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| Human Rights in the New World Order By Noam Chomsky |
| 11.28.04 (7:55 am) [edit] |
Once again an article which shows why people should care about Money and Investment if they want improvment in Human Rights.
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Human Rights in the New World Order
Speech delivered at Liberty's Human Rights Convention, Central Hall, Westminster, 16th June 1995
By Noam Chomsky
Exerpt from
yetilab.de/journal/wut/Chomsky-Ne wWorldOrder-06-95.html
http://www.yetilab.de/journal/wut/Chomsky-Ne wWorldOrder-06-95.html" title="http://www.yetilab.de/journal/wut/Chomsky-Ne wWorldOrder-06-95.html" target="_blank"http://www.yetilab.de/journal...
"To take the favourite example, instead of my picking an example, let's let the Clinton administration pick its example. Their example is Haiti. They now put that forth right now, as the prime example, I am quoting, of the "immense opportunities of the new world opening before us, as we consolidate the victory of democracy and markets". That is the National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, who is kind of the intellectual of the administration. speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations right after the American troops landed in the restored democracy.
I'll spare you the shameful history, including one of the prime examples of what is known technically as "Wilsonian idealism" - Wilson's murderous invasion of Haiti, which killed several thousand people, re-established slavery, established the rule of the National Guard to control the people, while turning the whole country into an American plantation, later into an export platform for assembly plants where workers, mostly women, try to survive on 5-10 cents an hour, working 12 hour days under impossibly miserable conditions. That is also what is called an economic miracle. In fact, during the 1980s, when this was going on, USAID described Haiti as becoming "the Taiwan of the Caribbean". Meanwhile real wages were dropping 50%. What was let of the agricultural system was being destroyed by the usual development policies, as they are called.
In fact everything was going just fine until 1990, when Washington committed a tactical error. They allowed a free election. The reason was that they were confident, as was everyone, that their own candidate, with enormous resources and so on - their candidate was Mark Bazin, a World Bank official - everybody assumed he would just walk away, win easily and continue with the economic miracle. Well, the problem is nobody was paying attention to what was going on in the hills where the peasants live and the slums of Port-au-Prince and so on. What was going on there was something pretty remarkable. The peasants in the hills and the slum dwellers had created a very vigorous and lively civil society, with grassroots movements and unions and all sorts of other things, and in fact it was powerful enough to sweep into office their own candidate, with an overwhelming majority, just shocking everybody. The standard line these days is that we have to go back to Haiti and teach them democracy, because these backward people don't understand it. Outside of a real commissar culture,9 anyone would just crack up with laughter watching this. We could go to Haiti and go up to the hills and learn something about democracy.
The US turned at once to undermining the elected Aristide government in every possible way to correct the error. Seven months later it was overthrown in a military coup. That set off three years of brutal terror. The Organisation of American States called an embargo. Washington at once undermined the embargo, namely by exempting US firms, saying they were doing this for the benefit of the people in Haiti. The only way to benefit the people of Haiti is to exempt the US firms from the embargo. The New York Times had an article where they described how they were "fine-tuning" the embargo, because of our human rights interests. So they exempted US firms. Trade in the first year of the military regime was not much below the norm. It increased 50% under Clinton, when he took over. The Bush and the Clinton administrations both informed the Texaco Oil Corporation that the US government would allow their illegal shipments of oil. They informed them that the shipments were illegal, but they said they could do it with impunity, because nobody would do anything about it. Oil is of course the major factor in an embargo. So the oil kept flowing happily to the junta and the rich coup supporters.
You could sort of see it but it was not known that it was authorised by the Bush and the Clinton administrations until Sunday, the day before the troops landed. There was a Justice Department leak of an inquiry into the authorisation. It was no secret. I was monitoring the AP wires that day, because it was obvious that something was going to happen in Haiti. That was when Jimmy Carter was there, meeting General Cedras and his "slim attractive wife" - I don't know if you have read all that stuff. But while this was going on, the Justice Department leaked the story. It was all over the AP wires. It was the main story of the day. It was impossible to miss. They kept repeating it, big story, never been any embargo, never been any sanctions. Both administrations had told the oil companies: you keep shipping oil illegally, we're not going to do anything about it.
I wrote an article the next day about Haiti, but my article was going to come out in six weeks or so. I wrote it in the past tense, as if everybody knew all this, because it was obviously the big story of the week. I was wrong. It was totally suppressed. On Monday, the day of the invasion, there was nothing. I got interested, so I did a databank search on it. On Tuesday, the second day, it hit a newspaper: Pratt's Oilgram, a professional journal of the oil industry, which reported it. On Wednesday, the next day, there were about ten lines somewhere in the Wall Street Journal totally obscure and meaningless, and it started to get into the small newspapers, like Dayton Ohio and things like that where the editors really aren't all that sophisticated and they don't quite understand what has to be suppressed. It has yet to make it to the New York Times and the Washington Post after months. Now, that was obviously the biggest story of the week, when the troops were landing. Biggest story of the week, big headline, any free press would have had a story saying: there never was an embargo, there never were sanctions, we're landing troops for some other reason. We'll wait a long time for that one.
By then the popular organisations had been pretty well decimated. The threat of democracy was removed. The US forces landed with a great fanfare.10 The killers and torturers were sent off to lives of luxury, courtesy of the American taxpayer - I guess their "slim, attractive wives" are fine. But Jimmy Carter doesn't seem to be getting his Nobel Prize11 - probably pretty upset about that. There was great self-adulation all over the place about how we were bringing democracy and freedom back to Haiti. However, there was much less attention - as far as I can determine flat zero attention - to the only important fact, namely that the United States had provided President Aristide with a very specific economic plan, which is public, you can read it if you can find it. The economic plan - here is the crucial passage of it, it says: "the renovated state must focus on an economic strategy centered on the energy and initiative of Civil Society, especially the private sector, both national and foreign". That means the core of Haitian civil society is US investors and the super rich coup supporters. That is Haitian civil society. They have to get the benefits of any foreign aid that is coming in, not the peasants in the hills and the people living in the miserable slums, who made the mistake of trying to enter the public arena.
Well, Haiti is back on track,10 following the principles of Washington and its defeated candidate, Mark Bazin, and it is well on its way to becoming an economic miracle in the usual sense once again."
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Newcomers, forgive my loose english - it's not my native language !
Book(s) I referred or will refer to in my posts:
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