I was listening to the radio this morning and cant believe how stupid these butthead analysts are. Fan safety is priority #1. So who gives a damn what the fans are saying in Minnesota. Just imagine this scenario; a blizzard in Minnesota is ongoing and the NFL decides the games must go on, and God forbid, the roof should collapse during the game, imagine the possible tragedy to players and fans.
I have Malawi in my mind, a country I visited several years ago. As a public health consultant, I had visited an official at an international development agency in New York and had left his office in total frustration. Although the man I met there was very pleasant, I couldn’t see how this meeting could lead me anywhere professionally. I was wrong.
Two weeks later, I received a call from another official at the same agency. He offered me the opportunity to be part of a mission to evaluate the health status of Mozambican refugees in Malawi, a country I had some difficulty placing on the map. When I asked him who had told him about me, he said it was the official I had initially met there. Although I had never been to Africa before, I eagerly accepted.
On arriving to Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital city, I found out that my only piece of luggage had been lost in transit. Since I like to travel light, I only had with me a satchel with some toiletries, a book and the clothes I had on. To say that I was annoyed is an understatement, since I couldn’t see how I would manage the four weeks’ mission in these conditions. I was wrong again. I managed well.
I washed my underwear every night at the hotel, bought another pair of pants and was relieved not to have to carry my heavy luggage every time we visited the interior of the country. My colleagues looked at me with envy every time we had to move. Never before had I been so happy to have so few things.
On one of the trips to the interior we passed through beautiful tea plantations that had as a backdrop a wonderful view of Mount Mulanje. Shortly afterward, our hosts wanted us to visit a vocational school, mainly for adult Malawians. I was very interested in the visit, because my wife has been involved in adult education for several years.
At the school, we went through several rooms where we saw people, mostly women learning different skills -young women learning to weave on looms, another group learning how to make wooden furniture, and a third group working on basic reading and writing in English. In this last group, I became fascinated at how adults of different ages went through the rudiments of language, despite the obvious difficulties that the tasks represented.
While I was entertained looking at the students in this group, my companions had gone to see another class. A short time afterward, I followed them but, since I had come late, I was unable to get close to the students and remained outside the room. Still, I was able to see that this was a music class and that the adults were singing to the visitors.
The song was a wonderful melody of how beautiful their country was, how powerful its rivers, how green its mountains and how plentiful their tea plantations. It was a song full of longing and appreciation of the beauties of their country. Their voices were so well attuned, and they carried the melody so well that it seemed obvious to me that they had been practicing that song for a long time.
When the song ended, and as my companions were leaving the entrance to the room I was finally able to see the singers. Only then did I realize that I had been listening to a choir of blind men.
César Chelala is an international public health consultant and a writer on human rights and foreign policy issues.
This week we depart from Haiti to visit the native son of another country with a deep history of oppression and resistance: South Africa. The luminary Dennis Brutus - freedom fighter, economic and environmental justice activist, professor, and poet - died last year on December 26. We republish this eulogy because of the transcendent lessons Dennis’ life offers to Haiti, the U.S., and all places where people seek greater justice and humaneness.
How does one pay tribute to Dennis Brutus? To do so appropriately would take a short book or a very long poem. Someone should attempt the feat, both because Dennis deserves it and because it would help spread the power of his life, work, and words. And spread is what Dennis’ life, work, and words must continue to do, for in them lie the essentials for a more just, nurturing, equitable, and environmentally sustainable world.
The Dalai Lama is reported to have said, “Let your life be your message.” Dennis’ was, in the humility with which he carried himself, the kindness with which he treated others, and the wisdom and clarity of those words. His message, and his life, lay also in the strength of his convictions and the energy with which he worked for them, whether the cause be liberation from oppressive regimes; reparations to victims of Apartheid from corporations that made profits off the system; the dissolution of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization; or control over corporations creating climate change.
I met Dennis in the early 80’s when we were both fighting the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti, during which time he was also fighting for his own political asylum from South Africa. Our collaboration deepened in the 90’s through the global boycott of the World Bank, and through our joint engagement with the Center for Economic Justice. Though reaching the Center’s board meetings in the remote city of Albuquerque required many hours of travel, and though he often had meetings or presentations in other countries on the front and back ends, and though his participation was often for no more than a day, still he came, for Dennis was faithful to whatever he committed to. The same was true of the World Bank boycott: Dennis appeared for most any workshop, presentation, or meeting we requested, raising high the flag with all his strength and brilliance.
He lobbied us all to involve ourselves, to turn out, to unite our voice and strength, to do more than we were already doing. The man was tireless and fearless, and gently urged us to be, too.
He always showed up with his most pressing passions and politically urgent campaigns. I recall running a workshop on strategies to challenge the World Bank’s power in a church in Washington during a week of protests. Making a cameo appearance, Dennis asked for the floor and proceeded to make a long appeal for everyone to join him at another gathering on another topic in another country, many months out. As he went on about that gathering, a woman hissed at me that the speaker was off-message and that I should cut him off. I was polite while denying her request, but what I really wanted to say was, “Do you have any idea who is speaking? You should just feel honored. Listen very carefully to what he has to say.”
The schedule he kept was remarkable for anyone of any age or state of health, but I never heard him complain or make excuses. On he plugged even after he had surpassed 80, when his health had diminished, when his itinerary exhausted him, when his memory had wandered. I ran into him at the World Social Forum in Mumbai in one of his final years when he was clearly weary of body and mind. After sharing a big hug, he said, “I must go now because I have a meeting. I can’t remember with whom, or where it is, but I know I have one.” And off he went through the throngs, tenacity and a fierce commitment to obligation trumping all personal challenges.
When we were lucky, Dennis had the time and inclination for a story. The narrative was always marked by his beautiful verbiage, exquisite oration, enlivened eyes, and -if a good story- delight, or -if one of injustice- calm. My favorite stories were of his and his comrades’ fierce fights against Apartheid. So much courage and creativity they bespoke. He found humor in unexpected places, and always understated his own suffering.
There was the tale of attempting to flee guards as he was being transported from one prison to another, jumping out of the police car at a red light and setting off in a dash. “That was when I learned what a through-and-through wound was,” he said of the bullet which pierced his chest and went out his back. He told of lying on the ground bleeding, “in the shadow of the Anglo American Corporation, appropriately enough,” waiting for the ambulance. When a whites-only ambulance arrived by mistake, he was not allowed in it and had to lie on the verge of death for another long period awaiting a second ambulance, this one for so-called coloreds.
He told of his comrades’ breaking into the hospital to free him after the shooting, as he barely survived on life support, and of his stealthily writing on his hand, “Abort mission,” sure that he would die in the attempted rescue. He told of being under house arrest with guards parked in front of his home around the clock, while he climbed out the side window to attend political meetings.
During one of his narrations in my living room, I noticed that the self-deprecating chortle that usually punctuated his stories had vanished. Dennis was quietly crying. A tear ran down his nose and hung at the tip, where it remained throughout the rest of his tale of horror and brutality. Like Dennis’ life, the sadness and frustration behind that tear never stopped his truth-telling.
Poems were easy to get from him, whether he read them during a public presentation or shared them in a calm moment. Whenever Dennis had a new book (he published 13), he carried copies around and freely gave them out, after adding a warm inscription in his exquisite calligraphy. Dennis was perhaps most full in his poems, which merged the personal and the political, which never denied the existence of tyranny but always brought his breath of hope that the world can be different – if we organize to make it so.
It is perhaps easiest to remember Dennis the fighter, but I was always equally impressed with Dennis the human being. No matter how ugly the political fight, Dennis’ anger remained streamlined on the unjust systems and policies, not wasted on the individuals behind them. He kept his eyes on the prize: the principles at play.
The same was true with his approach to social movements. When comrades and allies around him made errors, when internal politics divided, his response always shone like a beacon. He seemed to know better than most that we are all limited and imperfect, and that the benefit of the doubt or the possibility of change is a grace we need for humanity to continue to evolve. Or perhaps it was simpler: perhaps he believed that he was no one’s judge. Or maybe he just knew that the world was harsh enough already, as he expressed in his poem “Somehow We Survive”:
All our land is scarred with terror
rendered unlovely and unlovable
sundered are we and all our passionate surrender
but somehow
tenderness survives.
Dennis wrote his own simple obituary in 2009 as he discussed the 1960 Sharpeville massacre. “I was committed to the struggle and I would if necessary die in the cause of liberation: ‘Freedom or death.’ It was a very simple resolve.” He did indeed die in the cause of liberation, though fortunately not violently or prematurely. Every single thing that Dennis did was in the cause of liberation.
I would say I will miss Dennis, but he's not going anywhere. He’s in all of us who care profoundly for justice, humanity, and the planet.
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.
Sociable Susan Magazine at www.sociablesusan.blogspot.com covered some interesting events in 2010 showcasing some powerful female leaders from different parts of the world and walks of life who are handling their business.
Some share about themselves, some obstacles they have faced women and some tips on how you can become a leader too.
You will find these articles very entertaining and beneficial. The links are below.
Enjoy!
Meet & Greet To Celebrate Congresswoman Lynn Jenkins of Kansas
http://sociablesusan.blogspot.com/2010/12/meet-and-greet-to-celebrate-powerful.html
Why Women Often Don't Run For Political Offices
http://sociablesusan.blogspot.com/2010/12/why-women-often-dont-run-for-political.html
Honoring Women Ambassadors & Women In Diplomacy
http://sociablesusan.blogspot.com/2010/06/blog-post.html
March is Women's History Month and Women In Film & Video is partnering with the Washington Public Library's MLK Library to screen films by and about women, and we would especially like to showcase locally-made projects.
We are seeking your films/videos, short and long form, fiction and non-fiction, particularly (but not exclusively) on the following topics:
- Mother/Daughter Relationships
- Growing Older
- Women & Technology
- Immigration
MLK Library can screen DVDs, DVCPro tapes and 16mm film, and they prefer standard NTSC.
We would also like to invite selected filmmakers to personally present their films and participate in Q&As following the screening of their film. This film series will take place on each Tuesday evening in March.
Please note that, as part of a DC Public Library program, this is a public service and there is no financial compensation for filmmakers participating in this Film Series.
Submit projects for viewing on DVD, post-marked on January 24th at the latest, along with a self-addressed stamped mailer to:
Women in Film and Video
3628 12th Street NE
Washington, DC 20017
Note that submission does not guarantee selection.
If you have any questions, please email them to programming@wifv.org
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) is among the strongest armies in the world. According to Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, it is also one the most moral ones. One wouldn’t know that for its treatment of Palestinian children. On December 13, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) stated that the Israeli military and police were violating Israeli law by detaining Palestinian children, some as young as seven years old, and interrogating them. This last denunciation follows an equally serious one of Palestinian children being sexually abused by Israeli police officers.
“They [the police] hit me and dragged along the floor. They handcuffed me with these plastic handcuffs which are very tight. I was very scared. Only when my father came they stopped,” Muslim Odeh, an 11-year-old Palestinian, told the BBC. His charges were strongly denied by the Israeli police.
According to the Geneva-based Defence for Children International (DCI) they have 100 sworn affidavits from Palestinian children who said that they were mistreated by their Israeli captors. Fourteen among them say that they were sexually abused or threatened with sexual assault to pressure them into confession.
In 2009 alone, Defence of Children International (DCI) reviewed 100 sworn affidavits which showed 81% of them were coerced into confessions, 14% were kept in solitary confinement and 4% were sexually assaulted. DCI believes that these figures may understate the extent of the problem. Many parents don’t complain to the authorities, since they feel that they cannot rely on the same system that abuses their children.
There are currently 340 children in Israeli jails, most of them convicted of throwing stones at the Israeli soldiers and police. Children’s complaints of violence are disregarded, and no proceedings are taken against those responsible.
Israel’s policy towards children detainees has been sharply criticized by human rights organizations since it denies them access to their families, although their families’ presence during some of the proceedings is allowed by Israeli law. In addition, children can only see their lawyers when they are in court.
“The ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian child prisoners appears to be widespread, systematic and institutionalized, suggesting complicity at all levels of the political and military chain of command,” according also to B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization.
Inside the occupied territories the Israeli military considers any Palestinian who is 16 years old or older as an adult, while inside Israel and in most other countries adulthood is reached at 18. Mistreatment of children is against the tenets of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by Israel in 1991.
In Israel, the rules related to rights of minors in criminal proceedings are contained in Amendment 14 to the Youth Law, enacted in July of 2008, which took effect one year later. This amendment’s goal is meant to incorporate the rules of international law into Israeli legislation, particularly those related to the treatment of juveniles in criminal matters and the obligations derived from them.
At he same that these abuses are taking place, Palestinian children’s education has been sharply affected by the situation in the occupied territories. Thousands of Palestinian children in East Jerusalem are unable to attend school since there is no room for them in the state school system, while the drop-out rate is the highest in the Israeli school system. There is a shortage of approximately 1,500 classrooms in East Jerusalem. This means that only about half of all Palestinian children in the city attend state schools, according to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.
As Palestinian children’s abuse continues, so does the construction of settlements in Israeli occupied Palestinian land. One cannot but wonder at the international silence to these systematic abuses of Palestinian’s basic human rights.
Cesar Chelala, MD, PhD, is an international public health consultant and an award-winning writer on human rights and foreign policy issues.
The start of Haiti’s most recent crisis came with ample warning. Most Port-au-Prince residents scurried to their homes mid-afternoon last Tuesday, certain of the violence and chaos which would ensue once the electoral council announced which two presidential candidates would make it to the run-offs. The trouble-makers didn’t wait until the 8:00 p.m. announcement, but started throwing rocks and erecting barricades by late afternoon for good measure. By nightfall, gunfire ricocheted around the capital and other towns. Through Friday, the black smoke of burning-tire barricades rose above the small crowds who rampaged through towns, destroying shops and other structures, burning cars, and occasionally shooting people. Haitian Radio Metropole reported five deaths.
The electoral council’s results were as transparently fraudulent as the vote itself. The only candidate with popular appeal, Michel Martelly, was excluded from the run-off. The widely hated president René Préval’s chosen successor, Jude Célestin, was inserted into the January 16 run-off along with Mirlande Manigat.
Scrambling to get itself out of its jam, the electoral council announced a recount, but both Martelly and Manigat have rejected this option. Cancellation of the vote is a distant option. The council’s routes through which to backpedal appear blocked.
Meanwhile, on Friday, Sen. Patrick Leahy, who sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee, called for President Obama to withhold aid to the Haitian government and suspend travel visas of senior Haitian officials until “necessary steps” are taken to guarantee a democratic result. And yesterday, the United Nations, Organization of American States, European Union, American, and four other ambassadors in Haiti urged the government on to the next legal step, requesting that the 72-hour period in which parties may contest the results begin today.
The weekend brought calm - partial on Saturday and broader on Saturday. Some ventured out hesitantly after days spent house-bound to stock up on food or view the destruction, but still motor vehicles and pedestrians remained scarce. This morning dawned as just another Haitian day, except that schools remain officially closed. But there are more electoral council announcements on the horizon. No one knows what the coming week will bring, but calm is not high on the list of options.
The only ones who stand to gain from the current upheaval are the candidates vying for victory, and the demonstrators and agitators they have paid. Some acts of violence and construction of road barricades appeared to be random, enacted by thugs who control various neighborhoods or others who were perhaps simply bored. Those grassroots organizations who normally sponsor demonstrations against Préval sat this week out; these are not the activities of an organized pro-democracy movement.
As always, it is the poor who have paid the heaviest cost. For starters, those who live from the informal economy have lost days of the miniscule incomes which barely keep their families alive. The small army of vendors of phone cards who congregate at gas stations, the men who peddle long-expired medications from red buckets on their heads, the women who sell imported corn flakes or second-hand underwear, and all the rest were not to be found on the deserted streets from Wednesday through the weekend, meaning that their families lost the few cents they make on each sale.
Those living in shantytowns where much of the violence was concentrated could not leave their homes out of fear. Neither could those living under plastic tarps or tents on the streets or in internally displaced peoples’ camps in volatile neighborhoods; they, moreover, could not even retreat behind walls or lock their door. Numerous women in these settings, among a circle who call me whenever they can buy cell phone minutes, reported that their meager supplies of food and water ran out after a day or two. With no means to buy more even if they could have gone to the market, they ran to neighbors’ homes in calmer moments to try to collect small gifts to sustain their children – sometimes with more success than others. Hunger, every woman told me, has been the norm since Wednesday.
Yesterday morning, for example, one of my daily calls was from Dieuveut Mondestin. She is a widow who lives with four children and an infant in a tarp-covered lean-to in the shantytown of Martissant. She has no nearby relatives, no job or other source of support, no source of free or nearby water, and no electricity. Dieuveut had just returned from two days in the hospital, where she was watching over her dead husband’s father who had cholera. I ask how she’s made out these last few days. “I can’t suffer anything I haven’t already suffered, so I still have hope. But it’s been hard, hard, hard, I tell you. There was so much shooting in my neighborhood, there was nowhere to run. I haven’t had anything to feed my kids. They’re so skinny, even little Larissa; you remember she was chubby. They’re just sticks now.”
This past week has also provided the perfect conditions for a spike in cholera, what Partners in Health calls “a disease of poverty” which impacts those without safe drinking water. With roads blocked and all but a valiant few health care and sanitation workers at home, much of the humanitarian coordination effort in Port-au-Prince and other parts of Haiti was in “lock-down,” a high-level cholera response worker told me on Friday. My inbox brought an urgent call for anyone who could travel to ten camps to deliver the cholera-prevention essentials of water purification tablets and bleach. Clean drinking water, another essential, also ran out in many places early on in the days of mêlée.
Because sanitation workers could not get to the camps, toilets and garbage overflowed to extremes. (For a chilling account, see Sascha Kramer's recent article in Counter Punch.) The sporadic rains throughout the week, moreover, spread contaminated water and sewage, perfect vectors for the disease.
One eye-witness told me that the group controlling the burning tires on the central Champs de Mars Boulevard refused to let medical transport vehicles through. The street barricades and lack of available drivers limited possibilities of the cholera-struck to get to health care centers during the window in which healing is possible, which in extreme cases is as short as four hours. Lack of drivers for medical vehicles also meant that corpses of many cholera victims remained in camps, bringing serious risk of contamination.
The socially and economically marginalized will gain nothing for their troubles, as no president sympathetic to their cause is forthcoming from these elections. None of the 19 candidates has been outspoken or active on behalf of the needs of survivors languishing in camps, or on behalf of a reconstruction process or economic model which prioritizes the most vulnerable. The unknown Célestin, from the party that has failed the citizenry, is so clueless about state responsibility that he even told a campaign crowd, “To counteract this illness [cholera] is a matter of hygiene more than anything. Hygienic measures, the state can’t assume that… It’s a personal and individual matter.” The right-wing intellectual Mirlande Manigat briefly served as first lady in 1988 to the figurehead civilian president of a military dictatorship, but is otherwise undistinguished. Michel Martelly has made public no policy agenda, though it’s hard to imagine that he could effectively push through any policies. His notoriety stems being a buffoon and carrousing musician, known for such non-presidential antics as flashing his bare backside in public.
A vote for Martelly, several people interviewed for this article said, was a vote against the standard political elite. Human rights lawyer Patrice Florvilus said, “The [people] don’t know if Martelly will give them anything different, but they know that they won’t gain anything from the suits who are the current politicians. Martelly is a product of the vacuum of alternatives. People need an alternative to the current conditions of their life but they’ve been totally abandoned.
“So many have been under tents for eleven months with nothing coming to them. They haven’t seen any of the international aid. They’re at the end of their rope with their social problems. It’s such a shame that politicians are using them for their own political profit.”
Regardless of who wins and how, the next president will come in with constitutionally constrained powers. Since the parliament ceded its power in April to the Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti, a 28-member body whose membership is 50% foreign and whose co-chair is Bill Clinton, the president holds little power over the country’s future beyond the right to veto the commission’s decision. With the World Bank as the group’s fiscal sponsor and all the international muscle around the table, even that veto option is unlikely to translate to much authority. This constraint will remain at least until the commission’s current mandate expires in August 2011.
The electoral debacle appears to have one other beneficiary besides whoever wins the presidency. It is the boys who, for once in this super-dense city with almost no recreational spaces, have had endless open streets on which to play soccer. Block after block is full of fleet-footed kids moving between the broken cinder blocks which serve as goals. On an outing to check out the state of the streets, I called out to one group of boys, “The elections gave you your soccer field. You lucked out!”
One called back, “No way! We’d rather have a free election!”
Many thanks to Allyn Gaestel for her research help.
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.
Inequality and unequal access to education holds millions of girls and women back over the world. While the "gender gap" in education has narrowed over the past decade, girls are still at a disadvantage, particularly in their access to high school education. Women still constitute two-thirds of the world’s illiterate population.
This gender gap is generally wider at higher levels of schooling. According to some estimates, women in South Asia, for example, have only half as many years of education as men, and female enrollment rates at the high school level are two-thirds of those of males.
Within countries, gender disparities are also greater among the poor, and in some countries those disparities continue among the poor even after they have disappeared among the wealthier sectors of the population. To be a girl from a poor family thus becomes a double disadvantage. In addition, gender bias -- approaches to teaching and the degree of attention from teachers -- puts girls at a further disadvantage.
Overall access to basic education has risen markedly over the past decade in many developing countries. In spite of that, however, poor children are still less likely to attend school, less likely to be enrolled in school and more likely to repeat grades than those who come from wealthier families.
There is widespread agreement that primary school should become universal early in this century, but the differences in educational attendance and attainment according to economic status show that the poor are much further away from achieving this goal than those better off economically.
There are several reasons to explain this gap. It is harder for poor children to have easy access to schools, since schools tend to be concentrated in cities and areas where only better-off families reside. The physical availability of schools, though, is not the most critical factor in most developing countries. It is important to consider not only national averages but also how poor girls in rural areas are faring.
Although expenditures in education have increased over the past few decades in many countries, unless these resources are specifically addressed to those most vulnerable, they will tend to increase disparities rather than decrease them.
Attainment disparities have been attributed to ineffective school systems. Governments tend to spend less on public primary and high school education -- the type of schooling that tends to benefit the poor most -- during economic crises. Wars, civil conflicts, economic disruptions and epidemics alter services and affect school attendance. All of these problems are likely to have a greater effect on the poor.
Elimination of gender bias in education is particularly important when the level of education of parents is linked to their children's educational attainment. Several studies have shown that the education of the mother is more important than that of the father in terms of children’s success. In addition, a great deal of evidence shows the benefits of women's schooling not only for their children's educational attainment but also for their health, nutrition and survival. Immunization rates among children of educated mothers, for example, are consistently higher than those of uneducated mothers.
Educated girls can develop essential life skills, including self-confidence, the ability to participate effectively in society, and the capacity to better protect themselves from HIV/AIDS and sexual exploitation. In addition, several studies have shown that educated women not only have fewer children but also have better economic prospects themselves.
Girls’ education not only empowers them, but is considered the best investment in a country’s development.
Several factors indicate that special attention must be paid to the poor. Poor women are far more likely to die as a result of pregnancy and childbirth. Investments in education for the poorer sectors of the population yield better returns in productivity, income and economic growth. Inequality in the distribution of education holds down growth and per capita income in many countries.
Attacking poverty has become an urgent global priority. And one of the best ways to attack poverty is to increase the educational level of the poor, particularly the girls among them.
Cesar Chelala, MD, Ph.D., is an international public health consultant. He writes extensively on health and human rights issues.
by Beverly Bell and Tory Field
As we file this article, Port-au-Prince is thick with the smoke of burning tires and with gunfire. Towns throughout the country, along with the national airport, are shut down due to demonstrations. Many are angry over the government’s announcement on Tuesday night of which two presidential candidates made the run-offs: Jude Célestin from the widely hated ruling party of President René Préval and the far-right Mirlande Manigat. This is another obvious manipulation of what had already been a brazenly fraudulent election. A democratic vote is one more thing that has been taken from the marginalized Haitian majority, compounding their many losses since the earthquake of January 12.
What is at stake in Haiti? What interests underlie the grab for power in the country? One answer is the large amount of aid and development dollars that are circulating. Among those benefiting handsomely from the disaster aid are U.S. corporations who have accessed U.S. government contracts. Below is the tale of one U.S. corporation and its subsidiaries, who have received contracts which involve both a conflict of interest and harm to one of Haiti’s largest and most vulnerable social sectors, small farmers.
“We were already in a black misery after the earthquake of January 12. But the rice they’re dumping on us, it’s competing with ours and soon we’re going to fall in a deep hole,” said Jonas Deronzil, who has farmed rice and corn in Haiti’s fertile Artibonite Valley since 1974. “When they don’t give it to us anymore, are we all going to die?”
Deronzil explained this in April inside a cinder-block warehouse, where small farmers’ entire spring rice harvest had sat in burlap sacks since March, unsold, because of USAID’s dumping of U.S. agribusiness-produced, taxpayer-subsidized rice. The U.S. government and agricultural corporations, which have been undermining Haitian peasant agriculture for three decades, today threaten higher levels of unemployment for farmers and an aggravated food crisis among the hemisphere’s hungriest population.
Two subsidiaries of the same corporation, ERLY Industries, are profiting from different U.S. contracts whose interests conflict. The same company that is being paid to monitor "food insecurity" is benefiting from policies that increase food insecurity. American Rice makes money exporting rice to Haiti, undercutting farmers’ livelihoods, national production, and food security. Chemonics has received contracts to conduct hunger assessments and, now, to distribute Monsanto seeds.
Haiti is the only country in the hemisphere which is still majority rural. Estimates of the percentage of Haiti’s citizens who remain small farmers – or peasants, as they call themselves - are 66% to 80%. Despite that, food imports constitute upwards of 50% of what Haitians consume. And still the nation suffers under a dire food crisis, with more than 2.4 million of 9 million Haitians estimated to be food-insecure. Acute malnutrition among children under the age 5 is 9%, and chronic undernutrition for that age group is 24%.
It didn’t used to be this way. In the early 1980s, Haiti was largely self-sufficient in food consumption and was even an exporter nation. The destruction of agriculture and food security came through policy choices. In 1986 and again in 1995, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) gave loans to Haiti with the condition that the government reduce tariffs on goods imported into the country. While previous tariffs on some staple foods had been as high as 150%, by 1995 the Haitian government, under pressure primarily from the IMF and U.S. government, cut import tariffs on food basics to as low as 3%.
Unable to compete with imported goods and thus unable to survive, Haitian farmers have flocked into the overcrowded capital in search of a living. They have joined the ranks of the underemployed or been welcomed by sweatshops. And they have taken up residence in shoddily constructed housing built on insecure lands, like ravines and the sides of steep mountains. The devastating toll from the earthquake, with anywhere from 250,000 – 300,000 killed in and around Port-au-Prince, is in part due to farmers’ inability to remain in their rural homes.
Rice is among the five most heavily subsidized crops in the U.S., with rice growers receiving $12.5 billion in subsidies between 1995 and 2009. The subsidized production and the industrial scale, on top of the lowering of import tariffs in Haiti, combined to become a money maker: beginning in the early 1980s, rice grown in such places as Arkansas and California and shipped by boat to Haiti could be sold cheaper than rice grown in a neighboring field in the Artibonite Valley. With the U.S. television show Miami Vice in high popularity during the time the threat to local producers unfolded, Haitians named the imports ‘Miami rice.’
Between 1992 and 2003, rice imported into Haiti increased by more that 150%, with 95% of the imports coming from the U.S. The USA Rice Federation claims on its website that 90% of the rice currently eaten in Haiti is from the U.S.
The flood of imported rice has shot up since the earthquake. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, USDA purchased 13,045 metric tons of rice for Haiti. In such a dire humanitarian crisis, even Haitian peasant organizations who normally oppose food aid agreed that short-term assistance was essential.
At the same time, however, locally grown food was and is available. “If the foreigners want to give aid, it shouldn’t be food. We have the capacity to produce. They should give us a chance to grow our own food so agriculture can survive,” said Rony Charles, a farmer and member of the Agricultural Producer Cooperative of Verrettes. But a supplemental aid bill in the U.S. Congress – the Haiti Empowerment, Assistance and Rebuilding (HEAR) Act - which, among other things, would have increased the percentage of food aid purchased from Haitian producers, seems doomed because of Republican opposition. Advocacy groups in Washington such as Haiti Reborn will work to get the bill reintroduced in January, but it is unlikely that any local procurement will happen for several years.
ERLY Industries is one U.S. corporation that amply benefits from aid and trade opportunities in Haiti. ERLY is the parent company of American Rice, which has been selling rice in Haiti since 1986 via its Haitian subsidiary, the Rice Corporation of Haiti. By the mid-nineties, American Rice was importing 40-50% of all rice eaten in Haiti. A press release by the USA Rice Federation, of which American Rice is a member, referred to the federation’s “collaboration” and “proactive efforts” with USDA and USAID in getting rice to Haiti just after the earthquake.
Chemonics, another subsidiary of ERLY Industries, has been running two USAID-funded projects since before the earthquake and received one of the first post-disaster contracts in Haiti, for $50 million from USAID. Chemonics gets 90% of its funding from USAID and works in more than 75 countries. One of Chemonics’ focus areas is agricultural work, with many projects aimed at developing international trade opportunities. Chemonics has also been a large beneficiary of USAID contracts in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One of Chemonics’ pre-earthquake contracts in Haiti, as in other countries around the world, (2006-2010) is the USAID-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network. FEWS NET II, as it is known, monitors food security and reports on such issues as food prices, climate, and market flows.
Chemonics also holds a $126 million USAID contract for 2009 through 2014 for its Haiti-based Watershed Initiative for National Natural Environmental Resources (WINNER). Some of WINNER’s stated contract goals include increased agricultural productivity, strengthened watershed governance, and reduced threat of flooding.
WINNER now has a new role of distributing Monsanto’s recent donation of 475 tons of hybrid corn and other vegetable seeds throughout Haiti. While this year’s seeds were free of charge, farming advocates familiar with Monsanto’s history around the world consider the donation a Trojan horse, with Monsanto seeking to gain a foothold in the Haitian market. The full extent to which Monsanto will now join Chemonics and American Rice as economic beneficiaries of the earthquake remains to be seen. Elizabeth Vancil of Monsanto gave “special thanks to USAID and USDA, who connected us to be able to secure this approval.”
Meanwhile, Haitian peasant groups have declared this donation an affront to their seed sovereignty, which they refer to as “the patrimony of humanity.” Among other problems, they point to the Calypso tomato seeds being treated with Thiram, a pesticide additive so toxic that the EPA has banned its use for home gardeners in the U.S. On June 4 for World Environment Day, more than 12,000 Haitian farmers and allies marched in a rural town and burned Monsanto seeds. In the U.S., solidarity groups from Chicago to Seattle did the same. Doudou Pierre, a leading food sovereignty advocate, said that the June 4 action was “a declaration of war.”
In March, Bill Clinton formally apologized for his role in having promoted the import of U.S. rice into Haiti at the expense of Haitian farmers. "It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake… I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else." Mea culpa notwithstanding, nothing has changed in U.S. foreign aid and trade policies.
As for the March rice harvest grown by Jonas Deronzil, Rony Charles, and other producers in the Artibonite, it finally sold in June for almost exactly two-thirds of what it would have brought in before the earthquake: US$13.27 a sack versus US$20.77.
“It’s not houses which will rebuild Haiti.” said Rosnel Jean-Baptiste of the national organization Heads Together Small Peasants of Haiti. “It’s investing in the agricultural sector.”
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.
Tory Field is an organizer, farmer, and Program Associate at Other Worlds.
“I heard a thundering sound and saw darkness all around me. I spent three months in the hospital –and lost my leg and my son. I had stepped on a landmine and the world as I knew it had come to a halting end,” wrote Monica Piloya, chairperson of the Gulu/Amuru Landmine Survivors’ Network in northern Uganda. She is one of the thousands of women who have been maimed by landmines.
On November 30, 2010, Fifteen Nobel Peace Prize recipients sent a letter to President Barak Obama urging him to join the ban on antipersonnel landmines. The U.S. is still one of 39 states that remain outside the treaty. The Tenth Meeting of the States Parties to the Mine Ban Treaty is being held at the United Nations in Geneva from November 30 to December 3, 2010. The U.S. is attending as an observer delegation.
Mrs. Piloya’s ordeal didn’t end with those losses. “I returned to live with my husband, but everything had changed. He verbally abused me, telling me I was useless, helpless. My in-laws told him, ’Monica is disabled; get another woman.’ After a year, my husband left. I was four months pregnant at the time and struggling to care for my older child as well.”
Traumatic as her losses had been, however, Mrs. Piloya was able to overcome her difficulties. Slowly, she rebuilt her life. She started selling fish in the local market, which covers hers and her child’s expenses and has become the leader of a landmine survivor organization in northern Uganda.
Not all landmine victims, however, are able to reorient their lives. For those who are not killed, the disabilities left as sequelae of the landmine explosion are difficult to overcome and leave permanent scars in their lives, particularly in the case of children. UNICEF estimates that 30-40 percent of mine victims are children under 15 years old.
The International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) estimates that 15,000-20,000 people are injured or killed by landmines every year, and that millions more suffer from the economic, physical and psychological consequences of the weapon. The U.S. State Department estimates that fewer than one in four landmine amputees is fitted with an adequate prosthesis.
There are presently millions of landmines and other unexploded ordnance in the ground in more than 80 countries. From 1969 to 1992 the U.S. has exported an estimated 4.4 million antipersonnel mines to countries such as Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Iraq, Laos, Lebanon, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Rwanda, Somalia, and Vietnam.
The U.S. military has not been immune to the dangers of landmines. These weapons have killed thousands of U.S. and allied troops in every U.S.-fought conflict since World War II, including hundreds of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, in addition to civilian and soldiers from those countries. In the 1991 Gulf War, landmines caused 34 % of U.S. casualties. In spite of that, the U.S. is one of only about 14 countries that refuses to agree that it will never again produce the weapon.
The arguments in favor of the usefulness of landmines use are not valid. In 1996, an International Committee of the Red Cross study, “Antipersonnel Landmines –Friend or Foe?” concluded that they are not indispensable weapons, and that they do not necessarily offer a military advantage.
In addition, because they are indiscriminate and inhumane weapons, their use goes against international humanitarian law. Among the provisions of the Additional Protocol I (1977) to the Geneva Conventions, there are rules that seek to protect civilians by limiting the “means and methods of warfare.” Although the Additional Protocol I does not deal with specific weapons, it provides a general framework of rules applicable in international armed conflicts.
In 2009, Ian Kelley, State Department spokesman, declared that the U.S. wouldn’t join its NATO allies and many other countries in formally banning landmines. By insisting on this policy, the U.S. is complicit in the unnecessary suffering and maiming of thousands of civilians worldwide.
Dr. César Chelala is a co-winner of an Overseas Press Club of America award for an article on human rights.
For a long time it has been one of Nicaragua most guarded secrets. But a new Amnesty International report, “Listen to their Voice and Act: Stop the Rape and Sexual Abuse of Girls in Nicaragua,” brings it to light. Rape of teenagers in Nicaragua is widespread, and nothing is being done to stop it.
It doesn’t help that Nicaragua’s president, Daniel Ortega, was accused by his own step-daughter that he had been sexually abused by her. In 1998, Zoilamerica Narvaez Murillo accused Ortega of having abused her since she was 11, a situation that started in 1979 and lasted for 19 years.
Both Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, repeatedly denied the charges and said that they were politically motivated. Although a judge dismissed Narvaez’s charge, the Movimiento Autónomo de Mujeres de Nicaragua (Nicaragua’s Women Autonomous Movement) stated that history would not absolve Ortega politically or morally despite the ruling.
At the time, the case could not proceed in Nicaraguan courts because Ortega had immunity from prosecution as a member of parliament, there was a five-year statute of limitations for sexual abuse, and rape charges in that context fall under the proviso of statute of limitation.
Regrettably, Narvaez’s case is far from unique in Nicaragua. Between 1998 and 2008, more than 14,000 cases of rape among girls under 17 were reported, according to official statistics. Experts believe, though, that this is just a small percentage of the total; the number would be much higher if the number of cases also included incest.
Two-thirds of rape victims in Nicaragua are under the age of 17, according to Amnesty International. Information is difficult to find for those at risk or suffering sexual violence. In many cases, the stigma associated with sexual crimes blames the victims, not the perpetrators. “Every day, girls in Nicaragua are suffering the horror of sexual violence in silence, rather than risk the rejection that many suffer when they speak out,” stated Esther Major, Amnesty International Central America researcher.
Many victims of rape or sexual abuse rarely go as far as demand prosecution for those crimes, because the legal process is too traumatic or too expensive for them. For those who proceed with the charges, failures in the justice system mean that the attackers frequently walk free. Because most perpetrators are relatives of the victims or people in a position of power, victims are under heavy pressure not to denounce the abuse.
In Nicaragua, the situation is even more serious because of the ban on abortion, regardless of circumstance, which compels incest and rape victims to bear children and thus contributes to the increase in maternal deaths, a fact that had been denounced by Amnesty International.
According to the 2008 penal code regulations abortion is criminalized, with prison sentences for women who undergo the procedure and criminal sanctions for doctors and nurses who help them. “Children are being compelled to bear children. Pregnant women are being denied essential life saving medical care,” stated Kate Gilmore, Amnesty International’s UK Director, at a press conference in Mexico City. I can think of almost no worst fate for a young girl than having a child from the man whom she detests.
The Nicaraguan government needs to provide economic help and psychological assistance to victims of rape, to allow them to rebuild their lives, and the judicial system should be open to allow that the girls’ complaints are heard and properly addressed. At the same time, laws on abortion should be modified so that the victims of rape will be better able to overcome the ordeal they went through.
Nicaragua overcame a bloody civil war to enjoy the fruits of democracy. An essential component of this process is to guarantee gender equality and to eliminate the most brutal forms of abuse and discrimination.
Dr. César Chelala is an international public health consultant and an award-winning writer on human rights and foreign policy issues.
Politics involves dealing with issues, negotiating and brokering deals with allies and enemies, public speaking, hard decision making, endless socializing and staying popular with your constituency.
Sadly, the current political landscape is like a war zone with winners and losers and people at logger heads preparing for the next battle while little gets done. It is definitely not a career for the faint hearted.
With all the conflicts and hard decisions being made, and the unique skills required to execute them successfully, one would think politics and public office would be women’s domains, considering that generally women serve, mediate conflicts, are nurturing and good at conflict resolution. However, looking at the political landscape, it is obviously not.
Have you ever wondered why? Or thought to yourself, why don’t more women run for political offices? This wouldn’t be too farfetched considering that generally speaking women possess the skills to make good politicians. Well, if you have, you are not alone.
At a recent Meet and Greet event honoring Congresswoman Jenkins of Kansas, I posed the question, “Why do you think women don't run for office?” to the men in attendance to get their unique perspectives. Their answers are below…
Politics is one of the last heavily male dominated environments. It is entrenched in tradition and is sometimes passed from one generation to another. It’s pretty much a good old boy network.
Click HERE for the full article.
Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending the annual Celebration of Craftswomen show in San Francisco. The show continues this weekend at the Herbst Pavilion at Fort Mason. From 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., the Bay Area's most talented female artists will be selling their handcrafted goods. This was the second year I've attended the Celebration of Craftswomen (check out my coverage from last year), and it's so great to have an outlet to buy handmade holiday gifts directly from the makers.
Here are some of my favorite vendors from this year's show. And don't fret if you can't make it to San Francisco this weekend, many of the artists sell their goods online.
I bought a few pieces of Village Clayworks' pottery for holiday gifts. Lucky for you, the pieces are available on Etsy.
I want to buy all of Octavia Bloom's jewelry featured on her Etsy page, especially these hoops.
Last year I discovered Gaslight's beaded jewelry and I was so excited to see them again this year. I am so in love with everything they make!
As far as holiday decorations go, I like handmade pieces that have a folk art feel. This year I discovered Willow the Wisp's wood carvings, which are available on Etsy.
Josette Pérard is director of Fon Lanbi Haiti, the Haitian counterpart of the Lambi Fund. Fon Lanbi trains, builds capacity of, and gets grants to women’s and small farmer organizations in rural areas. Josette’s perspectives on community development follow.
The idea of development is to provide everyone with the means to work, to meet their needs, and to let them enjoy their human rights so they can be full citizens. But for development to occur, the system must change. And the people must be agents of that change.
If Haiti and our communities were organized, development activities would come just from the initiative of the community members themselves. But because of how the country works, because there’s no government action, there must be some organizations like ours to help people implement community development programs.
Alternative means if something that is necessary doesn’t exist, you must do it yourself. Lambi Fund’s development programs constitute an alternative compared to what the government does. But I don’t think this form of development can lead to a complete solution.
What we have now is a subsistence economy. An economy of local or community small businesses won’t change the national economy as a whole. The country's economy must change so that people can get education, health, and many other things. For this, there must be a responsible government. There must be two-way communication and joint participation between the government and the communities.
Everyone wonders why Haiti is in the state it’s in. It’s because since 1804, there are so many who’ve been called moun andeyò, outsiders [those living in the countryside]. These people continue to be excluded from what’s happening in their own homeland. They don’t know what the big social, political, and economic powers are doing. They must accept or take whatever is designed for them.
Some of the privileged are descendants of former colonists. After the revolution in 1804, they simply wanted to continue using the former slaves, keeping them in their fields of sugar cane and coffee just like in the days of slavery. Today it’s the great-grandsons and granddaughters who maintain political, economical and social power, at the expense of the majority. Those holding the reins of power aren’t affected by the problems of those ‘outside’, and they just don’t care.
A society that maintains so much exclusion simply can’t achieve development. No way. Development has to involve everyone.
I’ve been listening to the statements of the presidential candidates. Many of them say absolutely nothing about the majority of the Haitian people. You hear them seldom, if ever, even open their mouths to utter the words "the people.” You never hear them say they will do anything with the participation of the population, but you often hear them say, "We’ll do this or that for the people!" In fact, no leader can do anything for anybody.
Another thing since independence: Haitians have known that they have the courage and that they must take responsibility for their own lives. They know that they can’t rely on others. With this in mind, when they find organizations such as the Lambi Fund that support their initiatives, they become participants with all their energy and their whole being. They cooperate to make changes in the communities where they live.
Now, with the support of Lambi and other organizations, community members have been able to implement some development activities. For example, where there’s a corn mill, our organization helps members of the community increase their production by providing seeds for them to produce more corn. But the mill can still go unused because people don’t have access to roads. They need the means to transform their raw products [into more durable ones that can survive long travel] and they also need roads so that they can go sell their products in better market conditions. We can’t build inter-city roads; that’s the responsibility of the government. But through konbit, collective work teams, we can help construct paths that will allow farmers to go from one place to another, walking with their donkeys. That's how we’re implementing a few small programs of alternative development as a first step in a comprehensive intervention. That's how I see things.
The Lambi Fund is trying to help those organizations that have identified problems in their communities and are trying to resolve them. But even when people already know the means to solve a problem, there will always be financial issues, because for each activity in a development process, there must be money. So we sit down and talk to them, we work with them.
But giving money for community development activities isn’t the only work we do. We also have a support function of giving hope. The community members are facing major problems and have identified the solutions, but they want our help. We see how they envisage the planning and implementation of programs to bring change to their lives. We listen to what people have to say. We help them find the knowledge, resources and know-how to implement their projects. We educate and train the members of this organization, we pass on techniques for management, we strengthen the organization itself. We help people move through the processes to achieve their goals so they can become independent.
Now they create management committees, they appoint a coordinating committee, and you can feel the momentum. These people’s hopes are buoyed with the appearance of a small business they’ve managed to put on track. We can see the light that springs from this little hope that starts to shine brighter and brighter through everything else.
Consider, for example, the management and operation of that corn mill I talked about. Customers come and pay to have their grain processed into flour. Now with the education we’re providing the mill owners with, the community organization learns to better manage the money they earn. They know they need to save some of that money to use later to repair the mill if it breaks down. They know they must be able to cope with any problem that might arise. They have to be able to eventually buy another mill. They have to pay wages to the operator who runs the mill. Part of the money should go to fund the petty cash they keep to lend some money to group members, etc. So, it’s a whole chain of actions in which each activity leads to another activity.
It’s in the process of organizational development that people understand and learn that they must they must assert their rights and that they must demand what the government or the authorities owes them. So the work we do isn’t only implementing small development programs, because how could we change the economy that way? We’re also helping people to survive, to resist, to get the change they need.
After the earthquake of January 12, things got more complicated but regardless, I think there is hope in the air. Don’t you see how all the people move without getting tired like ants do, how they’re trying to reestablish their lives with their own hands? You’ve visited some camps; you saw the small businesses they’ve created. They make these small investments because nobody is doing anything serious to help them, because they’ve gotten little to none of the aid.
My dream is that there be real development in Haiti. As I said, these small community development initiatives we’re implementing now are simply for relief. We're just trying to help people to hold on until the legitimate demands of the Haitian people can be met, until significant changes can really be made; that’s why we call them alternatives.
Another part of my dream is that we have a responsible government. Progressive ideas have to come forth so that they can really make positive and tangible changes. And there has to be space for participation by all citizens who’ve courageously begun the development of their communities with their own means, however modest. Change will come when the people are engaged right at the heart of things.
For more information, see www.lambifund.org.
Many thanks to Joseph N. Pierre and Pro Bilingual Interpreter Services for translation of Josette’s interview.
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.
