Shunpiking Online Vo.4 No.4 Take a hard look at Haiti if you think Canada is building democracy

WE ALL are concerned about democracy and human rights. When Afghanistan comes up in Canadian debate, it is the military method that is questioned by many, not the idea of helping Afghanis to have a life. Democracy we support, officially, and privately anyway. Or do we? I am afraid some Canadians at the top are speaking with a "forked tongue."

There seems to be a disconnect between the leading lights of our country and the population at large. While most Canadians see themselves as peacemakers still - even the footsoldiers - there is a little problem in the real world of our actions abroad. Canadian CEOs, think tanks, fast-talking military brass, the politicians, all seem to have little respect for the Canadian majority when it comes to foreign policy actions.They talk a streak.

In the press we are not really told much about facts, either, because much of the mainstream press is "running with power," spinning a yarn and not willing to tell us the real story. You think we are supporting democracy in Afghanistan. This is what our soldiers die for, right? Then how is it possible that the Canadian government plotted, and helped execute, the forced removal of a democratically elected president in another country? In our name. Without our knowledge, that's how. It does make the whole Afghanistan affair look a tad disingenuous, even without considering the undemocratic American groundwork.

You don't buy it? I am not surprised. It does kind of rattle the base of trust in your leaders. Paul Martin even went to Haiti and said: "There are no political prisoners in Haiti." The filthy prisons were packed to the breaking point with them; still are, even now. That''s the mask of "democracy" speaking.

While medicating our upset over Canadians dying in Afghanistan with speeches about noble ideals worth defending, let's look at Canada in Haiti. In brief, this is what happened: In 2003, Ottawa, Paris, and Washington players had a meeting in Meech Lake, without Haitian representation, and concluded that Haiti's president had to go.

In 2004, after a long and violent covert campaign to undermine the Haitian government, in the wee hours of 29 February, US diplomats threatened bloodshed and mayhem and tricked President Jean-Bertrand Aristide into going with them, ostensibly to a press conference. With Canadian Forces "securing" the airport, Marines in plainclothes whisked him onto a jet without markings and took him to a place unknown.

Ever since, there has been persecution, murder and even more starvation in Haiti, with Canadians in nearly every key oversight position. An RCMP man heads UN police, a Canadian Forces colonel is in charge of election security, CIDA even paid the salary of a high official of the Haitian Justice Department, funded anti-democratic NGOs, etc.

While RCMP is training the police, the police are murdering and raping ... the poor. (The poor are largely supporting Aristide; the Haitian elite is threatened by that, and, as usual, works with the US/Canada/France managers of Haiti.)

Far from keeping peace, even UN forces are used by the Western managers, and are actually complicit in police crimes, themselves attacking the poor in their ghetto hovels. A fact I found hard to accept. But I saw the large-calibre holes in homes, schools and kindergarten buildings. Sometimes you have to get tough, I guess, especially to build democracy against the will of the people. (After you took it from them.)

Close to US$600 million were spent on the UN forces in a six-month period. Obscene, when you know that you could feed the whole country for the same time period, if you gave them the money. Haitians survive, miserably, on less than a dollar per day. The British medical journal The Lancet published a study concluding that 8,000 murders and 35,000 rapes had been committed in the capital alone in the two years since Aristide's kidnapping. (The rest of Haiti is unknown.) The suspects are mostly government agents, paramilitary and police.

Our newspapers attacked the researchers of the study -- no comment on the content. You should be hearing all this on CBC or CTV. They know, but unless you demand it, they won't bring it. I have told Tony Burman, head of CBC News, and others enough times.

Anyway, don't believe me. Look into it. It's all done in your name. You might like a say in it. So, to do something, I am in Haiti again, teaching young Haitian orphans as a volunteer teacher. (Orphans abound in Haiti.) Maybe we can convince young Haitians that Canadians do care, and "respect their democratic right to self-determination."

Maybe we have to clean house on Haiti before we play knights for the noble cause of democracy in faraway countries. Hundreds of political prisoners suffer in Haiti. Human lives are destroyed while we speak.