The Haiti Crisis Revisited: It Was All a "Commie" Plot

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

By now many, if not most, Canadians realize that Stephen Harper's quick response to the Haiti crisis was to change the channel, after taking a beating in the polls over his second self-serving prorogation.

And by now many, if not most, Canadians realize that Stephen Harper's visit to Haiti was for photo-ops.

If you had just one word to describe our prime minister, it would not be humanitarian, so the above assumptions are certainly justified.

However, there was something else going on here that seems to have been missed by Canada's mainstream media, even as several are revisiting our so-called aid, which appears to have been almost non-existent* (only 1.5% came from us)

This was a military operation. The ships Harper bragged about arrived empty and the military personnel, were there primarily to secure the airports and clear the way for the arrival of military jets. And they turned away Doctors Without Borders and planes loaded with medical supplies, so they could instead land troops**.

There were military trucks everywhere, with troops carrying machine guns... Stopping at the US Embassy we spoke with the marines... One said "...I thought I would be helping people but all I am doing is standing around in the heat with a gun...." And that's what they were doing. Everywhere. In trucks, hummers, on the streets, standing around in flak jackets with guns. Or sitting in the trucks with guns. While...Haitians were digging themselves out.... Everywhere we drove we saw Italian, French, Canadian, and US military...holding up the traffic, causing more congestion than was necessary, and not completely participating in relief efforts. ..." (1)

So why the need for so many troops? In part: Cuba.

The "Commie" Plot

Stephen Harper was the first world leader to visit Haiti after the earthquake. There was some belief that he rushed his travel plans, wanting to get ahead of French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who arrived days later.

But Harper's presence there, standing in front of our military hardware and with our troops, was to deliver a different message. He was on top of it.

Because before the Canadian or U.S. governments could respond, the Cubans were already taking charge.

... for the first 72 hours following the earthquake, Cuban doctors were in fact the main medical support for the country. Within the first 24 hours, they had completed 1,000 emergency surgeries, turned their living quarters into clinics, and were running the only medical centers in the country, including 5 comprehensive diagnostic centers (small hospitals) which they had previously built. In addition another 5 in various stages of construction were also used, and they turned their ophthalmology center into a field hospital-which treated 605 patients within the first 12 hours following the earthquake. (2)

The Cubans had actually been there since 1998, after Hurricane Georges ravished the island:

Cuba adopted a two-pronged public health approach to help Haiti. First, it agreed to maintain hundreds of doctors in the country for as long as necessary, working wherever they were posted by the Haitian government. This was particularly significant as Haiti's health care system was easily the worst in the Americas, with life expectancy of only 54 years in 1990 and one out of every 5 adult deaths due to AIDS, while 12.1% of children died from preventable intestinal infectious diseases.

In addition Cuba agreed to train Haitian doctors in Cuba, providing that they would later return and take the places of the Cuban doctors (a process of "brain gain" rather than "brain drain"). Significantly, the students were selected from non-traditional backgrounds, and were mainly poor. It was thought that, because of their socio-economic background, they fully understood their country's need for medical personnel, and would return to work where they were needed. The first cohort of students began studying in May, 1999 at the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM). (2)

No one was overly concerned. But now amidst the worst natural disaster in modern history, exacerbated by extreme poverty, the West may have been a little worried about Cuban [communist] influence.

While North American media might have ignored Cuba's role, Haiti has not. A pointed remark was made by Haitian President Mr. René Préval, who noted,
"you did not wait for an earthquake to help us". Similarly, Haiti's Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive has also repeatedly noted that the first three countries to help were Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. (2)

This story on it's own would not be newsworthy, except as a human interest story. But there are several other factors that make me question Stephen Harper's motives.

First comes from the Democracy Digest in December of 2009, revealing that Canada was going into the "democracy" business: The D-word out of favor? Don’t tell the Canadians. Seems that American warmongers are finding the coup business not as profitable as it once was, so the Harper government has expropriated 70 million dollars to take it over.

The second comes from Lawrence Martin's new book, Harperland. Martin reveals that Stephen Harper is not a fan of Peacekeeping, believing that Canada should become a "hard power". He also states that our prime minister sees the world not as a global community but as a "clash of civilizations". Something he's never shared with Canadians.

The third is Harper's anti-communist grounding, part of that "clash of civilizations". The Religious Right believe that the Antichrist will only appear after the world has ridden itself of communists. And his corporate base of course sees the profit in supplying military hardware, and also fear that communism will put an end to their greed.

But the most compelling reason, I believe, for the enormous military operation, was to protect something they would find more valuable than religion or war profiteering.

OIL!

The Jan. 12 earthquake was on a fault line that passes near potential gas reserves, said Stephen Pierce, a geologist who worked in the region for 30 years for companies including the former Mobil Corp. The quake may have cracked rock formations along the fault, allowing gas or oil to temporarily seep toward the surface, he said yesterday in a telephone interview. (3)

He speculated that these enormous oil reserves could help Haiti get out of poverty. But will they be used for that?

According to Marguerite Laurent:

I wrote Part 1 of Oil in Haiti as the economic reasons for the US/UN occupation back in October, 2009. After the earthquake, I questioned whether oil drilling could have triggered the earthquake: Did mining and oil drilling trigger the Haiti earthquake? ... After being called crazy and un-American for writing that the 2010 earthquake gives the US the perfect disaster-capitalism opportunity to come out from behind the UN and openly occupy Haiti to secure Haiti's oil ... , strategic location and other riches for the corporatocracy... a veteran oil company man comes forward in Business Week to say, and one wonders how he can so authoritatively speculate about the area of the faultline without intimate knowledge of the drillings, explorations .. Haiti lies in an area that has undiscovered amounts of oil, it must have oil and the earthquake "may have left clues" to petroleum reservoirs! Oil that, uhmmm, "could aid economic recovery in the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation. (4)

Of course the veteran oil company man was Stephen Pierce and as Laurent reminds us, what he really meant to say was "that could aid Haiti's US-occupied economy recover its strategic oil reserves" for the global elite.

So while Haiti looked like just another photo-op for the big guy, it was more than that. He had planted the flag of Exxon, conquering the region for the global elite and kicking a little "commie" butt for the morally self-righteous.

And what will this mean for the people of Haiti who are still living in tents under horrendous conditions, ten months after the expenditure of millions of dollars, while sitting on all that oil?

I expect they will be colonized and subjugated, and if the Haitian government doesn't see it our way .. can you say "coup"? He'll just have to claim that Cuba was planning an invasion and we needed to protect them.

And the media will applaud.

Footnotes:

*By this I mean only government aid. Canadians were more than generous in their contributions to relief organizations.

**During our stay of only seven weeks, our medical team did amazing work and the United States provided a much needed hospital ship.

Sources:

1. "Our Hands and Help For Haiti", By Elaine Brower, Op Ed News, February 24, 2010

2. One of the World's Best Kept Secrets: Cuban Medical Aid to Haiti, by Emily J. Kirk and John M. Kirk, Global Research, October 29, 2010

3. Haiti Earthquake May Have Exposed Gas, Aiding Economy, By Jim Polson, Bloomberg, January 26, 2010

4. Oil in Haiti: Reasons for the US Occupation Part II, by Marguerite Laurent, Global Research

The Haiti Crisis Revisited: Why is Haiti so Poor?

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

Ted Rall, author of Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?, wrote in a column following the earthquake:

As grim accounts of the earthquake in Haiti came in, the accounts in U.S.-controlled state media all carried the same descriptive sentence: "Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere..." Gee, I wonder how that happened? You'd think Haiti would be loaded. After all, it made a lot of people rich. (1)

And Gerald Kaplan wrote in the Globe and Mail:

What a grand old party it's going to be Monday when all those countries and financial institutions that have forever plundered, exploited and impoverished Haiti will gather in Montreal at the invitation of the government of Canada to decide its future .... But mostly this meeting is promoted by those who like to call themselves, and whom the media will call, the donor countries. What is important to note about most donor countries, including Canada, is that they have always extracted far more from the poor recipient countries than they've contributed. Poor countries, in reality, have been net donors to us rich folks. (2)

As Harper moved swiftly to bring in the military to protect the "rich folks", little was reported in the media about why we were in a position to be a "donor" to a country so rich in natural resources.

How did Haiti get so poor? Despite a century of American colonialism, occupation, and propping up corrupt dictators? Even though the CIA staged coups d'état against every democratically elected president they ever had? It's an important question. An earthquake isn't just an earthquake. The same 7.0 tremor hitting San Francisco wouldn't kill nearly as many people as in Port-au-Prince.

"Looking at the pictures, essentially it looks as if (the buildings are of) breezeblock or cinderblock construction, and what you need in an earthquake zone is metal bars that connect the blocks so that they stay together when they get shaken," notes Sandy Steacey, director of the Environmental Science Research Institute at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. "In a wealthy country with good seismic building codes that are enforced, you would have some damage, but not very much."When a pile of cinderblocks falls on you, your odds of survival are long. Even if you miraculously survive, a poor country like Haiti doesn't have the equipment, communications infrastructure or emergency service personnel to pull you out of the rubble in time. And if your neighbors get you out, there's no ambulance to take you to the hospital--or doctor to treat you once you get there.

The death toll was as high as it was, because of interference and exploitation. We helped to make them poor, and now we are determined to keep them that way.

The military invasion was about securing airports. The U.S. took Port-au-Prince, while the Canadian military occupied the airports at Jacmel and Léogane, clearing the area for the landing of military aircraft.

And the people on the ground in Haiti were not impressed.

The Canadian Peace Alliance (CPA) urges its member organizations and supporters to give generously to the relief efforts responding to the catastrophic disaster in Haiti following last week's massive earthquake. The CPA also wishes to express its deep concern about the deployment of up to an additional 1,000 Canadian Forces to Haiti, announced Sunday by Defence Minister Peter MacKay, in collaboration with a U.S. mission of over 10,000 troops.

Early reports from Haiti suggest that this militarization of the relief operation is both unwelcome and unhelpful. Al-Jazeera news reported on the weekend that the U.S. military, which now controls the airport in Port-au-Prince, turned away several planes carrying physicians and supplies from Doctors Without Borders. A CARICOM aid flight and other humanitarian deliveries have also been turned away, with deadly results for the Haitian people.

Patrick Elie, a social activist and former Haitian Defense Minister, stated, "We don't need solders as such. There's no war here." Elie noted the importance of Haitian sovereignty, "The choice of what lands and what doesn't... should be determined by the Haitians. Otherwise it's a takeover." Even the French government, which has long partnered with the U.S. in subjugating Haiti, complained that the U.S. operation looks more like an "occupation" than a relief mission. (3)

Paving the way for future colonization. Is this really your Canada?



Sources:

1. Haitian Earthquake: Made in the USA Why the Blood Is on Our Hands, by Ted Rall, Common Dreams, January 14, 2010

2. The betrayal of Haiti, By Gerald Caplan, The Globe and Mail, January 22, 2010

3. Humanitarian relief urgently needed in Haiti, not militarization of aid, The Canadian Peace Alliance, January 19, 2010

The Haiti Crisis Revisited: Canada's Military Response

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

When Stephen Harper announced as part of his swift action on the Haiti crisis, that "Ships of the Atlantic fleet were immediately ordered to Haiti from Halifax, loaded with relief supplies", the media applauded.

Canadians felt good that once again we were helping out in a time of need, and pundits felt sure that this would improve Harper's polling results, which had dropped ten points as a result of his last self-serving prorogation.

Lawrence Martin gave his account of our heroic PM, which will go down in history as exemplary. Or at least to those future historians who view Harperland as a chronicle. But even if media accounts will help to support the claim, the reality is that our government's response to this crisis was horrific. Most of the action was for the cameras, with canned stories and scripted accounts. Only the politics of the situation became important.

So what was our military doing there?

According to Roger Annis, critiquing the recent speaking engagements of our military brass, vaunting its role in Haiti in the month following the earthquake:

Commander [Josée ] Kurtz's ship [HMCS Halifax] arrived eight days after the earthquake and was stationed off Jacmel for five weeks; the sister ship, HMCS Athabasca, was stationed off the coast of Léogane for the same duration. The Halifax carried a full complement of 250 sailors as well as close to 200 Canadian soldiers. The commander stated that the fundamental mission of both ships was to provide "security and stability" in and around their assigned areas, Jacmel and Léogane. She gave an overview of the ships' work during their five weeks of service, saying the goal was to "save lives, mitigate suffering and assist the onshore activity of Canadian and other police, military and aid agencies."

"We didn't provide care in the beginning," she said. "Our first task was to secure order." (1)

A direct contradiction to reports that we were providing medical care and delivering much needed supplies.

HMCS Halifax provided no medical aid to the civilian population, the commander stated. It assisted the modest medical service of the Canadian military's Disaster Assistance Relief Team (DART) that was already onshore when the Halifax arrived ... the Canadian military provided no surgical assistance to Haiti following the earthquake. Its medical presence amounted to a first-aid station that would refer cases requiring serious medical attention to other services in the immediate region or in Port-au-Prince. (1)

And according to Emily and John Kirk:

Canada's contribution included the deployment of 2,046 Canadian Forces personnel, including 200 DART personnel. The DART (Disaster Assistance Response Team) received the most media attention, as it conducted 21,000 consultations-though it should be noted they do not treat any serious trauma patients or provide surgical care. Indeed, among the DART personnel, only 45 are medical staff, with others being involved in water purification, security, and reconstruction. In total, the Canadians stayed for only 7 weeks.

They provided some necessary services, but they only stayed seven weeks. Far too short a time to accomplish much, except important photo-ops.

So what was really going on?

This was an invasion to protect corporate interests and promote Canada as a "hard power".

The Conservative government has been anxious to assert a leading role in the relief and reconstruction of Haiti, so as to advance the interests of Canada’s corporate elite in the Caribbean—long a major site of Canadian overseas investment—and assert Canada’s claim to be a major power.

In an action closely coordinated with Washington, Canada deployed 2,000 Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) personnel and two navy battleships to Haiti in the days immediately following, the earthquake—one of the largest overseas CAF deployments since World War II. And on January 25, the Canadian government
hosted an international conference in Montreal on rebuilding Haiti. The conference focused on schemes to make Haiti a haven for cheap-labor offshore assembly and garment-manufacturing operations.

Despite the size of the CAF deployment and the enormity of the humanitarian crisis, Canadian aid reached Haiti only slowly. It took more than ten days for the CAF to initiate relief efforts in Jacmel and medical assistance only began to be provided in Léogâne on January 29.

While the press has obligingly promoted the Harper government’s claim that Canada has mobilized massive resources in support of the relief effort, Ottawa has in fact given Haiti less than $100 million in emergency aid ... All told, the Canadian government will provide about 1.5 percent of the estimated $14 billion that will be required to rebuild the shattered country. (3)

We were not there to help the Haitians, only to help ourselves and the new corporate government in Harperland.

Sources:

1. EXAGGERATED CLAIMS: ASSESSING THE CANADIAN MILITARY'S EARTHQUAKE RESPONSE, By Roger Annis, The Boston Haitian Reporter, October 7, 2010

2. "Canada's Response to the Earthquake in Haiti: Progress to Date". Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, March 17, 2010

3. Canada’s prime minister uses Haiti visit to promote “hard power”, By Guy Charron, February 25, 2010

The Politics of Exploitation: The Haiti Crisis Revisited

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

There is an interesting summary of Stephen Harper's response to the Haiti earthquake, in Lawrence Martin's book Harperland. He first describes how Harper was in trouble over the prorogation and how the resulting anger dominated the news.

The Haiti crisis then provided him an opportunity to change the channel and present himself as a take charge kind of guy.

A national day of protest as planned, belying the notion that Canadians were apathetic, that they didn't care about the functioning of their democracy. The momentum kept building, and then in an instant it was gone. A magnitude 7.3 earthquake struck near the capital of Haiti, sending tens of thousands to their deaths. It was one of the worst natural catastrophes in a century. Images from Port-au-Prince cast a pall over everything. Suddenly, arguments over the propriety of shutting down Parliament, or any other issue of public policy, seemed a trifling comparison.

The priority became a massive aid campaign, and the prime minister set about it in a blaze of activity. No one could accuse him of sitting idle now. Among the many fortunate breaks Harper had received in his career, the timing of this tragedy ranked high.

There was a month go before the Vancouver Olympics, and until the earthquake, he was destined to be on the defensive that entire month. The opposition parties had the wind in their sails, and the national protest day was promising to be a dramatic event. But Haiti totally consumed the airwaves for two weeks running, knocking prorogation and the planned protest to the back pages.

Harper hardly had the image of a great humanitarian or friend of & United Nations. But given the opportunity to change the political channel and lead a humanitarian effort, he did so with great aplomb, winning applause from all quarters. He dispatched the military in a timely fashion; made good use of his cabinet, most notably Peter MacKay and Lawrence Cannon; was more than generous with financial aid; played host to a quickly assembled international conference on the crisis, and shared the spotlight with a shaken Michaelle Jean, the Haitian-born governor general.

The epic catastrophe also allowed Harper to showcase the rebuilt armed forces. Canada's once sluggish and ill-equipped peacetime military was now well tuned and ready to respond to a crisis. When the 2004 tsunami struck, Canadian medics and engineers had to wait days to hitch a ride, as it was put, to get there. But this time, Canada's big new military aircraft were doing the job. (1)

Aside from the obvious, exploiting a crisis, there are many statements in the above that show either a deliberate attempt to gloss over the situation, or a misunderstanding based on the popular media reports of the day.

However, I suppose Martin is only tackling the story from the political perspective, and he's right. It was a gift. Just not for the victims of the quake, who received very little.

He Dispatched the Military in a Timely Fashion

Aside from my knee jerk reaction to the statement, "Among the many fortunate breaks Harper had received in his career, the timing of this tragedy ranked high", which was to resort to language I couldn't use here, let's break down this great humanitarian effort.

He did indeed show off our hardware and the planes took off with great thrust and enthusiasm. The people in Haiti needn't worry. Help was on it's way.

Harper's dispatch of troops matched a similar response from the United States. The military must first restore order we were told. But before saving lives?

It seems that the military was given landing preference over medical supplies and health personnel.

A Doctors Without Borders/Médecins SanscFrontières (MSF) cargo plane carrying 12 tons of medical equipment, including drugs, surgical supplies and two dialysis machines, was turned away three times from Port-au-Prince airport since Sunday night despite repeated assurances of its ability to land there. This 12-ton cargo was part of the contents of an earlier plane carrying a total of 40 tons of supplies that was blocked from landing on Sunday morning. Since January 14, MSF has had five planes diverted from the original destination of Port-au-Prince to the Dominican Republic. These planes carried a total of 85 tons of medical and relief supplies. (2)

And the Navy ships that Harper dispatched with "great aplomb"? According to the Chronicle Herald:

OTTAWA — When HMCS Athabaskan and HMCS Halifax were ordered to sail on a humanitarian mission to Haiti on Jan. 13, they worked through the night, passing boxes hand to hand, loading stores aboard the ships — everything they would need for the humanitarian mission. But sailors didn’t take aboard much in the way of relief aid — food packages, medical supplies or shelters — for distribution to Haitians.

In the House of Commons on Thursday, during his response to the speech from the throne, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said otherwise. "Ships of the Atlantic fleet were immediately ordered to Haiti from Halifax, loaded with relief supplies," he said as he recapped the government’s efforts to help Haiti recover from the earthquake.

... During the voyage, some sailors wondered if the ships might have been better off staying in port a little longer — say 12 hours — to take on more relief supplies, food aid and medical equipment before sailing for Haiti. (3)

They could have used a little less "aplomb" and a few more necessities. And they could have done it with just 12 more hours.

And we also learn that 10 months after the crisis, only 35% of the promised money (matching Canadian citizen's donations) has been delivered by our government.

The Canadian International Development Agency says only $65.15 million has been paid out so far. The $65 million that has been delivered has been to large agencies only, among them ones identified by many observers as the least able to deliver timely aid directly to victims. (4)

1.3 million Haitians are still living in tent cities and a cholera epidemic is threatening more lives.

So pardon me if I don't get all warm and fuzzy over our country's response to this crisis. These people have been exploited for years, which is why they were so poor in the first place. And sadly, our prime minister saw an opportunity to exploit them some more for his own political career.

And he wonders why we lost the UN Security bid.

This is who we are now, and life in Harperland is just peachy keen.

Continuation:

The Haiti Crisis Revisited: Canada's Military Response

Sources:

1. Harperland:The Politics of Control, By Lawrence Martin, Viking Press, 2010, ISBN: 978-0-670-06517-2, Pg. 241-242

2. Doctors Without Borders Plane with Lifesaving Medical Supplies Diverted Again from Landing in Haiti Patients in Dire Need of Emergency Care Dying from Delays in Arrival of Medical Supplies, January 19, 2010

3. The Halifax Chronicle Herald, March 12, 2010

4. Aid doesn't help Haiti much if it never gets there, By pogge, Peace, Order and Good Government, November 5, 2010