Haiti: Mass Protests for Workers’ Demands Defy Police Attacks

PORT-AU-PRINCE, December 12 — Students, teachers, and other members of the working class here continue their struggles against violence, injustice, insecurity, unemployment, cholera, occupation, and the outrageous wasting of government funds. They are organizing sit-ins, press conferences and marches to wrest a response from the rulers. The teachers continue to mobilize for better working conditions and a salary that meets their basic needs. Sometimes all these forces meet together — an idea of how it will be when workers everywhere are united under a single flag for revolution.
Since November 13, date of the 10,000-strong demonstration, high-schoolers, teachers, professors, workers and other social organizations have taken to the streets to denounce the system and demand better living conditions. College students have organized many mass activities to keep up the struggle against the bourgeois government, uniting in a general assembly of several campuses to mobilize more forces and build a university-wide base. They are linking up with workers’ and other organizations to plan joint organized actions, like several street demonstrations here.
The government constantly attacks the demonstrators. The police and United Nations occupying force MINUSTAH troops fire on and tear-gas the crowds. There are new victims, killed by bullets.  Plainclothes agents in state vehicles fire on students and demonstrators. Student and other demonstrators respond to these attacks with their usual shout, “We are not afraid!”  Students have been arrested on false pretenses. They are all accused of being window-smashing vandals, and yet they are arrested on the streets where they live or in places where there have been no such incidents. Students, teachers, PL’ers and professors then organize and free these arrested students. The unity of the working class is always a powerful weapon against the injustice of the ruling class and its state.
Among other things, students and others are taking up a struggle against the authorities in Mirebalais [town in the Central Plateau, near the base of the MINUSTAH soldiers who brought cholera to Haiti in October 2010]. The troops hung flags of the European Union in a location which used to bear the name Avenue of the Martyrs because it was the place where the European colonialists sold and killed slaves. Now the authorities want to change its name to Avenue of Europe and fill it with flags of the EU.
The students bought Haitian flags and replaced and burned all the EU flags, defacing the name which these authorities had inscribed on the wall of the entrance. To intimidate them, the government sent police armed with tear gas and heavy weapons. A score of them resisted every attempt at violence by these officers of crime. Eight of them were brutally arrested. Under pressure from other students and PL’ers who supported their struggle, they were released one day later.
This struggle shows how the imperialists seek at all costs to make us forget the past. Yet the real alternative to imperialist flags, past and present, is not the nationalist flags of the capitalist present but the internationalist red flag of the communist future. What workers in Haiti and all around the world need is a society run for the benefit of all, not for the profits of a few.
December 5th was marked by two demonstrations, one by students and the other by laid-off public-sector workers who for years have been leading a fierce struggle to demand justice. These two marches met and joined forces, taking the road to a higher class unity. The struggle continues.