This week in Haiti
WORLD TRADE CENTER
The Haitian Toll
There may be dozens of Haitians among the estimated 5,600 killed as a result of the Sep. 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center (WTC) (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 19, No. 26, 9/12/2001).
As we go to press, the official count of people "missing" according to New York City authorities rests at 5,422. Hope is dwindling that any of this number will turn up living as no survivors have been pulled from the rubble since last Wednesday. In addition to the missing, "we can classify 218 people as having died, 152 identified, 66 bodies still to be identified," New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani announced Sep. 18. "Of that overall number, 37 are uniformed officers, 32 fire, two E.M.T., two Port Authority Police officers and one New Jersey Fire Department."
Many families still hope to find their "missing" among the hundreds of injured in New York City hospitals. In Lower Manhattan, every bus stop, telephone booth, and light pole is covered with dozens of flyers posted by families looking for their disappeared loved ones. Occasionally, a missing person has turned up. But the confusion which reigned in the days immediately following the attacks is ebbing, centralized lists have been drawn up, and most families are beginning to lose hope.
Hundreds of Haitians worked at the World Trade Center as, among other things, financial analysts, engineers, salespeople, clerks, secretaries, janitors, receptionists, restaurant workers, and security guards. On radio programs, street corners, internet chat rooms, and living room sofas, many of them have told of their escape from the disaster.
But several Haitians are among the missing, and their families have begun to prepare for the worst. This week Haïti Progrès has investigated the names of some of the Haitian missing. Until their fates are confirmed, we continue to use the present tense.
Farah Jeudy, 31, lives in Spring Valley, a suburban town in Rockland County, about 20 miles north of Manhattan. She took a one week vacation cruise with her little brother during the first week of September. She returned to work at Aon Corporation, a Fortune 500 insurance company, on Sep. 10. Aon had about 1,350 employees on Floors 92 and 98-105 of Two World Trade Center. Farah was manager of the 99th floor as well as Fire Coordinator for the floor. After the second airliner slammed into Tower Two, Farah, along with her boss, evacuated all the Aon employees on that floor. Apparently, Farah and her boss also started down the stairs to safety. Around the 84th floor, Farah's boss called his wife on his cell phone. Unfortunately, the communication was cut in mid-conversation. Both Farah and her boss are now among the missing.Farah was born in Port-au-Prince and grew up in the U.S. since the age of four. "I have four sons but she is my only daugher," said Farah's mother, Anneida Jeudy, who lives with Farah in Spring Valley. Like her mother, Farah is a Jehovah's Witness. "It has been very hard for me these past days. So much anxiety. It is only my faith in Jehovah that keeps me going," Anneida said.
Aon Corporation reports that about 200 of its employees remain on the list of the missing.
André Bonheur, 40, is a financial analyst at Citibank. His office was on the 2nd floor of Tower One. He was about to be transferred to Citibank's office at 34th Street and Broadway, his family said.At 8:15 a.m. on the fateful day, André went to the 105th floor of Tower One for a meeting at the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald, according to his family. He did not make any calls after the jet struck the building.
André lives in Brooklyn. He has a wife, Roxanne, and two kids, ages13 and 5. He also has three brothers -- Fritz, Monode, and Moïse -- and a sister, Carole. His father, André, 68, also lives in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. The family moved to New York from Port-au-Prince 29 years ago.
André's brother, Monode "Mo" Bonheur, 37, was also at the WTC just before its collapse. He is a New York police officer who was stationed at the corner of Church Street and Vesey Street. "I was one of those people who had to run as fast as they could up Church when the building fell," Monode told Haïti Progrès. "I didn't know at that time that my own brother was probably in there."
Despite working 36 hours straight on the day of the disaster, Monode and his family have tirelessly sought out information about André. "We haven't turned up anything," Monode said.
François Jean-Pierre, 58, is a restaurant worker at the world-famous "Windows on the World," on the 107th floor of Tower One. He was at the WTC when a terrorist bomb went off in a basement garage in 1993, but nothing happened to him then.
This September, François had been out on sick leave. September 11 was his first day back at work.
He was born in Cap Haïtien on Feb. 6, 1943 and emigrated to New York in the early 1980s. He has one daughter, Sherly, age 26, and two sons, Roody and Jean Herold, aged 22 and 23.
"I have spent all my days looking everywhere for him," said Christine Jean-Pierre, his wife, who lives with François in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. "I have checked all the hospitals."
Christine's son has even made a color computer poster with François' photo, which they have posted around with the hundreds of family flyers now seen around New York.
Gérard Jean-Baptiste is a New York City fire figher, who is also confirmed to be missing. At press time, we had no further information about him.
There are also two Haitians who are reported missing, but Haïti Progrès was unable to contact their families for confirmation. Jacqueline Mompoint is an engineer who worked for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey on the 73rd Floor of Tower One. She is married and lives in New Jersey. Nolbert Salomon has also been reported missing. He is believed to have worked at the WTC for the Metropolitan Transit Authority.
Finally, the Sep. 18 Daily News published the photos of 133 missing people. Among them was Charles Laurencin, 61, of Brooklyn, whom the News says was in security. Haïti Progrès contacted André Laurencin in Jamaica, NY. André's family is from St. Lucia, where one also finds many French names. André did not know Charles, but intends to contact family members to see if they can determine if he is from Haiti.
Many Haitians are also asking if Jean Roger was Haitian. Jean was a flight attendant from Longmeadow, Massachusetts who was on American Flt. 11, the first Boeing 767 to crash into the WTC.
If any readers know of other Haitians who were killed or who are
missing, please contact
Haïti Progrès at 718-434-8100
or email us at: editor@haitiprogres.com.
Demonstrate Against War on Sept. 29
The following open letter is a call by a new anti-war coalition: International A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism) which plans a rally at the White House at 11 a.m. on Sep. 29. Ben Dupuy, co-director of Haïti Progrès and secretary general of Haiti's National Popular Party (PPN), as well as Ray Laforest, a Haitian trade unionist and member of the Haiti Support Network (HSN), are among the signers.
Our most heartfelt sympathies and condolences are with all those whose loved ones were lost or injured on September 11, 2001. At this moment, we would all like to take time to reflect, to grieve, to extend sympathy and condolences to all. But we believe that we must do more. We must act now.Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney GeneralWe are assembling International A.N.S.W.E.R. to call for worldwide rallies against war and racism. On September 29, there will be a national march and rally at the White House in Washington DC, as well as marches on the West Coast of the U.S. and around the world. We call on all people of conscience and progressive organizations to take up this call and organize rallies around the world.
Unless we stop President Bush and NATO from carrying out a new, wider war in the Middle East and beyond, the number of innocent victims will grow from the thousands to the tens of thousands and possibly more. A new, wider U.S. and NATO war in the Middle East can only lead to an escalating cycle of violence. War is not the answer.
After the horrific killings of thousands of innocent civilians on Sept. 11, the Bush administration is moving in a very ominous direction. In a chilling statement, Bush administration spokespersons have called for "ending states," an unprecedented threat.
At the same time, Arab American and Muslim people in the United States, in Europe and elsewhere -- as well as other communities of color -- are facing racist attacks and harassment in their communities, on their jobs and at mosques. Anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism is a poison that should be repudiated.
The U.S. government is attempting to curb civil liberties and to create a climate in which it is impossible for progressive people to speak their mind. The Bush administration is attempting to take advantage of this crisis to militarize U.S. society with a vast expansion of police powers that is intended to severely restrict basic democratic rights.
On September 29 tens of thousands of people had planned to demonstrate against the Bush administration's reactionary foreign and domestic policy and the IMF and World Bank. In light of the current crisis, with its tragic consequences for so many thousands of people, we have refocused the call for our demonstration to address the immediate danger posed by increased racism and the grave threat of a new war. We call on people to demonstrate around the world on that day.
Now is the time for all people of conscience, all people who oppose racism and war to come together. If you believe in civil liberties and oppose racism and war, demonstrate on September 29 in front of the White House and around the world. October 12-13 will be International Days of Action Against War and Racism. We urge all organizations internationally to join together at this critical time and take action.
Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, Auxiliary Bishop, Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit
Samia Halaby, Al-Awda Palestine Right of Return Coalition
Barbara Lubin, Executive Director, Middle East Children's Alliance
Teresa Gutierrez, Co-Director, International Action Center
Lucius Walker, Pastors for Peace
Pam Africa, International Family & Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal
Ben Dupuy, Co-Director, Haïti Progrès Newspaper
Ray Laforest, Labor Organizer, District Council 1707 AFSCME
Nania Kaur Dhingra, Sikh Student Organization, George Washington University
Michele Naar-Obed, Plowshares activist from the Jonah House Community in Baltimore
Chuck Kaufman, National Co-Coordinator, Nicaragua Network
Heidi Boghosian, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild
Leonora Foerstal, Women for Mutual Security
Njeri Shakur, Texas Death Penalty Abolition Movement
Nino Pasti Foundation, Rome, Italy,
Tom Hanson, Mexico Solidarity Network
Kriss Worthington, Berkeley City Council
Michel Schehadeh, Los Angeles 8 Case respondent
Leslie Feinberg, transgendered author, co-founder, Rainbow Flags for Mumia
Minnie Bruce Pratt, writer & anti-racist activist
Vieques Support Campaign
Arab Cause Solidarity Committee, Madrid, Spain
Korea Truth Commission
Michel Collon, Belgian anti-war journalist
Elmar Schmaehling, retired admiral, German Navy
Struggle Against War Coalition, Italy
Congress for Korean Reunification
(List in formation, September 17, 2001)
International A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism)
National Office: 39 W. 14th St., Suite 206, NY, NY 10011 (212) 633-6646
Washington DC Office: 1247 E St. SE, Washington DC 20003 (202) 543-2777
Email: iacenter@iacenter.org***Web: www.iacenter.org
A Letter to Congressman Major Owens
Many Haitians in Brooklyn, NY have Congressman Major Owens as their
representative. We present here a letter which Mark Dow, an occasional
contributor to this column, wrote to Owens this week on the heels of Congress
granting President George W. Bush a free hand in pursuing the perpetrators
of last week's attack against the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Congressman Major Owens
US House of Representatives
Washington DCSeptember 17, 2001
Dear Congressman Owens:
I live in Prospect Heights. After I moved into your district four years ago, I soon came to realize, each time there was a vote tally printed in the [New York] Times, that you had indeed represented me. And so I was disappointed to see this week that Congresswoman Lee of California was the lone voice of dissent against granting President George W. Bush the unlimited power of revenge which he seeks for last week's atrocities committed here.
The crucial point of Congresswoman Lee's position, as I understand it, is simply that military action by the US is not going to stop terrorist actions against us.
Certainly we should make every effort to apprehend those who collaborated with the killers. We should arrest them and try them and, if they are convicted, punish them. The alternative, in the real world, is the kind of revenge we took after the bombings of US embassies in East Africa. I urge you to ask a staff member to get you the Times articles on our retaliation bombings in the Sudan in particular. Read what the Times wrote as the situation unfolded and again, on "reflection," a few weeks later. You will see that, first, the administration's justifications for the planned and actual bombing of the factory were never convincing; and that, second and perhaps more important, the media and most government officials nevertheless took the administration at its word, perhaps in the name of "supporting our president," and only later "discovered" what had been obvious all along -- that the evidence for biological weapons manufacture in the plant was scanty at best, and seemed nothing more than pretext for our own show of strength.
We can be fairly certain that a more destructive version of such action is what will happen next. The administration is fully exploiting -- if not helping to manufacture -- the emotional shift from genuine grief into mindless jingoism. I share in the grief, and I fear the new nationalism.
Here in the areas of Brooklyn which you know, on Atlantic Avenue, and on 7th Avenue in Park Slope, Arab-American shopkeepers have already become victims of vandalism and "revenge." I have no doubt that you are personally and deeply disturbed by such actions. And so I am sad to say that your recent vote for the President seems to me essentially an extension of such actions into official US policy.
In the coming weeks, if not days, the US will take retaliatory actions which will include the killing of innocent people. But even as that possibility hardens into reality, the possibilities for debate here may widen. I urge you to reexamine your position. More than many of our officials, you have acknowledged the destruction which the US has caused around the world: if war-time "support" for our armed forces and the president means suppression of those truths, then that support must be wrong. Don't you agree?
The alternative to blind support of those who would now answer one massacre with another -- just as those who committed this massacre may turn out to have been answering a previous massacre -- is an honest examination of the US role in the Middle East and around the world, a look at the role which the US has long played, directly and indirectly, in the cycles of killing.
None of this would lessen the guilt of those who murdered thousands here last week.
I hope you will use your voice to speak out against any escalation in the cycle of violence.
Sincerely,
Mark Dow
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