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On March 7, 2012 Aljazeera uploaded a video where Al Jazeera’s
Kristen Saloomey interviews one of the UN-commissioned scientists from
the UN independent panel who investigated the source of the cholera
outbreak. Citing Herz’s reporting, ABC news wrote that Bill Clinton said, “I don’t know that the person who introduced cholera in Haiti, the U.N. peacekeeper, or [U.N.] soldier from South Asia, was aware that he was carrying the virus… it was the proximate cause of cholera. That is, he was carrying the cholera strain. It came from his waste stream into the waterways of Haiti, into the bodies of Haitians.”
Shifting blame off the UN, Clinton went on to say that, “what really caused it is that you don’t have a sanitation system, you don’t have a comprehensive water system…”
The ABC article, quotes U.N. spokesperson Kieran Dwyer sidestepping from the Clinton admission saying that “President Clinton… emphasized the importance of focusing on improving Haiti’s sanitation system and the fact that the United Nations and others are working hard to do this.”
Since these reports surfaced certain foreign pundits, have jumped to proclaim essentially that progress is being made toward the Haiti cholera victim getting justice, applauding Bill Clinton for his admissions, not inquiring about the “new information” referred to by Danielle Lantagne of the UN panel of experts, or relied upon by Clinton. When and how did it become available? Doesn’t the Haitian public have a right to all the facts about this contagious disease infecting over 5% of the Haitian population?
It’s like watching an accident happen in slow motion.
Like when the earthquake happened and battle-worn Haitians knew the US-UN and their “charitable” industry would take the opportunity to keep the billions collected, let the poor die, while clearing the land the slave-making Western countries been coveting for centuries in Haiti (for adding more dependency, more foreign hotels, resorts, one or two hospitals and schools and such, not accountable to the island people of Haiti). The earthquake is an opportunity, like the imported UN-cholera to pass through tyrannical US privatization policies and profit-over-people cruelties beyond imagination that they’ve been unable to get through for decades since the first US occupation of Haiti (1915 to 1934).
The grasping institutions, left after the 19-year US first occupation to carry through neocolonialism in Haiti finally broke with the demobalization of the Haitian army and popular election of Jean Bertrand Aristide in 1990.
A US-supported coup d’etat under Bush the father, took out Aristide months later. Former President Bill Clinton returned Aristide in 1994 to further stop the Lavalas popular movement, stop the flow of refugees, and most importantly to help re-image the Duvalierist thugs, thieves, local repugnant Oligarchs, suited tonton macoutes and neocolonial opportunists as “civil society” and/or impartial US trained “technocrats.”
On the second anniversary of the earthquake, commenting on the rape of Haiti since Bush-the-son completed his father’s return of the Duvalierist with the 2004 Bush regime change that took down the second term in office of President Aristide and deported him to Africa, Glen Ford from the Black Agenda Report, wrote:
“The horrific squandering of Haitian lives and earthquake relief and aid dollars by the occupying powers over the past two years are direct consequences of previous imperial crimes. ‘Since 2004, Haiti has been methodically stripped of its sovereignty, made into a protectorate of the United Nations,’ which is merely a front for the United States. ‘The earthquake of January 2010 was a natural phenomenon that happened to take place while a rape was in progress.’” (Haiti, Raped by the U.S. Since 2004, and Still Bleeding by Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report.)
Paul Farmer and Bill Clinton as UN Special Envoys to Haiti
With US key stakeholders like Paul Farmer and Bill Clinton as UN Special Envoys to Haiti (coming on board in 2009 shortly after the devastating Gonaives hurricanes and floods), another layer of US authority in Haiti was added that served the multiple purposes of: 1) putting a U.S. public face to the UN mission in Haiti, 2) using the international reputations of Farmer and Clinton to temper widespread Haiti criticism, claims against the UN peacekeepers for the sexual abuse of minors and public executions of unarmed civilians, 4) supplanting the spokesperson role of the Brazilian command in Haiti, as well as 5) hoodwinking the easily fooled, paid-to-lose-US-progressives. Add UN criminal negligence for importing the most virulent cholera bacteria to the Western Hemisphere into Haiti and the destruction of Haitian lives since 2004 has reached genocidal proportions.
As in the days of Western slavery on the Island and the first US occupation, Haitians are again disposable, prohibited the rights and obligations of self-defense and no rights the UN, US and their NGOs and private sectors will respect. White privilege, apartheid and racism reigns. The former slave-holding powers in the West and the UN Security Council that serves them are the biggest purveyors of impunity, violence, poverty, Clorox hunger, disease, human rights abuses, dictatorship, drug trafficking, human trafficking and apartheid in Haiti.
In just one year-and-a-half, more Haitians have been infected (526,000) with the deadly foreign bio-germ than were killed (30,000 to 100,000) under the combined thirty-year rule of Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier (1957 to 1986).
The largest political party has been excluded from the polls since the 2004 US regime change in Haiti. (Haiti, Raped by the U.S. Since 2004, and Still Bleeding.)
But hey, it’s like that old Kreyòl saying about Jews – se lan jwèt ou batize yon Jwif – it’s only in jest you’ll manage to convert a Jew. That’s dark Kreyòl humor about how hard it is to convert a Jew to Christianity – one has to make it a game, fool the person so that submersion in the waters of Christianity happens before the person really knows what’s going on. Meaning, in this context, Haitians would never so easily or consciously allow what’s happening today in Haiti, if it wasn’t hidden behind the abominable gleeful music of Michel (or is it Michael?) Martelly’s porn presidency and UN/Bill Clinton/Paul Farmer’s slick false international benevolence chords, strummed heavily in donor aid dollars, mixed with the heady cocktail of Washington’s approval.
Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, the OAS and even CARICOM, decreed the court jester, Michel Martelly as Haiti’s true president. Lawlessness under an election facade, band music, celebrity adrenaline – no veil needed. The US Ambassador recently decreed Michel Martelly is Haitian to stop a Parliamentary commission investigating strong evidence of his alleged American citizenship.
“Li se Ayisyen, li pa Meriken” said the US Ambassador Merten, despite eyewitnesses testifying to seeing Martelly in the US passport line upon landing at the Haitian airport. Of course, one wonders where the Haiti electoral commission charged with vetting candidates was when Martelly was a running for office and why these Senators didn’t object then?
Then again, nothing has been Constitutional in Haiti since the US-UN occupation began in 2004.
This passport fury is mostly theater. Distracting from the pillage of Haiti oil, natural resources, wealth and lands that goes on unabated, the billions in donor dollars to international NGOs for Haiti relief and recovery, unaccounted for.
Guns rule behind Santa Clinton’s white hairs and skinny Paul Farmers’ all pervasive praying mantis NGOs. Haiti swarmed and stung to death, again and again. It’s the NGO republic of the world. Haiti’s reality is what they and their USAID NGOs say it is. Indigenous Haitians who refuse to be pimped-out by the right or left wing missionaries from abroad are simply stepped over, co-opted, marginalized or destroyed.
Meanwhile, distasteful Haitian men and ridiculous Haiti women laugh and party at the palace with bad-boy Sean Penn, socialite Kim Kardashian or on luxurious cruise ships at carnival in Au Cayes. More than 500,000 earthquake victims remain homeless, the national palace still, tilting over, left in disrepair. Garbage mix with earthquake rubble on the Port au Prince streets, Clorox hunger ravages empty stomachs, the rainy season overflow rivers contaminated with UN cholera, blows tents and tart shelters into mud, people still drinking UN feces-laced river and ground water, dying, dying.
Haiti went from having zero cholera cases to the highest cholera rate in the world as the “charitable” foreign NGOs flourish behind guarded high gates. Poverty pimps living off the blood, gore and suffering. Lol, lol, lol – they laugh on. Practically every other week, there’s an international report of UN peacekeepers molesting and raping Haiti boys.
More notably, there’s no Haiti Parliamentary commission outraged and investigating, attempting to prioritize or protect Haiti’s most valuable treasure - its women and children.
This wrenching travesty, crushing anguish and horrific darkness visited upon a defenseless and humble Haiti peasantry and abandoned city residents with no antibodies to combat such demonic imported and local carnage is led forth behind two UN-US spokesmen and their reputed worldwide “good works.”
Truth, in a time of universal deceit
When Haitians give the coming retribution, I’d like to be alive when that justice day arrives.
To paraphrase George Orwell, in this time before justice comes, in this time when Haitians like me with passports but little institutional power and no financial support, in this “time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
The truth is that in this most difficult of Avatar times for Haiti, a celebrated Harvard doctor (the ultimate Jake Sully of our times) and a Yale lawyer known in his US administration for authoring “plausible deniability” – like “I did not sleep with that woman” helped to bring back US Duvalierist agents to power, helped to cover the pillage of Haiti’s natural resources irrespective of environmental harms behind UN/international guns, continues his Arkansas cronies’ greed with unfair trades. Tossed in a bio-germ that’s killing in genocidal waves in Haiti, all, off course, under a Barack Obama and UN veil.
These insects invading Haiti are reprobates, racist and narcissistic, analogous to the rich and high-born serial killers conducting their depravity at private clubs – gated compounds left alone by police because of the pathology of power, respect for old money and Ivy League reputations.
Their shameless reign is called Western civilization, hope for Haiti and the ultimate in technology-transfer and US democracy when its nothing if not high classed criminals disemboweling their defenseless preys in Haiti with everyone’s eyes wide open. Refusing to see. (Avatar Haiti part 2; Did Harvard scientists cover-up UN source of Haiti cholera? and Going Shopping in Haiti.)
US and Bill Clinton’s credibility
After the news about Clinton’s admission that a UN soldiers was responsible for bringing cholera to Haiti appeared, a woman with good conscience, wrote on my Facebook page:
“Why is Clinton’s admission news when Cuban medical services in Haiti made this same determination months ago?”
I add, the Clinton admission popped up right after the UN Security Council visited Haiti and notably after Ambassador Susan Rice, the U.S. Permanent Representative to the UN, made a similar statement, sort of foreshadowing Clinton’s admission.
What’s going on? What non-public information is Clinton relying on, that’s not in the UN investigative report, which now identifies the particular “person who introduced cholera in Haiti, the U.N. peacekeeper, or [U.N.] soldier from South Asia was carrying the cholera strain. It came from his waste stream into the waterways of Haiti, into the bodies of Haitians?”
Recall that Bill Clinton is a Rhode scholar, a Yale graduate, a former US president and a member of Mensa. Nothing he does is not thoroughly thought-out with multiple contingencies foreseen and planned for. Nothing. Expect that there are several escape routes being mapped out and prepared by the wrongdoers in Haiti and it’s definitely not for the benefit of Haiti cholera victims.
The question indeed is why would he, a UN official – the Special UN envoy to Haiti, suddenly, more than a year-and-a-half after the UN cholera outbreak and 10-months after the UN “independent” panel came out with their official findings, go to Haiti and make a seemingly haphazard public statement that it was a UN soldiers who likely brought the deadly cholera bacteria to Haiti, unleashing the outbreak? It’s not like Clinton has to answer a reporter’s questions. He’s managed not to address the UN liability for over a year now.
Just days before his statement, U.S. Permanent Representative to the UN, Susan Rice, called on the UN to take responsibility for the outbreak, urging it to “redouble its efforts to prevent any further incidents of this kind and to ensure that those responsible are held accountable.”
Those who are actually applauding either Susan Rice or Bill Clinton recent statements willingly fail to factor in the obvious fact that this UN occupation is a cover for the illegal US occupation of Haiti.
Said pundits’ credulity willingly help delay Haiti’s recovery of its sovereignty and willingly ignore the fact that nothing the UN does is not first approved by the US. That’s a period, no comma.
As Susan Rice herself said in an official statement before the World Affairs Council of Oregon,”(t)he truth is: the UN Security Council can’t even issue a press release without America’s blessing.”
Need I say more? OK, perhaps the entire Susan Rice statement is worth quoting. Susan Rice, the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, stated, inter alia, that:
“Some Americans believe the UN infringes on American sovereignty. Frankly, I am baffled by this concern. The fact is: the UN can’t tax us. It can’t override U.S. law. The UN can’t order our soldiers into battle. It can’t take away our Second Amendment rights. The UN can’t impose social norms on us. And it doesn’t begin to have any much-hyped fleet of secret black helicopters. The truth is: the UN Security Council can’t even issue a press release without America’s blessing. The UN depends entirely on its member states, not the other way around. When the UN stumbles, it’s usually because its members stumble—because big powers duck tough issues in the Security Council or spoilers grandstand in the General Assembly. As one of my predecessors, the late Richard Holbrooke, was fond of saying, “Blaming the UN when things go wrong is like blaming Madison Square Garden when the Knicks play badly.”” -Remarks by Ambassador Susan E. Rice, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, at the World Affairs Council of Oregon, Portland, Oregon, February 11, 2011.
Self-styled foreign experts or even native Haitians who applaud Clinton’s “admission” are hurting effective recovery. They willingly ignore there’s mostly no benevolence, no unselfish motives in US governmental actions towards the poor Haiti majority. None. Period, no comma.
“The United States has flexed every superpower muscle to prolong Haiti’s agony.”
*
In Haiti today we have the internal fight between the Haiti robbers of the peoples’ democracy – the lawless Martelly/Duvalier click, currently ruling solo, without Bill Clinton’s chosen Haiti Prime Minister – Gary Conille, who resigned. The Martelly newcomers are pushing to wrestle more trickle down pennies away from the equally repugnant internationally-imposed, Washington/UN-US Haiti technocrats. This tussle is evidenced most publicly with the issue raging in Parliament about the legitimacy of the Martelly presidency – if he is in fact a US or an Italian citizen. More particularly the question seemed centered on whether Michel Martelly ever used a US passport. Dual citizenship is not recognize in Haiti. (Haiti president denies dual citizenship.)
While the US plays its power game at the UN - through the Bill Clinton and Susan Rice statements on cholera and accountability – nowhere in any of these tussles between thieves of Haiti’s democracy, sovereignty and dignity are the best interests of the Haitian people or simple justice a factor.
Bill Clinton isn’t some hero in Haiti, nor is experimental-vaccine-pusher, Paul Farmer. (See, Paul Farmer, a total sell-out: Uses Haiti to sell Ineffective Cholera Vaccines.)
Bill Clinton is the UN envoy to Haiti, the Obama-appointed co-chair of the US earthquake relief fund, the effective head of the Haiti Reconstruction Commission at the UN in charge of donor country funds and how to use the monies for Haiti reconstruction. He is not separate from the UN or US officials running Haiti. No Associated Press or other embedded media spin will successfully separate Clinton from the officials responsible for the UN-MINUSTAH presence in Haiti no matter how many times they lead with titles such as, “Clinton Urges Officials to Stem Cholera in Haiti.”
| Felipe Luciano interviews Ezili Dantò on WBAI wake-up call, Friday, August 26, 2011 on UN-Cholera in Haiti, their latest denials…. *********
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