It is fair to say that the more we love our country the more we want it to be a better, more honorable country. Using this criterion, we can say that few people loved the U.S. as much as former senator Robert Byrd did. And only death could finally silence him.

Nobody was more vocal than Byrd in the opposition to the Iraq war, which he considered a disgraceful course of action that would have negative effects on the country. And he was one of the few to state that opposition as strongly on the Senate floor.

On March 19, 2003, addressing the nation soon after the bombing of Baghdad had begun, former president George W. Bush stated, “The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. We will meet that threat now, with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines, so that we do to have to meet it later with armies of fire fighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities.”

Thus was the beginning of one of the most costly wars, both economically, in the number of lives lost and in the U.S. social standing in the world that this country has ever faced. Senator Robert Byrd reacted with predictable horror to this course of action, and was one of the few to vote against the war.

Speaking from the floor of the Senate on the afternoon of March 19, Senator Byrd said, “…today I weep for my country. I have watched the events of recent months with a heavy, heavy heart. No more is the image of America one of strong, yet benevolent peacekeeper. The Image of America has changed. Around the globe, our friends mistrust us, our word is disputed, our intentions are questioned.”

“Instead of reasoning with those with whom we disagree, we demand obedience or threaten recrimination. Instead of isolating Saddam Hussein, we seem to have isolated ourselves. We proclaim a new doctrine of preemption which is understood by few and feared by many. We say that the United States has the right to turn its firepower on any corner of the globe which might be suspect on the war on terrorism. We assert that right without the sanction of any international body. As a result, the world has become a much more dangerous place.”

“We flaunt our superpower status with arrogance. We treat UN Security Council members like ingrates who offend our princely dignity by lifting their heads from the carpet. Valuable alliances are split.”

“After war has ended, the United States will have to rebuild much more than the country of Iraq. We will have to rebuild America’s image around the globe.”

In his address to the nation on the evening of March 19 former president Bush outlined the purpose of invading Iraq, “to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger.” Earlier that afternoon, on the Senate floor, Senator Byrd had stated, “The case this Administration tries to make to justify its fixation with war is tainted by charges of falsified documents and circumstantial evidence. We cannot convince the world of the necessity of this war for one simple reason. This is a war of choice.”

And while former president Bush and vice-president Dick Cheney insisted on finding lame excuses for the war against Iraq, Senator Byrd said in his speech, “The brutality seen on September 11th and in other terrorists attacks we have witnessed around the globe are the violent and desperate efforts by extremists to stop the daily encroachment of western values upon their cultures. That is what we fight. It is a force not confined to borders. It is a shadowy entity with many faces, many names, and many addresses.”

The Iraq war has proven to be an unrelenting tragedy not only for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi that were killed but also for the occupying forces soldiers killed and maimed. It is estimated that the total costs of veterans’ health care and disability may be higher than $700 billion. And Senator Byrd has been one of the earliest and strongest voices against this nightmare. His is a heroic voice that could only be silenced by death.

Dr. César Chelala is a co-winner of an Overseas Press Club of America award for an article on human rights.

Listen to the June 20th broadcast of Sundays at Five by clicking the play button below.

In 2009, the organization CARE supported over 800 poverty-fighting programs in 72 countries reaching more than 59 million people. On Sunday Kate and Ali had the opportunity to speak with Belén Cordovez, the coordinator of the LIFT UP Initiative in CARE Ecuador. Together they discuss the underlying causes of poverty in Ecuador and how solutions such as empowering women, forging partnerships, and building alliances help create permanent social change. Don’t miss Belén’s frank assessment of the real issues impacting women and children in Ecuador and why women’s empowerment is essential to ending violence, hunger, and maternal mortality.

And be sure to visit CARE online to learn more about the International Violence Against Women Act (I-VAWA) and to take action by reaching out to your members of Congress!

Guest Biography: Belén Cordovez is the coordinator of the LIFT UP Initiative in CARE Ecuador. Previously, Belén directed and designed the organizational and programmatic learning, communication and transparency strategy for CARE Ecuador’s Democracy and Governance division. Before joining CARE in 2004, Belén directed the Department of Social Sciences at the Colegio Menor San Francisco de Quito for 10 years, where she designed a comprehensive, multicultural Latin American history curriculum.

About the Broadcast: The WIP’s Executive Editor, Kate Daniels teams up with identical twin sister Ali Daniels to present Sundays at Five, a weekly radio broadcast on KRXA, Monterey Bay's Progressive Talk Radio station. The twins share stories and discuss topics ranging from campaign finance reform to the phenomenon of Facebook. Tune in every Sunday from 5-6 pm PDT or listen online. Podcasts of previous broadcasts are available on The WIP Talk.

Make a cup of tea and join the conversation!

Jean-Jean, six, is part of the pack of kids that races to meet me each time I arrive at one internally displaced people’s camp in Port-au-Prince. Jean-Jean is usually at the front, all flashing eyes and big toothy grin, out-shouting the others or engaging in some ridiculous antic for my attention.

On one visit, Jean-Jean’s mother appeared dragging by the arm a very different little boy, slow and sad. Jean-Jean feebly raised his eyes to me; the whites were just one shade this side of mustard-yellow. Hepatitis.

• Jean-Jean, right, nearly joined the statistics of fatalities from easily treatable diseases - easy if one has the money, that is. Photo: Tory Field.•

“How long has he been like this?” I asked, trying to mask my panic.

“Five days.”

“And what have you given him?”

“Nothing. I know he’s supposed to be drinking a lot of water, but we don’t have any money just now.” Of course, that also meant no medication and little food – or perhaps, on some days, no food. Many of the people in these camps can go days without a single small coin touching their palm. Some have asked me if it’s true that Haiti has received billions of dollars in aid.

“Have you taken him to the doctor?”

I knew the answer before I asked. There are a few free clinics around town, but even then the tests and medicines usually cost money, and there is bus fare to be paid. “No, but I will,” she said. I bought a shopping bag full of small water sacks, two for a quarter; asked Jean-Jean’s neighbor, my friend, to keep an eye on him; finished my business at the camp; and moved on with the day.

Three days later, I returned. Jean-Jean had still not gone to the doctor. An all-too-familiar look on the mother’s face – some combination of shame and desperation - let me know that that had not been an option for her. This time we worked together and devised a way to get medical care.

This story has a happy ending. Jean-Jean is now well and back to being a heart-stealing mischief-maker.

But I’ve known it to go the other way, many times over. At one point, decades before the earthquake when I was living in a Haitian village, an unofficial part of my job description was to transport to the hospital babies and little children who were sick or dying, effectively, from poverty. Another part of my de facto duties was to collect from the morgue the bodies of some of those same small patients.

Late one night, someone knocked on my door. It was a woman I didn’t know, clutching a baby to her chest. The child’s wizened face, loose skin, distended stomach, and thin hair made it clear that she was in the final stages of dehydration and starvation.

Not having a car to drive her to the Leogane hospital forty minutes away, I instead wrote a note to the staff. By virtue of my knowing many of them through repeated visits there with children such as this, and of my U.S. citizenry and white skin, this note was all but guaranteed to give the infant quick access to health care.

The next morning, a neighbor came to tell me the baby had died. “Died?” Her admission was good to go and the treatment was free. “Didn’t they connect her to an IV?”

“No,” the neighbor said. “The mother didn’t go to the hospital. She couldn’t come up with the gourde” – at that time, twenty cents – “to take the bus there.”

An estimated 62 Haitian children out of each 1,000 die in the first year of life, and 85 of those 1,000 never made it to age 5. A Haitian child under 5 dies every hour from hunger, according to the World Food Programme, while chronic undernutrition of children under 5 is 24%.

The U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, says that there exists enough food worldwide to feed 12 billion people, almost double the number of the global population. Yet hunger is growing. And according to Ziegler, none of its causes are natural; they are all human-made. “Every child who dies from hunger is assassinated,” Ziegler commented.

Similarly, the World Health Organization's Commission on the Social Determinants of Health credits the “grand scale” of death from illness and disease to “social injustice.” The Commission attributes the fact that the majority of the world’s inhabitants do not have the good health that is biologically possible to “a toxic combination of bad policies, economics, and politics.”

If the government or more rich citizens of Haiti and other low-income countries, or the governments of wealthy countries, or the World Bank and IMF, valued the fate of poor children over profits and were willing to better share wealth and other resources, a lot more babies and children like that starving one who showed up at my door would be alive today. (See Paul Farmer’s excellent The Uses of Haiti for more on the role of the U.S. and other powers in getting Haiti to its current state.) More would be alive, too, if the international financial institutions and World Trade Organization did not strong-arm low-income counties into accepting policies that promote so-called free trade at any cost. The costs have been borne by an unknowable number of children.

The roots of profound suffering on the western portion of the island of Hispañola go back to 1492, when the Spanish colonists who arrived with Columbus enslaved the Arawaks and Caribs, and worked almost all to death, literally, within 27 years. This led the Spanish to replenish their labor force with captive Africans, which the French later imported at much higher numbers.

After the 1804 revolution, large Haitian landowners replaced the French landowners and the slaves became serfs. Neglect and exploitation by landowners and other wealthy classes were backed by successive regimes, whose raison d’être was to serve that small elite while keeping profits flowing to government officials. Violent security forces helped accomplish the job.

Social abandonment and economic exploitation by the Haitian government and elite have been mirrored in foreign policies. Their roots go back to Haiti’s beginning as a free nation, too, when the U.S. imposed a trade embargo so that word of the successful slave emancipation didn’t spread. Moreover, France kept Haiti in debt until it paid off the former colonist for lost income due to the revolution.

Post-earthquake politics offer new twists on the same theme. The IMF, for example, is apparently still considering whether it will convert a $100 million post-earthquake loan to a grant. (Surely the IMF doesn’t expect to ever collect this debt, but its creditor status gives it a lot of power over Haiti’s economy.) As another example, the disaster food aid which the U.S. procures from domestic agribusiness has further crippled local agriculture and the national economy. The U.S. and U.N.’s plan for reconstruction is based on a sweatshop model, a ‘race to the bottom’ in which the lowest wages, the fewest health and safety standards, and the worst possibilities for unionizing are considered advantages for the industry.

All of these historic and global forces converge to affect whether a child like Jean-Jean survives.

But alternatives do exist. As the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food and the World Health Organization indicate, the suffering with which Haiti and other low-income nations are branded is not inevitable. It is the result of economic and political choices by a few. But other choices can be made that will yield different outcomes. Progressive Haitian social movements – the grouping of women’s, youth, student, farmer, street vendors, and many other sectors – are advocating those other choices. They are urging the Haitian government and international community to adopt policies and programs which can produce a more just and equitable future. They are demanding that all citizens, not just a few wealthy ones, be active participants in the process. (For more about alternative redevelopment options in Haiti, see other articles in this series, including: Post-Disaster Reconstruction: Putting Haitian Citizens into the Equation; A Future for Agriculture, A Future for Haiti; Haiti: “Post-Disaster Needs Assessment” - Whose Needs? Whose Assessment?; and Raising Up Another Haiti.)

I have thought about the baby girl that died that fateful night in the village hundreds of times throughout my life. She is an indicator of the failure of our global society.

I have also wondered about the woman she might have become. I have always imagined that she would be fighting to create a new world in which no one dies for lack of twenty cents. Today, I like to think, she would be out there working hard to ensure that the Haiti that is reconstructed doesn’t look anything like Haiti before the earthquake. She’d be making sure that the rebuilt Haiti is based on equity, rights, and democratic participation in a world in which all, not just a few, stand a chance.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Repeatedly, Muslim women have defied the stereotypes and proven that modest dress is their choice and a right they are fighting for from their governments, their societies, and yes, even from their husbands. Many of the women who cover the most are actually converts to Islam; Anglo-European women who have embraced the principles of modesty in the form of covering. In a recent article published by The Times Online UK, five female converts who were interviewed decided to adopt the hijab as a matter of choice. Despite being very vocal about their choices, the media and the politicians continue to ignore them and propose legislation to protect them from their own decisions. They are based on widely held misconceptions that Islam is inherently oppressive to women.

A significant portion of Europeans support some type of ban and cannot understand why a woman would ever choose to cover herself. It is likely they see the practice as something foreign, backwards, and forcibly imposed, however for me and many other Western Niqabis (women who wear the niqab), this could not be further from the truth.

Legislation banning the full face veil is presented under the auspice of protecting Muslim women, and that the burqa, as a symbol of oppression, should be banned in order for Muslim women to be liberated. The legislation, if taken at face value, may appear to protect Muslim women, but in fact it is ignoring the fundamental question of why women cover. For me this comes down to the freedom of choice.

I was born in Tennessee to Egyptian immigrant parents and have never lived outside of the United States. I entered college at 15 with the full support and encouragement of my Muslim father. At 22 I completed my Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, one of the top engineering universities in the world.

After a stint in the corporate world, in which I experienced firsthand sexual harassment and intimidation, I left to discover my spirituality, my femininity and my true self-worth. As a result I started to wear the niqab. I began to choose jobs that allowed me to work on my terms rather than in an environment that compromised my values.

I daresay there are few women in the West who don’t question their image, or have concerns about their weight, body measurements, skin texture and colouring. A woman’s body can easily become a commodity, either for her own vanity or someone else’s objectification. These are societal pressures that are put on women, but the majority of women really seek security, respect, love, and commitment.

I have found that modesty and Islamic dress, for me, gives a woman that sense of value, control, and security. Wearing a full face veil for the first time gave me an unexpected self confidence because I no longer cared what others thought of me, only how I thought of myself. For a Muslim woman who covers, her sexuality is under her control and expressed in the confines of her marriage in an atmosphere of commitment and respect. In this way modesty has for me and many others become a liberator and a source of empowerment.

This is not being recognized by the policy makers shaping proposed legislation, in fact, in their attempt to protect women, some European countries are taking away the freedom of choice they claim to promote. Legislators need to confer with the range of Muslim women in an attempt to understand the reasons behind the choice to wear the niqab. This will ensure that diversity is embraced rather than outlawed.

We must move forward into a new discourse that is neither gender or religiously exclusive. If proposed legislation is based on the grounds of protecting the rights of Muslim women, their voices must be a vital part of the debate. The current debates have, in part, lost sight of the real issues: a woman’s right to have a say and a freedom of choice.

Hebah Ahmed lives in the US with her husband and two children. She works to dispel the myths about Islam and Women through community presentations, is an Associate writer of MuslimMatters.org and heads Daughterz or Eve, a Muslim girls youth group in the US.

I still seem to be hearing the Mexican sportscaster shouting in the radio for more than one minute, “Dieguitooooo, Dieguitoooooo, Diego Armando Maradonaaaaaaa!” after the Argentine soccer player scored his second goal against the British during the 1986 World Cup that Argentina won beating West Germany in the final game. He had good reason to shout. Diego Armando Maradona (now Argentina’s coach at the World Cup) had scored his second goal after dribbling six British players (including the goalkeeper) in what is commonly known as “The Goal of the Century.”

Never mind that his first goal during that game was also the most infamous in soccer’s history since it was made striking the ball with his left hand. Maradona was initially evasive about that goal saying that it had been scored “a little with Maradona’s head and a little with the hand of God.” Since then that goal is known as the “Hand of God,” or “la mano de Dios.” Only in 2005 did Maradona acknowledge that he had used his hand on purpose and that he knew the goal was invalid but the goal stood, to the dismay of the British players.

As a special tribute to him, the Mexican officials at the Aztec Stadium where the game took place built a statue of him scoring the second goal and placed it at the entrance to the stadium. That helped ensure that he would always be remembered as one of the greatest players in soccer’s history. In March of 2010, The Times of London chose him as number 1 among The Greatest 10 World Cup players of all time.

For decades Diego Maradona has been the most admired (and for many the most reviled) sportsman in the world. But whether one likes him or not, nobody can deny that he is a unique character in the world of sports. In trips I took to several countries around the world I always found the same reaction after saying that I was an Argentine. Maradona! Maradona! people shouted. It could be a small city in China or a remote town in Africa. Everybody knew Maradona. And now, as the coach for the Argentine team in the South African World Cup, people are still talking about him.

He was an unlikely soccer star, since he is extremely short, although very sturdy. His two strong legs seemed to anchor him to the ground. He could start dribbling his opponents with maniacal speed and dexterity, as he did during the 1986 World Cup. He was a generous player, always sending the ball to a better placed teammate.

But great as his gifts as a player were, so were his personal shortcomings. While playing in Italy for the Napoli team he made it the most successful in its history leading it to winning its only two Italian Championships in 1986/87 and 1989/90 and the Coppa Italia in 1987. At the same time, however, he intensified his cocaine habit for which he was given steep fines and was suspended from soccer for 15 months in 1991. In 1994 he was sent home from the World Cup in the USA for using ephedrine. He retired from soccer in 1997.

He has suffered from serious health problems and gained considerable weight, in addition to continuing use of cocaine. In 2005, a stomach stapling operation helped him overcome his weight problem and after stopping his cocaine addiction he became a popular TV host in Argentina. In 2008, despite his lack of managerial experience, he was named head coach of the Argentine soccer team. Several defeats of the team in international games made many doubt his technical capacity as a coach.

But Maradona continues to be well… just Maradona. He is still his same defiant, arrogant self. Much as I dislike his antics I am still thankful to him. Years ago I was traveling in several Asian countries when I arrived in Bangladesh. After finishing my work there I was at the airport when a customs officer asked me if I had any cash with me. I told him that I had $2,000. The officer then asked me, “Where is the form that you have to fill?” Surprised I responded “What form?”

Upon hearing this, the officer started yelling at me, saying “You damned foreigners are all the same. You come to this country, make money, don’t pay taxes and then just leave, without caring about anything!” Startled, I started mumbling a response when he asked me, “Where are you from?” After I answered “Argentina” he said, obviously overwhelmed, “Oh, Argentina, Maradona, Maradona, just continue, Sir, please, there is no problem, no problem at all!”

César Chelala is a writer on human rights and foreign policy issues.

The Gulf oil spill is not only a metaphor for the habitat-killing greed of Big Oil; it fits the society-killing greed of the hate taxes movement of the last thirty years. When I open my mail box this week it is packed with special election campaign flyers for the state senate race in California.

One is published by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. On the cover appear the words “Politician John Laird’s Tax Hikes Hurt All of Us.” Above the words is a close up of the frightened faces of a senior couple who look like they’ve just been told calamitous news. Inside is an image of a worried and fearful young couple in soft focus with their infant child in foreground. The flyer announces “You pay the price for Laird’s tax Hikes.” A list of income, sales, property, utility, and payroll tax bills candidate Laird apparently supported as an assemblyman are presented like the counts in a grand jury indictment. The flyer accuses Laird of taking money that YOU could use to pay living expenses, of imposing higher costs on YOU for clothes, a car, a home and making YOU pay higher utility bills. The message is clear: Taxing YOU is evil.

The flyer doesn’t say that not taxing YOU means governments have deficits that compel them to borrow from China, allows public infrastructure to disintegrate, causes American education to fail to produce a globally competitive workforce, cuts back on public safety services of police and fire departments, and induces budget crises. Instead the flyer appeals to an ideology of selfishness and the retentive greed of citizens.

When will citizens and politicians remember that simple words of the United States Constitution that give Congress the power to “Lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises to pay the Debts and provide FOR THE COMMON DEFENSE AND GENERAL WELFARE of the United States…?” The founding fathers have a message for the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association: constitutional tax policy is designed to make the money that goes around come around.

I can remember my friend’s face when he told me that his daughter had been born with a severe mental disability. “It was as if somebody had pointed a gun to my head,” he told me. For as long as they have been known, mental disabilities (also called mental retardation) have been the cause of profound unhappiness in the parents of children born with them, as well as in the children themselves. But now there is hope.

An experimental drug made by Novartis, a Swiss pharmaceutical firm, has been shown to improve behaviors associated with mental retardation and autism in people affected with fragile X syndrome, the most common inherited cause of these mental disabilities. Although the results have been obtained in a small clinical trial involving only a few dozen patients, this finding offers the possibility that further advances could be obtained in the near future.

If further trials in larger populations produce equally good or better results, they could offer hope in the field of autism research, since between 10 to 15 percent of autism cases result from fragile X syndrome or another kind of genetic defect. Also, even though Novartis tested the drug only in adults, experts believe that it could be even more effective in young children, whose brains still in development are more likely to respond positively to the drug.

It is estimated that as many as one in 35 people in the U.S. are mentally retarded, which amounts to approximately 3% of the population. Also, every five minutes a child is born with mental retardation. The annual cost to the country is over $6 billion in special services and lost wages.

Mentally retarded children have impaired or incomplete mental development, and are limited in their ability to learn and also in their capacity to apply learning. Most of those affected have mild or moderate mental disability and with proper education, training and understanding they can become productive members of society. However, the limitations in cognitive functioning will cause them to learn and develop more slowly than children who are not affected by this condition.

Fragile X syndrome is caused by a genetic mutation in chromosome X in which part of the instructions in the gene are repeated several times. When that section of the gene is repeated 200 or more times, the body shuts off the gene. As a result, the protein that is normally produced by that gene is not produced any longer or if produced is defective. This is what causes the wide variety of symptoms among those afflicted with Fragile X syndrome.

The protein normally produced by chromosome X acts as a sort of coordinator of information among brain synapses (connections between nerve cells), helping to stop or slow down brain signaling at critical intervals. Regulating the flow of information among brain cells is crucial for the brain’s ability to learn and develop normally.

Until recently many researchers believed that the right and perhaps only approach to dealing with mental retardation was rehabilitation, not medication. The improvement in some patients’ behavior after administration of a drug opens a totally new panorama of possibilities. The new studies confirm some previous studies in mice with the fragile X mutation, that show that the drug was able to reduce some abnormalities such as seizures, atypical rates of protein synthesis and other molecular defects. If further authenticated these findings will show that however hard the steel wall of mental retardation is, it can still be broken.

Dr. César Chelala was a researcher in microbial genetics at the Public Health Research Institute of the City of New York.

The international community (here referring to nations and international organizations) has pledged or given $9.9 billion in relief and reconstruction aid to Haiti, since the earthquake on January 12, 2010. Citizens and non-profit agencies of foreign countries have provided billions more. The aid is many times the size of Haiti’s annual budget, which was $1.97 billion for the 2009-10 fiscal year.

• One use of aid in Haiti: boxes for vegetable oil and soldiers' meals are re-purposed as refugee housing.  Photo by: Julie Dermansky©2010, www.jsdart.com..•

If one looks close to the ground, in certain refugee camps and community organizations, one can see the donations of citizens and non-profits at work, supplying tents, food, and medical aid. A handful of progressive foundations are funding community, peasant, and advocacy organizations, as they work for an alternative rebuilding process, based on economic justice and the fulfillment of social needs. Social assistance and rebuilding projects are working best when communities are engaged in the planning and implementation.

Yet, for the most part, the impact of the dollars is imperceptible. Where is it going?

Much of the aid pledged has not yet arrived, and may never. A lot of it has gone straight back to donor nations, as with the $.40 on every US government aid dollar that paid for the US military presence in Haiti for, at least, the first two months after the quake. Untold dollars more go to US firms, like the agribusiness corporations whose surplus rice is being purchased by USAID to deliver as aid. Then there are fees and expenses paid to a small army of consultants working for foreign governments and international agencies. Many UN consultants, for example, slept until mid-March in a luxury cruise ship (the Love Boat), which the UN rented. Then, there is graft, corruption, and poor planning, all of which further redirects aid dollars away from desperate earthquake survivors, up to 1.9 million of whom are left homeless, hungry, and wet in tents during the rainy season.

What would Haitians like to see happen with the aid? We asked for opinions; here are a few.

Christine Miradieu is an unemployed mother of nine who lost her husband, one of her children, and her home in the earthquake. She now lives with six of her children in two tents in a field outside of the town of Gressier.

They tell me the international community gave $2 million dollars in aid. Where is it? [We suggest the figure is actually $9.9 billion.]

What? [Turns to her family behind her.] You hear? Nine point nine billion in aid. Now, who’s getting that? We haven’t seen any of it.

Lucien St. Louis is an agronomist by training who worked for many years with farmers through the Ministry of Agriculture. Now, he is employed by a European NGO, helping to direct disaster responses in several earthquake-impacted towns to those who most need them.

First, we want to say how much we appreciate all the citizens of the world who have paid attention to Haiti after January 12 and who have given whatever they could, whether money or solidarity. They make us know we’re not alone in this fight to reclaim our lives and rebuild our country.

This aid could be a marvelous thing, giving us the assistance we need to get back on our feet. It could help us build a different country, a country where everyone is recognized as a human being, a country where all children go to school, and no one dies for lack of decent medical care. It could help strengthen peasant agriculture, so farmers could stay in the countryside, where they could have work and feed the nation, instead of having to migrate to Port-au-Prince. It could help women do marketing and form cooperatives, so they could have an income for their family. It could provide decent housing for all, especially those who lost their homes in the earthquake, in communities that are close to all the services people need to live. It could strengthen the people’s institutions that are trying to build a new society and economy.

We haven’t seen any of this yet. But, we’re going to keep on fighting for it.

Ghislene Deloné (a pseudonym used at her request) is a health promoter at the clinic of the Center for the Promotion of Women Workers (CPFO). Prior to this job, she worked for eleven years as a seamstress in a multinational textile factory.

Now, we have the international community which came to Haiti, which is helping workers and CPFO get medicines. They’re distributing medicines; they’re doing free exams for the women at CPFO. Workers can now come and get the medical care they need, without having to pay anything. We are satisfied.

Marlène Jean-Pierre lives in Cité Soleil. She is a student in civil engineering and an organizer with women's and youth grassroots groups in Cité Soleil.

We don’t need more than social support. We need collaboration with all the foreign citizens who want to come help us Haitians, who want to give their support. We don’t need money coming into the country to create huge projects to bring about change, no. When that money comes, the population itself doesn’t receive it. It doesn’t ever get to the community.

They should find people within the community and divide it among them. But, the foreigners who came after the earthquake, they don’t know a single person. They come to this country and want to take action. They say, “I’ve brought you water! I’ve brought you food! Look at all I’ve brought for you!” But, they don’t know who to contact. So, they work through the government, or else, they choose someone to work with them, and that person gets to direct the aid whatever way they want. But, with someone who knows the country well, that work would be better supervised, they’d be able to see that the population is really receiving the aid directly.

We know there are billions of dollars coming to the NGOs now. It’s from that money the NGOs are paying their employees, that they’re buying gas for their cars; it’s with that money that they’re paying for their own security. The only thing we ask is that, whatever is left for us, that the work they do with it is done well. That’s all we ask for.

Carolle Pierre-Paul Jacob is a coordinator of Solidarity Among Haitian Women (SOFA). Among other things, SOFA provides health care and anti-violence support to women now living in refugee camps.

This is an international parade. The aid has been given in total chaos. The way it’s been run represents economic and political domination. It’s being done in a context where the symbols of state power are gone, and the government is basically nonexistent.

There are lots of ways we could have taken advantage of this moment, to create a minimum of social, economic, and political transformation. But, we haven’t had that chance, because of the domination of the foreigners.

Josette Pérard is the director of Fon Lambi, the Haitian-run branch of the Lambi Fund of Haiti. Josette has a long history of providing funding and technical support to women and peasant groups in Haiti and, prior to that, in the Congo.

The people want another system, so they can be treated as citizens in a country that belongs to them. They want their rights as human beings to be respected. But, with all the aid and programs, they’re treating people like children. It’s not possible. Who knows better than the people? They want to make decisions with themselves; they don’t want anyone to make those decisions for them.

What plan does the country have five months after the earthquake? People can’t sit in the mud in the camps all day; they can’t live like that. Now, they’re kicking people out of the tents to send them to other tents, without water or shade. There are no changes. The government is totally irresponsible.

We’re very happy that people are coming to help us, but there is no one to sit down with them to coordinate. This is because the state is inexistent. It doesn’t take its responsibility. People are saying, “Here’s what we need in the way of aid; here’s what we want to happen so we can have results.” But, each group comes up with its own program for reconstruction. If no one sits down together and comes up with one coordinated program, will there be one?

What makes me most angry is to see people sitting under the hot sun to get a half-sack of rice and a bottle of oil. Where are they going to cook food? They don’t have a stove to cook food with, and they can’t eat rice and oil only. They’re saying that aid recipients are selling the food, in order to buy a piece of bread with peanut butter, because they don’t have any way to cook the rice.

People are very dissatisfied. For weeks, there have been demonstrations in the streets against Préval.

Presto Deroncil has lived in Cité Soleil since 1977, where he is an informal (unelected) community leader.

Cité Soleil is a place where lots of money is spent, but nothing ever happens. It’s the place where everyone comes to make money, to get rich. After January 12, it got even worse. After January 12, everyone mobilized, the international community mobilized. Me, I thought that things were finally going to change. No way! I see things getting more difficult. I see there’s a lot of food distribution happening. At the beginning, it went well, but after a while things started getting looser, people started making money off it.

What hurts the most is that people from Cité Soleil have been working to have political representation, to have people who will represent them in the government. But, now, it’s those same people who are making a business [out of aid]. Imagine, really imagine – when a person is the leader in a community, there are a lot of things that person shouldn’t do. But, there are people who take those cards [aid vouchers] and make a fortune with them. They buy cars with them; they buy motorcycles. Something that was meant to help the people, and now they’re selling them. I think this has to change.

People are sleeping in the mud; they’re sleeping in garbage. When it rains, they don’t have anywhere to sleep. I think that the most important thing now is a public housing project within Cité Soleil.

I think that everyone, the international community that wants to help Cité Soleil, they must sit with the community leaders, with the population of this community. First off, they should listen to people, so that they know what they should work on. We know what we need.

Jacqueline Cherilus is a fourth-year medical student at Université Lumière in Port-au-Prince. On January 12, her school collapsed, killing many of her professors and classmates. Her home was damaged, and now she and her family sleep under a tarp, because they are afraid to be inside.

Americans and everyone who’ve sent tents, we’re tired of that stuff, those same tents and tarps. We need construction. You see how strong the rains are becoming? Tents can’t resist that rain. How long can we live in tents and tarps? You can’t live for two or three years under a tarp. We need houses. We’re going to have hurricanes soon and flooding.

The aid is poorly organized and poorly divided. There are lots of people who don’t receive anything. To have real aid, we need social change. Right now, they’re just giving us tarps, tents, and food.

We need health care. You see, in Briztou [a tent community in Pétion-ville] they only have one doctor for 25,000 people? And, there’s no educational reform. Children are still paying to go to school. Like my little brother, who still has to pay. How can other children, the ones who lost their parents in the earthquake, pay for school?

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Listen to the June 13th broadcast of Sundays at Five by clicking the play button below.

Kate and Ali talk with Nancy Sleeth, author of Go Green, Save Green, about our consumption habits in light of the BP oil spill. Nancy’s faith-based message offers hope as well as practical tips for what we can do today to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels.

Guest Biography: Nancy Sleeth is the Program Director of Blessed Earth. After a spiritual and environmental conversion experience, Sleeth and her family radically altered their footprint, reducing their electricity use to one-tenth and their fossil fuel use to one-third the national averages. Along with her husband, Matthew, Nancy now travels throughout the U.S. speaking and writing about faith and the environment.

About the Broadcast: The WIP’s Executive Editor, Kate Daniels teams up with identical twin sister Ali Daniels to present Sundays at Five, a weekly radio broadcast on KRXA, Monterey Bay's Progressive Talk Radio station. The twins share stories and discuss topics ranging from campaign finance reform to the phenomenon of Facebook. Tune in every Sunday from 5-6 pm PDT or listen online. Podcasts of previous broadcasts are available on The WIP Talk.

Make a cup of tea and join the conversation!

Doudou Pierre is on the coordinating committee of the National Haitian Network for Food Sovereignty and Food Security (RENHASSA). He is also a member of the International Coordinating Committee for Food Sovereignty, organized by Vía Campesina, the worldwide coalition of small farmer organizations. In addition, he is a member of the National Peasant Movement of the Papay Congress and the Peasant Movement for Acul du Nord. This week he will be heading North to the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit.

In the June 4, 2010, article, “Groups Around the U.S. Join Haitian Farmers In Protesting ‘Donation’ of Monsanto Seeds,” Doudou commented on the damage that Monsanto and other agricultural corporations could wreak on Haitian agriculture. Here, he speaks about how government investment in small farmers and in food sovereignty could impact Haiti’s future.

• Ten thousand Haitians, most of them peasant farmers, marched against Monsanto's recent donation of seeds and for food sovereignty on June 4. The banner reads in part, "Defend food sovereignty in our country and the planet." Photo credit: Alice Speri.•

We’re putting together a national network, RENHASSA, to show what our alternatives are today. The whole peasant sector is coming together to tell everyone about the policies we want. Our mission is to advocate for Haiti to be sovereign with its food and to promote national production.

We’re mobilizing politically for the policies we want. We publish articles and do community radio programs about our positions. We’re also doing media campaigns and having meetings to educate people about growing for local and family consumption as much as possible, instead of buying food from other countries. People are starting to recognize and change their habits to just buy local goods.

Now, what must be done: the state must exercise its responsibility toward its people. When we talk about reconstructing Haiti, we can’t just talk about houses. It’s got to be a whole plan. We have to talk about reconstructing land, about total reforestation.

First, we have to decentralize the Republic of Port-au-Prince, which got created during the U.S. occupation of 1915 to 1934. Services now exist only in the capital. People died during the earthquake for an identity card or a copy of a transcript, because they had to come to Port-au-Prince to get them. Services must be in all departments [akin to states]. All the people who are in the countryside have to have the resources to stay there.

Second, and this is the essential element, is the relaunching of agriculture in this country. We were almost self-sufficient until the 1980s. We have to fight and pressure the state, so it prioritizes agriculture. Otherwise, we’ll always have to depend on multinationals and non-governmental organizations for our food. The government has to take responsibility for that.

We’re not in favor just of food security, which is a neoliberal idea. With food security, as long as you eat, it’s good. But, we only produce 43% of our food; 57% is imported. We need food sovereignty, which means that so that everyone can eat, we produce it here at home. We could produce here at least 80% of what we eat.

You can’t speak of food sovereignty without speaking of ecological, family agriculture. We need that and indigenous seeds. We need for peasants to have their own land.

We have threats from multinationals, mainly to grow jatropha [whose seeds produce oil which can be used for biofuel]. The Jatropha Foundation is lobbying hard to start growing. Jatropha puts us at risk, because we don’t have enough land to be able to divert some toward biofuel. Haiti is only 27,760 square kilometers. Their plan would have us produce even less food and would force peasants to be expropriated. Plus, they’d be using a lot of water, which could create an ecological disaster. It’s a death plan against the peasants.

We’re mobilizing people against growing biofuel. Last October, when the government was considering giving contracts to grow jatropha, we held a big march and sit-in; we gave a petition to parliament. We said, “No, Haiti’s land is for growing food.” We met with the minister of agriculture and the World Food Program.

We’re also mobilizing against GMO seeds, and we’ve just declared war against Monsanto. This battle has just begun.

Besides food sovereignty, our other main priority is integrated land reform. We can’t talk about food sovereignty, if people don’t have land. They have to have land to be able to market; that’s the only way we can get away from food aid. Our plan is to take the land from the big landowners and give it to the peasants to work. And the food has to be organic, without any chemical fertilizers which destroy the land. We don’t use anything [unnatural in our cultivation process].

Now, even if people have a little handkerchief of land, they don’t have the technical support to let them plant. The state has to give us credit and technical support and help us store and manage water. Préval said he was doing agrarian reform in his first term. We called it agrarian demagoguery. He just gave out a few parcels, divided into very small plots, to his political clientele and political party, even to people who weren’t in Haiti. And, his government didn’t offer any technical support.

That’s not what we need. The agrarian reform we want is for those who work the land to have the right to that land, with all its infrastructure.

The cultural reality of Haiti is that peasants each want their own little piece of land to produce their own food. But, there has to be cooperative land. Peasant organizations can create collectives to produce food for export and make money, but for that there has to be integrated land reform with technical support, credit, water, everything. We must have government support.

Right now, the government doesn’t even exist for us. It’s saying to the international community, “Here’s our country. Come take it.” They’ve given away the whole country, and now we have [U.N. Special Envoy Bill] Clinton, who is a tool of the big multinationals. So, on top of all our other fights, we have to fight to change the state.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Predator drones are equipped with large and powerful cameras that beam real-time images to their operators. Last February, a Predator crew operating out of Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, asked for an air strike against three vehicles with males supposed to be insurgents. An OH-58D Kiowa helicopter fired Hellfire missiles and rockets which destroyed the three vehicles. Instead of insurgents, 23 innocent men, women and children were killed and 12 more were seriously injured.

In a scathing report released on May 29, the American military blamed the “inaccurate and unprofessional reporting” by a team of Predator drone operators that led to the strikes. This episode illustrates the serious risks involved in the use of drones, whom many law experts consider violate rules of war. Predator drones are extensively used in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where they track and kill suspected insurgents, sometimes with their own missiles.

A report by the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Philip Alston, makes a thorough assessment on the effect of drones, whose use has provoked significant controversy.

Drones’ proponents argue that since they have significant surveillance capacity and great precision, they are able to avoid collateral civilian casualties and injuries. They also state that since drones may provide the ability to conduct aerial surveillance and to gather “pattern of life” information, they may allow operators to distinguish between peaceful civilians and those engaged in direct hostilities. The above episode is a clear demonstration of the fallacy of this argument and of the dangers to civilians of using such lethal weapons.

According to the Alston report, the main concern about drones is that they make it easier to kill without any risk to a State’s forces. I believe that an even greater risk is the process of trivializing war, making it thus a deadlier, more dangerous activity since it affects not only those who are target but also those who direct the operation and for whom war becomes no more significant than a video game.

An additional complication to the use of drones is that in many cases international forces are too often uninformed of local practices, or too credulous in interpreting information, to be able to arrive at a reliable understanding of a situation, wrote Michael N. Schmitt, a Professor of International Law at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, in Germany.

According to Schmitt, precision warfare such as the one carried out by drones intersects (or has the potential to interact) with international humanitarian law in four specific areas: the prohibition of indiscriminate attacks; the principle of proportionality, the requirement to take precautions in attack; and perfidy and other misuses of protected status.

Precision attacks as carried out by drones may violate international humanitarian law’s tenet of distinction, as stated in Articles 48, 51 and 52 of Additional Protocol I. As indicated by Schmitt, distinction has been cited as a “cardinal” principle of international humanitarian law by the International Court of Justice.

CIA officers are concerned that the use of drones will backfire and may help Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders recruit more militants. “Some of the CIA operators are concerned that, because of its blowback effect, [the drones’ program] is doing more harm than good,” said Jeffrey Addicott, former legal adviser to U.S. Special Forces in an interview with Inter Press Service.

Presently, several countries including China, France, India, Israel, Iran, Russia, Turkey and the United Kingdom either have or are seeking drones with the capability to shoot laser-guided missiles. If the use of these dangerous weapons becomes more frequent, so will the safety of innocent civilians and violations of international humanitarian law.

César Chelala is a co-winner of an Overseas Press Club of America award for an article on human rights.

The following is a testimonial from Ms. Gulnaz Joseph, a resident of Saif-ul-Murry Goth, Pakistan, detailing how personally cultivated produce has improved her and her family’s health and quality of life. This interview has been transcribed by Mansha Noor, a focal person in the livelihood program of Caritas Pakistan Karachi.

My name is Gulnaz and I have passed matriculation. I have four children and they all go to school. Both of we do jobs. We are the residing here in Saif-ul-Murry Goth for last five years.

We were very fond of cultivating vegetables and we used to cultivate the vegetable at our home, but we used to shy. The people used to say that they work so hard and earn enough money but still they cannot buy the vegetables from the market.

• Photo courtesy of the author.•

When Caritas Pakistan Karachi started their kitchen gardening program in Saif-ul-Murry Goth and organized the Training of Trainer (TOT) on Kitchen gardening in February 2010, I am became aware and got training about who to grow various vegetables and home for self-consumption and theses vegetables are chemical-free, which improved our health and nutrition. My interest have been increased more to cultivate the various vegetables at home.

We both of us after the job we dig the soil and taker of the cultivated vegetables. We use the water of washed pots, utensils and clothes for growing vegetables and we suggest to other people also use the same water in a better way.

• Photo courtesy of the author.•

Those who used to laugh at us now they are ahead of us in cultivating the vegetables. Once a week we surely cook our home made vegetables which are free from chemical and improved our health and Nutrition. This reduces our monthly expenses which we used to spend for buying vegetables from market. Our tenant also takes vegetables twice a week from us for cooking.
I am personally very thankful for Caritas Pakistan Karachi and its Livelihood Program, we especially thank animator, Javed Iqbal who provided an opportunity to learn the benefits of kitchen gardening and to make aware about the hazards of the chemical vegetables. Kitchen gardening training helped us a lot. We have enough spaces to grow the vegetables but we were lacking the knowledge, methods and techniques to grow the vegetables at home.

It’s amazing to me that we’re supposed to understand Haiti without ever hearing from Haitians. - Beverly Bell

Listen to the June 6th broadcast of Sundays at Five by clicking the play button below.

Kate and Ali talk with Beverly Bell about the current situation in Haiti. Beverly reports that Haitians themselves do have a clear and strong agenda for their future, despite a lack of coverage in US media. While living conditions for many remain dire, Haitians recognize the opportunity to build a better Haiti from the ground up. The question is, will international organizations seek input from Haitians regarding Haiti’s future? So far the answer is no.

Guest Biography: Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

About the Broadcast: The WIP’s Executive Editor, Kate Daniels teams up with identical twin sister Ali Daniels to present Sundays at Five, a weekly radio broadcast on KRXA, Monterey Bay's Progressive Talk Radio station. The twins share stories and discuss topics ranging from campaign finance reform to the phenomenon of Facebook. Tune in every Sunday from 5-6 pm PDT or listen online. Podcasts of previous broadcasts are available on The WIP Talk.

Make a cup of tea and join the conversation!

A slogan of Haiti’s popular movement – a grouping of many organized sectors, from community-based journalists, to cooperative street vendors, to children’s rights advocates – is ‘Another Haiti Is Possible.’ Most Haitians we speak with, whatever their sector or political persuasion, have very clear ideas of what a different Haiti could look like and what would be required for its construction. Here are some of those ideas.

Jean Jores Pierre is student of economics at the State University of Haiti and an intern at a policy advocacy organization. An orphan, when Jores’ home collapsed in the earthquake, he began sleeping in a tent in the yard outside the office of his organization. He is now living with relatives in Port-au-Prince.

• It's not just Haiti's infrastructure that needs to be reconstructed, but its economy, society, and polity as well. Photo by: Julie Dermansky©2010, www.jsdart.com•

The catastrophe of January 12 showed clearly how poorly the country has been managed. At the core of the problem has been the complete exclusion of those who have always dreamed of a Haiti which is based on solidarity between people. We’re talking about all those who have decided to fight to change the conditions of their lives and their compatriots’ lives.

Today, to get past the problems, we have to envision another Haiti, based on the participation of everyone, where women, peasants, and marginalized people have a place in society. Where solidarity serves as the basis of all national decisions. A sovereign Haiti that can take its destiny in hand, with a clear perspective of how to raise up all Haitians without distinction.

Rosnel Jean-Baptiste is a member of the national coordinating committee of Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen (Heads Together Small Haitian Peasants), a national organization of agricultural workers. He goes back and forth between his home in the countryside and the organization’s headquarters in Port-au-Prince.

We have to deconstruct the capital by supporting agriculture in the countryside and doing land reform, so that people have land to work and can live there. We have to bring services to the countryside, too, not just have a government representative in each rural section, like we do now.

Re-envisioning Haiti… it’s not houses which will rebuild Haiti, it’s investing in the agricultural sector. If the country doesn’t produce, our farmers won’t be able to survive. And we’ll always have to depend on others.

But if the government hasn’t been able to do anything after [the earthquake of] January 12 to resolve the problems, I don’t think they’ll do it for us now. It’s up to us, social movements, to unite ourselves to change the situation of this country and to change the model our state.

Jacqueline Cherilus is 22 and a fourth-year medical student at Université Lumière in Port-au-Prince. On January 12, her school collapsed, killing many of her professors and classmates. By sheer luck, she wasn’t there. Her own home did not collapse, but it was damaged. Now, she and her family are afraid to go inside, so they sleep under a bright-blue tarp instead. Her university has since re-opened in a new location, and every day, she and her surviving classmates spend money and hours taking several buses across town. But, the professors haven’t shown up yet.

You’ve asked the wrong person. I’m not a political person, I don’t know a lot about these things. If you want me to think like a good Haitian patriot, then I’d say we need social change. Social change that can bring about political change. We need a revolution in the political milieu. I don’t mean an armed revolution or anything like that, but we need to demand what we really need. Life is too expensive; we need to bring prices down. Everyone should have access to what they need.

It’s the people first who can bring about change. They can make demands of the government, so the government can put pressure on the international community.

Yannick Etienne has been a labor rights organizer with the grassroots group Workers’ Struggle (Batay Ouvriyè) for many years. She speaks perfect English, having attended university in the U.S. in the late 1960s, where she also engaged herself in the anti-Vietnam war and Black power movements. She moves a lot around industrial zones in Port-au-Prince and elsewhere.

In re-building Haiti, the people are not being consulted. Yet, they have lots of ideas about what they don’t like and what kind of Haiti they would love. They say, “We would like it to be totally different.” We have to change social relations, change exploitation, change rural environmental degradation, change the control by the big land owners and the capitalist class, all those involved in import-export commerce. Those people have been ruling the country, and look what’s happened to it.

We need workers’ rights and social support in the factories, and workers have to be able to determine the environment they want to work in. We need to get rid of peasants working on halves [sharecropping where the farmer gives half of his produce to the landowner]. We have to have land reform. It’s very important to make sure that small peasant get land to work and get the technical assistance they need. We have to offer peasants alternatives in the rural areas and the cities, so they don’t have to cut trees to make charcoal.

People are saying, “If we don’t organize ourselves, these camps could become permanent places to stay.” We know that provisional things in Haiti always become permanent. People have to mobilize to make sure they build real homes, dignified places.

We have to know what we’re fighting for. The earthquake gives us an opportunity as a movement, to continue our organizing, to push for social justice, and to unify the people to take change into their own hands.

Nixon Boumba is an organizer with the Democratic Popular Movement (MODEP by its Creole acronym) and with students at the School of Social Sciences at the State University of Haiti.

He prefers to be called Boumba, because of the political associations with his first name.

This wasn’t a natural catastrophe, but a social catastrophe. It just reproduced the pre-existent castastrophe, with so much exclusion and exploitation, where you have the “country inside” and the “country outside” [as Port-au-Prince and the rural areas are known], where you have [differential power for] men and women. We propose more egalitarian relations.

We propose a rupture with the crumbling state, instead leading to a state that’s at the service of the people. The rupture must first be with dependence, which has been reinforced since January 12, with the imperialists who are further militarizing the country.

We want the school system to be nationalized. We want the government to dedicate money to take the school system in hand and consecrate schools to the service of the public.

We think that the state has to provide housing. We’re in favor of cooperative housing, to give people decent housing at an affordable price. We talk about ‘villages of life’, with a whole plan administered by the state. Maybe you don’t have a hospital in each village, but at least you have health center, so kids can get health care. You create schools, so that no child lacks an education. You have professional centers, recreation centers for youth, in these villages of life. We’re working out the details now.

We need another country, where everyone has the chance to live as a human being, where nothing is reconstructed the way it was prior to January 12.

Yves-Rose Jean-Juste is 22. Her mother, who worked as a live-in servant in a middle-class household, died on January 12. Her mother worked hard to create a better life for her only daughter, despite never learning to read or write. Yves-Rose now lives in her uncle’s modest home in Delmas, where she sweeps the floor, cooks meals over charcoal, fetches buckets of water, and waits for the U.S. Embassy to tell her if her application for a visa (to join her father) has been processed. On Sundays, she dresses up and goes to the Kingdom Hall to pray.

This country didn’t offer people anything in the first place, and it’s become even worse after the earthquake. Many things in the country are broken, and perhaps those people who could have helped the country realize its goals lost their lives in the earthquake.

When you look at all these disasters, we have to ask ourselves: Where is the world going? Is the world going to end soon? There is only one person who knows the answers: Jesus.

I would like the government to concern itself and take responsibility for reconstructing the country, offer young people more means to live, and take kids off the streets. For our country to be beautiful, for tourists to come visit and invest in our country. For us not to die in boats trying to seek life in other countries. But, for now, all of this is just a dream.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book, Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

A friend of mine, a prestigious physician who works the longest hours of anybody I know makes only one exception from her demanding schedule in New York. Once a week, she returns home early to watch a new episode of her favorite soap opera. I cannot think of a more unlikely fan. It goes to show that soap operas appeal across a broad spectrum, from the most intellectually sophisticated to people with little or no formal education.

Increasingly, soap operas, or telenovelas, are being used throughout the world to disseminate messages about health issues such as the need for contraception, domestic violence, HIV/AIDS, nutrition, how to achieve peace between countries in conflict and how to elevate the status of women in developing countries. By identifying themselves with the protagonists’ dreams and problems the viewer establishes an immediate connection with them.

In Colorado, State officials have developed a telenovela called “Crossroads: Without Health, There Is Nothing,” specifically aimed at conveying health messages to the population. One of the producers’ aims was to increase the number of health-insured kids in the State, since almost half of the 150,000 uninsured children were eligible either for Medicaid or the Child Health Plan Plus program. Following airing of the telenovelas, there was a substantial increase in the number of children applying for insurance.

In Niger, Africa, Niger’s Broadcasting Corporation (ORTN) and UNICEF have joined forces and produced a serial drama entitled ‘Soueba’ which focuses on the lives of young people in Niamey, Niger’s capital. By following their journey into adulthood, the program explores the realities of love and sex and the dangers posed by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. “Soueba is more than an entertainment. Our aim with Soueba is to stop the taboo around HIV/AIDS, decrease the stigma towards people living with the disease, encourage positive attitudes and improve prevention behaviors,” declared Director Mahaman Souleymane.

In Ethiopia, the characters in the soap opera Yeken Kignit (“Looking Over One’s Daily Life”) have kept millions of Ethiopians glued to their radios for two and a half years. In the process, they may also have changed their lives. Following both Yeken Kignit and a similar soap opera called Dhimbibba (“Getting the Best Out of Life”) male listeners sought to be tested for HIV at four times the rate of non-listeners, while the demand for contraceptives rose 52 percent among married women who listened to the programs.

In Nicaragua, PATH, an international nonprofit organization based in Seattle, working with a Nicaraguan non-profit group called Puntos de Encuentro (“Meeting Points”) has inserted health-related messages into one of the country’s most popular soap operas. The aim of those messages is to change some cultural assumptions that lead to domestic violence and sexual abuse among adolescent girls and young women.

In Vietnam, the Ministry of Agriculture and several partners used entertainment education concepts to communicate pest management and environmental protection techniques to rice farmers. The soap opera project won several awards for its effectiveness in communicating science to people.

Latin American countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and Venezuela have become active exporters of these products, which are eagerly watched in countries as far away from Latin America as Russia, Albania, China and several countries from the former Soviet Union.

There may be other advantages to soap operas. I was recently in Albania, a country that had suffered from intense isolation during Enver Hoxha’s regime. While in Tirana, I was running late for a dinner appointment since I couldn’t find the restaurant where the meeting was to take place. I decided to ask a couple of young women who were walking in my opposite direction. Graciously, they told me that it was easier for them to accompany me than to try to explain to me how to go there. They asked me where I was from and when I said that I was from Argentina they said to me in Spanish, “Then we can speak in Spanish!” with flawless Argentine accent. Surprised, I asked them where they had learned to speak it so well. “In the Argentine soap operas, of course,” they answered laughing.

Dr. César Chelala is an international public health consultant and a writer on human rights and foreign policy issues.

Over the years as an MEP I have actively campaigned for funding to improve maternal health, specifically to prevent deaths in childbirth. The Green Party has long backed a tax on currency speculation, like the Robin Hood Tax, precisely to raise finance from bank levies to help support measures such as this.

• Women in a maternal health clinic in Mathare, a slum area of Nairobi, Kenya. Photo courtesy of Nell Freeman / Alliance.•

As the new coalition government explores the idea of bank levies it is important that it ensures that the most vulnerable are not forgotten, and that the issue of maternal and child health are not ignored in these difficult economic times.

I will be following developments at the second international meeting of Women Deliver that opens in Washington, USA this week (7-9 June) with interest. Until a month ago achieving the Millennium Development Goal to reduce maternal mortality seemed unlikely, despite all our efforts, but new evidence is showing that we have made a difference. Maternal deaths have fallen by more than 35 per cent in the last 30 years, thanks in part to improvements in funding this work.

Does this mean we have cracked the problem? Sadly not. The situation is still bleak for so many women. Between 350,000 girls and half a million women die from pregnancy-related causes every year and almost all of these deaths occur in the developing world. That’s ten million women ‘lost’ in every generation.

Longstanding inequalities make it much harder for girls and women to access healthcare. Family planning services, quality care for pregnancy and childbirth and access to safe abortion services are essential if women are to avoid the risk of death from pregnancy-related causes.

HIV and AIDS is a major contributor to maternal deaths, and children whose mothers are living with HIV and become ill are three times more likely to die. The good news, however, is that the response to HIV is providing some solutions to further reducing maternal deaths.

The International HIV/AIDS Alliance, for example, works to support local communities around the world tackling HIV and AIDS, and their own experience demonstrates that by providing both HIV and reproductive health services in the same room, the uptake of both services can increase.

In South Sudan the Alliance has trained health workers to provide HIV testing and treatment to women in antenatal clinics and provide advice on prevention of mother to child transmission. In India women can get contraceptives and collect ARVs at the same time, and don’t have to worry that people know they have HIV.

Integrating HIV testing and care into routine ante-natal care also means women diagnosed with HIV can be fast-tracked into programs that provide holistic care, including antiretroviral treatment, to keep a mother healthy and reduce transmission of the virus.

And it is HIV positive women who are most often ‘forgotten’ in the maternal healthcare debate - denied their sexual and reproductive health rights often due to stigma and discrimination. Too many mothers living with HIV die because the prevention of parent to child transmission, maternal health and follow up for HIV care and treatment are simply not joined up.

So how do we move forward? We need to tackle the Millennium Development Goals to reduce child mortality, improve maternal health and combat HIV together. Unless the experts in sexual and reproductive health, including maternal and child health and HIV work together, progress will continue to falter.

We must ensure that we are meeting the funding commitment to reach these three Millennium Development Goals, despite this period of economic austerity. With a Robin Hood Tax, we can provide revenue to make this a reality.

Without continued focus we will lose the gains we have made so far and women and children will continue to die unnecessarily. That will be a scandal.

Caroline is the MP for Brighton Pavilion and the Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales. Caroline previously served as an MEP. Her professional background includes research and policy analysis on trade, development, and environment issues for a major UK development agency. She is an acknowledged expert on climate change, international trade and peace issues.Caroline was voted Politician of the Year in the Observer Ethical Awards in 2007 and 2009, and was also named as one of the Guardian’s ‘Top 50 eco heroes’ in January 2008.

“We’re for seeds that have never been touched by multinationals. In our advocacy, we say that seeds are the patrimony of humanity. No one can control them,” said Doudou Pierre, national coordinating committee member of the National Haitian Network for Food Sovereignty and Food Security (RENHASSA), in a recent interview. “We reject Monsanto and their GMOs. GMOs would be the extermination of our people.”

• These farmers belong to one of the organizations sponsoring today's demonstration against the arrival of Monsanto seeds in Haiti. Peasant organizations are adamant that their production involve only local, organic seeds.  Photo: Salena Tramel, Grassroots International.•

A march is being held in Haiti today for World Environment Day, called by at least four major national peasant organizations and one international one. The march’s purpose is to protest the new arrival of Monsanto seeds. The day’s slogans include, “Long live native seeds” and “Down with Monsanto. Down with GMO and hybrid seeds.”

Several U.S. organizations are planning simultaneous events to protest the entry of the controversial multinational in Haiti.

Last month, Haitian citizens learned the news that the giant agribusiness Monsanto will be “donating” 60,000 seed sacks (475 tons) of hybrid corn seeds and vegetable seeds. While the seeds are free this year, peasant organizations see a Trojan horse, with Monsanto seeking to gain a foothold in the Haitian market. Hybrid seeds typically do not regenerate, so that farmers would have to buy them again each year, and they generally require large quantities of fertilizer and pesticides (two products that also fill Monsanto’s annual coffers). And while the Ministry of Agriculture rejected Monsanto’s offer of genetically modified [GMO] seeds this year because Haiti does not have a law regulating their use, there may follow a push to get GMOs approved, in which case Monsanto would be well-positioned. Moreover, the Calypso tomato seeds contain the pesticide Thiram, whose chemical ingredient is so toxic that the Environmental Protection Agency has banned it for home use in the U.S.[1] (For more information, see “Haitian Farmers Commit to Burning Monsanto Hybrid Seeds.)

Monsanto representative Kathleen Manning commented on Huffington Post on May 20, “It’s disappointing to see people encouraging Haitian farmers to ‘burn Monsanto seeds,’ especially when the ones hurt by that action will be Haitian farmers and the Haitian people—not those of us watching on the sidelines.”

Yet the call to burn the seeds is based on a strong commitment of the Haitian peasant movement to food and seed sovereignty, which is the ability of local farmers to support themselves with local seeds for local consumption. Amongst the thousands of peasant organizations which exist among millions of peasant farmers, from village-level groups to national networks, food and seed sovereignty is a key principle. It has formed the basis of their national advocacy since the catastrophic January 12 earthquake. The lynchpin of the reconstruction model that small farmers and many other sectors advocate is developing the country’s agricultural potential. This would provide stable employment for the 60% to 80% of the population who are small farmers. It would improve prospects for food security, with an increase in consumption of domestic crops replacing the current dependence on imports, which now compose 57% of food consumed. Critical elements in strengthening peasant production include: government investment in agriculture, including technical support; the procurement of local food by USAID and other international agencies’ food aid programs, instead of the products of foreign agribusiness; and restriction on the dumping of foreign food and seeds.

Doudou Pierre said, “If Haiti isn’t sovereign with its food, if the government doesn’t promote national production, we’ll just always be opening our mouths to seeds and food aid so multinationals can make money off of us. We’re for family agriculture which respects the environment.” The coalition which Doudou Pierre co-coordinates represents 54 organizations from different sectors and regions throughout Haiti.

Below are some of the U.S.-based events which will protest the Monsanto seeds today. Also below are a few of numerous U.S. initiatives which are helping Haitian farmers get organic, creole seeds.

AGRA Watch in Seattle plans a march today which will end outside the Gates Foundation office. AGRA stands for A Green Revolution in Africa, which is a multinational corporation-driven, GMO-driven program now being launched in Africa. The Gates Foundation has been a key promoter of AGRA. The group says, “The dumping of toxic seeds in Haiti is the latest in a series of unsustainable solutions that Monsanto has pushed on farmers around the world. If the Gates Foundation wants to support a truly sustainable agricultural system in Africa, they must divorce themselves from Monsanto. Haitian farmers and African farmers have said NO! to corporate control of their food systems. The Gates Foundation and AGRA must say no to Monsanto.”

Rising in Solidarity with Ayiti in Chicago urges, “From Haiti to Chicago, reclaim our right to control our food and sovereignty!” Today a group of urban farmers and community members will join in a rally to burn GMO seeds in protest of Monsanto’s “donation” to Haiti. Participants in the event will also plant organic and heirloom seeds, and sign letters to USAID to protest the distribution of Monsanto’s seeds in Haiti. The event will also feature testimonials about the lack of access to food security, particularly fresh fruits and vegetables, in neighborhoods in Chicago, and how this connects to the right to food sovereignty in Haiti.

Community Action for Justice in the Americas, Africa, Asia, in Missoula, is hosting a protest this evening. “Bring posters, signs, or just come. Wear black /white, or lab coats, dust masks, goggles or Tyvek suits or creative costume! Bring drums, pots & pans...” A personal email from a member of the group says, “The people in Missoula, Montana are paying attention and taking action for farmers in Haiti.”

The Organic Consumers Association's network sent more than 10,000 emails to USAID and President Obama. Two dozen members have donated to the Seeds for Haiti project.

A coalition of U.S. churches and foundations are supporting Fondation FONDAMA, a Haitian federation of farmers and local NGOs. The coalition has sent down several million dollars to purchase 86,000 kilos of local corn seed and 59,000 kilos of local pea seeds. (Seeds are available in Haiti, but small farmers have not had the money to buy them.) All of the farmers who belong to member organizations in Foundation FONDAMA have gotten seeds, allowing them to proceed with planting their spring crop. The donations have also purchased 13,300 machetes and 9,200 hoes. The U.S. coalition has, moreover, sent a Massachusetts farmer to the village of Papay for today’s march, and will host the leader of the Peasant Movement of Papay in New York and Washington for public, media, and Congressional meetings next week.

Like numerous other supportive groups in the U.S., Groundswell International’s approach to seed sovereignty in Haiti pre-dates Monsanto’s announcement. Through its Haitian partner Partnership for Local Development, Groundswell is strengthening the capacity of peasant organizations in Haiti to sustainably improve their agricultural production, income generation, food security, health, and natural resources management. A Groundswell staffperson writes, “A key thing we'll be working on is trying to promote the alternative, which is Haitian production of 100% of their seeds so they don't need imports.”

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

The U.S. and U.N. have based their plan for Haiti’s redevelopment on the expansion of the assembly industry. Toward this end, the U.S. Congress passed legislation last month which would expand benefits and income for U.S. investors yet again. Haitian workers will continue to earn $3.09 a day.

• "People in the factories are sweating hard and working hard and they don't get anything," says labor rights organizer Yannick Etienne. Photo: Charlie Kernaghan, National Labor Committee.•

Worker rights groups and other sectors of Haiti’s social justice movements are adamant that a sweatshop-based development model cannot advance either the country or its workers. First, the investments are unstable, and companies can and do pull out at a moment’s notice. Second, the work does not offer a living wage, benefits, possibilities for advancement, or skills training. Third, with the primary products and the machinery imported and the finished products exported, assembly does not stimulate Haiti’s economy.

Here Yannick Etienne, an organizer with the labor rights group Batay Ouvriyè (Worker’s Struggle), talks about the assembly sector and why it is neither a sustainable nor humane development model. Alternative models of development exist, ones that are not premised on the exploitation of some for the profits of others. Yannick talks about Batay Ouvriyè’s work to help Haitians participate in determining what redevelopment after the earthquake should look like. (Many articles in this series discuss some economically just options; see www.otherworldsarepossible.org/alternatives/another-haiti-possible.)

We are at the crossroads. What happened January 12 put the traditional way of doing things under the debris of the earthquake. Haiti has to move from where it is, as the poorest country of the hemisphere with people feeling sorry for us.

This earthquake was one of the worst things that could have happened, but we have to turn it into something positive. We have to make sure that people are agents of change and right now this is a good opportunity, positive in a political sense. There are so many things that can be done to shake up the traditional way things have always worked here.

HOPE II [Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement Act of 2008; which removes tariffs on importing certain types and quantities of Haitian-assembled garments into the U.S.] is supposed to help Haiti in the assembly industry. Actually, what you have is U.S. companies benefiting by getting stuff assembled at a very low price for the U.S. market without paying taxes or customs. They’re saying, “More people will get jobs because of preferential trade access,” but the workers who are making those factories’ profits are not getting anything. No one even remembers them.

People in the factories are sweating hard and working hard and they don’t get anything. They have to have union rights. They need other forms of social support and social insurance. They need meals in the factories and funds for when there are problems.

The legal minimum wage for assembly plants that manufacture for export is 125 gourdes ($3.09) per day. If you are earning by piece rate [paid per unit, such as a sleeve, instead of for the amount of time worked], they often set a minimum that you have to meet that day, but sometimes it’s higher than what a worker can do in eight hours. Then the workers have to work longer but [instead of paying overtime] the bosses say, “No, they’re just finishing their work.”

Most of the piece rate quotas have gone up since minimum wage increase [in 2009], and again since January 12. They have different gimmicks to make sure that salary isn’t paid. Now some factories are rushing people, raising the piece rate quota [so people have to work faster or longer to make minimum wage]. I’ve heard of factories where they say they can’t pay the minimum wage because they have problems. Some factory owners are saying, “If you don’t want to stay with less pay, we have 50 people to replace you.” People need the jobs; most of them have lost their homes and are living in refugee camps.

Another problem is that many of the workers never got their salaries for the first two weeks of January [payday should have come shortly after the earthquake]. Some workers have been going back and forth to get their money but the factories say, “The banks were closed, we lost everything,” all kinds of excuses not to pay them.

As for rights and benefits: The law says you get 45 minutes of break a day, but that’s not always respected. If you go to a doctor for a work-related injury, they’ll reimburse you, but workers don’t always have the money to pay up front. Otherwise there’s no health care. You get a little retirement money if you reach 65, but no one can stay working in factory conditions that long. There are no other social benefits. There has to be political processes to push this government to do things.

We understand that it’s a process to get rid of the assembly plants, but they have to be organized a different way, they have to be more than decent work. We need better jobs, not more sweatshops. Workers should participate in designing their working conditions and salaries and the whole environment. The people will have to say, “This is what we want,” and things should be upgraded according to what they say.

People have to fight back against those anti-change forces who were ruling the country before January 12. This is an opportunity because some of the people didn’t want to get involved in any political or social action before because they were so busy taking care of their children.

Some people say Haiti has not been built, now it has to be built. We have to understand what happened in the past and change things radically, including the people who are at the top. We have to build not only awareness but also mobilize people to action. We need to shake the state, to make sure that the people really take things into their hands and get a state that will really work in the interests of the masses. The people have to be able to make decisions democratically that are in the interest of the masses.

We have found camps that have many factory workers, people who used to live in shantytowns. So some members of Batay Ouvriyè and other groups in the camps have started organizing to raise the political awareness of the situation, to make sure that things are dealt with democratically, to have discussions and debates to see what should be done to change this country and to allow people to better their lives. People can’t just work to get the food and water they need; they also need to see about the future. This is our job right now: to raise consciousness to make workers believe in their ability to change things.

In places like Ouanamenthe [a town which hosts a free trade zone and several factories], we are gathering ideas for regular citizens to say what kind of political structures and redevelopment they want. We’re getting different sectors – university students, teachers, professionals, street vendors – together. Our first question is, “If you are a worker in the factory, if you are a doctor, a teacher, an engineer, what are the things you don’t like?” Then we say, “Okay, you don’t like this, how do you want to change it?” We’re having workshops and social forums.

Haiti is a very small country. As Haiti alone, we can’t get to the radical solutions that Haiti needs. It has to be a worldwide movement, in America, Europe, and Africa; this is why solidarity is so important. You have countries like Venezuela that want to bring their support to the Haitian people. One hand has to give to the other.

We are a people that resists what we don’t like; this is one of our trademarks. We fought against one of the biggest powers [in the late 1790s and early 1800s] and got rid of the French colonists and had an anti-slavery revolution. We have that experience as an example. We can use it and see how far we can go.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Last week, the United Nations peacekeeping mission fired tear gas and rubber bullets into a crowded refugee camp, leaving at least six hospitalized and others suffering respiratory problems. Citizen organizations plan demonstrations for today, the sixth anniversary of the U.N. armed presence in Haiti. The march is part of growing protests against the military forces which have amassed in Haiti since the January 12 earthquake and the lack of attention to displaced people’s needs.

• Today is the sixth anniversary of the U.N. military presence in Haiti. Mistrust of that presence runs high. Photo: Tory Field.•

On May 23, students at the School of Ethnology of the State University of Haiti held another in a series of protests on the central Champs de Mars Boulevard. The U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH, by its French acronym) and Haitian police went into the school, firing tears gas and rubber bullets while the students threw rocks.

Then at about 3:00, MINUSTAH troops began firing in the internally displaced people’s camp in the downtown parks around Champs de Mars, where many thousands of people are crowded into tight quarters. The firing continued for hours, according to residents interviewed for this article and other reports. Camp residents reported that babies and small children choked on the gas and passed out, as did at least two women with preexisting heart conditions. Three doctors with Partners in Health at the University Hospital reported treating at least six victims of rubber bullet rounds. Two children were wounded in the face, one of them requiring about ten stitches, according to one of the doctors.

When the attack began, camp residents, including many elderly and infirm people, and babies and small children fled. “I saw one woman running with her twins that are three or four months old,” said Eramithe Delva. “She had one in each arm, and with every step as she ran they banged against her chest. Is this what they want for us?” Many spent the night in the streets, for fear of returning to the camp. Residents interviewed said they had no idea why MINUSTAH fired on them.

MINUSTAH has since issued an apology for entering in the School of Ethnology. The statement did not mention the attack on the camp.

Demonstrations in Port-au-Prince and other areas of the country have become a daily occurrence. Most of them protest the government’s handling of the disaster and the heavy political and military presence of foreign powers since January 12. Within days after the earthquake, 12,600 U.N. troops, 20,000 U.S. troops, 2,000 Canadians, 600 French, and more from other countries amassed there.

Rural organizer Selina Pierre-Louis said, “We don’t know what these soldiers came to do. They have batons and guns in their hands. They zoom up and down in their huge vehicles all day. We’re not at war and we’re not armed. We need technical support, we need reconstruction, we need psychological help. They’re not doing anything to help the rebuilding. They’re just adding to our trauma.”

Troop levels overall have abated since the first months after the earthquake. The most recent figures on MINUSTAH’s web site show that just over 9,000 MINUSTAH forces remain there. The mission’s cost for the current fiscal year is $611.75 million.

The Security Council-approved MINUSTAH was established on June 1, 2004 with a triple mandate of ensuring a “secure and stable environment,” promoting a constitutional political process, and strengthening human rights. Francky Etienne Remy, who owns a small craft shop in Jacmel, said, “The Haitian police are totally ineffectual so MINUSTAH fills a vacuum.”

Yet MINUSTAH troops have repeatedly been accused of killings, arbitrary arrests, and human rights violations throughout the duration of the mission. (See, for example, the reports of Harvard Law Student Advocates for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch.) These charges include an attack by MINUSTAH forces in Cité Soleil on April 15, 2005, killing several; an attack on July 6, 2005, resulting in an uncertain number of deaths; the killing of at least five, and possibly many more, people in Cité Soleil in December 22, 2006; and the shooting death of a young man at the funeral of a prominent priest on July 14, 2009.

In February, 2008, the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services released its findings from an investigation into accusations against Sri Lankan MINUSTAH troops. It found that acts of sexual exploitation and abuse of children were "frequent" and occurred "at virtually every location where the contingent personnel were deployed."

MINUSTAH forces have also been shot at and killed. MINUSTAH claims it has suffered 152 troop fatalities.

Beyond charges of unnecessary force, others like the student, small farmer, worker, and popular organizations who are organizing today’s march, oppose MINUSTAH because they claim the mission undermines Haitian sovereignty. The May 26 press statement for the march, signed by ten organizations, states, “After the January 12 catastrophe, the occupation has been strengthened with other foreign soldiers and MINUSTAH, on the pretext that they are helping us… [T]hey did nothing to help prevent more than 300,000 people from dying under rubble… Now on the sixth anniversary of the occupation, we are taking to the streets of Port-au-Prince to get the country out from under the rubble of MINUSTAH.”

Community organizer Nixon Boumba with the grassroots organization Democratic Popular Movement said in an interview, “We’re asking for Haitians to be the true actors in their future, and for an end to the occupation to allow the country to have dignity and autonomy for the development and transformation of the country. We need schools, we need people in the camps attended to. After January 12 there have been a lot of opportunities to resolve the problems in the country. Instead, Canada, France, the U.S., Brazil, and others have acted like imperialists, strengthening their power and trying to undermine our chance to change the quality of our country. The U.S. wants Haiti to serve as a military base for the Caribbean, to control resistance from Latin America. And they want to prevent a massive emigration toward the U.S. and Canada.”