Open letter to the Caribbean press on the cholera outbreak in Haiti and the Bill Clinton visit to Jamaica

Dear Editors,

I ask that this excerpt from Zili Dantò (see below) be published concerning the current crisis of the cholera epidemic in Haiti. I am particularly incensed by the fact that President Obama selected Bill Clinton and George Bush to manage and help solve the original crisis in the aftermath of the earthquake some ten months ago and relatively nothing has happened except the development of additional crises for the Haitian people, which was expected.

It is even more revolting to remember that millions of dollars and tons of equipment were being deliberately withheld from suffering Haitians in need and perhaps still lie idle in banks and on the ground in Haiti now while the people die. It is further distressing to remember that P.J. Patterson was also named by the Caribbean Community and Common Market (Caricom) to manage the region's input in helping solve the crisis in the country and clearly that has also been a failure.

Perhaps the most revolting outcome, however, is that Bill Clinton is supposed to be coming to Jamaica to tell us about our common humanity and people are being asked to pay some $13,000 for the opportunity to hear this at a posh hotel in Kingston. I call upon all decent human beings in Jamaica to boycott Bill Clinton's visit and those who would wish to foist this hypocrite upon us at this time.

Former President Clinton's history with Haiti is an unsavoury one as is the entire policy of successive American presidents. Remember Aristide was evicted from office at gunpoint and the threat of being shot by goons sent by George Bush to bring democracy to Haiti.

It would be one of the darkest days in Jamaica's history if we ever supported in any way Clinton's visit to Jamaica to lecture us. On what? Truth, rights, justice, the cause of humanity? God would surely punish us and what would we say to the Haitian people?

Let us do what we can to support our Ministry of Health to help the Haitian people instead.

Dickie Crawford
P. O. Box 1823
Kingston 8
Contact 366-1966

Ezili Dantò's Note: Foul drinking water killing Haitians

Foul drinking water is killing Haitians while donations that could have provided permanent clean water are collecting interest for the thousands of charity organisations making a business out of poverty and the earthquake in Haiti. A cholera epidemic just killed 140 Haitians and at least 1500 more are infected and may die. This cholera is caused by drinking dirty toxic water.

Haitians in the diaspora ought to get together and purchase and provide this sort of environmentally conscious water purifying unit (http://bit.ly/dn0wQn ) or a similar mobile unit that will provide purified drinking water, communication and electricity, all in one.

We should not be looking to the NGOs, the Haiti oligarchy, the Haiti government, Papa Clinton, Paul Farmer or the UN to help us save our people. We've had 10-months and more of such ‘help’ and know what to expect.

Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN) would like to make a positive difference but we do not have monetary resources to purchase these units. We're coming to the Ezili Network and asking for a partnership with others in the diaspora and in the conscious community.

But if you've looking for the international community to finance permanent clean drinking water for the masses that doesn't come from a bottle or purification pill to be purchased from USAID's profiteering contractors making a killing off the poverty business then you're too unconscious to help.

But if you understand the poverty business will not leave any permanent good in
Haiti because that would make their presence obsolete, then we could work together. Kindly don't contact us with your contributions to saving lives in Haiti. We'd like help to mobilise the conscious community to provide a self-reliant, permanent source of clean drinking water for the people dying in Haiti. Please let us know how we may use the Ezili Network to help.

Remember all the international community will do with this cholera outbreak is suppress the number of Haitians dying in order to make themselves look good because they kept the earthquake donations collecting interest in the NGO/charitable organisation's coffers for ‘future use’.

At least 140 Haitians, not including those dead from the recent rains, but who've died of cholera now have no future and 1,500 or more are said to be infected. ‘Cholera comes from contaminated water or food, often contaminated by faeces...Cholera can kill someone within a day...Right now the infection is an epidemic. There has not been such an epidemic in the region for a century.’ (See http://bit.ly/cP1Zmg)

Haiti’s pains are a good capital asset for the NGO industry. They wouldn’t have a job, salaries and tropical vacations and the illicit black sex they crave from Africans, without our pains, indignities, death, submissions and sufferings. Imagine swallowing the nutritional supplements, vitamins, vaccines and the other pharmaceuticals USAID insist are ‘aid to Haiti’, when you've not eaten in four days?

And the HIV drugs (and now ‘medicine’ and rehydration tablets for cholera) you have to swallow are also washed down with toxic ground water, in some ways also from US/Euro/Canada gold, copper, oil, iridium, uranium, coal, marble, granite, limestone, aggregate and other mining companies who pollute Haiti's shores and riverbeds.

When the earthquake hit many of us, who have lived through the two recent US coups in Haiti and the two Gonaives hurricane destructions of 2004, knew these poverty pimps, knew they would crank up the press releases and telethons and collect and collect and collect, while the majority of people suffer, lose more, grieve and die in Haiti. In our minds' eye we saw USAID, CRS, CARE, Red Cross, World Vision, et al..sad perhaps, but still calculating and salivating at the huge prospects of monies to be collected from the deaths and brutal suffering of Haitians.

It’s a profitable gig the poverty pimps are just not about to give up. (See http://bit.ly/dj4mUc)

A UN report released in March of 2010 said that dirty water kills more people each year than all forms of violence combined, including war. According to the WHO, of the 42,000 deaths that occur every week from unsafe water and a lack of basic sanitation, 90 per cent are children under five years old. . Eighty per cent of all disease is caused by lack of basic sanitation and lack of clean water.

There are 4,500 kids that die everyday from lack of basic sanitation and water. But there are some less obvious impacts of drinking dirty water. For example, dirty water can undermine other humanitarian efforts that money and effort have been poured into, like efforts to control HIV/AIDS in Africa. –(See http://bit.ly/929NXS –and http://bit.ly/br88o3)

Ezili Dantò of HLLN
October 2010