Haiti Sovereignty, Disaster relief, Rebuilding with Dignity
Ezili Danto
- Bio
- Ezili Dantò is an award winning playwright, a performance poet, author and human rights attorney. She was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and raised in the USA. She holds a BA from Boston College, a JD from the University of Connecticut School of law. She is a human rights lawyer, cultural and political activist and the founder and president of the Ezili’s Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN). She runs the Haitian Perspectives on-line journal and the Ezili Dantò Newsletter. Ezili’s HLLN is the recognized leading and most trustworthy international voice in Haiti advocacy, human rights work, Haiti news and Haiti news analysis. HLLN’s work is central to those concerned with the welfare of the people of Haiti, Haiti capacity building, sovereignty, institutionalization of the rule of law, and justice and peace without occupation or militarization. Ezili Dantò is also an educator who specializes in teaching about the light and beauty of Haitian culture; the Symbolic and Archetypal Nature of Haitian Vodun; the illegality and immorality of forcing neoliberal policies on Haiti and the developing world... For more go to the Ezili Danto/HLLM website at http://www.ezilidanto.com/
Ezili HLLN's 14-Points for the Voiceless in Haiti: For a Return of Haiti's Sovereignty and for Disaster relief, Rebuilding with Human Rights, Healing and Dignity
1. Haiti needs emergency humanitarian aid – rescue, recovery, relief and rebuilding, not military occupation.2. End indirect aid to Haiti. Foreign Aid should go to Haiti not the churches and NGOs. The Obama administration must support an international response that respect Haitian sovereignty, not boost NGO profits and power in Haiti
3. Support the institutionalization of the rule of law
a. Return former president Aristide to Haiti so he may assist Haiti’s majority at this agonizing time and help in the relief and rebuilding of the nation.b. Support community organizing, community policing, transparency and participatory democracy.4. Value life - Value life over political and economic interests. Value the lives of the survivors not the “security” interests of the US and the international community.5. Respect Haitian human rights and dignity. Stop criminalizing the poor in Haiti.
The UN has enacted Guiding Principles for Internally Displaced People. Make them required reading for every official and non-governmental person and organization. Non-governmental organizations like charities and international aid groups are extremely powerful in Haiti - they too must respect the human dignity and human rights of all people.6. Value Family - Help reunite displaced families
The Obama administration must support an international response to the tragic Haiti earthquake that values family and is sensitive to the human agony of family lost and separated in Haiti.Extend the Temporary Protective Status cutoff date from January 12, 2010 to December 31, 2010, allowing patients and those who are accompanying their USC children post January 12 to enjoy said benefit. Provide humanitarian parole and equal application of TPS.
7. Rebuilt Haiti
The Obama administration must support an international response that use its power to uphold Haitian-led, Haiti-capacity building relief and rebuilding efforts that sustains human rights, healing and dignity.Support the launching by Haiti of national public works projects to rebuild infrastructure, sanitation systems, communication, public schools, literacy programs, public health hospitals and clinics, reinforce outback village units with affordable housing, firehouses, health clinics, legal offices, clerks offices, art & job training, communication, sanitation systems, access to safe drinking water units. Expand Haiti’s national handicraft industry, folkloric music training and education on Vodun, Haitian history of struggle and resistance, Kreyòl, traditional dance movements and significance, basic sacred drumming, vèvè writing and psychology/philosophy, basic herbal healing.
8. Relief, rebuilding and redevelopment should be designed by Haitians and their collaborators, not USAID, the UN or the “international community.”
Stop the stranglehold of USAID, its other international counterparts and the over 10,000 NGOs over Haiti. Their grip must be loosened if a new paradigm is to be installed for the people of Haiti that promotes Haitian self-reliance not Haitian dependency
USAID has a history of mistreating the Haitian majority, feeding dependency, starving democracy and should not be the US agency overseeing the US relief effort. And if they are, oversight and accountability are needed.
a. Oversight and accountability.b. Support Haitians and to rebuild Haitic. Promote Haitian self-reliance, self-respect, self-determination, not dependency, injustice and indignities
9. Prioritize jobs and skills transfer to Haitian nationals10. Debt Cancellation
a. Immediately cancel all debts owed by Haiti to the multilateral financial institutions (IMF, WB and IDB);b. Suspends all debt service payments to these institutions until the debts are completely canceled; and,
c. Provides that all additional funds to Haiti for the rescue, relief, rebuilding and redevelopment are to be given in the form of grants, not loan debts.
11. All international adoptions or evacuations of "disaster orphans" must stop.
12. Encourage maximum leveraging of Diaspora remittances
a. Release all Haitians in US jails who are not accused of any crimes so that they may apply for Temporary Protected Status (TPS.)b. Support with tax-incentives direct capital investment/Haitian remittances in Haiti; and,
c. Ending the militarization of aid and the US/UN occupation shall protected and not diminish the value and use of Diaspora remittances because their shall be less violence, less demonstrations against the occupation and more normalcy so the people may invest the remittances in school fees, education, small business enterprises, and not funerals and lawyers to incarcerated relatives..
13. End free trade, began fair trade.
Support domestic food production, indigenous Haiti manufacturing and job creation. Stop IFIs policies that limit social spending, require that Haiti remove tariffs on food and other imports, privatize public enterprises, exempt foreign investors from taxes on their profits. Support grassroots, indigenous Haiti capacity building organizations.Protect workers rights and provide a living wage, especially in the export assembly industry.
Haiti needs food sovereignty, domestic manufacturing, local entrepreneurship, fair wage jobs, affordable and clean energy.
Support Haiti in subsidizing domestic food production, domestic manufacturing, organic food market from Haiti, local job creation, valid reforestation, fair wages not free trade wages, public works projects, sustainable development and a good working culture that values workers’ rights and health. Support Haiti entrepreneurship, Konbit culture and equitable distribution and profit sharing from the assets of the country. Support Haiti’s fuel sovereignty, clean alternative fuel and valid reforestation alternatives suited to Haiti’s reality. After the emergency relief stage of the earthquake emergency, calibrate food aid so to assist and not further destroy Haiti's food production.
14. Raise funds to support the work of Ezili Dantò/HLLN Nou La!- We are Here - earthquake relief efforts********Ezili HLLN's 14-Points with talking points
(for more info, check our website)
1. Haiti needs emergency humanitarian aid – rescue, recovery, relief and rebuilding, not military occupation.
The occupation of the Toussaint Louverture international airport and other Haitian national spaces by foreign militaries, especially by the US/UN, Canada and France, must end and these areas be returned to the control of the people of Haiti. End the UN/US, France and Canadian occupation of Haiti.
President Obama sent in a bipartisan military invasion. Soldiers are trained to intimidate and kill if ever the need arises. A gun does not heal or cure. Stop militarizing emergency relief. Haiti needs more doctors, nurses, medicines, medical and psychological treatment, food, water, shelter and conscious relief with dignity and human rights, not occupation. This time of horrific loss of life and damage ought not to be used to push through unpopular policy interests of the corporatocracy and global oligarchy to further fleece Haiti of its resources or put Haiti in more debt. (Haiti Disaster Capitalism Alert: Stop Them Before They Shock Again.)Neither the US Marines nor the 82d Airborne are humanitarian aid
organizations. If the US had wanted to at least make a show of disaster relief, it could have sent in the Navy Seabees and the Army Corps of Engineers, notwithstanding that latter organization’s failures after Katrina in New Orleans. Also, if the US wanted to help empower earthquake-ravaged Haiti, it would not have UNILATERALLY rerouted all commercial flights to the Dominican Republic, thus boosting up the DR's economy while further crippling Haiti's economy and making it poorer.Haiti did not need the militarization of aid relief. 45,000 Americans were living safely in Haiti before the earthquake and "Violent Haiti" is a myth . There's MORE violence in Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Brazil, Mexico, Columbia, even in the United States, than there is in Haiti .
But even if security had been a concern requiring 20,000 US soldiers, how is it that the most powerful army on earth, with supposedly the most advanced engineers and technological expertise on earth could not have erected, in a relatively short time, a transitional airport with multiple landing airstrips that the Seabees would have constructed solely for the use of the US military and for evacuating of US citizens and other foreign nationals as the US did with the Haitian airport in the initial weeks of the earthquake, blocking critical first responders from entering Haiti? Moreover, reportedly the US has the satellite imaging technology to have conducted a search and rescue using satellite to detect and pinpoint body mass or body heat under the rubble and concrete. This technology has been used in Kosovo and Bosnia and such similar technology used during blizzard and avalanche disaster rescues. Perhaps, in this way, within the first 48 to 72 hours, many more Haitians under concrete and rubble could have been located and rescued if security had not been the US priority, but search and rescue.
Was this some sort of opportunistic depopulation or ethnic cleansing of the poor in the capital of Haiti – collateral damage in the stealth war for Haitian resources such as Haiti's uranium, gold, iridium, limestone, oil and natural gas deposits? Or an easy, if not cruel way for the US/Euros, through this UN facade and US militarization of aid to further secure, not only Haitian riches and strategic position between Cuba and Venezuela, but the strait between Guantanamo Bay and Port au Prince that is the main channels for shipping from the Atlantic to the Caribbean basin. Perhaps securing all that canal bound traffic, at a time when Cuba has found a huge cache of oil its negotiating with Russia and China to help it exploit, as well as circling these seas to prevent Haitian earthquake victims from seeking refuge elsewhere via these sea routes, instead of using the coastal waterways abutting the destroyed villages of Haiti to deliver food, water, tents and medicine, are the only US priorities? (See 100 links to the The Militarization of Aid to Haiti.)
The Obama administration must support an international response to the tragic Haiti earthquake that ends the US/UN-led military occupation of Haiti and its current entrenchment with 20,000 US troops charged with the management and execution of humanitarian assistance. Haiti needs tractors, backhoes, cranes, not war tanks and soldiers. The wounded people need community policing and psychological counseling, not military guns in their weary faces.
The Associated Press reports that less than a penny of each dollar the U.S. is spending on earthquake relief in Haiti is going in the form of cash to the Haitian government:
Each American dollar roughly breaks down like this: 42 cents for disaster assistance, 33 cents for U.S. military aid, nine cents for food, nine cents to transport the food, five cents for paying Haitian survivors for recovery efforts, just under one cent to the Haitian government, and about half a cent to the Dominican Republic. (AP: Haiti govt gets 1 penny of US quake aid dollar)
Instead of spending all this resource to militarizes Haiti, these funds could instead be better redirected to help with reconstruction, viable reforestation, engineering projects, community-based policing and development, educational initiatives, building of flood barriers, dikes, flood resistant roads, bridges, dredging harbors, building sewers and drainage networks, viable farms, schools, hospitals and health centers. To assist Haiti in irrigation, fertilizer and necessary farming equipment to increase domestic food production in the Artibonite valley and Plaine du Sud farming areas. For planting fruit trees to assist the small rural farmers towards self-sufficiency. For creating indigenous Haiti manufacturing and eco-friendly green jobs with an emphasis in helping meet the needs of women and children in Haiti. (Proper Jatropha production is an excellent option.) To support Haitian-led grassroots capacity building organizations. For child health care, medicines, permanent clean water facilities. For educational initiatives that don't deny Haiti's unique indigenous culture.
2. End indirect aid to Haiti. Foreign aid should go to Haiti directly to strengthen the Haitian government not the churches and NGOs.
a. US foreign policy undermined Haiti’s capacity to respond in emergency situations because it forced Haiti to privatize state assets, funneled all foreign aid to NGOs and not the Haitian government.A recent article reported the Haitian government has not seen one cent of that money that has been raised for Haiti. I presume that that means the money is going to NGOs," he said, referring to non-governmental aid groups. He said a Puerto Rican group had presented him with a shipping receipt showing it donated $3.5 million of food aid to feed Haitians. Preval said he asked, "Where is the food?" and was told it had already been given to aid groups. (Coordination needed for Haiti aid: Aid flows to charities, but Preval hasn't seen a cent.)
It is the Clinton and Bush neo-liberal policies or US support for coup d’etat that has severely weakened the Haitian government, Haiti's already limited infrastructure, public health and economy that is needed to provide services in times of disasters like this. Neo-liberal policies posits that governments should not provide social services to the people – community policing, electricity, food, clean water, health care, schools, roads, irrigation canals, literacy programs, agricultural assistance. That these things should be privatized and let the marketplace provide. This is the policy that has been imposed on Haiti by both the Bushes and Clinton. And Obama has enlisted these two to further “help” Haiti.
b. The Obama administration must support an international response that respect Haitian sovereignty, not boost NGO/World Relief Organization, security company profits and corporatocracy power in Haiti.
This US foreign policy effectively forms a shadow government enchaining Haiti that undermines Haiti’s sovereignty, emboldens and empowers NGOs with no public responsibility or accountability to Haitians or Haiti’s long term well-being. The idea that Haiti is too corrupt to absorb aid or get it to the most needy applied during US-supported Haiti dictatorships not, in general, when Haiti has a duly elected government. Besides this fear does not support self-reliance but dependency. There should be accountability measures to assure the aid reaches its intended constituency.
Haiti can no longer countenance World Relief NGOs in the country whose method of doing business is inappropriate to Haiti’s reality, doesn’t respect Haiti’s Vodouist/Konbit/Lakou culture and puts in place programs to exclude the majority of Haiti's people from decisions affecting their every day life.3. Support the institutionalization of the rule of lawa. Return former president Aristide to Haiti so he may assist Haiti’s majority at this agonizing time and help in the relief and rebuilding of the nation. No one can be made stateless. It’s a violation of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.b. Support community organizing, community policing, transparency and participatory democracy.
4. Value life - Value life over political and economic interests. Value the lives of the survivors not the interests of the US and the international community.
Haitians, both in Haiti and in the Diaspora, who are historical immune to adversities along with mobilized Black America and our collaborators from all the nations and races, are ready to help, with our bare hands, walking anywhere, doing anything, to get the distribution done. Still are. The military takeover and their alliance with World Relief Organizations who prioritize not saving lives and providing disaster relief with dignity and human rights but their bank accounts, is blocking this.Eyewitnesses in Haiti report that aid trucks are filed to the brim with supplies blocked at the border and sitting idle at the ports. Once the US got to Haiti on Thursday, Jan. 14, 2010 they privatized the airport and blocked humanitarian aid in favor of: 1) landing military planes and 1) evacuating foreign nationals. Food, water, medicine and doctors could not enter through the airport, were diverted to the Dominican Republic and trucked or drove in. One US retired general said USAID and the State Department are not a rapid response entity and ought not to head this mission. Even two weeks after the earthquake, there still has not been widespread distribution of food, medicine and water.
"The next morning after the earthquake, as a military man of 37 years service, I assumed … there would be airplanes delivering aid, not troops, but aid," said retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honore ,..I was a little frustrated to hear that USAID was the lead agency," he said. "I respect them, but they're not a rapid deployment unit… In the first two days after Tuesday evening's quake, "we saw national media in, but we didn't see Air Force airplanes taking in food and water," Honore said. Nor were military doctors on the ground treating the injured, he said. (Retired general: US aid effort too slow.)
The Obama Administration must do better. It must prioritize relief, rebuilding and development initiatives for everyone in Haiti harmed by the earthquake, especially the poor Black majority, not just the wealthy, the foreign citizen, charity workers and their hotels or other properties. Infrastructure rebuilding should be conducted simultaneously in the poor as well as wealthier areas of the capital and southern areas damaged by the earthquake. Rich and poor, foreign or Haitian national ought to be similarly treated.
The Obama administration must support an international response to the tragic Haiti earthquake that prioritize humanitarian assistance, not security and that makes every effort to allow relief assistance from Haitians abroad and from other nations and providers to enter Haiti. In addition to stopping the blockage of assistance coming from Haitians abroad, Black Americans and from other nations and providers in favor of the major corporate charity organizations, it must also prioritize the distribution and promote and allow Haitians to set up an international coordination of international assistance so that relief supplies, medical treatment and the necessary emergency help actually gets to the most excluded majority in Haiti – reaching the maximum number of earthquake victims immediately. The Haitian people, in Haiti and abroad, with families victimized by the earthquake are the best ones to know where the most urgent needs are still to be met and allowed to direct medical and psychological assistance and other relief to those areas.
5. Respect Haitian human rights and dignity. Stop criminalizing the poor in Haiti. Stop the aid bureaucracy and security restrictions that harms and insults the earthquake victims.
Stop USAID/State Department and the world relief corporate charities from criminalizing the people of Haiti with their dividing of Port au Prince into color-coated security zones (red, orange and yellow – depicting criminal zones to less criminally-prone zones) and inevitably parading around Haiti in vehicles with tinted or rolled-up windows accompanied by an entourage of armed security that distances them from the poor they are supposed to be helping, sending a menacing message of dominance and greater authority over the suffering Haitians in their own country. World Relief NGOs or aid providers working in this crisis should always hire a local Haitian interpreter at an equal wage to the NGO worker's salaries who will act as translator to better communicate with the victims and beyond the immediate need for food, water, shelter, medical and psychological assistance, assess, not guess or make racists presumptions about the people’s needs.
If USAID and the major charities cannot let go of their fear of Blacks, and are letting Haitians die while they wait for their required UN or US military escorts, than let the Nation of Islam, Haitians and their non-hysterical partners, from all the races and nations, take care of the aid delivery to peoples in their “ red and orange zones.”
6. Value Family - Help reunite displaced families
The Obama administration must support an international response to the tragic Haiti earthquake that values family and is sensitive to the human agony of family lost and separated in Haiti.Stop separating Haitian families, or exacerbating family separations with insensitive US emergency relief policies and procedures at a time family members most need to be together. For instance, lift up the ban that prohibits Haitians with permanent residency, who live in the US with their husbands, wives or children, but who are not US citizen from returning to their families in America. Similarly, allow the entry and return of Haitians living abroad, including those who are not US citizens but legal US residents, into Haiti so they may give aid, monies and moral and bereavement support to their families. Respect the earthquake dead – identify the unclaimed corpses, even if through taking a picture before putting them in mass graves, so their love ones may, at some point see that they are gone and have more closure. The mass displacement of the population in the capital and in the South also means the injured and dying are harder to locate and families have been separated from their loved ones. Stop dropping food and water from the air or from the back of trucks. Haitians are not livestock.
6a. Extend the Temporary Protective Status cutoff date from January 12, 2010 to December 31, 2010, allowing patients and those who are accompanying their USC children post January 12 to enjoy said benefit.
7. Rebuilt Haiti
The Obama administration must support an international response that use its power to uphold Haitian-led, Haiti-capacity building relief and rebuilding efforts that sustains human rights, healing and dignity. And that helps save and protect the lives, lands, property and human rights of the Haitian survivors displaced by the 2010 earthquake. Show respect for the people of Port au Prince and in the destroyed Southern areas, who, on the first three days after the earthquake were mostly alone, and who spontaneously organized themselves to save each other with the help of those foreigners who got there to help and set up over a thousand refugee camps to house over two million people throughout Haiti, sharing with each other whatever they had. Show respect. They should be a central and integral part of the redesigning and rebuilding of Haiti.Rebuilding efforts should hire companies that are committed to integrating all levels of corporate responsibility - economic, social and environmental - in their entire range of operations.
Rebuilding and redevelopment efforts should prioritize agricultural production, building flood barriers and better drainage systems. Infrastructure, sanitation, sewers, electricity, earthquake and hurricane resistant homes, hospitals, schools, supermarkets, etc. Better transportation such as inter-connecting roads from the outback to the cities, a railroad, effective public transportation, watershed protection, communication networks, projects to combat illiteracy, building a universal education system that respect Kreyòl and indigenous Haitian culture and a universal health care system that services the public, an integrated urban land, public spaces and housing reform in the unique character of Haitian art and culture, et al...
8. Relief, rebuilding and redevelopment should be designed by Haitians and their collaborators, not USAID/State Department or the “international community.”USAID has a history of mistreating the Haitian majority, feeding dependency, starving democracy and should not be the US agency overseeing the US relief effort. And if they are, oversight and accountability are needed. (See, Ezili’s US Congress must provide more oversight guidelines for USAID.)
a. Oversight and accountability
Demand more oversight of USAID earmarked funds for Haiti, greater fiscal accountability, transparency and quantifiable evidence of self-sustainable development achievements and, in particular these new Haiti foreign assistance guidelines should ensure, that food and other aid actually reach their intended beneficiaries and not end up for sale in the open market or stay in Washington or used in Haiti mostly on administrative salary, fees and expenses for USAID's political benefactors, shipping companies and nonprofits.b. Support Haitians to rebuild Haiti
The Obama administration should support an international response to the tragic Haiti earthquake that supports relief, rebuilding and development efforts designed by Haitians and that allows Haitians with their collaborators in Black America and other chosen partners first preference to assist the Haitian government with plans to rebuild Haiti, and given contract preference and employment preference to rebuild Haiti. Moreover, Haitian natives in Haiti ought not to have to compete with anyone living abroad, including Haitians in the Diaspora for relief, rebuilding and redevelopment jobs generated in the rebuilding of Haiti.c. Promote Haitian self-reliance, self-respect, self-determination, not dependency, injustice and indignities9. Prioritize jobs and skills transfer to Haitian nationalsStop the stranglehold of USAID, its other international counterparts and the over 10,000 NGOs over Haiti. Their grip must be loosened if a new paradigm is to be installed for the people of Haiti that promotes Haitian self-reliance not Haitian dependency.
Haitians are in need of justice, restitution, reparation, human rights not charity. Fair trade not free trade. Haiti needs to have its indigenous culture and domestic economic development respected. It does not need the failed unholy Western enslavement trinities of political, socio-economic and educational/religious institutions keeping Haiti’s Black majority in physical and mental chains. Nor does Haiti require further colonial paternalism, false benevolence and to be burden with dependency through World Bank/IMF/IFI's debts and such other modern tools of domination, economic enslavement and financial colonialism. In particular, respect means humanitarian assistance, rebuilding and redevelopment aid should go directly to the Haitian government and not through USAID and its major corporate subcontractors – Catholic Relief Services, World Vision, Care International, International Red Cross, DYNCORPS, and other such Blackwater-like sorts of private contractors because USAID projects undermines Haitian sovereignty, does not promote sustainable development and the funds allocated to USAID for Haiti generally do not reach the people most in need.
USAID was at the frontlines of the irregular warfare creating Coup D'etat, chaos, anarchy and destabilization in Haiti culminating in the 2004 ouster of President Aristide and UN/US occupation.
"The objective of irregular warfare is control over the civilian population and the neutralization of the state, and its principal tactic is counterinsurgency, which is the use of indirect and asymmetric techniques like subversion, infiltration, psychological operations, cultural penetration and military deception." (Cuba: USAID making ever-higher investments in subversion.)
It should be the aim of the rebuilding to train qualified Haitians and Haitians without jobs living in Haiti as their only abode to take over the work that Haitians from the Diaspora or other consultants may hold in the short term during the formulation, design, maintenance of a rebuilt Haiti. For the initial phases of medical relief, there are more Haitian doctors abroad then in Haiti and said doctors and health care providers and collaborators must be immediately integrated in the conceptualization, coordination and distribution of the medical relief efforts. Haitian doctors leaving in Haiti should simultaneously be trained to take over running the hospitals, clinics and health care systems built during the reconstruction phase. This model should apply, as possible, in all the other fields also.
10. Debt Cancellation
The Obama administration should support an international response that supports debt cancellation for Haiti and supports humanitarian relief, rebuilding and development efforts with grants, not loans. Haiti cannot afford to invest in humanitarian relief, rebuilding and development projects while continuing to make payments on bilateral debts and debts owed to multilateral financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Debt service payments to these international financial institutions were an onerous burden to Haiti even prior to the earthquake and severely hindered the Haitian governments’ ability to meet its people’s need. The Obama administration should support three specific debt cancellation initiatives and urge an international response that also acts to:a. Immediately cancel all debts owed by Haiti to the multilateral financial institutions (IMF, WB and IDB);b. Suspends all debt service payments to these institutions until the debts are completely canceled; and,
c. Provides that all additional funds to Haiti for the rescue, relief, rebuilding and redevelopment are to be given in the form of grants, not loan debts.
****************************11. All international adoptions or evacuations of "disaster orphans" must stop.
Let us step back and take a moment to consider the best long term interests of these earthquake orphans as well as getting them the immediate protection from predators and short term life-saving relief - food, water, medical treatment, shelter and love, children need. Both must be done.
The opportunistic use of either man-made or natural disasters in Haiti, to permanently exile Haitians, without consent, from the reach of their relatives, homeland, its resources, ancestral legacy and culture is unacceptable. The myth that Haitians do not CARE for their children is just that, a myth. As HLLN has proven over and over again in our work to expose the foreign predators hiding behind white privilege, NGO legitimacy and the victorious US/UN occupation of Haiti since 2004. (See, Statement on Haiti adoptions from the international community of adoptees of color.)
Human trafficking is on the rise after the earthquake. The displaced Haitian children are not up for sale for either the organ traders, laboratory experiments, sexual predators or to wealthier Northerners in need of a child to raise willing to ignore the trauma experienced by these earthquake children, forcing them to assimilate to meet the expectations of others at such a confusing time. (No wholesale evacuation and adoption; Claims of a million earthquake orphans are clearly false and those making them are being irresponsible.)
These displaced children or eathquake orphans need immediate shelter, food, medical treatment, security, sanitation. Their parents may have been separated from them and if not, now is not the time to also abruptly deny them cultural sovereignty and the right to mourn and heal with the support of their community. Family in Haiti is more than the nucleus mom/dad/children in the Euro/American way. It's extended further. (See, Statement on Haiti adoptions from the international community of adoptees of color.) There could be some intermediate measure taken besides flying them off with strangers, no matter how well meaning. Those truly interested in the best interests of the child may help make sure that immediate emergency relief reach these children. Don't just take the child away leaving the community to spend a lifetime wondering whatever happened to each child.
Ezili's HLLN supports, reiterates and agrees wholeheartedly with the Adoptees of Color Statement on Haiti, written from the perspective of a group of adoptees of color opposed to international adoption of Haitian children that maintains: "All adoptions from Haiti must be stopped and all efforts to help children be refocused on giving aid to organizations working toward family reunification and caring for children in their own communities. We urge you to join us in supporting Haitian children's rights to life, survival, and development within their own families and communities."
12. Encourage maximum leveraging of Diaspora remittancesa. Release all Haitians in US jails who are not accused of any crimes so that they may apply for Temporary Protected Status (TPS.) Thirty thousand people are facing deportations without committing a crime against society. Expedite the processing of immigration status and granting of work permits for the over 30 thousand Haitians in America eligible for deportation to allow them to work in order to send remittances back to their families.b. Support with tax-incentives direct capital investment/Haitian remittances in Haiti
Contrary to the media, State Department, NGO and USAID/US Embassy spins, it's the Haitian Diaspora’s $2 billion dollars per year in remittances, not foreign aid that upholds Haiti. No other national group in the world sends more money to their homeland than Haitians living in the Diaspora.Congress recently 1) passed a bipartisan measures allowing donations made for Haiti relief to be tax deductible for 2009 and 2) put together a $1 million dollar Health and Human Services Repatriation Assistance Fund providing reimbursable help with cash, travel expenses, medical care, lodging and food to return to the US the about 45,000 U.S. citizens living in Haiti at the time of the earthquake. It would also be helpful, for instance, if Congress made Haitian remittances sent via transfer houses (Western Union/CAM) and banks to Haitian families in Haiti tax deductible and to be able to deduct the transfer fees from their taxes.
c. Ending the militarization of aid and the US/UN occupation shall protected and not diminish the value and use of Diaspora remittances because their shall be less violence, less demonstrations against the occupation and more normalcy so the people may invest the remittances in school fees, education, small business enterprises, and not funerals and lawyers to incarcerated relatives.
13. End free trade, began fair trade. Support domestic food production, indigenous Haiti manufacturing and job creation. Support grassroots, indigenous Haiti capacity building organizations.
Haiti needs food sovereignty, domestic manufacturing, local entrepreneurship, fair wage jobs, affordable and clean energy.Support Haitian domestic food production, domestic manufacturing, organic food market from Haiti, local job creation, valid reforestation, fair wages not free trade wages, public works projects, sustainable development and a good working culture that values workers’ rights and health. Support Haiti entrepreneurship, Konbit culture and equitable distribution and profit-sharing from the assets of the country. Support Haiti’s fuel sovereignty, clean alternative fuel and valid reforestation. After the emergency relief stage of the earthquake emergency, calibrate food aid so to assist and not further destroy Haiti's food production.
Support Haiti Food Sovereignty:
According to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, (FAO), the rice bowl areas in Haiti alone, are capable of producing food to feed 10 million people. Haiti has a population of 8.5 people and thus, Haiti has the capacity to feed itself.
Promote donation of seed, fertilizer and farming equipment and deploy a team of agronomist in collaboration with Haitian agronomists to engage immediate cultivation of basic staple food to lessen the level of dependency on food aid. U.S. agricultural aid to Haiti should support local people-centered, self-sustaining projects to rebuild the 2008 flood-devastated breadbasket areas of Haiti in the Artibonite valley and Plaine du Sud.
Organic foods from Haiti: Support creating a uniquely Haitian organic food-for-trade market from Haiti's own traditional fruits and crop staples (Pitimi, ble, pwa Kongo, nwa, yellow rice, avocado, mangoes, white Haitian yam, plantains, St. Marc rice, St. Marc corn, millet, pigeon peas, Vetiver oil, cashew, potatoes, tomatoes, leafy greens, bananas, cassava, peas, corn, cereals, papayas, bread fruit (lam veritab), et al...).
Support Haiti entrepreneurship, konbit culture and equitable distribution and profit-sharing from the assets of the country: U.S. corporations should be encouraged to patronize the informal sector of local service providers and generally not export all profits and capital but commit to paying equitable custom duties and investing a reasonable percentage of their Haiti profits back into Haiti.
Calibrate Haiti's unique reality and riches: Haiti is a country filled with "non-workers" by US standards. But this informal working sector (small local producers, distributors, retailers and market women) is the economic backbone of Ti Pèp La - the masses in Haiti. Haiti is a place with iridium, oil, gold, copper, lignite, coal and uranium mines, gas reserves, precious minerals, limestone, construction aggregate, marble, chalk, and stone quarries, gem stones, underwater sea treasures and where the poorest of the poor own property. US neo-liberal economic policies that doesn't calibrate these factors and the Haitian peoples' right to equitable distribution of their country's own assets, will always fail.
Support Haiti’s fuel sovereignty, clean alternative fuel and valid reforestation. Rebuilding should prioritize Haiti’s fuel/energy sovereignty, cheap alternative energy and reforestation such as planting of fruit trees for food, capital building and trade and use of indigenous Haiti plant, such as Jatropha which can be processed into biodiesel fuel and glycerin and the pulp used for: organic fertilizer, animal feed, and/or 3. the presscake may be used to make char, and then form the char into briquettes and burning it as fuel to produce stream to turn a steam turbine to produce electricity. It would be truly helpful to Haiti's fuel sovereignty, reforestation needs, and economic independence and manufacturing needs for and long-term sustainable development if emphasis could be put on a biodiesel program combined with a micro finance program for purchasing modified kerosene stoves fueled by biodiesel, providing Jatropha press to community groups, seeds and training in processing of soap and cosmetics from the pulp. This would assist with economic independence, replace charcoal for cooking, lower fuel costs and employ farmers in a profitable trade while reducing pressure on Haiti’s remaining forests.
Jatropha grows in marginal soils and is drought-resistant so will mostly not compete with lands needed for food crops and restores topsoil to the eroded land. Help Haitian agricultural production emphasizing assistance to local indigenous community groups by not only distributing needed seeds but with support for indigenous management of comprehensive systems of drainage canals to protect cropland from flooding; with fertilizers, with building or repair of rural roads for local Haitian to get their excess produce to market.
Fund or encourage funding for wind, water, solar (solar cookers, solar panels, wind turbines for electricity, modified kerosene stoves fueled by Jatropha biodiesel and such other simple) and good renewable energy alternatives, instead of constantly funding IRI/USAID/NED/NGO "training programs," conferences or more "poverty studies" and “assessments” in Haiti.)
14. Raise funds to support the work of HLLN Nou La!- We are Here - earthquake relief efforts, not the same old people who are part of the problem and have no authentic connection to the majority in Haiti.*
Please feel free to adopt these measures and help us mobilize an international tsunami force to sweep aware Haiti's containment-in-poverty, dependency, debt and domination.
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- "If you have come here to help me then you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine then let us work together." -- Lila Watson******
"Transformation is only valid if it is carried out with the people, not for them. Liberation is like a childbirth, and a painful one. The person who emerges is a new person: no longer either oppressor or oppressed, but a person in the process of achieving freedom. It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors."-- Paulo Freire, from Pedagogy of the Oppressed
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Please feel free to adopt these measures and help us mobilize an international tsunami force to sweep aware Haiti's containment-in-poverty, dependency, debt and domination.
