-- Download What If We Treated Harper Like We Treated Haiti's Aristide? as PDF --

Just imagine!

Imagine if, one day, US President Obama sent in the Marines to Ottawa [with support from, say, the Maldives, the UK and Peru, and other Coalition of the Willing partners], who then strolled up to 24 Sussex Drive, liberated Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his family from their residence, spirited them off to #YOW to be deposited on a plane, without passports, to fly to a foreign land, like Mali.

We know the prime minister is a bad guy, but this is pretty rough treatment. Then, once Harper was conveniently out of the way, these foreign powers, with the help of the UN helped make Elections Canada more robust to ensure we had a better democracy.

Then, in future elections, the UN-occupied Elections Canada does not recognize Conservative Party candidates in their application to be candidates because…get this…they could not get the signature of their party leader, exiled Stephen Harper [shhh, because he’s been exiled, and incidentally a faxed signature is not acceptable]. But this isn’t entirely fiction. Read why:

I know, this is comical, but common practice in UN-occupied Haiti. Read this from 2009 when the UN-occupied electoral commission refused to recognize Fanmi Lavalas candidates in the election:

In February it was announced that Haiti’s Conseil électoral provisoire (CEP) would not recognise candidates from FL in the upcoming senatorial elections. The reason given was that the candidates – listed in two different slates – did not have the signature of the party’s head, former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was ousted by the George W. Bush administration in 2004.

via IPS – HAITI: Fanmi Lavalas Banned, Voter Apprehension Widespread | Inter Press Service.

Just so we’re clear, Canadian military personnel were securing the Port-au-Prince airport on February 29, 2004 when the US Marines kidnapped Aristide and flew him to Africa, the second coup that Aristide suffered. This one was particularly galling because Canada and the USA helped re-establish Aristide’s presidency after the first coup he suffered in the 1990s.

But Aristide and the Fanmi Lavalas, both extremely popular among the poor masses of Haiti, were no friends of the global neoliberal regime of exploitation so favoured by the governments of Canada, the USA an the OECD world, run by the compradors looking for seats on the boards of directors of the WEF corporations when they finish their political careers.

Essentially, what we’ve been seeing in the economic occupation of Haiti for the last several generations is a concerted, international attempt to disenfranchise the majority poor of Haiti, the poorest nation in our hemisphere. We are keeping them poor, undermining efforts to create their capacity for basic food, clothing, shelter, education, healthcare and subsistence economic ability.

We are ensuring they are punished and impoverished because of their “uppity” past when two centuries ago the slaves of Haiti declared their own freedom and spent more than a century paying France for their own self-release, totally an equivalent of more than $22 billion in today’s dollars, which France refuses to pay back. No surprise there.

The recent earthquake was bad for Haiti, but we have been far worse for decades.

If you want to read more about how this exploitative dynamic has been playing out last week, try this, and the entire article it comes from:

Many folks who took to the streets yesterday indicated that even if shot down or killed by the U.N. or police, they will not allow the “internationals” to escape accountability for the theft of over $7 billion in charity dollars meant for homeless earthquake victims. Three years after the earthquake, Haitians will not be distracted by the “Aristide-is-corrupt-and-without-support” card to prolong the corruption and tyranny. “2013 will not be the same as 2004,” the year of the coup that forced Aristide into exile, they say. – Ezili Danto, Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN), Jan. 10, 2013

River of Haitians march to stop the attacks on President Aristide and the Lavalas movement | San Francisco Bay View.

And to stay up with a strong Canadian group working to improve human dignity in Haiti, see the Canada Haiti Action Network.

And as an added bonus on the Canadian side, we have this galling piece of spin on the weekend from Denis Coderre from the federal Liberal Party talking about how important it is to help Haiti in a meaningful way:

The Haitian people need a responsible Canadian Minister of International Cooperation and Development, not a know it all who sees himself as a sententious health expert.

After three years, it is past time that we stood up and said “Count us in” to our Haitian brothers and sisters. It is the only possible response is we are to see the light at the end of tunnel and to overcome cynicism and fatalism.

– Haiti: More than ever, we have to say “Count us in”!

Frankly, I’m not sure I’d want to count YOU in, since you were “MP for Bourassa, former Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, the Francophonie and special adviser to Prime Minister Martin on Haiti” and Paul Martin was prime minister on February 29, 2004 when we helped the Americans kidnap Aristide.

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Stephen Elliott-Buckley

Post-partisan eco-socialist. at Politics, Re-Spun

Stephen Elliott-Buckley is a husband, father, professor, speaker, consultant, former suburban Vancouver high school English and Social Studies teacher who changed careers because the BC Liberal Party has been working hard to ruin public education. He has various English and Political Science degrees and has been writing political, social and economic editorials since November 2002. Stephen is in Twitter, Miro and iTunes, and the email thing, and at his website, dgiVista.org.

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