Starting a Haiti-Solidarity Movement in Toronto – Black Youth United

-Pierre Pettigrew Splattered with Red Paint at Montreal Conference on Haiti: ; A SYMBOL OF THE HAITIAN BLOOD ON THE HANDS OF THE CANADIAN GOVERNMENT

Pictures from the June 17th Action in Montreal and Statement of Arrested Activist Yves Engler below. See Pettigrew’s blood-red hands) share.shutterfly.com/osi.jsp?i=EeAOGblmzcOGryg

– www.thewitness.org/article.php?id=938

– Where “Freedom” Talk Rings Hollow: The Attack on Democracy in Haiti By Neil Elliott, June 17, 2005 | Witness Magazine (For complete article go to:www.thewitness.org/article.php?id=938 )

– Two Letters to the New York Times regarding lies and distortions about Haiti: 1. Letter regarding “growing instability in Haiti” June 18, 2005 by a. mark liiv | www.whisperedmedia.org

2. Letter to New York Time regarding NCHR and the 2004 coup d’etat in Haiti: “Jocelyn McCalla of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights is being disingenuous…” JUNE 17, 2005 by Ben Terral (referring to: How Haiti’s Future May Depend on a Starving Prisoner By GINGER THOMPSON, June 16, 2005 – also below) * ******************************** Starting a Haiti-Solidarity Movement in Toronto Join our first meeting to form a Haiti-Solidarity movement in Toronto

MONDAY, JUNE 20, 2005 6:30-8:00PM

Lillian H. Smith Library 239 College St.(College St. and Spadina Ave) Room BC and can be found in the basement.

(905)-717-6172 / (416) 925-9120 black_youth_united@hotmail.com

Directions: www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/hou_az_ls.jsp

On May 18 various community groups came together to show solidarity with the people of Haiti. Next week, these groups will again come together to start a Haiti-Solidarity movement in Toronto.

A Toronto-based Haiti-Solidarity movement is being proposed by various community groups, as a committee to:

– Educate the public about what is happening in Haiti and how various parties including the Canadian government are involved

– Lobby

– Support other groups in Canada and abroad

We are united based on The Haiti Resolution 1. Support the return of Constitutional rule to Haiti by restoring all elected officials of all parties to their offices throughout the country until the end of their mandates and another election is held, as mandated by Haiti’s Constitution;

2. Condemn the killings, illegal imprisonment and confiscation of the property of supporters of Haiti’s Constitutional government, and insist that Haiti’s Illegitimate “interim government” immediately cease its own persecution and put a stop to persecution by the thugs and murderers from the paramilitary gangs;

3. Insist on the immediate release of all political prisoners in Haitian jails, including Prime Minister Yvon Neptune, other Constitutional government officials and folksinger/activist So Ann;

4. Insist on the disarmament of the thugs, death squad leaders, and convicted human rights violators, and their prosecution for all crimes committed during the attack on Haiti’s elected government; and, help rebuild Haiti’s police force, ensuring that it excludes anyone who helped to overthrow the democratically elected government or who participated in other human rights violations;

5. Stop the indefinite detention and automatic repatriation of Haitian refugees and immediately grant Temporary Protected Status to all Haitian refugees presently in the United States until democracy is restored to Haiti; and

6. Support the calls by the OAS, CARICOM and the Africa Union for an investigation into the circumstances of President Aristide’s removal; and, enact Congresswoman Barbara Lee’s T.R.U.T.H Act (HR 3919) which calls for the investigation of the forcible removal of the democratically elected President of Haiti.

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PIERRE PETTIGREW SPLATTERED WITH RED PAINT AT MONTREAL CONFERENCE ON HAITI; A SYMBOL OF THE HAITIAN BLOOD ON THE HANDS OF THE CANADIAN GOVERNMENT

Statement of Arrested Activist Yves Engler below

MONTREAL, June 17 2005 ñ Yves Engler, an activist with Haiti Action Montreal, interrupted a press conference at the Montreal International Conference on Haiti to splatter red paint ó a symbol of Haitian blood — on the hands of Canadian Foreign Minister Pierre Pettigrew. Shouting ìPettigrew Lies, Haitians Die!î, Engler was tackled to the floor by several RCMP agents and arrested. He is currently being held at the prison at 980 Guy (just south of Rene Levesque) where a crowd of Haitian Montrealers and other solidarity activists gathered to demand for his release. Engler will appear before a judge on Saturday, June 17. Heís currently being charged with assault with a weapon.

Pettigrew and his handlers are already trying to slander Engler as one who has a longstanding personal grudge against the Foreign Minister. Do not be fooled ó Engler and Haiti Action Montreal formed in the aftermath of the Febuary 29, 2004 coup that overthrew the elected government, which Canada has supported ever since. Engler has been a leading member of this group traveled, traveled to Haiti in December 2004, and has written countless amounts of articles on the issue that are readily available online. It was Englerís attempt to bring this foreign policy scandal to light, and put the Canadian-backed suffering of the Haitian people to the forefront of national attention.

Photos to come. A full video recording of the action at the press conference will be available shortly. Members of the media interested in obtaining a copy of this video or speaking to a spokesperson for Haiti Action Montreal may call Aaron MatÈ at (514) 286-9275, Kevin Skerrett at (613) 864-1590, or Jean Saint-Vil at (613) 661-8474.

(Pictures from June 17 action in Montreal & Canada’s blood-drenched hands) share.shutterfly.com/osi.jsp?i=EeAOGblmzcOGryg

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Below is a statement written by Yves Engler shortly before his arrest:

It is completely understandable that Canadians may be offended by the action taken this afternoon. I only ask them to consider whether they are offended by the real blood that is being spilled in Haiti every day, with the full support of Pierre Pettigrew and the Canadian government. Mr. Pettigrew has said nothing to condemn the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Haiti in February 2004 — not just President Jean Bertrand Aristide, but the entire elected government. Likewise, he has said nothing about the barbaric actions of the Haitian police that Canada is currently funding and training.

Mr. Pettigrew and the Canadian government have had plenty of opportunity to learn about the horrors of what they are supporting. In February, I personally handed him a copy of an extensive report by the University of Miami’s Center for Human Rights. Copies of the report will be handed out to members of the media today. The report details the widespread abuses of the Haitian police, and the sham of a judicial system that Canada is directly funding.

Most recently, the Haitian Supreme Court ordered the release of Louis Jodel Chamblain, convicted for the 1994 massacre of slum residents in Raboteau. The former death-squad leader was acquitted in a hasty overnight trial that Amnesty International denounced as ìan insult to justiceî and a ìmockery.î The University of Miami reports that police and paramilitaries ìroutinely enter [poor neighborhoods] to conduct operations which are often murderous attacks” leaving victims that ìprefer to die at home untreated rather than risk arrest at the hospital. When I visited Haiti in December 2004, I heard many gruesome testimonies of these operations first-hand.

At almost every major Haitian demonstration that has called for the return of their democratically elected President, Canada-trained police have shot and killed protesters. It is tragically commonplace to read news stories ≠- few of which have found their way beyond the back pages of the North American corporate media, if reported at all — that begin such as these:

  ï Associated Press, April 27 2005: ìPolice fired on protesters demanding the release of detainees loyal to Haiti’s ousted president Wednesday, killing at least five demonstrators, U.N. officials and witnesses said.î

  ï Associated Press, March 24 2005: ìPolice opened fire Thursday during a street march in Haiti’s capital to demand the return of ousted resident Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Witnesses said at least one person was killed.î

ï Miami Herald, March 1 2005: ìHaitian police opened fire on peaceful protesters Monday, killing two, wounding others and scattering an estimated 2,000 people marching through the capital to mark the first anniversary of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s ouster.î

As Mr. Pettigrew continues his complete silence about these abuses, and the mainstream media continues to shield the public from knowing about them, we can no longer remain silent. The fake blood on Mr. Pettigrewís suit can be removed; he can return to this sham of an international conference and continue about shmoozing and enjoying fancy meals with an illegitimate government and its international accomplices, including the US, France, the World Bank and IMF. But they must know that there are concerned citizens who will be standing up on behalf of the starving, impoverished Haitians that they are doing nothing to help.

Haiti is the poorest country in the hemisphere. It needs our support, ≠ which we can give by simply respecting its democracy, respecting the will of its majority. The people of Haiti have suffered long enough from foreign-backed tyranny. Canada should immediately denounce the killings that it has been supporting, and immediately call for the reinstatement of Haitiís democratically elected government. I ask all Canadians to back this call. And lastly, I ask you to open up your hearts and minds to the plight of Haitiís suffering poor, suffering that our government is directly supporting, and suffering that together we can stop.

  Yves Engler, Haiti Action Montreal, June 17 2005.

************** Where “Freedom” Talk Rings Hollow: The Attack on Democracy in Haiti By Neil Elliott Friday, June 17, 2005

Since his inaugural address in January 2005, President Bush has been talking about “freedom” and “liberty” as if he had copyrighted the words. During March, as popular demonstrations rocked Beirut and pressed the Syrian government to reconfigure its military footprint in Lebanon, Newsweek published an encomium by Fareed Zakaria on “what Bush got right,” giving the president a good deal of the credit for “freedom’s march” (March 14).

It’s what such gushing editorials leave out that worries me. Yes, protesters thronged the streets of Beirut to demonstrate against Syrian influence, but an even larger crowd turned out days later in support of Hezbollah, showing that the Lebanese aren’t any happier with U.S. interference in the region. Meanwhile, neoconservative crowing about elections in Iraq and (soon, we’re told) Afghanistan conveniently omits the forceful insistence from the U.S. that no democratically-elected coalition would ever determine the timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops, even though (as Naomi Klein observed in The Guardian) that’s precisely what “a decisive majority” of Iraqis thought they were voting for.

And now the headlines tell us “Bush pushes democracy” in a speech before the Organization of American States (OAS), in which he contrasted “competing choices” for Latin America and the Caribbean. One choice, he declared, offered a “vision of hope,” founded on “representative government” and participation in the U.S. version of “free markets.” “The other seeks to roll back the democratic progress of the past two decades by playing to fear, pitting neighbor against neighbor, and blaming others for their own failures to provide for their people.”

Those of us still clinging stubbornly to the “reality-based community” can readily determine to which of those two options the Bush administration is committed by looking to an exemplary “test case” nearby. As Ben Terrall reports in Democracy’s Death,” a superb article for In These Times, the U.S. embassy in Haiti readily concedes that “if there were an election held today, Lavalas” — the political party of deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide — “would win.” What makes that concession really impressive is that it comes after a year-long assault on the poor communities that supported Aristide, by masked National Police and death squads, which has left hundreds dead in the streets or stacked in the capital city’s morgues. Through it all, the U.S. government has lavished support on a “de facto” government that a Bush administration team assembled from Aristide’s enemies, while heavily armed men (toting brand-new U.S.-made automatic weapons) go about “systematically repressing” Aristide supporters.

So much for the “proud march of freedom.”

The Coup in Haiti

In February, 2004, the Bush administration pulled off a remarkably efficient coup d’Ètat in Haiti. Armed U.S. commandos entered the residence of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been democratically elected, as even our own State Department concedes, by a margin of which President Bush can only dream. They forced him to board a plane that was bound, unknown to him, for the Central African Republic.

For months before the coup, Haiti observers at the Washington, D.C.-based Council On Hemispheric Affairs and others had been reporting that administration officials who had once managed Reagan’s illegal “contra” wars in Nicaragua were again working their peculiar magic in Haiti. Shuttling back and forth to the neighboring Dominican Republic (DR), they’d reportedly met with former officers from the disbanded Haitian army, including men convicted of notorious murders and massacres during the previous U.S.-sponsored coup regime (that of Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras, 1991-94). (The curious coincidence that the guerrillas would emerge, well armed, from the Dominican jungle soon after the Bush administration promised 20,000 automatic weapons to the DR has prompted Sen. Christopher Dodd to call for an investigation into just how the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent $1.2 million earmarked for “democracy enhancement,” and just what sorts of “training” former Haitian military have received in the DR.) A few observers managed to get the word out, though not in the “mainstream” media: the courageous Kevin Pina (already in 2003!) in The Black Commentator; Canadian journalist Anthony Fenton in Z Magazine online; Pomona College political scientist Heather Williams in Counterpunch; the indefatigable Dr. Paul Farmer, interviewed by Amy Goodman on “DemocracyNow” radio as the coup was taking shape, who published an incisive analysis of the coup in the London Review of Books a few weeks afterward. (I tried to do my part at The Witness online, two days before the coup.)

Last February, those newly “trained” criminals emerged at the heads of heavily armed and well organized columns, with names like “the Cannibal Army” and “the Orphans’ Army.” Their forces swept from city to city, systematically torching the offices of the woefully understaffed and ill-equipped Haitian National Police, killing police officers and civilians by the score, and marching on Port-au-Prince. Secretary of State Colin Powell presented Aristide with a thinly veiled threat: leave office or face the “cannibals.” After U.S. commandos whisked Aristide out of the country, Powell produced an alleged letter of resignation by the president, which Aristide denounced as fraudulent as soon as he was able to communicate with the outside world.

In another disturbing echo of Reagan’s contra wars, the man the U.S. installed in Aristide’s place, Florida businessman Gerard Latortue, hailed the criminals who had helped remove the democratically elected government as Haiti’s “freedom fighters.”

  In another disturbing echo of Reagan’s contra wars, the man the U.S. installed in Aristide’s place, Florida businessman Gerard Latortue, hailed the criminals who had helped remove the democratically elected government as Haiti’s “freedom fighters.”

  Getting at the Truth…

FOR COMPLETE ARTICLE, go to: www.thewitness.org/article.php?id=938

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Letters to the New York Times regarding lies and distortions about Haiti:

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From: “a. mark liiv” www.whisperedmedia.org Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 10:12:11 -0700

To: letters@nytimes.com

Subject: Re: “growing instability in Haiti”

Editor,

You write that, “growing instability in Haiti brought immense pressure by the United States, and Mr. Aristide fled the country for exile in Africa”(”How Haiti’s Future May Depend on a Starving Prisoner,” June 16).

But pressure from the United States created instability in Haiti, not the other way around. The Bush Administration did every thing it could to destabilize Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s democratically elected government, including blocking aid (which kept Aristide from delivering on promised social programs). The “Group of 184,” the anti-Aristide coalition which forced out the constitutional government of Haiti, was largely a creation of the International Republican Institute.

Further, to write that Aristide “fled” ignores the essential point that the U.S. Ambassador made clear that many more of Aristide’s followers would die if he refused to board the plane U.S. soldiers all but pushed him on to.

Sincerely, A. Mark Liiv San Francisco, CA

— “All empires collapse eventually: Akkad, Sumeria, Babylonia, Ninevah, Assyria, Persia, Macedonia, Greece, Carthage, Rome, Mali, Songhai, Mongonl, Tokugawaw, Gupta, Khmer, Hapbsburg, Inca, Aztec, Spanish, Dutch, Ottoman, Austrian, French, British, Soviet, you name them, they all fell, and most within a few hundred years. The reasons are not really complex. An empire is a kind of state system that inevitably makes the same mistakes simply by the nature of its imperial structure and inevitably fails because of its size, complexity, territorial reach, stratification, heterogeneity, domination, hierarchy, and inequalities. “ -Kirkpatrick Sale

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“Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.” “Sentimento sin acci�n es la aniquilaci�n del alma.” —Edward Abbey ***************************************** ****************************************

Whispered Media P.O. Box 40130 San Francisco, CA 94140 USA (415) 789-8484

www.whisperedmedia.org

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Letter to the New York Times regarding the NCHR and the 2004 coup d’etat in Haiti

Letter to the New York Times re NCHR and the Coup D’etat in Haiti

June 17, 2005

Editor,

Jocelyn McCalla of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights is being disingenuous when he expresses concern that jailed Prime Minister Yvon Neptune’s hunger strike raises “hard questions about he legitimacy of the United States’ intervention in Haiti” (”How Haiti’s Future May Depend on a Starving Prisoner,” June 16).

The NCHR was funded by the Bush Administration and has selectively targeted ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide�s Lavalas movement for criticism. In contrast, NCHR was silent when anti-Aristide paramilitaries drove Haiti’s democratically-elected President from office and systematically released jailed thugs who then went on to participate in repression of Lavalas members. The U.S.-backed coup regime replaced those criminals with hundreds of political prisoners, whom McCalla said nothing about until Prime Minister Neptune�s principled dissent made the political prisoners an international issue.

Sincerely, Ben Terrall San Francisco, CA

— see also:

Protesting the NCHR www.wbai.org/gallery/nyc_haitian_resistance/18nchr

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June 16, 2005

How Haiti’s Future May Depend on a Starving Prisoner By GINGER THOMPSON | New York Times

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, June 11 – Once again, one man has become the center of a political storm that threatens to foil this country’s uphill struggle for stability.

This time, it’s not Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former priest and charismatic slum leader who was deposed last year by an armed uprising and forced into exile. It is the man who rose and fell in Mr. Aristide’s shadow, his former prime minister, Yvon Neptune.

The former senator and radio talk show host has been jailed for a year without charges under a new government installed by the United States and is slowly starving himself to death in a minimum-security prison cell.

Last year, Haiti’s new government arrested Mr. Neptune, 58, accusing him as the mastermind of a massacre in a small northern town, St.-Marc. Prime Minister G�rard Latortue argued that justice was the best way to heal Haiti’s wounds, and promoted the case as proof that no one, no matter how powerful, could stand above the law.

But as the anniversary of Mr. Neptune’s arrest approaches, his continued detention has become an embarrassment to the Bush administration and a symbol of the failures of what was supposed to be Haiti’s transition to a fully functioning democracy.

From prison, the former prime minister has denounced his case as a “political witch hunt” aimed at seeking vengeance, not justice, against those who supported Mr. Aristide. In February he started a series of hunger strikes to demand that the government try him or set him free.

When a visitor went to the two-story house where Mr. Neptune is being held, the former prime minister could not lift his bony body off a foam mattress on the floor of his cell. He was wearing striped boxer shorts and listening to music on a Walkman. His most striking feature was the lines of his rib cage.

“I feel weak,” he said barely above a whisper. “Some days I feel weaker than others. But it was my choice to go on hunger strike.”

The hunger strikes have sent Mr. Neptune twice to the hospital in critical condition and brought expressions of concern, even outrage, about the injustices that continue to plague Haiti’s justice system. Only about 20 of the more than 1,000 prisoners at the federal penitentiary have been convicted of crimes; many have spent years awaiting trial.

But Jocelyn McCalla, executive director of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights in New York, said much more is at stake than Haiti’s justice system.

Rather than a political achievement for Haiti’s interim government, he said, it has become a serious liability less than four months from the start of important national elections.

And rather than uniting this violently polarized society, Mr. McCalla said, the case against Mr. Neptune has seemed only to keep old political hostilities festering, raising questions about the crimes of the past government, and about the legitimacy of the current one.

“The Neptune case has raised hard questions about the legitimacy of the United States’ intervention in Haiti,” Mr. McCalla said. “The intervention was based on the premise that the United States was ousting a criminal despot, namely President Aristide, who had used his powers to subvert democracy, and that the interim government was going to establish rule of law. That has not happened.”

It is not easy to tell exactly what happened in St.-Marc. Estimates of the dead range from 5 to 50. But according to rights investigators and reports by the Haitian press, the violence had its roots in the upheaval that ousted President Aristide.

That rebellion began in early February 2004 in Gona�ves, when a rag-tag group of former soldiers attacked police stations and forced officers to abandon their posts. Word spread rapidly to St.-Marc, where Aristide opponents who called themselves Ramicos attacked the police station and set up barricades.

Mr. Neptune arrived there in the presidential helicopter on Feb. 9. Witnesses said he toured the city, summoned police officers back to their stations and vowed in an angry speech that the government would not surrender.

“What we are doing is to make sure that peace is re-established,” he was quoted as saying in a Haitian newspaper account. “We are encouraging the police to get together with the population so that the cycle of violence can cease. We ask all the population that wants peace to mobilize against the spiraling violence.”

In hindsight, some today see those words as giving the police a license to kill. Others see them as a beleaguered prime minister’s striving to give confidence to his constituents.

Two days later, witnesses said, the presidential helicopter returned and circled over the city. Police officers accompanied by pro-Aristide gunmen called Bale Wouze (the Creole phrase describes a cleansing ritual) broke through the barricades around a Ramicos stronghold, setting buildings on fire and throwing people inside to burn alive.

No one claims to have seen Mr. Neptune. In fact, several days passed before anyone dared to enter the area to search for survivors.

Terry Snow, a missionary from Tyler, Tex., who has worked in Haiti since 1986, recalled that the streets were littered with bodies. He was too scared to take photos of them, he said, but he recalled seeing at least seven in one house and three heads in an outhouse. Others told him there were bodies on the hillside, being eaten by hungry pigs and dogs.

“By the time the police started looking for the bodies,” he said, “they weren’t there anymore.”

By then, neither was President Aristide. The growing instability in Haiti brought immense pressure by the United States, and Mr. Aristide fled the country for exile in Africa.

Mr. Neptune, however, refused to flee, and cooperated with the United States by handing over power to Mr. Latortue, whose government repaid the favor with a warrant for Mr. Neptune’s arrest.

Three weeks ago, the emaciated prisoner was carried on a stretcher to his first court hearing in St.-Marc and testified for several hours, the latest sign that the interim government had begun to buckle under mounting pressure and was seeking a way to expedite the Neptune case.

Months earlier, the government offered to fly Mr. Neptune for emergency medical treatment to the Dominican Republic, but Mr. Neptune refuses to leave Haiti until his name is cleared of wrongdoing.

[On Tuesday, Justice Minister Bernard Gousse resigned, a move that may clear a final obstacle to Mr. Neptune’s release.]

The Haitian government blocked numerous attempts by two reporters from The New York Times to visit Mr. Neptune. Last Thursday, a reporter based in Haiti who works for The Times posed as a family friend and was allowed to visit him for seven minutes.

He was rail thin and could barely speak above a whisper. Still he was clean and well groomed, his hair combed, his fingernails filed and his signature goatee clipped in a neat line around his jaw.

He did not know for sure whether he was going to be released soon, he said. But if he was, he said, he would go to the United States for a while to recover with his wife and daughter. Still, he said he would not leave Haiti for long.

“I will be back,” he said. “I made the decision that I am never going to live in exile. I am going to stay here. I think I can be a lot more useful in Haiti than in the United States.

“Haiti needs me more.”

Regine Alexandre contributed reporting for this article.

*************** Forwarded by the Haitian Lawyers’ Leadership Network

*************** “Men anpil chay pa lou” is Kreyol for – “Many hands make light a heavy load.”

Join our International Solidarity – THE FREE HAITI MOVEMENT. For info, see:

www.margueritelaurent.com/photogallery/haitisolidarityday.html and, www.margueritelaurent.com/solidarityday/infoforsponsors.html

Help stop the slaughter in Cite Soleil, Bel Air and throughout Haiti, now. Learn more: ìBandit King in Cite Soleilîwww.margueritelaurent.com/campaigns/
campaignone/presswork/interviewdread.html

There’s no time to waste. All the nationalities are down there in Haiti, in the form of UN troops, quietly liquidating young Black brothers who will not accept the recolonization of Haiti and return of the bloody Haitian bourgeiosie and army back to power.

Even after death, our indignities and sufferings don’t stop, because their families can’t afford to bury them and their bodies are just dumped in mass graves, left to rot in the streets or morgue: www.margueritelaurent.com/solidarityday/pictures/orel_01.html

Keep up to date with Ezili Danto Witness Project that publishes the voices and pictures from the streets of Haiti of this hidden genocide:

www.margueritelaurent.com/campaigns/
campaignone/testimonies/personaltestimonies.html

www.margueritelaurent.com/solidarityday/pictures/hsd_pictures.html

1. Carnage and chaos brought to Haiti by the U.S. “technocrats” and Bush regime change: See, the incinerated cadaver of a Haitian marketwoman with her arms still wrapped-up around her tiny incinerated child from the May 31, 2005 firebombing at the Ox head market www.margueritelaurent.com/solidarityday/pictures/fire_tetbef_07.html

2. See, incinerated cadavers of marketwomen in Haiti: www.margueritelaurent.com/solidarityday/pictures/fire_tetbef_03.html

3. Funeral pictures for Sanel Joseph on our website: www.margueritelaurent.com/solidarityday/pictures/sanel_funeral_01.html

4. Sanel Joseph was killed on flag day, May 18, 2005: www.margueritelaurent.com/pressclips/flagdaymay18-05_killings.html

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Here is what you can do to help us help the people of Haiti:

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Action Requested from Haiti solidarity groups and activists for justice and democracy

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Please circulate our mailings and posts to your mailing list and e-mail contacts. Subscribe or unsubscribe by writing to: Erzilidanto@yahoo.com;

Read, adopt and circulate the Haiti Resolution (see below) from the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network.

Circulate our human rights reports:www.margueritelaurent.com/campaigns/campaignone/
human_rights_reports/c1humanrightsreports.html

Do Press Work: Join our letter writing campaigns to help free the political prisoners in Haiti, stop the persecution of Haiti’s most popular political party and restore Constitutional rule. Write a letter, call the media, fax, – See our Press Work page for sample letters and contact information: www.margueritelaurent.com/campaigns/
campaignone/presswork/pressreleases_hll.html

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Support the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Haiti Resolution:

1. Demand the return of constitutional rule to Haiti by restoring all elected officials of all parties to their offices throughout the country until the end of their mandates and another election is held, as mandated by Haiti’s Constitution;

2. Condemn the killings, illegal imprisonment and confiscation of the property of supporters of Haiti’s constitutional government and insist that Haiti’s illegitimate “interim government” immediately cease its persecution and put a stop to persecution by the thugs and murderers from sectors in their police force, from the paramilitaries, gangs and former soldiers;

3. Insist on the immediate release of all political prisoners in Haitian jails, including Prime Minister Yvon Neptune, Interior Minister Privert and other constitutional government officials and folksinger-activist SÚ Anne;

4. Insist on the disarmament of the thugs, death squad leaders and convicted human rights violators and their prosecution for all crimes committed during the attack on Haiti’s elected government and support the rebuilding of Haiti’s police force, ensuring that it excludes anyone who helped to overthrow the democratically elected government or who participated in other human rights violations;

5. Stop the indefinite detention and automatic repatriation of Haitian refugees and immediately grant Temporary Protected Status to all Haitian refugees presently in the United States until democracy is restored to Haiti; and

6. Support the calls by the OAS, CARICOM and the African Union for an investigation into the circumstances of President Aristide’s removal. Support the enactment of Congresswoman Barbara Lee’s T.R.U.T.H Act which calls for U.S. Congressional investigation of the forcible removal of the democratically elected President and government of Haiti.

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