By Matthew Cardinale
Joseph H. Beasley is Founder/President of African Ascension
ATLANTA, Georgia, (IPS) – A U.S. delegation to Haiti led by civil rights veteran Joe Beasley is calling for a 30-billion-dollar restitution payment by France to help Haiti rebuild after the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake, and the end of what Beasley refers to as an unofficial blockade of Haiti.
Beasley, 73, was part of a six-person delegation that travelled to Haiti Jan. 22 to 27. The group spent two days in the Dominican Republic trying to gain official clearance to enter, Beasley said. After being unsuccessful, they decided to enter Haiti on their own and stayed for three days.
”It’s absolutely worse than anything I’ve ever seen before or been able to imagine in my mind,” Beasley told IPS.
”One third of Port-au-Prince was destroyed,” added delegation member Bruce McMillian. ”There’s homelessness and hunger everywhere.”
”The 30 billion could really put Haiti on path to being a prosperous, modern nation,” he said.
McMillian says the money should go to a special fund the government has established to receive foreign aid with the promise of complete transparency.
”We believe the NGOs in Haiti are just as much of the problem as they are the solution,” he said. ”According to certain officials in Haiti, only 20 percent of the aid sent to Haiti works its way down so it’s actually reaching the people.”
”It’s our belief the Haitian people should control their own fate and destiny,” he said.
Beasley and others say they are working to educate the U.S. public about the situation in Haiti, particularly the political context that led to Haiti’s extreme poverty.
”I think there are so many preconceived notions about Haiti that are negative and that need to be clarified,” he noted. ”I think this earthquake has provided us an opportunity to not only talk about the disaster, but to tell the truth about Haiti, the historical reality around Haiti and why it happened to be the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.”
Beasley argues the U.S. and other countries were threatened by the challenge to white supremacy the Haitian revolution in 1804 represented.
”In the U.S. at the time of the Haitian revolution, Thomas Jefferson was the president. He picked up the notion that these ‘black savages from Africa’ were able to overthrow the strongest army at the time, Napoleon Bonaparte of France,” Beasley said.
”That was an idea the Western world was not willing to entertain. In the U.S. in 1804, we still had slavery for another 60 years and another 100 years in Brazil,” he said, adding, ”I think the Haitian revolution transformed the world.”
”I’m 73 years old. I grew up on a plantation in Fayette County . We had no rights that white people had to respect. I was a person enslaved, and I read about the Haitian revolution as a boy when I was 10 years old,” Beasley said.
Some in the U.S. were shocked at recent reports that people in Haiti had resorted to eating dirt cookies, but Beasley noted that some Blacks in the U.S. South had done so as recently as the 1940s.
”We had to make in Fayette County, we used to eat mud as a part of our , so it isn’t unique to Haiti. I remember in Fayette County, there was white mud, with my mother, but we learned to like it. It was a supplement to our diet. I’ve eaten mud in Georgia right here,” he said.
The Haitian revolution ”gave me great inspiration that it didn’t have to be that way. That’s way before the Civil Rights Movement… that there could be some possibility, that we could have our dignity,” Beasley said.
”At one point was considered the Pearl of the Antilles, but now… it’s poorest because it has enemies in the world that have relegated Haiti to the sidelines of the community of nations,” he stated.
The delegation included Beasley, founder of African Ascension and southeastern director of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition; McMillian, a Federal Aviation Administration employee assigned to African Ascension; Latron Price, vice chair of African Ascension and managing partner of Inertia Petroleum; Kevin Griffin, president of International Supplies and Construction (ISC) and the KG Group; Patrick Holbert, a videographer; and Roland Wilfong, CEO of Arkadis, Inc.
Some members of the delegation had ties to the U.S. government. For example, ISC supports U.S. coalition military forces and has completed over 4,000 contracts, according to a press release. Inertia Petroleum is a division of KG Group and the ISC.
However, Beasley said it was important to include the private sector in the relief effort.
”We need to rebuild Haiti and we need to include people with the expertise and the resources to do so,” he said. ”We also understand that business people are also humanitarians.”
One of the delegation’s most urgent missions was to find children who had previously been living in an orphanage which was destroyed, and to provide the orphanage director with money, Beasley said.
”We had an orphanage in Haiti, we’ve been supporting over time… We communicated with the leader of the orphanage. One girl had her arm broken, but the rest had escaped without injury, they escaped out into the yard, into the court. But they were left homeless and in the streets of Port au Prince,” he said.
”We want to relocate the orphanage from Port-au-Prince to Papio, that’s a place where we built a church and a school and a health clinic,” Beasley said.
Source: FAXTS and FACEBOOK/JOSEPH-H-BEASLEY
Related posts:
- FBI’s Civil Rights Initiative: No Trials Yet
- Congressman And Woman Take Congressional Delegation Trip To Haiti
- NY Governor Calls For More Supplies To Aid Haitian Relief
- American Isn’t Carrying Doctors and Nurses to Haiti, Calls the Report a “Hoax”
- Fears Of A Cover-Up Grow In The Case Of Missing Human Rights Activist In Haiti
Twitter: @Lahiny
says:
I am happy our former President is back to form but he must understand the following message from the Haitian mass. He says Haiti is his love and close to his heart. That heart gave away. He must recognize Haitian sovereignty. The mass of Haiti is not without consciousness. Ignoring our rights to self govern will not lead to a Haiti for Haitians but to occupation. United Nations
Development Program paying Haitians 75c. an hour does not work with the Haitian mass vision for a new Haiti. We thank the former President but Haiti declared autonomy hundreds of years ago. We should not have to dispute seniority here.
In the context of creating a new Haiti, the old Haiti will return. The old Haiti that was declared an enemy of western civilizations and values. The enemy that proclaimed Black Power to the world as the POWER of RESISTANCE. The power of influence to liberate Latin America and propel abolitionists world wide.
In the haste to rebuild a new Haiti, let’s become aware of the following:
Haiti will not become a model of western democracy. Haitian value system and life mode is communal. The new Haiti will not function as dictated by Haitian scholars who represent western ideologies. There’s a lot of “big talk” using “big words” but the new Haiti will not be influenced by those concepts because they do not fit our make up. The outside views that Haitians are incapable need to be immediately abolished. It is important to reshape the scope of evaluation for Haiti because change is coming reguardless.
Is it so wise to pin point Haitian failure on every attempt? I live in a country where nothing works for the poor. The poor pays taxes and gets zero representation to influence. The politicians and government lie, steal, plot, extort, bribe, conspire, invade, kill, torment, torture, denigrate… yet, we do not insist on their ineffectiveness and poor judgment. Haitians always say, “Dan pouri gin fos sou bannan mi” “Rotten teeth show strength with bananas”.
Who are the people who have been enjoying Haiti and its beauty? It is not the massive poor Haitians. More than 45 thousand international personnel along with well to do Haitians enjoy the best plot of land, housing, the best hotels, the beaches, the delicacies, an the resources. In this case Haiti has been functioning well! It has managed to uplift the rich and privileged while downing the massive poor. This is in perfect alliance with western ideology. The massive poor Haitian says no to this arrangement and it is best to listen and adhere.
So one cannot blame anyone for the state of Haiti because I am part a society where one does not cast blames. We do not take ownership for ill doings, only accept the awards and the bravado.
Haitians are responsible for allowing the enemy to infiltrate our systems. It is Haitians who have sold over the country, it will have to be Haitians who take charge of its renewal. We should forget the international sanctions, we should forget the importation of 30 yr old frozen goods New Yorkers wouldn’t even feed their rats. We should forget the destruction of the black pigs, our rice fields, or coffee, cocoa, sugar, molasses, the avocados and mangoes. Let us also forget that while we have been under major international debts, the nations that owe us reparation are primary in the list of the nations stiffing our growth.
How can one expect Haiti to mimic the organization of any other state, especially the super powers, when the ideals grounding the formation of Haiti are based on maintaining A FREE BLACK NATION. The demise of Haiti has been the struggle to maintain a free state and the influence of our most prominent western educated scholars who are obviously regurgitating “massa” language and law. In the presence of chaos, hunger, illiteracy, political upheavals, floods, cyclones, earthquakes, when one lands on Haiti soil it is love at first breath. Why? For most folks it is the first time they breathe freedom air (what is left of it). Ask any Haitian and they will say, stepping off that plane into Haiti soil, all the bills and the stress of a democratic nation go AWAY.
Debates are wonderful but they commit to no actualization of work that leads to progress. “Min anpil chay pa lou. Pise krapo enkouraje la rivye desann. Nan pami diri ti roche goute gres.” The proverbial messages make up our foundation and should dictate to anyone the philosophies guiding Haitian life style. “Many hands make the cargo light. Even the frog’s piss encourages the river’s flow. Among the rice, little rocks are sure to taste grease.”
In the community of life one is as strong as the next being.
So all of a sudden CNN updates us on drug trafficking in Haiti, DR and the rest of Latin America. Absurd! This recent news update only reinforces the fact that US intention to deliver aid to Haiti is tinted with outside motives. That is why about 22,000 troops are off the coast of Haiti. 900 UN troops inside the country not to mentions US troops inside and OMG we cannot forget Brazilian troops et al…
So what if all these personnel and military folks were to really focus on relief, to focus on providing relief to the massive poor? The result would be different but they would not play into the master plan.
What is the master plan? The master plan has always been the same when it comes to providing Haitians in Haiti with international aid. “We let them starve till they riot. That only gives us more ground to stay down there and monitor the Latin American drug trade.”
LP