On Sat., Mar. 29, 2014, the
anniversary of the 1987 Haitian Constitution,
tens of thousands of people took to the streets
of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and Haiti’s
second largest city, Cap-Haïtien, to demand the
unconditional departure of President Michel
Joseph Martelly, despite a strange reticence
from the Lavalas Family party’s Executive
Committee.
The Lavalas
Family put out the original call for a march to
commemorate the Constitution with the ambiguous
slogan: “Mobilization or death,” and then
called for Prime Minister Lamothe’s departure,
but not Martelly’s, in a statement issued after
the demonstration.
Meanwhile, in
Cap-Haïtien, the initiative to demonstrate for
Martelly’s departure was taken by the Movement
for the Liberation of Haiti, a popular
organization supported by another opposition
current, the Patriotic Movement of the
Democratic Opposition (MOPOD).
Meanwhile, the party Dessalines Coordination (KOD) in a Mar. 27 press conference at the
International Lawyers Office (BAI), announced
that it would also participate in the
Port-au-Prince mobilization.
"Dessalines
did not give us this nation for colonists to
come back to whip us as they did in the days of
the colony and slavery,” said KOD
spokesperson Manette Chery at the press
conference. “So on Mar. 29, just as we are
saying NO to Martelly remaining in power, we
will also be saying NO to the UN’s continued
occupation of Haiti. We say 10 years is enough!
It is too much! There can be no credible
election in an occupied country!"
In
Port-au-Prince, protesters gathered at two
different points: the Church of Perpetual Help
in Belair and St. Jean Bosco Church in La
Saline.
At about 10
a.m., the protesters gathered outside the Church
of Perpetual Help marched down the hill towards
St. Jean Bosco, where they arrived around 10:30
a.m., creating a huge crowd in the city center.
The protesters, mostly from grassroots
organizations, marched peacefully but noisily
down several streets accompanied by riot police
of the National Police of Haiti (PNH).
Among the many
slogans on posters and banners were: "Down
with Martelly! Down with Lamothe! Down with
MINUSTAH [UN Mission to Stabilize Haiti]! Down
with [Catholic Cardinal] Chibly Langlois! Down
with the El Rancho Agreement [which created a
bogus political compromise between Martelly-friendly
parties]. Down with domination! Down with
exploitation! Down with hunger! Vive Haiti!"
These slogans
showed the large political divide between the
Lavalas Family’s Executive Committee and the
Lavalas grassroots organizations which have
historically made up the party’s base.
The KOD
contingent carried its own posters denouncing
the Martelly-Lamothe regime and the occupation
of the country in these terms: "KOD demands
the departure of Martelly-Lamothe and MINUSTAH!",
"KOD says there can be no free and fair
elections under occupation!", and "KOD
says elections and occupation are lemon and
milk!”
Like the KOD
contingent, most protesters were adamant in
their demands for the departure of Martelly and
Lamothe, rejection of the El Rancho agreement,
and MINUSTAH’s withdrawal. They also sent a
clear message to the international community,
saying: “The dew dances as long as the sun
has not risen. Sooner or later, things have to
change in the country. Down with the El Rancho
Accord between the little friends Martelly and
[Sen. Steven] Benoit. We are proving to the
international community that we are stronger,
more numerous, and we are not playing. We are
here, we don’t have Galils [assault rifles], we
don’t have weapons, we are not involved in
kidnappings, we are not in so-called dialogue.
But we have the 1987 Constitution in our hands.”
Demonstrators
also pointed to former U.S. President Bill
Clinton, his wife Hillary, and current U.S.
President Barack Obama as all having conspired
against Haiti. They placed a “mental slave”
like Michel Joseph Martelly at the head of the
first black republic to keep the country under
their control and that of so-called leaders in
their service. The failure of the Martelly/Lamothe
regime is also their failure, demonstrators
said.
“The model
imposed on Haiti since 2004 has two elements,”
said former Organization of American States
ambassador to Haiti Ricardo Seitenfus in a long
interview published in French in Haïti
Liberté just days before the march. “On
the one hand, there is the military presence
through MINUSTAH, and on the other the civil
presence in the form of the [Transnational
Non-governmental organizations] TNGOs and the
alleged private development corporations. Added
to these are the bilateral strategies of the
member states in the so-called Group of Friends
of Haiti.”
Dr.
Maryse Narcisse, the coordinator of the
Executive Committee of the Lavalas Family
Political Organization, has called for the
departure of Lamothe and his ministers, but, it
must be emphasized, she did not call for
Martelly’s departure. The party’s statement
said: "Lamothe must go. He symbolizes
corruption, waste of national resources,
poverty, unemployment, insecurity, impunity,
lying, and kidnapping." This focus soley on
Lamothe’s departure is also the position of
Deputy Arnel Belizaire Delmas, a leader of
FOPARC (Patriotic Front for Respect of the
Constitution), which only helps, objectively, to
strengthen the Martelly/Duvalier camp.
The position of
the Lavalas Family leadership and Deputy
Bélizaire reflects nothing more than an internal
contradiction between two factions within the
Martelly regime: the Duvalierist wing,
represented by the Mayard-Paul brothers, Gregory
and Thierry, and the pocket-patriot bourgeoisie
represented by Lamothe. This position to give
Martelly a pass while demanding Lamothe’s
resignation reflects the sad fact that the
Executive Committee of the Lavalas Family party
is now dominated by politicians from the two
wings of the ruling class, the bourgeoisie and
the big-landowners, many of whom ironically
supported the two coups, in 1991 and 2004,
against former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
The KOD, on the
other hand, took a very different position. "Michel
Martelly is an illegal president,” the party
said in its press conference. “It's Bill and
Hillary Clinton, the OAS, the United Nations,
and Washington which gave him power so he can
sell the country to the multinationals. Martelly
and Lamothe are two agents, two servants of
imperialism. We of the Dessalines Coordination
we say loudly: Down with Martelly! Down with
Lamothe! Down with the occupation! Martelly is
an illegal president; the Provisional Electoral
Council never signed for President Martelly to
become president. It is MINUSTAH’s chief Edmond
Mulet and the U.S. Embassy which decided who
would be the president of Haiti in the last
election."
Despite these
differences, Mar. 29 was the first large
demonstration uniting all of the anti-Martelly
opposition currents since last year. "If [the
march on the U.S. Embassy] of Nov. 29 2013
divided us, we are please to say that the
demonstration of Mar. 29, 2014 has again united
all of us against the regime" said Rony Thimoté,
a spokesman for FOPARC, which is a somewhat
renegade base organization of the Lavalas Family
party. It is clear that this unity among the
people must be strengthened and consolidated to
maintain a general mobilization against the
regime.
Many prominent
political figures representing different
political currents also joined in the Mar. 29
demonstration: Senator Moïse Jean Charles,
Deputy Arnel Bélizaire, former Senator Turneb
Delpé, former Deputy Serge Jean-Louis, and
former Minister of Women’s Affairs and Rights
Marjorie Michel.
The
demonstration ended without the usual police
repression such as the firing of tear-gas at
protestors. However, a serious incident occurred
at the march’s final rally on Champ-de-Mars’
Constitution Square, where Sen. Moïse
Jean-Charles was physically accosted by two
Lavalas Family second-tier leaders, Duclos
Bénissoit and Dounnaxient “Engineer” Bastien.
Mr. Bastien,
ironically, is a former member of the
Mobilization for the Progress of Haiti (MPH), a
party headed by Samir Georges Mourra, a
right-wing bourgeois leader of both the 1991 and
2004 coups. Today Mr. Bastien has ostensibly
converted himself into a henchman for the
Lavalas Family party. Mar. 29 was not the first
time he has acted as a provocateur and agent of
destabilization. On Sep. 29, 2013, he attempted
to disrupt a KOD-sponsored “Popular Forum” which
was working out how to arrive at a provisional
government to replace Martelly. He also, along
with Duclos Bénissoit and former Sen. Gérard
Gilles, assaulted Sen. Moïse Jean-Charles at the
studios of Radio Zenith earlier in March. He is
a classic example of someone who says he is
defending the people but who, in reality,
objectively or knowingly, is working on behalf
of the people’s enemies.
Nonetheless, such stunts only reveal
those working against the people and do little
to derail the growing mobilization. On the
contrary, the masses appear to be gaining
strength in their struggle for their two key
demands: Martelly must go! MINUSTAH must go!
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