This week in HaitiHaïti Progrès
August 9 - 15 2000
Milot Mayor Stands Up to U.S.
Military's "Humanitarian Work"Moise Jean-Charles is not your typical small town mayor. Two and a half years ago, he went into hiding for months after Haitian police SWAT teams trashed a peasant radio station in his town and crushed an attempt by local peasants to take back land stolen by big landowners (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 17, No. 1, 3/25/98).
Milot is also not your typical small town. About 15 kilometers south of Cap Haïtien, it was once the seat of power when northern Haiti was ruled in the early 19th century by the legendary Henri Christophe, builder of the famous mountain-top fortress, the Citadel. In the generations since, the people of Milot have maintained a tradition of militancy and resistance.
So it was particularly imprudent when last week a squad of armed U.S. soldiers pulled up their bulldozers, graders, and heavy trucks into an area near town called La Fossette to supposedly work on an orphanage named the "Children of Promise." But Mayor Jean-Charles immediately put a stop to the construction, saying that the foreign troops had no permission to be doing anything in his town.
"We regret that," he said in a press conference last week in Cap Haïtien, "but even if it was the President of the Republic who gave them permission, that permission is not valid for us as long as they don't come to the mayor's office to get authorization for construction in the commune of Milot."
Since the closure of its permanent 500-man base in Port-au-Prince last January, the Pentagon has deployed about 200 U.S. troops at a base in the Cap Haïtien suburb of Vaudreuil as a part of the Southern Command's "Operation New Horizons," a program to provide the U.S. military with training, public relations stunts, and an excuse to be in someone else's country.
U.S. Commander Michael J. Brennan, who is in charge of the "New Horizons" operation in Haiti, tried to downplay the confrontation in Milot, saying that it was "an unimportant problem which shouldn't affect the continuation of our activities."
But Mayor Jean-Charles, who was re-elected to his post on May 21, was in no mood for arrogance. "If they continue construction without getting permission, we will tear down all the construction they do there," Jean-Charles said. "They say they have a lot of other things to do in the area, but we don't know who is coming with these projects. For what interests have they come to do these things in the area? We asked to see the papers for the land they supposedly bought, but they couldn't show them to us. They couldn't show us any papers."
In fact, Brennan had to admit that the construction on the "Children of Promise" orphanage was completely unauthorized by any Haitian authorities, who have only approved repairs on the Justinien Hospital and National School Jean 23 in Cap-Haïtien. According to Brennan, his military engineers had "volunteered" their services to work on the orphanage, at the request of ... a U.S. non-governmental organization!
Furthermore, the continued deployment of the U.S. troops on Haitian soil is a flagrant violation of a law passed by the Haitian parliament two-years ago forbidding the presence of any "armed forces parallel to the National Police (PNH)."
Former deputy Joseph Jasmin defended Mayor Jean-Charles' actions, noting that "for some time now foreigners, in particular U.S. soldiers or military engineers and other uniformed technicians, have been circulating around the Northern department." Usually no Haitian authorities or civilians know what the U.S. soldiers are up to, Jasmin said. "They are prospecting just about everywhere in the mountains, even at night, and this has had an effect upon the population," he said. "We always know that, in addition to their cover activities like humanitarian work and repairing schools, which is very useful, but they have the real activities which they hide from us so we never really know them."
There are many rumors and stories in the North of soldiers roaming the mountains with Geiger counters, drilling holes in remote places, and doing other unexplained activity with sophisticated apparatuses.
Meanwhile, this week, Washington closed its program for training the Haitian police, using the excuse that the program's funding was cut. The Justice Department-run program, known as ICITAP (International Criminal Investigations Training Assistance Program), was set in place after the return to power of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Sept. 1994 and has cost about $72 million. It employed about 40 police trainers from the U.S., Canada, and France.
The suspension of this program is very telling. It shows that Washington is continuing to step back from the Haitian government, which refuses to scrap the results of May 21st elections. The polling was largely carried by the Lavalas Family party. The U.S. disagrees with how the votes of 8 Senate races were calculated.
"We are going to tighten our belts to continue to construct our country which has been abandoned," President René Préval said in a Jul. 28 speech at the National Palace. "It took them over 20 years to recognize our independence, and now they can take the time they want to recognize the victory of May 21."
Significantly, however, the government and the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) have not yet made the results of the legislative elections official, as they were expected to do last week. Publication of the final tallies in Le Moniteur, the government's journal of record, will be the real point of no return.
Meanwhile, U.S. and European diplomats continue to threaten Haiti with a general aid cut-off. (Last week, Japan announced that, contrary to press reports, it did not intend to cut its aid to Haiti.)
But the Haitian people, as in the case of Milot, will not be intimidated. For the second time in two weeks, several hundred people demonstrated in the streets of the northwestern city of Port-de-Paix demanding that the U.S. and allies stop meddling in Haitian affairs. "We ask the international community to stop pushing its eyes and nose into our country's affairs because it pretends, above all the Americans, that they are your benefactor, that they are helping the country, when in fact they are plundering the poor," one demonstrator declared.
Motivated by the same outrage, Haitian community groups and activists in New York are coming together to organize a large demonstration in front of the United Nations on Sept. 8 to demand an end to foreign interference in Haiti, particularly from Washington.
And this is the same sentiment which motivated Milot's Mayor Jean-Charles to declare last January: "If the U.S. military deploys in my commune, even if I don't have the physical force to fight them, I will mobilize the population and national opinion to stop those U.S. soldiers."