Disasters in
Iraq, Haiti and Jamaica
by
John Maxwell
“The
Americans, British, French and Germans supplied the opportunity for
Saddam to do his dirty work.”
As
some of us predicted several years ago, Mr. George W. Bush’s
policies have now hit the fan. It may be instructive to go back and
read what Wayne Brown and I were saying four years, three years and
two years ago. You may not have to do that, because what we said then
is now being echoed in some sections of the American press.
The
murder of Saddam Hussein was a given. According to Mr. Bush, the US
was engaged in a crusade
– which correctly defined, is Christian action against
unbelievers. He withdrew the word, but the policy lingers on. As a
President appointed not by the voters but by God, according to one of
his generals (Boykin)
Mr. Bush is clearly not answerable to any earthly authority. His Shia
allies in Iraq are similarly unencumbered by human considerations of
justice or law.
According
to Mr. Bush and his obedient poodles in the British government,
Hussein
got “Justice”
and it is not for ordinary mortals to consider the parameters of that
Justice. After all, Saddam “even tried to kill my Dad!” which
justifies junior in all his excesses.
American
Presidents since Reagan have all been accomplices of Saddam Hussein
in the crimes for which he was charged, the crimes against Humanity
in Jubail, Kurdistan and Iraq. The Americans, British, French and
Germans supplied the apparatus of death, the tactical information,
the materials to make the poison gas and even the opportunity for
Saddam to do his dirty work.
Additionally,
there is no qualitative difference between the US and UK-led
sanctions regime which killed more than half a million Iraqi
children, the present war which has killed nearly a million
Iraqi adults and the bulldozers which buried
thousands
of Iraqi soldiers alive towards the end of the Gulf War.
Messrs. George Bush Sr. and Clinton are in eminent retirement as is
Mr. Rumsfeld, while Messrs. Cheney and Bush Jr. are still at the head
of American affairs, doing their damnedest for the sake of American
corporations and oil. And Mr. Blair? well, what can anyone say of Mr.
Blair?
“The
behavior of the American press that has been most disgraceful.”
The
millions of demonstrators like me, who carried signs reading “No
Blood for Oil” and found ourselves described by the New York Times
as the world’s other superpower – Public Opinion – knew then,
as we know now, that the real world of realpolitik pays no
attention to the messages of the people whether delivered in English,
Arabic, Urdu or any other language.
All
that is left to us is the power to try to shame the malefactors, not
the power to try them for their crimes. Pinochet died in his bed as
have most of the western sponsored “Sons of Bitches” – to use
Franklin Roosevelt’s language.
It
is savagely ironic that a majority of Iraqis now consider the regime
of Saddam to have represented the “Good Old Days” – when they
could go safely to the supermarket, when their women were in
Parliament and free to walk abroad and work without the threat
of murder and rape because of the manner of their dress.
For
Saddam, whatever one thought of him, one can say that he met his end
with dignity and even, perhaps, nobility. He refused to be humiliated
from the day he was captured, examined for American TV by American
veterinarians – or so it seemed – for the delectation of
corpse-chasers like Larry King, whose itchy-fingered deathwatch in
Baghdad did more to disgrace the profession of journalism than
anything since the Judith Miller scandals.
In
all of this it is the behavior of the American press that has been
most disgraceful. They have acted as the Judas Goats leading a
substantial proportion of Americans into nothing less than disaster
and they, as much as Mr. Bush, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney, are
responsible for the 50 thousand Americans maimed and 3,000
killed in Iraq and the looting and desecration of eight
thousand years of human history and the resurgence of the theory that
might makes right, as Adolph Hitler used to say.
Disaster in
Haiti
The
visit of the Haitian president, Mr.
Rene Preval
to Jamaica is a poignant reminder of the failure of Haiti’s closest
neighbor, Jamaica, to do anything over more than a decade, to come to
the assistance of eight million of our brothers and sisters who
inherited the hatred and revanchism and racism directed against the
slaves who abolished slavery.
It
was in Haiti that plantation slavery in the western world was
destroyed. It was Haiti which caused the doubling of the size of the
United States by forcing the nearly bankrupt France of Napoleon
Bonaparte to sell off off most of what has since become a
great chunk of the United States.
And
it was France and the United States, chiefly, who beggared Haiti into
insolvency by trade embargoes and extortionate blackmail. The United
States refused to relax its embargo on Haiti until France had
re-established relations with its once enslaved colony. France, as a
condition of recognizing Haiti’s blood-won independence, demanded
and got the modern equivalent of $25 billion in blood money extracted
from the ex-slaves. When the Haitians couldn’t pay, United
States’ banks lent them the money, and when they couldn’t repay
that, the United States invaded
Haiti
and imposed a regime as bad as slavery and which, in addition,
devastated Haitian forests and agriculture, leaving the proud
Haitians reduced to the destitution and misery which they suffer
today.
“The
United States invaded Haiti and imposed a regime as bad as slavery.”
At
this moment, the Haitian people have managed to elect a President who
is tolerated by the United States as long as his predecessor, Jean
Bertrand Aristide remains
in South Africa.
The
United States is acting in protection of the elite interest, the
‘high-yallers’ and other mainly mulatto ruling class and its
Middle Eastern proselytes who have been given the franchise to run
Haiti on behalf of the United States.
This
means, for instance, that President Preval and the Haitian people are
not masters in their own house, and mercenaries from Brazil, Jordan
and other non-Caribbean states are the armed forces of Haiti. They
are the real rulers, free to go into the poorest areas and
murder
and arrest
whoever they thinks supports Aristide and wants him back. These
mercenaries are also free to rape and murder Haitian women and
children under the benign auspices of the United Nations, as decreed
by three eminent Uncle Toms: Kofi Annan, Colin Powell and Condoleezza
Rice.
It
is time for Jamaica and Caricom to awake to their sibling
responsibilities and duties. If it weren’t for Haiti and the
Jamaican
Maroons,
the slave trade and slavery might never have been abolished on the
West Indian plantations. It would have continued at least until
slavery was abolished in the United States, Brazil and Cuba, decades
after it was abolished here and more than half a century after the
people of Haiti asserted their wish to be free and made that freedom
real – or so they thought.
Our
brotherly responsibilities go further, because the flag of Haitian
revolution was raised by none other than the Jamaican Maroon –
Bouckman,
a survivor of the Taki rebellion.
The
Land of Look Behind
On
Thursday I was the keynote speaker at an assemblage of Maroons
convened by the Council
of Overseas Maroons
– COOM. The conference was attended by Maroons from here and
abroad and by distinguished scholars, foremost among them Dr. June
Besson, a ‘brown’ Jamaican, Reader in Anthropology at Goldsmith’s
College in London. Dr. Besson has been studying Accompong
Maroon
culture for nearly two decades and she has written and is writing
about what she has found. She is a fierce defender of Maroon autonomy
and the principle that they have a culture which should be respected
and made known to the world.
Also
heard at the conference was the solemn pledge by the Colonel, Mr.
Peddie and from his deputy, Harris Cawley, who may not see eye to eye
on everything but are united in the resolve that no mining will be
allowed in the Cockpit
Country.
This
resolve was also brought to the meeting by representatives of the 75,
000 people whose livelihoods depend on or are situated in and around
the Cockpit Country. On their behalf I would like to suggest that
those who wish to rape the Cockpit Country for bauxite, limestone and
bituminous coal, should come out and openly state their intentions,
if they believe that they are honorable and would survive public
exposure.
“What
is contemplated is an indecent assault on our heritage.”
The
Cockpit Country is the last refuge for the Jamaican soul, the last
clean, un-messed up part of Jamaica, and millions of us, some who
have never been there, regard the Land of Look Behind as a sacred and
intrinsic part of our patrimony and heritage.
Since
the government wants to know what our objections are to the
despoliation of this biological, anthropological, geological and
environmental treasure we would suggest that in fairness to the
Jamaican people, the prospective predators must be asked to present
all the information they have available so that the real owners of
the Cockpit Country, the people of Jamaica, can decide in open
discourse, what we want done.
And,
with due respect to the unions and their 5,000 bauxite workers, I
would suggest that emotion, feeling, sensibility and respect, are the
key elements of any decision to be made about a sacred place. And I
won’t even remind them of their part in ensuring that Jamaica
exacted a smaller take from the aluminum companies, even as those
companies were and are planning to give us, free of everything but
cancer, asthma and polluted water, the gift of three million tons of
red mud every year for the next twenty. What is contemplated is an
indecent assault on our heritage and our Jamaican soul, and it must
be resisted at all costs.
Come
on chaps! You too have the right to be heard in dis yah democracy.
John
Maxwell of the University of the West Indies (UWI) is the veteran
Jamaican journalist who in 1999 single-handedly thwarted the Jamaican
government's efforts to build houses at Hope, the nation's oldest and
best known botanical gardens. His campaigning earned him first prize
in the 2000 Sandals Resort's Annual Environmental Journalism
Competition, the region's richest journalism prize. He is also the
author of How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalists
and Journalists. Jamaica, 2000. Mr. Maxwell can be reached at
[email protected]
Copyright
2007 ©John Maxwell