The Passion of Haiti
One year ago, on February 29, 2004, we drove yet another nail through the body of Haiti's crucified people—we cut off the head of their popularly-elected government, led by Jean Bertrand Aristide. There has been no Easter, for as the months have passed, no one has taken the bodies down from the cross. Haiti's poor majority remain nailed on the cross, starving, bleeding, and rotting. I went to observe and record this enduring passion which is recorded in a report called simply "Haiti Human Rights Investigation: November 11-21, 2004" and can be found at the Center for the Study of Human Rights of the University of Miami School of Law, www.law.miami.edu/cshr. The record is clear. I still don't know how, if at all, the gut-wrenching suffering can ever be understood. In this time of Lent, as we meditate on our physical selves, try to feel some self-imposed deprivation and internalize Jesus' corporal suffering. I keep turning to the report's photos. I keep crying. I keep shivering. I am remembering the touch of the starving children. I am remembering the sight of blood pouring from wounds. I can still see the morbidly infected walking wounded. I can still smell the grotesque odor of the morgue. I can still hear the ghastly buzz as maggots devoured the flesh from the cadavers of boys, leaving only the bones and the bullets. I cannot fathom why, some 2000 years after the Crucifixion, we continue to nail the innocent to the cross. We have come nowhere. The violent change in the Haitian government reeked of U.S. commercial imperialism. It also had the stench of racism -- Haiti was just beginning to celebrate the 200th anniversary of its self-made independence from the most brutal slavery. The overthrow of the government was founded in selfishness and greed. Within hours, the poorest of the poor, who had carried Aristide to power, began to die violently at the hands of the police in the streets, or from hunger quietly in their God-forsaken cardboard shacks. A few hundred miles from the "Bible-belt" and even closer to Disney World -- where the toughest decision of the day is what flavor ice cream cone to buy - new decisions have been at hand in Haiti. Mothers are deciding which of their babies will eat, and which must go hungry. Fathers are deciding where to look for their teenage boys who didn't come home last night -- at his friend's house or in the morgue. From my brave colleagues in Haiti I learned of this and more. Under the regime installed by the U.S., Canada and France, peaceful marches for the return of democracy were under attack by police automatic weapons fire; the brutal disbanded army had returned to serve the rich and crush the poor; boys were being tied down together and executed by police in the middle of the day while the UN provided protection and firepower; jails were filling to the brim with politicians from the elected government, an outspoken Catholic priest who publicly chastised the puppet regime, and hundreds of shoeless young men and boys. I was compelled to see it myself, to record it, and to find out who was behind it. No journalist had reported it. No human rights agency had denounced it. No one had the guts to uncover the powers behind the violent fall of the Western Hemisphere's youngest democracy. So I went to Haiti. I took a camera. I threw away my fear. I confirmed the state-sponsored violence with my own eyes. I counted the people in the jails. I saw bullet riddled children naked in the hospital. I watched the de facto army drill and then attack the poor. I saw the UN machine-gun raid the poorest crowded neighborhoods. Police told me they routinely obey orders to summarily execute. Haitian government and U.S. Embassy officials told me they are doing their best and we must blame the voiceless, jobless, and penniless. But these powers each admitted that they have invested nothing in dialogue. Then I dug inside and found out even more. I found out how the U.S. had undermined the freely elected government by manufacturing an "opposition" it could control; by choreographing demonstrations that turned into riots; by parading the victims of the riots around Washington like prizes; and by buying off journalists and human rights groups. I found out that one super-rich, white, mega-sweatshop owner and Aristide-hater has bought off a poor gang leader in the largest slum and firmest Aristide stronghold so that this thug now has the resources to continue killing his own starving brothers and sisters. This one rich man is the person Colin Powell asked for advice, one year ago when Powell wanted to know if the democratically-elected leader -- freely chosen by the poor black majority -- should remain in office, or be allowed to fall. We have come nowhere. I have been privileged to explain the findings and show the photos to some large gatherings. There are always one or two who approach me afterward and say the pictures are "too much." But I won't stop showing them to this world that runs from pain and seeks a balm for every discomfort it cannot avoid. Until we see them, internalize their suffering and try to empathize with every horror they suffer, we will never change the decisions we make. No Christian should ever have to be reminded of our greatest motivation to change our decisions: the passion of a poor young man, emaciated, whipped, beaten, stabbed, hanging bloody by nails. The report ends with a photo of a baby, starved to death, who I found in a box, lying in the sunset at the back of the state morgue in Port-au-Prince, next to an empty tomato sauce can. The other photos, all of atrocities, prompt questions of "who did it?" and "why?" I think we ask these questions because if we can find a reason outside ourselves, blame someone else, we can get back to our own comfort and to our old decision-making. It's like blaming Jesus' execution on "the Jews," Pilate, Judas, the Pharisees, Rome -- or the centurions who struck the nails and stole his clothes. But they are still here. Now the nails are being struck by George Bush, Colin Powell, USAID, ambassadors, imperialist governments, and UN forces. The nails are being struck by cowardly journalists, sweatshop masters, turncoats, imposed political leaders, the Haitian Police, and a brutal army. The nails are being struck by religious leaders who are too quick to conform and too slow to challenge. But the baby, arms spread, head bowed down, cuts off our escape route of blame. The baby had no political party. He was a member of no gang. His hands could neither steal bread nor hold a gun. He could not even cry for democracy. All he could ever do was feel his body's searing ache for food and for love unconditionally. So who did this? Unless we admit that it is we who did it and begin to change the decisions each of us makes, we have come nowhere. Thomas M. Griffin, Esq.
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