On the night of August 21, 1791, the slaves of the French colony of Saint-Domingue, then the richest in the Western Hemisphere, rose up in fury.
They had been kidnapped in Africa, had survived the murderous “middle passage”. They had seen their families separated, been enslaved for 3 centuries in inhuman conditions, worked around the clock, tortured, raped, abused and humiliated.
When the day of reckoning arrived, three centuries of anger erupted in a geyser of violence.
These rampaging field slaves set fire to the plantations and homes of their European slaveholders. They killed their wives and children, even infants, sometimes mutilating them as they had been mutilated. They also set fire to slave quarters and the homes of free men who did not own slaves.
In addition to looting, raping, torturing, mutilating and killing the French, the insurgents also killed fellow slaves, usually “servants”, who sought to hide or protect their masters, or were suspected of doing so.
European historians and newspapers reported the violence in gruesome detail, perhaps inventing events in their accounts, and some even cited the ferocity of the uprising as evidence of why slavery had been justified in the first place.
But the violence of 1791 and the 13 years of Haitian revolution that followed gave birth to a completely new and transformative society, in which slavery was abolished and all men and women – at least formally – had equal rights and status, a first in modern human history.
Today, Haiti may be in the early days of its second social revolution, which differs from a political revolution (such as the election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1990) in a crucial way. An oppressed or exploited class seizes not only political power but also control of the economy, wresting from the ruling class ownership of the country’s means of production: its land, factories, banks, stores, transport, utilities, communications and other economic pillars.
Today’s revolution is also led by men whom many in the West, including some “leftists”, consider subhuman. The revolutionaries are simply referred to as “gangs” or “thugs” and, indeed, some of them have not only committed crimes, but have also survived through crimes, including kidnapping. But many other members of the Viv Ansanm coalition, which is now fighting the Haitian National Police (PNH), have fought the criminal “gangs” with which they are currently united. The armed groups once focused on crime and those who fought crime, now united for “system change”, are drawn directly from Haiti’s proletariat and lumpenproletariat in Port-au-Prince, the now sprawling capital of almost three million souls.
Like the European writers of two centuries ago, today’s mainstream media scream daily about the “horrors” they claim the modern-day insurgents are committing: wanton murder of innocents, burning down the homes of the poor, vandalizing national institutions like the National Library and the General Hospital.
In fact, the violence now gripping Haiti can be divided into four different categories.
1) Popular anger: like the slave uprising of the 18th century, the masses of wage-slaves in Haiti today are deeply angry at those who have oppressed and exploited them for decades. This can be seen in their attack on institutions, however imperfect, that essentially and formally belong to them, such as the Hôpital Général. But because of corruption, lack of funding and incompetence in its management, the masses have become alienated from the institution and regard it as a parasitic organism disconnected from themselves.
2) Indiscipline, ignorance and lack of control: The “soldiers” of the various armed groups that make up the Viv Ansanm coalition have different levels of training and discipline. Some are almost military in preparation and structure, while others are more informal and anarchic.
On April 3, armed individuals stormed and looted Haiti’s National Library. “I was told that thugs were taking away the institution’s furniture,” said the library’s director general, Dangelo Neard. “They also destroyed the building’s generator. I alerted the police for a quick intervention […] We have rare documents, over 200 years old, of heritage importance that are at risk of being burnt or damaged by bandits.” The library has some 26,000 volumes.
“No, Viv Ansanm did not give the order to attack the National Library,” Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier told Haiti Liberté the following day. “It was attacked by a group of men who don’t even know what a library is. They don’t know how to read, they don’t know anything, they don’t even understand the concept of a library. Ultimately, it’s the state’s fault; these poor devils never went to school, so they don’t understand that a library is a national treasure that shouldn’t be uprooted, that it holds rare books, archives, important to the nation. Some of these books are irreplaceable.”
As for the General Hospital, “anyone in his right mind who had been to school would uproot and vandalize a hospital,” continued Chérizier, once again accusing the state of failing to educate poor young men. “We have now given formal orders to all troops to protect hospitals, schools, libraries, etc.”
Chérizier also lamented that his Masonic lodge had been vandalized. “Some guys broke into my lodge and looted it,” he said. “I want to make a video about it. It’s again because the state has never invested in the education of these young men. I don’t blame them; I blame the state”.
In another interview with ON TV on April 9, Chérizier again seemed to follow Amilcar Cabral’s revolutionary maxim: “Don’t lie, don’t claim easy victories.”
In a lengthy statement, he admitted many problems but assured that the fight would go on.
“We knew this fight would not be easy,” he said. “Moreover, we are fighting against a very rich and powerful opponent and against a system that has been in place for over 200 years. We launched this fight only two months ago. We can’t get it into our heads that we could have done away with this system by now. It is powerful, controls the media, gives many opportunists living in precariousness, misery and hunger and allows them to become journalists for hire to say that we make the poor suffer and attack people who look like us, all to discredit our struggle.”
“Our forces remain strong and united, despite many difficult moments and several disagreements we’ve had. But we continue the fight!”
3) False flag or psychological operations: Viv Ansanm leaders claimed that the police were carrying out attacks on poor neighborhoods, and blamed Viv Ansanm for them. On Sunday April 7, a Viv Ansanm leader issued a statement saying: “We are going to uproot the oligarchs and with the police. Since the police have killed too many men and women in poor neighborhoods. They come in cars, shoot at everyone, motorcyclists are killed, people have been murdered at the Croix-des-Missions market, in Clercine, people can’t pass through Bobine… We can’t stand these attacks. Nobody talks about human rights… When the police fight us, they burn the poor people’s belongings and then claim that we did it… We know that literacy hasn’t reached many people in our poor neighborhoods. Often, they believe the lies they hear and don’t hear our side of the story, even though we live in the same poor neighborhood.”
This type of “psy-op”, as it is known in CIA and Special Forces jargon, is to be expected. Indeed, the US State Department’s April 2022 policy document “U.S. Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Promote Stability” explicitly calls on the Pentagon “to manage and prevent conflict and address global fragility through specialized activities, including… psychological operations…” This refers to efforts to discredit Viv Ansanm through “false banner” actions. Well-known historical examples of “false-banner” operations aimed at starting, maintaining or waging a war are the 1898 bombing of the U.S.S. Maine in the port of Havana, the organized attack in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 and the 2002 accusations that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction”.
Such psychological operations then find an echo in the mainstream media, what the State Department calls “information operations engagements”. The DoS also calls for “security cooperation”, which is a euphemism for US Special Forces training, commanding or even fighting alongside the Haitian police or army.
Meanwhile, “psychological operations” are carried out in Haiti. Under the Aristide government, Evans Paul and André Michel’s KID organization took bodies from the morgue and dumped them in the street as if they were victims of government death squads. It’s no exaggeration to think that they have resorted or will resort to such tactics again today.
4) Opportunistic crimes and settling of scores: In any situation of revolution or war, the state is weakened, the police are busy fighting and there are people who take advantage of the situation to steal or take revenge on a rival. Sometimes, the culprits are not clearly identified in the fog of war.
Last week, even an octogenarian councillor and member of the board of Haïti Liberté, Edmond Bertin, saw the house he owns just off Avenue Jean-Jacques Dessalines in Port-au-Prince attacked by assailants and set on fire. Its inhabitants had to flee. This just goes to show how blind and indiscriminate some violence is, particularly in conflict zones close to the National Palace and police stations.
Was it vandals? Was it the indiscipline of Viv Ansanm soldiers? Was it the police or their agents? So far, we don’t know.
But the mainstream and bourgeois Haitian media want to amplify and draw attention to every misstep, every mistake in those first days of struggle, in order to build the case for the foreign military intervention that Washington, Ottawa and Paris want to see. With that, let’s give the last word to Jimmy Cherizier in his April 9 statement.
“A lot has happened since we started this movement that we deplore and regret. We wish they hadn’t happened. Unfortunately, when there is fighting, the leaders of the different zones are not in the street. Unfortunately, when some soldiers are in the street, they carry out their own actions and initiatives, which is detrimental to the fight. We don’t want to play devil’s advocate. We try to understand things.
“When a young man is armed and untrained, he represents a danger to himself and to society. There are things that have happened, places that have been looted or set on fire, which we deplore. But the state is responsible, because if it had educated young men and women, some of these tragedies might not have happened.
“Despite these setbacks, we are not discouraged. We know what we’re fighting for, where we’re going, and we’ll continue our fight to get exactly where we’re going.
“Everyone with a gun in their hand is a victim. Don’t let us be the guilty ones, the killers. Our goal is clear and we will not back down. We are working to make Haiti a paradise for all, or a hell for everyone.”
sourrce: https://haitiliberte.com/