Last month’s severe earthquake in Haiti could not have been prevented. The death toll may reach a quarter of a million. Some three million Haitians – a third of the country’s population – have been directly affected by the disaster. No fewer than 1½ [1.5] million people (many of them already very poor) are now homeless. But the earthquake’s effects, the likelihood of far fewer people dying, and the extent to which corporate greed and power can – even now – make matters much worse for Haitians could all have been mitigated.

You’ll search far and wide in the US TV, radio and printed propaganda get past the stories of ‘brave US marines’ being diverted from other ‘duties’ to save lives. Not a hint that, were it not for the imperialist interference with the country by France and the US in particular, the scale of the disaster – and now of the recovery – would be very different.

Kim Ives, journalist with Haiti Liberté, puts it well when he says, “this earthquake was preceded by a political and economic earthquake with an epicenter 2,000 miles north [of Port-au-Prince], in Washington, DC.… [The] coups d’états and subsequent … foreign military occupations, in a country whose constitution forbids that, were fundamentally destructive, not just to the national government and its national programs, but also to the local governments or the parliaments, the mayors’ offices and also the local assemblies, which would elect a permanent electoral council.”
In fact, the US client political infrastructure has deliberately prevented these councils from being effective. Préval’s (the president of Haiti since the US overthrew the previous incumbent) cronies and henchmen and women, effectively dominated this structure and used it to their own ends. As anarchists, such political manoeuvres scarcely excite us. But the economic oppression wrought by successive western élites is alarming.

Two Centuries
For two centuries the big powers have bullied Haiti and its people: from the harsh reaction to Haiti’s independence as a republic of free slaves to the US-backed overthrow of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide (twice) and his replacement with unpopular puppet régimes. In 1804 the first and so far the last slave revolution in history produced Haiti as the first black republic in the world. The country was also the first independent nation of Latin America; in many ways that revolution became the touchstone for other similar revolutions. But not until 60 years later (at the time of the US Civil War, when lip service to blacks was fashionable) did the US recognise the country. In 1915 US Marines invaded Haiti taking control of the bank and government. They occupied the country for almost 20 years – until 1934. On leaving, they installed an outfit called the Garde d’Haiti; it acted as a proxy force to maintain US interests there. In 1957 it evolved into the notoriously vicious dictatorship of François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier.

A Member of Papa Doc’s death squad, with Haitian soldier right

He was president for life and passed that title to his son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, when he died in 1971. The US actively supported the family, its oppression and further degradation of life for Haitians. By the 1980s it was obvious to Washington that so great was the oppression that resistance movements were becoming effective. The solution was to stage faux elections (the first was in 1986) to lift the lid on such pressure. In fact Haiti was the first country in Latin America to expose and confound these bought elections by choosing a poor parish priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, as president.

Aristide had no illusions about what Haiti needed – real independence from the US. At his inauguration on February 7 1991, he actually declared Haiti’s independence (from US control) a second time. One of his first moves was to increase the minimum wage. Less than a year later Washington responded with a coup d’état. Aristide was removed for the first time by Clinton (now appointed – along with George W Bush, who staged the second coup, in 2004 – by Obama to oversee Haiti’s ‘recovery’). Aristide remains in exile. Security Adviser at the time Condoleezza Rice forbade Aristide from setting foot “anywhere within the Western Hemisphere”, threatening Jamaica in the process.

Economics
Aristide had a nationalist agenda; it was to try and build the national self-sufficiency of the country. Washington couldn’t allow that. The US élite insisted that the nine principal state and publicly owned industries be privatised and sold off to US and foreign investors. So towards the end of the 1990s they forced through the privatisation of the Minoterie d’Haiti (which produced flour for bread) and Ciment d’Haiti (cement). The former was sold to a company of which Henry Kissinger was a board member. The mill was closed and Haiti now has no flour mill. Flour (and rice in a country once self-sufficient) for hungry Haitians has had to be imported over the last decade – at great cost… from the United States. Haiti is a country mostly made of limestone (the foundation of cement). When the Ciment d’Haiti was closed down, US (-backed) corporations began using the docks of the cement company to import cement – again at greater costs. Now, with buildings flattened, Haiti is going to have to pay for the import of millions of tons of cement, a commodity it once had in abundance.

One of the biggest challenges after the earthquake was the management of information between families and loved-ones. The Haitian telecommunications company, Teleco, was highly regarded amongst the Haitian state industries. Just a week before this earthquake, Teleco was privatised. It was sold to a Vietnamese company, Viettel. All the communications today are in the hands of the three private cell companies, Digicel, Voila and Haitel. Ives again, “…thirteen years ago, we were doing a delegation here to talk to the [telecommunications trade] unionists… A certain Jean Mabou, the union leader, took us to a room where it was filled with new, brand new, modern telecommunications equipment, boards, all sorts of things. He said, ‘We’ve got these, and they won’t allow us to install them. They are deliberately undermining the state company so they can sell it’.”

True to Form
Now, in the teeth of one of the worst catastrophes in recent decades, instead of helping, the US state in particular is taking advantage of the situation to continue to pursue its own greedy aims. Although they didn’t reach the propaganda outlets in the United States, such eye-witness reports as this from Sebastian Walker of Al Jazeera English are typical on the ground in Haiti. Commenting exactly a week after the first and most serious earthquake shook Haiti, Walker says:

“Most Haitians here have seen little humanitarian aid so far. What they have seen is guns, and lots of them. Armored personnel carriers cruise the streets. UN soldiers aren’t here to help pull people out of the rubble; they’re here, they say, to enforce the law. This is what much of the UN presence actually looks like on the streets of Port-au-Prince: men in uniform, racing around in vehicles, carrying weapons. At the entrance to the city’s airport, where most of the aid is coming in, there’s anger and frustration. Much needed supplies of water and food are inside. Haitians are locked out… Beyond the well guarded perimeter, there’s something else going on. Here, the United States has taken control. It looks more like the Green Zone in Baghdad than a center for aid distribution. Heavily armed US forces patrol the entrances. Even within the airport, these soldiers are never without weapons. There are several thousand on the ground already, and that number is expected to grow. America now decides who lands in Haiti, and there’s a constant stream of US aircraft arriving with thousands of US boots on the ground. Meanwhile, aid flights from other nations are being turned back. Two Mexican aircraft with vital life-saving equipment were told they couldn’t land on Saturday.

Thousands demonstrated on Dec 16 2008 to commemorate the date in 1990 of Haiti’s first open democratic elections, and demand the end to UN occupation

Patrice Ali is the former Haitian defence minister. Even he is concerned with the way the Americans have taken over the relief efforts: “But we don’t need soldiers, as such, you know? There’s no war here. The choice of what lands and what doesn’t land, the priorities of the flight should be determined by the Haitians. So, otherwise, it’s a take-over. And what might happen is that the need of Haitians are not taken into account, but only either the way a foreign country defines the need of Haiti or try to push its own agenda.”

One Haitian man spoke for many: “These weapons they bring, they are instruments of death. We don’t want them. We don’t need them. We are a traumatized people. What we want from the international community is technical help — action, not words.” This is all consistent with the way the ‘Shock Doctrine’ (a political-economic theory advanced by Naomi Klein in her book of the same name) works. In Klein’s words shortly after the quake, “…crises are often used as the pretext for pushing through policies that you cannot push through under times of stability. Countries in periods of extreme crisis are desperate for any kind of aid, any kind of money, and are not in a position to negotiate fairly the terms of that exchange.”

Just one example illustrates the point. The Heritage Foundation is a right wing think tank, the ideas and public speeches of many of whose members both reflect and influence current US government (and corporate) thinking. Shortly after the quake, the following appeared on its website: “Amidst the suffering, crisis in Haiti offers opportunities to the U.S. In addition to providing immediate humanitarian assistance, the U.S. response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti earthquake offers opportunities to re-shape Haiti’s long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to
improve the image of the United States in the region.”

And “Finally, a vital part of Haiti’s recovery will be increased help from the faith-based community in the U.S. [that is, Christian fundamentalists] and around the world. Religious organizations have long played a critical role in keeping Haiti afloat through generous cash and food donations as well as mission visits to help build and run Haitian schools and clinics. Faith-based assistance often has more lasting long-term effects than official development assistance, and no doubt this will prove to be the case in Haiti.”

In barely-concealed coded language, the Foundation suggests that “Long-term reforms for Haitian democracy and its economy are also badly overdue.” It doesn’t take much imagination to understand what they mean by ‘reforms’.

Murder
Combining all Saddam’s atrocities together still doesn’t add up to the number of people estimated dead from UN sanctions, but even ignoring this, the US and UK governments helped him perpetrate most of them.

• Iranian war: one million dead – Saddam was supported by the US throughout.
• Kurdish suppression: 180,000 dead.
• Gassing of Kurds in Halabja: 5,000 dead – immediately after, the US administration authorised a $400 million emergency loan, then bombed two Iranian oil rigs and a frigate for him.
• Aid continued to be given to Saddam, ignoring his actions in favour of helping him win against Iran.
• Marsh Arab suppression: 30-60 thousand dead, US/UK imposed a no fly zone following intense international pressure, massacre continued on the ground.
• Crushing of Shia rising in 1991: 100,000 dead – permitted by the US who preferred Saddam to a popular rebellion.
• Estimated dead from UN sanctions: 1.6 million. Sanctions failed to curb military spending, while guaranteeing a lack of food and basic medical supplies to Iraqis.

Money
Iraqi oil will bring in $10-15 billion this year, but 25% of all revenue will help pay off a $150 billion dollar ‘debt’ to the US based on Saddam’s actions in the past, while privatisation – decided without asking Iraqis – means most state revenue sources will be sold to big corporations and run for shareholders, not the Iraqi people.

So little money has been spent on reconstruction so far that electricity and water production levels are still far below what Saddam managed under UN sanctions.

The total worth of the oil in Iraq is over $10.5 trillion, with gas being worth a further $1.7 trillion. To put this into perspective, the Catholic church’s total assets in 2003 – everything from font to spire right across the globe – are valued at just over $1 trillion.

Memories
Paul Bremer, ex-dictator of Iraq, was hauled away from Viet…  (oops) Iraq in an armoured helicopter, as yet another three-hour power outage darkened the homes of Baghdad.

Except that even a tentative scratch at the surface reveals another picture beneath. Iraqi sovereignty has come to mean the imposition of an unelected civilian administration on the people of Iraq. The extent of such ‘sovereignty’ is borne out by the opening of the trial of Saddam. The location of the court was kept secret. The judge insisted his own name be kept secret. There was no defence counsel. The videotaped proceedings were censored by the US military. Saddam was chained throughout, and most of his comments were censored to the media. To any impartial observer, justice in the new ‘independent’ Iraq looked about as impartial as the justice overseen by Saddam.

‘Sovereignty’ is a slippery concept. International law treats ‘sovereignty’ as a fundamental. Sovereignty and equality are governing principles in bourgeois law at every level. The legal theorist Lassa Oppenheim opined as far back as 1920 that the equality of states was “the indispensable foundation” of international society. When the US invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq it put forward its right to ‘self-defence’ as a justification for intervention. Yet the US was not under attack, as Article 51 of the UN Charter specifies as necessary for armed self defence. Afghanistan and Iraq, it was argued, had supported and harboured Al-Qaeda.

Yet when the Nicaraguan government attempted to pursue the US government over its support for the right-wing paramilitary Contras, the World Court held that the US was not responsible for breaches of international humanitarian law committed by the Contras since it had not directed and controlled the individual operations which gave rise to these breaches. “Organising or encouraging the organisation of irregular forces or armed bands … does not constitute an armed attack sufficient to give rise to a right to exercise self-defence.” Under the terms of the Military Assistance Agreement concluded between the International Security Assistance Force and the interim government in Afghanistan, the UK military forces operating in Afghanistan are immune from prosecution for grave breaches of the Geneva Convention. ‘Sovereignty’ appears to be honoured only in the breach. It is in the gift of some ‘Great Power’ nations to grant ‘sovereignty’ to others.

The same is true for the concept of ‘human rights’. Behind the rhetoric of formal equality, and immutability of rights lies a social terrain of real inequality and rights instituted or violated at the behest of the state. The detainees at Guantanamo Bay were deemed ‘illegal combatants’ by the US and hence denied the protections of the laws of war. The intervention of the Supreme Court remedies the situation, but the fact that a legal environment could be created wherein the US could contend that the law of human rights had no applicability goes to suggest that such rights are in any event no more than gifts of the state. So also the detainees held at HMP Belmarsh in the UK, indefinitely and without trial.

The Blair government’s vaunted introduction of the Human Rights Act – the recognition of the European Convention on Human Rights within UK law – counts for little given the ease with which the government was able to derogate from its Conven-tion duties in violating the rights of the Belmarsh detainees.

The lesson of all this? ‘Sovereignty’ and ‘equality’ are meaningless, the ‘rights’ intended to protect us useless, so long as they remain the gifts of the state. The only guarantees of sovereignty and equality can be through the destruction of the state and the system of fundamental inequality of which it is the armed guarantor. Those who argue that the means to equality and justice lie through the state have to explain how ‘sovereignty’ can be anything other than a game in the courts of international law, if it is something that can be granted or denied by those with the biggest guns.