| Haiti: "Brother, I'm dying" 1/30/10 |
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Haiti: "Brother, I'm dying"[AWorldToWinNewsService] 25 Jan 2010 - AWTW News Service
25 January 2010. A World to Win News Service. Maxo Danticat's father Joseph suffered the kind of death no one deserves in the U.S. government Krome detention centre for refugees in Florida.
(more info on Haiti earthquake, occupation and relief efforts here ) The 81-year-old Protestant minister, a valid U.S. visa holder, had entered the U.S. legally and asked for political asylum. If he had been Cuban, he would have been given it automatically because that policy suits U.S. geopolitical interests. Haitians are considered a different matter. For one thing, since the U.S. has directly or indirectly run Haiti for almost a century, granting them asylum would amount to an admission of guilt. For another, Haitians are almost all black.
Joseph Danticat needed asylum due to events in the wake of the U.S.-sponsored coup. After American soldiers kidnapped Haiti's elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and dumped him in Africa, UN troops and Haitian police went into the Bel Aire neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince and clashed with gangs that supported the president. Soldiers stormed into Joseph's church. They used the roof as a sniper nest to shoot 15 neighbourhood people. Joseph knew that gang members blamed him for the killings and wanted revenge. He also knew what kind of people he would be dealing with if he put himself at the mercy of the American authorities. As a child in the countryside he had seen U.S. soldiers grabbing up peasants for forced labour building bridges and roads. One day he saw them kicking around what he at first thought was a football. It turned out to be a man's head.
He didn't have any good choices. But he had family in the U.S.
Joseph's asylum request was turned down on the spot. Instead, he was sent to the notorious Krome prison camp for deportation.. They took away his medication. A few days later as he was being interviewed for an appeal hearing, he apparently had a seizure. Vomit poured out through his mouth, his nose and a tracheotomy hole in his neck. His jailers accused him of faking. His voice box, covered with vomit, no longer worked, so he couldn't talk. The jailers told his lawyer he was being uncooperative. When the lawyer raised hell, Joseph was taken to a hospital prison ward. His niece, Edwige Danticat, a well-known writer whom he had raised, was not allowed contact with the prisoner. Five days after they took away his medicine he died, shackled to his bed. His family buried him in New York, though he had never wanted to leave Haiti. "He shouldn't be there," his brother, Edwidge's father, said about the location of Joseph's grave. "If our country were ever given a chance and allowed to be a county like any other, none of us would live or die here."
The American lawyer who tried to save Joseph's life commented to the press at the time, "This could have been avoided. They could have exercised more humanity."
Maxo came to the U.S. with his father and they applied for asylum together. They were together at Krome until the American authorities separated them and sent Joseph to die alone. That was in October 2004. After his father died Maxo was released. Denied asylum, eventually he had to go back to Haiti. He was killed when his father's church collapsed on him during the 12 January 2010 earthquake. "He wasn't able to stay here," his cousin Edwige said about him, speaking from New York, a city that is, by population, the second or third biggest Haitian settlement in the world, "and he wasn't able to remain alive there."
Humanity is exactly what the U.S. has never exercised in Haiti, no more than in other countries whose stolen wealth has done so much to make the American empire rich. The U.S. government's conduct during today's ongoing dire humanitarian emergency is guided by the same interests and outlook that crushed Haiti long before the earthquake, and the same kind of inhuman policies that killed Joseph Danticat and indirectly Maxo Danticat.
When Maxo died, he had been trying to raise money to build a small school in the mountain town of Leogane, where the Danticat family originated. The earthquake killed many schoolchildren even though it struck shortly after 6 in the morning. One reason is that Haitians place a high value on schooling and there are few educational facilities, so that many schools run three shifts a day from dawn to dusk.
Leogane is near the earthquake's epicentre. The worst-hit town in Haiti, it was cut off from the world. Many people there spend their days trying to dig the bodies of loved ones out of the concrete with hammers, just as Maxo's family in Port-au-Prince set out on their own to dig out the survivors ? his wife and all but one of their five children ? and Maxo's body as well. Even the dead must be treated with dignity if the living are to have any, a fact ignored by the U.S. and local authorities who called off the search through the rubble and dump truckloads of bodies in mass graves without even recording their names.
A helicopter sent by an American religious organization landed briefly in a field near Leogane about ten days after the quake. Journalists had visited the town, but no aid workers. The aircraft took off again almost immediately. It climbed, circled over the heads of the townspeople assembled below, and dropped bagged loafs of bread down on them like bombs. Enraged, the people raised their faces to the sky and screamed, "We are not dogs! We are human beings!" If this sounds familiar, it is because the same scenes were reported earlier in Port-au-Prince.
For the U.S., aid to Haiti continues to take a back seat to other military and political considerations. Although aircraft arrivals at the country's only major airport, commandeered by the U.S., have been adjusted to allow more food, water and medical supplies to get through, the shipment of U.S. soldiers and military equipment continues to push aside aid deliveries.
Doctors without Borders report that only five of thirteen cargo shipments were allowed to land, while medical supplies are so desperately lacking that volunteer doctors have been performing amputations with a saw bought in the market, and there is no pain medication for their patients when they awake after the operation. The organisation's local leadership called this situation "shocking" and "crazy". "This is about helping Haiti, not occupying Haiti," said French Minister Alain Joyandet. When he went to the U.S.-run control tower at the airport to try and convince them to let aid flights through, the American commander sent armed soldiers to stop him. The head of Italy's civil protection service said that the U.S. effort was "a truly powerful show of force but it's completely out of touch with reality."
Even now, as supplies pile up on pallets at the airport, most of it is not getting to the people. American soldiers, sailors and Marines are coming by the thousands but few are doing much to help people. Twelve days after the disaster, only 20,000 survival tents ? an item armies and relief organisations keep on hand in huge numbers ready to go ? have reached the hundreds of thousands of people sleeping in the sun, rain and cold. The U.S. military says its concern is security. This exaggerated fear-mongering is also pushing some big aid organizations to keep their workers away from any direct contact with Haitians. They drive around in SUVs with the windows rolled up, and they don't stop if people are nearby. Sometimes they throw down huge bags of rice in front of the makeshift camps at night.
Most Haitians are making terrible sacrifices to help others. In fact, without the active and conscious involvement of the masses of Haitian people there is no way that foreign help can be used effectively and for the good of the people. If medical workers and other volunteers from the U.S., including many Haitian-Americans, can go to Haiti on their own and play a vital role in setting up emergency clinics and hospitals, why can't the U.S. government and some other giant organizations do likewise? The "insecurity" shown on television has been the looting of a few stores by people who have nothing, and, occasionally, thirsty crowds failing to line up properly while relief is doled out a few drops at a time. Police have shot at children in defence of the principle of private property. Brazilian soldiers under UN command fired live rounds into a crowd in Port-au-Prince when people rushed toward a relief column.
The Krome camp in Miami where Joseph Danticat died is gearing up again now. The current inmates have been transferred to other facilities to make way for an expected new wave of Haitian would-be refugees. U.S. authorities have announced that they will be stopped at sea or jailed upon arrival.
The alleged security concerns sabotaging relief efforts in Haiti have about as much foundation as the threat to U.S. security supposedly represented by new Haitian refugees in the U.S. It is intolerable that those supposedly in charge of humanitarian aid lack the slightest humanity.
Sources
The Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat's non-fiction book Brother, I'm Dying, about her childhood in Haiti, her parents' life in New York where they worked to support the family they had to leave behind, and her uncle Joseph, her cousin Maxo and the rest of the family provides a rich and moving picture of Haiti and Haitians today. (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2007). She wrote about Maxo's death in The New Yorker issue dated 1 February. The excellent Web video coverage by U.S. journalist Amy Goodman and her news team shows the Leogane incident. (democracynow.org) For a press report on Joseph Danticat's death, see Black Issues Book Review, March-April 2005. Also: BBC (21, 22 & 25 January), Washington Post (20 & 25 January), The New York Times (19 & 23 January) and Le Monde (24 January).
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