Ours has been a long struggle. It started, 509 years ago in 1503 when the first kidnapped African captives set enchained feet on what is now known as Haitian soil.

Oceans of our blood have poured and watered the soil to nourish civilized co-existence on this planet Earth and continue, this very minute, to soak the earth needlessly, simply because Haitians were the first to counter, in combat, European/U.S. biological fatalism, destroy their myth of white superiority and to do what even Spartacus could not.

How should Haitians mark this anniversary? Who should we confer with about our awesome burden, our plight, our long struggle to be treated as human beings by the European “discoverers” and settlers? About the U.N. soldiers’ massacres, rapes of our women, importation of cholera and repression of Haiti’s defenseless poor? About this insane Western force that attacks all that is not like itself, even though it had no attackers? About Bartholomew De La Casas’ “New World,” enmeshed in its own armor of materiality, caged in centuries of self-serving lies that defends itself endlessly from the planet’s masses, from truth? (See full text of HLLN’s regular Jan 1st essay at Another Independence Day Under Occupation .)

On the occasion of the 208th anniversary of Haiti’s Independence from European enslavement and colonization, beating back the French, the Spanish, the English, their US mercenaries and a US embargo to create the sacred trust for Blacks called Ayiti, we remember we are a BLACK nation as defined by Desalin, with a Vodun culture from mother Africa.

We remember Janjak Desalin (Jean Jacques Dessalines), Haiti’s liberator and his three ideals.

Having no wish for this sacred trust, called Ayiti (Haiti), to be a playground for Northerners or its best lands owned and enjoyed by other than the Descendants of Desalin’s revolution while the indigenous Haitian masses of Haiti are used and exploited, like the rest of Caribbean Islands, as mere props, maids, butlers, whores and sex receptacles for vacationers, or provide reason for the  non-living-wage enslavers and poverty pimping NGOs to feed their greed, Ayiti’s struggles for sovereignty, its own entrepreneurial lakou/konbit/viv lifestyle and self-determination continues. (See also,  Vodun Konbit and Vodun Lakou.)

Celebrating the Ancestors’  honor, humane values, struggles and triumphs, we remember Dessalines’ Law and that Blacks are the original peoples on planet earth, including Ayiti and the Americas. We re-MEMBER the Ayiti lives lost to earthquake 2010, crushed under the Bush bi-centennial occupation and now, with UN-imported cholera. We shall fight from generation to the next to maintain our humanity and dignity against this merciless Western storm. In 2012 the Haiti revolution shall continue to survive, block and expose Avatar Haiti’s oppression by NGOs, paid-to-lose-progressives, Haiti opportunists/betrayers, US/UN/and their client nation’s false benevolence. Justice lives in the inner spaces Haiti colonizes. Ginen poze.

Thank you to Janjak Desalin and the indigenous Haiti army for our freedom from 300 years of European enslavement and torture won by the Ancestors on January 1, 1804, 208 years ago. Thank you Manman Defile. (Yon oun kokennchenn kouwòn pou Defile. Lè nou sonje Desalin, nou paka pa wè Defile. Kouwòn pou Defile.)

Mèsi Papa Desalin – Thank you Father Desalin
(Thank you Father Dessalines by Morisseau-Leroy)

Janjak Desalin rejected the European institutionalized concepts and established, for the African masses in Ayiti, a nation that rejected Bourgeois Freedom.

“Bourgeoisie Freedom is where liberty, brotherhood, equality and democracy exist alongside or even in virtually the SAME SPACE as slavery, genocide, exclusion, exploitation, intolerance and tyranny – notably Black enslavement, exploitation and disenfranchisement in the Americas.”

Haiti’s founding father, Jean Jacques Dessalines (JanJak Desalin), said, “I Want the Assets of the Country to be Equitably Divided” and for that he was assassinated.

That was the first coup d’état in Haiti (Ayiti). The Haitian holocaust – organized exclusion of the masses, misery, poverty, endless debt and the impunity of the economic elite – continues with the Feb. 29, 2004 Bush bi-centennial regime change marking the 33rd coup d’état. Haiti’s peoples  continue to resist the return of despots, tyrants and enslavers who wage war on the poor majority and Black, contain-them-in poverty through neocolonialism’ debts, “free trade,” privatization, UN occupation and foreign “investments.” These neocolonial tyrants refuse to allow an equitable division of wealth, excluding the majority in Haiti from power and from sharing in the country’s wealth and assets.

Following Janjak Desalin’s assassination in 1806, under the long Mulatto and Eurocentric presidencies of Petion (12 years) and Boyer (25 years), the name Janjak Desalin was execrated, declared loathsome, cursed, marginalized and not allowed to be spoken. Neocolonialism had begun in Haiti, would be formalized with Boyer’s “Independence Debt” – the $22 billion Haiti was force, at gunpoint to pay to France after already winning their freedom, with the last slave-trade payment made in 1947 to US, the richest country in the world by Haiti, the most defenseless and poorest.) The legacy of the impunity and undemocratic offenses of this one class and sector of Haitian society, continues to this day. This Haitian economic elite with their foreign allies cannot accept the principal of one citizen-one vote because it would mean that they would lose their privileges and influence. Hence the Feb. 29, 2004 coup d’etat and current UN protectorate under Neo-Duvalierist Martelly which pursues the interests of foreigners and their black overseers in Haiti.

On this Jan. 1st Independence Day under occupation, Ezili Dantò/HLLN ask all free peoples to Demand France Pay back the $22Billion Independence Debt it forced Haiti to pay at gunpoint. Please sign our on-line petition demanding France pay Haiti back the $22 billion for the Independence Debt.

In addition to the Independence Debt that Haiti was forced to pay to France, back in 1915 during the first US occupation, “Ayiti was the only country, at that time in the Americas, that didn’t have its money backed by the US dollar. Our money was backed by gold. Our entire gold reserve was taken away (by the US Marines in 1915) for “safekeeping” we were told and brought to Fort Knox. It has yet to be returned back home. This was 1915. When some white person says “I want to go help the poor people in Ayiti. So I am going to bring a little bread and a little water for them.” Ask them: “Why don’t you just ask your government to give them back their gold?” ( — Bayyinah Bello )

Dessalines’s descendants hold a sacred trust. Our mission is to live free, not as dead zombies, corporate or U.N. sell-outs, servile to gluttonous and inhuman greed. “Kanga Mundele,” said the spirit archetype Ezili Dantò, the African warrior mother which spoke through that great mambo Cecile Fatiman, on Aug. 14, 1791 at Bwa Kayiman, the ceremony that began the great Haitian Revolution. Kanga Mundele means “kill the stranger” in Kikongo – “kill the stranger within,” “amongst us” – and also means “long live freedom.”  (Haiti Epistemology)

Indeed our freedom and the masses’ indomitable spirit and thirst for justice lives. Despite 509 years of almost incessant grief, Haitians are still here – standing on truth, living without fear. Nou La. We don’t get much press, but we’re here.

Desalin our healer and greatest teacher said, “I only want the braves to stay with me. Those who wish to become once again French slaves can make their way out of this fort. Those on the contrary who wish to die as free men may take their place around me” (Jean Jacques Dessalines, Haiti’s founding father, speaking at the battle of Crête-à-Pierrot, March 11, 1802.)

Our history of survival is our greatest asset and rallying point. We exist still because we have ALWAYS defined ourselves, extended ourselves, given value to ourselves, our life, strengths, ancestors, history and heroes, when the world’s greatest armies, media and superpowers have not.

January 1, 2012