Responding to the urgent call for help from local Haitians living on the offshore island, Ilavach (Île a Vache), I wrote an article this week to sound the alarm and get the world to pay attention to what's happening to the people at Île Vache Haiti. The article is titled, US occupiers in Haiti privatizing Île Vache -- Chronicles of a massacre.
The article's Kreyòl companion piece is a Franns Lwi transcription of a RadioVKM interview and Lakou New York re-broadcast of the Haitians telling of their plight, urging for the international authorities, international media, human rights organizations and world citizens everywhere to take action to stop their coming massacre, stop their displacement from their homes and livelihood to make way foreign tourists.
One Haitian, who read the article wrote to me and said:
"(Ezili Dantò) r u out of ur mind with this senseless article? can't u c the progress n development that is happening in nearby Dominican republic n elsewhere in the Caribbean, the people r not complaining, they r benefiting. u r preaching the impossible that even ur lavalas party "party of doing nothing" did not even care for Haiti. it's time to stop the hatred n show some love for Haiti. let the government do its job, because they are doing the right thing, only the blind can't see. "
In response and in defense of the Haiti protestors making the point that the tourism plans the Martelly-Lamothe government is executing is not development for the local people of Île Vache, but wholesale thievery. Our talented Alix Saintil, answered:
"...Migratory patterns are concise criteria when determining socioeconomic developments. Examine this demographic reality in, let us say, New york and it will liberate you from the erroneous notion of tourism as an effective method for development and, worse, the selling off the nation territories. How do you explain the underdeveloped nations making tourism their economic sustenance contribute the most to the number of immigrants swelling the ranks of the developed nations? Tourism has never catapulted underdeveloped nations to a more envious status ever and it is not about to change with an inept and corrupt crew selected to oversee the international gangsters interests in Haiti."--Alix Saintil
A job as a maid, butler, busboy, cashier or sexual receptacles for Northern tourists will not create wealth for Haiti. The international hotel chains circulate little of their profits and capital in the Caribbean countries their in. The tourists mostly spend the bulk of their monies in their own countries. Paying travel fees to the international airlines, car rental chains, hotel chains, international vacation package chains. What's left to spend in Haiti is for small arts and crafts, which is also now big business as the internationals discourage the locals from littering their pristine hotel gift stores.
Haiti
wants the world to come and see its riches, but that would be another,
more Haitian interaction with foreigners. An interaction that preserves
and protects local Haitian interests, values and dignity. This means we
must kick out the US occupational forces out of Haiti first and get our
sovereignty back first. First things first.
The Western tourism
template doesn't work for a free Haiti. Like US sweatshops, it does
nothing to help with what Haiti really needs, which is more local
production, local manufacturing, local agriculture, local distribution,
local industries run by local Haitians. (Haiti: Foreign Investment means Death and Repression: A Historical Perspective.)
Responding directly to the guy that spewed the colonial line on Haiti, I said:
-
Ezili Dantò
The Dominican Republic is the biggest tourist location in the Caribbean
and every other week you've got Dominicans getting in dangerous boats
to get to Puerto Rico so they can say they're Americans and get out of
the DR, find work, school and a better life in the United States and
elsewhere.
The Dominican Republic is the biggest tourist location in the Caribbean but this tourism is unabashedly SEXUAL TOURISM. Dominican women have to sell themselves to feed their families. The DR is FOURTH in the world for prostitution trafficking. (The United Nations Population Fund ranks the Caribbean country fourth worldwide in the number of women who are trafficked to other nations)
Is that what you're calling development?
If tourism is DEVELOPMENT for the DR - how do you explain the women that are leaving the DR to go sell themselves all over the world; how do you explain Dominicans taking boats to go to Puerto Rico and past themselves off as Puerto Ricans in order to get to the US. So many of the DR people are going to work in Haiti as prostitutes. DR women and now more and more Eastern women people the upscale brothels in the Haiti. If tourism is so good in DR why are all the construction workers in Haiti Dominicans who can't find life and work in their own country.
Perhaps, life in Haiti is not as bad as the international gangsters with less IMF/WB grip on it then they have in the DR, Jamaica, Bahamas, et al. Watch, "Life and Debt" regarding Jamaica's situation.
The "Life and Debt" documentary on the Jamaica situation illustrates why tourism is not development for local Haitians. Shows why tourism, an export economy, sweatshops and privatization of pubic assets are not development for Haiti, Africa, the Caribbean. The Dominican Republic would not be able to oppress its masses this way without the 70,000, mostly US trained military, running around daily silencing protest, protecting some filthy, perverted resorts and communes hiding pathology. Protecting the one percent there - the local overseers servicing the international bankers and warmongers ruling our planet.
Only this force, along with the IMF/WB economic hit men death
policies, keeps the people in the DR, in the entire Caribbean, from
taking back their coastlines and sovereignty back.
Jamaica,
like the Dominican Republic is a tourist haven. But there's more
violence and crime in these countries than in Haiti. Their people own
less land than Haitians. The land is what the enslavers have come to
take in Haiti. That's why the UN is there and not in the Dominican
Republic or Jamaica. They already own those nations. Haitians are still
fighting. The people of Île Vache are not going to give up their
lands.
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