Abridged and reprinted from a special issue of LE DÉFI , the local CHALLENGE in Haiti.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, October 28 — After the devastating 2010 earthquake a fragile Haiti was struck by a devastating cholera epidemic, brought in by the UN’s “peacekeeping” force MINUSTAH.
The UN did not vaccinate these troops coming in from an area where cholera is endemic. The so-called “international community” (which gave us cholera) wants us to believe the earthquake caused this genocidal epidemic when in fact the earthquake had nothing to do with it. There is a deathly silence about cholera here. To this day, against all the scientific evidence, they refused to acknowledge their responsibility. Thousands among the oppressed class are dead, with many traumatized and in tears. If it is not eradicated soon, another wave of deaths will ensue because cholera is with us still and spreading.
It is a crime against the workers, peasants and students in Haiti, a small black population under the harsh, direct domination of U.S. imperialism. This is racism! The society in such countries is always under the imperialists’ control. They are our real enemies.
Poverty and its Diseases:
A Consequence of Capitalism
Poverty, hunger, and diseases like cholera stem from the domination and exploitation of the blood-sucking capitalist system. No capitalist state can ever stop driving people into extreme poverty, unemployment — and worse, death — under whatever form of rule the ruling class erects over the working class.
Once cholera established its rule here, it slaughtered many a family, and dumped into poverty many others who lost the relatives who could have helped them combat it. The authors of this evil are MINUSTAH, the UN and U.S. imperialism, joined to a capitalist state which is the tool of, and always defends, the bosses’ interests. These merchants of death could produce no other result. It’s a white sheet hiding a gaping wound. People will die by the thousands if we don’t understand that the state does not function in workers’ interests. We can’t look for hope where there is none to be found.
The Cholera Campaign: Direct Action and International Solidarity
In mid-September, some comrades brought our revolutionary politics to a teachers’ assembly just outside the capital, to connect cholera to the problems teachers are facing everywhere, and show how capitalism has created both. We wanted to prepare people for the revolutionary battle against the system itself if they lacked that perspective.
One comrade spoke about cholera awareness and then moved from a political analysis to mobilizing for the cholera campaign, linking problems of education to those of health. He noted that vaccination and ending cholera was right up there among the teachers’ demands; that teachers belonged to the same class as the workers who were victims of cholera; and that capitalism was the root cause of all these problems.
While he spoke other comrades distributed cholera campaign flyers to the 100 teachers in the crowd, to a few journalists and others who came to listen. “What can you give us to do?” asked several teachers, showing their desire to join the campaign. Many quickly grabbed the flyers and everyone was reading them.
The comrade leading the meeting addressed the journalists about why ending cholera was one of the teachers’ strike demands, how the epidemic was tied to the teacher’ problems. “If the government does nothing, strike!” shouted those distributing the flyers, and the whole crowd chanted it loudly for the press to hear.
As some went to additional meetings, others stayed to continue the discussion. The campaign is moving ahead and all comrades must commit themselves to its success.
During the third week of October, there were many demonstrations against MINUSTAH and against cholera, organized by a coalition to drive out MINUSTAH and obtain reparations for cholera victims. Union and student activists participated and distributed cholera campaign flyers. Such direct action will continue.
We call on the solidarity of all our international friends engaged in popular struggles to force the Haitian state, the UN and all the criminals guilty of this genocide to be forced to root out cholera in every corner of the country. The Ministry of Public Health must establish: universal vaccination of all people in Haiti; well-equipped nation-wide treatment centers with well-trained health workers; and clean water and modern sanitation systems.
Fighting Cholera Means
Fighting MINUSTAH
We demand that MINUSTAH leave Haiti, that they pay reparations to ALL their victims, and that they be punished under so-called human rights law. We must liberate the whole working class from this vicious occupation force, bandits with heavy weapons here to break our spirit and aid the reactionary ruling class and its government servants.
Their death squads massacred students and workers during the 2009 fight for the minimum wage. They don’t just have their jackboots on the necks of the poor and on workers in the factories. Everyone knows how they’ve sexually assaulted young girls, women and men; stolen peasants’ livestock; made innocent blood flow in the capital’s slums until the earth became mud. Their atrocities in Cap Haïtien remind us of slavery days, hanging people as the colonialists did. In Ti Goave they fired on demonstrators and in Port Salut grossly assaulted a pregnant teenager and a young boy.
In Port-au-Prince they’ve fired on demonstrators as they did to the hunger protestors in 2008; entered university campuses — Social Sciences, the Ecole Normale and the School of the Arts — to kidnap students and smash or steal equipment. And then they brought cholera, leaving more than 7,500 dead and hospitalizing 300,000, besides killing us with bullets and tear gas.
The workers worldwide have been facing huge problems of health, unemployment and hunger. National and international rulers do nothing to end this epidemic. We call on everyone suffering these problems to take to the streets and force them to act. Students and teachers, workers, professionals, unemployed: let’s rise up and march against cholera, against racism, against imperialist occupation. People everywhere have the right to live like human beings.
The fight against cholera is an international fight because it kills the working class internationally. That’s why the petition of ECHO (End Cholera in Haiti Organization) is for all the world’s workers. It’s being circulated in Haiti, the U.S. and all over. One single international working class is signing it, against capitalism and all its diseases.
Oppressed of the world, wherever you are, join us to fight this bloody, devastating capitalism. Surely our future cannot be built on racism, sexism and disease. We have to abolish this profit-driven view of “difference” we call racism, invented by capitalists to justify their exploitation.
Our class must defend our own destiny and our very lives, now in danger of being snuffed out. Our just demands must be satisfied. Neither MINUSTAH, the UN nor the capitalist state can resolve the problems of the working class or bring peace to the world. The solution is once and for all to destroy this system that eats our class alive! It is only communism, rule by and for the working class, that can liberate us.