Haiti protest

Between 10 and 15 thousand New Yorkers protested police brutality at rally this afternoon in City Hall park. They demanded justice for Abner Louima--in Creole, "Jistis pou Abner Louima"--as they streamed across the Brooklyn Bridge. The crowd was mostly Haitian, judging from the Creole conversations I heard all about me.

Louima is the Rodney King of New York. The brutality of Los Angeles cops was captured on amateur video. The sadism of New York's cops is documented not by video, but by the extensive damage done to Louima's intestines and bladder as a consequence of having been sodomized by a toilet plunger in Brooklyn's 70th Precinct. He is in critical condition and very likely has suffered permanent damage which will require the use of a colostomy bag. He is suing New York City for 550 millions dollars and Johnny Cochran has agreed to represent him.

The Haitian community has correctly blamed the Giuliani administration for the injustice done to Louima. The cops who sodomized him taunted him in the act: "It's Giuliani time, not Dinkins time." Dinkins, the rather hapless former Mayor of New York City, spoke at today's rally and was roundly booed after making the observation that most New York cops are not racist.

Giuliani has appointed a investigatory committee that is stacked with right-wingers. It includes Raymond Joseph, a Haitian whose newspaper regularly attacked Aristide. Giuliani writes a weekly column in this newspaper, the "Haiti Observateur". Giuliani himself went to Haiti in 1982 when Jean Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier was in power. He was a representative of Reagan's Justice Department on a fact-finding mission. His conclusion? There was no repression in Haiti and the refugees fleeing the dictator were economic rather than political refugees.

The Haitian community in New York, especially in the borough of Brooklyn, is immense with estimates of at least 400,000 according to an informative column by James Ridgeway and Jean Jean-Pierre in this week's Village Voice. Economic conditions have been deteriorating steadily in Haiti, even after the election of Aristide and successive reform administrations. The neoliberal agenda is being accepted by these administrations, in much the same way that they are being accepted in South Africa or Vietnam. What is the alternative to neoliberalism, they ask?

The Haitian community in Brooklyn is in touch with a myriad of communications outlets that keep them informed of island and local politics. The left-wing newspaper "Haiti Progres" vies with Raymond Joseph's newspaper. Creole radio in New York is constantly burning up with political discussion. There is liberal Radio Soleil, which claims a half-million listeners to Columbia University's Sunday morning L'Heure Haitienne. The host of this show is Lionel Legros who had set up a trip to Haiti for me and other members of Tecnica in 1988 to work with Father Aristide on an agronomy project. The trip was aborted after Ton-ton Macoutes launched a reign of repression during the elections in Haiti.

The Haitian community in New York is highly politicized and well-organized. It is in marked contrast to the African-American community which suffers from inadequate leadership and poor morale. The economic depression in the black community of the past 20 years or so seems to have generated much more drug traffic and aspiring basketball players or rap artists than political activists unfortunately. One can only hope that the Haitian political initiatives might provide an example of how to fight back to a beleaguered black community.

Another interesting development might be the shift in politics to the left overall from a radicalized and organized immigrant community. There is a precedent for this. The Communist Party of the early 1920s was made up primarily of immigrants, Finns in particular. Nowadays, the "globalization" phenomenon is seen as something that starts in the United States and expands outward. Perhaps it is time to reflect on another aspect of globalization. The misery that the United States and other advanced capitalist countries is bringing to the underdeveloped countries produces a reaction in the form of population shifts. Mexicans and Haitians come to the United States, while Africans and Arabs come to France. If current demographic trends hold up, they expect that a majority of the work force in the United States in 2050 will not be white and male. This should challenge many of our most deeply held shibboleths about the conservatism of Joe Six-Pack.

Louis Proyect