perilous, and far more unlikely. The scale of the event in 1994 was larger because Aristide was the president returning to the palace. The time of the return was known in advance, and people could gather on the vast space of the Champs Mars to hear him speak. But that day was filled with contradiction. Aristide returned to Haiti along with 20,000 US troops, a compromise that he and most Haitians accepted in order to rid themselves of a brutal military dictatorship. But it rankled.

This time the exile was twice as long, the coup of 2004 far more devastating both in terms of loss of life and in its near success in trying to erase Aristide and Lavalas from Haitian history. A single private plane came halfway across the world, with explicit threats to its safety delivered right up until takeoff. This time, an African president gave the word that allowed the plane to leave. (And an African-American president called at the last minute to try to stop it!) It happened anyway. Without permission and without compromise, Aristide returned to Haiti a free man.

In the courtyard of Aristide's house on the day of this return, people stayed on, hoping he would emerge and speak again. (There was no sound system, and nowhere near enough security to pull that off, plus he'd said what he had to say from the airport). From the outside, the house looked like a three-tiered wedding cake, decorated at every level with people, who shimmied up the coconut trees, onto the roof, and the balconies, who ate mangoes from the mango trees, who cracked open coconuts and passed them down to the crowd below, who reveled, and smiled, and claimed the house and its occupants as their own.

No one got hurt, and no one broke into the house itself, though certainly they could have. An American friend of mine lost his wallet in the crowd, and hours later, someone he knew came running after him to say he had it, someone had given it to someone who had given it to someone else until they found him. The money was gone, but everything else was still there. A Haitian friend lost his cell phone in the melee. Later he got a call from someone who'd found it, taken it home and charged it, then called him to say come get it.

Eventually, when they'd had their sit on the roof and eaten their mangos, and peered in the windows, when it became clear Titid would not speak, the crowd slowly and peacefully dispersed.

A rather disheveled press core remained, sitting on the thoroughly trampled grass in in front of the house, still fixated on the idea that Aristide would make a statement about the elections, call for a boycott or endorse a candidate, or otherwise "destabilize" the country as the Americans had insisted he would. They begged to know when he would appear in public, where would he vote, when they could get a photo op. Photo op? How about the moment he stepped from the plane, both hands in the air? Or the crowds dancing on the road? Or the house covered with people? Alas, joy in Haiti is not newsworthy. Aristide's triumphant return garnered almost no news coverage in the mainstream media in the US.

Which does not alter one bit what Haitians experienced on March 18. As someone said to me late that day: The New York Times does not make Haitian history.

Aristide's return to Haiti changes nothing. Aristide's return changes everything.

A million or so Haitians are still without homes. The latest study now predicts over 800,000 Haitians will be infected with cholera before the disease runs its course. And eleven thousand more will die. Haiti is still occupied by a UN force, which brought cholera to the country, which consumes half a billion dollars a year, yet has not built a single school or hospital, and which is not even able to contribute adequately for the care of those it has infected. The international community, headed by the US government, has now carried out a "selection" as Haitians call the recent elections. Voter turnout for the first round was 22%, the second round turnout appeared to be even lower. A perilously weak government will emerge, one disconnected from its people, unable to mobilize or even communicate with them.

And yet, for those who were asking just two months ago if they could possibly go on struggling for change, Aristide's return is, at last, a taste of justice. For those sweltering in tents in the hot sun, this is a breath of hope. Yes, I know, people cannot eat hope. But they also cannot rebuild a country without it. And for everyone in Haiti and abroad, who worked for this return, it is proof that the US government does not control every last inch of this earth. A plane can take off from South Africa and land in Haiti without their consent. A person can scale a thirteen-foot wall and land on their feet on the other side.

Photos courtesy of Paul Burke.