US issues Haiti travel warning: How dare they!

According to a recent Associated Press article, ‘State Dept. warns Americans about Haiti travel,’ the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs has now issued a travel warning ‘to inform U.S. citizens traveling to or living in Haiti about the current security situation.’

In other words, Americans living in or about to travel to Haiti must beware of incipient ‘robbery, lawlessness, infectious disease and poor medical facilities’ as cultural inhibitors against living in or visiting the Caribbean nation.

The absolute nerve of them! How dare they!

Robbery? Lawlessness? Disease? What poor medical facilities? What ‘security’ situations?

When President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the twice democratically elected president of Haiti, was in power there were only 3,500 policemen in the entire nation of Haiti and there was virtually no crime.

But since U.S.-Canadian-French usurpation of Haitian sovereignty, Haiti has suffered not only from a lack of national security in the sense of borders and territorial integrity but also an ongoing crisis of human security, the right of each person to live in peace and with the guarantee of basic rights.

Aristide, through two terms in office – both of which he was deposed in the middle of – was sabotaged at every step by the U.S. CIA, USAID, the European Union, the Canadian government, the IMF, and the World Bank.

Why? So the U.S. government could blame everything that was ‘wrong’ with Haiti on anyone but itself. This century it chose Jean-Bertrand Aristide to be its scapegoat.

Because the U.S. government cannot stand the thought of grassroots democracy and cannot stand the fact that the achievements of Afrikans who defeated entrenched slavery are of monumental significance to Black people in the Diaspora – and that Black people have the right to take and to define our place in the world without requesting anyone’s sponsorship and without needing anyone’s approval.

Haitian struggle and resistance has taught the world these facts, much to the chagrin of the U.S. State Department. So now, in retaliation, the U.S. State Department seeks to criminalize Haiti. Again.

But since U.S.-Canadian-French usurpation of Haitian sovereignty, Haiti has suffered not only from a lack of national security in the sense of borders and territorial integrity but also an ongoing crisis of human security, the right of each person to live in peace and with the guarantee of basic rights. After perpetrating a reign of superpower terrorism that includes 33 coups d’etat, financing right wing para-militarism, the terrorizing, abduction and murder of human rights activists, the hijacking of loans meant to establish sources of clean, potable water, hospitals, and clinics, dismantling the democratic election process, forbidding the existence of the largest political party in the country, Fanmi Lavalas, and fomenting the spreading of disease, starvation, mass murder and U.S. hegemony via the Monroe Doctrine, many Haitians believe that the U.S. State Department is now in firm control of the monster it has created.

Not only that, but it is also believed that the U.S. is playing a cruel game, running people against their very own monster. It is a classic game of the criminal blaming the victim.

Thus, in 2012 the U.S. continues to spread the contempt of Haitians held by the Anglo-Saxon power structure. Reminiscent of the views expressed by Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan so long ago when he said, ‘Imagine! Niggers speaking French!’ the State Department has begun its ‘official,’ for-sound-bite-use-only pogrom, couched in a ‘travel warning’ to America.

However, this pogrom is liable to bite Anglo-Saxon hegemony in the ass, even when it has an Obama face, because the idiots don’t realize there are more Afrikans with a command of the French language than those whose limited command is of English alone.

That being said, it is now evident by this little noticed State Department ‘travel warning’ to Haiti that their U.S. trained U.N. MINUSTAH occupation forces cannot handle the popular opposition of the Haitian people to the current lawlessness of U.S. imposed puppet, Michel Martelly.

For, in the finest traditions of semper fidelis and the 1915-1934 invasion, occupation and racketeering of Haiti led by Gen. Smedley Butler and the U.S. Marine Corps, Michel Martelly is robbing the people and the Haitian treasury blind. Just like old times, making Haiti safe for the National City Bank boys – or whatever bank is fashionable nowadays – to collect revenues in.

And the illegal U.S. inspired coups d’etat of 1991 and 2004 that robbed Haitians of their twice democratically elected President Aristide were transparent as U.S. instigated regime changes in Haiti.

This doesn’t inspire belief in a law-abiding U.S. State Department.

Not when considered in light of Michel Martelly’s receipt of ‘more than $2.5 million in bribes for providing non-bid reconstruction contracts to companies in the Dominican Republic,’ working in consort with Bill Clinton to force U.S. born businessman Laurent Lamothe into the post of prime minister despite Lamothe’s lack of qualification for the post, and Martelly’s blatant and arbitrary alteration of the 1987 Haitian Constitution, re-establishing laws to limit the basic human rights of Haitian citizens.

And especially not when former U.S. President and current U.N. Special Envoy William Jefferson Clinton legitimizes the s/election of Michel Martelly as president of Haiti by less than 16 percent of the vote and embraces former dictator for life Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier at a ceremony held one year ago, on Jan. 14, 2012, to ‘commemorate’ the second anniversary of the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake.

The ceremony was held in Titanyen near Port-au-Prince. Duvalier couldn’t leave Port-au-Prince while awaiting trial for human rights violations and crimes against humanity. The trial didn’t happen. And the Martelly-Clinton-Duvalier presence at Titanyen was a travesty and an insult, for Titanyen is the burial ground of earthquake victims and has been for decades the dumping ground of the bodies of Haitians murdered by the infamous Ton Ton Macoutes and other Haitian death squads commanded by Duvalierists, approved by the U.S. State Department, and trained and financed by the U.S. and the CIA.

THEY KILL YOU AND THEN DANCE ON YOUR GRAVE?

I repeat, the U.S. State Department’s duplicitous actions are hardly trustworthy. Most particularly when coupled with the disappearance of human rights hero Lovinsky Pierre Antoine in 2007, the premature death of Father Gerard Jean Juste in 2009, which was caused by prolonged incarceration and mistreatment under the U.N. occupation, and the pictures of U.N. soldiers killing mourners at the funeral of Father Jean Juste.

Haiti’s occupation was instigated and engineered by the U.S., Canadian and French governments. U.N. MINUSTAH forces now maintain that occupation. U.N. Special Envoy William Clinton’s embrace of Baby Doc Duvalier and Michel Martelly is greatly illustrative of a U.S. State Department’s design to turn back the clock on democratic progress and the people’s participation in the process of democracy in Haiti established by the twice democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

No wonder the U.S. State Department now wants the world to view ‘travel’ to Haiti as fraught with ‘robbery, lawlessness, infectious disease and poor medical facilities.’ They’ve implemented and now practice what they preach: robbery, lawlessness, the spread of infectious disease and the destruction of proper medical facilities to destroy any hope of democracy in Haiti.

Whatever is the State Department to do but to increase their attempts to re-criminalize Black Haitians?

It might do to remember, on this first day of January 2013, that 209 years ago in 1804, Haiti celebrated its independence by crushing chattel enslavement of Afrikan people everywhere.

On this day a victorious Jean-Jacques Dessalines specifically de-criminalized Black people. This scared then US president Thomas Jefferson to death.

Perhaps now, hushed State Department dinner conversation analysts will try to subvert the feelings of the Haitian masses about U.S. attempts to return the brutal, Papa Doc military to power, but the terrorist ploy won’t work.

The nearly 700,000 people still living under old sheets since the 2010 earthquake will speak out on the lawlessness of an Obama regime that sends a U.S. military invasion force to occupy injured, starving, homeless Haitians after a 7.2 earthquake instead of sending doctors, food and medical supplies.

This is the same regime that controls the U.N. occupation forces and is backing Martelly’s forced eviction of earthquake survivors from refugee camps in 2012.
No wonder the U.S. State Department now wants the world to view “travel” to Haiti as fraught with “robbery, lawlessness, infectious disease and poor medical facilities.” They’ve implemented and now practice what they preach: robbery, lawlessness, the spread of infectious disease and the destruction of proper medical facilities to destroy any hope of democracy in Haiti.

If this was Obama’s prep for the U.S. armies being sent to 35 Afrikan countries in 2013, who knows – maybe the Marines will again be sent to Haiti to quell the cholera infected and those injured from the lack of infrastructure after Hurricane Sandy. After all, most of those poor medical facilities could use that $20,000 per day per diem that Washington’s pet buffoon, Michel Martelly, gets daily when he travels, don’t cha think?

And I don’t know, do you think that maybe the populace could appear on TV with Martha Stewart and show the world how to bake mud cookies?

For those who do not know the recipe, read the following: First get some special clay containing calcium and other nutrients from near the town of Hinche in the Central Plateau. “Combine” it with salt and vegetable shortening. Then dry the result in the sun and eat.

Do you think Ms. Stewart would wanna make Haitian mud cookies a dietary staple of her customers? No? No “cooking with Crisco” this time around, in the finest tradition of that old American idiom for making everything run smoothly?

Well then, consider the crucial question asked by the great Jamaican columnist John Maxwell: “Is Starvation Contagious?” That is the issue that must be addressed when the country whose enslaved labour kept all of Europe fed before the Haitian Revolution is reduced by soaring food prices and globalization to eating mud!

And maybe during a commercial break, folks could be quizzed about how it feels to eat, sleep and take care of their young while standing “at home” in 2 feet of dirty flood water with no food, in their tent cities paid for by starving Haitians instead of said people having access to billions of mismanaged post-earthquake funds that find their way into U.S. government pockets and into the pockets of overseers Bill Clinton and George Bush – overseers, I might add, who were specifically placed in Haiti by Barack Obama.

Yes, the U.S. State Department’s lawlessness knows no bounds. And apparently financing Martelly’s corrupt government is one of the more creative and innovative ways that France and her U.S. allies have used the $22 billion France extorted from Haiti for having thrown off chattel enslavement, thus “depriving” Europe of its entire source of income.

Maybe the Associated Press should caution wealthy Americans “traveling” to Haiti about how the U.N. MINUSTAH’s cholera epidemic won’t touch their lives, as they are not likely to see piss and feces from U.N. soldiers in their drinking water or be raped by blue helmeted so-called peacekeepers to earn protection as “travelers” under U.N. MINUSTAH aegis.

The AP should also tell American travellers to Haiti that they’re not likely to be shot while brushing their teeth in their swank hotels or on the way to work, because the latest U.S. puppet, Martelly, will personally see to it that they survive to be robbed or killed by his – and only his – staff.

After all, ‘tis the season to be jolly, and the U.S. State Department and their quislings are some of the happiest killers on the planet, din’t cha know?

Yeah. The U.S. State Department should indeed warn Americans about the dangers of spending “Christmas in Hell: Or A Dread of Black Freedom,” where the coins of exchange are a history of resistance to oppression and naked U.S. engineered aggression, terrorism, starvation, disease and death.

But this article is a call to action.

There are political prisoners in Haiti, people who have been put in jail for saying “Enough!” of the thefts of our land and money, enough of the massacres, enough of the starvation and death. And recently, there are 21 newly imprisoned young men and women – seven young women and 14 young men – who have been imprisoned for nothing more than speaking out against the brutality perpetrated against Haiti by the U.S.-Canadian-French triad, by the U.N. MINUSTAH forces, by Brazil, the European Union and by the Haitian elite.

This is what has been going on in Haiti.

It is time for Euro-America and its allies to break with the legacy of rape that has marked their relations with Haiti. Haitians have always resisted. It was Haiti who broke the chains of slavery.

This latest demonization of Haiti is part of what has happened since the days of Haitian independence, when slavery advocates and slave owners designed the U.S. foreign policy that continues to be followed to this day.

And that needs to be changed.

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* Malaika H Kambon is a freelance photojournalist and the 2011 winner of the Bay Area Black Journalists Association Luci S. Williams Houston Scholarship in Photojournalism. She also won the AAU state and national championship in Tae Kwon Do from 2007-2010. She can be reached at [email protected]

* This article was first published by the San Francisco Bay Review