Ezili's Counter-Colonial Narrative on Deforestation,

Haitian Perspectives, Oct. 25, 2008

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...Environmental Minister Jean-Marie Claude Germain indicated in an AP article titled Haiti's Efforts to Save Trees Falters, "reforestation projects and efforts to preserve trees in three protected zones were set back by the violent rebellion that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004 and prompted the U.N. to send in thousands of peacekeepers to restore order. Even though there were agricultural laws, the laws were not respected," Germain said. (See also - HLLN on the causes of Haiti deforestation and poverty.)

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Since the beginning of Haitian president, Rene Preval's term in office in 2006, the Haitian Legislature has been, in turn, arguing over corruption, the Senator Boulos disqualification to hold office, dual citizenship, corruption; they spent four months haggling over selecting a new Prime Minister after the April 2008 food riots help get rid of the last one and now said President and government officials are occupied in round the clock meetings with international representatives and NGOs, begging, with no sense of history, authority or dignity, for "help" from the internationals, all presumably because of the four September storms/hurricanes. These folks do not represent Dessalines' legacy or descendants, whatsoever.

On February 29, 2004, Bush-the-second, along with Colin Powell, Condi Rice and Kofi Annan of the UN, helped take down Haiti's Constitutional government, legitimizing the Boca Raton imposed regime from the US, creating unprecedented anarchy, slaughtering 20,000 Haitians from Feb. 2004 to 2006, and then setting up a shadow government of foreign NGOs to run Haiti behind the proxy UN-firepower cover. And, by 2006, an "elected-under-occupation" Preval government. The Bush regime change in Haiti is perhaps similar to Bush abandoning 'free trade' to save free trade. His USAID/US Embassy functionaries in Haiti destroyed Haiti's democracy to save it for easier plundering and pillaging. Today, gold, silver, copper, iridium, uranium, granite, limestone, coal, chalk quarries, oil/gas exploration contracts are all being pursued behind the headlines, as the US builds its masssive, most expensive new US embassy compound, the largest in the world except for Iraq, Afghanistan, China and Germany, in tiny Haiti with over 1,000 employees. This, in a country that's facing FAMINE, klorox hunger...and that presumably has no U.S. strategic and economic interests as there is in Iraq, Afghanistan, China and Germany...

So what is the US doing in Haiti with this UN proxy occupation, other than masking its pillaging and plunder; letting the world know of only the colonial narrative - that Haiti is resourceless and selling the myth of the innately "violent Haitians" who brought deforestation upon themselves, coupled with the US/mainstream-benevolent/charitable chorus of how hard the US tries to assist "these-failed-blacks-who-cannot-rule-themselves!?"

Why do they need such a huge new investment in Haiti, after getting rid of Haiti's democracy in 2004 and bringing on UN proxy occupation? To serve the needs of poor, hopeless Haitians? Those "failed" and always "fighting-each-other-Haitians," who've single-handedly rendered Haiti, as the corporate media never misses an opportunity to say, directly or indirectly, in a myriad of ways: "the hemisphere's eternal basket case - a dismal repository of poverty where there is no future?"

In sum, as intended, this post-Bush coup d'etat Haitian puppet government offers absolutely no impediment to the empire's corporate benefactors, no HAITIAN leadership, vision, sustainable development, no viable solutions other than the acceptable, hat-in-hand cow-towing and BEGGING. And don't at all, address effectively the immediate necessities of the Haitian masses for food, health care, jobs, schooling, lower prices for food and fuel, dignity, sovereignty, respect, self-determination, self- sufficiency, need for personal safety, energy, freedom from UN imprisonment, abuse or answers to any other major welfare concerns of the people of Haiti. For, the new puppet Haitian government's job is to keep a dynamic people and indigenous Vodun culture passive as the Internationals' dominate, tie Haiti down with unfair trade laws, endless IMF/World Bank debts, failed neoliberal economic policies, dump food and other imports into Haiti that eviscerate Haiti's domestic growth and cause famine, with USAID/US Embassy engineering a shadow government of its approved NGOs to oversee the entire project, using the colonial narrative and UN firepower to silence dissent while robbing Haiti blind of its riches. (See, Haiti's Riches; Eurasian Minerals acquires 27 exploration licenses in Haiti and Recommended HLLN Links (Energy and Mining in Haiti): The wealthy, powerful and well-armed are robbing the Haitian people blind).

The Haitian people are hungry, dying, being raped, terrorized, abused and slaughtered by the UN soldiers whose non-development mandate the Haitian government just renewed on October 14, 2008. ("We don't have a development mandate and never will" said U.N. Special Representative Hedi Annabi, according to the Asociated Press. See, also:� Rich countries use trade deals to seize food from the world's hungriest people).

Haitian children don't have schools to go to and moreover, cannot even safely venture outside without fear that some UN pedophile will pull them into their UN war tanks and trucks for rape and sexual molestation.

On the other hand, the high price of living is reflected in that many are simply dropping dead of hunger, some eating dirt as sustenance... while the four September 2008 storms/hurricanes have destroyed all the major bridges, flooded the rice harvest, left mud cities from the exacerbation caused by unregulated US and other foreign mining, digging, pillaging of Haiti's soil, minerals and resources the 2004 Bush regime change was all about, which no Miami Herald/Jacqueline Charles article, intent on finding no indigenous Black-Haitian environmentalist/conservationists in Haiti and on blaming the Haitian peasants for deforestation, will ever mention...It is against this backdrop, against the backdrop of a people dying of hunger, disease, mired in the devastation of the various Bush regime change, fraudulent free-trade mud slides and floods, some right now have not eaten for 7 days... some telling Ezili's HLLN that they are so eaten up by mosquitoes from the toxicity of the storms flood waters that there's no more skin left on their bodies to be bitten off...It's against this backdrop that we address the lastest Miami Herald colonial narrative on Haiti and deforestation.

Such Miami Herald articles on Haiti and the hurricanes won't ever mention US/USAID's trade deals and "reform projects" - that annihilated the peasant Haitian farmers' rice production incomes or which eradicated the Haitian pig, causing the peasants to then start cutting more trees to sell for charcoal to survive - as factors that led to the harsh realities of greater deforestation in Haiti when traditional Haitian avenues of producing income were destroyed by US trade laws and USAID free trade projects and reforms. Don't expect to learn how a people with a Vodun culture that reveres nature and especially the Mapou (oak-like or ceiba pendantra/bombax) trees, and other such big trees as the abode of living entities and therefore as sacred things, were forced to watch the Catholic Church, during Rejete - the violent anti-Vodun crusade - gather whole Haitian communities at gun point into public squares, and forced them to watch their agents burn Haitian trees in order to teach Haitians their Vodun Gods were not in nature, that the trees were the "houses of Satan."

No. Miami Herald articles on Haiti myopically centered only in present-day crisis, won't give its readers any context; won't explain how once upon a time, trees were sacred things in Haitian/African culture, looked upon as living energies that provided strength to the people. Thus, cutting down trees was relatively a taboo. But these core Africanist values were scorned and desecrated by the influences of Western colonialism and Christian missionaries on traditional Vodun. These core values were uprooted during the anti-Vodun Rejete campaigns (1940-41) as a means for the Catholic Church to get rid of Vodun as its rival religion and philosophy in Haiti and as a way for the US to clear peasant Haitians off lands they wanted to acquire for their agricultural initiatives in Haiti in the 1940s during the post-U.S.- occupation presidency of Elie Lescot (1941-46).

The Catholic Churches' brutal anti-superstition campaigns in the 1940s, which made it alright to destroy trees that holds up not only the land but a culture, adds to deforestation in Haiti. For, once these core values were broken down and substituted with foreign ideals (senility?) - foreign psychology irrelevant to Haitian survival, things in Haiti for the vast majority, as Chinua Achebe, would put it: began to "fall apart..."

Haitians who had acquired generations-deep strong beliefs that certain trees were the houses of the spirits that gave them strength, continuity, familial identity and connections to the Ancestors were deliberately traumatized. Rejete, the campaign that killed Vodouist priests, destroyed their sacred temples, including centuries-old trees in Haiti, was also tied in to the US government's and the Port-au-Prince bourgeoisie's agricultural policy in Haiti that required the appropriation of peasant lands. So, in addition to the psychological trauma inflicted on Vodouist Haitians, forced to watch the US agents burn down their sacred familial trees, the land tenures upon which these trees and Vodun temples stood, these sacred spaces that gave the majority of Haitians grounding, spiritual roots as well as their livelihoods, sources of income and food were simultaneously destroyed. Also, some knowledgeable Haitians maintain that under the pretext of the Rejete campaign, thousands of acres of peasant lands were cleared of sacred trees so that the US could vainly try to make Haiti a Western-controlled rubber kingdom where it would grow sisal or rubber trees (for portable bridges, the tires in military jeeps, planes, aircraft guns, et al...) for the US war efforts during World War II.

Once Haiti's natural zones for agriculture were confiscated by big agribusinesses and pushed off their ancestral lands, disenfranchised peasants had no choice but to go into the harsher lands in the mountains or wherever they could, to try to grow some food to feed their families, while a small group of the world's rich - such as the procession of US lumber companies in the 19th century and then, in the 20th century the procession of US lumber, sugar and fruit companies paid large sums to corrupt government officials to cut down pine, mahogany, cedar, oak and other trees for access to the Haitian forests and peasant lands in order to pillage Haiti's resources, under the guise of "development," "job creation" or "anti-superstition." Questionable companies such as: Haitian American Sugar Company (HASCO, 1915), Haitian American Development Corporation (1926), or Elie Lescot's Societe Haitiano-Americaine de Developpement Agricole (SHADA, 1941), et al - uprooted all that was valuable, made millions and exported it all overseas, leaving behind only poverty, depleted soil and tremendous environmental degradation.

One pertinent example of this sort of Western chicanery and plunder that tampered with Haiti's zones for forest use, and zones for forest conservation and natural access to responsible wood consumption is how during the Duvalier era, it was an American company that simply and without conscience or remorse clear cut major portions of the dense pine forest - Forêt des Pins - in Thiote, Haiti, a forest of centuries old, if not thousand-year-old giant pine trees, and took Haiti's precious lumber to the US. The US company, with the complicity of Haiti's mercernary mafia families, did not only hack into a national heritage of the people of Haiti but left an ecological disaster and tragedy behind - areas left bare and certain neighboring residents, used to the soil protection, productivity and cool climate provided by the mature forest, facing alone a devastatingly dry, hot, arid climate, no more food or fuel sovereignty, not to mention no means to make a livelihood from the responsible uses of the forests' natural bounty; not to mention facing alone the dangers from drought, floods and mudslides now that the centuries-old lush Haitian pine forest no longer protected the surrounding area villages. Villages like Bodarie, et al. With no tree roots to hold the soil, topsoil disappears and fewer vegetables can grow. Fewer trees also means there is less rain.

Clearly, environmental degradation in Haiti cannot simply be ascribed to the "peasants cutting trees for charcoal." Environmental degradation is a result of the economic, social, cultural, and political choices of the morally repugnant economic elites in Haiti and their foreign patrons.

But the multiple causes which accelerated the deforestation in Haiti and that don't involve blaming the poor Haitian, won't be outline by colonial narratives written by the likes of Jacqueline Charles of the Miami Herald. These narratives completely ignore, for instance, the European genocide of the Tainos-Haitians and enslavement of Africans in Haiti to clear the forests for sugar and coffee also ushered in the desecration of nature, and that today practically every Catholic Cathedral bench in Spain and in France all these tourists are sitting on, were made out of wood cut down from Ayiti. And, that the red dye used to color deep crimson or bright scarlet those French and Spanish monarchs' and noblemen's clothes you see displayed in horrendous pictures of the time, evidenced at, for instance, the Palace of Versailles in France, came from trees from Ayiti. Nor, will such mainstream media significantly factor in a consciousness of the crisis of global warming evident. No, the mainstream media's colonial narrative blames the Haitian victims of US trade liberalization policies, unbridled capitalism and greed. Completely ignoring, for instance, as Celia Hart wrote, that however typical they are in the Caribbean, "hurricanes are now growing in size and number as a result of human disdain toward nature's balance. We are condemned by the insatiable greed of the wealthy of the world and their mortal obsession with using their money to pay for what their poor souls just can't perceive to deal with these new enemies who turn up in the summer to threaten –- for a change -– the fragile Caribbean islands along with all their dispossessed... unbridled capitalism kills nature while we’re left to breathe worse, starve to death and suffer from the ravages of their squandering...” (See, Celia Hart Santamaría for Kaos en la Red, Sept. 3, 2008; and Celia Hart's last essay; and Miami Herald article by Jacqueline Charles - Ravaged environment keeps Haiti at risk).

Many, in hurricane-ravaged Gonaives, Haiti, right now, are using tiny, useless brooms to push against fatigued muscle sinew, pushing mud to clear houses and belongings from beneath the storms' death jaws....it is against this backdrop that we address the Haitian Diaspora (Haitians living abroad) and the Haitian government and say, make feeding the people a PRIORITY, stop begging, use what's in your hands and kindly don't go back to arguing in the Legislature about concerns that are NOT priorities to the people of Haiti right now, concerns like who gets more Legislative and Executive power in Haiti (i.e. dual citizenship) while Haiti is under foreign occupation, indefinite detentions, unnecessary militarization, free trade famine, endless fraudulent neo-liberal World Bank/IRI/USAID/IMF impositions. Not to mention the pillaging and fleecing of Haiti's oil, gas, gold and other natural resources that is taken place and not reported whatsoever behind this racist, abusive "humanitarian" facade, of UN guns and the Christian NGO's anarchy and de facto rule of Haiti since Bush W's Haiti regime change, 2004...

(See Forwarded Mail on Ezili's Comment on need for Constitutional Amendment in Haiti - Not A Priority, Haitian Perspectives, Oct. 25, 2008; See also,

"... a lot of NGOs do as they wish and the (Haitian) government has not been able, so far, to coordinate their efforts," says Haiti's Prime Minister, Michelle Pierre-Louis. Go to: Haiti aid effort unravels by Mike Thomson, BBC News, Oct. 24, 2008; HLLN's "What Haitian-Americans Ask the US Congress and of the New U.S. President"; HLLN on the causes of Haiti deforestation and poverty ; Racism and Poverty By John Maxwell, Oct. 25, 2008; Ezili Dantò on Help for the Hurricane Victims in Haiti, Sept. 12, 2008; and The forgotten occupation ).

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