(Français)
Since 1806, the Haitian ruling classes have always associated themselves with the former slave-owning powers to maintain neocolonialism over the masses of self-freed slaves, who were our ancestors.
Already in 1825, President Jean Pierre Boyer’s government had capitulated by agreeing to pay colonialist France the “independence ransom” of 150 million francs, equivalent to nearly $120 billion today at a rate of 5% per year. To top it off, his government published a rural code which virtually restored the conditions of slavery.
Later, in December 1914, the U.S. government came to plunder the gold reserves of Haiti’s National Bank, transporting them to New York without ever returning them to the public treasury for what has now been 110 years. Six months later, the U.S. marines landed with the complicity of Haiti’s ruling classes of the time to establish a military occupation which would last 19 years until 1934.
Although the occupiers withdrew in that year faced with resistance from the poor peasantry and the progressives of that era, they nonetheless had killed and imprisoned many Haitians who resisted their invasion (the Cacos led by Charlemagne Péralte and Benoit Batraville among others), massacred the peasants of Marchaterre (near Les Cayes, in Haiti’s south) and established forced labor (corvée). In the following decades, Washington subverted Haiti’s socio-economic development by installing, through bogus elections and coups d’état, corrupt leaders to head a state which only serves U.S. interests.
Thus, U.S. political and economic domination has continued since then with Washington continuing to fuel socio-political crises, only to then intervene as a supposed savior without ever resolving them.
The imperialisms of the U.S., France, and Canada continue to fuel insecurity in Haiti, while they posture as helping us to find a “Haitian solution” to the crisis they have fomented. Their embassies control the politics and economy of the country, destabilizing the latter through structural adjustments imposed by the IMF, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank.
The current situation is the immediate consequence of foreign military interventions of 1915, 1994, and 2004, reducing the Haitian state’s capacity to ensure the nation’s physical security, as evidenced by the Dominican Republic’s impertinence and aggression during the construction of the “Dignity Canal” off the Massacre River near Ouanaminthe and cases of kidnappings, rapes, shootings, and massacres carried out by armed groups under the control of the private business sector, PHTK politicians and their allies, and the embassies of Western countries.
The U.S. has now established a new military base in preparation for the arrival of the supposedly Kenyan-led “Multinational Security Support” (MSS) mission, due to deploy in a few days. The invasion force is in fact paid for and led by Washington from behind the scenes.
The progressive vanguard of the struggle of the popular masses must denounce at all times and in all places the coming of this new international force into Haiti, as well as the corrupt Haitian politicians and parties which have joined in the so-called “Temporary Presidential Council” and embrace this illegal intervention.
We need a real revolution in Haiti to end the domination of the capitalist and imperialist powers. Facts are stubborn things, said Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin. The organization of the popular masses and raising their political consciousness is the best formula for a popular revolutionary mobilization.
An organized and conscious popular mobilization is the only remedy for imperialist interference, the criminality of armed gangs, the arrogance of Macoute powers, and capitalist exploitation.
Let us demand from France, whose wealth was built upon enslaving our ancestors, the restitution of the “independence ransom” in addition to generous reparations for slavery with a view to rebuilding our dear homeland.
Homeland or Death!
National Independence or Death!
[…] (Anglais) […]