It’s due largely to the Israeli Lobby’s influence, or as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote in their book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, America’s Middle East policy is driven “almost entirely (by) US domestic politics, and especially (because of) the (Lobby’s) activities…. This situation has no equal in American political history.”

In his book, The Power of Israel in the United States, James Petras documented its enormous influence, explaining its roots throughout government, the business community, the dominant media, academia, the clergy, and powerful wealthy Jewish families. Broad support comes from thousands of dedicated activists, including doctors, lawyers, accountants, other professionals, philanthropists, and journalists given special prominence and benefits for their unwavering pro-Israeli reporting, suppressing decades of its militarism, belligerence, and illegal occupation while vilifying Israel’s enemies.

As a result, Israel receives enormous benefits, including billions in annual aid, the latest weapons and technology, unrestricted US market access, and free entry of its immigrants. Its imperial wars, illegal occupation, and crimes of war and against humanity are supported. Harmful Security Council resolutions are vetoed and General Assembly ones ignored. As a result, it operates freely, including spying in America by covertly penetrating US military bases, the FBI, CIA, IRS, DHS and many other government agencies, remaining unaccountable for its actions.

Israel is unique as America’s largest aid recipient, on the most favorable terms, and virtually anything more requested, given openly or covertly, in violation of the 1961 US Foreign Assistance Act (as amended), stipulating that no aid be provided to governments that engage:

in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, including torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, prolonged detention without charges, causing the disappearance of persons by the abduction and clandestine detention of those persons, or other flagrant denial of the right to life, liberty, and the security of person, unless such assistance will directly benefit the needy people in such country.

In 2004, the amended Act let the president provide aid to treat orphans, other vulnerable children, those with HIV/AIDS, and to set up schools and other supportive programs.

US Aid to Israel

In November 2008, Shirl McArthur of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (WRMEA) used Congressional Research Report (CRS) data for a “Conservative Estimate of Total Direct US Aid to Israel” since 1949, saying it’s almost $114 billion, but explaining that determining the exact figure is impossible since parts are buried in various agency budgets, mostly the Defense Department’s (DOD) or in forms not easily quantifiable.

He states:

“It must be emphasized that this analysis is a conservative, defensible accounting of US direct aid to Israel, NOT of Israel’s cost to the US or the American taxpayer, not of the benefits to Israel of US aid. The distinction is important, because the indirect or consequential costs suffered by the US as a result of its blind support for Israel exceed by many times the substantial amount of direct aid” provided.

Besides Afghanistan and other Middle East conflicts, excluded from McArthur’s data, is the mounting Iraq invasion and occupation cost, estimated by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes to be $3 trillion in their book titled, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.

They include an extra $2 trillion national debt, ad infinitum interest on it, veterans’ healthcare and disability payments, the economic impact of lives lost and jobs interrupted, the higher cost of oil, the long-term economic impact, and numerous intangibles such as global anti-American sentiment, the near universal Arab world view that Washington attacked Iraq for Israel, and the US’s reduced capability to respond to other global crises and address vital homeland needs.

In his June 2003 WRMEA article titled, “The Cost to American Taxpayers of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” Thomas Stauffer conservatively estimated it at around $3 trillion measured in 2002 dollars, nearly four times the amount for the Vietnam war, also in 2002 dollars.

Stauffer said US Israeli aid is way-understated:

“since much is outside of the foreign aid appropriation process or implicit in other programs. It comes to $1.8 trillion, including special trade advantages, preferential contracts, or aid buried in other accounts. In addition to the financial outlay,” about 275,000 US jobs are lost annually.

His estimates include:

• multi-fold oil price increases;
• the effect on US jobs and exports;
• economic and military aid,
• special benefits to Israel, including privileged contracts for Israeli firms, legal and illegal weapons and technology transfers, exemption from US trade protection provisions, discounted “surplus” military equipment sales, low or no-interest loans, and other undisclosed costly benefits, exclusively for Israel.

He concluded that Israeli assistance and Middle East unrest “ha(ve) proven to be very expensive for the US,” much higher than revealed figures. Their total costs “are some six times the official aid” with all related factors included such as the price of oil and burden on other regional states. “All states — not just the US — have borne the burden of conflicts in the Middle East.”

Known US aid includes:

• annual $3 billion direct appropriations;
• undisclosed additional amounts;
• millions annually to resettle immigrants;
• disclosed and unknown billions in loan guarantees;
• since 1981, economic aid in direct cash transfers, and since 1985 military aid the same way;
• Israeli military loans as grants, repayment not required; Israel wants them called loans to avoid US monitoring; according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), “Technically, the assistance is called loans, but as a practical matter, the military aid is (given as) grants;”
• economic aid is the same, Israel spending it as it pleases with no required accountability;
• since 1982, Economic Support Fund (ESF) cash transfers come in lump sum form at the beginning of each fiscal year, no strings attached — a benefit afforded no other country, made even greater by investing it in US Treasuries;
• special Foreign Military Sales (FMS) funding is also afforded to purchase American weapons and technology; other countries buy them through the Defense Department (DOD); Israel deals directly with US companies; other countries must comply with minimum purchase amounts; Israel has no such restriction; other countries let DOD disburse funds to suppliers; Israel pays them directly and is reimbursed by the US Treasury; under this arrangement, Israeli officials have committed serious offenses, including embezzlement and improper access to highly classified information on US weapons and technology;
• US weapons suppliers provide offsets by purchasing Israeli products and services;
• Israel may use over 26% of its aid to buy weapons, munitions and other equipment from its own companies; no other nation has this benefit; as a result, its arms industry is one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated; in 2007, it was the 8th largest supplier to developing countries;
• aid finances Israel’s defense industry;
• state-of-the-art weapons and technology are provided; and
• America guarantees Israel’s access to oil and finances its settlements — illegal under international law.

In April 1998, Washington designed Israel a “major non-NATO ally,” qualifying it to receive Excess Defense Articles (EDA) under Section 516 of the Foreign Assistance Act and Section 23(a) of the Arms Export Control Act. As a strategic US ally, it gets unmatched preferential treatment.

In FY 2009, the If Americans Knew web site said America gave Israel $7 million or more daily. Palestinians got nothing, except to police their own people, strengthen Fatah against Hamas and other competing parties, some economic aid benefitting Israel and the West, and spotty amounts through USAID and to UNRWA and US-based NGOs for projects called “humanitarian.”

In their above-mentioned book, Mearsheimer and Walt said:

Since the October (1973) War, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing the amounts (given) any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct US economic and military assistance since 1976 and the largest total recipient since World War II. Total direct US aid to Israel amounts to well over $140 billion in 2003 dollars…. In per capita terms, the United States gives each Israeli a direct subsidy worth about $500 per year.

Over the last 20 years, Washington focused mainly on military aid, increasing it by $150 million annually since FY 2007, plus additional amounts for Israeli incursions, planned jointly with Washington.

Before 1998, Israel annually received military grants of $1.8 billion and economic ones totaling $1.2 billion. Beginning in FY 2009, by mutual agreement, economic aid is being reduced by $120 million and military grants increased by $60 million annually over 10 years. In August 2007, a memorandum of understanding afforded Israel $30 billion in aid for 10 years, plus later discovered undisclosed amounts, totaling billions.

Budgeted amounts go mostly for specific projects, such as Israel’s Merkava tank, its Arrow anti-missile missile, other anti-missile systems, and the cancelled Lavi attack fighter. Grants also go to US-Israeli scientific and business cooperation organizations, the two largest being the BIRD (Binational Research & Development) Foundation and the BARD (Binational Agriculture and Research and Development) Fund.

Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report on US Foreign Aid to Israel — December 4, 2009

Its latest report affirms Israel as “the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign assistance since World War II,” saying it gets nearly $3 billion annually, mainly as military assistance.

In August 2007, the Bush administration incrementally increased it by $6 billion over the next decade. For FY 2010, the Obama administration requested $2.775 billion in Foreign Military Financing (FMF). Congress provided $555 million of Israel’s total FY 2010 FMF in PL (Public Law) 111-32, in the FY 2009 Supplemental Appropriations Act. HR 3081 and S 1434 contain the remaining funds.

On July 9, 2009, HR 3160 was introduced, the Israeli Foreign Assistance Appropriations Act, 2010. The bill was referred to committee and awaits further action.

Recent possible military sales include:

• on September 29, 2008, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter with associated equipment and training, a deal, if consummated, worth up to $15.2 billion; Israel wants up to 75 depending on the cost; negotiations continue, but reported disagreement was reported over its right to customize aircraft to its needs and the final per plane cost, from $100 – $200 million depending on the degree of customization;
• on September 9, 2008, Patriot Missile Fire Unit upgrades, 1,000 GBU-39 small diameter guided bombs, and 28,000 M72A7 light anti-armor weapons, in total worth about $330 million; Israel already has US-supplied Hawk and Patriot missiles as well as its own defense systems; since 1988, both countries have been developing the Arrow Anti-Missile system, a weapon with theater ballistic missile capability; Arrow became operational in 2000; Arrow II is designed to deter longer-range conventional ballistic missiles, and other systems are under development, including Arrow III;
• on July 30, 2008, nine C-130 J-30 aircraft with associated equipment and training, worth up to $1.9; billion; and
• on July 15, 2008, four Littoral combat ships, worth up to $1.9 billion, and JP-8 aviation jet fuel worth up to $1.3 billion; in 2009, Israel declined to purchase these ships over cost concerns.

American Israeli aid began in 1949 with a $100 million Export-Import Bank loan and continued modestly for the next two decades. In 1962, Israel bought its first advanced weapons system, Hawk anti-aircraft missiles. In 1968, a year after the Six Day War, the Johnson administration assured Israel’s regional military superiority. Since 1970, large-scale aid followed. In 1971, it was $545 million, and by 1974 Israel became America’s largest aid recipient, two-thirds for military purposes.

After the 1979 Camp David Accords and Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty, Washington gave both sides $7.5 billion under the 1979 Special International Security Assistance Act, allocated 3-2 favoring Israel. Thereafter, regular and emergency economic and military aid followed. Today, Israeli allocations far exceed amounts given Egypt or any other nation.

In 1985, Congress appropriated special economic assistance of $1.5 billion under terms of a US-Israel Joint Economic Development Group (JEDG), calling for neoliberal reforms and empowering Israel’s Finance Ministry and national Bank.

Washington and Tel Aviv colluded for two goals:

– balancing Israel’s budget; and

– cutting wages, prices, credit, public benefits, pensions, and the currency’s value as well as curbing union power and establishing an exploitable temporary worker market.

It began Israel’s race to the bottom by mass privatizations, welfare and social benefit cuts, and wealth shifted to the top as in America, the result being growing Jewish poverty, hunger and homelessness to the present.

In 1985, all US military aid became grants, what began for economic aid in 1981. Thereafter, generous supplemental aid followed, including after the Gulf and 2003 Iraq wars. The FY 2003 Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act included $9 billion in loan guarantees over three years and $1 billion in military grants. Other amounts came earlier. They’ve continued ever since, some open, others covert, affording Israel exclusive preferential treatment.

The “special relationship” remains fixed under Obama, what he affirmed at the June 2008 AIPAC meeting that he’s “a true friend of Israel,” felt he was “among friends,” stressed that “the bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable today, tomorrow and forever,” and, in fact, “as president, I will work with you to ensure that this bond is strengthened.” He hasn’t disappointed.

Speaking to the heavy reliance on military troops, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez observed that “thousands of men are disembarking in Haiti as if it were a war.” Chavez’s sentiments echoed his counterparts in Bolivia, Nicaragua and Cuba.

Beleaguered with increasingly bad press about Iraq and Afghanistan, Western armed forces have an opportunity to highlight their humanitarian face in Haiti. But, some wonder, with what costs?

Military-led versus the civilian-oriented approach favoured by regional countries highlights a difference in approach to disaster relief. Fusing humanitarianism and the military, both the US and Canada say that order must come first to prevent the descent into chaos. Alternatively, Nicaragua told the UN General Assembly that “Haiti needs doctors, engineers, teachers, construction materials. It needs to strengthen its agricultural production; it doesn’t need soldiers.”

Venezuela is providing Haiti free fuel, delivered along with other aid shipments through the Dominican Republic.

Cuba and Venezuela have co-operated to deliver health services to Haiti, according to Al Jazeera’s Tom Fawthrop. Cuban doctors are specially trained for disaster relief and have proven themselves during the earthquakes in Pakistan and Indonesia in 2005 and 2006. Washington declined Havana’s aid during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

However, regional groups, states and humanitarian organizations have had difficulty accessing Haiti. As MSF’s Francoise Saulnier explained to Reuters, “Urgent and vital attention to the people has been delayed (for) military logistics.” As planes and supplies are delayed or re-routed, doctors have had to employ impromptu measures, such as hand-operated breathing devices and saws for amputations, according to media reports.

The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) was unable to secure US approval to land in Port-au-Prince in January, even though Haiti is a member state. Instead, they have had to form their base for disaster relief in Jamaica.

As the Responsibility to Protect doctrine was invoked in 2004 to justify Haiti’s military occupation, disaster relief justifies the current military intervention. Some 27,000 foreign soldiers are currently stationed in Haiti.

The Canadian Forces contingent consists of 2,046 military personnel, including the Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART), a Naval Task Group, six Griffon helicopters, an urban rescue and recovery team, a detachment of military police, a field hospital, and a sizable Land Force presence, including a light infantry battalion.

Yves Engler, co-author of Canada in Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority, describes the militarized response: “Canada sent 2,000 troops while disaster relief teams in Calgary, Toronto and other cities were told to stay at home.” Engler sees this response as a “dangerous sign for a continuation of long-standing policy.”

The policy Engler is referring to is the political interference in Haitian democracy emanating from the ousting of democratically elected president Jean Bertrand Aristide in 2004: a move planned by Washington, Ottawa and Paris. In his recently published Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy, Engler documents how Canadian elite JTF-2 forces secured the airport while 500 Canadian soldiers patrolled the streets and engaged in counterinsurgency operations against Aristide supporters.

In the post-earthquake context, the Canadian military is present in a different capacity. Engler explains that there is “no doubt that Canadian troops are fulfilling a humanitarian function, but troops are not the preferable option.” Engler says doctors and search and rescue teams should be on the ground, not soldiers.

There is growing fear from regional states that the US is establishing a large, permanent military base in Haiti with Canadian support. Recently on the A-Infos Radio Project, Anthony Fenton, co-author of Canada In Haiti, said that states such as Nicaragua and Venezuela have expressed concern that Haiti is becoming “a launching pad for destabilization and continuing Western military and economic hegemony for the entire hemisphere.” With a long-term American presence in Haiti, the US can further its strategic interest in the Caribbean/Latin American region, much like it’s doing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

US influence in Latin America has declined in the past decade, explained in part by the strengthening of grassroots democratic governments in countries like Venezuela and Bolivia. Caracas and Havana’s leadership in establishing the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA) Trade Bloc based on social issues rather than trade-liberalization, for example, has been a direct challenge to the US-led attempts at establishing the Free Trade Area of the Americas. This movement, combined with the crisis in Haiti, has led analysts like Engler to believe there is “some concern [in the US] that the earthquake would [increase] Venezuelan and Cuban involvement in Haitian affairs.” Increased Haitian involvement with ALBA would strengthen this movement, which has already attracted eight states.

As Michel Chossudovsky, Editor for The Centre for Research on Globalization and visiting professor at the University of Ottawa, writes: “In all likelihood the humanitarian operation will be used as a pretext and justification to establish a more permanent US military presence in Haiti.”

… the executive director of the National Nurses Union. She contacted the [Obama] administration. She got put off. She had no response. Then they sent her to some low-level person that had no authority to do anything.

And then, finally, she’s contacting me. And she says, ‘Do you know any way to get a hold of President Obama?’ And I’m going, ‘Well, this is pretty pathetic if you’re having to call me. I mean, you are the largest nurses union… I don’t know what I can do for you. I mean, I’ll put my call in, too.’ But as we sit here today, not a whole heck of a lot has happened. And it’s distressing.

The courage and compassion of thousands of people willing to enter a chaotic disaster zone threatened with aftershocks are very real. Compassion arises out of a recognition that ‘their’ suffering is no different to ‘my’ suffering. The heart trembles and softens in response to this awareness. Such a subtle resonance and yet it has the power to relieve much of the world’s despair. It is the only counter force to the brutality and greed of human egotism willing to sacrifice everyone and everything for ‘me’.

But if compassion is to make a real difference, it must be allied to rational analysis. In the absence of this analysis, compassion is like a bird with a broken wing flapping in futile circles, never leaving the ground.

Joining compassion with reason means asking why over 80 per cent of Haiti’s population of 10 million people live in abject poverty. Why less than 45 per cent of all Haitians have access to potable water. Why the life expectancy rate in Haiti is only 53 years. Why seventy-six per cent of Haiti’s children under the age of five are underweight, or suffer from stunted growth, with 63 per cent of Haitians undernourished. Why 1 in every 10,000 Haitians has access to a doctor.

In September 2008, Dan Beeton of the US-based Center for Economic and Policy Research told us:

Media coverage of floods and other natural disasters in Haiti consistently overlooks the human-made contribution to those disasters. In Haiti’s case, this is the endemic poverty, the lack of infrastructure, lack of adequate health care, and lack of social spending that has resulted in so many people living in shacks and make-shift housing, and most of the population in poverty. But Haiti’s poverty is a legacy of impoverishment, a result of centuries of economic looting of the country by France, the U.S., and of odious debt owed to creditors like the Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank. Haiti has never been allowed to pursue an economic development strategy of its own choosing, and recent decades of IMF-mandated policies have left the country more impoverished than ever.¹

John Pilger has witnessed the reality on the ground that explains Western interest in the country:

When I was last in Haiti, I watched very young girls stooped in front of whirring, hissing, binding machines at the Port-au-Prince Superior Baseball Plant. Many had swollen eyes and lacerated arms. I produced a camera and was thrown out. Haiti is where America makes the equipment for its hallowed national game, for next to nothing. Haiti is where Walt Disney contractors make Mickey Mouse pyjamas, for next to nothing. The US controls Haiti’s sugar, bauxite and sisal. Rice-growing was replaced by imported American rice, driving people into the cities and towns and jerry-built housing. Years after year, Haiti was invaded by US marines, infamous for atrocities that have been their specialty from the Philippines to Afghanistan.²

Peter Hallward examined recent US policy in Haiti in the Guardian:

Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti’s people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s phrase) ‘from absolute misery to a dignified poverty’ has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.³

The US Double Game

Aristide took office in February 1991 and was briefly the first democratically elected President in Haiti’s history before being overthrown by a US-backed military coup on September 30, 1991. The Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs observed after the coup:

Under Aristide, for the first time in the republic’s tortured history, Haiti seemed to be on the verge of tearing free from the fabric of despotism and tyranny which had smothered all previous attempts at democratic expression and self-determination.” His victory “represented more than a decade of civic engagement and education on his part,” in “a textbook example of participatory, ‘bottom-up’ and democratic political development.”⁴

Aristide’s balancing of the budget and “trimming of a bloated bureaucracy” led to a “stunning success” that made White House planners “extremely uncomfortable”. The view of a US official “with extensive experience of Haiti” summed up the reality beneath US rhetoric. Aristide, slum priest, grass-roots activist, exponent of Liberation Theology, “represents everything that CIA, DOD and FBI think they have been trying to protect this country against for the past 50 years.”⁵

Following the fall of Aristide, also with US support, at least 1,000 people were killed in the first two weeks of the coup and hundreds more by December. The paramilitary forces were led by former CIA employees Emmanuel Constant and Raoul Cedras. Aristide was forced into exile from 1991-94. Noam Chomsky summarised the situation:

Well, as this was going on, the Haitian generals in effect were being told [by Washington]: ‘Look, murder the leaders of the popular organisations, intimidate the whole population, destroy anyone who looks like they might get in the way after you’re gone.’… And that’s exactly what Cedras and those guys did, that’s precisely what happened — and of course they were given total amnesty when they finally did agree to step down.⁶

In 1994, the US returned Aristide in the company of 20,000 troops. This was presented as a noble defence of democracy, but in fact the US was playing a double game. As Chomsky noted, Aristide was allowed to return only after the coup leaders had slaughtered much of the popular movement that had brought him to power. His return was also conditional on acceptance of both the US military occupation and Washington’s harsh neoliberal agenda. The plans for the economy were set out in a document submitted to the Paris Club of international donors at the World Bank in August 1994. The Haiti desk officer of the World Bank, Axel Peuker, described the plan as beneficial to the “more open, enlightened, business class” and foreign investors.⁷

In 2004, the US engineered a further coup by cutting off almost all international aid over the previous four years, making the government’s collapse inevitable. Aristide was forced to leave Haiti by US military forces. US Congresswoman, Barbara Lee, challenged the US government:

“It appears that the US is aiding and abetting the attempt to violently topple the Aristide government. With all due respect, this looks like ‘regime change’.”⁸

In our search of the Lexis Nexis media database (February 3) we checked for articles containing the word ‘Haiti’ over the last month. This gave 2,256 results (some online press articles are not captured by Lexis Nexis). Our search for articles containing ‘Aristide’ gave 47 results. The words ‘Haiti’ and ‘Voodoo’ gave 53 results. The words ‘Haiti’ and ‘looting’ gave 136 results.

These numbers give an idea of how the broken wing of media analysis keeps public compassion grounded in an endless circling that is powerless to end the suffering of the people of Haiti.

Media Performance

The 47 mentions of Aristide in 2,256 articles discussing Haiti contained around nine articles that discussed US responsibility for his overthrow. We found several more online articles — notably two excellent pieces by Mark Weisbrot and one by Hugh O’Shaugnessey in the Guardian — that were not picked up by Lexis Nexis.

Hallward made a brief reference in his Guardian article, cited above. Seumas Milne wrote in the Guardian that Aristide’s challenge to Haiti’s oligarchy and its international sponsors “led to two foreign-backed coups and US invasions, a suspension of aid and loans, and eventual exile in 2004.”

Isabel Hilton wrote in the Independent:

“President Clinton negotiated his [Aristide’s] return in 1994, reportedly on condition that he accept a US blueprint for Haiti’s economic development. When Aristide won a second election in 2001, he was again deposed, in 2004, this time forcibly flown by George W Bush’s administration to exile in Africa, where he remains.”

Mark Steel, Patrick Cockburn and Andrew Buncombe made similar comments in the Independent. To his credit, Buncombe published two pieces mentioning the US role in Aristide’s overthrow. This handful of brief references to the US role in destroying Aristide, restricted to two national newspapers — the Guardian and the Independent — represents most of the honest commentary on this issue available to the public. Meanwhile, a flood of mainstream broadcast and print coverage has depicted the US as the high-tech saviour of Haiti.

Even more shocking, not one of the above national media journalists made any mention of the role of the +media+ in suppressing the truth of the US role in Haiti. Journalists apparently do not find this silence problematic.

If it is important for journalists to hold governments to account, then why not their own industry? Public awareness and outrage +do+ have the power to obstruct government criminality. But the public cannot know enough to be outraged, to resist, if the media does not tell them what is happening and why.

Nevertheless, it seems clear to us that there has been a marked improvement in current media performance on Haiti compared to the output we analysed in 2004. Then, the US role was almost completely buried out of sight.

It could be that Aristide’s fate simply matters less now. Alternatively, it could be, as we believe, that this is evidence that the mainstream is beginning to improve its performance in response to pressure from alternative, web-based media. With all mainstream trend lines pointing down, notably advertising revenues, and with readers turning in droves to non-corporate websites, it could be that the mainstream liberal media are being forced to compete by publishing more honest, radical material. If so, this is an extremely hopeful sign for everyone who cares about working for a more peaceful, rational world.

Of Devils And Dignity Lost

The rest of recent media performance is consistent with earlier coverage. In 2004, as democracy was being crushed, The Times observed:

“Mr Aristide, a former Roman Catholic priest, won Haiti’s first free elections in 1990, promising to end the country’s relentless cycle of corruption, poverty and demagoguery. Ousted in a coup the following year, he was restored to power with the help of 20,000 US troops in 1994.”⁹

There was no mention of the history of US support for mass murderers attacking a democratic government and killing its supporters.

The Guardian also believed the US had “restored” Aristide:

To a degree, history repeated itself when the US intervened again in 1994 to restore Mr Aristide. Bill Clinton halted the influx of Haitian boat people that had become politically awkward in Florida. Then he moved on. Although the US has pumped in about $900m in the past decade, consistency and vision have been lacking.¹⁰

The BBC, Channel 4 News and other media followed the same themes¹¹

Following the January 12 earthquake, Charles Bremner wrote in the Times: “Bankrupt, barren, misruled and ravaged by nature and human violence, the country on the western end of Hispaniola island serves as a text-book example of a dysfunctional nation.

“While the rest of the Americas have been pulling out of poverty in recent decades, Haiti has sunk deeper into destitution, dependent on foreign charity and a United Nations force to keep its eight million people from starving and fighting.”

And the explanation for this? Bremner quoted Joel Dreyfuss, a Haitian journalist, who observed sagely: “Some countries just have no luck. Haiti is one of those places where disaster follows on disaster.”

The photo caption to Vanessa Buschschluter‘s piece on the BBC website read: “The Clinton Administration intervened to restore President Aristide to power.” She added: “US troops left after two years — too soon, some experts argue, to ensure the stability of Haiti’s democratic institutions.”

In the Observer, Regine Chassagne could only lament “the west’s centuries of disregard.”¹²

Tragicomically, the media has preferred to focus on the colonial past 200 years ago rather than on the destruction of democracy in the last decade. Ben Macintyre wrote in The Times: “But for many Haitians, the fault lies earlier — with Haiti’s colonial experience, the slavers and extortionists of empire who crippled it with debt and permanently stunted the economy. The fault line runs back 200 years, directly to France.”

As for the role of the US: “When the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, pledged a US presence in Haiti for today, tomorrow and the time ahead, she was addressing a central concern of a relationship that has swung wildly from intervention to neglect.”

In the Guardian, Jon Henley wrote a piece entitled, ‘Haiti: a long descent to hell.’

We wrote to Henley on January 26:

Hi Jon

In your January 14 Guardian article, ‘Haiti: a long descent to hell,’ you discussed Haiti’s history without once mentioning the role of the United States. Also in the Guardian, Peter Hallward wrote on January 13:

“Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti’s people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s phrase) ‘from absolute misery to a dignified poverty’ has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/13/our-role-in-haitis-plight)

In 2004, Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics at Columbia University, wrote in The Nation:

“Haiti, again, is ablaze. Almost nobody, however, understands that today’s chaos was made in Washington – deliberately, cynically, and steadfastly. History will bear this out.” (Sachs, ‘Fanning the flames of political chaos in Haiti’, The Nation, February 28, 2004)

Why did you make no mention of these issues?

Best wishes

David Edwards

Henley replied on January 27:

hi david
obviously i “did not once mention the role of the united states” (which is untrue, in fact: i did mention the occupation) because i am a fervent believer in the longterm benefits of US cultural and commercial imperialism.
happy?
no seriously: the article was about haiti’s colonial and post-colonial inheritance, the impossible reparations it was still paying until 1947, and the impact of its own corrupt and despotic rulers. i had five hours to write the piece and i ran out of time nd space to discuss the aristide era, about which many readers know something already and which in any event only compounded the country’s pre-existing problems.
i’m sorry this meant the article did not meet your high quality criteria. many other people have expressed their appreciation for throwing some light on an earlier period in haiti’s troubled history about which they knew nothing.
best wishes
jh
ps i assume you have chapter and verse to substantiate rofessor achs’s comment. unfortunately, at time of writing, didn’t.

If the media has had little time or space to consider the recent demolition of Haitian democracy, there has been room aplenty for speculation on the mysterious causes of Haitian suffering: “Why does God allow natural disasters?”, asked philosopher David Bain on the BBC website.

Archbishop of York John Sentamu wisely declared that he had “nothing to say to make sense of this horror”, while Canon Giles Fraser preferred to respond “not with clever argument but with prayer.” American Christian televangelist Pat Robertson said of Haitians: “They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil… ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another.”

For others the problem with Haiti appears to be the innate lawlessness of Haitians – “looting” has been a constant, shameful theme in media reporting of survivors’ efforts simply to stay alive. The BBC’s well-fed Washington correspondent, Matt Frei, opined from the stricken country that “looting is the only industry” and “the dignity of Haiti’s past is long forgotten”.

Other commentators have been awestruck by the fortitude and dignity of a people tragically accustomed to struggling against impossible odds.

Talk of colonial betrayals, deals with the devil, and a loss of dignity are fine. They are embarrassing, certainly, but not to the vested interests with the power to reward and punish. Expressions of sympathy in response to heartbreaking pictures on the evening news are also fine — they are important and admirable but ultimately unthreatening to the political and economic forces crushing the Haitian people.

More even than water, medicine, food and petrol, the people of Haiti need truth. They need donations of honesty from journalist whistleblowers willing to defy the self-imposed super-injunction on the complicity of their industry. They need journalists willing to break the silence, to defy the lie that only governments are to blame for the misery in our world.

Donate to Haiti.

1. Email to Media Lens, September 9, 2008.
2. Pilger, ‘The kidnapping of Haiti.’
3. Hallward, ‘Our role in Haiti’s plight,’ The Guardian, January 13, 2010.
4. Quoted, Chomsky, Year 501 — The Conquest Continues, Verso, 1993, p.209.
5. Quoted, Paul Quinn-Judge, ‘US reported to intercept Aristide calls,’ Boston Globe, September 8, 1994.
6. Chomsky, Understanding Power, The New Press, 2002, p.157.
7. Quoted Noam Chomsky, ‘Democracy Restored,’ Z Magazine, November 1994.
8. Quoted Anthony Fenton, ‘Media vs. reality in Haiti,’ February 13, 2004.
9. ‘Barricades go up as city braces for attack’, Tim Reid, The Times, February 26, 2004.
10. ‘From bad to worse’, Leader, The Guardian, February 14, 2004.
11. See our media alerts ‘Bringing Hell To Haiti’ and Part 2.
12. Chassagne, ‘Think of Haiti and imagine all that you love has gone,’ The Observer, January 17, 2010.

However, crossing the border into Haiti was simply a matter of asking the person who was about to close the gate to leave it open for us. We were waved through and no one asked for our passports, our vaccination cards, the reason for our trip, or how long we planned to stay in the country. Crossing was so easy that we were not sure we were in Haiti until we saw two Haitian police officers standing outside the UN building in Malpasse.

We made it to the border a lot quicker than we thought we would. It took less than five hours to get to Jimani from Santo Domingo, and, an hour later we were at Croix-de-Bouquet, a town just outside Port-au-Prince. It was there we encountered our first problem — a major traffic jam. Aid trucks and vans coming in and out were blocking the way, and traffic was completely deadlocked.

We did not see any evidence that people are hijacking cars on the roads and stealing provisions, as we had been warned. Instead, we found many friendly people who guided us to our destination. We arranged to meet with our contacts in Croix-de-Bouquet.

In Croix-de-Bouquet, we began to see some of the destruction caused by the earthquake. Many houses were left standing, yet many others had been demolished. In general, however, life seemed to go on as usual. People were selling telephone cards, food, drinks, and other sundry items on the street.

Young men from the Dominican Civil Defense and police officers were trying to direct traffic in Croix-de-Bouquet, without much success. Finally, we were able to get through by going down a side road, and we made our way towards Port-au-Prince.

Driving along, we saw many destroyed buildings, and a lot of people in need. Relief efforts are underway, but they are not enough. Even if they were enough, there are little signs of how the city will begin to rebuild itself. People cannot live off of handouts of rice and beans forever, nor should they.

What’s more, the earth continues to tremble, keeping people in fear. In one day, there were three noticeable tremors. Each one shows the earth’s power and validates people’s fear that another terrible quake will occur. Geologists have confirmed that the earth has not finished settling and that another quake is likely.

Nevertheless, to the extent possible, people in Port-au-Prince continue with their daily routine. People with roadside stands set up shop where they can; police officers show up to work. However, many others are idle. Many businesses have been shut down because the building has been destroyed or rendered unusable. Schools are not operational because of damage. Many people are not going to work because their place of employment is not there any more.

At the same time, there is a lot of work to be done in Haiti. Some people are coordinating rescue efforts and cleaning up buildings and sweeping streets. Others are providing security for those who must sleep on the streets or in tent cities. Others are rebuilding walls or salvaging bricks from destroyed buildings.

The future of Port-au-Prince and of Haiti remain uncertain. Port-au-Prince needs not only to be rebuilt, but also to be built better. The poor building construction is one of the main reasons for the high mortality in the aftermath of the quake. There is much more work to be done, and, as yet, no clear plan for how it will be accomplished. There are many destroyed buildings and little organization in place for a plan to rebuild the city.

With the national palace and many important government buildings in ruins, there is barely a functioning government in Haiti. This makes organization difficult.

With many problems in providing relief, many people in Haiti continue to live with little food and in unsanitary conditions. On Wednesday, we saw a dead body lying by the side of the road, full of flies. Two weeks after the earthquake and no one had taken this corpse to the morgue or even to one of the many mass graves.

That is one image I can’t get out of my mind. Another is a destroyed school. It was a seven story building. During the earthquake, it shook so hard that it completely crumbled. The walls disintegrated and each floor fell on top of the other. People say that there was a room full of students in the basement, and that they likely have died slowly of thirst and hunger, as no one came to clear the building and rescue them.

The loss of life in that one school is a clear example of the fact that many lives were lost, not just because the earth shook, but because Haiti is a poor country. The incredibly poor quality of the seven story building meant that the walls crumbled under the weight of the ceilings. The lack of sufficient heavy machinery meant that there were not enough trucks to come and remove the rubble and potentially save the lives of the children and teachers in the basement.

The accumulated human suffering in Haiti is unfathomable to me. Although I have now left Haiti, images of destruction run like a slideshow through my mind. The fact that many of these deaths were preventable makes it worse. For these reasons, I am committed to doing what I can to ensure that this destruction does not reoccur. For that to happen, we cannot turn our eyes away from Haiti once the cameras are gone and the blood dries up. We must work to build a better Haiti and a better world — one in which people do not die because of poverty and inequality.

What we saw still resonates. Hundreds of families who had had to flee their homes in the face of repression, thousands of grass roots activists in prison because of their association with Aristide’s Lavalas movement, literacy projects and schools destroyed, community-based activists forced into exile, Haiti returned to elite control in the name of “stability” and “security.”

We also saw the beginnings of the United Nations occupation, labeled “peacekeeping” by UN (Minustah) authorities, but clearly seen by the popular movement as the beginning of an international take-over of Haiti.

The coup devastated Haiti. It shattered the promises of a truly democratic period in Haitian history. It interrupted a process of building schools (more schools were built under Lavalas governments than had been built in all of Haitian history), establishing health clinics and parks in the poorest communities, support for literacy efforts among women, respect for the indigenous religion of Vodou, and a commitment to the development of Haitian agriculture in the face of the flooding of Haitian markets by U.S. goods.

Six years later, here we are. Fanmi Lavalas, the most popular political party in Haiti, has been banned from participating in elections, with the full support of the United States. The Preval government has tailored its policies to what the United States demands, rather than to what the people need. There is a deep fissure between the people and the official government, a deep gap between the occupied and the occupiers.

Yes, the earthquake was a violent natural disaster, presenting overwhelming challenges to any government or any aid responders. Yet, it is clear that this natural disaster – just like that of Hurricane Katrina – is compounded by a political failure, the continuation of generations of assaults against Haiti, and – in particular – a brutal UN/US occupation that has brought to a grinding halt the promise of the Aristide years.

Now we watch the U.S. gear up for a massive military operation in Haiti, while people die due to lack of medicine, or starve while food supplies sit on the airport tarmac. We see the pictures of families digging their relatives out of the rubble, with no aid in sight despite the presence of 9000 UN troops. We read the usual racist slurs against Haitians, called “scavengers” or “looters” when, after days of no assistance, they look for food and water in abandoned homes. We read that the problems of Haiti are rooted in “their culture and religious beliefs,” rather than in the harsh realities of colonialism and occupation. We hear CNN reports of a field hospital being ordered out of a community for “security reasons” by the United Nations, even in the face of wounded and dying people. And we read that Doctors Without Borders cargo planes were denied landing space in Port-au-Prince by U.S. military authorities.

This is a time to respect the resiliency and courage of the Haitian people. It is a time for aid, not charity, for solidarity not a U.S. military take-over. And it is a time to return President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to his homeland.

Please support community-based organizers in Haiti who are working day and night to get aid to the people. Please contribute to Haiti Emergency Relief Fund at www.haitiaction.net.

I don’t know about anyone else, but if my country had just been devastated by some awful catastrophe and I had to rely on a foreign government coming to save me, a government that had quite cheerfully ignored the plight of tens of thousands of its very own citizens when they had been similarly struck down, I’d be fairly worried.

We have had blanket news coverage this week of the aftermath of the recent earthquake in Haiti. Amidst all the usual terrible scenes of human suffering and tragedy one very brief incident is transfixed in my memory. It was of a news conference with some senior US politician who had something to do with the ‘relief’ effort. I forget who he was – it doesn’t matter: if it hadn’t been him it would have been a clone. A reporter asked him why they didn’t just parachute in essential supplies, like food and water, to the desperate survivors who were wandering around the ruined streets of Port-au-Prince quite naturally scavenging anything they could. The politician dismissed the question almost as though some naive child had asked it, and, before quickly moving on answered that if they did that there would be carnage as desperate people fought over whatever was supplied. In other words they’re not supplying immediate relief because that’s in the Haitians’ best interests.

Let’s give that gentleman the benefit of the doubt, and say that he actually believed his own words; so I won’t call it a lie, I’ll simply call it the biggest load of rubbish I’d heard since… I don’t know… the previous night’s ‘news’ maybe.

The only situation where this gentleman might have been correct is if the available aid was so miniscule that it could not possibly have provided significant relief. If that is the case, why is it? I mean, the west is absolutely swimming in ‘humanitarian’ organisations of one kind or another, why are they so poor and disorganised that they can’t respond to a crisis when it actually happens? If that were the case it would mean either that these organisations just don’t have or can’t get stocks of essential food and water; or there is a transport problem i.e. they can’t get it there. I simply don’t believe that is the case. I cannot believe that a professional relief organisation doesn’t have the ways and means to obtain food and water instantly; and as the world’s media have arrived in Port-au-Prince without any difficulty, and the US has had enough time to send half its navy to the scene (together with thousands of ground troops), I’m struggling to see that there might be a transport problem. There must be another reason.

They say a picture tells a thousand words, and another brief clip shown on the BBC this morning was particularly helpful in this respect. It showed the US marines helping the relief effort. Ahhh… This was they how they were doing it: one marine was handing one small bottle of water to one Haitian child. Behind that child was another, and perhaps another child behind that one. All very ordered; all very controlled. You could almost see that image on the recruiting page of the US Marines website beneath a caption reading “Saving Childrens’ Lives in World Disasters.”

There’s no love lost between the people of Haiti and the United States. The US managed the military overthrow of the people’s chosen government under Jean-Bertrand Aristide, just as they’ve done in many other places in the region, and have helped to cruelly oppress a tragic land that Christopher Columbus once described as ‘rich and bountiful’ (just prior to his nation exterminating the quarter of a million of so Arawaks who were living there).

Disaster ‘relief’ is seriously big business where corporate profits and political prestige must be considered long before anything as mundane as helping desperate poor people. With the US ‘leading’ the relief of Haiti, quite apart from feeling even more sympathy for the Haitians than we otherwise would, the single most important thing to understand is that that ‘relief’ effort will be managed not by ordinary caring human beings but by big business – because the US government and big business are one and the same thing; and big business is legally mandated to maximise its profits.

Maximising profits means controlling supply, and making that supply as cheap as possible to produce, and as expensive as possible to buy. From a profit point of view, the idea of just parachuting food and water to desperate people whist proper support systems can be set up is pure madness. Not only does it cost money but it would also mean that desperate people aren’t quite so desperate anymore, and therefore aren’t quite so easy to control. In a country like Haiti, which has every reason to be deeply suspicious of American soldiers, the population needs to be adequately ‘prepared’ to accept the authority of a foreign army. Normally the preparation of suspicious populations requires considerable bombing and armed invasion – but just because nature provides the prerequisite devastation free of charge (if that was in fact the case here), that doesn’t mean you can afford to be more liberal with the supply side of the equation, it simply means the costs are even lower and therefore the profits even more bounteous.

The United Nations is the only organisation that has truly legitimate international authority. The fact that it is being muscled aside in Haiti, with the US marketed as ‘leading’ the relief effort, is of course no surprise. But the fact is that it is the UN and only the UN who should be left alone to co-ordinate the relief effort. That’s the only way we can be reasonably sure the job is being done with minimal ulterior motive, and that the people of Haiti are getting the best support and assistance possible. My heart goes out to the people of Haiti. Not only have they been struck down by a terrible catastrophe, but they are forced to rely on the most ruthless government in existence for their relief.

When his administration finally responded, it deployed the National Guard and armed Blackwater personnel to impose order, rather than putting the priority on providing food, shelter and safe water. Kanye West’s words during an NBC Concert for Hurricane Relief–”George Bush doesn’t care about Black people”–were proved right.

On the surface, the response of the Obama administration to the horrific earthquake that struck Haiti last week couldn’t seem more different. “I have directed my administration to respond with a swift, coordinated, and aggressive effort to save lives,” Obama declared. “The people of Haiti will have the full support of the United States in the urgent effort to rescue those trapped beneath the rubble, and to deliver the humanitarian relief–the food, water and medicine–that Haitians will need in the coming days.”

His words were a stark contrast to the ravings of the racist right. Rush Limbaugh claimed that Obama’s speech was an attempt to win support among “both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country,” and that “we’ve already donated to Haiti. It’s called the U.S. income tax.” Writing in the New York Times, conservative columnist David Brooks dismissed the idea that aid could help Haiti in this crisis–because Haiti’s culture is “more progress-resistant than others.”

Compared to such statements, Obama’s sympathetic response and promises of aid may seem decent and just. But in the week since the earthquake, it has become clear that the U.S. isn’t pursuing a humanitarian policy.

Though it is an opponent of the Obama administration, the conservative Heritage Foundation accurately described the aims that are driving U.S. policy in Haiti:

The U.S. response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti earthquake offers opportunities to re-shape Haiti’s long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the public image of the United States in the region.

While on the ground in Haiti, the U.S. military can also interrupt the nightly flights of cocaine to Haiti and the Dominican Republic from the Venezuelan coast and counter the ongoing efforts of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez to destabilize the island of Hispaniola. This U.S. military presence, which should also include a large contingent of U.S. Coast Guard assets, can also prevent any large-scale movement by Haitians to take to the sea in rickety watercraft to try to enter the U.S. illegally.

Meanwhile, the U.S. must be prepared to insist that the Haiti government work closely with the U.S. to insure that corruption does not infect the humanitarian assistance flowing to Haiti. Long-term reforms for Haitian democracy and its economy are also badly overdue.

However impolitic–the piece was quickly removed from the Heritage web site–this actually describes the policy that Barack Obama is carrying out.

If the Obama administration were pursuing a humanitarian policy in Haiti, it wouldn’t have appointed George Bush to join former President Bill Clinton in overseeing fundraising for disaster relief.

Not only did Bush spectacularly fail the victims of Hurricane Katrina, but his administration orchestrated a political destabilization campaign against Haiti’s democratically elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Bush imposed sanctions on the country that undermined Aristide’s presidency and impoverished the masses. The U.S. then backed a right-wing coup that toppled the government in 2004.

Appointing Bush to oversee aid to Haiti is like putting Nero in charge of the fire department.

Then there’s the mismatch between Obama’s words about “full support” and the pittance his administration plans to spend to address the crisis–just $100 million. As Bill Quigley, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, wrote, “A Kentucky couple won $128 million in a Powerball lottery on December 24, 2009. The richest nation in the history for the world is giving Powerball money to a neighbor with tens of thousands of deaths already?”

Moreover, a week into the disaster, while U.S. officials, privileged Americans and rich Haitians received quick relief, the promised aid hasn’t reached the mass of Haitian people.

Amid a crisis where the first 48 hours are decisive in saving people’s lives, the United Nations–and the U.S. in particular–failed to come anywhere near addressing the needs of the 3 million people impacted by the earthquake.

Every minute that aid gets delayed means more people dying from starvation, dehydration, injury and disease–and yet by Monday, the UN only planned to distribute food and water to 95,000 people.

An estimated 1.5 million people are homeless and sleeping in the streets, as many as 200,000 have died, and with each tick of the clock, the toll grows higher. Why could the U.S. not rush aid to Haiti. Why were American helicopters and transport planes so late in starting aid drops.

The U.S. and UN claimed that damage to Haiti’s airport, port and roads impeded delivery of doctors, nurses, food, water and rescue teams. But the U.S. always seems to find ways around such obstacles when it comes to invading countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. Clearly the means exist to deliver aid quickly to a country an hour away from Florida.

So did the U.S. relief operation fail to live up to its mission? The truth is that disaster relief for the poor is not the mission in Haiti, just as it wasn’t the priority in New Orleans or any other disaster.

Instead of rushing aid to Haiti’s poor, the Obama administration has prepared a military occupation, claiming that armed forces are necessary to control what they expected to be angry Black people.

The corporate media coverage shifted from its initial sympathy with victims of the disaster to churning out scare stories about looting. “[M]arauding looters emptied wrecked shops and tens of thousands of survivors waited desperately for food and medical care,” Reuters claimed. “Hundreds of scavengers and looters swarmed over wrecked stores in downtown Port-au-Prince, seizing goods and fighting among themselves.”

In other words, the media took a few isolated conflicts and blew them up into an implication that Haiti’s poor are a violent threat–and the real obstacle to relief efforts.

These scare stories in turn became a justification for not delivering aid. Writer Nelson Valdes reported:

The United Nations and the U.S. authorities on the ground are telling those who directly want to deliver help not to do so because they might be attacked by “hungry mobs.” Two cargo planes from Doctors Without Borders have been forced to land in the Dominican Republic because the shipments have to be accompanied within Port-au-Prince by U.S. military escorts, according to the U.S. command.

When asked why the U.S. hadn’t used its C130 transport planes to drop supplies in Port-au-Prince, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said, “It seems to me that air drops will simply lead to riots.”

Of course, precisely the opposite is case. People will riot because they lack food and water.

The real situation is quite different. As author Richard Seymour wrote:

The striking fact, patiently reported by observers on the ground, is that Haiti is not gripped by anarchy, “mob rule,” mass slaughter or anything of the kind. There was probably no more violent crime this weekend, and probably less than in some American cities. Instead, while aid is obstructed, Haitians have cooperated to undertake rescue efforts and administer aid without the assistance of relief workers.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez rightly describes Obama’s military intervention as “occupying Haiti undercover.” The U.S. has taken control of Haiti’s main airport and seaport, and is in the process of deploying 10,000 U.S. troops to bolster the 9,000 UN troops already occupying the island. Half of the soldiers will police Port-au-Prince and half will be deployed on military vessels surrounding the island.

In a puff piece meant to support this occupation, Time magazine perhaps unintentionally revealed the colonial nature of the operation. “Haiti,” they write, “for all intents and purposes, became the 51st state at 4:53 p.m. Tuesday in the wake of its deadly earthquake. If not a state, then at least a ward of the state.”

The U.S. is using its position of power to impose its control over the country and impede relief efforts, turning away planes from Doctors Without Borders, the Mexican government and the Caribbean Community and Common Market. Jarry Emmanuel, the air logistics officer for the World Food Program, complained, “There are 200 flights going in and out every day, which is an incredible amount for a country like Haiti. But most of those flights are for the United States military. Their priorities are to secure the country.”

In a stunning video report from Port-au-Prince, an Al Jazeera reporter said:

Most Haitians here have seen little humanitarian aid so far. What they have seen is guns, and lots of them. Armored personnel carriers cruise the streets. UN soldiers aren’t here to help pull people out of the rubble. They’re here, they say, to enforce the law.

This is what much of the UN presence actually looks like on the streets of Port-au-Prince: men in uniform, racing around in vehicles carrying guns. At the entrance to the city’s airport where most of the aid is coming in, there is anger and frustration. Much-needed supplies of water and food are inside, and Haitians are locked out.

“These weapons they bring,” [an unidentified Haitian says], “they are instruments of death. We don’t want them; we don’t need them. We are a traumatized people. What we want from the international community is technical help. Action, not words.”

As anger among Haitians simmers over the lack of real relief, it is only a matter of time before heavily armed U.S. and UN forces open fire and kill innocent Haitians.

Already, on Wednesday evening, CBS News reported, “Controlled chaos turned to confrontation near the airport in Port-au-Prince today, when UN peacekeepers were ordered to clear the street filled with Haitian men seeking jobs. The force was made up of Jordanian, Pakistani and Indian forces that were unable to speak Creole, English or French. They did their talking with nightsticks and rubber bullets. At least one rubber bullet was seen fired into the crowd. No one was seriously injured.”

U.S. ships are in the process of surrounding the island. Some will provide floating hospitals. But they are also there to prevent an exodus of refugees out of Haiti.

Under some pressure, Obama granted Temporary Protected Status to Haitian refugees currently in the U.S.–but only for 18 months. At the same time, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has announced that any Haitians who attempt to enter the U.S. will be returned to Haiti.

The Obama administration is already coordinating plans for the restructuring of Haitian society–in the interest of international capital. It is implementing what author Naomi Klein calls the “Shock Doctrine”–when capitalist powers use economic or natural disasters to impose neoliberal programs, such as opening up national markets to multinational corporations, privatization of state-owned companies and cuts to the minimum wage.

The UN’s special envoy to Haiti, Bill Clinton, had been hard at work implementing such proposals before the crisis. He cut deals with cruise ship companies to dock on Haiti’s northern coast, and pushed the re-development of the Haitian sweatshop industry.

Now Obama, Clinton and Bush will further impose neoliberal “reforms.” Already, the International Monetary Fund has extended $100 million in loans to Haiti during the crisis, and all that of money comes with strings attached. As the Nation’s Richard Kim wrote:

The new loan was made through the IMF’s extended credit facility, to which Haiti already has $165 million in debt. Debt relief activists tell me that these loans came with conditions, including raising prices for electricity, refusing pay increases to all public employees except those making minimum wage, and keeping inflation low. They say that the new loans would impose these same conditions. In other words, in the face of this latest tragedy, the IMF is still using crisis and debt as leverage to compel neoliberal reforms.

While the U.S. sends soldiers to police Haiti instead of providing humanitarian aid, Haitians in the U.S., Haiti solidarity activists and unions are mobilizing to meet the needs of the Haitian poor–and help empower them to take control over their society. In one powerful example, the National Nurses Organizing Committee is in the process of mobilizing 7,000 nurses from the U.S. to volunteer in Haiti to provide medical care.

As activists continue to donate money to organizations like the Haiti Relief Fund and Partners in Health that aim to empower Haitian grassroots institutions, we must make several demands on the Obama administration.

First, we must demand that Obama immediately stop the military occupation of Haiti, and instead flood the country with doctors, nurses, food, water and construction machinery. Soldiers with guns will only make the situation worse.

Second, the U.S. must also end its enforcement of Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s exile and the ban on his party, Fanmi Lavalas, from participating in elections. Haitians, not the U.S., should have the right to determine their government.

Third, we must demand that the U.S., other countries and international financial institutions cancel Haiti’s debt, so that the aid money headed to Haiti will go to food and reconstruction, not debt repayment.

And we must agitate for Obama to indefinitely extend Temporary Protected Status to Haitians in the U.S.–and open the borders to any Haitians who do flee the country.

Only through agitating for these demands can we stop the U.S. from imposing its Shock Doctrine for Haiti at gunpoint.

The US has worked to break Haiti for over 200 years. We owe Haiti. Not charity. We owe Haiti as a matter of justice. Reparations. And not the $100 million promised by President Obama either – that is Powerball money. The US owes Haiti Billions – with a big B.

The US has worked for centuries to break Haiti. The US has used Haiti like a plantation. The US helped bleed the country economically since it freed itself, repeatedly invaded the country militarily, supported dictators who abused the people, used the country as a dumping ground for our own economic advantage, ruined their roads and agriculture, and toppled popularly elected officials. The US has even used Haiti like the old plantation owner and slipped over there repeatedly for sexual recreation.

Here is the briefest history of some of the major US efforts to break Haiti.

In 1804, when Haiti achieved its freedom from France in the world’s first successful slave revolution, the United States refused to recognize the country. The US continued to refuse recognition to Haiti for 60 more years. Why? Because the US continued to enslave millions of its own citizens and feared recognizing Haiti would encourage slave revolution in the US.

After the 1804 revolution, Haiti was the subject of a crippling economic embargo by France and the US. US sanctions lasted until 1863. France ultimately used its military power to force Haiti to pay reparations for the slaves who were freed. The reparations were 150 million francs. (France sold the entire Louisiana territory to the US for 80 million francs!)

Haiti was forced to borrow money from banks in France and the US to pay reparations to France. A major loan from the US to pay off the French was finally paid off in 1947. The current value of the money Haiti was forced to pay to French and US banks? Over $20 Billion — with a big B.

The US occupied and ruled Haiti by force from 1915 to 1934. President Woodrow Wilson sent troops to invade in 1915. Revolts by Haitians were put down by US military — killing over 2000 in one skirmish alone. For the next nineteen years, the US controlled customs in Haiti, collected taxes, and ran many governmental institutions. How many billions were siphoned off by the US during these 19 years?

From 1957 to 1986 Haiti was forced to live under US backed dictators “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc” Duvlaier. The US supported these dictators economically and militarily because they did what the US wanted and were politically “anti-communist” — now translatable as against human rights for their people. Duvalier stole millions from Haiti and ran up hundreds of millions in debt that Haiti still owes. Ten thousand Haitians lost their lives. Estimates say that Haiti owes $1.3 billion in external debt and that 40% of that debt was run up by the US-backed Duvaliers.

Thirty years ago Haiti imported no rice. Today Haiti imports nearly all its rice. Though Haiti was the sugar growing capital of the Caribbean, it now imports sugar as well. Why? The US and the US dominated world financial institutions — the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank — forced Haiti to open its markets to the world. Then the US dumped millions of tons of US subsidized rice and sugar into Haiti — undercutting their farmers and ruining Haitian agriculture. By ruining Haitian agriculture, the US has forced Haiti into becoming the third largest world market for US rice. Good for US farmers, bad for Haiti.

In 2002, the US stopped hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to Haiti which were to be used for, among other public projects like education, roads. These are the same roads which relief teams are having so much trouble navigating now!

In 2004, the US again destroyed democracy in Haiti when they supported the coup against Haiti’s elected President Aristide.

Haiti is even used for sexual recreation just like the old time plantations. Check the news carefully and you will find numerous stories of abuse of minors by missionaries, soldiers and charity workers. Plus there are the frequent sexual vacations taken to Haiti by people from the US and elsewhere. What is owed for that? What value would you put on it if it was your sisters and brothers?

US based corporations have for years been teaming up with Haitian elite to run sweatshops teeming with tens of thousands of Haitians who earn less than $2 a day.

The Haitian people have resisted the economic and military power of the US and others ever since their independence. Like all of us, Haitians made their own mistakes as well. But US power has forced Haitians to pay great prices — deaths, debt and abuse.

It is time for the people of the US to join with Haitians and reverse the course of US-Haitian relations.

This brief history shows why the US owes Haiti Billions — with a big B. This is not charity. This is justice. This is reparations. The current crisis is an opportunity for people in the US to own up to our country’s history of dominating Haiti and to make a truly just response.

(For more on the history of exploitation of Haiti by the US see: Paul Farmer, The Uses of Haiti; Peter Hallward, Damning the Flood; and Randall Robinson, An Unbroken Agony).

2. There’s no such thing as a ‘natural’ disaster. 200,000 Haitians have been slaughtered by slum housing and IMF “austerity” plans.

3. A friend of mine called. Do I know a journalist who could get medicine to her father? And she added, trying to hold her voice together, “My sister, she’s under the rubble. Is anyone going who can help, anyone?” Should I tell her, “Obama will have Marines there in ‘a few days’”?

4. China deployed rescuers with sniffer dogs within 48 hours. China, Mr. President. China: 8,000 miles distant. Miami: 700 miles close. US bases in Puerto Rico: right there.

5. Obama’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, “I don’t know how this government could have responded faster or more comprehensively than it has.” We know Gates doesn’t know.

6. From my own work in the field, I know that FEMA has access to ready-to-go potable water, generators, mobile medical equipment and more for hurricane relief on the Gulf Coast. It’s all still there. Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who served as the task force commander for emergency response after Hurricane Katrina, told the Christian Science Monitor, “I thought we had learned that from Katrina, take food and water and start evacuating people.” Maybe we learned but, apparently, Gates and the Defense Department missed school that day.

7. Send in the Marines. That’s America’s response. That’s what we’re good at. The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson finally showed up after three days. With what? It was dramatically deployed — without any emergency relief supplies. It has sidewinder missiles and 19 helicopters.

8. But don’t worry, the International Search and Rescue Team, fully equipped and self-sufficient for up to seven days in the field, deployed immediately with ten metric tons of tools and equipment, three tons of water, tents, advanced communication equipment and water purifying capability. They’re from Iceland.

9. Gates wouldn’t send in food and water because, he said, there was no “structure … to provide security.” For Gates, appointed by Bush and allowed to hang around by Obama, it’s security first. That was his lesson from Hurricane Katrina. Blackwater before drinking water.

10. Previous US presidents have acted far more swiftly in getting troops on the ground on that island. Haiti is the right half of the island of Hispaniola. It’s treated like the right testicle of Hell. The Dominican Republic the left. In 1965, when Dominicans demanded the return of Juan Bosch, their elected President, deposed by a junta, Lyndon Johnson reacted to this crisis rapidly, landing 45,000 US Marines on the beaches to prevent the return of the elected president.

11. How did Haiti end up so economically weakened, with infrastructure, from hospitals to water systems, busted or non-existent — there are two fire stations in the entire nation — and infrastructure so frail that the nation was simply waiting for “nature” to finish it off?

Don’t blame Mother Nature for all this death and destruction. That dishonor goes to Papa Doc and Baby Doc, the Duvalier dictatorship, which looted the nation for 28 years. Papa and his Baby put an estimated 80% of world aid into their own pockets — with the complicity of the US government happy to have the Duvaliers and their voodoo militia, Tonton Macoutes, as allies in the Cold War. (The war was easily won: the Duvaliers’ death squads murdered as many as 60,000 opponents of the regime.)

12. What Papa and Baby didn’t run off with, the IMF finished off through its “austerity” plans. An austerity plan is a form of voodoo orchestrated by economists zomby-fied by an irrational belief that cutting government services will somehow help a nation prosper.

13. In 1991, five years after the murderous Baby fled, Haitians elected a priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who resisted the IMF’s austerity diktats. Within months, the military, to the applause of Papa George HW Bush, deposed him. History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. The farce was George W. Bush. In 2004, after the priest Aristide was re-elected President, he was kidnapped and removed again, to the applause of Baby Bush.

14. Haiti was once a wealthy nation, the wealthiest in the hemisphere, worth more, wrote Voltaire in the 18th century, than that rocky, cold colony known as New England. Haiti’s wealth was in black gold: slaves. But then the slaves rebelled — and have been paying for it ever since.

From 1825 to 1947, France forced Haiti to pay an annual fee to reimburse the profits lost by French slaveholders caused by their slaves’ successful uprising. Rather than enslave individual Haitians, France thought it more efficient to simply enslave the entire nation.

15. Secretary Gates tells us, “There are just some certain facts of life that affect how quickly you can do some of these things.” The Navy’s hospital boat will be there in, oh, a week or so. Heckuva job, Brownie!

16. Note just received from my friend. Her sister was found, dead; and her other sister had to bury her. Her father needs his anti-seizure medicines. That’s a fact of life too, Mr. President.

Through our journalism network, we are trying to get my friend’s medicines to her father. If any reader does have someone getting into or near Port-au-Prince, please contact Haiti@GregPalast.com immediately.

Urgently recommended reading: The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, the history of the successful slave uprising in Hispaniola by the brilliant CLR James.

First appeared in The Huffington Post.

What you see when you look at the images of Haiti depends in large part on your perspective and knowledge of the country that shares an island with the Dominican Republic. For this reason, I think it is important to share my own perspective on what I observe when I see pictures of people desperate for a bucket of water or a bowl of rice.

Many people say this is a time to act, not to speak. But, really, what can I do? I am in Santo Domingo, a few hours drive from Port-au-Prince, but I have no on-the-ground skills that would help people in Haiti. I can send supplies in the many caravans that leave Santo Domingo each day. I have done so, and will continue to do so. As a writer, however, I think the best I can do is to think about Haiti, write about Haiti, and tell people why this is happening to Haiti and what it means for the rest of us.

You may critique this effort as opportunism — using the human tragedy for my own political purposes. To that charge, I say, this is the moment when people are interested in Haiti, so this is the time to tell the story of Haiti. This story is not unique to Haiti. The story of pillage and plunder and coups and the CIA is the story of much of the Third World. The story of global inequality is the story of capitalism. Except for, in Haiti, it goes back right to the beginning of capitalism.

Haiti, led by revolutionary Touissant L’Ouverture, defeated France in a war for its independence in 1804 — making it the first non-slave republic in the Americas. After losing the war, the French demanded reparations from Haiti, to the tune of 150 million gold francs. This was eventually reduced to 90 million gold francs — the equivalent of over $20 billion current US dollars. Haiti did not finish paying this crippling debt until 1947. Haiti provided more wealth to France than any of its other colonies prior to Haiti’s independence. After independence, the debt prevented Haiti from gaining a solid economic footing. France, in contrast, has flourished.

Throughout the 19th century, the United States and the rest of the Americas kept a close eye on Haiti, doing what they could to prevent any of the other nations and colonies from experiencing a major slave revolt. The specter of Haiti sent fear through the hearts of plantation owners throughout the Western Hemisphere.

Twentieth century Haitian history is marked by US interventions, occupations, and interference. Haiti was occupied by the United States military from 1915 to 1934. From 1957 to 1951, Haiti was ruled by “Papa Doc” Duvalier, a brutal dictator who was backed by the United States because of his anti-communist stance. When “Papa Doc” passed away, his son, “Baby Doc” became President. He ruled Haiti under the same reign of terror until he was finally overthrown in 1986. In 1991, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was democratically elected by the Haitian people — the first democratically elected president of Haiti. Eight months later, he was ousted in an effort orchestrated by the CIA. In a twist of events, US-backed forces restored Aristide to power in 1994, and the US military occupied Haiti from 1994 to 2000. Haiti was occupied again by US and UN forces in 2004. UN forces continue to occupy Haiti to this day.

The constant influence and interventions of the United States and Europe have kept Haiti a poor and tremendously unequal nation. A 7.0 earthquake is a horrible event whenever it strikes on or near a land mass. However, the proportions of the disaster were much greater in Haiti because of its poverty. Over twenty years ago, in 1989, a 7.0 earthquake struck the Bay Area in Northern California. In that quake, 63 people were killed. In Haiti, the Red Cross estimates that as many as 50,000 people have died in Haiti. Already, thousands of people have been buried in mass graves.

Poverty exacerbates natural disasters for many reasons. Some of these reasons are the poor structures people inhabit, overpopulation in urban areas, deforestation of hillsides, and a lack of an adequate infrastructure.

When “Baby Doc” was in power in Haiti, the Haitian business community and the United States developed a plan to implement neoliberal reforms that would take Haitians out of rural poverty and into the modern world. As a “modern” nation, Haiti could take advantage of its location close to the United States and supply cheap consumer goods to its wealthier neighbor.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) developed “aid” programs in Haiti that were designed to transform subsistence farmers into laborers for export-oriented farming. Peasants that could not find jobs as farm laborers could go to urban areas and work in the newly built low-wage sweatshops making T-shirts for Walt Disney Corporation and other US-based companies.

The farming for export idea failed and there were not nearly enough jobs for the working poor in the cities. The “development” plan did not work, and Haitians were left worse off. Of course, the USAID and other initiators of the plan never fixed the disaster they created. Eventually, the “American planners and Haitian elites decided that perhaps their development model didn’t work so well in Haiti, and they abandoned it,” leaving Haiti worse off than before.

Failed development initiatives left Port-au-Prince extraordinarily vulnerable to natural disasters. USAID initiatives in the countryside combined with dumping of US-subsidized agricultural products forced peasants out of subsistence farming and into the cities to seek out survival. Many of these urban migrants live in houses made of cinderblock or other substandard materials that are very susceptible to earthquake damage. The fact that so many people live in inadequate housing structures adds significantly to the destruction.

Poverty and underdevelopment have also led to deforestation. People too poor to afford kerosene or gas for cooking turn to wood for fuel. In addition, European and US companies have been mining Haiti’s natural resources (cement, marble, granite, aggregate, gold and copper) and razing forests for lumber for decades. The extreme deforestation of Haiti makes the country more vulnerable to landslides and earthquakes.

The story of Haiti — a nation that broke the rules from the beginning by standing on its own two feet — is the story of how global capitalism works to keep most people in poverty. When Haiti won its independence from France, France and its allies ensured through military means that Haiti paid its debt — and much more — to France. When investors in the US were looking for a source of cheap labor, they looked to Haiti. Maintaining global inequality though military force and profiting off of cheap labor from poor countries is how global capitalism works — or does not work, according to your perspective.

The earthquake in Haiti is a prime example of how unbridled capitalism kills. For this reason, it is crucial to think and to talk about Haiti, in addition to doing what we can to avoid as many deaths and injuries as possible during the current crisis. Perhaps then we can prevent the same mistakes from being committed in Haiti as they have elsewhere in the aftermath of disasters. Perhaps then we can truly rebuild Haiti, for the Haitians.

Poor Mexico, so far away from God but so close to the United States.

– Porfirio Diaz

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

– Santayana

Just like we have learned earlier from the Katrina disaster, it is important, while we share our solidarity and our support for the tragedy being endured by the courageous people of Haiti, not to forget the historical and social context that frames this most recent disaster in the Haitian experience. After hearing the news and the self-congratulatory speech of President Obama about the “historical ties” of Haiti and the United States, I could not but recall a different narrative of “historical ties” than the one the media is conveying. This counter narrative is more congruent with a famous quote from former Mexican Dictator Porfirio Diaz which applies to the Haitian experience in an ominous way. Dictator Diaz in the last half of the 19th century opened Mexico to foreign capitalists, especially U.S. investors and created the precursor of today’s neo-liberal policies in that country. By the early part of the twentieth century half of Mexico’s wealth was in foreign hands. Today, Haiti is under the total control of the United States and its institutions. A country that used to produce its own rice, now imports it from the United States.

One aspect of these “historical ties” that are not told in United States’ high school history textbooks is that Haiti, by being the first independent country in the Americas, led by people of African descent, created fear in the white slave holding elites throughout the world. Haiti was the most prosperous European colony in the Americas and one that brought to France a significant amount of the wealth that catapulted it to the rank of a developed nation. But, France’s and the United States ascent to the developed world were rooted in the sentencing of Haiti to centuries of economic despair and political instability. This is the story we are asked to forget.

In 1804, Haiti declared its independence from France under the leadership of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who succeeded the brilliant military strategist and former slave Toussaint L’Ouverture. In the preceding years the Haitian army defeated the most powerful European army in Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte’s army of tens of thousands and at different times defeated smaller attempts by the British and the Spanish to subdue the Haitians.

Europe and the United States never forgave Haiti for becoming a model of freedom against the infamous system of slavery and after Haiti was in a state of political weakness because of internal strife imposed economic blockades (like in Cuba). Ironically, France collected “reparations” for its loss of “property” (slaves) during the Haitian war of liberation and Haiti was isolated (worse than Cuba is today). The United States waited sixty years before it granted recognition to the nascent republic. What today we call the global north, dominated by the United States created the conditions for perpetual Haitian underdevelopment. The example of an African nation which was prosperous in the Americas was too much to swallow for the slaveholders of the United States and Europe. In fact, President Jefferson initially supported the French efforts against Haiti until it discovered that Napoleon wanted to then expand the French empire beyond the Louisiana territory. After Napoleon’s defeat, it sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States dramatically expanding the United States’ empire. So thanks to Haiti’s victory, the United States began its modern phase of territorial expansion. We paid them with economic sanctions.

Unfortunately, Latin American nations in struggle for their own independence from Spain, also betrayed the nascent Haitian nation. Simon Bolivar, the liberator of the most of Latin America, received military support and weapons from the Haitian revolutionaries in 1816. Yet, in the end Bolivar denied support and recognition to Haiti when they needed it. Their own fear of a pardocracia (government of the people of color) instilled more fear in the Bolivarian revolutionaries than the Spanish or the United States imperialists. Brazil did not abolish slavery until 1888, being the last country in the world to do so.

The economic disaster created by United States and Europe policies of isolation, let to the creation of one of the first debtor states. Haiti, in what was latter debt peonage, was forced to endure a period of formal colonialism when the United States marines invaded Haiti in 1915. After 19 years, they left the country neatly re-organized to become a neo-colony of United States. In order to assure obedience and discipline to the imperial requirements, the United States military trained the Haitian National Guard (like in recent years the formerly called “School of the Americas” trained Latin America’s military) and left the military forces that would lead to the eventual dictatorship of Francois Duvalier in 1957, probably (together with another U.S. protégé in the other side of the island, the Dominican Republic’s dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo) one of the most cruelest and murderous in the Americas.

In recent decades, after the end of the Duvalier dynasty period of bloody control, the Haitian nation has attempted to stand on their own feet and establish a democratic and prosperous nation. Each time their efforts have been thwarted, this time again by the United States and the support of Europe. Father Bertrand Aristide, who despite his weaknesses, was by far a step in the right direction for Haiti. He was elected democratically by the Haitian people twice and twice removed by forces supported and directed by the United States. The last time, in 2004, President Bertrand Aristide, was overthrown by former military forces influenced by the Duvalierists and other forces allied to the light-skinned elites who have ruled Haiti for decades in alliance with the United States. Marx said that history repeats itself, the first as tragedy the second time as a farce. The first tragedy was that President Bertrand Aristide was kidnapped by United States agents, placed in a United States military plane and whisked away to the Central African Republic. Today he lives in exile in South Africa. Summer 2009, President Zelaya from Honduras was also overthrown and later kidnapped and exiled in a sequel that seems more like a farce. Today, he is still in exile.

Someone has said that “Americans are the people with the most access to information and the least informed.” As we watch the coverage of the Haitian tragedy and we hear President Obama’s words, the first African American president, let’s not forget white supremacy is alive and kicking in the United States. The main networks are in a self-congratulatory mood about how we are the first responders and celebrating the spirit of giving of the nation. The United States people are a generous people and they will respond but we should not forget the reasons why this disaster has been amplified. The government and the infrastructure of Haiti are so inefficient and non-existent that the coordination of efforts will be more difficult.

Ironically, corporate media in the United States, because they are monolingual and do not read Spanish or Creole, are cheerleading the arrival of Canadians and U.S. planes late on Wednesday, the fact is that the first responders came from Venezuela, which sent its air force with medics, food and equipment a few hours after the tragedy. Cuba, which already had 344 medical doctors on the ground, sent more teams with 151 more specialized medical doctors (including the Reed brigade that was offered to the Bush administration to help in New Orleans) that arrived (Cubans already had two tent hospitals serving 800 wounded), the Dominican Republic which sent a 20 member Urban Rescue team, and through which Puerto Rico attempted to coordinate and sent a team of three helicopters, dozens of urban rescuers (who had earlier served in New York during 9/11 attack) and 20 structural engineers. However, Puerto Rico was unable to send them as quickly as they wished; at least until last night (1/16/2010) teams of technicians with water purifying systems, communications and military police did not receive permission from the Southern Command. As a colony of the United States, they had to wait for approval from the U.S. Southern command. God forbid Puerto Ricans and Latinos upstaged the U.S. rescue efforts.

President Obama promised $100 million in aid to Haiti on January 14, 2009. A Kentucky couple won $128 million in a Powerball lottery on December 24, 2009. The richest nation in the history of the world is giving Powerball money to a neighbor with tens of thousands of deaths already?

Point Two: Have You Ever Been Without Water?

Hundreds of thousands of people in Haiti have had no access to clean water since the quake hit. Have you ever been in a place that has no water? Have you ever felt the raw fear in the gut when you are not sure where your next drink of water is going to come from? People can live without food for a long time. Without water? A very short time. In hot conditions people can become dehydrated in an hour. Lack of water puts you into shock and starts breaking down the body right away. People can die within hours if they are exposed to heat without water.

Point Three: Half the People in Haiti are Kids and They Were Hungry Before the Quake

Over half the population of Haiti is 15 years old or younger. And they were hungry before the quake. A great friend, Pere Jean-Juste, explained to me that most of the people of Haiti wake every day not knowing how they will eat dinner that day. So there are no reserves, no soup kitchens, no pantries, nothing for most. Hunger started immediately.

Point Four: A Toxic Stew of Death is Brewing

Take hundreds of thousands of people. Shock them with a major earthquake and dozens of aftershocks. Take away their homes and put them out in the open. Take away all water and food and medical care. Sit them out in the open for days with scorching temperatures. Surround them with tens of thousands of decaying bodies. People have to drink. So they are drinking bad water. They are getting sick. There is no place to go. What happens next?

Point Five: Aid is Sitting at the Airport

While millions suffer, humanitarian aid is sitting at the Port au Prince airport. Why? People are afraid to give it out for fear of provoking riots. Which is worse?

Point Six: Haiti is Facing A Crisis Beyond Our Worst Nightmares

“I think it is going to be worse than anyone still understands,” Richard Dubin, vice president of Haiti shipping lines told the New York Times. He is so right. Unless there is a major urgent change in the global response, the world may look back and envy those tens of thousands who died in the quake.

Wake up world!

Of course, if they had done what they were supposed to and (with the rest of the international community) made sure the Palestinians were left in peace to run their own affairs with their homeland intact, there would be no need to endlessly raid taxpayers’ pockets for aid.

Here’s the text of a letter to foreign secretary David Miliband…

Some two months ago, on 10 November, Lord Brett announced that the British Government had “pledged £30 million at the Sharm el-Sheikh conference, of which £20 million was allocated for reconstruction and £10 million for early recovery. We are already funding a number of early recovery projects, such as cash for work schemes employing people to clear rubble and repair agricultural roads, and expect to spend the full £10 million allocated for this purpose by March 2010. However, due to restrictions on the entry of building materials into Gaza, the UK has not yet been able to spend any of the funding earmarked for reconstruction. We stand ready to provide support as soon as the situation improves, and continue to press the Israeli Government for improved access to Gaza for aid, aid workers and reconstruction materials.

“The UK has spent £16.9 million in the West Bank and Gaza so far this financial year, including £5.2 million in humanitarian assistance to Gaza, and £10 million in support to the Palestinian Authority to enable it to provide essential public services. We have also provided nearly £20 million to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to provide support to Palestinian refugees, of which around half is allocated to Gaza and the West Bank.”

Exactly what have Britain’s efforts amounted to so far? How much humanitarian aid has Britain succeeded in bringing to bear on the crisis and human suffering in Gaza? Where has it been spent and by whom?

On 5 January Mr Michael Foster of the Department for International Development said: “The €32 million pledge for Gaza made by the Commissioner for External Relations and European Neighbourhood Policy in March 2009 was for humanitarian aid and early recovery activities… Like the DFID the EU has been unable to spend money on formal reconstruction activities in Gaza due to Israeli restrictions on the import of essential materials.”

How long is this inaction likely to continue and why are Britain and the EU merely “pressing” Israel to no effect instead of forcing the issue? If the intended reconstruction aid has been blocked for nine months why was the money not reallocated to other critical humanitarian needs such as medical care and public health? What is stopping you, for example, asking Gaza’s ministry of health for a list of hospital spares and shipping them direct?

What concerns so many people out here is that there is no sense of urgency or determination within the Foreign Office or Number 10 to actually deliver real help into the living (and dying) hell that our so-called friends in Tel Aviv have created in Gaza, and that consequently Britain is made to appear complicit in prolonging the criminal devastation when our duty is surely clear enough.

Miliband and his chums need to understand that the death toll of Palestinian hospital patients due Israel’s blockade of life-saving facilities is nearing 370, itself a scandalous crime against humanity that can be added to the long list of Israel’s other atrocities.

Gaza, tell us how much aid has reached you

Perhaps the authorities in Gaza – government and non-government – would please tell the world how much humanitarian aid they were hoping to receive and how much has actually been allowed to reach them?

The siege was inhumanly severe two years ago when, after visiting Gaza, I was sent a list of urgently-required hospital spares by the Ministry of Health, which I forwarded to the British government. To my eternal shame it was ignored. Would our beleaguered healthcare friends in Gaza like to send an up-to-date list to see if that too is rejected? I would suggest they send it to all three UK party leaders, who are in moralizing overdrive with elections looming, and we’ll see what each one is really made of.

British prime minister Gordon Brown likes saying that “the only solution is a peace settlement between an Israel that needs security within its borders and a Palestine that needs to be a viable economic state”. How long have people like him been saying tosh like that? No, Mr Brown, you simply don’t get it. The only solution is compliance with international law and the dispensing of justice, not more shabby peace ‘negotiations’ dictated by a massively strong side subsidized by powerful friends, armed to the teeth with state-of-the-art weaponry and holding a gun to the head of an impoverished side weakened by 40 years of brutal occupation and equipped only with makeshift weapons and smuggled small arms.

Incidentally, note how western leaders always stick to the Israeli script and never acknowledge that Palestine is equally entitled to “security within its borders”.

We have the worst British government in my lifetime, guilty of the most disastrous foreign policy blunder of the last 100 years – Iraq – and happy to blindly make other lethal mistakes. In centuries past, politicians were parted from their heads for treachery or incompetence. Nowadays they are allowed to profit while innocent masses pay with their lives.

Hopefully this perverse government will be kicked out in the coming elections. Before they go, however, let us see if they can do one decent thing.

And with reports coming in of Israel massing its military strength in the western Negev and elsewhere near the Gaza border, presumably for a second Gaza war as if last year’s wasn’t unforgivable, and the US storing extra ordnance in Israel presumably for the IDF to use against Palestinian civilians, it’s time Dogsbody Britain finally snarled a little at the bloodthirsty lunatics in Tel Aviv and Washington instead of sitting at their feet and wagging its tail.

The earthquake toppled poorly constructed houses, hotels, hospitals and even the capital city’s main political buildings, including the presidential palace. The collapse of so many structures sent a giant cloud into the sky, which hovered over the city, raining dust down onto the wasteland below.

According to some estimates, more than 100,000 people may have died, in a metropolis of 2 million people. Those that survived are living in the streets, afraid to return inside any building that remains standing.

Around the world, Haitians struggled to contact their family and friends in the devastated country. But most could not reach their loved ones since phone lines were down throughout the country.

One person who did reach relatives, Garry Pierre-Pierre, editor and publisher of the Brooklyn-based Haitian Times, stated, “People are in shock. They’re afraid to go out in the streets for obvious reasons, and most of them can’t get inside their homes. A lot of people are sitting or sleeping in front of the rubble that used to be their homes.”

President René Préval issued an emergency appeal for humanitarian aid. He described the scene in Port-au-Prince as “unimaginable. Parliament has collapsed. The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed. There are a lot of schools that have a lot of dead people in them. All the hospitals are packed with people. It’s a catastrophe.”

The weak Préval government was unable to respond to the crisis, and the United Nations — which occupies Haiti with close to 9,000 troops — was completely unprepared to manage the situation. Many UN leaders and troops died in buildings that collapsed, including their own headquarters.

International Red Cross spokesman Paul Conneally said that 3 million out of Haiti’s 9 million people would need international emergency aid in the coming weeks just to survive. The UN, U.S., European Union, Canada and countless non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have promised humanitarian aid.

While most people reacted to the crisis by trying to find a way to help or donate money, Christian Right fanatic Pat Robertson stooped to new depths of racism. He explained that Haitians were cursed because they made a pact with the devil to liberate themselves from their French slave masters in the Haitian revolution two centuries ago.

The corporate media at least reported that shifting tectonic plates along a fault line underneath Port-au-Prince caused the earthquake — and that Haiti’s poverty and the incapacity of the Préval government made the disaster so much worse. But they didn’t delve below the surface.

“The media coverage of the earthquake is marked by an almost complete divorce of the disaster from the social and political history of Haiti,” Canadian Haiti solidarity activist Yves Engler said in an interview. “They repeatedly state that the government was completely unprepared to deal with the crisis. This is true. But they left out why.”

Why were 60 percent of the buildings in Port-au-Prince shoddily constructed and unsafe in normal circumstances, according to the city’s mayor? Why are there no building regulations in a city that sits on a fault line? Why has Port-au-Prince swelled from a small town of 50,000 in the 1950s to a population of two million desperately poor people today? Why was the state completely overwhelmed by the disaster?

To understand these facts, we have to look at a second fault line — US imperial policy toward Haiti. The US government, the UN, and other powers have aided the Haitian elite in subjecting the country to neoliberal economic plans that have impoverished the masses, deforested the land, wrecked the infrastructure and incapacitated the government.

The fault line of U.S. imperialism interacted with the geological one to turn the natural disaster into a social catastrophe.

During the Cold War, the U.S. supported the dictatorships of Papa Doc Duvalier and then Baby Doc Duvalier — which ruled the country from 1957 to 1986 — as an anti-communist counterweight to Castro’s Cuba nearby.

Under guidance from Washington, Baby Doc Duvalier opened the Haitian economy up to US capital in the 1970s and 1980s. Floods of US agricultural imports destroyed peasant agriculture. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people flocked to the teeming slums of Port-au-Prince to labor for pitifully low wages in sweatshops located in US export processing zones.

In the 1980s, masses of Haitians rose up to drive the Duvaliers from power — later, they elected reformer Jean-Bertrand Aristide to be president on a platform of land reform, aid to peasants, reforestation, investment in infrastructure for the people, and increased wages and union rights for sweatshop workers.

The U.S. in turn backed a coup that drove Aristide from power in 1991. Eventually, the elected president was restored to power in 1994 when Bill Clinton sent US troops to the island — but on the condition that he implement the US neoliberal plan — which Haitians called the “plan of death.”

Aristide resisted parts of the US program for Haiti, but implemented other provisions, undermining his hoped-for reforms. Eventually, though, the US grew impatient with Aristide’s failure to obey completely, especially when he demanded $21 billion in reparations during his final year in office. The U.S. imposed an economic embargo that strangled the country, driving peasants and workers even deeper into poverty.

In 2004, Washington collaborated with Haiti’s ruling elite to back death squads that toppled the government, kidnapped and deported Aristide. The United Nations sent troops to occupy the country, and the puppet government of Gérard Latortue was installed to continue Washington’s neoliberal plans.

Latortue’s brief regime was utterly corrupt — he and his cronies pocketed large portions of the $4 billion poured into the country by the U.S. and other powers when they ended their embargo. The regime dismantled the mild reforms Aristide had managed to implement. Thus, the pattern of impoverishment and degradation of the country’s infrastructure accelerated.

In the 2006 elections, the Haitian masses voted in longtime Aristide ally René Préval as president. But Préval has been a weak figure who collaborated with U.S. plans for the country and failed to address the growing social crisis.

In fact, the U.S., UN and other imperial powers effectively bypassed the Préval government and instead poured money into NGOs. “Haiti now has the highest per capita presence of NGOs in the world,” says Yves Engler. The Préval government has become a political fig leaf, behind which the real decisions are made by the imperial powers, and implemented through their chosen international NGOs.

The real state power isn’t the Préval government, but the US-backed United Nations occupation. Under Brazilian leadership, UN forces have protected the rich and collaborated with — or turned a blind eye to — right-wing death squads who terrorize supporters of Aristide and his Lavalas Party.

The occupiers have done nothing to address the poverty, wrecked infrastructure and massive deforestation that have exacerbated the effects of a series of natural disasters — severe hurricanes in 2004 and 2008, and now the Port-au-Prince earthquake.

Instead, they merely police a social catastrophe, and in so doing, have committed the normal crimes characteristic of all police forces. As Dan Beeton wrote in NACLA Report on the Americas, “The UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), which began its mission in June 2004, has been marred by scandals of killings, rape and other violence by its troops almost since it began.”

First the Bush administration and now the Obama administration have used the coup and social and natural crises to expand the US’s neoliberal economic plans.

Under Obama, the U.S. has granted Haiti $1.2 billion in debt relief, but it hasn’t canceled all of Haiti’s debt — the country still pays huge sums to the Inter-American Development Bank. The debt relief is classic window dressing for Obama’s real Haiti policy, which is the same old Haiti policy.

In close collaboration with the new UN Special Envoy to Haiti, former President Bill Clinton, Obama has pushed for an economic program familiar to much of the rest of the Caribbean — tourism, textile sweatshops and weakening of state control of the economy through privatization and deregulation.

In particular, Clinton has orchestrated a plan for turning the north of Haiti into a tourist playground, as far away as possible from the teeming slums of Port-au-Prince. Clinton lured Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines into investing $55 million to build a pier along the coastline of Labadee, which it has leased until 2050.

From there, Haiti’s tourist industry hopes to lead expeditions to the mountaintop fortress Citadelle and the Palace of Sans Souci, both built by Henri Christophe, one of the leaders of Haiti’s slave revolution. According to the Miami Herald:

The $40 million plan involved transforming the now quaint town of Milot, home to the Citadelle and Palace of Sans Souci ruin, into a vibrant tourist village, with arts and crafts markets, restaurants and stoned streets. Guests would be ferried past a congested Cap-Haïtien to a bay, then transported by bus past peasant plantations. Once in Milot, they would either hike or horseback to the Citadelle . . . named a world heritage site in 1982 . . .

Eco-tourism, archaeological exploration and voyeuristic visits to Vodou rituals are all being touted by Haiti’s struggling boutique tourism industry, as Royal Caribbean plans to bring the world largest cruise ship here, sparking the need for excursions.

So while Pat Robertson denounces Haiti’s great slave revolution as a pact with the devil, Clinton is helping to reduce it to a tourist trap.

At the same time, Clinton’s plans for Haiti include an expansion of the sweatshop industry to take advantage of cheap labor available from the urban masses. The U.S. granted duty-free treatment for Haitian apparel exports to make it easy for sweatshops to return to Haiti.

Clinton celebrated the possibilities of sweatshop development during a whirlwind tour of a textile plant owned and operated by the infamous Cintas Corp. He announced that George Soros had offered $50 million for a new industrial park of sweatshops that could create 25,000 jobs in the garment industry. Clinton explained at a press conference that Haiti’s government could create “more jobs by lowering the cost of doing business, including the cost of rent.”

As TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson told Democracy Now! “That isn’t the kind of investment that Haiti needs. It needs capital investment. It needs investment so that it can be self-sufficient. It needs investment so that it can feed itself.”

One of the reasons why Clinton could be so unabashed in celebrating sweatshops is that the US-backed coup repressed any and all resistance. It got rid of Aristide and his troublesome habit of raising the minimum wage. It banished him from the country, terrorized his remaining allies and barred his political party, Fanmi Lavalas, the most popular in the country, from running for office. The coup regime also attacked union organizers within the sweatshops themselves.

As a result, Clinton could state to business leaders: “Your political risk in Haiti is lower than it has ever been in my lifetime.”

Thus, as previous US presidencies have done before, the Obama administration has worked to aid Haiti’s elite, sponsor international corporations taking advantage of cheap labor, weaken the ability of the Haitian state to regulate the society, and repress any political resistance to that agenda.

These policies led directly to the incapacitated Haitian state, dilapidated infrastructure, poorly constructed buildings and desperate poverty that combined with the hurricanes and now the earthquake to turn natural disasters into social catastrophes.

While everyone should support the current outpouring of aid to help Haiti, no one should do so with political blinders on. As Engler said:

Aid in Haiti has always been used to further imperial interests. This is obvious when you look at how the U.S. and Canada treated the Aristide government in contrast to the coup regime. The U.S. and Canada starved Aristide of almost all aid. But then after the coup, they opened a floodgate of money to back some of the most reactionary forces in Haitian society.

We should therefore agitate against any attempt by the U.S. and other powers to use this crisis to further impose their program on a prostrate country.

We should also be wary of the role of international NGOs. While many NGOs are trying to address the crisis, the U.S. and other governments are funneling aid to them in order to undermine Haitians’ democratic right to self-determination. The international NGOs are unaccountable to either the Haitian state or Haitian population. So the aid funneled through them further weakens what little hold Haitians have on their own society.

The Obama administration should also immediately lift the ban against Aristide’s return to Haiti, as well as the political ban on his party, Fanmi Lavalas, from participating in the electoral process. After all, a known drug criminal and coup leader, Guy Philippe, and his Front for National Reconstruction (FRN) party has been allowed to participate in the electoral process. Aristide and his party, by contrast, are still the most popular political force in the country and should have the right to participate in an open and fair vote.

The U.S. should also stop deportations of Haitians who have fled their crisis-torn country and grant Temporary Protected Status to Haitian refugees. That would allow any Haitians who have fled the political and social crisis since the coup, the hurricanes and now the earthquake to remain legally in the U.S.

On top of that, we must demand that the U.S. stop imposing its neoliberal plans. The U.S. has plundered Haitian society for decades. Instead of Haiti owing any debt to the U.S., other countries or international financial institutions, the reverse is the case. The U.S., France, Canada and the UN owe the people of Haiti reparations to redress the imperial plunder of the country.

With these funds and political space, Haitians would be finally able to begin shaping their own political and economic future–the dream of the great slave revolution 200 years ago.

What You Can Do

The American solidarity organization Haiti Action is committed to raising money for Haiti’s grassroots movement — including labor unions, women’s groups, educators and human rights activists, support committees for prisoners, and agricultural cooperatives — to distribute to those in need.

You can make a donation to the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund online.

The charity MAP (Medical Aid for Palestinians) had written an open letter to Brown asking him to “urgently use all available diplomatic means to bring an immediate and unconditional end to the blockade of the Gaza Strip”.

It reminded Brown that a year after the assault on Gaza, in which almost 1,400 Palestinians were killed and more than 5,300 injured, civilians continued to pay a devastating price. “Across the Gaza Strip, over 3,530 homes were completely destroyed and more than 2,850 severely damaged. Tens of thousands more homes suffered structural damage.”

A recent MAP survey of the most vulnerable families shows that only 2% have been able to repair their homes from damage inflicted in last winter’s bombardment. Families now face the winter in tents or in the rubble of their destroyed homes.

Furthermore “the blockade is directly compromising one of the people of Gaza’s most basic human rights; the right to health. Israeli authorities continue to routinely, and without explanation, block or delay the entry of medical supplies and equipment, leaving hospitals less able to cope. As hospitals falter, patients seeking care outside the Gaza Strip are routinely denied exit for life-saving medical treatment…”

And that’s not all. A public health disaster is looming: with no spare parts for maintenance or repair, water and sewage treatment facilities cannot function. “The World Health Organisation reports that over 80% of Gaza’s water is no longer safe to drink, while up to 80 million cubic litres of untreated or partially treated sewage is being dumped into the sea daily.”

The letter also reminded Mr Brown that the British Government had said Israel’s blockade must end, and emphasized the need for fine words to be backed up by meaningful diplomatic action. It was signed by nearly 4,000 people.

And what was Mr Brown’s response?

Dear Friends

Your open letter to me of 27 December in The Observer was right to draw attention to the grave humanitarian situation in Gaza, one year after a conflict that cost over a thousand Palestinian lives and those of over ten Israelis.

As I have made clear repeatedly to the Israeli government, it is unacceptable that Israel continues to prevent aid from reaching those who so badly need it in Gaza. EU Foreign Ministers reinforced our call for full humanitarian access earlier this month.

Alongside diplomatic pressure, I pledge that the UK will remain in the forefront of the humanitarian effort. Following the offensive a year ago, we spent £20 million on humanitarian aid for the people of Gaza.

And on 28 December, Douglas Alexander announced a total package of £53.5 million for Palestine, with a particular focus on Gaza – including £5 million of new funding for the United Nations’ work with Gazan refugees.

While Hamas’ actions can be no justification for preventing aid reaching the people of Gaza, Hamas must remove the menace of rocket attacks against the people of southern Israel, and release Gilad Shalit.

Ultimately, we can only give the people of Gaza real hope when genuine negotiations bring a lasting and just peace settlement. The parameters of such a potential agreement are clear. In the coming year, we must pursue still more vigorously a comprehensive peace based on secure and viable states of Israel and Palestine. For all of our futures, those who oppose justice and peace for the peoples of the region must not be allowed to prevail.

Yours sincerely

Gordon Brown

1 January 2010

He hasn’t budged an inch and just gets siller.

Britain spent £20 million on humanitarian aid for the people of Gaza last year? Where and when? Can any of it be accounted for?

“I pledge that the UK will remain in the forefront of the humanitarian effort,” says Mr Brown. No, Viva Palestina are at the forefront while Brown and the other loafers twiddle their thumbs.

And what has the release of the Israeli paid killer Gilad Shalit got to do with this? Why isn’t Mr Brown evenhanded enough to call for the release of 11,000 Palestinians who are rotting in Israeli jails. Doesn’t he know that Israel’s troops continue to abduct Palestinians on a daily basis?

And hasn’t it dawned on Brown yet that you can make something clear to the Israelis till you’re blue in the face but they’ll take no notice unless you’re prepared to act?

As for “negotiations”, is international law suddenly negotiable? Are UN resolutions negotiable?

Is “real hope” only available from Britain at some distant future point in time when non-existent negotiations have brought a lasting and just peace settlement? What gobbledygook is that? Humanitarian action is needed now – today – and surely must leapfrog interminable, bogus peace processes.

If the parameters of a peace settlement are so “clear”, why don’t the British government and the other western powers stop dithering and implement them? For decades our scheming, conniving western leaders have failed to deliver one jot or tittle of justice to the Holy Land. Instead, they have allowed the enormity of Israel’s crimes to escalate, for which the lawless entity continues to be admired and rewarded in the higher echelons of British government to the point where certain ministers plan to change our laws to protect wanted war criminals and let them walk free on the street of our capital city.

And have you looked at the map recently, Mr Brown? What is clear to most people is that your “comprehensive peace based on secure and viable states of Israel and Palestine” is now impossible, especially for Palestine, without forceful action by the international community.

What’s needed are “adverse economic consequences for Israel”

While Brown was penning his reply to MAP, the Gaza Freedom Marchers were composing their excellent Cairo Declaration calling for an end to Israeli apartheid. In it they point to our own governments having given Israel direct economic, financial, military and diplomatic support and allowing it to behave with impunity.

They point to the contempt for Palestinian democracy shown by Israel, the US, Canada, the EU and others after the Palestinian elections of 2006.

They point to the war crimes committed by Israel during the invasion of Gaza a year ago and make no bones about the need to end the charitable status enjoyed by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), of which Brown is unwisely a patron.

And while Brown prattles about how unacceptable it is that Israel still prevents aid from reaching those who so badly need it, there is no sign that he’s prepared to do anything about it. On the other hand Richard Falk, the Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, is much more positive. He tells UN Radio: “Israel does not respond to language of diplomacy, which has encouraged the lifting of the blockade, and so what I am suggesting is that it has to be reinforced by a threat of adverse economic consequences for Israel.”

So let’s hear it, Mr Brown. Let’s hear the S-word… SANCTIONS.

After all, you’re not afraid to deploy sanctions against poor beat-up Palestinians, and against Iraqis, and against Iranians — none of whom have ever posed a threat to Britain.

So you shouldn’t flinch from using sanctions against the thugs for whom last year’s killing spree wasn’t enough and who now threaten a second Gaza onslaught.

About 1400 activists from all over the world gathered there on their way to the Gaza Strip. On the anniversary of the “Cast Lead” War, they intended to participate in a non-violent demonstration against the ongoing blockade, which makes the life of 1.5 million inhabitants of the Strip intolerable.

At the same time, protest demonstrations were to take place in many countries. In Tel-Aviv, too, a big protest was planned. The “monitoring committee” of the Arab citizens of Israel was to organize an event on the Gaza border.

When the international activists arrived in Egypt, a surprise awaited them. The Egyptian government forbade their trip to Gaza. Their buses were held up at the outskirts of Cairo and turned back. Individual protesters who succeeded in reaching the Sinai in regular buses were taken off them. The Egyptian security forces conducted a regular hunt for the activists.

The angry activists besieged their embassies in Cairo. On the street in front of the French embassy, a tent camp sprang up which was soon surrounded by the Egyptian police. American protesters gathered in front of their embassy and demanded to see the ambassador. Several protesters who are over 70 years old started a hunger strike. Everywhere, the protesters were held up by Egyptian elite units in full riot gear, while red water cannon trucks were lurking in the background. Protesters who tried to assemble in Cairo’s central Tahrir (liberation) Square were mishandled.

In the end, after a meeting with the wife of the president, a typical Egyptian solution was found: one hundred activists were allowed to reach Gaza. The rest remained in Cairo, bewildered and frustrated.

While the demonstrators were cooling their heels in the Egyptian capital and trying to find ways to vent their anger, Binyamin Netanyahu was received in the president’s palace in the heart of the city. His hosts went to great lengths to laud and celebrate his contribution to peace, especially the ‘freeze” of settlement activity in the West Bank, a phony gesture that does not include East Jerusalem.

Hosni Mubarak and Netanyahu have met in the past – but not in Cairo. The Egyptian president always insisted that the meetings take place in Sharm-al-Sheikh, as far from the Egyptian population centers as possible. The invitation to Cairo was, therefore, a significant token of increasingly close relations.

As a special gift for Netanyahu, Mubarak agreed to allow hundreds of Israelis to come to Egypt and pray at the grave of Rabbi Yaakov Abu-Hatzeira, who died and was buried in the Egyptian town of Damanhur 130 years ago, on his way from Morocco to the Holy Land.

There is something symbolic about this: the blocking of the pro-Palestinian protesters on their way to Gaza at the same time as the invitation of Israelis to Damanhur.

One may well wonder about the Egyptian participation in the blockade of the Gaza Strip.

The blockade started long before the Gaza War and has turned the Strip into what has been described as “the biggest prison on earth”. The blockade applies to everything except essential medicines and the most basic foodstuffs. US senator John Kerry, former candidate for the presidency, was shocked to hear that the blockade included pasta – the Israeli army in its wisdom has designated noodles as a luxury. The blockade is all-embracing – from building materials to school children’s copy books. Except for the most extreme humanitarian cases, nobody can pass from the Gaza Strip to Israel or the West Bank, nor the other way round.

But Israel controls only three sides of the Strip. The Northern and Eastern borders are blocked by the Israeli army, the Western border by the Israeli navy. The fourth border, the Southern one, is controlled by Egypt. Therefore, the entire blockade would be ineffective without Egyptian participation.

Ostensibly, this does not make sense. Egypt considers itself as the leader of the Arab world. It is the most populous Arab country, situated at the center of the Arab world. Fifty years ago the president of Egypt, Gamal Abd-al-Nasser, was the idol of all the Arabs, especially of the Palestinians. How can Egypt collaborate with the “Zionist enemy”, as Egyptians called Israel then, in bringing 1.5 million brother Arabs to their knees?

Until recently, the Egyptian government had been sticking to a solution that exemplifies the 6000-year old Egyptian political acumen. It participated in the blockade but closed its eyes to the hundreds of tunnels dug under the Egyptian-Gaza border, through which the daily supplies for the population were flowing (for exorbitant prices, and with high profits for Egyptian merchants), together with the stream of arms. People also passed through them – from Hamas activists to brides.

This is about to change. Egypt has started building an iron wall – literally – along the full length of the Gaza border, consisting of steel pillars thrust deep into the ground, in order to block all tunnels. That will finally choke the inhabitants.

When the most extreme Zionist, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, wrote 80 years ago about erecting an “Iron Wall” against the Palestinians, he did not dream of Arabs doing just that.

Why do they do it?

There are several explanations. Cynics point out that the Egyptian government receives a huge American subsidy every year – almost two billion dollars – by courtesy of Israel. It started as a reward for the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. The pro-Israel lobby in the US Congress can stop it any time.

Others believe that Mubarak is afraid of Hamas. The organization started out as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, still the main opposition to his autocratic regime. The Cairo-Riyadh-Amman-Ramallah axis is poised against the Damascus-Gaza axis that is allied with the Tehran-Hizbullah axis. Many people believe that Mahmoud Abbas is interested in the tightening of the Gaza blockade in order to hurt Hamas.

Mubarak is angry with Hamas, which refuses to dance to his tune. Like his predecessors, he demands that the Palestinians obey his orders. President Abd-al-Nasser was angry with the PLO (an organization created by him to ensure Egyptian control of the Palestinians, but which escaped him when Yasser Arafat took over). President Anwar Sadat was angry with the PLO for rejecting the Camp David agreement, which promised Palestinians only “autonomy”. How dare the Palestinians, a small, oppressed people, refuse the ”advice” of Big Brother?

All these explanations make sense, yet the Egyptian government’s attitude is still astonishing. The Egyptian blockade of Gaza destroys the lives of 1.5 million human beings, men and women, old people and children, most of who are not Hamas activists. It is done publicly, before the eyes of hundreds of millions of Arabs, a billion and a quarter Muslims. In Egypt itself, too, millions of people are ashamed of the participation of their country in the starving of fellow Arabs.

It is a very dangerous policy. Why does Mubarak follow it?

The real answer is, probably, that he has no choice.

Egypt is a very proud country. Anyone who has been in Egypt knows that even the poorest Egyptian is full of national pride and is easily insulted when his national dignity is hurt. That was shown again a few weeks ago, when Egypt lost a soccer match with Algeria and behaved as if it has lost a war.

“Consider that from the summit of these Pyramids, forty centuries look down upon you,” Napoleon told his soldiers on the eve of the battle for Cairo. Every Egyptian feels that 6000 – some say 8000 – years of history look upon him all the time.

This profound feeling clashes with reality at a time when Egypt’s situation is getting more and more miserable. Saudi Arabia has more influence, tiny Dubai has become an international financial center, Iran is becoming a far more important regional power. Contrary to Iran, where the Ayatollahs have called upon families to limit themselves to two children, the Egyptian birthrate is devouring everything, condemning the country to permanent poverty.

In the past, Egypt succeeded in balancing its internal weaknesses with external successes. The whole world considered Egypt as the leader of the Arab world, and treated it accordingly. No more.

Egypt is in a bad situation. Therefore, Mubarak has no choice but to follow the dictates of the US – which are, in fact, Israeli dictates. That is the real explanation for his participation in the blockade.

When I spoke today at the demonstration in Tel-Aviv, after we had marched through the streets to protest against the blockade, I refrained from mentioning the Egyptian part in it.

I confess that I liked the people I met during my visits to Egypt very much. The “man in the street” is very welcoming. In their behavior towards each other there is an air of tranquility, an absence of aggression, a particular Egyptian sense of humor. Even the poorest keep their dignity in crowded and often miserable conditions. I have not heard them grumble. In all the thousands of years of their history, Egyptians have risen in revolt no more than three or four times.

This legendary patience has its negative side, too. When people are resigned to their lot, this may prevent economic, social and political progress.

It seems that the Egyptian people are ready to accept everything. From the Pharaohs of old right down to the present Pharaoh, their rulers have faced little opposition. But a day may come when national pride will overcome even this patience.

As an Israeli, I protest against the Israeli blockade. If I were an Egyptian, I would protest against the Egyptian blockade. As a citizen of this planet, I protest against both.

It says a year after Operation Cast Lead, extensive damage hasn’t been repaired and thousands “are being prevented from rebuilding their shattered society.” It’s not from a lack of commitment or enough resources with over $4 billion in pledged aid. It’s because Israel blocks goods and equipment from entering Gaza. The world community and Arab world do nothing to stop them, so much of the Strip still lies in ruins.

Following Hamas’ January 2006 electoral victory, all outside aid was cut off. Sanctions and an economic embargo were imposed, and the democratically elected government was falsely designated a terrorist organization and isolated. Stepped up repression followed as well as regular IFD attacks, killings, targeted assassinations, property destruction, and more. Gazans have been imprisoned ever since.

Since June 2007, the Strip has been under siege, described in an August 2009 OCHA report (“Locked In: The Humanitarian Impact of Two Years of Blockade on the Gaza Strip“) as a:

“protracted human dignity crisis with negative humanitarian consequences.” At its heart is the “degradation (of) living conditions,” the erosion of livelihoods, the lack of vital services in the areas of health, water, sanitation and education, and the collapse of essential infrastructure in the wake of Operation Cast Lead.

Gazans can’t leave, export anything, or live freely on their own land. In addition, Israel lets in restricted amounts of essential goods, far too inadequate to relieve the grave humanitarian crisis by design to essentially starve its residents into submission, or perhaps eliminate as many of them as possible by slow motion genocide.

In addition, all materials needed to rebuild are prohibited, including cement, glass, wood, gravel, steel bars, spare parts, and more. In May, the Palestinian Chamber of Commerce reported unemployment reached 65%, poverty 80%, and the longer the siege continues, the higher these figures go. Further, 96% of Gaza’s industrial capacity was destroyed and closed, and well over 80% of the population is aid-dependent. Yet most get below minimal amounts of virtually everything.

International Responsibility

Expressing alarm and frustration, the NGOs say:

“Israel has the primary responsibility to end the blockage.” So does the world community to stop the illegal collective punishment of 1.5 million people. “The people of Gaza have been betrayed (by powerful nations) which can and must do far more to end the illegal and inhumane blockade:” an unconscionable grievous crime against humanity.

The NGOs’ report focuses on what the international community can do, especially the EU as “a major funder of humanitarian and development programmes in (Occupied Palestine) and Israel’s largest export market.”

Thus far, its nations have abstained, as have others able to help. In a March 2008 report, many of the NGOs warned that the siege caused the most deplorable conditions in Gaza since the 1967 war and occupation. Then in September, they examined the Quartet’s record (the US, Russia, EU and UN), warning that:

“if the cessation of violence ends, the consequences for civilians — both in terms of violent attacks against civilians and the humanitarian situation — will be dire. To this end, all Quartet members should demonstrate robust, public support for the cessation of violence and take further steps to deepen it.”

The two and a half year siege, compounded by Operation Cast Lead’s mass killings and devastation “left a legacy of destruction and loss. It is time to allow the people of Gaza to begin to pick up the shattered pieces of their lives and rebuild, by ending the blockade that prevents them. There must be no more excuses.”

Israel’s Agenda: Siege and Blocked Rebuilding

Before the blockade, on average 70 daily Gazan truckloads were exported and 583 let in with essential and other goods. During the siege’s first two years, about one-fifth of previous amounts got in while nearly all exports were prohibited.

Currently, Israel lets in only about 35 categories of items compared to 4,000 pre-siege. Yet no published list exists, so there’s no consistency on what is or is not allowed as well as amounts. For example, fruits entering one day are prohibited on another as luxuries, and the same qualification applies to virtually everything as pure harassment and collective punishment.

Also, needless delays are imposed. For shelter kits, on average 85 days; health and pediatric kits, 68; and household items like bedding and kitchen utensils, 39.

Construction Materials

Banning them prevents essential rebuilding of houses and other structures. As a result, thousands of homes, factories, businesses, schools, hospitals, mosques, and other structures, totally or partly destroyed, are affected. So are razed agricultural lands, destroyed farms, fields, crops, olive trees, and irrigation systems depriving farmers of their livelihoods and Gazans essential food in amounts to sustain health.

Pre-siege, construction materials comprised over half of Gaza’s imports, around 7,400 truckloads monthly. After June 2007, it dropped to an average 31, and in the past year, it’s a bare four loads a month trickle. Case-by-case exceptions are made but in small amounts, then cancelled merely to harass. For example, a promised cement shipment to rebuild Gaza’s flour mill was denied for no apparent reason, and most entering is smuggled through Gaza’s tunnels into Egypt. But it’s too little and at inflated prices so unaffordable for most people.

Exceptions permitted “demonstrate how possible it is to allow (in everything needed. Gazans) desperately need (a) systematic, large-scale reconstruction operations — and (a) change of policy that would allow this. Piecemeal and patchwork initiatives simply make no impact on the scale of the destruction which people in Gaza are living with a year on” from the war.

The Cost: No Reconstruction, No Recovery

International assessments of Gaza’s destruction range from $659-$892 million. Others estimate $1 billion or more because so much of the Strip was affected, including homes, agriculture, government and private structures, and vast amounts of infrastructure. The war’s toll left an estimated 600,000 tons of rubble, most still in place, and clearing it entails 200,000 or more person-days to complete.

Homes

The UN estimated around 53,000 homes sustained minor damage, but over 15,000 were destroyed or heavily damaged, displacing 100,000 residents forced to live with relatives, in tents, or if lucky in habitable rented apartments. Many are still there.

Industry and Jobs

Hundreds of private factories and businesses were destroyed or severely damaged, amounting to millions in losses not recovered. Gaza got a double blow. “Not only is cement largely denied by the blockade, but according to the UN, 19 of Gaza’s 27 ready mix concrete plants were also either badly damaged or destroyed… including (its) only cement packaging and storage plant.”

Agriculture

Pre-siege, it was substantial, producing up to 400,000 tons annually. A third included tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, flowers and fruit, much of it in greenhouses. Farms supplied a portion of Gaza’s food needs and employed over 40,000 people or 13% of its workforce. The war took its toll destroying an estimated 17% of tillable land, including open fields, olive, date, and other fruit orchards. In addition, bombing and bulldozing demolished greenhouses, livestock shelters, irrigation channels, wells and pumps “on a huge scale.”

Then in May, Israel declared a 300-meter “buffer zone” no-go area around Gaza’s perimeter (in some places extending up to two km) affecting up to one-third of the Strip’s agricultural land and putting half or more of it all out of production.

Power

The war caused extensive long-term damage on top of earlier attacks putting it on the verge of collapse. During the conflict, Gaza’s main power station closed for 10 days for lack industrial diesel from Israel. In addition, most power lines supplying electricity from Israel and Egypt were destroyed, causing a 75% or greater shortfall.

During the offensive, one million Gazans had no power, and a half million no running water. In addition, sewage couldn’t be treated so it was dumped into the Mediterranean polluting beaches or ran in streets causing a severe health problem.

Bombing destroyed transformers, pylons, cabling, and the main stores and vehicles of the Gaza Electricity Distribution Company (GEDCO). While key power lines are restored, 90% of residents endure power cuts of four-eight hours daily. Affected are homes and all other facilities, including hospitals forced to rely on back-up generators, themselves vulnerable for lack of spare parts.

Industrial fuel is also restricted causing the power plant to switch on and off when it’s designed to stay running. As a result, it’s wearing out and may end up beyond repair.

Water and Sanitation

Its infrastructure is badly damaged enough to need millions for restoration. Over 30 water network km were damaged or destroyed. Most are partly repaired, but nothing in Gaza functions properly given shortages of everything, including spare parts.

The conflict also destroyed or damaged 6,000 rooftop water tanks, 840 household connections, and key storage tanks throughout the Strip. A lack of cement prevents rebuilding. Generator imports also are prohibited, essential to supply water during power outages that increase in winter. Besides water stoppages, lost pipe pressure pollutes groundwater sent through them to households compounding the ongoing health crisis.

Health

The WHO estimated that the war destroyed or damaged half of Gaza’s 122 health facilities, including 15 hospitals, 41 primary care centers, and 29 ambulances. Most now function but far short of optimally given the siege’s constraints. There’s a chronic shortage of everything, including specialized medical personnel to deal with severe war injuries requiring extensive or complicated surgeries as well as the proper equipment to perform them.

Education

Besides the siege’s affects, war destruction greatly exacerbated a bad situation, unrelieved by an inability to rebuild. As a result, in the past year, 82% of government schools and 88% of UNRWA ones operated on double shifts to accommodate Gaza’s children.

During the war, 18 schools were destroyed, and at least another 280 damaged, affecting thousands of students. “To date, almost nothing has been rebuilt or repaired as a result of the” construction materials ban also affecting textbooks and other educational supplies. New schools are needed and damaged ones repaired to begin to restore Gazan education to normality.

Israel’s Siege

Isolating Gaza isn’t new. Since 2000, it’s been subject to closures, but near totally since mid-2007 in defiance of international law. By enforcing Gaza’s blockade, “Israel is violating the absolute prohibition on collective punishment in international humanitarian law….”

Responsibility of the International Community, Especially the EU

As the occupying power, Israel is obligated under international law to assure the safety and well-being of civilians — “protected persons” as defined by Fourth Geneva’s Article 4.

At the March 2009 donor’s conference, over $4 billion in reconstruction aid was pledged, of which $1 billion came from EU countries. “The EU and the rest of the international community have again taken responsibility for repairing damage cause by (Israel), but failed” to see it’s delivered.

For their part, EU nations haven’t sought compensation for damage to their funded projects, estimated at tens of millions in 2000.

Fourth Geneva obligates third parties to conform to international law in all respects. So far, effective action is absent despite the May 2008 Quartet’s call for a “new approach” on Gaza. None followed nor from the Security Council’s January 8 Resolution 1860 (adopted 14 in favor with Washington abstaining) calling for an “Immediate, Durable, Fully Respected Ceasefire in Gaza Leading to Full Withdrawal of Israeli Forces (followed by) Unimpeded Humanitarian Assistance” and reopening of Gaza’s crossings.

So far, the Security Council has done nothing to implement its order, only binding on Israel if enforced. Yet, the EU expressed clear opposition to the siege, most recently at a December Foreign Affairs Council session saying: “the continued policy of closure is unacceptable and politically counterproductive. It has devastated the private sector economy and damaged the natural environment, notably water and other natural resources.”

It also called for “an immediate, sustained and unconditional opening of crossings for the flow of humanitarian aid, commercial goods and persons to and from Gaza,” but keeps abstaining from backing its words with action. It also hasn’t recognized the siege as “collective punishment” under international law, leaving its statements toothless, disingenuous, and contemptible.

So while its members extend new economic and trade privileges to Israel (after freezing their upgrading during the war), it denies Gazans the basics of life and contemptuously sells Israel weapons to batter them again. Also, few of its officials visited Gaza to view the devastation and assess its affects first.

In fact, the Quartet contributed to Gaza’s isolation by not recognizing Hamas, the Occupied Territory’s elected government, not Fatah under Mahmoud Abbas and the appointed prime minister, Salam Fayyad, who usurped it in the West Bank illegitimately.

Diplomatic Initiatives and Plans

“The international community appears to have accepted the blockade, seeking little more than small concessions.” Yet in May 2009, the UN formulated a specific plan to deliver construction materials for a number of stalled health, housing, and education projects. It guaranteed Israel’s security in return for letting it proceed. Then negotiations got diverted to a few pilot projects, not the full package, so:

“almost nothing has been allowed into Gaza under this plan…. The international community’s failure to do enough (perhaps nothing beyond rhetoric) to halt the blockade is a sign of the wider failure to hold all parties to account for violations of international humanitarian law.”

In June 2009, Jimmy Carter, like others with similar comments, said:

Tragically, the international community largely ignores the cries for help, while the citizens of Gaza are treated more like animals than human beings…. Never before in history has a large community been savaged by bombs and missiles and then deprived of the means to repair itself. The responsibility for this terrible human rights crime lies in Jerusalem (under Netanyahu), Cairo (under Mubarak), and Washington (under Obama who treats Palestinians as contemptuously as George Bush and the worst Republican extremists).

Call to Action

Stopping this outrage demands action, what the NGOs urgently call for, saying “no more excuses.” They want the Quartet, EU, and international community to commit to ending the siege, pressure Israel to assure it, have its government compensate Gazans for their losses, and hold guilty parties accountable under international law. Otherwise, they’ll be “no rebuilding, no recovery,” and no measures to prevent further attacks or to end decades of illegal occupation.

Israel’s Counteroffensive

Israel, of course, responded, like it always does when cornered with no credible defense, so it attacks critics like respected human rights groups, accusing them of organizing a campaign of false allegations, misinformation, and malicious personal attacks.

It also uses Zionist front groups like the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor to disseminate propaganda, debase the legitimate human rights community, and promote a pro-Israeli agenda defending the indefensible.

It countered with its own report titled, “Trojan Horse: The Impact of European Government Funding for Israeli NGOs,” with its president, Gerald Steinberg saying:

These (international NGOS) continue to exploit moral, legal and humanitarian principles in order to promote political warfare against Israel. Many of the claims in (their) report are not supported by credible evidence, and reflect double standards. Through this systematic bias regarding Israel, these NGOs have lost respectability, and the European governments that fund such attacks share responsibility for this abuse.

Never mind the array of respected human rights organizations, jurists, and activists universally condemning Israel’s war crimes, documenting them extensively in detailed reports, and calling for accountability.

Never mind Israeli officials fearing arrest in European cities, advised to contact the Judge Advocate General’s office prior to traveling, and a UK arrest warrant issued for former foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, for war crimes under the universal jurisdiction principle, by which nations may prosecute alleged criminals for offenses committed outside their borders.

According to Richard Goldstone, former South African Constitutional Court justice and head of the UN Human Rights Council’s Goldstone Commission, its precedent was Israel’s Adolph Eichman seizure, trial, conviction on 15 charges (including crimes against humanity and the Jewish people), death sentence, and June 1, 1962 hanging.

Despite Israel’s denial, coverup, and protestations, plus help from what James Petras calls the “Zionist Power Configuration (ZPT)” and supportive front groups like NGO Monitor, the evidence is clear, extensive, and conclusive. Israeli officials committed decades of the most grievous crimes of war and against humanity against defenseless Palestinian civilians, Operation Cast Lead one of the worst, but many others also particularly horrendous that still continue near daily.

Those responsible must be held accountable under the law, the same as Adolph Eichman and convicted Nazis at Nuremberg. Globally, people of conscience, including many thousands of Jews, demand and deserve no less.

A Final Comment

On December 27, B’Tselem launched a “public campaign” to lift the Gaza siege, saying:

“This is necessary to rehabilitate the Gaza Strip from the destruction wrought by the hostilities…. The siege has led to economic collapse, isolating one and a half million Gazans… and reduc(ed) most of them to poverty and a life of unemployment, extremism and hopelessness.”

Most of them need outside aid. Many thousands are still homeless, and can’t rebuild because materials can’t enter. “Not only is the siege unlawful and immoral, it is also utter folly.” Hamas is more popular than ever. Global outrage keeps building for resolution and an end to the occupation. Yet one year after Operation Cast Lead, there’s been no accountability for Israel’s lawlessness nor justice for a beleaguered, oppressed people. No longer can this outrage be tolerated nor should it.

My heart goes out to the 500 or so dedicated people from 17 different countries who brought their convoy of 200 vehicles almost to the gates of Gaza, only to be stranded at Aqaba just 4 hours short of their destination.

And not only the 500 driving with the Viva Palestina convoy but the thousands of supporters, fund-raisers and donors back home who have worked for months to provide the medical supplies, the food, the transport and the countless other humanitarian items.

These 500 ‘salt of the earth’, many from Britain, were kicking their heels in Aqaba, and threatening a hunger strike while their precious cargoes spoiled in the heat, because the Egyptian authorities wouldn’t allow them to enter Egypt through the port of Nuweiba. The reason appeared to be that the road across the Sinai from Nuweiba to Rafah ran close to the Israeli border and the 250 trucks and ambulances of the convoy might have caused “a big infiltration problem”.

Why the Egyptian army couldn’t have provided an escort to ensure that no trucks left the column, wasn’t explained. The convoy had already taken great trouble and gone many hundreds of extra miles to avoid Israel.

To have come so far and given so much — in time, effort, money and other resources — and to be thwarted at the last minute, was very hard to take.

However, Egypt is perfectly entitled to lay down rules and its foreign ministry issued a statement saying: “The Egyptian government welcomes the passage of the convoy into the Gaza Strip on December 27, on condition that it abides by the mechanisms in place for humanitarian aid convoys to the Palestinian people, including most importantly the entry of convoys through the port of El-Arish.”

In February 2006 the British MP George Galloway, who leads today’s convoy, was refused entry into Egypt. The last Viva Palestina convoy was pelted with stones and vandalised at El-Arish, which is about 28 miles from the Rafah border crossing into Gaza, after Galloway reportedly called President Mubarak uncomplimentary names and urged the country’s armed forces to overthrow him.

We all know what Mubarak is, but how clever was it to publicly insult the guy when asking easy passage for your convoy through his territory?

There’s clearly no love lost between them, and I heard the Egyptians had imposed three conditions if the convoy wished to reach Gaza through Egypt.

1) It must hand all its vehicles and aid over to UNWRA.

2) It must drive 500 miles back to Syria, then take ship from Latakia to the port of El-Arish.

3) It must ask Israel’s permission to cross from Egypt to Gaza.

This information came from members of the convoy, not the organisers. Items 1 and 3 are unthinkable, surely. But yesterday evening the organisers announced that the convoy, after mediation by Turkey, would indeed turn around and head back to Syria and embark from Latakia to El-Arish. Nothing has been said about complying with the other two conditions.

The voyage should take them under the noses of the trigger-happy and piratical Israeli gunboats who think nothing of opening fire on Gazan fishermen. Will the Royal Navy be dispatched to provide an armed escort?

The question remains: did the organisers know all this beforehand — especially the El-Arish stipulation — or was it suddenly sprung on them? Was clearance given for the southern route via Aqaba, then rescinded, or was it left to chance?

The convoy’s organizers are not answering basic questions and the full picture has still not emerged.

“This is a very determined convoy and we’re not going anywhere except to Gaza,” says George Galloway.

God speed you to the Gates of Hell then, George. But next time you should maybe consider going by sea, sailing 200 boats though international waters and demanding that the Western Powers guarantee the freedom of the high seas. That way you don’t need to bow to the likes of Mubarak.

And you could become an admiral.

This includes only those killed directly by military attacks. The actual casualty figure from Israel’s policies towards Gaza, including the number of deaths attributable to its ongoing siege of the territory, is unknown.

The official pretext for the operation given by Israel and parroted unquestioningly in the Western media is that Israel had to respond with force as an act of self-defense against to an onslaught of rocket attacks against southern Israel from Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza.

Even if this were true, nations acting in self-defense against armed attacks must respect international law designed to protect civilians in time of war. Israel flagrantly violated the Geneva Conventions and other relevant treaties governing the use of force during the course of its operation, committing numerous war crimes.

But the stated pretext itself does not stand up to scrutiny. Six months prior to the assault on Gaza, Israel and Hamas had agreed to a cease-fire. Under the terms of the truce agreement, Hamas would end its rocket attacks against Israel and Israel would similarly cease attacks against Palestinians in Gaza and lift its siege on the territory.

Hamas, for its part, lived up to its obligations under the truce. It fired no rockets into Israel and actively pressured other groups to similarly refrain from launching attacks.

Israel, on the other hand, never lived up to its obligations under the truce. From the beginning, Israel declared a “security zone” on Gaza’s side of the border and Israeli soldiers repeatedly violated the truce by firing at Palestinians, guilty of merely trying to access their own land.

Israel also never eased its siege of Gaza. Israel controlled (and continues to control) the borders of Gaza, its airspace, and its coast, and implementing a near total blockade, including preventing by force the delivery of humanitarian goods into the territory.

Rather than easing the siege, Israel continued to let in only minimal amounts of humanitarian supplies (a practice that also continues today), just enough to prevent a total humanitarian catastrophe, thus keeping the population of Gaza in a state of despair and on the verge of human limits, with untold consequences on the health and mental well-being of the Palestinians.

The complete breakdown of the truce agreement came on November 4, when Israel launched airstrikes and a ground incursion into Gaza, killing four Palestinians. This violation of the cease-fire resulted in its effective undoing.

Israel’s official reason for the attack was its claim that militants were digging a tunnel under the border. The more credible explanation, however, was that Israel wanted to provoke Hamas into launching rockets and thus to claim a pretext for the full-scale military assault that Israel had, at that time, by its own account, already been planning.

Indeed, from the beginning of the truce, it appeared Israel’s intent was to provoke a violent response in order claim a pretext for its military assault. While Hamas scrupulously observed the cease-fire, Israel took deliberate actions to undermine it. Besides those already noted, Israel also stepped up operations against Palestinians in the West Bank, such as the assassination of members of Islamic Jihad shortly after the announcement of the truce.

Islamic Jihad militants in Gaza responded to that incident by firing rockets into Israel, but Hamas criticized the attacks and pressured Islamic Jihad to cease, including with the threat of arrests, and the tenuous truce continued to hold, for a time.

A greater and more provocative action was necessary in order to completely undermine the truce, and Israel’s November 4 attack proved to be that action. From that day forward, the so-called “cease-fire” consisted of tit-for-tat attacks on a daily basis, with Israel launching repeated attacks on Gaza and Hamas and other militant groups launching rockets into Israel.

Israel had achieved the pretext it was looking for in order to gain the political cover necessary to wage its assault on the civilian population of Gaza.

And make no mistake; Operation Cast Lead was a war on a civilian population, an extremely murderous act of collective punishment.

The death toll itself stands as an undeniable testament to that, but the manner in which Israel waged its operation also leaves no doubt as to its true objective.

As already noted, Israel claims its operation was designed to end rocket attacks. In truth, it was Israel that deliberately violated and undermined the truce.

Israel also claims its operation was aimed at militants. As evidence of its respect for international law and extraordinary efforts to prevent the loss of innocent life, Israel notes the fact that it dropped thousands of leaflets on Gaza prior to its operations warning civilians to flee the oncoming assault.

But the fact is this is not evidence of Israel’s respect for innocent life, but rather strong evidence that its killing of civilians was deliberate and intended. For starters, civilians, told to flee, had nowhere to go. No place in Gaza was safe from Israel’s attacks. Furthermore, in some cases civilians were told to go to city centers, and, after many had done so, those same locations were then purposefully bombed by Israel.

Israel’s claimed respect for innocent life is also belied by its means of indiscriminate warfare. Israel heavily bombarded civilian population centers. It deliberately and systematically targeted civilian locations with protected status under international law, including schools and hospitals.

Israel also used indiscriminate weaponry, including white phosphorus munitions. The use of white phosphorus is permitted under international law for illuminating the battlefield or creating smokescreens. However, its use as an incendiary weapon (it is also a chemical weapon, in that its incendiary effect is the result of a chemical reaction) is a violation of international law and a war crime, particularly when used indiscriminately against populated areas and civilian locations such as schools, as it was in Gaza.

Moreover, Israel, demonstrated extreme contempt for and defiance to the United Nations and the international community by deliberately targeting U.N. sites within Gaza. It targeted U.N. clinics, schools, and other compounds.

Israel attacked humanitarian convoys attempting to deliver much needed supplies to the desperate people of Gaza, and in other cases prevented medical teams, including from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from reaching victims of its assault, also a war crime.

Israel also deliberately targeted a U.N. warehouse where humanitarian supplies were being stored, attacking the site with white phosphorus munitions, resulting in the warehouse and goods inside catching fire and nearly burning to the ground.

All of these actions by Israel, all well documented and incontrovertible, constitute grave war crimes under the Geneva Conventions and other relevant treaties of international law.

The U.S. Role

Israel’s contempt for innocent life, for the international community, and for international law is perhaps matched only by the U.S. willingness to support Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people.

Simply stated, without U.S. support, none of this could go on.

The U.S. supports Israel financially. Aid to Israel is on the order of $3 billion a year. This money is given, unlike aid to other countries, with no strings attached, and with little to no oversight about how it is to be used.

Even if it is not used directly to finance Israeli policies and activities in violation of international law, such as its ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories, construction of settlements in the West Bank, construction of a its “separation barrier” within the West Bank, destruction of Palestinian homes and other property, killing of Palestinian civilians, etc., U.S. financial support allows Israel to free up other funding for these illegal activities. It effectively rewards Israel for criminal actions.

The U.S. supports Israel militarily. And military equipment provided by the U.S. is used by Israel for actions constituting war crimes under international law. The massacre in Gaza was carried out with the help of U.S.-provided Apache helicopter gunships, U.S.-provided F-16 fighter bombers, and U.S.-provided munitions, including white phosphorus and cluster munitions.

This military support to Israel is not only a violation of international law and relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions calling on member states not to provide material support for Israeli crimes, but it is also a violation of U.S. law. Besides international treaties such as the U.N. Charter and the Geneva Conventions constituting “the supreme Law of the Land” under the U.S. Constitution, U.S. law forbids the exporting of military equipment to countries that routinely violate international law and commit offenses against human rights. Yet U.S. military support for Israel continues unabated.

The U.S. supports Israel diplomatically. The principle means by which the U.S. does so is through the use of its veto power in the U.N. Security Council. While Israel was using U.S. military hardware to murder innocent Palestinians, the U.S. was actively trying to stall a cease-fire resolution to give Israel more time to carry out its assault. A watered-down version of the resolution was finally found acceptable to the U.S., which reportedly was ready to vote in favor, but after receiving a call from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, while not going so far as to cast a veto, instead abstained rather than casting a vote for a resolution rightfully critical of Israel.

The Role of the U.S. Media

The U.S. mainstream corporate media also play a significant role in the Israeli-Arab conflict, and reporting on Operation Cast Lead provides a useful case study into the nature of its role. To describe U.S. media accounts of Israel’s ongoing atrocities in Gaza as “biased” would be a sore understatement.

Take the reporting of the New York Times, America’s “newspaper of record” reporting “all the news that’s fit to print”. Arguably the most widely read and important newspaper in the world, what the Times reports is regularly picked up by other major media, with the newspaper effectively serving as a trend-setter for the news Americans consume. Its impact on the perceptions Americans have of conflicts such as Israel’s war on the civilian population of Gaza is enormous.

The New York Times’ reporting on Israel’s assault was reminiscent of its reporting on Iraq with respect to that nation’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and ties to terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda, prior to the initiation of the U.S. war of aggression against that country based on such lies and deceptions as then reported matter-of-factly by the Times.

Propaganda devices employed by the Times in this case, as in the case of Iraq, included the use of euphemisms and the selective reporting of facts.

For instance, although the Times did report initially on Israel’s November 4 violation of the truce, it exercised selective amnesia in its subsequent reporting and described only the “breakdown” of the cease-fire and thus failing to inform readers of the single identifiable causal factor for that “breakdown”.

Moreover, the Times accepted without scrutiny and parroted the official line from Israeli officials that its operation was launched in response to rocket attacks and the violation by Hamas of the truce, thus implicitly and falsely attributing the failure of the cease-fire to its violation by Hamas.

The Times repeatedly and consistently downplayed the true nature of Israel’s assault on Gaza. In one notable example, the Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner wrote in an article that Palestinians had “claimed” that Israel was using white phosphorus munitions, employing this propaganda device to intentionally cast doubt in the mind of the reader as to the veracity of the so-called “claim”.

The truth is that Bronner knew perfectly well this was not a “claim” but a known fact. He could just as well have written at that time that human rights organizations had criticized Israel for its known use of white phosphorus, rather than attributing it as mere a Palestinian “claim”.

By this time, although reporters were banned from entering Gaza, there was no question that Israel was doing so, including proof in photographs showing the unmistakable smoke trails and incendiary projectiles of white phosphorus being used over residential neighborhoods.

Remarkably, the same day Bronner’s article appeared, another article also appeared, written by his Palestinian colleague Taghreed El-Khodary, the Times’ only correspondent actually reporting from inside of Gaza, who reported on finding white phosphorus casings with markings showing that they were U.S.-made.

In El-Khodary’s reports from Gaza, one could find a more reliable account of what was actually happening on the ground, but even her articles were heavily edited and/or rewritten by the Times’ editorial staff, and it was the dishonest and propagandistic reporting of Bronner and his Jerusalem-based British-Israeli colleague Isabel Kershner that generally typified the nature of the Times’ reporting on the massacre.

Countless other examples abound, but it’s beyond the scope of this article and would be superfluous to continue to list them.

The Role of the American People

In short, Americans reading about the violence in U.S. newspapers or watching it on TV received a heavily distorted account of what was going down.

But this is no excuse for ignorance. The facts are known and available to every American with access to the internet. One may turn to the healthy alternative media in the U.S. One may turn to international media sources, including Israeli sources like the Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, or Ynet (Yedioth Ahronoth online). One may turn to human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights, or the Israeli group B’tselem.

One may also turn to the report of the U.N. Human Rights Council inquiry into the violence, headed up by the respected international jurist Richard Goldstone, who himself happens to be Jewish (a fact worthy of mention due to Israeli and U.S. charges that the report is biased; in another example of U.S. diplomatic support for Israeli crimes, the U.S. has actively sought to block implementation of its recommendations or any Security Council follow-up actions).

Goldstone himself has concluded that Israel’s actions were targeted at the civilian population of Gaza as an act of collective punishment, and his conclusion is well supported by his final report and the evidence it presents.

The facts are beyond dispute. The conclusions are obvious and incontrovertible. It is well past time that the American people wake up to the realities on the ground in the Palestinian territories. Many Americans already demonstrate the modicum of moral integrity required to speak out against their government’s support for Israeli crimes, but it is not enough.

Without massive public opposition to the U.S. policy of supporting Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people, the crimes will continue. Israel will continue to act with impunity and continue to violate international law under U.S. cover.

The fact of the matter is that the American people have more power in their hands than any other body to bring about an end to the violence and to create the conditions for a just and sustainable peace in the Middle East.

Americans themselves may not realize this truth, but the international community well recognizes it. And the world is watching, and waiting.

Will the American people continue to turn their heads away and wash their collective hands of the affair, deceiving themselves into believing they have no responsibility for what goes on “over there” and that they have no influence to change things, anyway?

Or will the American people cast away ignorance and apathy and demonstrate intellectual honesty, moral integrity, compassion, and strength of will by standing up and acting to pressure their government to change its policies?

The answer to these questions remains to be seen. Only time will tell. In the meantime, the Palestinian people continue pay the price for the willingness of Americans to allow their government to pursue criminal policies contrary to their own interests and antithetical to the very principles of justice and humanity every American would like to think their country stands for.

The conflict mineral approach has an obsessive focus on the FDLR and other rebel groups while scant attention is paid to Uganda (which has an International Court of Justice ruling against it for looting and crimes against humanity in the Congo) and Rwanda (whose role in the perpetuation of the conflict and looting of Congo is well documented by UN reports and international arrest warrants for its top officials). Rwanda is the main transit point for illicit minerals coming from the Congo irrespective of the rebel group (FDLR, CNDP or others) transporting the minerals. According to Dow Jones, Rwanda’s mining sector output grew 20% in 2008 from the year earlier due to increased export volumes of tungsten, cassiterite and coltan, the country’s three leading minerals with which Rwanda is not well endowed. In fact, should Rwanda continue to pilfer Congo’s minerals, its annual mineral export revenues are expected to reach $200 million by 2010. Former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Herman Cohen says it best when he notes “having controlled the Kivu provinces for 12 years, Rwanda will not relinquish access to resources that constitute a significant percentage of its gross national product.” As long as the West continues to give the Kagame regime carte blanche, the conflict and instability will endure.

According to Global Witness’s 2009 report, Faced With A Gun What Can you Do, Congolese government statistics and reports by the Group of Experts and NGOs, Rwanda is one of the main conduits for illicit minerals leaving the Congo. It is amazing that the conflict mineral approach shout loudly about making sure that the trade in minerals does not benefit armed groups but the biggest armed beneficiary of Congo’s minerals is the Rwandan regime headed by Paul Kagame. Nonetheless, the conflict mineral approach is remarkably silent about Rwanda’s complicity in the fueling of the conflict in the Congo and the fleecing of Congo’s riches.

Advocates of the conflict mineral approach would be far more credible if they had ever called for any kind of pressure whatsoever on mining companies that are directly involved in either fueling the conflict or exploiting the Congolese people. The United Nations, The Congolese Parliament, Carter Center, Southern Africa Resource Watch and several other NGOs have documented corporations that have pilfered Congo’s wealth and contributed to the perpetuation of the conflict. Some of these companies include but are not limited to: Traxys, OM Group, Blattner Elwyn Group, Freeport McMoran, Eagle Wings/Trinitech, Lundin, Kemet, Banro, AngloGold Ashanti, Anvil Mining, and First Quantum.

The conflict mineral approach, like the Blood Diamond campaign from which it draws its inspiration, is silent on the question of resource sovereignty which has been a central question in the geo-strategic battle for Congo’s mineral wealth. It was over this question of resource sovereignty that the West assassinated Congo’s first democratically elected Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba and stifled the democratic aspirations of the Congolese people for over three decades by installing and backing the dictator Joseph Mobutu. In addition, the United States also backed the 1996 and 1998 invasions of Congo by Rwanda and Uganda instead of supporting the non-violent, pro-democracy forces inside the Congo. Unfortunately and to the chagrin of the Congolese people, some of the strongest advocates of the conflict mineral approach are former Clinton administration officials who supported the invasions of Congo by Rwanda and Uganda. This may in part explains the militaristic underbelly of the conflict mineral approach, which has as its so-called second step a comprehensive counterinsurgency.

The focus on the east of Congo falls in line with the long-held obsession by some advocates in Washington who incessantly push for the balkanization of the Congo. Their focus on “Eastern Congo” is inadequate and does not fully take into account the nature and scope of the dynamics in the entire country. Political decisions in Kinshasa, the capital in the West, have a direct impact on the events that unfold in the East of Congo and are central to any durable solutions.

The central claim of the conflict mineral approach is to bring an end to the conflict; however, the conflict can plausibly be brought to an end much quicker through diplomatic and political means. The so-called blood mineral route is not the quickest way to end the conflict. We have already seen how quickly world pressure can work with the sidelining of rebel leader Laurent Nkunda and the demobilization and/or rearranging of his CNDP rebel group in January 2009, as a result of global pressure placed on the CNDP’s sponsor Paul Kagame of Rwanda. More pressure needs to be placed on leaders such as Kagame and Museveni who have been at the root of the conflict since 1996. The FDLR can readily be pressured as well, especially with most of their political leadership residing in the West, however this should be done within a political framework, which brings all the players to the table as opposed to the current militaristic, dichotomous, good-guy bad-guy approach where the West sees Kagame and Museveni as the “good-guys” and everyone else as bad. The picture is far grayer than Black and White.

A robust political approach by the global community would entail the following prescriptions:

1. Join Sweden and Netherlands in pressuring Rwanda to be a partner for peace and a stabilizing presence in the region. The United States and Great Britain in particular should apply more pressure on their allies Rwanda and Uganda to the point of withholding aid if necessary.

2. Hold to account companies and individuals through sanctions trafficking in minerals whether with rebel groups or neighboring countries, particularly Rwanda and Uganda. Canada has chimed in as well but has been deadly silent on the exploitative practices of its mining companies in the Congo. Canada must do more to hold its mining companies accountable as is called for in Bill C-300.

3. Encourage world leaders to be more engaged diplomatically and place a higher priority on what is the deadliest conflict in the World since World War Two.

4. Reject the militarization of the Great Lakes region represented by AFRICOM, which has already resulted in the suffering of civilian population; the strengthening of authoritarian figures such as Uganda’s Museveni (in power since 1986) and Rwanda’s Kagame (won the 2003 “elections” with 95 percent of the vote); and the restriction of political space in their countries.

5. Demand of the Obama administration to be engaged differently from its current military-laden approach and to take the lead in pursuing an aggressive diplomatic path with an emphasis on pursuing a regional political framework that can lead to lasting peace and stability.

To learn more about the current crisis in the Congo.