Hell in Haiti – Ike Update in Comments.

(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Cross-posted from my blog, The Wild Wild Left.

My friend went to The Dominican Republic a few years back. Staying at a Gated Resort, she mentioned how the worst part was getting there. Apparently the tour bus had to pass nearby the machine gun border areas with Haiti, and the driver reiterated how dangerous it was to even go near their border.

Devastating poverty and war lords out of sight, though, she had a marvelous time in a lush resort with huge buffets and plentiful alcohol. When asked if it bothered her, her typical American response was “Not my problem. They obviously fucked their side of the Island up, so why shouldn’t I enjoy the Good Side?”

Much the same American response to how Gustav fucked Haiti like Katrina fucked NOLA, and is now fucked worse from the rains and flooding from Hanna in the area and Ike on its way.

“Not my Problem?”

From

Agence France-Presse via Citizen Orange:

The third deadly tropical storm in three weeks to batter the northeast Caribbean, Hanna stood still much of Tuesday delivering sheets of rain and blasting winds to Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Cuba, and leaving Haiti’s third largest city, Gonaives, under water.

“The situation in Gonaives is extremely urgent. I appeal for help,” said Stephen Moise, mayor of the city of 300,000, 152 kilometers (94 miles) north of Port-au-Prince.

“Practically the whole city is flooded, there is water everywhere. The water is rising in some areas to more than two meters (six feet),” Moise told AFP by telephone.

[…]

Gonaives residents reached by telephone Tuesday said floodwaters had reached the ceilings of some homes, forcing inhabitants to seek safety on the roof.

“I have seen about 10 bodies floating in the flooded streets of the city,” Ernst Dorfeuille of the Gonaives police told AFP by phone.

Moise, the mayor, called the situation extremely critical. “The toll is only preliminary, because it is impossible to enter the city at the moment,” he said.

“I don’t know how long we will stay alive,” a clearly panicked father, Germain Michelet, told AFP. “If we have to go another night in these conditions, there will not be a lot of survivors.”

Cuba seems to be better prepared than even the U.S. in terms of evacuation and meeting the basic needs of evacuees when a hurricane strike. Their death toll remains low, even though there was extensive damage to homes and infrastructure there.

Yesterday NPR reported that relief was being stopped by the flooding and the high waters.

The Miami Herald reported Thursday:

The convoy rumbled out of the U.N. base toward a flooded, starving and seething city Thursday, carrying some of the first food aid since Tropical Storm Hanna drowned Gonaives in muddy water three days ago.

Hungry children at three orphanages were waiting for the canvas-topped trucks, loaded with warm pots of rice and beans and towing giant tanks of drinking water.

But the food never arrived Thursday.

The convoy crept over mud-caked, semi-paved roads past closed stores, overturned buses and women wading in water up to their knees with plastic tubs on their heads.

After about 45 minutes, the half-dozen trucks ground to a halt. U.N. peacekeepers wearing camouflage fatigues and bulletproof vests jumped out while others stood guard with assault rifles.

Before them, a huge gouge marred the road. The floods had split the asphalt, and water ran through the 10-foot-wide (3-meter-wide) gap.

The convoy turned around. And the children — like tens of thousands more in this increasingly desperate city — went another day without food.

They had flooding from Fay, got flattened by Gustav, more flooding from Hanna and Ike and Josephine are enroute.

Let us take a little foray into why Haiti of all the Caribbean Islands was the most profoundly elected.

The Island of Hispaniola was founded on blood slavery, apartheid and revolt.(Wiki as source for below quotes to support my own views and the NPR report of the reasons they have been so hard hit.)

Following the arrival of Europeans, Haiti’s indigenous population suffered near-extinction, in possibly the worst case of depopulation in the Americas.

Slavery and cruelty soon followed when the French took over.

“Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to eat shit? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they not consigned these miserable blacks to man eating-dogs until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and poniard?”

As people of color and mixed heritage began to amass their own wealth and sought self-determination, the island splintered. Every success was soon followed by a coup d etat of more fascist leaders wanting the free labor of the gens de couleur.

The French, the British, then the Americans all financed and supported the violent overthrow of anyone who tried to make gains in human rights and self-determination.

In recent history the US even supported Papa Doc and Baby Doc in no small part due to:

In 1971 Papa Doc entered into 99-year contract with Don Pierson representing Dupont Caribbean Inc. of Texas for a free port project on the old buccaneer stronghold of Tortuga island located some 10 miles (16 km) off the north coast of the main Haitian island of Hispaniola.

It seems not to be about “Spreading Freedom and Democracy” when a leader slaughters his own population, as long as they are OUR WEASELS when it comes to letting Korporate America take their extorion money up front.

(See the Shah, then Saddam Hussein as other examples of this…. until we no longer got the lion’s share, we loved them.)

Bush’s gift to the region came in 2004: (from CounterPunch

This week, the Bush administration added another violent “regime change” notch to its gunbelt, toppling the democratically elected president of Haiti and replacing him with an unelected gang of convicted killers, death squad leaders, militarists, narcoterrorists, CIA operatives, hereditary elitists and corporate predators – a bit like Team Bush itself, in other words.

::snip::

No, Aristide did something far worse than stuffing ballots or killing people – he tried to raise the minimum wage, to the princely sum of two dollars a day. This move outraged the American corporations – and their local lackeys – who have for generations used Haiti as a pool of dirt-cheap labor and sky-high profits. It was the last straw for the elitist factions, one of which is actually led by an American citizen and former Reagan-Bush appointee, manufacturing tycoon Andy Apaid.

Lets get to the meat of the issue now that a brief and pathetic attempt to frame their lives now has been made.

The farmers there get their crops stolen by warlords over and over. In an attempt to raise enough to feed themselves they have been clear cutting the mountains to farm, for charcoal and firewood.

Look at how little green is left PRE-GUTAV! Clear cut, nothing to stop normal erosion, let alone stand up top hurricane driven rains.

The roads are horrible, there is no infrastructure there, no relief centers or emergency plans for the victims of a hurricane, Period.

Enter storm after storm, the second of which flattened the few trees left and whatever pathetic structures the populace could afford to build… and you have thousands of people with no where to go when the mudslides of an unprotected mountain region come. These are typical Haitian dwellings:

There is nothing, no forests to hold the land intact. Those dwellings lie at the feet of barren mountains. People have no where to go to avoid the inevitable flooding and mudslides. The roads have failed under the same flooding and mudslides. There is no way to get relief to these people.

All Americans think of is all those “Dirty Haitians” washing ashore in Florida, turned back for trying to come here and steal our daily bread.

Not our PROBLEM?

As long as Americans can bask in places like these, waited on hand and foot by exotic brown people with really good ganja, I guess not, eh?

The Irony is Heart Rendingly Sickening.

Good fucking thing there is no Oil there. It could be worse, I suppose. Picture War Lords with Blackwater support.

Haiti, my soul burns for you.