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Front Page   << PREVIOUS - 17 - NEXT>>  Index Page Haiti: A New U.S. Occupation Disguised as Disaster Relief? U.S. arrives to provide "security and stability" by Arun Gupta of  Official denials aside, the United States has embarked on a new military occupation of Haiti thinly cloaked as disaster relief. But what is the purpose of an occupation, the fourth in the past 100 years? The official response, from the Pentagon to the United Nations, was that more U.S. and UN troops were needed to provide "security and stability" to bring in aid. Leaving aside what is really meant by security and stability, the rapid military response was actually a major reason why aid was delayed. One week after the January 12 earthquake, Doctors Without Borders said 5 of its cargo flights carrying 85 tons of medical and relief supplies had been turned away from the Port-au-Prince airport, which was under U.S. military control. Jarry Emmanuel, the air logistics officer for the World Food Program (WFP) Haiti said there were 200 flights going in and out of Haiti every day, "But most of those flights are for the United States military." The aid organization said its own flights carrying food, medicine, and water were delayed for up to two days "so that the United States could land troops and equipment and lift Americans and other foreigners to safety." While flights carrying food and water supplies were being prioritized by January 19, the order to do so was "issued by the U.S. embassy on behalf of the Haitian government," according to the Wall Street Journal. Despite that order, aid deliveries were still chaotic weeks later. By January 31, only 639,200 out of an estimated 2 million Haitians in need had received "a meal" from the WFP. Additionally, Haitian authorities said they had received only 4,000 of the 200,000 tents requested, only 500,000 people were receiving potable water, and a scant 20,000 latrines had been provided. Incredibly, around the same time, "Basic medical supplies such as antibiotics and painkillers [were] running dangerously low at some hospitals and clinics in Port-au-Prince, the capital, and in the countryside," according to the Associated Press. According to Free Speech Radio News Reporter Dolores Bernal, U.S. and UN forces had set up just four sites for distributing food and water in the capital and 16 others around the country. Not About Aid or Oil Traveling with an armored UN convoy on the streets of Port-au-Prince, Al Jazeera's Sebastian Walker reported on January 17 that, "Most Haitians here have seen little humanitarian aid so far. What they have seen is guns, and lots of them. Armored personnel carriers cruise the streets. UN soldiers aren't here to help pull people out of the rubble. They're here, they say, to enforce the law.… At the entrance to the city's airport where most of the aid is coming in, there is anger and frustration. Much-needed supplies of water and food are inside and Haitians are locked out." One Haitian told Walker, "These weapons they bring, they are instruments of death. We don't want them. We don't need them. We are a traumatized people. What we want from the international community is technical help. Action, not words." It's not that U.S. forces were totally lead-footed. Within 48 hours, the U.S. Air Force was able to redeploy to Haiti one of its "high-end RQ-4 Global Hawk" spy drones that had been tasked for Afghanistan. The Air Force was also quick to send skyward its EC-130J Commando Solo aircraft, dubbed "a radio station in the sky," which broadcast daily a recording from the Haitian ambassador to the United States warning people not to try to flee by boat because, "If you think you will reach the U.S. and all the doors will be wide open to you, that's not at all the case. And they will intercept you right on the water and send you back home where you came from." Within 24 hours, the U.S. Navy dispatched multiple warships, including an aircraft carrier, while 5,700 U.S. soldiers and Marines were ordered deployed. By the end of January, 6,500 U.S. soldiers were in Haiti and the Coast Guard committed nine separate cutters to the campaign (as compared to the 2004 coup, when the Coast Guard mustered three cutters). Clearly, the military response was not about providing aid. But neither was it about oil, the idea of the moment. Based on a Bloomberg News report, conspiracy theorists speculated feverishly that the U.S. was occupying Haiti for its hydrocarbon wealth. It sounds vaguely plausible because wars, coups, and destabilization campaigns often target energy-rich countries such as Iraq, Venezuela, and Iran. However, these operations are hardly secret. They may be masked in rhetoric about weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, but the maneuvering is done openly. Second, concluding the U.S. invasion was about oil assumes Haiti has no interest in developing oil reserves or, if it did, concessions would not go to Western oil companies, and there is no evidence for either position. Third, and most important, Haiti's energy reserves are meager at best. The Bloomberg article, based on a U.S. Geological Survey report from 2000, estimated that, "The Greater Antilles, which includes Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and their offshore waters, probably hold at least 142 million barrels of oil and 159 billion cubic feet of gas…. Undiscovered amounts may be as high as 941 million barrels of oil and 1.2 trillion cubic feet of gas." In comparison, Iraq's reserves are more than 100 times greater. Keeping Haiti in the West Atlantic System If occupying Haiti is not about oil or aid, what is the motivation? The overarching goal is to keep Haiti within the "West Atlantic system," that is, part of the American empire. With "rollback" guiding U.S. foreign policy in the region—support for the coup in Honduras, seven new military bases in Colombia, stepped-up hostility toward Bolivia and Venezuela—an occupation of Haiti fits into the overall scheme. Related to that, the United States aims to ensure that Haiti does not pose the "threat of a good example" by pursuing an independent path, as it tried to under President Jean-Bertrand Aristide—which is why he was toppled twice, in 1991 and 2004, in U.S.-backed coups. Instead, Haiti must adhere to extreme neoliberalism and serve as an ultra-low-wage processing zone close to the United States. Take a 2001 report from Oxfam, which noted: "Haiti now has one of the most liberal trade regimes in the world." Add to that the sweatshop model of development being promoted by UN Special Envoy to Haiti Bill Clinton. Speaking at an October 2009 investors' conference in Port-au-Prince that attracted do-gooders like Gap, Levi Strauss, and Citibank, Clinton claimed a revitalized garment industry could create 100,000 jobs. The reason some 200 companies, half of them garment manufacturers, attended the conference was because, "Haiti's extremely low labor costs, comparable to those in Bangladesh, make it so appealing," the New York Times reported. Those costs are often less than the official daily minimum wage of $1.75. The Haitian Parliament approved an increase last May 4 to about $5 an hour, but President Rene Preval refused to authorize the bill, effectively killing it. The refusal to increase the minimum wage sparked numerous student protests starting last June, which were reportedly repressed by Haitian police and the Brazilian-led UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). In this light, the impetus of a new occupation may be to reconstitute the Haitian Army (or similar entity) as a force "to fight the people." Despite all the terror inflicted on Haiti by the United States, particularly in the last 20 years—two coups followed each time by the slaughter of thousands of activists and innocents by U.S.-armed death squads—the strongest social and political force in Haiti today is probably the organisations populaires (OPs) that are the backbone of the Fanmi Lavalas party of deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Twice last year, after legislative elections were scheduled that banned Fanmi Lavalas, boycotts were organized by the party. In both instances the abstention rate was said to be about 90 percent. One casualty of the earthquake and the response has been the Haitian civilian government. As the official organ of the elite mindset, the New York Times stated: "Haiti Faces Leadership Void" and it described a scene in which U.S. ambassador Louis Lucke and Lt. Gen. Keen were "seated at center stage" addressing the media in Port-au-Prince about recovery efforts, while Haitian President Preval stood in the back and eventually "wandered away without a word." While Preval was elected president in 2006, after being backed by Fanmi Lavalas, he has buckled under to neoliberal policies of low wages and export-processing zones. The Washington Post describes Preval as "a technocrat largely free of the sharp political ideologies that have divided Haiti for decades.") The Times article talked about "familiar…rumblings of chaos and coups," an indication that Washington is pondering a regime change. The real powers in Haiti right now are Keen, Lucke, Bill Clinton (who has been tapped by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to lead recovery efforts), and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. When asked at the press conference how long U.S. forces were planning to stay, Keen said, "I'm not going to put a time frame on it" while Lucke added, "We're not really planning in terms of weeks or months or years. We're planning basically to see this job through to the end." CONTINUE READING  1  2  >>>   Front Page   << PREVIOUS - 17 - NEXT>>  Index Page Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.