Harry Fouché, Haiti’s Consul General in New York, read a statement from Haiti’s Prime Minister Yvon Neptune.

“Kill all the Haitians” the video game instructs its players, who tend overwhelmingly to be young teenage boys. Using an arsenal that includes pistols, shotguns, machine guns, a flame-thrower, a rocket-launcher, and swords, the player of “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City” then must bloodily mow down dozens of Haitians, depicted as evil gun-toting drug dealers. A game character calls them a “stinking nest of Haitians. We gonna kill them all.”

It is this kind of message which brought indignant Haitian community leaders and activists along with many state and city officials to the steps of New York’s City Hall on the morning of Nov. 25 to express their outrage.

“Video games such as ‘Grand Theft Auto: Vice City’ are seeds to hate crimes,” declared Dr. Henry Frank, reading a statement of Haitian-Americans for Human Rights (HAHR), an impromptu coalition formed to lead a campaign against the game. “Our objective is to inform parents and the public, educate our youth, and prevent further dissemination of racist and potentially dangerous video games through all available legal means.”

Toward this end, the coalition has called upon Sanford Rubenstein, one of the lawyers for police brutality victim Abner Louima, to investigate avenues for litigation.

“Freedom of speech as outlined by the constitution does not protect the freedom to yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater,” Rubenstein said. “Likewise, video games with racist dialog like ‘kill all the Haitians’ should not be protected either.” He said his firm and the HAHR would press the civil rights division of both federal and New York State attorney generals to look for possible civil rights violations. He also called for legislation “on a federal, state, and local level to prohibit these racist games from being sold and distributed.”

“Grand Theft Auto: Vice City” is not some obscure title. A part of the “Grand Theft Auto” series, it is the biggest selling video game in history. Since its release in October 2002, it has netted Rockstar Games, a subsidiary of Take 2 Interactive Software, Inc., some $260 million. Such figures are not so surprising when one realizes that 79% of U.S. children now play video games on a regular basis.

“Vice City” first came to the Haitian community’s attention when a New York affiliate of CBS Television aired an expose about the game on its “Shame on You” series. A few days later, over 100 people turned out for a meeting at the Brooklyn offices of the Haitian Centers Council where Frank, who was interviewed for the TV report, is executive director.

Over the next couple of weeks, the HAHR was formed and a demonstration planned for 10 a.m. on Dec. 15 in front of Rockstar’s offices at 575 Broadway in Manhattan. “There has been an outpouring of support from the community and even the press,” said John Alexis, an organizer with SEIU Local 1199 and an HAHR member. “We expect the demo to be very, very big,”

It is a safe bet, judging by the parade of politicians who turned out for the Nov. 25 City Hall press conference. “If you are going to use your power as a corporate entity in the United States of America to spread hate, to perpetuate hate crimes, then we say to you that people of goodwill are here to fight back,” said Councilwoman Yvette Clark, who helped organize the press conference. “The Haitian community are revolutionary people. We stand with those revolutionary people today.”

Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz called for a boycott not only of Rockstar titles, but of stores selling them. “Violence and hate are intolerable,” he said. “The game is over Rockstar. You’re history.” State senators, councilmen, and assemblymen delivered similar messages of solidarity and outrage at the unscrupulous profiteering of the game’s corporate owners.

But lawyer Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) pointed to additional culprits. “Games like this don’t just happen out of the blue,” he said in an interview. “This game comes because of a history of U.S. government attacks and discrimination against the Haitian people for over a century. The intellectual authors of a game like this are administration after administration in Washington. When you put people in jail for fleeing from repression or being HIV positive, blame them for AIDS, denigrate their religion, make them out to be people from another planet, then companies like Rockstar will produce video games targeting the people vilified by the U.S. government and society.”

At the request of members of the New York Haitian community, the CCR “will be looking at the possibility of litigation in the U.S. and Canada,” Ratner said. Group libel laws, which would pertain to this type of video, are very weak in the U.S., but strict in Canada.

The Haitian government is also investigating legal action. Haiti’s Consul General in New York, Harry Fouché, read a communique from Prime Minister Yvon Neptune at the press conference which called for “a huge mobilization to force Rockstar Games and the stores distributing it to remove it from their shelves.”

“The Haitian government is seriously considering litigation,” Fouché told Haïti Progrès. “Our lawyer in the U.S. as well as a team of lawyers in Haiti is reviewing the matter and will be speaking to and coordinating with the lawyers of the group here in New York. This video game is an incitation to violence, which is a violation of civil rights, a violation of the constitution.”

Fouché said that just last week in Canada the Haitian government has sued for damages of $32 million against a Quebec lawyer who publicly stated that prostitution was “a part of Haitian culture.”

“Grand Theft Auto: Vice City” is a graphically violent game populated by warring criminal gangs set in a fictional Florida city closely resembling Miami. One of the criminal kingpins is an “elderly Haitian matriarch” named Auntie Poulet. Rockstar/Take 2 Software’s website refers to the racism of the game as “irreverent humor.”

The other 79 video game titles produced by Take 2 Software include 4 x 4, Action Bass, Age of Wonders, Stronghold, Ford Racing, Hidden & Dangerous, Max Payne, Motocross Mania, and Midnight Club.