Disasters In Iraq, Haiti And Jamaica
By John Maxwell
11 January, 2007
Black Agenda Report
“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]This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it
Copyright 2007 ©John Maxwell
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