PORT-AU-PRINCE, February 26 — Five student militants from GREPS (Group for Reflection on Social Problems) went on a hunger strike for ten days after administrators at the Faculty of Ethnology of the State University of Haiti continued to ignore their demands for a functioning campus with a full program of courses, a library, and a cafeteria. The administration still made no response to these basic demands. The hunger strikers were hospitalized for observation, and two are still there. “I have to tell you that so far nothing has been done. For more than a year there have effectively been no courses...It seems there is no future for Haitian youth any more,” wrote a GREPS leader.
But the students, who are also demanding the return of expelled militant comrades, are holding firm. They are organizing a general popular assembly of students, teachers, and workers on March 10, and marches and other protests after that date. They drew this lesson from the non-response to their hunger strike: “It has clearly shown how these vampires care not a whit for human life but rather only for capital and power.”
That comment was from a fierce message of international solidarity which the students in Haiti wrote to the university Teaching Assistants and other workers occupying the Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, linking the two struggles. (See Box, page 4)
U.S supporters, including PLP’ers organized a support campaign. They were able to send fifty-three online signatures and twenty-five individual letters to the university Rectorate before the hunger strike ended. Readers should collect more signatures on the petition at www.ipetitions.com/petition/haiti-university-student-hunger-strike/. It is still being circulated at several schools and campuses and on many lists.
Sometimes the effect of international solidarity is cumulative, rather than immediate. A petition like this, brought to campuses and schools like Bronx Community College, where 100 students attended a forum called “Youth Movement Rising,” shows that students in Haiti are not the passive victims the media portrays but are an integral part of that rising movement, which has much to contribute to a workers’ revolution.