Free at Last!

John Maxwell

As a toddler on Derby Beach, now Silver Sands, I remember asking my father what was the roaring sound we heard when we put seashells to our ears. His answer, I believe, was to the effect that the shell concentrated all the sounds around us, the wind, the waves, the sand, every noise in the universe, into the shells and perhaps, with enough patience, we could unravel and make sense of some of it.
If my grandchildren were in the neighbourhood I don't think I'd need to answer that question, since I doubt that they would now be able to find a whole seashell on any Jamaican beach.
My father died when I was 12, of a heart broken (it was said) by the electorate of Northern Trelawny, who had forgotten the hard labour he'd put in as Member of the Legislative Council for the whole parish. His brother-in-law, Morris Thelwell, a comparative unknown, had won Southern Trelawny for the Jamaica Labour Party while the totally obscure Clement Aitcheson, head-teacher of the Duncans Elementary School, selected for that job by my father, had won in Northern Trelawny also for the JLP. Another brother in law, Hugh Cork, had won southern Clarendon for the JLP.
I remember as a ten year old cowering in my father's library in astonishment as my father excoriated Bustamante who wanted to recruit him to run for the JLP in 1944. It was an unforgettable confrontation: my father, all 5'6' of him facing down Bustamante, nearly a foot taller with a hairdo that exaggerated his height. Busta, furious, simply went across the street and recruited Aitcheson.
My father had refused to join the PNP because he thought that there was still a place in Jamaican politics for independents. His sympathies were with the PNP and he really admired Manley, but a decade earlier, Manley had been the lawyer whose arguments unseated him on the ground that he was not wealthy enough to be elected. It wasn't Manley's choice; in those days lawyers were more or less obliged to accept the first brief offered and the first brief was from the losing candidate, the richest man on the north coast, the manager of the building society, the chairman of the Parish Council, the Custos of the Parish, the MLC and the attorney for more than half the land and sugar estates in Trelawny – Mr W.U.Guy S. Ewen.
Manley regretted the result – as he wrote the Chief Justice afterward – why should people be prevented from being represented by the delegate of their choice simply because he was poor?

A few years later Manley joined a ferment with O.T Fairclough, Ken and Frank Hill, W.A.Domingo, Adolphe Roberts, Amy Bailey and the rest to first energise the Jamaica Progressive League in New York then Public Opinion in Jamaica and finally the People's National Party which was determined to give every man a vote and to bring universal human rights to Jamaica.

So, despite my father's defeat at the hands of Manley, he would tell me, as a toddler, that I had to grow up to become a lawyer like Mr Manley, to defend poor people.
Shortly after the case Ewen's solicitors distrained on my father for the costs of the case. They were determined to finish him off. The bailiffs seized everything in the house, including my baby crib and announced that they were coming back for the "body" – they were going to arrest my father for debt and cast him into the debtor's jail in the St Catherine District Prison.
This animus was provoked by the fact that shortly after winning the case against my father Mr Ewen dropped dead, felled according to the gossipmongers, by my grandmother's obeah.Dad won the ensuing bye-election with all his papers in order
When the sale of my father's pitiful possessions failed to satisfy the lawyers a commitment warrant was issued for his arrest and incarceration. My father's roots are in Accompong and in Maroon Town and he vanished into the Cockpit Country. Not even my mother knew where he was.
The plan was that he could not be 'attached' once he was sworn in to the Legislative Council. But Trelawny is a long way from Kingston; in those days of marl roads the drive was anywhere between four and five hours.
My father's best friend, Mr A.B. Lowe, MLC for St James and a very sober and upright Baptist deacon was the unlikely agent. By prior arrangement Lowe picked up my father somewhere on the Burnt Hill Road and then drove south, through Manchester, Clarendon and St Catherine, outwitting the small army of scouts on the expected North coast route.
In Kingston my father was stowed on the back seat of the car, covered by empty luggage and a carpet. Instead of coming through Duke Street and the northern approaches to Headquarters House, Lowe came from the East on Beeston Street. When he drove around Headquarters House seeking a place to park, special constables alerted to his friendship with my father, asked Lowe if he had seen Maxwell. Telling what was probably the only lie in his life Lowe said he'd seen someone resembling my father at the Beeston Street entrance and the bailiffs dashed off. Lowe and one or two confederates, pulled some of the luggage out of the car, blocking the sidewalk while my father sprinted up the steps, escaping capture by inches.
He was duly sworn in and in time paid his debt to the solicitors.

Like Mr Manley

My mother and various family members pressured me for years to become a what the Americans call a trial lawyer. Unfortunately as a teenager I had become hopelessly enmeshed in journalism.

Since January 29, 1952, except for 18 months or so spent as the first press officer for the Industrial Development Corporation( now Jamaica Trade & Invest) I have been employed or unemployed entirely as a journalist. Last month made it 58 years hard labour and there is nobody in Jamaican journalism, living or dead, who has spent more time at it.

There are others still alive who may have become reporters before me but they have spent most of their lives in other, more lucrative pursuits.
Over that time there must be quite a paper trail, millions of words, hundreds of lost causes. Some of this is because my career paralleled to a certain extent, the development of modern media. In broadcasting for instance, I did things in the fifties that no one in Jamaica had thought of doing, a weekly political commentary and a thrice weekly economics-made-easy commentary called Progress report. We did things because we didn't know they were impossible. I did an audio montage of the people who lived on and off, the Kingston Dump. C.L.R.James said he'd never heard anything as moving.
Moving back into print journalism in 1963 Having been fired by the Prime Minister, (and a certain Edward Seaga) brought me into direct conflict with the new government of Jamaica who behaved, as I and others said at the time – as if they had simply assumed the prerogatives of the British colonial dictatorship. I don't think any current Jamaican politician would even think about jailing a journalist; fifty yeas ago I was threatened with prison for my "rude, insolent, indecent" remarks, which verged, it seemed, on sacrilege. The threats were made in Parliament. THe government tried to shut down my paper and eventually forced me into exile.
I spent a few years in Britain, doing what I'd been doing at the JBC, but half the work for twice the money.
I have never fancied myself a politician, contrary to my detractors. I returned from Britain to contest West KIngston in 1972 because the sad truth was that every other plausible PNP candidate was too afraid to run. I ran to prevent the seat being handed to the JLP on Nomination Day. Some JLP people who know the facts, feel I should have graciously allowed a coronation in West Kingston in 1972,

Perhaps the single thing of which I am most proud is the invention of the talk-show –the Public Eye. There had been other talk shows, but none combining news, commentary and public participation. WE changed things. Despite attempts, there has never been anything similar.

Rosina Wiltshire and Gillian Monroe gave the programme a vital push soon after we started . They had done a study of working conditions among domestic helpers, then, as now, the largest single class of workers in Jamaica. I interviewed them, let them talk and was amazed at the horrors they revealed. When I asked domestic helpers to phone in,giving their side of the story it was as if a a massive dam of years of hurt, oppression and cruelty had suddenly burst, sweeping away all the pretensions of the Jamaican upper classes to civilisation.
In those days we used dial telephones and you could buy locks for them. It soon became a joke in Jamaica that every shipment of telephone locks was swept up within hours of arrival.
I have reported here before, how we recruited first the Prime Minister's wife, Beverley and then Michael Manley himself to the idea that only a national minimum wage with enforcement could rescue the workers.

Public Eye went on to campaign for other workers causes, equal pay, housing, against capital punishment and police brutality, and for what I and others thought was the essential framework of a civilised society.

It was my opinion that radio could be used to mobilise pubic opinion in the non partisan process of what Norman Manley called nation building.
At that time I was also the unpaid chair of the Natural Resources Conservation Authority,(the Beach Control, Wildlife Protection and Watershed Protection Authorities) and the National Gallery.
We managed to do some serious work including organising public opinion to clean up Kingston Harbour, , to alert people to the government sponsored theft of public beaches and other lands – Hellshire, Long Mountain etc) and to the need to guarantee safe land for housing.
Over the years I have accumulated some really good stories, for instance how I solved two murder cases that baffled the police,but the real story of my life has been in the small stories about the human rights of people without friends and most of all, the story of the defamation and despoliation of Haiti.
As I once wrote in this column, sometimes I think I can smell the blood of Haiti from here.
This column is the last one from me for a little while.
Some of you may know that I continued writing every week through my one year course of radiation and chemotherapy for advanced lung cancer.
The cancers are no longer in evidence thanks to the esprit de corps, optimism, determination and skill of dedicated practitioners in Jamaica and the Netherlands.
Having come out of what seemed a very long dark tunnel and having lost a slew of friends – Sonny Bradshaw, Trevor Rhone, Wayne Brown,Albert Huie, Rex Nettleford, to name only the most prominent, I remember that I want to publish my columns on Haiti, on Jamaican politics and on the Environment. I also want to select from and publish some of the 6,000 pictures I call 'Portraits of Jamaican birds.

 

So, if you see my column only occasionally, depending on my arrangement with my editors, it is not because I have abandoned you, just that I'm taking things a bit easier.
After all I've been working for longer than most people have been alive.
The problem of course is that no journalist is ever free.
Copyright ©2010 John Maxwell jankunnu@yahoo.com

ballade of unexpected disaster

you haven't got the sense to make things short

when length must matter brevity's the key

to bridge the immense gap from is to ought

which many of us do not want to see

since clarity of vision makes us flee

straight to the place where no one wants to hide

afraid of all the facts that cannot be

but truth and passion have to coincide

 

your choices do not lead us to support

the cause that we learnt at our parents' knee

when we were told that it was dearly bought

and at that time all things seemed to agree

with what we wanted and no absentee

masters abroad were eager to deride

nor wail and whimper like a mad banshee

but truth and passion have to coincide

 

you think the vessel won't get into port

since nothing you commanded came to be

while those you ordered have to face a court

and some of then will hang from gallows-tree

or lie beneath a dark and angry sea

as fate and anguish either may decide

since neither time nor force will hear your plea

but truth and passion have to coincide

 

prince you have given cause to disagree

with all your actions but you've shown esprit

the problem is you've chosen the wrong side

the time has come to fight or else to flee

but truth and passion have to coincide

the mad hatter’s teaparty

all softer magics fall before the lie

that eases into minds and dulls all taste

beneath its glamour we ignore the sky

 

where carrion birds in masses all now fly

above the lands that swiftly go to waste

all softer magics fall before the lie

 

we watch the largest rivers all run dry

and wonder just what pain we have embraced

beneath its glamour we ignore the sky

 

no one's ambitions here would move so high

now our best memories shall be erased

all softer magics fall before the lie

 

that all will soon be better by and by

when good and sacred words will be enplaced

beneath its glamour we ignore the sky

 

for far too long and now no honest eye

is left to note the urgent need for haste

all softer magics fall before the lie

beneath its glamour we ignore the sky

What the World Owes Haiti

John Maxwell

Some of us grow up with the feeling that being free means that we are at liberty to do whatever we want – as long as we don't hurt anyone else; that simply by being born, we are entitled to inherit the riches and beauty of nature and to do whatever we think will make us wealthy, healthy and happy.
Most of us grow up in very different circumstances, walking barefoot, wearing cast-off clothing and knowing that we are mostly free to do what we can get away with and knowing that we will probably always have to worry about the next meal.
In places like Jamaica, however, rich and poor tend to believe that there are some basic freedoms we all share: the right to life, to liberty and to say what we want and associate with whomever we choose.
These freedoms are rights for which the human race has been fighting for a long time, and a few hundred years ago certain people believed that because they had acquired the Chinese invention called gunpowder, they owned superior rights to all those who had not got the secret recipe.
Primitive firearms made it possible for long distance 'impersonal' murder. Until then, if you wanted to kill someone you had to stab, or to throw a spear or an arrow not much further than the length of a cricket pitch. Blunderbusses and muskets meant that you could remain out of the range of your enemy's arrows and spears and mow him down with invisible darts accompanied by horrendous noises.
Primitive firearms meant that men on horses, armed with guns, could round up dozens of fellow humans in a cost-effective time frame and move them like cattle to enormous holding pens where they were selected for desirable qualities and priced accordingly. Upright European merchants would then select those creatures most likely to bring good prices on the other side of the Atlantic, either for breeding purposes or for hard labour growing sugar or cotton.
As the history of the Palace of Westminster makes plain: The outbound slave ships were packed with British goods such as metal goods, firearms, textiles and wines, destined for exchange for human cargo. And returning vessels heading to their home port filled with plantation produce from the colonies.

Here was a trading network on an integrated international scale, lubricated by slavery, and all approved, regulated and monitored by Parliament.

We know of dozens of Acts passed specifically to encourage, regulate and monitor the trade in Africans."

 

The slave trade and the plantation system which it supported, provided the motive force of the capitalist system and the foundation of the Palaces of Westminster and Versailles, of the Louvre and the British Museum, of London, Liverpool, Bristol and Marseilles. The extinction of civilisations on both sides of the Atlantic and their replacement by plantation economies provided the capital on which the European Empires and social systems of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were erected.
The empires of Spain, and later France and Britain were built on the bones of the original inhabitants of the so called West Indian islands

The Spanish historian, Gonzalo Oviedo, estimated that of the one million Indians on Ayiti (Hispaniola) when the Spaniards arrived, less than five hundred remained half a century later.
Toribio Motolina, another Spanish priest, said in some parts of Mexico "more than one half the population died; in others the proportion was a little less; they died in heaps, like bedbugs." A German missionary writing in 1699, said the so-called Indians "die so easily that the bare look and smell of a Spaniard causes them to give up the ghost."
Then began the wholesale destruction of nations and civilisations in Africa– some disappearing almost without trace, further impoverishing mankind's cultural diversity and robbing Africa of the populations and skills it needed for its own development.

As Sybille Fischer remarks in her book Modernity Disavowed: "Colonialism in the Caribbean had produced societies where brutality combined with licentiousness in ways unknown in Europe. The sugar plantations in the new World were expanding rapidly and had an apparently limitless hunger for slaves." (Quoted in Common Sense "Christmas in Hell", Dec. 30 2007)

The whole mad vampire enterprise seemed destined to continue as long as greed endured, notwithstanding bloody uprisings in every colony, the most dangerous being in Haiti and Jamaica. In Jamaica the slaves and their escaped brethren, the Maroons, fought the British to a standstill, a truce and a land concession. Bouckman, a leader of the islandwide Taki rebellion escaped to Haiti and there helped light the spark of revolution.

An Unpayable Debt

It was the Haitian revolution that destroyed slavery and the slave-trade forever.
It was the Haitians alone of all of history's enslaved peoples who defeated the system, destroyed the institutions of slavery and legislated that thenceforth, all men, women and children of whatever colour or station or nationality were, in Ayiti, full and free human beings. It drove the Americans mad.
That declaration anticipated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by 144 years and should be recognised for what it is: the single most important definition of humanity ever implemented.
The world owes Haiti an unpayable debt.
At this moment apparatchiks of various ideologies are busy racing around in Washington and similar places, like scarab beetles marking out territory on a fresh deposit of excrement.
It is clear that the peoples of the world are minded to help Haiti recover from the most punishing natural disaster of modern times. The scarab beetles – with grand names and even grander resumes – intend to be first in line as was Cheney's Halliburton in Iraq – to milk the system and suck as much Haitian blood as possible.
People have already threatened to stop speaking to me – I'm anti-American or I'm anti-Haitian – because I believe that we need to assemble all those who want to work for Haiti to work for Haiti in exclusion to working for anyone else.
There are two huge problems:
On one side are Haitians, jealous of their liberty and suspicious of any and every one who offers to help. They have been victimised so often that they expect treachery as a given.
People like Clinton and Patterson do not impress them. Their records of anti-Haitian action speak for themselves. The hypocrisy is blatant.
On the other side – the American/French/Canadian side while there is knowledge of the grievous harm these countries have wreaked and are wreaking on Haiti, there is no understanding of the need – the absolutely essential requirement – that Haiti belongs to the Haitians and it is they alone who must decide what they want.
They may ask for help but the US, France and Canada must have the grace to apologise and atone for the heinous crimes they have committed in Haiti. If the Haitians want Aristide back, simple human decency should inform the Americans, the French and the Canadians that they have a duty to help the Haitians get back their President and a responsibility to protect him and the constitutional integrity of Haiti. The Haitians have the brains, the genius and the skills to manage their own country, if they are only left alone.
Haiti is a charter member of the United Nations and its various organs. Haiti has however been cheated, blackmailed, double-crossed and screwed by big powers in the IDB and IMF, for example.
Haiti needs to be able to summon the collective wisdom and skills of the General Assembly, to get rid of the so-called UN Peacekeepers – a bunch of bandits and rapists –and to assemble a force to keep the peace and help train a civil guard – as in Costa Rica – or whatever mechanism the Haitians prefer.
The United Nations General Assembly is the proper organ for the people-to-people assistance Haiti may require. The Security Council knows nothing about land reform, cooperatives or community development.
Finally, the General Assembly must find some way to organise an endowment fund for Haiti from the enormous sums she is owed by France and the United States. This fund should be for the development of Haiti, not Halliburton or Bechtel. The $25 billion Haiti paid to France and the United States in a brute force extortion scheme was the single resource whose absence made Port au Prince so vulnerable to the earthquake. Generations of capital investment were lost because they were never installed. Simple justice and human decency requires they be returned.
The countries of the Caribbean, Haiti's siblings and neighbours, owe Haiti more than most. Haiti's abolition of slavery led to the immediate abolition of the Caribbean slave trade and Caribbean slavery, a few years later.
When the US, France and Canada decapitated Haitian democracy in 2004 Caricom first protested and demanded a UN investigation into the affair. Patterson and Manning led Caricom's cowardly retreat from that position.
But the Caribbean was honorably represented at the UN by the experienced Trinidadian diplomat, Reginald Dumas. He had just been appointed by Kofi Annan as his Special Representative on Haiti – one of the few sensible actions Annan took in the affair. Dumas recommended to CARICOM that it should use the General Assembly to get assistance for Haiti. As Reggie Dumas has reminded me, the President of the General Assembly at the time was Julian Hunte of St Lucia, who could have used his position to help CARICOM seek justice for Haiti.
CARICOM (and Hunte) ignored Dumas, and some of the same cowardly leaders are now poised to 'help' or again betray Haiti and the aspirations of the downtrodden of the world.
If the Caribbean wants to make sense and to help Haiti, we could do much worse than seeking the advice of Dumas and other Caribbean and Third World sages who know more about the problems of small states and are better disposed to help than the UN's caravanserai of scarab beetles and Praying Mantises.
Copyright©2010 John Maxwell – jankunnu@gmail.com

Shameless and Graceless

 

John Maxwell

Henry Kissinger once said that the United States had no friends, only interests. Watching the US intervention in Haiti makes it clear that the US, in the pursuit of its interests, does not need to exhibit any human attributes, such as shame or grace.
I said a few weeks ago that it seemed a little counterproductive sending masses of soldiers to Haiti since you can't eat soldiers and soldiers needed to be fed and, in Haiti, one American probably consumes as much as ten Haitians. Feeding 20,000 US soldiers takes as much resources as feeding the entire population of Cite Soleil - the biggest slum in the Caribbean.
It is heartbreaking to read of the screwed-up relief efforts, screwed up mainly by sending in soldiers instead of relief workers, nurses and just ordinary people willing to follow instructions and to use their imaginations and initiative. Remember that army put-down from the comic books:
"You're not being paid to think!"
Famines, famously, are not caused by shortages of food but by deficiencies of imagination and planning. In Haiti at this moment, some of the world's most disciplined people are too often, being treated like wild animals. The problem is that many of Haiti's self-appointed rescuers are scared witless by their own superstitions and the garbage fed them by irresponsible journalists and crazy preachers.
You can see it in the pictures, where people have on their own, formed orderly queues but are still being harassed by men with rifles and an inflated sense of their own importance. One of the scourges of Haiti, self-righteous NGOs, are clearly wasting resources, time and lives insisting on being protected against starving women and children instead of getting out and doing what they should be doing.
Above it all are the mainstream journalists, busy viewing with alarm, scornful of the heat, the smells and the people, and prophesying at any moment, outbreaks of mindless violence.
It is impossible to view Haiti without realising the enormous tax the world pays for ignorance and fear, and without understanding the real cost of journalism in promoting strife, frustration and unhappiness.
The Internet has made it much easier to transmit lies and superstition. A piece that landed on my screen supposedly from a black person in South Africa was so full of misinformation and outright lies that I thought that it must be a production of one of the thousands of rightwing solfataras of hate. Briefly, this farrago of nonsense claimed that no black country had come to the aid of Haiti – when his own country had been one of the first responders. Venezuela and other Caribbean countries had also made their contribution and of course he forgot Cuba, with 1,200 doctors and other emergency workers now there and more to come.
The letter was meant to discredit the poor, the black and the developing countries who are clearly not grateful for the incredible blessings bestowed on the by colonialism.
One of these days someone should try to estimate the real economic cost of 'journalists' like James Anthony Froude, Rudyard Kipling, Bob Novak, Jules Dubois and their more recent versions, the Wolf Blitzers, Judith Millers and their ilk.
These people are among the most important factors in the current confusion about Haiti and about the true state of the world.
Robert Novak, for instance, parachuted into Haiti in 2004 on a mission to sanitise the bloodthirsty La Tortue and his way of doing that was to malign Jean Bertrand Aristide.

According to Novak, the Haitian 'Prime Minister' La Tortue was correct in describing the bandits, rapists and murderers backing him as 'freedom fighters'".
According to Novak "The radical president's [Aristide's] reign left a country without electricity, passable roads or public schools, with a devastated economy and, according to LaTortue, a looted treasury."
La Tortue told Novak: "The public finance is in crisis. They (the Aristide regime) took everything they could from the reserve of the country." His estimate: "over $1 billion stolen in four weeks." (Emphasis added)
The problem is that there has never been one billion of anything in Haiti worth stealing, and what is remarkable is that a remark so completely unbelievable and outrageous as to verge on the insane, was published and republished in newspapers and magazines considered reputable in the United States. Aristide, despite his interruptions, left a country better off than he found it. (See http://www.haitiaction.net/News/WWNF/2_28_5.html)
The question of course, is why the US has such a down on Haiti and why apparently sane people are so ready to believe the rubbish they do about Haiti.
Some of the reasons are:
    • Haitian insubordination in declaring themselves independent and offering universal emancipation and universal rights.
    • Haiti's strategic position, commanding two of the most important gateways to the Caribbean;
    • Haiti's potential as a base to attack Cuba;
    • Haiti's position on top of a super-giant oil-field, rivaling Saudi Arabia's in importance
    • Haiti's potential as an offshore slave plantation from which US companies can import cheap 'manufactures' without worrying about unions or human rights.

Haitians of course, have completely different ideas.
• They want to be allowed, for the first time at last, to govern themselves without the brutal interference of the former slave-owning states;
• They want back the money – €20,000,00,000 – extorted from them by the French and the Americans over 120 years, and which robbed them of the resources to develop their own country;
• Haitians driven abroad by US backed dictators want to go back home and work for their development of their own country.
• Haitians cannot understand why they are denied the benefits of their membership in the United `nations and other International organisations of which they were foundation members.
Part of the problem with any discussion of Haiti with Americans is the political illiteracy of so many Americans – particularly journalists – some of whom think Obama is a Socialist or a Nazi. Aristide's opponents, including some so-called journalists, have portrayed him as a blood-drinking, baby-sacrificing black-magician Communist. This garbage has been spread so wide and so deep that outside of Haiti, most people do not know that Aristide is a gentle, God-fearing priest. A practical man whose ideology is Haiti.
The Haitian people know this and keep telling the world that they want their democracy and their President back. The world press this week is full of stories about the lack of leadership in Haiti. There is no lack of leadership in Haiti; the leadership is there but it is the leadership of the majority, of the Fanmi Lavalas, of people loyal to Aristide. The United States and their clients in the United Nations Security Council do not wish to see this.
Aristide does not want to be President again, but he wants to help Haiti develop. Between him and that aspiration sit a small gang of parasitic margin-gatherers who call themselves businessmen but are really sophisticated gang-leaders operating by remote control.
If Haiti is to regain its integrity and autonomy there will need to be a programme resembling the post-war de-Nazification in Germany to re-educate people in elementary civics. Otherwise, sooner or later there will be another Papa Doc or maybe, even an Idi Amin.
In 2004, the UN Special Envoy to Haiti, Reginald Dumas, a Caribbean man, declared that the UN should be committing itself to a long-term mission in Haiti to last about twenty years, "We cannot continue with the start-stop cycle that has characterized relations between the international community and Haiti. You go in, you spend a couple of years, you leave, the Haitians are not necessarily involved and the whole thing collapses. This has to stop," Dumas said.
He told the council:
"There has to be a long-term commitment, which I perceive the council is ready and willing to give," Dumas said. "It must be coordinated assistance. It must be sustained assistance, and it must be assistance that involves the people of Haiti. It cannot be a situation in which the UN or some other agency goes in and says `I have this for you.' There has to be discussion. There has to be cooperation, or else it will fail again."
I agree with Dumas but for one particular: The Haitians needs to get out of the clutches of the Security Council and seek help from the General Assembly, where they have friends.
Copyright©2010 John Maxwell. jankunnu@yahoo.com

old mapmaker

you think the boundaries are all the same

imbued with meaning by the hand of time

not records of some old forgotten crime

but guarantees the world is safe and tame

that there are limits set to hate and flame

so we keep back the fury and the grime

of human nature and wall in the slime

of all our hatred that is the full game

now miracles come extra that's the rule

you must expect as we deploy each troop

of brazen rescuers who'll save the day

in proper form and manage to stay cool

keep things in order and then all regroup

off to one side while others come to play

Jamaican Mahogany

John Maxwell

There are lots of places in this world where, for weeks or months to come, people will be turning to other people and saying – "Let's ask Rex what he thinks …" before realising that there is no Rex to ask, that the man they depended on for advice or counsel is not there any more.
Rex is dead. Gone.
He has been part of the intellectual landscape of Caribbean society for so long that he seemed to be a permanent fixture, one of those features that were here when we came and will be here long after we've gone
That will be true in a sense, except that when we lose a tree of this size, the space it once occupied appears so big that it seems impossible to fill.
Trelawny and more specifically, the Cockpit Country and its environs is where the soul of Jamaica goes for rest and recuperation. It is the spiritual home of Jamaican culture, the centre of resistance to slavery and colonialism, the last bastion of the maroons and the first place where the British Army first conceded defeat in the Western hemisphere. And here, every little boy has a built-in feistiness, and the knowledge that he is no one's inferior.
As Rex Nettleford grew to young manhood he never appeared in any doubt that he was not simply destined to be 'somebody' but that he always had been somebody and he took it upon himself to carry this effortless self-confidence into the building of a Jamaican personality worthy of the Kojos and Akkompongs that populated the mists of Burnt Hill, Bunkers Hill and all of the Land of Look Behind.
But he was also acutely aware of the other side of his patrimony and embraced his European heritage as eagerly as the rest. In the Jamaica of the 1950s the idea of country boys dancing ballet was so outlandish as to seem bizarre, but that did not bother Rex Nettleford who knew what he wanted to do and refused to be fazed by opposition or even ridicule.
His determination to excel at anything he did swept away the ridicule and the opposition and by the time he won the Rhodes Scholarship it was clear that here was someone out of the ordinary. His selection by Norman Manley to be a member of the Mission to Africa on behalf of the Rastafari movement was recognition at the highest level, if any were needed, of his quality , and his career since then has simply amplified our understanding.
A little while ago, I had just returned from nearly a year of medical treatment abroad. Rex sought me out to invite my wife and me to the season's final presentation of the National Dance Theatre . At the very end of the concert came an electrifying session from the company's massed drummers – a performance that I told him deserved to be on DVD on its own. It was hair-raising, and with the dance, one of the most profoundly exciting theatrical experiences I've ever had; And I thought, this was the ultimate artistic tribute to Rex, who in the near half century of the NDTC has forged an instrument of national expression that is professional, imbued with enormous confidence and skill and with an elan that elevates them to the highest class. The NDTC's achievement alone would be the pride of any one auteur working full time. That Rex managed this intricate and demanding human enterprise along with his other 'day jobs' is an amazing feat.
Rex was above all a teacher dedicated to his students and to none more so than the Diploma classes at Carimac that he and (Sir) Roy Augier, by far the most senior members of the university, insisted on teaching, year in and year out in an extraordinary example of commitment to the welfare of the young. He never gave up even when he was Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies. He took the Extra-Mural Department and converted it into an open University, inadequately named the School of Continuing Studies and singlehanded he created the Trade Union Institute – in my view the crown jewel of his successful campaign for the 'smaddification' of Jamaicans like him
It is impossible to do justice to Rex Nettleford. It is, for instance, unprecedented and amazing that of Oxford's more than 7000 Rhodes scholars, Nettleford should be among four singled out for special centenary honour and even more extraordinary that the University of Oxford should create, in his honour, a special prize in Cultural Studies, a discipline almost unknown when he was at university.
I could go on, piling statistic upon statistic, fact upon fact, honour upon honour, degree upon degree, but none can add to the lustre that was Rex's.
I am proud, simply to say that I was honoured to have been his friend for most of our lives.

 

Albert Huie

    Albert Huie, the most renowned of all Jamaican painters, died a few days before Rex . Huie was another piece of Trelawny mahogany, having been born in Falmouth, a dozen or so years before Rex.
He was another feisty man of the Maroon country who knew what he wanted to be at a time when country boys could become sign-painters, not artists. Albert told me that when he was a bare teenager he threw stones to help chase away gangs of bullies who had been hired to break up political meetings held by my father. My father, a penniless country parson, had challenged the power structure of Trelawny, then the last bastion of planter power in Jamaica. My father was running against one of the richest planters in Jamaica, Mr Guy Ewen; the leading lawyer on the north coast, head of the largest building society, chairman of the Parochial Board, Custos of the Parish and Member of the Legislative Council for 25 years. Against all the odds, my father beat Ewen despite the fact, according to Albert, that Ewen's supporters had descended to hiring gangs of toughs to break up my father's meetings. The toughs would march up the road, liquored up, swinging their kukkumacca sticks and making as much noise as possible, to the alarm of those waiting to hear my father speak.
Huie and his friends would lie in wait for the marauders, armed with slingshots and rocks and at a signal would attack the surpised bullies who ran in all directions shouting 'murder!' Two or three such encounters stopped the rot.
Huie came into Kingston and headed straight for the Institute of Jamaica, then the centre of everything intellectual and artistic in Jamaica. There he was soon noticed by Mr Molesworth, the Director, but more importantly by Edna Manley, who was teaching art classes there.
Soon, he was selected to represent Jamaican art at the New York World's Fair. He was 18. Huie won several prizes at the fair and never looked back. He was a foundation member of the so-called Drumblair group. He did spend some time earning money by 'interior decorating' or house painting, but he never gave up his art and for years Albert could be seen with his easel, on various mountainsides or river banks, painting the Jamaican landscapes he loved. In a more civilised society Huie would have made a good living, but it wasn't until near the end of his career that patrons began to realise the importance of his work and began to pay for it.
I believe that Huie brought with him to Kingston something of the quality of light of his Cockpit Country backgrounds – adding a mysterious quality that pervades some of his best work.
His work is in collections around the world, not as well known as it should be, but now commanding the sorts of prices that should have made Albert a wealthy man But his wealth is in his vision and he, like his fellow Trelawny man, Rex, is a national treasure and he fortunately, like Rex, lived long enough to know that.
The title of this piece is "Jamaican Mahogany", because Huie and Nettleford remind me of the giant mahogany trees which during our lifetimes, adorned the Cockpit Country. Their lightness and grace belied their immense size and it was only after they were no longer there that it was possible to understand what an important part of the landscape they formed. In the case of Huie and Nettleford, these were not simply a part of our intellectual and cultural landscape, they were also, more important, architects of the very landscape in which they were such important components.

Dr George Proctor

    I first met Dr George Proctor when I was at school, spending my Saturdays at the Institute of Jamaica – either at the Junior Centre or at the Science Museum. I remember Proctor as a rather gawky American reputed to be very learned and aloof. He would not remember these encounters. It was much later that we had any real contact, and only a few years ago I at last did what I had wanted to do for years, interview him for a column

As I wrote in a column (Treasure in the Badlands) seven years ago, The Caribbean, particularly Jamaica, is the world's third most biodiverse region. and an almost unknown place in Clarendon called Harris Savannah is one of the jewels in our crown, unlikely as it may seem.

"I consulted the leading expert on Harris Savannah, Dr George Proctor, who has spent the last fifty years attempting to find and catalogue every species of plant in this part of the world. In the first 6 years of this somewhat quixotic mission, Dr Proctor collected and catalogued about 12,000 specimens in Jamaica alone. Since then he has catalogued and described well over 100,000 plants and has become one of the world's foremost botanists. He is THE expert on the Jamaican flora, particularly on ferns – of which we possess 609 taxa – a great many of them discovered by him. At the age of 82 he is still exploring, discovering, collecting, and cataloguing.
Dr Proctor thinks Harris Savannah is a very special place - not only by Jamaican standards, but by any standards. It is, he says, is a scientific treasury."
This column is not about Harris Savannah and the riches it may mean for Jamaica. It is about Dr Proctor who, at 90, has just been found guilty of conspiracy to murder his wife and three other women and sentenced to four years in prison.
I do not contest Dr Proctor's guilt, although I find it hard to believe that he has been convicted on the word on a man who is a professional liar and con-man with 70 convictions for various frauds and misrepresentations.
If a jury found him guilty, so be it.
My objection is to the sentence. I appeared in court on Dr Proctors behalf to give evidence in mitigation. I told the judge that I believed Proctor to be a man with a great respect for life, as evidenced by his life's work.
I told her I was there to try to prevent him going to jail because , I said, if you lock him up you are going to kill him. I thought it would be pointless to send a 90 year old man to jail in any case
The judge referred specifically to my appeal and declared that despite what I said, a 'balance' had to be struck
I do not understand what balance she meant and I implore my readers help me understand.
Prison sentences are supposed to induce remorse, to be deterrent, to set an example, to prevent future offences. Does this apply to Proctor?
Dr Proctor is 90 and in Britain and the US would be accounted legally blind. He suffers from diabetes, from macular degeneration of the retina and from glaucoma, any and all of which would tend to slow anyone down, particularly at 90.
Dr Proctor spent five days in the lockup at Central Station, sharing a cell with an accused murderer who he said treated him kindly. He was supposed to sleep on a concrete slab, to be shared with his cellmate. Dr Proctor can barely walk, cannot stand straight and in court was unable to sit up. His head rested on the pew in front of him.
He said to me, before court began
"John, my head has shrunk from the few days in jail," and it appeared to be true. As a diabetic he requires special food. None was available. He couldn't eat. He was not allowed to buy even a cup of coffee. The first cup of coffee he had in five days was at the Supreme Court.
I believe that conspiracy is notoriously the easiest charge for prosecutors to make. It is very difficult to disprove a conspiracy.
Whatever the merits of the Crown's case, I believe, in the end, that the proceedings cannot be described as either in the public interest, nor, as civilised.
Copyright 2010©John Maxwell jankunnu@gmail.com

the blessing of the giver

not unexpected even kings must die

it was no secret everyone had heard

there was no cloud across the winter sky

 

you sense the shaping know that what went by

though it was sudden was when it occurred

not unexpected even kings must die

 

at their due time emit their one last sigh

while many gathered hoping for some word

there was no cloud across the winter sky

 

no final opening of one bright eye

not a hoarse whisper we had long inferred

not unexpected even kings must die

 

in a bright room with no friend there to cry

a century's tears nor declare absurd

there was no cloud across the winter sky

 

you have to dance as if you were to fly

a man no more but a returning bird

not unexpected even kings must die

there was no cloud across the winter sky

Protecting Haiti’s Interest

John Maxwell

It would be ironic, if you like your irony flavoured with blood and disinfectant, to discover that moored off Port au Prince at this moment is the US hospital ship, the USS Comfort, one of two employed in 1994 as floating slave barracoons in Kingston Harbour. Today the Comfort is providing medical care for people injured in the great earthquake of January 12.
In 1994, the Comfort and its consort functioned as temporary 'processing facilities' for Haitian refugees fleeing from a US supported coup and attendant tyranny. The refugees had been picked up either on the high seas or in Jamaican waters, running for their lives from a US-backed hoodlum-state, whose favourite law and order procedures were murder by dismemberment and disemboweling with bodies left in the streets; and women and children, beaten, publicly raped and disfigured and otherwise terrorised to encourage the others. Of those kidnapped either in Jamaican waters or on the high seas, 78.5% were sent back to their murderers while the rest were sent to Guantánamo Bay.
This barbarous triage was a joint venture operated by President William Jefferson Clinton of the United States and Jamaican Prime Minister Percival James Patterson. It was ended by Clinton's deciding he couldn't afford the death of a prominent black American leader on his record, if not on his conscience. Randall Robinson, President of TransAfrica, in one last desperate initiative, began a fast to the death in protest against his President's callous behaviour.
Clinton had inherited "the Haitian problem" from his predecessor who could tolerate any number of fair-skinned Cubans dropping in on Miami Beach, but was revolted by the idea of Haitians doing the same thing. It didn't matter that the Cubans, like Jamaicans and Mexicans were economic refugees while the Haitians were literally in fear of their lives.
This point was made explicit in 2002, by a former US Ambassador to Haiti, Timothy Carney, at the launching of the Haiti Democracy Project, the most important US NGO operating in Haiti. The launching was at the Brookings Institution, one of the most eminent right ring 'think-tanks' in Washington.
Carney said:

"Ambassador Roger Noriega mentioned that one of our interests is to defend human rights, but he didn't mention the fundamental interest, which is to defend Miami Beach. We don't want Haitians on Miami Beach … That is a fundamental interest of the United States … Now that you have realized that interest, you hopefully will have policies by which Haitians can realize their prosperity and their future at home.
" How do you do that? Well, we haven't figured that out yet, have we?"

That was a job for the Haiti Democracy Project and other US backed subversive NGOs whose function was simply to make sure that the President of Haiti, legally elected, would be unable to govern. These NGOs, dozens of them, using tactics honed in the 'peaceful overthrow' of former Communist states, didn't work well in Haiti; violence and provocation were introduced. The most effective weapons against Aristide were the press releases of the NGOs, swallowed whole by a criminally compliant US press. Even now, six years after Aristide was kidnapped by the then US Ambassador, US news agencies are printing garbage about "Aristide, deposed amid a violent uprising.'
These days, the USS Comfort, Bill Clinton and P.J Patterson are back in the organised hypocrisy game, along with new players like Ban Ki Moon who is proving as clueless about Haiti as his predecessor, Kofi Annan. Obama has brought back G. W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice's mouthpiece. No doubt there is room for old Haiti hands like Roger Noriega and Otto Reich. Pity they can't reanimate Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, both eminent authorities on black people. But there's always Luigi Einaudi: "The only thing wrong with Haiti is that it is being run by Haitians"

Encouraging News

There is good news for those people, and there are many, who worried that valuable American cash was being squandered on hapless Haitians who specialise in provoking Acts of God.
The Associated Press reports:
Only 1 cent of each dollar the U.S. is spending on earthquake relief in Haiti is going in the form of cash to the Haitian government, according to an Associated Press review of relief efforts.
Less than two weeks after President Obama announced an initial $100 million for Haiti earthquake relief, U.S. government spending on the disaster has tripled to $317 million at latest count. That's just over $1 each from everyone in the United States.
Relief experts say it would be a mistake to send too much direct cash to the Haitian government, which is in disarray and has a history of failure and corruption.
"I really believe Americans are the most generous people who ever lived, but they want accountability," said Timothy R. Knight, a former US AID assistant director who spent 25 years distributing disaster aid. "In this situation they're being very deliberate not to just throw money at the situation but to analyze based on a clear assessment and make sure that money goes to the best place possible."
The AP review of federal budget spreadsheets, procurement reports and contract databases shows the vast majority of U.S. funds going to established and tested providers, who are getting everything from 40-cent pounds of pinto beans to a $3.4 million barge into the disaster zone."
So, the worry warts can rest.
For one thing the Canadians and Europeans have donated more per capita to Haitian relief than the US and deserve a larger part in the immediate relief works.
Organisations like the Haiti Democracy Project and John McCain's International Republican Institute will make certain that American money is spent on Strengthening American democracy and defeating the populist interests which have made governance in Haiti a problem ever since the peasant rebellion 90 years ago which required the machine gunning of entire villages to restore law and order.
Meanwhile the United States, Canada, France and the rest of the (rapidly diminishing) civilised world met in Montreal a few days ago to devise a plan for developing a Haiti for the Age of Globalisation.
The participants were more or less the same countries who plotted to depose Aristide. "Shortly after Aristide's overwhelming victory in Haiti's first democratic presidential election in 1990, the relicts of the Jim Crow Marine occupation managed to convince the Americans, first John McCain's International Republican Institute and then elements of Bill Clinton's government and various Canadian politico and officials that Haiti under Aristide was a threat to civilisation as they knew it.…"

Denis Paradis, a Canadian Minister, convened a coven of like-minded fascists, "who decided that Aristide must go, and the Canadians and Americans through the Canadian aid agency (CIDA), the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and John McCain's International Republican Institute financed a whole panoply of Haitian francs tireurs, pimps and wannabe-presidents and face-card NGOs to support the programme of the elites which was simply to grab back from the Haitian people, the Universal Human Rights promulgated 200 years earlier for the first time on Earth by Jean Jacques Dessalines and the other illustrious fathers and mothers of the Haitian Revolution." (Common Sense-Canada's Bloody Hands' April 19,2009)
This is the juncture where things get really tricky.
It would appear to me that a people who fought for their freedom incessantly, for 300 years and finally won it 200 years ago deserve to be accorded considerable respect. Moreso, because they fought as slaves, entrapped and circumscribed by the system itself and despite this, defeated three of the world's most powerful armies, one of them twice. They are the only people in history to have broken their shackles themselves. Spartacus who tried valiantly but failed, is revered as a European hero. Bouckman, Toussaint and Dessalines are ignored by the same historians. It is not so odd; TIME recognised Margaret Thatcher but not Fidel Castro as a revolutionary.
Those Haitians whose savagery, indiscipline and general lawlessness the western "press" celebrated in slavering anticipation failed to show. The Haitians who survived behaved as those who know them expected: patient, disciplined, and displaying an exemplary solidarity, sharing their crusts while starving.
It was these same people who declared universal emancipation and universal human rights two centuries ago and who have told anyone who wants to listen that they know what they want and who they want to lead them and speak for them
They know how to develop their nation, if only, for the first time at last, they are allowed to do what they want.
They need help, but help on their own terms.
They want work, real work, not plastic 'jobs' in freezone sweatshops..
They want to go back to feeding themselves. They want to be complete Haitians again; the people who helped Bolivar liberate South America.

The world needs to get out of the way. France, the United States and Canada owe the Haitians billions in damages. It is not for them to tell the Haitians what to spend it on. France used Haitian money to conquer Algeria. Haitians want that money to conquer child hunger and maternal mortality.
If the General Assembly wants to prove its worth it should move quickly to take the Haitian initiative away from the clueless and overtaxed Security Council. The Assembly can – guided by  the Haitians and with the expert help of Cuba, Venezuela,  South Africa, Kerala (India),  Brazil,  China  and other parts of the developing world – map out an agenda and organise help from wherever it is available without strings. The object is not to defend Miami Beach but to protect the vital interests of the Haitians, and, by extension, the vital interests of humanity.
And, if anyone wants to know what to do right now: Land 10 thousand wheelbarrows on the streets handing them over to neighbourhood groups. Let the groups decide how they are going to move the rubble and what they are going to do with it. Give the groups money and supplies to set up 10 thousand street kitchens say about $200 a group. Let the groups pay the wheelbarrow men if necessary. In three weeks the casual journalist would be hard put to find any of the 'usual' stories. Total cost $2 million plus $1 million for wheelbarrows.

Meanwhile the UN can be assembling a real security force to protect the Haitians and particularly their president and under his direction, design and instal the apparatus allowing Haitians to run their own country and to make their own mistakes, for the first time at last.

COPYRIGHT©2010 JOHN MAXWELL – jankunnu@yahoo.com

remembered light

take this and jell it as remembered light

one simple gesture laughing at a joke

in middle afternoon and at one stroke

you've got it down and kept it in plain sight

when all the other moments take their flight

or disappear behind the darkest cloak

of all forgetting where the world is broke

but yet we act to make things come out right

vision is sure and clear when you are young

so slow to fade but still the edges pale

we can't recall the colour of the stone

on the south wall nor where the laundry hung

long years have passed and recollections fail

still there is crystal fire within the bone

Boojum Hunting in the Caribbean

 

John Maxwell

 

When Thor Heyerdahl crossed the Atlantic from Africa to the Caribbean nearly 40 years ago he was shocked by – of all things – a garbage dump in the middle of the ocean.

In the area known as the Doldrums (wonderful word) Heyerdahl's papyrus raft Ra II, was surrounded for days by a wilderness of plastic rubbish from all over the world. The Age of Plastic has bequeathed countless conveniences to humanity as well as new forms of cancer and enormous collections of litter on land, at sea and even in space.

Since Heyerdahl's observations we now know that every ocean in the world has its own garbage dump. The largest by far is the so-called North Pacific Garbage Patch, an area covering most of the North Pacific from Alaska to Japan – twice the size of the continental United States and discovered only in 1997. The gyres are not easily discerned, because most of the plastic rubbish has been macerated by marine forces and is composed of small particles that float just below the surface, killing fish that mistake it for food.

The Atlantic gyre like all others. has formed at the confluence of various ocean currents, an area of slackwater circulating majestically, slowly and almost imperceptibly until you pick up – on a Jamaican or Haitian beach – soft drink containers thrown into the Congo or the Niger.

There is another less well known gyre in the North Caribbean which has quite different effects from the other garbage patches.

This area of existential discombobulation is much more dangerous than its kin. It is, first of all, not composed of material fragments but of abstractions, strange apparitions that do not poison fish or litter beaches but poison minds and litter brave new policies with the toxic detritus of ancient ignorance, hysteria, and unreasonable beliefs.

It is a place where ancient racist libels still hang around, driving US politicians to distraction and the Bible. It is the place where apparitions like Pat Robertson, Roger Noriega, Otto Reich, and Luigi Einaudi flourish and have their being, sustained by vicious fables invented 500 years ago to justify human slavery, revised and updated periodically to deal with black rebellion against slavery, and colonialism, and used today to frighten and confuse US soldiers and journalists.

Baron Samedi Walks again

When I was about 12 years old I borrowed a book from the Institute of Jamaica's Junior Centre library. It was part of a donation by the Carnegie Foundation and was almost brand new.

I cannot remember the name or author but the book was obviously written to sell millions by frightening the wits out of its American readers.

I had up to that time, heard nothing about Haiti or their religious system, Vodun. The novel was populated by zombies – the living dead – as well as other evil spirits presided over by the sulphurous presence of Baron Samedi who seemed to be in charge of everything in Haiti, from cooking to current affairs. If my memory is reliable there were incredible scenes of 'demoniac possession' mostly among the epically bloodthirsty natives but not sparing the fairest flowers of Nordic pulchritude and chastity.

Since the book was written n the first half of the twentieth century, indecencies were suggested rather than made plain and even bloodshed was a lot less indiscriminate than say – the latest dancehall invocation against homosexuals. What was clear was that the narrative was intended to make your skin creep; in my case it certainly succeeded.

The novel was not unusual for American colonial narratives of the time. Non-Europeans could be trusted as far as the front gate, being consumed by lust and crazed by the need to spill blood.

And the 'black magic' was integral to cultures that were brutish, repellent and totally merciless.

The Devil in the Flesh

A few years ago TIME magazine, quite seriously, printed what it said was a recipe for creating zombies. The process was not difficult, if one was not squeamish. It involved among other things, the flowers of the Datura bush (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,952208-2,00.html).

So, I was not surprised by the most recent eructations of Pat (Napoleon III) Robertson, a semi-literate Quack who seems to have a hotline to Satan himself and is always willing to explain the latest demonic manifestations. Nor was I really surprised to learn that the US Army was so terrified of unarmed, starving and wounded Haitians that it needed about ten soldiers to protect one aid person.

Others were not so intimidated by the Haitians.

Partners in Health, a Boston based NGO led by Paul Farmer, was running several field hospitals from its headquarters in Cange, in Haiti's Central Plateau. Tiny Iceland (facing bankruptcy) had search and rescue teams on the ground in Port au Prince within 48 hours of the earthquake. Andri Magnason, a friend in Iceland sent me the following:

"There is an Icelandic team of 20 rescue workers in Port au Prince and Léogane. They have saved a few lives with their special equipment. They have not seen the violence that has been in the news, on the contrary - they see only gratitude and goodwill and cooperation - no hostility - and they have even seen some hope. Strange how the world media wants to paint things black - while they could pick up many stories of human dignity from the ruins."

And, of course, the Cubans ("We Never Closed") had more than 400 medical professionals on the ground before the earthquake and doubled that number with their graduating class of 400 Haitian doctors. Doctors without Borders complained that the US military was preventing medical assistance reaching those who needed it most.

The real problem as I see it, is that the US has scared itself silly with the policy garbage bequeathed by Thomas Jefferson and refined by the like of William Jennings Bryan, Reich, Noriega, Einaudi and their sainted mentors, Joe McCarthy, Strom Thurmond, and Jesse Helms.

If the US Army had thought to drop water, nothing more, they could have saved many lives. Some people drank their own urine. Others, less knowledgeable, may have died of thirst.

The late Hedi Annabi – the UN's man in Haiti, died in the earthquake. He was clearly another who thought Haitians were all terrorists and his way of preparing for democracy involved the UN mission –MINUSTAH – making periodic forays into the slums to slaughter members of Fanmi Lavalas.

The UN secretary general is even more clueless, tolerating René Preval's de-legitimising Fanmi Lavalas and appointing Bill Clinton as his representative in Haiti. Clinton was the man who restored Aristide in 1994 to stem the flood of refugees into Miami Beach and then broke every promise he made and pressured and blackmailed the Haitians by shutting down essential foreign aid.

So, I must confess that my blood ran cold when Barack Obama proved even more clueless than Ban Ki Moon by appointing Haiti's worst enemy, George Bush, to join Clinton to raise funds for Haitian relief. If there is anyone who believes in Haitian zombies and bogeymen, it is Bush. As far as Ban Ki Moon, Clinton and Bush are concerned, the Haitians are only good for mindless 'jobs' in foreign-owned sweatshops.

What is so tragic about the loss of life since the earthquake is that, were it not for the boojums, zombies and Baron Samedi, so much more could have been done.

If you don't believe me read the following:

"However, away from the glare of the international media, a team of Cuban doctors has been working among the quake-affected. The Cuban government offered its medical expertise to the governments of Pakistan and India immediately after the magnitude of the destruction caused by the quake was known. The Indian government did not even acknowledge the offer. Pakistan, where the scale of disaster was humongous, was quick to accept the offer. The first Cuban medical team was in Pakistan on October 14, six days after the earthquake." (Frontline
Vol:22 Iss:26
URL: http://www.flonnet.com/fl2226/stories/20051230000606300.htm)

In short order the Cubans had established 19 field hospitals staffed by more than 700 doctors – half of them women – working 12 hour shifts.

This was in Pakistan in 2005.

Pakistan is 14,000 miles from Cuba and the Cubans were working in foreign conditions, in fierce cold, in a country with which Cuba had no diplomatic relations.

There are now more than 25,000 Cuban doctors working outside their country and an almost equal number of teachers

If you think that boojums are a figment of my imagination, consider this: Three weeks ago the US government identified Cuba as one of the countries exporting terrorism.

After 200 years, the heirs of Jefferson are still hunting boojums in the Caribbean

Copyright © 2010 John Maxwell

narrative constraint

you tell a story made of what's well-known

not just to you but to the whole surround

the human crew the birds the very ground

has understood each laugh and every groan

is analysed from village unto throne

for qualities of both meaning and sound

each fact is weighed to fractions of a pound

since nothing here is yours and yours alone

the common tongue we learn is one more fact

that binds into a whole the world entire

and turns dull life into a blazing art

smashes it up and remakes intact

what first was formed in the refining fire

but glows still secret in each living heart

false dawn

in the damp corner of the morning yard

where grey and quiet many secrets wait

this is the time when nature stand unbarred

 

not yet for us is life or fortune marred

by force of life or family or state

in the damp corner of the morning yard

 

where not a bird or beast now stands on guard

all fast asleep and seeming just to wait

this is the time when nature stands unbarred

 

to wary eyes and life seems not so hard

as we are told and we may now create

in the damp corner of the morning yard

 

a better world with choices not so hard

with sweeter wisdom and a kinder fate

this is the time when nature stands unbarred

 

one lucid moment before light is marred

and all our knowledges begin to grate

in the damp corner of the morning yard

this is the time when nature stands unbarred

No, Mister! You Cannot Share My Pain!

No, Mister! You Cannot Share My Pain !

John Maxwell

 

If you shared my pain you would not continue to make me suffer, to torture me, to deny me my dignity and my rights especially my rights to self determination and self expression.

Six years ago you sent your Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to perform an action illegal under the laws of your country,my country and of the international community of nations.

It was an act so outrageous, so bestially vile and wicked that your journalists and news agencies, your diplomats and politicians to this day cannot bring themselves to truthfully describe or own up to the crime that was committed when US Ambassador James Foley, a career diplomat arrived at the house of President Jean Bertrand Aristide with a bunch of CIA thugs and US Marines to kidnap the President of Haiti and his wife.

The Aristides were stowed aboard a CIA plane normally used for 'renditions' of suspected terrorists to the worldwide US gulag of dungeons and torture chambers.

The plane, on which the Aristides are listed as "cargo" flew to Antigua – an hour away – and remained on the ground in Antigua while Colin Powell's State Department and the CIA tried to blackmail and bribe various African countries to accept ('give asylum to") the kidnapped President and his wife.

The Central African Republic – one of George W Bush's 'Dark Corners of the World' – agreed for an undisclosed sum, to give the Aristides temporary asylum.

Before any credible plot can be designed and paid for – for the disappearance of the Aristides – they are rescued by friends, flown to temporary asylum in Jamaica where the government cravenly yielded to the blackmail of Condoleezza Rice to deny them the permanent asylum to which they were entitled and which most Jamaicans had hoped for.

Meanwhile in Haiti the US Marines protected an undisciplined ragbag of rapists and murderers to allow them entry to the capital. The Marines chased the medical students out of the new Medical School established by Aristide with Cuban help and teachers. The Marines bivouac in the school, going out on nightly raids, trailed by fleets of ambulances with body bags, hunting down Fanmi Lavalas activists described as 'chimeres' – terrorists.

The real terrorists, led by two convicted murderers, Chamblain and Philippe, assisted the Marines in the eradication of 'chimeres' until the Marines were replaced by foreign troops paid by the United Nations who took up the hunt on behalf of the civilised world – France, Canada, the US and Brazil.

The terrorists and the remains of the Duvalier tontons and the CIA-bred FRAPF    declared open season on the remnants of Aristide's programmes to build democracy. They burnt down the new museum of Haitian Culture, destroyed the Children's television station and generally laid waste to anything and everything which could remind Haitians of their glorious history.

Haitians don't know that without their help Latin America might still be part of the Spanish Empire and Simon Bolivar a brief historical footnote.

Imagine, Niggers Speaking French!

About ninety years ago when Professor Woodrow Wilson was President of the USA his Secretary of State was a fundamentalist lawyer named William Jennings Bryan who had three times run unsuccessfully, for President.

The Americans had decided to invade Haiti to collect debts owed by Haiti to Citibank.

General Smedley Butler, the only American soldier to have twice won the Congressional Medal of Honour, described his role in the US Army:

"I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long.

General Butler said: "I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. … My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical in the military service'. Butler compared himself unfavourably to Al Capone. He said his official racketeering made Capone look like an amateur.

Secretary Bryan was dumfounded by the Haitians; "Imagine" he said, "Niggers speaking French.

Smedley Butler and Bryan were involved in Haiti because of something that happened nearly a hundred years before. The French slave-masters, expelled from Haiti and defeated again when they tried to re-enslave the Haitians, connived with the Americans to starve them into submission by a trade embargo. With no sale for Haitian sugar, the country was weak and rundown when a French fleet arrived bearing a demand for repaations. Having bought their freedom in blood, the Haitians were to be oblige to purchase it again in gold.

The French demanded, essentially, that the Haitians pay France an amount equivalent to 90 percent of the entire Haitian budget for the foreseeable future. When this commitment proved too arduous to honour, the City Bank offered the Haitians a 'debt exchange" paying off the French in exchange for a lower interest longer term debt. The terms may have seemed better but were just as usurious and it was not paid off until 1947.

Because of the debt the Americas invaded Haiti, seized the Treasury, exiled the President, their Jim Crow policies were used to divide the society, to harass the poor and finally provoked a second struggle for freedom which was one of the most brutal episodes in colonial history.

Long before Franco bombed Guernica, exciting the horror and revulsion of civilised people, the Americans perfected their dive-bombing techniques against unarmed Haitian peasants many of whom had never seen aircraft before.

The Americans set up an Haitian Army in the image of their Jim Crow Marines and it was these people and the alien and alienated Élite who with some conscripted blacks like the Duvaliers have ruled Haiti for most of the last century.

When I flew over Haiti for the first time in 1959 en route from New York to San Juan, Puerto Rico, I saw for the first time the border between the green Dominican Republic and brown Haiti.

First world journalists interpret the absence of trees on the Haitian side to the predations of the poor, disregarding the fact that Western religion and American capitalism were mainly responsible.

Why is it that nowhere else in the Caribbean is there similar deforestation?

Haiti's Dessalines constitution offered sanctuary to every escaped slave of any colour. All such people of whatever colour were deemed 'black' and entitled to citizenship. Only officially certified 'blacks' could own land in Haiti.

The American occupation, anticipating Hayek, Freedman and Greenspan, decided that such a rule was a hindrance to development. The Assistant Secretary of the US Navy, one Franklin D Roosevelt was given the job of writing a new, modern constitution for Haiti.

This constitution meant foreigners could own land. Within a very short time the lumberjacks were busy, felling old growth Mahogany and Caribbean Pine for carved doors for the rich and mahogany speedboats, boardroom tables seating forty etc etc. The devastated land was put to produce rubber, sisal for ropes and all sorts of pie in the sky plantations.

When President Paul Magloire came to Jamaica fifty years ago Haitians were still speaking of an Artibonite dam for electricity and irrigation. But the ravages of the recent past were too much to recover.

As Marguerite Laurent (EziliDanto) writes: Don't expect to learn how a people with a Vodun culture that reveres nature and especially the Mapou (oak-like or ceiba pendantra/bombax) trees, and other such big trees as the abode of living entities and therefore as sacred things, were forced to watch the Catholic Church, during Rejete - the violent anti-Vodun crusade - gather whole communities at gun point into public squares, and forced them to watch their agents burn Haitian trees in order to teach Haitians their Vodun Gods were not in nature, that the trees were the 'houses of Satan.'

In partnership with the US, the mulatto President Elie Lescot (1941-45) summarily expelled peasants from more than 100,000 hectares of land, razing their homes and destroying more than a million fruit trees in the vain effort to cultivate rubber on a large plantation scale. Also, under the pretext of the Rejete campaign, thousands of acres of peasant lands were cleared of sacred trees so that the US could take their lands for US agribusiness

 

 

After the Flood

Norman Manley used to say 'River come Down' when his party seemed likely to prevail. The Kreyol word Lavalas conveys the same meaning.

Since the Haitian people's decisive rejection of the Duvalier dictatorships in the early 90s, their spark and leader has been Jean-Bertrand Aristide whose bona fides may be assessed from the fact that the CIA and conservative Americans have been trying to discredit him almost from the word go.

As he put it in one of his books, his intention has been to build a paradise on the garbage heap bequeathed to Haiti by the US and the Elite.

The bill of particulars is too long to go into here, but the destruction of the new museum of Culture, the breaking up of the medical school, the destruction of the children's television gives you the flavour. But the essence is captured in the brutal attempt to obliterate the spirit of Haitian community; the attempt to destroy Lavalas by murdering its men and raping its women, the American directed subversion of a real police force, the attacks on education and the obliteration of the community self-help systems which meant that when Hurricane Jeanne and all the other weather systems since have struck Haiti many more have died than in any other country similarly stricken. In an earthquake, totally unpredictable, every bad factor is multiplied

The American blocking of international aid means that there is no modern water supply anywhere, no town planning, no safe roads, none of the ordinary infrastructure of any other Caribbean state. There are no building standards, no emergency shelters, no parks

So, when I write about mothers unwittingly walking on dead babies in the mud, when I write about people so poor they must eat patties made of clay and shortening, when I write about people with their faces 'chopped off' or about any of 8 million horror stories from the crime scene that is Haiti, please don't tell me you share their pain or mine.

Tell me where is Lovinsky Pierre Antoine and ten thousand like him?

If you share my pain and their pain, why don't you stop causing it? Why don't you stop the torture?

If you want to understand me, look at the woman in the picture, and the children half buried with her. You cannot hear their screams because they know there is no point in screaming. It will do no more good than voting.

What is she thinking: perhaps it is something like this – No mister! You cannot share my pain!

Sometime perhaps, after the camera is gone people will return to dig us out with their bare hands. But not you.

 

Copyright©2010 John Maxwell

No, Mister! You Cannot Share My Pain !

John Maxwell

 

If you shared my pain you would not continue to make me suffer, to torture me, to deny me my dignity and my rights especially my rights to self determination and self expression.

Six years ago you sent your Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to perform an action illegal under the laws of your country,my country and of the international community of nations.

It was an act so outrageous, so bestially vile and wicked that your journalists and news agencies, your diplomats and politicians to this day cannot bring themselves to truthfully describe or own up to the crime that was committed when US Ambassador James Foley, a career diplomat arrived at the house of President Jean Bertrand Aristide with a bunch of CIA thugs and US Marines to kidnap the President of Haiti and his wife.

The Aristides were stowed aboard a CIA plane normally used for 'renditions' of suspected terrorists to the worldwide US gulag of dungeons and torture chambers.

The plane, on which the Aristides are listed as "cargo" flew to Antigua – an hour away – and remained on the ground in Antigua while Colin Powell's State Department and the CIA tried to blackmail and bribe various African countries to accept ('give asylum to") the kidnapped President and his wife.

The Central African Republic – one of George W Bush's 'Dark Corners of the World' – agreed for an undisclosed sum, to give the Aristides temporary asylum.

Before any credible plot can be designed and paid for – for the disappearance of the Aristides – they are rescued by friends, flown to temporary asylum in Jamaica where the government cravenly yielded to the blackmail of Condoleezza Rice to deny them the permanent asylum to which they were entitled and which most Jamaicans had hoped for.

Meanwhile in Haiti the US Marines protected an undisciplined ragbag of rapists and murderers to allow them entry to the capital. The Marines chased the medical students out of the new Medical School established by Aristide with Cuban help and teachers. The Marines bivouac in the school, going out on nightly raids, trailed by fleets of ambulances with body bags, hunting down Fanmi Lavalas activists described as 'chimeres' – terrorists.

The real terrorists, led by two convicted murderers, Chamblain and Philippe, assisted the Marines in the eradication of 'chimeres' until the Marines were replaced by foreign troops paid by the United Nations who took up the hunt on behalf of the civilised world – France, Canada, the US and Brazil.

The terrorists and the remains of the Duvalier tontons and the CIA-bred FRAPF    declared open season on the remnants of Aristide's programmes to build democracy. They burnt down the new museum of Haitian Culture, destroyed the Children's television station and generally laid waste to anything and everything which could remind Haitians of their glorious history.

Haitians don't know that without their help Latin America might still be part of the Spanish Empire and Simon Bolivar a brief historical footnote.

Imagine, Niggers Speaking French!

About ninety years ago when Professor Woodrow Wilson was President of the USA his Secretary of State was a fundamentalist lawyer named William Jennings Bryan who had three times run unsuccessfully, for President.

The Americans had decided to invade Haiti to collect debts owed by Haiti to Citibank.

General Smedley Butler, the only American soldier to have twice won the Congressional Medal of Honour, described his role in the US Army:

"I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long.

General Butler said: "I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. … My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical in the military service'. Butler compared himself unfavourably to Al Capone. He said his official racketeering made Capone look like an amateur.

Secretary Bryan was dumfounded by the Haitians; "Imagine" he said, "Niggers speaking French.

Smedley Butler and Bryan were involved in Haiti because of something that happened nearly a hundred years before. The French slave-masters, expelled from Haiti and defeated again when they tried to re-enslave the Haitians, connived with the Americans to starve them into submission by a trade embargo. With no sale for Haitian sugar, the country was weak and rundown when a French fleet arrived bearing a demand for repaations. Having bought their freedom in blood, the Haitians were to be oblige to purchase it again in gold.

The French demanded, essentially, that the Haitians pay France an amount equivalent to 90 percent of the entire Haitian budget for the foreseeable future. When this commitment proved too arduous to honour, the City Bank offered the Haitians a 'debt exchange" paying off the French in exchange for a lower interest longer term debt. The terms may have seemed better but were just as usurious and it was not paid off until 1947.

Because of the debt the Americas invaded Haiti, seized the Treasury, exiled the President, their Jim Crow policies were used to divide the society, to harass the poor and finally provoked a second struggle for freedom which was one of the most brutal episodes in colonial history.

Long before Franco bombed Guernica, exciting the horror and revulsion of civilised people, the Americans perfected their dive-bombing techniques against unarmed Haitian peasants many of whom had never seen aircraft before.

The Americans set up an Haitian Army in the image of their Jim Crow Marines and it was these people and the alien and alienated Élite who with some conscripted blacks like the Duvaliers have ruled Haiti for most of the last century.

When I flew over Haiti for the first time in 1959 en route from New York to San Juan, Puerto Rico, I saw for the first time the border between the green Dominican Republic and brown Haiti.

First world journalists interpret the absence of trees on the Haitian side to the predations of the poor, disregarding the fact that Western religion and American capitalism were mainly responsible.

Why is it that nowhere else in the Caribbean is there similar deforestation?

Haiti's Dessalines constitution offered sanctuary to every escaped slave of any colour. All such people of whatever colour were deemed 'black' and entitled to citizenship. Only officially certified 'blacks' could own land in Haiti.

The American occupation, anticipating Hayek, Freedman and Greenspan, decided that such a rule was a hindrance to development. The Assistant Secretary of the US Navy, one Franklin D Roosevelt was given the job of writing a new, modern constitution for Haiti.

This constitution meant foreigners could own land. Within a very short time the lumberjacks were busy, felling old growth Mahogany and Caribbean Pine for carved doors for the rich and mahogany speedboats, boardroom tables seating forty etc etc. The devastated land was put to produce rubber, sisal for ropes and all sorts of pie in the sky plantations.

When President Paul Magloire came to Jamaica fifty years ago Haitians were still speaking of an Artibonite dam for electricity and irrigation. But the ravages of the recent past were too much to recover.

As Marguerite Laurent (EziliDanto) writes: Don't expect to learn how a people with a Vodun culture that reveres nature and especially the Mapou (oak-like or ceiba pendantra/bombax) trees, and other such big trees as the abode of living entities and therefore as sacred things, were forced to watch the Catholic Church, during Rejete - the violent anti-Vodun crusade - gather whole communities at gun point into public squares, and forced them to watch their agents burn Haitian trees in order to teach Haitians their Vodun Gods were not in nature, that the trees were the 'houses of Satan.'

In partnership with the US, the mulatto President Elie Lescot (1941-45) summarily expelled peasants from more than 100,000 hectares of land, razing their homes and destroying more than a million fruit trees in the vain effort to cultivate rubber on a large plantation scale. Also, under the pretext of the Rejete campaign, thousands of acres of peasant lands were cleared of sacred trees so that the US could take their lands for US agribusiness

 

 

After the Flood

Norman Manley used to say 'River come Down' when his party seemed likely to prevail. The Kreyol word Lavalas conveys the same meaning.

Since the Haitian people's decisive rejection of the Duvalier dictatorships in the early 90s, their spark and leader has been Jean-Bertrand Aristide whose bona fides may be assessed from the fact that the CIA and conservative Americans have been trying to discredit him almost from the word go.

As he put it in one of his books, his intention has been to build a paradise on the garbage heap bequeathed to Haiti by the US and the Elite.

The bill of particulars is too long to go into here, but the destruction of the new museum of Culture, the breaking up of the medical school, the destruction of the children's television gives you the flavour. But the essence is captured in the brutal attempt to obliterate the spirit of Haitian community; the attempt to destroy Lavalas by murdering its men and raping its women, the American directed subversion of a real police force, the attacks on education and the obliteration of the community self-help systems which meant that when Hurricane Jeanne and all the other weather systems since have struck Haiti many more have died than in any other country similarly stricken. In an earthquake, totally unpredictable, every bad factor is multiplied

The American blocking of international aid means that there is no modern water supply anywhere, no town planning, no safe roads, none of the ordinary infrastructure of any other Caribbean state. There are no building standards, no emergency shelters, no parks

So, when I write about mothers unwittingly walking on dead babies in the mud, when I write about people so poor they must eat patties made of clay and shortening, when I write about people with their faces 'chopped off' or about any of 8 million horror stories from the crime scene that is Haiti, please don't tell me you share their pain or mine.

Tell me where is Lovinsky Pierre Antoine and ten thousand like him?

If you share my pain and their pain, why don't you stop causing it? Why don't you stop the torture?

If you want to understand me, look at the woman in the picture, and the children half buried with her. You cannot hear their screams because they know there is no point in screaming. It will do no more good than voting.

What is she thinking: perhaps it is something like this – No mister! You cannot share my pain!

Sometime perhaps, after the camera is gone people will return to dig us out with their bare hands. But not you.

 

Copyright©2010 John Maxwell