PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI, November 19 — Huguens Leroi was a 24-year-old student at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (FASCH) campus of the University of Haiti (UEH), and an actor in a university theater group that commemorated the 2010 assassination of his activist mentor, Professor JnAnil Louis-Juste. In October, Huguens was himself killed by two gunshots at a busy intersection near the Port-au-Prince airport. As usual, the police are lying about “an investigation being under way.” Another FASCH activist, Onald Auguste, was “disappeared” from the campus on October 31 (the second recent case), and has not been heard from since. On November 10, students organized a one-day strike to protest his kidnapping, blocking roads with a demonstration at the Ministry of the Interior.
FASCH students regard these assassinations and disappearances as more than just business as usual by Haiti’s ruling class. They see them as part of a new attempt by President Michel Martelly to accelerate the move toward fascist social control. The Martelly regime is organizing vigilante killers known as milis wòz (literally “pink militias,” because Martelly often wears pink) to eliminate “extremists.” A music video on Haitian TV shows macho uniformed officer-thug types rapping and recruiting young men from the United Nations earthquake refugee camps, and lining up young children to salute them.
Martelly recently attempted to reinstate a Duvalier-style Haitian army under his direct control for the stated purpose of eliminating foreign and local “extremists” and “terrorists.” But this plan led Martelly into conflict with the imperialists who really rule Haiti. Although the U.S. embassy maneuvered to get Martelly into power and then supplied him with a prime minister from former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s staff (Gary Conille), they apparently do not trust him with his own army for now. Martelly was forced to accept instead a beefed-up Haitian National Police. (The disagreement may have prompted Martelly’s attack on the U.S. embargo against Cuba during his visit to Havana this week.)
UN ‘Peacekeepers’: An Occupying Army
The National Police is no less a fascist force; one unit is now on trial in Les Cayes for the massacre of unarmed prisoners. And behind the police, as always, stand the UN’s “peacekeepers,” the occupying army MINUSTAH, which recently had its mandate renewed with strong backing from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
FASCH students are fighting this fascist trend, linking up with unionized workers and warning all workers of the need to organize against it. An antifascist resistance cannot rely on liberal bourgeois forces. PLP in Haiti is saying that the only way to defeat fascism is to overthrow the capitalist system itself with communist revolution. And the key to launching a revolutionary movement in Haiti is to build the international Party here as a communist fighting force. The struggle against rising fascism today will test and harden communists in Haiti and other students and workers for the even greater battles ahead. PL is in a position to lead this struggle because of our growing roots among workers both organized and unorganized, including the camp residents.
Meanwhile, there is conflict within the Haitian ruling class over Martelly’s fondness for dictatorial power, which strips the “democratic” veil from fascism. Last month, he arrested Deputy Arnel Belizaire in spite of the deputy’s parliamentary immunity. But a general outcry forced Belizaire’s release. The Haitian parliament summoned the Minister of the Interior and National Defense to answer for his boss’s illegal move.
Fight Privatization of Education
While students are being disappeared and killed, there is an ongoing struggle against the downgrading of UEH, a free public university. Education policy has shifted toward favoring expensive private schools like Quisqueya University, in line with the education plan of Bill Clinton’s Interim Committee for the Reconstruction of Haiti. A policy paper from the University Council noted a deliberate degradation of UEH and its budget going back ten years. (One example of the consequences: Penniless freshmen at the Faculty of Ethnology campus are required to buy and donate one book to the library before being allowed into classes.)
Students from FASCH, the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Teachers’ College), and the Ethnology campus organized mass meetings to denounce the state policy of privatizing higher education, in effect restricting it to those who can pay private fees. Despite threats of expulsion, student leaders called for restoration of funds, courses, faculty salaries and student aid.
One student member of PL, who has been hurt badly by the bosses’ hatred for his activism, said at a meeting — almost through clenched teeth — “Je m’accroche à mon parti communiste.” (“I’m sticking to my communist party.”) We don’t yet see in Haiti the mass upsurge in struggle visible in the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, the strikes and militant protests in Greece and the U.K. But a group of students and workers in Haiti issued a message of solidarity with OWS, focusing on the fascist character of police repression of protest in both the U.S. and Haiti. The Martellys and Clintons of the world will one day have their turn to ride in that coffin (see box). They will learn the lesson of Mussolini, who killed and killed communists until there were millions of them.J
MINUSTAH: Fascism UN-Style
MINUSTAH is just another form of fascism, the genocidal imperialist UN-staffed version. The “peacekeepers” have already lost all credibility from their brutal repression, as in the recent rape of a young man by Uruguayan troops, and who brought cholera into Haiti. Students are fighting MINUSTAH, too. They led a big anti-MINUSTAH march in October, featuring traditional Haitian culture as a weapon of contemporary struggle. The students carried a coffin containing the effigy of a MINUSTAH officer, and, with overtones of vaudou (voodoo) symbolism, they set it down at every crossroad, chanting over and around it. The march ended in the cemetery, where the students burned the coffin and its despised contents.