Konbit Pou Ayiti

April 9, 2008, 11:23 am
The whole country is waiting for President Preval to speak. We are in the fourth day of food riots and he has not said anything yet. We have seats on a chartered flight to Port-au-Prince, but so far the pilot hasn’t been able to get to the airport there. In the airport here they are saying “peyi a firme”, the country is closed. When we tried to go to the airport in Jacmel we were frankly shocked to see a barricade just below the Jaclef Hotel on the road to town. Joe went back on his bike later and there were five barricades between here and Morne Nicholas.

When we got back, Joe started the generator so I could go online to see what is happening. I quickly learned several disturbing things:

1. There are genuinely hungry protesters but there are also people out in the streets to create disorder. They are violent, burning tires, and looting stores.

2. Looters have attacked Epi D’Or (a bakery and fast food restaurant), Caribbean Market (the biggest import grocery store), Air Frrance and others. It is rumored that the Petionville market was burnt to the ground, but this has not been confirmed in the press.

3. President Preval has been silent and people are going to continue to demonstrate until he speaks.

4. People are angry with Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis for saying that drug traffickers manipulated the protesters in Les Cayes. They say it shows the government’s disdain for the population and demonstrates that they aren’t listening to the serious needs of the people.

5. So-called “office gangs” – suit-wearing, briefcase-carrying elites – are angry about the corruption-busting and Preval’s efforts to get the books straight to please banks and lenders.

6. President Preval has been praised for not taking himself too seriously but criticized for not taking the protests seriously enough. He said that if the people were going to protest “lavi a che”, the high cost of living, they should pick him up on the way, “vin chache m.” But when they went to get him yesterday at the Palace, “li te kache anba kabann” – he hid under the bed.

7. When the protesters began to attack the Palace gates yesterday, the Haitian National Police and blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers were no where to be seen for at least thirty minutes. One MINUSTAH said they were ordered by the government to not be there.

Now we are waiting for Preval’s speech. We’ll turn on the generator so we can see it online. The reason there are no photos with today’s blog is because people Joe knows and is normally friendly with said they would stone him if he tried to take a picture of the barricades on the road from Cyvadier to Jacmel. Why don’t they want the world to see that they are protesting? While observing the crowd, Joe saw one photojournalist and a car attacked by stone-throwers.

In Jacmel, normally the oasis of calm and peace in Haiti, the market-goers and women were stoned for having the audacity to do business is Jacmel’s iron market in the midst of the strike. But isn’t that what hungry people do to survive – sell and purchase food in the market??

At this point it is quite obvious that there is more than one thing happening here, and the mainstream media need to start picking up on the fact that these are not merely “food riots.” As usual, the situation in Haiti is much more nuanced that they would lead you to believe.

On the one hand, Haitians are extremely and extraordinarily hungry. Rising food prices are hitting this country hard, and soon they will be hitting other countries in this hemisphere, too. Hungry people have taken to the streets throughout Haiti to demand that the government lower food prices.

On the other hand, there is a struggle for power. We are hearing gossip that if Preval dismisses Prime Minister Alexis today the people will go home. Alexis recently faced a possible vote of no confidence in the Parliament. Is this the next strategy of a few privileged and powerful to get what they want – Alexis out of power?

And if the powers that be are only playing politics to shift the power around amongst themselves, we will end the week with hungry people who are much hungrier and little else to show for it beyond burned UN vehicles, destroyed public property, and more roads scarred and pockmarked from the heat of burning tires.

10:08pm

We watched President Preval’s speech after downloading it from Haiti’s National Television. He explained to people that food prices are skyrocketing around the world, not just in Haiti. He asked people to chill out, and said that he couldn’t eliminate import tariffs on food because it would kill what little national production the country has left. He talked about lowering tariffs on imported rice and how it affected rice production in the Artibonite. He said he would lower prices with subsidies for nationally produced food, a long-awaited investment in national production and food security for Haiti.

The people in our zone responded with anger towards Preval. Now we hear that the really big protests are planned for tomorrow. Preval said he would depend on the Haitian National Police and the UN peacekeepers to keep the peace. In Jacmel there is supposed to be a designated protest route.

Preval said some very right on things in his speech today. He appealed to the hungry people and talked about how looting cannot bring the price of food down, and how it hurts Haiti’s chances of getting the investments he has been working towards. He finally addressed the issue of national production and food security head-on, something the Peasant Movement of Papaye asked for in their recent 35th National Congress Declaration.

So why is everyone so angry? It’s proof positive that this was never just about hunger, and these were never just straight-up food riots. The label “food riots” has always seemed wrong to me, because I have seen hunger and it does not lend itself to such rigorous activity. Haitian peasants protest, but riots are something else. That’s why I’ve been calling them hunger protests, and there have been various sources reporting that the protests were intended to be peaceful and were infiltrated. This is not the same as saying people were manipulated. This is suggesting there were street gangs creating disorder, and paid instigators of violence.

Tomorrow we are scheduled to take another charter flight to Port-au-Prince. There are a lot of variables, and thanks to some 1,000 flights in the US being canceled by American Airlines today we can’t get through to see if we can get on the flight to New York tomorrow. One thing I’m wondering is how long people can really afford to block the streets and paralyze movement and business like this. No food or gas is coming from Port-au-Prince to Jacmel for three days now. When people protested and blocked the road in Cayes-Jacmel and in the mountains in the days before Aristide was removed from power in 2004, it only lasted a few days because people couldn’t afford to live in a blackout and not conduct business. The electricity is on now, so I guess we can afford at least one more day.