Haiti - Forced on Dependency, Starved of Independence
2010 - Volume 13 Number 3
Just over a week after the earthquake it was evident that the initial phase of the US-led relief operation conformed to three tendencies that have shaped Haiti’s recent history. Three tendencies of the US intervention which are not only connected, but mutually reinforcing:
- they adopted military priorities and strategies.
- they sidelined Haiti’s leaders and government, and ignored the needs of the majority;
- they proceeded to reinforce the already harrowing gap between the rich and the poor.
These tendencies of the US military "relief-intervention" will continue to govern the reconstruction effort unless determined political action is taken to counteract them.
Haiti has been robbed of its food, money and popular government. The ‘looters’ come from the colonial West that has never wanted a free Haiti, whose history consists of subjugation, revolution and further subjugation.
The USA and France have profited from the ‘three-cornered trade in sugar, manufactured goods and slaves’. In the name of free trade, US neo-liberal policies ruined Haitian agriculture when forced to lower its own tariffs that protected its rice growers. US subsidised rice flooded the market forcing mass migration of small farmers to Port au Prince, further adding to the overcrowded slums which made the earthquake so much more devastating.
The predatory ‘looters’ are still coming from outside Haiti’s fragile borders. Haiti needs genuine allies. It does not need to be occupied under the cover of aid.
April 14, 2016
Prisoner Rights are Human Rights
2010 - Volume 13 Number 2
Our prisons are full of people who are vulnerable and at risk. Prisoners are often young, mentally ill, suffering from drug dependency, poor or Indigenous – or all of these. It is for this reason that we must be committed to protecting the human rights of our prisoners, and prisons must be complemented with adequate housing, employment, drug treatment and mental health support.
April 14, 2016
War by Remote Control
2010 - Volume 13 Number 1
We may be wired for war but are we wired for weighing the consequences? What happens when science fictions becomes battlefield reality?
There are philosophical and ethical questions when a soldier thousands of kilometres away can, as if playing a video game, sit in a control room before a computer and obliterate an Afghan or Pakistani village or Taliban hideout by remote control then sign off, go home for dinner with his family and play with his/her children. It is war by remote control. It is also ‘execution without trial’. The use of drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV’s) will not make the world safe and will lead us to lose trace of the morals of armed conflict?
April 14, 2016