Securing disaster: The US repeats past mistakes in Haiti

Peter Hallward, The National

The American-led mission in Port-au-Prince, Peter Hallward writes, has put military stability before humanitarian needs in a painful echo of Haiti’s past.

One week after the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, it’s now clear that the initial phase of the US-led relief operation has conformed to the three fundamental tendencies that have shaped the more general course of the island’s recent history.

culte d’action de grace for Haiti at the Centre Kimbanguiste, Kinshasha

On 17 January 2010 12:46, Ernest Wamba dia Wamba wrote:

Dear All,

I just returned from the culte d’action de grace for Haiti at the Centre Kimbanguiste (at Force Publique et Sao, commune de Kasa Vubu) in Kinshasa. It was very moving. First, the crowd was immense, mostly women as is often the case (it was the women who had the courage to go first to Jesus’s tomb).

Legacy of US-Haitian Relations Dating Back to 1804

By Danny Glover and Amy Goodman,  Democracy Now!

JUAN GONZALEZ: We’re joined here in New York by the acclaimed actor, director, producer and activist Danny Glover. He’s chairman of the board of TransAfrica Forum and executive producer of a new documentary, Soundtrack for a Revolution, that opens Friday.

Let Haiti be Haiti

by Jacques Depelchin, Ota Benga

To all those who have lost loved ones, please accept our most sincere condolences. Our deepest sympathies to the entire Haitian population and in particular to those who, prior to the earthquake were already suffering too much, simply because they were continuing a struggle started more than two centuries ago. To those who departed, we wish them eternal peace and the most warm welcome by the Creator and the ancestors.

Our role in Haiti’s plight

by Peter Hallward, The Guardian

Any large city in the world would have suffered extensive damage from an earthquake on the scale of the one that ravaged Haiti’s capital city on Tuesday afternoon, but it’s no accident that so much of Port-au-Prince now looks like a war zone. Much of the devastation wreaked by this latest and most calamitous disaster to befall Haiti is best understood as another thoroughly manmade outcome of a long and ugly historical sequence.

The Left’s Challenge is the New Poor

by William Gumde, Pambazuka

The conventional wisdom among Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and (South African Communist Party) SACP strategists, and many other commentators, in business, civil society and opposition parties, is that exploding poverty should naturally strengthen the power of the Left within the African National Congress (ANC) tripartite alliance. Yet the reverse may actually hold true.

African Migrants Revolt for Life & Dignity in Italy

Clandestina, 9 January 2009

A racist attack on African migrant farm workers in the Southern Italian region of Calabria by a gang of local youths armed with air rifles has provoked a series of disturbances in the town of Rosarno. Last night hundreds of cars were damaged and set on fire as the migrants sought revenge for the attack that left several of them injured.