Twenty-nine years ago, on February 7, 1986, Haiti ousted the bloody, US-supported Duvalier dictatorship and swore never to allow dictatorship in Haiti ever again.

The other week, tens of thousands of demonstrators in Haiti swarmed the streets to mark this anniversary and to demand an end, not to another US-supported Haiti dictatorship, but worse, a US-installed dictatorship and an 11-year military occupation of Haiti.

For 11 years, Haitians outraged at dictatorship and occupation have, in various waves, taken to the streets to demand an end to the US-UN occupation and NGO false benevolence. Since the 2010 doctored elections, Haitian demonstrators have demanded the removal of the puppet Martelly government. As carnival time approaches, this month is slated to see more protests. As world gas prices go down, and as the Haiti elites continue to block popular demands for sovereignty and participatory democracy, the demonstrators are also boycotting businesses and agitating against the high cost of living, low wages and domestically high gas prices.

Each time Haitians take to the streets, they know that the powerful, US-trained militarized police will teargas, shoot and even kill unarmed demonstrators, as they’ve done before. According to eyewitness reports, after the February 7th march militarized CIMO/police vehicle #1-608 opened fire on protest leaders who went to the home of two journalists. Yet, Haiti fights on, will demonstrate again, with no weapons, except their bodies, songs, slogans, the divine within and the certainty that their call to the Ancestral powers and universal force for goodness shall not return void.

The corporate media, human rights industry, charitable industrial complex, and other Ndòki forces for empire remain silent about the outsourced US occupation of Haiti. The colonial narrative is that the Internationals are “helping” Haiti, and have no partisan interests. So far, they’ve been effective at using this false credibility to get funding, legitimize themselves and the foul acts and lies of the US Ambassadors to Haiti, the US State Department, the OAS and the UN.

The Internationals reinforce each other. The US State Department freely funds the human rights industry, like the UN, Amnesty International, Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health and others in the crisis caravan, to give credibility to the neocolonial tyranny in Haiti.

When former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton threatened dissenting Haiti officials with lost of visas if Michel Martelly was not allowed into the second round during the “elections” (though he didn’t have the votes), the human rights industry said nothing. For 11-years, the international human rights industry and corporate media have remained fairly mute about the outsourced US occupation, the US false aid (actually, money laundering), the widespread military rapes of Haiti children, the UN shooting live ammunition at peaceful demonstrators and killing unarmed Haitians. When they touch on these subjects, it’s to obfuscate the real issue, minimize the foreign savagery as if these are not criminal acts in need of fair and independent scrutiny. Mostly, when the international human rights industry mentions Haiti, it’s to promote the occupation and the US-installed dictatorship.

For instance, the Haiti protestors are demanding the removal of the Martelly dictatorship, the US occupation, a stop to white supremacy, arbitrary arrests, corruption and an accounting of what former president Bill Clinton and his crew did with the $10 billion collected in earthquake monies.

But Amnesty International recently sent an open letter, not to ask Bill Clinton why donation monies meant for homeless people were used to build luxury hotels, nor to ask the UN to stop shooting at unarmed demonstrators. No. Amnesty International, sent a letter to Martelly’s newly appointed prime minister. The pretext is that Amnesty International is asking the prime minister to protect homeless Haiti quake victims and the demonstrators’ right to peacefully protest. The sudden concern is suspect because the protestors have been in the streets for years and pushed alone to get political prisoners released. The real effect of the strategically timed “Open Letter” was to immediately put the weight of Amnesty International behind the defacto Prime Minister. Amnesty International is actually signaling to any squeamish cohort that Martelly, ruling by decree and his unilateral appointment of a prime minister, even after Parliament was dissolved, is legitimate governance. The people on the streets want the usurpers removed. The Internationals are writing to them, recognizing their authority, providing firepower to them and receiving them in the halls of power with UN Security Council visits.

After 300 years of direct European enslavement in Haiti and 200 years of unremitting US-Euro tyranny, containment-in-poverty, abuse and exploitation, Haiti is without hate and still rated the least violent nation in the entire Caribbean. It demonstrates peacefully and suffers interminably the rape, abuse and atrocities of power elites with the faces of Samantha Power, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Paul Farmer, Amnesty International and Hollywood celebrities.

In myriad ways, Haiti lives are swapped around and cashed in, while the colonial bullies circulate in polite company as if nothing will unveil them. As if their impunity, degeneracy and gross corruption is the newest, shiniest hit record or song.

Haiti demonstrators call forth the Ancestors, Ogou and Dantò – the energies, vibration or irreducible essence of raw power, a will of steel, the warrior mother, warrior father, justice defenders, healing, love and creation.

Just like their foreparents, Haitians are deeply committed to liberty and justice. Death is not the worse fate. To live as a slave zombie, is.

* Ezili Danto is executive director of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network. She can be contacted through her website, where this article was previously published.

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