Nell Lancaster: How to help Haitians

From A Lovely Promise:

Partners in Health has been working in Haiti in an exemplary way for years. The literal collapse of many medical facilities in Port au Prince and other areas hardest hit by the quake has made their network of clinics and local health workers an even more important part of the country's sparse medical infrastructure. Please support them today.

Some people consider it unseemly to speak about the political context in which a massive, tragic catastrophe is happening. If you're one of those people, please stop reading this post now.

On February 29, 2004, the U.S. government helped depose the elected President of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Marines forced him onto a plane in the middle of the night and flew him to the Central African Republic. With U.S. and U.N. military and economic support, Haiti's new rulers launched a campaign of assassination, detentions, and intimidation against leaders and activists of Aristide's Lavalas party. The U.N. "peacekeepers" have participated in this campaign, firing on demonstrators, ignoring crimes committed against Lavalas activists by the police (who are being trained by the U.N. troops), and massacring civilians while carrying out sweeps in Lavalas neighborhoods against "criminal gangs".

Lavalas candidates have been prevented from running in subsequent elections. Their exclusion from this past spring's Senate election resulted in a massive boycott; even the government claimed only 11% participation. Now they have been barred again from the general elections scheduled for February 28, the eve of the coup's sixth anniversary.

Through all this, most of the U.S. political class has painted the overthrow and forced exile of Aristide and the reimposition of government for the rich as a good thing, a "transition to democracy". (This piece by Mark Leon Goldberg of UN Dispatch is typical.) This is a lie, as big a lie as the claim that the coup against Pres. Manuel Zelaya in Honduras was a legal "democratic transition".

The Obama administration, and the State Department run by Sec. Clinton, are firmly committed to this lie and the policies for which it is a cover story. But suppression of the largest political party in the country is not going to make it, or Haiti's poor, disappear. Haiti can only rebuild and develop if its people drive that development. An organization supporting such work is the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund. Your solidarity can make a difference to Haitians struggling for something they need as badly as shelter, food, and water: genuine democracy.