By Paula Bustamante:


CALLEBASSE, Haiti (AFP) -- "I would like to give up my son again," says Anchello Cantave, a farmer here, who willingly handed over his five-year-old to US missionaries now facing charges of child abduction in Haiti's post-quake chaos.

An hour outside of the devastated Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, Callebasse is a poor town set in the mountains, where a massive 7.0-magnitude earthquake on January 12 destroyed 50 homes.

Saurentha Muran, one of the parents who gave her kids to American missionary waits in Calebasse, east of Port au Prince. AFP PHOTO

Just two days later, 10 American missionaries from the US state of Idaho arrived in town.

To impoverished parents desperate to give their children a better future, they offered the promise of something more -- but they also represented the children as orphans when they tried to take them across the border to the Dominican Republic.

Cantave, 36, is convinced that the Americans had only good intentions.

"It's better for our children to stay with strangers in a foreign country," he told AFP.

But Haitian authorities have been less forgiving.

After the group was detained trying to cross in the Dominican Republic with 33 children on January 29, they now faces charges of child abduction and criminal association.

"The Americans took the children with permission from us, the parents," said Fritzian Valmont, the father of three daughters aged 11, eight and two.

"If they had had a big bus that could have taken more children, even more would have gone," he added, with all the pride of a parent trying to secure the best future for his daughter.

A few feet away from Cantave and Valmont sat Jean Ricia Geffrand, a widowed mother of five and a grandmother at just 47.

"The Thursday after the quake a man named Issac who is from near here came and asked if we wanted our children to go with them to a school in the Dominican Republican, where they would be better off than here," she said.

The man is believed to have come from a neighboring town and was working as a translator for the American missionaries.

Next to Geffrand sat Saurentha Muran, 25, who cradled her two-year-old daughter Magdalenne in her arms.

She consulted her husband in trying to decide whether their daughter Ansitho should go with the missionaries.

"We discussed it and I asked (my children)... if they wanted to go to school in the Dominican Republic and they said they wanted to go," said Muran, who like everyone here adds that they received no money for handing over their children.

"We gave them away, and the only reason we want to take them back now is that we have many problems with the media," said Valmont, to nods of agreement from others close by.

"If, after the trial, the Americans can come and take the children again, we would agree to it," added Cantave, who is thinking about visiting his son this week at the SOS Children's Villages, a charitable organization taking care of the 33 children, to clear up the situation.

The children range in age from between two months to 12 years old. SOS Children's Villages has confirmed their names.

Muran said she would take Ansitho back if she wants to come, but she fears it wont be for the best. She can barely take care of her two-year-old Magdalenne and is eight months pregnant.

Most of Callebasse's residents are Baptists, but they say they had no idea what religion the Americans were, they simply hoped they would offer their children a better life.

The 10 Americans belongs to the New Life Children's Refuge, a Christian religious organization whose Haiti mission statement says they planned to "rescue Haitian orphans abandoned on the streets, makeshift hospitals or from collapsed orphanages."

February 8, 2010

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TWO hundred years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court’s chief justice, John Marshall, ruled that the legal relationship of the land’s original inhabitants with the United States was not one of equals, but of "wardship," given that it dealt with people "completely lacking in civil abilities."

When one native American said "Our work consists of procuring that those who come afterwards, the generations that have not yet been born, do not find a world worse than ours, but instead a better one…" he was focusing on what today is a serious problem stemming from foolish ambitions and the absence of an attitude of consternation regarding the planet. The idea is adjusted to other precepts, including the resentments unleashed among nations and destructive wars to dominate or steal the territory and resources of others.

"Why do they take away by force what they can obtain with love? We are disarmed and ready to give them what they ask if they come as friends…" The idea seems so logical, basic and noble that not to proceed in that manner reveals a lack of moral authority, but the leaders of the United States during its first expansion did not ponder on such advanced possibilities, and acted the way in which they still do today: dispossessing those who were already there when they arrived, and subjecting them to the use of force or imbuing them with pessimism and impotence.

The usurpation of the northern part of this continent could have been less degrading, even though it would always remain an unjust act, in violation of every law. It is difficult to believe, but in the 19th century, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that Indians were, by birth, "alien and dependent." That is one of the reasons that it was included in the Constitution that indigenous peoples could not be represented in Congress.

The nascent empire wanted to expand its geographical horizons and possess those places where there were resources to explore. That is also the source of the barbaric statement by Philip Sheridan: "The only good Indian is a dead Indian."

Whoever assumes that these are questions of the past is ignoring or giving short shrift to the racial discrimination that African Americans continue to suffer after so many projects with little progress, after years of struggle and the deaths of so many civil rights fighters. It is the same case, with its own particularities, of the Native Americans who live on reservations — like the Bantustans of South Africa — often on highly toxic land, and are insulted, ignored or questioned when they want to maintain their customs.

"We do not have control over the resources on our reservation; we do not have economic power…. That is why a major controversy persists in the state of South Dakota about the problems and double standards of justice (one for "whites" and another for Indians) that we protested in the 1960s and ‘70s."

— Excerpt from an interview with Leonard Peltier by German political scientist Heinz Dietrich.

Peltier is one of the longest-held prisoners in the United States, treated like one of the many "bad Indians" typically stereotyped in those "Western" flicks with which they made us believe and "demonstrated" the superiority of the criminals and the absence of virtue among the abused, who today continue to be the system’s evident victims.

THE PELTIER CASE

The FBI still has some 100,000 pages of secret information on Peltier. Independent investigations and those by international agencies, however, place the story of this Anishinabe/Lakota man in the 1970s — dubbed the "prodigious decade" by some because it gave the world significant changes in music and considerably broad social movements, including the anti-Vietnam War movement.

Peltier was part of the American Indian Movement (AIM), a group committed to the progress of indigenous communities, based on the preservation of cultural pride. They were joined by the so-called traditionalists, tribes determined to maintain their customs, moral sovereignty and closeness to nature.

Those expressions of emancipation were never smiled upon [by the U.S. authorities]. Several members of these communities were killed, and after suffering various abuses, they held a protest in 1973 in the town of Wounded Knee, on the Pine Ridge reservation. They were savagely repressed, and although the government promised to investigate complaints filed by the victims, the reservation’s conditions became worse, to the extent that the two protesting groups were unable to enact their ancestral ceremonies together.

In the three years that followed, AIM members experienced many attacks, including their houses being burned down, and were the targets of shots fired from moving vehicles. They were injured or murdered. A campaign against them was organized depicting them as violent, lawless individuals in order to justify the attacks perpetrated by paramilitary forces with the consent of the FBI. According to diverse sources, at the time, it was the FBI that headed the fabrication of a fraudulent scheme to justify any action against these indigenous individuals.

The growth of such a heavy, artificial environment led the traditionalists to call on the AIM activists to return to their reservations and protect them from constant, often deadly attacks. Those who responded to that plea for help included Leonard Peltier, who together with 12 others, camped out on the Jumping Bull Ranch, where a number of families were living. That’s where he was on June 26, 1975, when two FBI agents burst onto the scene in unmarked vehicles. They claimed they were following an Indian who had participated in an assault and robbery.

Residents and police were soon involved in a shoot-out. The police asked for backup from special troops of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They surrounded the farm, but Peltier was able to get a group of adolescents out to a safe place under the crossfire, which ended up wounding the two FBI agents. Peltier was accused of having finished them off as they lay injured.

Immediately, three AIM leaders were blamed for this outcome: Dino Butler, Bob Robideau, and Leonard Peltier, along with Jimmy Eagle). Butler and Robideau were found innocent by the jury for having acted in self-defense, admitting that the atmosphere of alarm and unease prevailing on Pine Ridge explained why they would have shot back at police fire.

The FBI’s reaction to this verdict was rage, and it withdrew charges against Jimmy Eagle (the man originally pursued by the FBI agents) so that the "full prosecutive weight of the Federal Government could be directed against Leonard Peltier," according to memoranda that were accidentally leaked. This means they were capable of releasing from all guilt the individual who may have been, consciously or not, the trigger of these events, in order to transfer their complete revenge to the man who was a very prestigious and popular activist for his people. In order to guarantee the outcome they finally obtained, they ensured that Peltier was tried by a different judge than his comrades, one who stood out for the rigidity of his considerations.

Peltier was extremely dubious about the quality of the trial to which he was to be subjected, based on the highly prejudiced approach and zeal for vendetta that was in the air in the region. He traveled to Canada, where he was arrested some months later. In order to extradite him to the United States, testimony against him was presented from a woman who despite not knowing him, claimed that she was his girlfriend and that she saw him shoot at the agents. She was not even present at the site during those events, and later retracted her statement, saying that her false testimony was given under threat and pressure from the FBI.

In any case, Peltier was extradited, and a rigged trial took place in the United States (Fargo, North Dakota, 1977), after which Peltier was sentenced to a double life term in prison, despite expert testimony that the bullets that killed the two agents were not fired from his gun.

According to Amnesty International, "after studying the case in depth for many years… different aspects continue to be of concern regarding the impartiality of the proceedings that led to his conviction, such as the evidence linking him to the point-blank shooting and the coercion of an alleged eyewitness."

Along with about 50 U.S. congress members and several members of the Canadian Parliament, Amnesty International joined with other groups demanding a new trial for Peltier, this time an impartial one, given that it is clear that the defendant suffered manipulation in the case brought against him for his extradition in 1976, for which the prosecution has retained "potentially key" ballistic evidence that "could have helped defend Leonard Peltier."

A SCAPEGOAT?

Some hold that Peltier served as an element of contention against a movement that was taking shape and becoming strong at a time when the government thought it had squelched all indigenous attempts at demanding their rights. The government was particularly desirous of putting a stop to indigenous resistance because of the development of mega-energy projects on lands allocated to tribes via signed treaties.

A large number of the treaties reached with tribal chiefs — when a fatally dissolute level of decorum still existed — were broken at different times and in their overwhelming majority. By the time the abovementioned events occurred, the idea was to repeat these violations of promises made, but it encountered the opposition of new generations united with their elders, convinced that living in harmony with nature was better than destroying it, and considering that there was no reason to cede on rights that had already been considerably diminished, and that it was preferable to defend them no matter what the cost.

Over time, it has been learned that the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota was in reality selected for a "peacekeeping" paramilitary operation by the FBI, which would have taken all of the counterinsurgency war methods it has implemented in various countries, to apply them against nonconformist Indians at a time when various protest movements of oppressed minorities were converging in the country, standing up for their rights.

By the mid-1970s, some 60 members of the AIM or its followers had been killed. Given that the previous "warnings" carried out did not have the desired results, they went on to escalate the attacks and injustice. The context of violence was of such magnitude that the leaders and elders of the Oglala tribe created the Jumping Bull encampment — where the fatal events later occurred — to protect their families from the deadly police and paramilitary operations.

The fact that the people were capable of organizing and resisting was intolerable to the "white authorities," who sought a pretext and a scapegoat to put a stop to indigenous attempts at resistance. They had Peltier in their sights because of his popularity. Later, he became the right man to be used in their plan of containment. Asked why he had not been given another trial, he said, "They know that if I get a new trial, they have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning."

Before his case was sent to the Federal Parole Commission, he was beaten in jail, as a way of trying to dampen his activism in prison for noble causes. It was also meant to lay the bases for putting him in solitary confinement, alleging that he was centrally responsible for the disorder, and depicting him as an inveterate rebel after three decades of attempting to wear him down. That was how he was to appear before the board that was to evaluate him, in a position that was not at all advantageous.

In July 2009 he was assessed for parole, always denied. His lawyer spoke in favor of parole, citing his good conduct and the promise of the Turtle Mountain tribe to take him into their fold.

The parole denial was based on the idea that releasing him would "disregard the seriousness of his offenses and would promote disrespect for the law." The commission ignored the fact that one of the former defendants had admitted shortly before that he had fired the shots that killed the agents.

This means that not even the conclusive evidence of that spontaneous confession was enough for those who used and maintain the opinion that they are making an "example" out of him, so that others do not dare to be defiant again.

It is shameful to know that Peltier’s next parole hearing is in 14 (!) years. The commissioners know that Peltier is suffering from several serious conditions, and is receiving poor medical attention, meaning they could become worse or even cause his death while incarcerated.

Prominent individuals from the arts, the law and politics, as well as ordinary citizens from many countries, are demanding clemency for such a glaringly twisted case, taken to an extreme of notorious perversity.

At this time, a letter to Barack Obama is circulating with the request that Peltier’s case be reviewed, or freedom should be given to a man who never should have been subject to such a prolonged and illegal sentence. There are no great hopes that this president, among all the others who were similarly petitioned, will be the one to absolve him.

February 5, 2010

granma.cu

By Wellington C Ramos:


In almost all the countries in the English-speaking Caribbean crime rates have increased to the point where the governments are frustrated and baffled by the new numbers. Not only have the crimes increased but, when it comes to bodily harm and theft, they are more violent in nature.

In Belize, where I am from, it is gang violence, murders and violent robberies. The rate of crime in a couple months last year may have influenced the early departure of the then Commissioner of Police Gerald Westby, to be replaced by a new Commissioner Crispin Jeffries. Yet, despite the change in the top brass, the difference in numbers is minimal.

In order to solve crimes, the government must find out the true reasons why people choose to commit crimes and come up with a crime prevention plan, which should include the following measures: beat patrol, community policing, criminal intelligence, arrest and conviction of criminals, reforming prisoners, criminal investigation, rehabilitation of deportees, drug eradication, drug rehabilitation, drug treatment programs, youth programs and a confidential Hotline number with rewards.

After a crime is committed, the law enforcement authorities must spend a lot of time trying to detect who committed the crime, which could be avoided if more resources are invested in crime prevention.

I was a member of the Belize Police Force from 1973 to 1978. In those years that I served I gained experience working in most of those areas that I outlined earlier. Orange Walk District had most of the violent bodily harm crimes and Belize City had most of the theft. Residents of Orange Walk District had the economic means to survive and did not need to engage in petty theft. However, the bodily crimes were due to arguments over drugs and bar quarrels that led to outright violence.

Today, I do not know what the current statistics are but, from what I have read in the news, Belize City has taken over crimes in all categories. I worked in Orange Walk District from 1974 to 1977 as a Criminal Investigator and we had a lot of unsolved murder cases. Many of these cases could have been solved if more resources were given to the Orange Walk Police Department. This District is huge and has many villages and people living in them.

I think that people who engage in criminal activities commit crimes out of desperation, make it their lifestyles or have no regard or respect for the citizens of their countries. A government that cannot protect its citizens from these individuals, in a matter of time itself will become a victim of these people.

The population of Belize is small and most Belizeans are related to one another or know each other. Belizeans are not a violent set of people because I have travelled the entire districts and have met Belizeans from all walks of life. I am strongly urging this government to make crime their number one priority this year.

Belizeans coming from the United States are a new breed of criminals with experiences that the average Belizeans do not possess. The government must have a program in place for these individuals that is separate from the Belizean criminals. Weapons of all sorts are coming into Belize from the neighboring countries and that trafficking has to end. Most of the weapons are far more advanced than the weapons available to the members of the Belize Police Force.

If we come together as a people and make up our minds that we are going to address this problem together as one big family, then we will see a major reduction in our crime rates and a better way of life for all Belizeans. The people who visit Belize and the other Caribbean countries have similar experiences in their own countries. The governments should also bring the political leaders from all the political parties and community organizations into this effort because it is a problem that affects every citizen of our country.

February 6, 2010

caribbeannetnews

By Clarens Renois:


PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AFP) -- The death toll in the Haiti quake has swelled to 200,000, Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said Wednesday as angry protests over the slow arrival of aid flared on the rubble-strewn streets.

More than three weeks after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake, Bellerive said his tiny Caribbean nation had been ravaged by "a disaster on a planetary scale" and detailed the tragic toll suffered by his people.

Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive sits in his office during an interview with AFP on the situation in Haiti following last month's earthquake. AFP PHOTO

"There are more than 200,000 people who have been clearly identified as people who are dead," he said in an interview with AFP, adding that another 300,000 injured had been treated, 250,000 homes had been destroyed and 30,000 businesses lost.

At least 4,000 amputations have also been carried out due to horrific crush injuries -- a shocking figure which is likely to strain the impoverished nation's already meager resources for years to come.

Bellerive said he has proposed the formation of an "emergency government" in Haiti to focus on the crisis, but insisted that the authorities, devastated as their ranks have been by the disaster, remained "in control of the situation."

Despite a massive aid operation, a lack of coordination and the sheer extent of the damage have hampered the distribution of food and water leading to mounting tensions among a million people left homeless.

"The Haitian government has done nothing for us, it has not given us any work. It has not given us the food we need," Sandrac Baptiste said bitterly as she left her makeshift tent to join angry demonstrations Wednesday.

In separate protests after a tense night when shots were fired in the ruined capital Port-au-Prince, some 300 people gathered outside the mayor's office in the once upscale Petionville neighborhood.

"If the police fire on us, we are going to set things ablaze," one of the protesters shouted, raising a cement block above his head.

Another 200 protesters marched toward the US embassy, crying out for food and aid, and about 50 protestors also gathered late Tuesday outside the police headquarters where the Haitian government of President Rene Preval is temporarily installed.

"Down with Preval," demonstrators shouted at the president who has only spoken to the people a few times since the disaster struck.

"There are no tents! There is no food!" protested Bousiquot Widmack, while demonstrators who said they were government workers complained their homes had collapsed, they had not been paid, and that they had nothing to eat.

Meanwhile, a group of US Christians were to learn Thursday whether they would be charged with trying to illegally take children out of the quake-stricken nation, a judge told AFP.

The 10 Americans from the Idaho-based Baptist group New Life Children's Refuge have been detained in Haiti since the weekend after they tried to take some 33 children out of the country to neighboring Dominican Republic.

The case has drawn the attention of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who said Wednesday it was "unfortunate that, whatever the motivation, that this group of Americans took matters into their own hands" in trying to take the children across the border.

"We are engaged in discussions with the Haitian government... and looking for the best way forward on this," she added.

Amid the mounting frustration in Haiti's streets, UN chief Ban Ki-moon asked former US president Bill Clinton to assume a leadership role in coordinating the international aid.

"The trick is to get the Haitian people back where they can stop living from day-to-day and start living from week-to-week or month-to-month and then start the long-term efforts," Bill Clinton said.

An aid group warned Wednesday against "quick-fix rebuilding" plans before sufficient studies had been done on how to best protect Haiti from future hurricanes and earthquakes.

"Right now the Haitian people need good quality temporary accommodation and emergency relief. But we are also looking at how we can help people to rebuild their lives over the next three years, leaving Haiti better prepared for future natural disasters," said Brendan Gormley, chief executive of the Disasters Emergency Committee, a British aid umbrella group.

For most of Haiti's one million homeless, the focus was on how to improve on the dire day-to-day conditions.

Marjorie Michel, the Haitian minister in charge of women's affairs, said neighborhood committees were reporting a rise in the number of rapes in the tent camps, although women were reluctant to make a formal complaint.

She said teams were being sent into the camps to try to deal with the situation, and promised segregated bathroom facilities would be installed in new camps.


Related article: Mistrust in the eyes of rescued Haitian children>>>

February 4, 2010

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