What: Haiti Solidarity Week 2005

When: February 20 – 28, 2005

Where: Washington, D.C., Boston, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Portland, ME,


Tucson, Los Angeles, Montreal, and other cities

Advocates of democracy and human rights across the U.S. and Canada are organizing protest marches and other events this week that will focus on Haiti, where democratically-elected President Jean Bertrand Aristide was ousted in a coup on February 29 last year. Organizers hope to raise awareness of the ongoing human rights crisis in Haiti following the January release of report by the Center for the Study of Human Rights documenting the Haitian National Police's extra-judicial killings in the slums around major cities and the imprisonment of hundreds of people in overcrowded cells for indefinite periods.

Events during the week of February 20 – 26 and on February 28th – the anniversary of the coup – will include protests, vigils, film screenings, and religious services focused on calling for an end to rights abuses in Haiti and calling for a return to constitutional democracy. Key among the organizers' demands are for Temporary Protective Status for Haitian refugees fleeing to the U.S., and for a congressional investigation into the U.S. role in the coup.

"One year later and the truth still has not been told," said Tom Ricker, Co-Director of the Quixote Center, which is coordinating many of the Haiti Solidarity Week activities. "The U.S. Congress still has not demanded a thorough accounting of what role the Bush Administration played in ousting Haiti's democratically-elected president. Meanwhile, the U.S. targets Haitian refugees for harsh treatment – including routine detention for extended periods – when they flee the death squads for U.S shores."

See the Haiti Solidarity Week calendar of events online: http://www.quixote.org/hr/campaigns/hsw-2005/body/hsw%20events.php

For more information, contact 301-699-0042

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The following excerpt is from an article about Wangari Maathai (African woman, Nobel Peace award 4 deforestation) and her work on deforestation in Africa and Haiti. The focus is on export plantation crops like rubber in Haiti causing deforestation. Corporations like Goodyear/Firestone exploited slave labor to work on rubber plantations, escalating to WW2. After Saudi petroleum was secured by US, rubber became synthetic petroleum byproduct and rubber plantations were useless. The people of Haiti were left with rubber plantations that provided no food, resulting in soil erosion and biodiversity loss of Haiti's forests that could not be replaced..

Anyone with info about Haiti's rubber plantations and involvement of Goodyear/Firestone, please post this info on indybay, it is difficult to find any details..



From forests.org;

"A butterfly flutters its wings on an East African coast, and winds, great storms touch down in North America. Great forests fall to rubber plantations, corporate cattle farms, massive agri-businesses and logging capitalists; flood waters rise, mud slides rush down slopes, waters run through streets, wiping out cities and towns, clapboard houses, trailers of poorer people, mansions of the rich, carbon coughing SUVs of the careless.

In richer countries, taxpayers pay for cities and states declared states of emergency. Taxes fund shelters for people made homeless by storms, for merchants who lose their places of business, for businesses whose payouts exceed projected revenue. In poorer countries - and in sectors of rich countries - no such luck.

As people suffer one after another storm, the effects worsened by deforestation, their debt to developed countries such as the United States rises. To pay down the debt, they sell off their forests, sustaining double loss, often endless poverty. And more hurricanes come.

This is a simplified case of Haiti and corporate rubber (or robber) barons. Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, and with corporate greed, rising debt, great storms, constant meddling into its governance by foreign governments and civil chaos - not unlike Iraq of late - Haiti has broken down completely.

A BBC report in late September said the storm called Jeanne caused a thousand deaths and left tens of thousands of Haitians without food and water. What's behind Haiti's stream of natural disasters? "Environmental destruction and lack of economic development," says the report. "Haiti is one of the poorest, most densely populated and most deforested countries on Earth." Lacking peaceful, unconditional human assistance, Haiti is destroyed over and over again. Where is the justice in this?"



http://forests.org/articles/reader.asp?linkid=37669