As Haïti Liberté enters its 18th year of publication in the spirit of continuing not only to clearly denounce Western imperialism but also to defend the fundamental rights of peoples affected by unemployment, precariousness and poverty, two simultaneous facts have caught our attention just to remind us of the importance of getting more involved. This new Kenyan-led multinational occupation mission in Haiti coincides with the uprising of the Kenyan people expressing anger at the economic attacks of their own government recommended by capitalist institutions.
It is comforting, however, to note that imperialism has the same ugly face everywhere and uses the same score to tune its destructive violin in its struggle against peoples in search of change and improvement of their living conditions.
For two centuries, Western imperialism has oppressed and exploited the Haitian people. The poverty and misery of the working class are neither natural nor inevitable; they are the result of the plundering of yesterday’s colonization and the exploitation maintained today by the capitalist system through governments led by traitors, mercenaries imposed to establish its neocolonial policy. As a result, Washington’s financial and diplomatic blackmail to organize puppet groups, parties and organizations in defiance of the most elementary principles to abort any serious popular movement and break any process of real liberation of the Haitian people.
Capitalism is a system in desperation that throws millions of human beings into misery, unemployment, and sows death day after day. It exists only to monopolize the wealth of the peoples, to devalue the peasant-working class and to oppress it to an extreme situation.
The events of the last few days in Kenya and Haiti have caused a public stir that is of the utmost concern to us and calls for reflection. While Kenyan forces on the frontlines in Haiti are fighting against insecurity caused by austerity measures, social inequality, chronic unemployment and excessive exploitation, the Kenyan people, on the other hand, are taking to the streets of Nairobi and the rest of the country to demonstrate against the multiplication of neoliberal measures demanded by the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the World Bank. Does this not mean that the proletarians, whether they are Haitians, Kenyans, or any other nationality, have the same demands and face the same oppressor, the same executioner? Hence the cry of Flora Tristan, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Workers of all countries, unite!
The imperialist enemy is the same everywhere. He has neither color, nor race, nor frontiers, he has only his own interests. While on the one hand it uses Kenyan soldiers in Haiti, on the other it oppresses Kenyan workers through their own government. This illustrates that in any capitalist society, the privileges of exploitation from one class over another are not much different.
One of the global characteristics of capitalism is that it cannot admit the right of the people to choose their own destiny. This is why it seeks everywhere to impose its diktat, even in a ridiculous and demagogic way. Today in Haiti, everything is false, faked, equivocal. The presidency is a chimera since it is only a simple Council of stooges.
A government bearing the mark of infamy, dignitaries of state without portfolio. To top it all off, it is a government made up of an alliance that would favor the strategy of domination and enslavement of the people. As usual, imperialism has found allies in the political class, henchmen and straw women of all stripes ready to sacrifice the interests of the people with the obvious aim of consolidating American influence. These collaborators, who have no problem taking their orders from Washington, are tied up, hand and foot to validate this new multinational intervention and precisely to hide their own failure and that of imperialism in Haiti.
It is on this contempt that this new regime of the Haitian state is based. A maneuver intended to shift the center of gravity of the crisis to the source, in reality, of social inequalities and bad governance, real evils leading to symptoms such as gangs. What better way to use Kenyan forces than to try to hide or restore an image tarnished by a policy of atrocious repression and odious corruption that will not change a situation that is already in decay.
All our solidarity goes to the Haitian people in the same measure to the Kenyan people who are fighting against a common enemy: Western imperialism.
This system dominating the world has demonstrated that it must be overthrown and it is in this logic that the newspaper Haïti Liberté has been involved throughout its existence so that another political and economic system is possible in Haiti. Capitalism harms the interests of impoverished countries. Until this system ends and is wiped out of the hemisphere, we can never live in peace.
Haïti Liberté cannot fail to express its continued total solidarity with the Cuban people, as well as with the people of Venezuela and all the oppressed peoples of the world, especially the Palestinian people. We categorically reject and condemn the coup attempt by Washington and its accomplices in Bolivia and support the popular mobilization to thwart this dirty coup and guarantee the defense of the democratic rights of the people, including Bolivian workers. No to imperialist intervention!
Haïti Liberté will remain a weapon of struggle for the national liberation of peoples and the transformation of the world! Long live the popular struggle for a fundamental change of the workers of Haiti and those of the Kenyan masses to overthrow capitalism and put an end to exploitation, misery, unemployment and barbarism.
Haiti and Kenya the same struggle, the same fight against the capitalist system!