Biloxi residents still recovering from Katrina

Boston-Bay State Banner
March 30, 2006

In hindsight, L.C. and Sylvia McCray say they should have left their home in East Biloxi before Katrina hit.

But they didn’t, largely because their house, nestled between the Back Bay to the north and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, survived Hurricane Camille in 1969.

They thought they could ride this one out too, despite National Weather Service warnings that southern Mississippi faced “devastating” damage from approaching Hurricane Katrina.

As it turned out, the Weather Service was right. “Camille was bad,” said Sylvia McCray. “But not as bad as Katrina. Katrina had a lot of tornadoes in it. That water come in so fast. Nothing but straight water. Water. Water. Water. That water had to be real powerful to move boats. And the way these houses done got picked up off the foundation. Split, busted all loose. Not just taking the roof here or there, but taking a whole house.”

Though it was not as strong as Camille, Katrina was wider, pounding the coastline for a longer period of time. Where Camille brought a record 24-foot storm surge, Katrina hit the Gulf coast at high tide, with high winds and a 30-foot surge. Though New Orleans has received the bulk of attention, small towns like Pass Christian and Bay St. Louis and small cities like Gulfport and Biloxi bore the full brunt of the storm as well, prompting one newspaper to call the stretch of land, “Mississippi’s Invisible Coast.”

According to local officials, nearly every home in East Biloxi went under water. Over 5,000 homes have been reported destroyed and another 2,500 uninhabitable. Little more than half of the residents have returned to the area, and most of them live in cramped FEMA trailers.

L.C. and Sylvia McCray are two of them.

“At the time, there was about four or five people that we knew personally that died,” McCray said. “Just in that one day. It was bodies laying all over the streets a couple days after because they didn’t come and pick ‘em up and stuff. A lot of people they found were drowned in the house. A lot of handicap people in wheelchairs drowned. A lot of children drowned. A lot of them still missing.”

In Biloxi, over fifty people have been reported killed as a result of the storm. Statewide, thousands are listed as missing.

“It was just real hard, just like the first four or five days. That was terrible right there. Because you had all this sticky stuff on everything. You couldn’t bathe. No water, no lights, no nothing. It was really hard. And you had to get all this stuff out because after the second day it went to smelling. You had to hurry up and get it out if you didn’t want that mold to get in here,” said Mrs. McCray.

“Next time, I would not stay here,” she said. “I have a hard time sleeping now. A lot of depression, a lot of stress.”

Some of that stress, she explained, has eased since a work crew from a Presbyterian church in Knoxville, Tenn. has twice visited to help her family rebuild. Like many in the neighborhood, the McCray family has relied on faith-based volunteer groups to assist in the recovery.

While the McCrays only have the flooring and paint jobs remaining, much of Biloxi still bares the hurricane’s scars. The storm surge wiped clean this resort casino coastline.

Six months later, only foundations remain of beachfront mansions, hotels, restaurants, and gas stations. Only recently has work begun on the gambling barges that Katrina broke from their moorings and swept miles down the coast.

“The fact that the storm did so much damage on the beach and the casinos, I figured, God is whooping somebody,” continued Mrs. McCray. “He’s very angry, he don’t want this here, see. He took all of them but three that I know of. Now they are talking about bringing it on land. So I’m thinking, he’s really angry now, because they’re not doing what he’s saying.”

In the aftermath of Katrina, the Mississippi State Legislature has allowed casinos to build on land where they had earlier been relegated to water. “Now they’re trying to turn [Biloxi] into a big old city like Las Vegas and I don’t like Las Vegas,” said Mrs. McCray. “This is greed. And it’s power and it’s politics.”

Many residents in East Biloxi are concerned that long time residents will lose their damaged homes to the city and their land to new casino construction. Through the East Biloxi Coordination and Relief Center, Councilor Bill Stallworth has been working to block the loss of residential homes to eminent domain and delay for one to two years FEMA’s proposed home elevation regulations calling for many structures to be raised higher, making many homes virtually unaffordable.

However, Stallworth warned that the biggest threat to the community is land grabs by condominium developers seeking to build pricey high rises. “Condos prey on people who are not able to rebuild, either because they have no money or no home or too little money to rebuild.”

As much as 82 percent of Stallworth’s district did not have flood insurance and those with other forms of coverage have seen their claims denied.

For the McCray family, this meant that the insurance coverage they had paid for the past thirty-nine years only paid out a couple thousand dollars to cover damage to their roof. Mississippi’s Attorney General and other lawyers are suing larger insurers for refusing to cover damage from Katrina’s storm surge.

Councilman Stallworth emphasized that local residents face an uphill battle: “It’s a process. We are rebuilding a whole town. At most we anticipate that it will take five to ten years. But hopefully we can have things back to normal in two years.”

Thus far, an estimated twenty-five hundred homes have been cleaned. Though residents receive support from volunteer groups, there is a constant need for building materials.

Though some residents have received recovery money from FEMA, it has been nowhere near the $20,000 per home Stallworth estimated necessary to rebuild. The U.S. House of Representative recently passed a bill that included $4.2 billion in Community Development Block Grants for the Gulf Coast, but the measure will not be voted on in the Senate until May 9. In the mean time, many of those who left East Biloxi are reluctant to return without affordable housing and quality jobs.

Mrs. McCray put it plainly: “The people that’s really gonna suffer is the one’s that earn fifteen thousand, twenty thousand, twenty-five thousand a year. They are going to have to have at least two jobs each to survive. If they don’t have a home or at least something they can call home, I don’t see them surviving. Everybody else in my family was renting, you see what I’m saying. Is they gonna come back? I don’t see that happening.”

Those interested in assisting recovery efforts in East Biloxi can contact the East Biloxi coordinator and Relief Center at (228) 435-7180. Donations can be sent to the at the Greater St. John AME Church, 511 Division Street, Biloxi, MS, 39530.

Efforts being made to rebuild after Katrina

Boston Bay State Banner
March 16, 2006

As New Orleans authorities issued a mandatory evacuation order on the morning of Aug. 28, 2005, just one day prior to Hurricane Katrina’s landfall, Daphne Jones bundled her family and several suitcases into the car and left her home in the 25th block of Delery Street in the city’s Lower Ninth Ward.

The Jones family didn’t get far. With thousands of vehicles clogging the highways, they sat in traffic for hours, eventually finding refuge in a small town just north of New Orleans. But even here, Katrina’s 120-mph winds knocked out power and water for several days.

Evacuating once again, the family drove to Atlanta to stay with Jones’ brother. With help from the community organizations, the Red Cross, and church groups, second hand clothes replaced those that had been left behind. New toys kept the grandchildren busy. Donations helped pay for an apartment in Smyrna, just outside the city.

For three months, Jones was not able to freely return to her house. Because of the extensive damage in the area, city officials determined that residents’ entry into the neighborhood needed to be under the strict supervision of Homeland Security Personnel. Until Dec. 1, the Lower Ninth Ward was under military curfew with National Guard units patrolling the streets.

“I saw my house for the first time on Dec. 2.” Jones recalled, stopping at a local volunteer center to look for supplies. “It was awful. It was unbelievable the things that I’ve seen. And the cleaning up, it was hard. It was really hard.

“They are saying that we got thirteen feet of water. It had to be over twenty feet of water because we couldn’t see any water lines or anything. The roof was completely covered, ceilings, I mean everything.

“Dry fixtures, ceilings, the walls, the insulation, the dry wall, everything had to be taken out. The only thing there left is the floor and that might have to go. The frame and that has to be cleaned. I was able to save it because it was new. But the house was sitting in water for at least a month, just sitting there,” Jones said.

Compared to many of her neighbors, Jones was fortunate to find her home intact. A predominantly working class, African American neighborhood with a high rate of homeownership, the Lower Ninth Ward suffered the greatest devastation of the city’s sections. According to local officials there are between 15,000 and 17,000 homes in this area.

Storm surges from at least three levee breaches flooded the Lower Ninth, knocking houses off their foundations. And as the levees burst, an unsecured barge came into the neighborhood’s north east section, flattening homes as it floated in Katrina’s, and later, Hurricane Rita’s floodwaters.

Though clear of much of the mud and debris that once choked the streets, this six-block section of the Lower Ninth seems as if it has been left untouched for the past six months. Not far from the barge, rusting cars are tossed in all directions, at times on top of each other or wedged under leveled buildings. Molding clothing and furniture line sidewalks. Tree branches and twisted fences cover front stoops and naked building foundations.

In the rest of the Lower Ninth Ward, many homes are still standing, though clearly in need of repair. Even in the daytime, the streets are desolate, save the groups of volunteer work crews or the crowds that arrive daily to tour the devastation. As New Orleans has lost more than half of its population and shifted from a largely black to a barely majority white city, the absence of many residents indicates how this demographic change might have taken place.

Shortly after Hurricane Katrina and Rita, some city officials recommended bulldozing parts of the Lower Ninth Ward. The idea remerged in a January 2006 preliminary report from Mayor Ray Nagin’s Bring Back New Orleans Commission with plans to convert the lowest-lying parts of the neighborhood into park space.

Homeowners protested this decision widely understood as a land grab by wealthy and well-connected developers. After several rallies and demonstrations, residents settled a class action lawsuit with the city in January, blocking efforts to bulldoze homes without proper notification of their owners. Several weeks ago, the area’s councilwoman also promised that electricity and potable water would soon be restored, making it possible to hook up temporary FEMA trailers.

Over the past month, Jones has turned her attention to working with the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Coalition (PHRF) by passing out flyers and reconnecting with neighbors “to let them know that if they come back that we can work together to rebuild our neighborhood.”

The PHRF is a broad coalition of grassroots organizations committed to having the relief, return and reconstruction process in New Orleans led by those most affected by Hurricane Katrina. This coalition came out of meetings first held in the late 1990s of cultural workers, community activists and labor leaders under the umbrella of Community Labor United.

Though working groups addressing issues of basic needs, media, government accountability and other topics, PHRF has sought to mobilize and inform newly returning residents. According to organizer Kanika Taylor, PHRF is focusing on the Lower Ninth Ward because “we believe that whatever happens in the Lower Ninth Ward can be a model for the rest of Louisiana and the nation.”

“People need to rebuild and occupy their land. As long as people are there occupying the land they are more accountable to us when we are present,” said Taylor.

Rather than waiting on government authorities, Jones and others with the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund have been working to determine the future of the Lower Ninth Ward through a People’s Reconstruction Plan. Weekly meetings bring residents together for discussions and planning. This March, hundreds of African American student volunteers will be working to rebuild damaged homes, jumpstarting recovery in a neighborhood that has been largely neglected.

These efforts face a host of obstacles that go beyond the physical condition of homes. Many homeowners are reluctant to return because of fresh memories of their ill treatment during the city’s evacuation and fears regarding the safety of the levees.

“My youngest daughter, she’s made up her mind that she’s not coming back. My oldest daughter, she wanna come back but right now she can’t because we don’t have any schools for the kids and jobs,” Jones explained. “No housing. And she’s not going to be able to afford things for too long because she’s a single parent and the cost of living is ridiculous.”

Black Panthers recall FBI's COINTERLPRO

Bay State Banner
February 23, 2006

When Americans hear about torture, it is often described as a practice used in foreign countries run by ruthless dictators. Even the US government’s violations of the Geneva Conventions — in the interrogations at Guantanamo Bay, the detainee abuse of Abu Gharib or the Central Intelligence Agency’s policy of flying suspects abroad for “extraordinary rendition” — is something that seems to take place far from here.

Last Saturday at Roxbury Community College, three former members of the Black Panther Party, John Bowman, Hank Jones and Ray Boudreaux, brought home the reality of the government’s torture of its own citizens to over 50 activists and local residents at the “Stop Political Repression” event hosted by Jericho Boston, an organization fighting to free all political prisoners. All three spoke frankly and openly about their abuse by the New Orleans police after being arrested in 1973 along with ten other suspected “black militants.” These men and several others were held for days by authorities seeking information about the Black Panther Party’s activities.

These men had long suspected that the San Francisco Police Department and other authorities had targeted them. “We would get stopped in the streets,” explained Boudreaux. “They would take our newspapers. They would take us to jail two or three times a day. As long as we could afford to get out, we would be back in the community and they would put us back in jail. They would put dope in our pockets. They would put pistols in our pockets. This was the tactic of the COINTELPRO program.”

The FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) sought to investigate and disrupt domestic political organizations considered radical. Groups ranging from Dr. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference to the Puerto Rican Independence movement were targeted from 1956 to 1971. This program was later found to be illegal and unconstitutional by a congressional commission.

In 1968, then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover described the Black Panthers as “the greatest threat to internal security in the country.” Soon after, the party became the primary focus of COINTELPRO activities. These activities included planting informants, spreading misinformation, placing illegal wiretaps, harassing activist through the legal system, raiding Panther offices and reportedly assassinating leaders, like Chicago’s Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in 1969.

In front of a hushed crowd, John Bowman described how he and his comrades were blindfolded and tortured when the men failed to provide satisfactory answers. Beaten with blunt objects, covered with wool blankets soaked in boiling water, slammed into walls and stuck repeatedly with an electric cattle prod, all three men still bear the physical and psychological scars of their treatment.

Demonstrating how the police tortured them, Bowman offered that the government has graduated from the COINTELPRO program to the 2001 Patriot Act. “The purpose of us coming here is so that we can ensure our own dots are in order to organize on a more sophisticated level and begin to resist the process that is developing in front of our very eyes”

This concern about new tactics of government investigation of political activists is rooted in their recent experiences. In 1975, three of these men were indicted for the unsolved murder of a police officer. The case was dismissed when the extent of their abuse was revealed in court, but no one was ever held accountable for this torture. Thirty years later, the same police officers that had overseen their interrogation and torture in New Orleans knocked on their doors with more questions about the same unsolved murder.

In spite of the wounds that these unexpected visits reopened, these men refused to testify in a series of federal grand juries and were held in contempt of court for over two months. A grand jury is a special investigative trial where individuals are subpoenaed to present information rather than face prosecution. While those who testify cannot have their testimony used against them, there is no attorney for the defendant, no judge to advise the jury and no check on biased jurors. Those who resist and refuse to cooperate are usually held in contempt until the case is finished.

Bowman and others emphasized how government authorities are using grand juries more frequently to investigate and disrupt political organizations. Each member could be called to testify, each providing enough evidence to convict another, making this process an easy tool of political repression. “The power that the grand jury, and most particularly, the US attorney deliberating that jury, has is almost unlimited,” said Marta Rodriguez, a Puertorriquena activist. She presented non-cooperation with investigations and mobilizing community support as the only effective strategy against grand juries.

Since their release in October 2005, Bowman, Boudreaux, Jones and others have formed the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights to educate the public about their experiences. At the event, these men sat alongside activists from the animal liberation and earth liberation movements, which have been the targets of recent government investigation.

Danae Kelley, an animal liberationist, spoke about her refusal to cooperate in an unfocused investigation and served seventy-four days in custody. Andrew Stepanian who dealt with subpoenas for multiple grand juries in nine different states because of his participation in a campaign to shut down the Huntington Life Sciences animal testing laboratory, described how “little things, things people thought were harmless — e-mails, contact lists — brought more subpoenas and more grand juries.”

This event also featured performances by the musical group Presente! as well as a martial arts demonstrations. Following the panel discussion, several members of the audience thanked Bowman and his comrades for sharing their experiences.

Zimbabwe struggling with land redistribution program

Bay State Banner
January 19, 2005

A decade ago, Zimbabwean Memezi Nyoni was pursuing an honors degree in English Literature at the prestigious University of Cape Town in neighboring South Africa.

“When I was in school, I was studying to be a lawyer,” Nyoni said. “I would never have dreamed of being a farmer.”

Today, he and his parents run Fountains Fresh Farms, an agricultural company on a sizeable 4,200 acre tract of land thirty minutes outside of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city.

With ample space for grazing cattle, raising chickens, and crops like onions, butternut and potatoes, Fountain Fresh Farms has offered a range of prospects to its new owners. Unlike other black Zimbabweans who gained access to land through their country’s controversial land reform program, the Nyoni family negotiated with the departing white farmer to purchase the machinery and other vital assets.

“This bought goodwill and the farm managers stayed on,” said Nyoni, ensuring some stability for the new farmers in the midst of a now six-year economic crisis. “2003 was the worst year, as costs went up and it wasn’t clear whether we would pull through. Even now, there are times where we can’t buy fuel, fertilizer, or farm equipment, which makes even planning for the next year very challenging. But at least it’s up to you – you run things for yourself.”

In Zimbabwe, land reform is generally known as “the third chimurenga,” or liberation struggle, rooted, first, in the dispossession of the indigenous Shona and Ndebele people by British settlers in 1896-7 and, then, the struggle against the white-settler Rhodesian government in the 1970s.

“Historically,” explained Nyoni, “this is a continuation of what started in the 1970s – a war over land.”

The promises of this war, however, were delayed when the formal negotiations that paved the way for independence in 1980 restricted the new ZANU-PF government’s ability to correct the severe racial inequality caused by British settler colonialism.

With ZANU-PF legally bound to redistribute land only on a “willing seller, willing buyer” principle, white farmers, although less than 1% of the population, continued to own more than 70 percent of arable land.

Throughout the 1990s, the ZANU-PF government sought out various land redistribution, including a 1998 plan to appropriate nearly half of all privately owned farmland while offering owners fair compensation.

However, these plans were consistently delayed by unwilling landowners, reluctant Western donors, and corruption that often resulted in government officials and business elites receiving the bulk of seized farms.

It was not until 2000 that the threat of a robust political opposition ultimately spurred President Robert Mugabe’s ruling ZANU-PF party to employ forceful seizures of white-owned farmland.

Two weeks after voters rejected a proposed constitution that called for land redistribution without compensation, the pro-Mugabe War Veterans Association organized seizures of white-owned farmlands.

Over the next several years, ZANU-PF supporters seized an estimated 27.2 million acres of land and evicted hundreds of white farm owners. In 2005, the ruling party passed a constitutional amendment nationalizing Zimbabwe’s farmland, replacing title deeds with 99-year leases.

Reflecting on the events of the past few years, Nyoni remarked that “a huge slice of wealth and assets has been transferred to black people. The fact that we have productive assets in our possessions means we have won the war. If we mess it up that is our problem.”

While some rural subsistence farmers have been able to add to their lands, political and business elites have again gained the most from this process, but often without the skills, equipment, and financing to maintain the profitably of commercial farming, once 40 percent of Zimbabwe’s economy.

This hasty and poorly planned process of land redistribution has resulted in the sharp decline in production from commercial farms, affecting downstream industries and drastically undercutting an already fragile economy. In Dec. 2005, President Mugabe acknowledged at a ZANU-PF conference that there had been a lack of planning and implementation in the land redistribution program.

Although the haphazard manner of land redistribution has hindered economic recovery, much of Zimbabwe’s current crisis is firmly rooted in its economic policies. In the years following independence in 1980, Mugabe’s government expanded quality education, health care, and other services to the black majority.

In the early 1990s, Zimbabwe sought to cover growing budget deficits with financing from the International Monetary Fund. In exchange for IMF loans, the government adopted a structural adjustment program requiring lower taxes, import tariffs and social spending. Instead of bringing promised economic growth, these policies resulted in less money for social welfare, increased budget deficits, rising inflation, growing poverty and greater debt.

In 1999, the ZANU-PF government refused to apply even more stringent conditions and the IMF revoked balance of payments support, effectively cutting the country’s line of credit for purchasing foreign goods and service.

With no credit, Zimbabwe’s government has had to pay for all imports in cash, resulting in shortage of foreign currency as well as restricted supplies of fuel and other key commodities. As of Dec. 2005, Zimbabwe still owes the IMF an estimated US $150 million.

Over the past six years, inflation has risen dramatically, with a loaf of bread priced at 21 Zimbabwe dollars in 1999, currently running at Z $45,000. The recent series of droughts which have plagued Southern Africa have further lowered yields from tobacco, corn and other cash crops.

With the deterioration of a commercial farming sector that once employed a large portion of the population, unemployment now stands at an estimated 80 percent and millions have left the country. Aid agencies suggest that more than 75 percent of Zimbabweans survive on one frugal meal a day.

In the midst of this economic crisis, the United States, Britain and other Western countries have placed travel and financial sanctions on President Robert Mugabe and his cabinet ministers, criticizing the ruling party for human rights abuses and election fraud.

The ruling ZANU-PF government has also drawn criticism for last years Operation Murambatsvina, or “say no to filth,” a recent slum clearance effort that forcibly removed an estimated 700,000 families from informal settlements in Zimbabwe’s larger cities, splnitering an informal economy that many in the cities depended on for their livelihood.

In spite of these recent difficulties, Nyoni is largely optimistic about what is to come.

“Having survived everything that has happened in Zimbabwe over the past several years, there must be a bright future ahead.”

Already, he hopes to increase to the number of cattle from 220 to 500 in the next two years. In that time span, he also plans to see the farm double the number of egg-laying hens to 30,000.

Ironically, in spite of the pitfalls of ZANU-PF’s land redistribution efforts, Zimbabwe’s economic prospect largely rests on the shoulders of new black farmers like Memezi Nyoni. If they are able to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by one of Africa’s few land reform attempts and revive Zimbabwe’s once widely respected farming sector, they will have done a great deal to secure their country’s future prosperity.

Dorchester shooting adds fuel to city’s gun violence crisis

Bay State Banner
with Yawu Miller
December 22, 2005

While many in Boston were trying to make sense of a shooting last week that claimed the lives of four young men, gunned down in a Dorchester basement recording studio, members of the city’s hip hop community are questioning the violent themes that have become commonplace in rap music.

Jason Bachiller, Jihad Chankhour, Edwin Duncan and Chris Viera were shot in the basement of Duncan’s parents’ Bournside St. home, triggering a man hunt for suspects in the shooting, which left no eyewitnesses.

All four victims were graduates of Wakefield High School and three were members of an up-and-coming rap group called Graveside.

Coming toward the end of a year where gun violence has increasingly dominated headlines and public discourse in Boston, the quadruple homicide in a more affluent section of Dorchester has driven home the image of crime gone out of control.

While police have concentrated on the city’s so-called hot spots, bringing in police, ministers and street workers in an effort to prevent violent incidents before they happen, police officials said the Dorchester shooting was an unpredictable act of targeted violence.

Federal law enforcement officials have joined the search for suspects in the shooting. Saturday, police recovered the Ford Escort believed to have been used as a get-away car by the shooter, but no one has yet been charged.

At a monthly performance staged by local hip hop and spoken word artists and fans at the Jorge Hernandez Cultural Center in the South End, some in attendance said the violence portrayed in mainstream rap music could have a negative influence on many young fans and artists.

“In my head there’s a line between hip hop and violence,” said Jesse Winfrey, who performs with the group Reality. “People forget that line exists because now the music is associated with violence.”

Particularly in the mainstream rap music that is played on local stations, violent lyrics and street credibility are valued over positive messages. Witness the performer 50 Cent, who survived a volley of bullets in his life as a drug dealer and starred in a film glorifying his checkered past.

But many hip hop artists eschew violent lyrics. Some at the Jorge Hernandez event, titled Critical Breakdown, said hip hop is unfairly tarnished by its association with violence.

Hip hop artist AfroDzak says many artists contribute to the negative image, blurring the line between the violence in their lyrics and committing actual acts of violence.

“Young people feel like it is necessary to align themselves with that stereotype when they make their music,” he said.

Art-imitates-life scenarios unfolded in 1997 when rap artists Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls were both gunned down in murders that to date are unsolved. Both had violent lyrics in their raps.

Many in the hip hop community say that the rappers are merely expressing what they see happening around them, that the violence in their raps is simply indicative of the violence they witness in their communities.

“The lyrics that people are writing by-and-large represent the reality the young people are living in,” said Eric Wissa, one of the coordinators of the Critical Breakdown event. “People shouldn’t get upset about the music, they should get upset about the conditions the music is reflecting.”

At the same time, the Dorchester homicide victims did not lead overtly disparate lives. All four attended a suburban high school. Both Chankhour, who was visiting the rap group members, and Viera, lived in suburban communities.

Some of the lyrics their group recorded included depictions of gun violence. Group members bragged of packing heat in one of their raps.

In contrast, at Critical Breakdown the message tended to be more positive. Even swearing was prohibited.

“As emcees, we have to reflect on the messages that we put out there,” said Ernesto Arroyo of the group, The Foundation. “We have to step up and look at life and make sure the words we put out are reflective of that.

“But at the same time, we have to stop blaming the victims. It’s important to recognize that violence has been there before hip hop.”

Arroyo and others interviewed by the Banner said public policy should be focused on providing teenagers with constructive alternatives to crime.

“Young people are asking for more jobs, better education — the basic necessities that make for better lives,” said Wissa. “Political leaders shouldn’t waste time pulling shirts off shelves.”

“We’re losing people left and right,” agreed Ruth Henry, a teen activist. “Looking for answers in a “Stop Snitchin’” tee shirt or some hip hop lyrics is like trying to put a Bandaid on a bullet wound.”

Haiti tribunal probes U.S. role in ’04 coup

Bay State Banner
December 1, 2005

While debate of U.S.-backed regime change has focused on Iraq and Afganistan, Haiti has often stayed out of the media spotlight.

But as former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark offered during his remarks to the second session of the International Tribunal on Haiti, the most recent instance of regime change on the world stage is the kidnapping and overthrow of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide on Feb. 29, 2004.

“That crime cannot be ignored,” Clark said, addressing a three-judge panel at Suffolk University Law School. “We wouldn’t be here today if that crime had not occurred.”

The panel, which has no legal sanction by any government body, helped gather information for an upcoming case to be tried before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

For three years, according to Clark, the U.S. worked with Haitian elites to destabilize the Aristide administration by cutting off foreign aid, funding political opponents, boycotting elections and arming paramilitary forces. This campaign culminated in the forced exile of the president and the imposition of an unelected interim government in 2004.

Since then, the interim government, with the support of peacekeeping forces from the U.N. Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH), has sought to assert control over large portions of the country where Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas party continues to receive popular support.

New presidential elections have been postponed three times because of the growing insecurity, logistical problems and low voter registration. Recently, the nine-member Provisional Electoral Council set a new date of Jan. 8 date and a Feb. 15, 2006 runoff.

These dates will miss a constitutionally mandated deadline of Feb. 7 to handover power to a new government.

Critics of the interim government have denounced these as so-called demonstration elections to weaken support for popular movements and legitimize the status quo. They argue that Aristide has twice been elected with overwhelming majorities and twice removed by U.S.–backed coups d’etat.

Fanmi Lavalas has refused to participate in the elections, maintaining its call for an end to the killings of political activists, the return of constitutional democracy in the form of the exiled Aristide and the release of more than a thousand imprisoned Famni Lavalas leaders detained without trial, including former prime minister Yvon Neptune and Roman Catholic Priest Rev. Gerard Jean Juste.

Elections, however, were not the focus of the tribunal. Rather, attention centered on the killings and human rights abuses that have occurred in the months since Aristide’s overthrow to collect evidence for a case of crimes against humanity.

The case is to be submitted to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The tribunal’s first session on Sept. 23 collected evidence and found guilty three of the twenty-one indicted officials: the former head of the Haitian National Police Leon Charles, former MINUSTAH military commander Brazilian Lt. General Augusto Heleno Ribiero Pereira, and current Chilean chief Juan Valdes.

The first session also convened a blue-ribbon Commission of Inquiry, headed by Clark, to visit Haiti from Oct. 6-11 and investigate reports of recent civilian massacres. Over these five days in the capital of Port-au-Prince, the commission visited many of the poor neighborhoods including Cite Soleil, Bel Air and Martissant.

They gathered testimony from dozens of victims and eyewitnesses as well as interviews from the commanders of the police and multinational forces. On Nov. 15, another coalition of human rights advocates filed two petitions with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights seeking legal redress for Brazil’s leadership role in the MINUSTAH forces and the United States’ violation of its own arms embargo against Haiti in funding and arming Haitian police forces.

Presenting the commission’s evidence before the court, Clark argued that the UN soldiers “are not peacekeeping forces. Many come from the elite forces of their country, bringing with them their biases against the poor majority.”

Increasingly, UN forces have worked in collaboration with former Haitian soldiers, who took over the police force following Aristide’s ouster, to carry out regular attacks on the capitol’s poor neighborhoods, areas seen as Lavalas’ base of support. “This is not the random violence you see in Iraq or Afghanistan, but the targeted violence like you see in Palestine,” said Clark

In the prosecutions opening remarks to the court, attorney Desiree Welborn Wayne outlined a case of “widespread and systematic assault on the civilian population, particularly those most impoverished and most disenfranchised. Today the truth will be known. It will be heard.”

She addressed a jury of teachers, activists, and labor leaders, many from Boston’s Haitian community. Throughout the five-hour trial, the defense table remained empty, though, the tribunal organizers explained, all the individuals listed on the indictment had been notified and invited to attend the proceedings.

The first witness called to testify was Pierre Sayant, an employee at the National Palace who was forced to go into hiding following the coup. Speaking through a translator, he described how armed men repeatedly came to look for him at his home and how he was finally forced to come to the U.S. because of this political persecution.

When he returned to Haiti in the fall of 2004, the armed men returned to his home, killing his brother who refused to reveal his whereabouts. Wayne described Sayant’s persecution as indicative of systematic assault on anyone believed to be a Lavalas sympathizer.

Where witnesses could not testify directly, members of the commission of inquiry took to the stand to introduce video taped testimony. Human rights lawyer Thomas Griffin described his reaction to interviewing witnesses to the soccer field massacre that took place at Gran Ravin-Martissant on Aug. 20, 2005.

At halftime during a local soccer match, police officers ordered the crowd of 5,000 to lie down on the ground. When few complied, the police shot into the air, and then started shooting into the fleeing crowd.

“When they started to run, almost simultaneously with the shots going off, a band of about two dozen, machete wielding civilians, joined in with the police and came onto the field. Obviously working with the police, as they didn’t stop them. And as the fans and the players started to run away, [the police] started to shoot at them, into their backs, as they ran away,” Griffin recounted.

“The gang of machete forces working side by side with the police continued to shoot and hack those people that they could reach before they got away.”

The video taped testimony noted that the machetes used were marked with initials “PNH” or Haitian National Police. It was reported that the police and their accomplices killed as many as 50 people.

Video taped testimony of additional human rights abuses were introduced by other members of the commission. Cpt. Lawrence Rockwood described an attack on a family by paramilitary prior to the coup on June 23, 2002 leaving six dead. He also introduced testimony from the July 6, 2005, when a predawn MINUSTAH raid on Cite Soleil, killed at least 63 people and injured 30 more.

Dave Walsh, another commission member, introduced an eye witnesses account of a march by Lavalas supporters on May 18, 2004, where the US, Canadian, and French forces who were control of the country at the time blocked the end of the march route and as the demonstrators wound back through the streets of Bel Air, they were shot down by a police ambush.

After several hours of emotional testimony and graphic visual evidence of killings, Wayne gave her closing arguments, asking for the conviction of Police Chief Yves Gaspar for the soccer field massacre and US Brigadier General Ronald Coleman for the Bel Air march ambush.

Though these men had not pulled the triggers themselves, she offered, they were criminally responsible, as these murders took place on their watch and they have since failed to take all reasonable measures to address these abuses.

“The judicial system in Haiti is not functioning but that doesn’t mean victim’s rights can’t be protected.” After a ten-minute deliberation, the jury returned a unanimous guilty verdict for both men.

Nearly two hundred people attended the tribunal, some traveling from as far away as New York to attend. Eddie Toussaint of Boston compared it to the 1967 Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal. When asked why the reality of Haiti is not being carried in the mainstream media, a Hyde Park high school student said, “this is being ignored because it’s a lot of black people who in some way have no value to the U.S. The truth has to get out there.”

Argentine workers meet Rox. counterparts

Bay State Banner
November 17, 2005

Though unemployed residents of Roxbury face a host of obstacles, from the lack of healthcare and high cost of living, to job discrimination and social service cuts, few, if any, have had to face death threats from former employers or rampant police repression.

But for Argentine workers who have organized street blockades, reopened closed factories, and provided for their community’s needs following their country’s economic collapse in 2001, these are ever-present dangers in the struggle — not simply to make ends meet — but to transform their society.

On Monday, Nov. 7, a two-member delegation from Argentine social movements met with a dozen members of the Boston Workers’ Alliance, a local initiative organizing and cooperatively employing those without steady jobs. For three hours, activists from opposite ends of the American hemisphere discussed these struggles and the lessons learned as part of a nation-wide tour, titled Fire the Boss.

Speaking through a translator, Carlos Berra of the Unemployed Workers Movement of Allen, a town in Southern Argentina, described how members of his organization work outside of the political system to build people’s power through genuinely non-hierarchical, decision-making.

“Our movement is based on assemblies, general meetings where everyone makes decisions together,” said Berra. “We use direct democracy in these big meetings, trying to resolve the problems that we have in a way that is horizontal.”

Though the MTD Allen is best known for its militant barricades of highways and major streets to demand government reforms and basic necessities, this group also grows crops, sponsors workshops, and collectively produces goods for community members.

In response to a question from Timothy Hall of Roxbury, Berra gave an example of a community bakery that sells bread at a low price to neighbors who are not in the movement and uses the revenue to fund future projects.

“Our challenge is always to use our imagination to create something from nothing and be clear that change starts today,” he said.

For others, like Elsa Montera, the 2001 crisis resulted in sharp salary cuts and months of unpaid work. Finally, the owners of the health clinic where she works just stopped showing up, and she, like many others, lost her job overnight.

“The majority of factories that are part of this movement are businesses that went bankrupt, that were emptied out, closed on a Friday night and during the weekend, the owners cleaned out everything,” Montera explained.

“And on Monday, when we went back to work, there was nothing. In this situation of impunity, people took actions to occupy their former workplaces. Some were jailed. But each time the situation closed in on us, we were able to imagine a way out and survive.”

Montera and other workers now cooperatively run the health clinic with an elected administrative council, equal sharing of income, and decisions made at general assemblies.

According to Montera, there are now 177 occupied workplaces and over 12,000 workers in a nationwide movement to open closed factories and manage themselves.

“Even beyond our slogan – occupy, resist, and produce – we see the occupying of the workplace as a recuperation of our rights,” she told the Roxbury workers.

“The biggest troublemakers in this movement are the women. When jobs are taken, women don’t let this happen because it touches the family. We are often the one’s making the decision to occupy or take back the workplace.”

In the 1990s, Argentina was considered the ‘United States’ of Latin America because of its fast growing economy and the high standard of living enjoyed by its middle class. At the same time, government corruption and US-backed free market policies that privatized state companies, lowered trade barriers, and erased financial regulations plunged the country deeper into debt.

The 2001 collapse forced many working- and middle-class Argentines into homelessness and more than half the population into poverty. Though the crisis is over and the economy has grown steadily for several years, unemployment still remains high. Today, roughly 40 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, with 14 percent in extreme poverty and high economic inequality.

Local activists asked their Argentine counterparts a range of questions from their relationship with unions to their ability to export cooperatively produced goods to other countries. When asked how the U.S. is viewed in South America, Barra described President George Bush as “genocidal.”

Montera pointed out that President Bush recently traveled to Argentina to push a free trade agreement for all of the Americas; despite the misery these policies have already created in many countries.

At the same time, Montera offered that “those who are in government, they don’t resemble the people that make up this country.” Both emphasized that the people they have met on their U.S. tour have welcomed them warmly.

Later, Gwen Johnson of Jamaica Plain asked what dangers they have faced; both cited various instances of police harassment and the creation of new laws banning protests.

“When they can do repression in a covert form, it continues,” she argued. “But if we put it out there in the open, the government is forced to bend to the people.”

Thanking them from their sharing their experiences, District 7 Councilor Chuck Turner noted that “Given the common problems that unemployed workers face in this country and around the world, its essential that we begin communication with each other and understand the focus of each other’s struggles and over time try to develop strategies that can be helpful to each other as we struggle for change. The reality is that while you may be coming from Argentina and we are here in Boston the enemies we have are the same.”

At the end of the discussion, Montera urged that “we should continue to connect and make networks based on solidarity, This is the only way we can rid ourselves of this system and get even more strength to struggle against what they are doing to us.”

Arroyo, Yoon clinch 2nd, 3rd place spots on council ballot

Bay State Banner
with Yawu Miller
November 10, 2005

Three weeks ago, when city councilors Felix Arroyo, Chuck Turner and Charles Yancey gave their Team Unity endorsement to Sam Yoon, the move got no mention in most of the city’s news media.

Yoon, who finished 5th in the preliminary, didn’t factor into the prognostications of many of the city’s pundits. But when he marched into the Arroyo campaign’s party at Club Mirage Tuesday evening, it was clear that Team Unity, the joint campaign organization founded by the councilors of color, had expanded its ranks.

With 41,839 votes — more than 6,000 votes ahead of 4th place finisher Stephen Murphy — Yoon became the first Asian American candidate to win a seat on the city council. Arroyo, with 43,492 votes, finished in second place behind City Council President Michael Flaherty, who finished with 49,163 votes.

In clinching his 3rd place finish, Yoon jumped ahead of Murphy and John Connolly and held off Patricia White, Edward Flynn and Matt O’Malley. And, as was noted at the Team Unity celebration, he proved the pundits wrong.

“They want to make Team Unity a joke,” said Arroyo’s son, Ernesto, of the mainstream media. “But Team Unity is the new Boston. The new Boston is the Boston that has been invisible to so many people for so long. It’s been here.”

In the room were activists from the black, Latino and Asian communities as well as labor movement activists and progressive whites. Political elders like former state Rep. Mel King and attorney Eddie Jenkins rubbed shoulders with newcomers including Gibran Rivera, who challenged District 6 City Councilor John Tobin, who garnered 36 percent of the vote in a strong first showing.

Yoon said his own victory was by no means a sure bet.

“I knew people didn’t expect people like me to win office because I come from the nonprofit world, because I’m Asian American, because I live in Fields Corner and I didn’t come with a lot of political experience,” he said. “It has not quite sunk in that we are making Boston history.”

Arroyo and Yoon’s 2nd and 3rd-place finishes — sandwiched between two Irish American politicians — could serve as a potent metaphor for the new reality in racial politics. While neither was able to match the might of Flaherty’s city-wide machine, both were able to prevail over the power of incumbency and political legacies.

Both did so with broad-based coalitions of black, Latino Asian and white progressive supporters, while pushing agendas calling for greater regulation of the rental housing market, improving Boston schools and greater community say in government affairs.

In his remarks, Arroyo pledged to continue what he called his efforts to make government more open.

“In reality, nobody on the council knows better than you what is needed in this city,” he told the gathering at Club Mirage. “We’re not here to tell you what you want. We’re here to do what you want.”

Arroyo message of empowerment seemed to resonate with supporters in the room.

“We have a person who is re-elected who is not only representing Latinos and people of color, but who represents a large number of people in the city,” said Dorothea Manuela. “He ran a campaign with very little money. He wants equity. It was a campaign with very little financial resources, but with a lot of people. He’s giving voice to the people who haven’t had a voice, to the poor, to immigrants. He represents an opportunity to fight all the inequity. We can compete with the people who represent the corporations and their money.”

While there mood in the room was euphoric, Turner reminded the celebrants that the councilors of color occupy just four out of 13 seats on the body. Seven votes are still needed to prevail on the body.

“The reality is that the work is just beginning,” he said. “We’re facing tremendous challenges. We need people to come together to face up to the realities of the struggles that we’re facing in the city of Boston.”

Chinese Progressive Association Executive Director Lydia Lowe said Yoon’s win was a sign of change, but warned that more organizing is needed to attain real power.

“This is great, but not sufficient,” she said. “We need to organize a solid movement to actually change policies. With these victories we should be in a position to do that. We’ve just need to get the community to put the issues forward.”

Kenyan Nobel Prize winner shares insights at Harvard

Bay State Banner
October 13, 2005

“I want to share with you a short story,” offered 2004 Noble Peace Prize Laureate Dr. Wangari Maathai of Kenya near the end of her talk at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government on Friday afternoon.

Titled, “Empowering Women and Children One Tree At a Time,” the address by this award-winning academic, activist and government official wove together a rich tapestry of wise counsel and political satire, humorous fables and personal struggles.

Thirty years ago, Dr. Maathai began working with women in rural Kenya to halt deforestation and alleviate poverty by planting trees to conserve the natural environment and provide greater access to income, fuel and other resources.

In 1977, she founded a broad-based, grassroots organization called the Green Belt Movement that has since helped restore forests, opened opportunities for rural communities, campaigned for non-violent, democratic change while planting over 30 million trees throughout her country.

In 2002, the GBM was part of a broad opposition “National Rainbow Coalition” that brought an end to twenty-four years of one party rule in Kenya. In that election, voters from Dr. Maathai’s district sent her to Parliament with 98 percent of the vote and the new government appointed her Assistant Minister for Environment and Natural Resources.

Sponsored by the school’s Women and Public Policy Program, this event packed the forum with students, teachers, and political figures including former New Hampshire Governor Jeanne Shaheen and Teresa Heinz Kerry.

Dr. Maathai’s entrance was met with cries from the audience and a standing ovation. Former ambassador Swanee Hunt introduced her as “an activist in office.”

Clothed in modern African dress, Dr. Maathai opened her talk by focusing on a simple point that has been central to her activism: an unjust distribution of resources creates poverty and fuels violent conflict.

Reminding the audience that across the world two billion people survive on less than a dollar a day, she cautioned that “it is impossible for us to go to live in the future together if we do not manage our resources, our finite resources, more sustainably and responsibly, and literally and deliberately work towards sharing them more equitably.

“And it is very important for us to create the environment in which that is possible. And that environment is an environment in where we have democratic space, choosing to call it democratic space, rather than democracy. Because that word can be translated in different ways in different parts of the world.

“But we need democratic space, a space where we are all respected, a space where our rights are respected. A space where even when the majority is in power, the minority can have their space, can have their dignity, can have respect. And that we can, in such an environment, work towards peace, towards preempting conflict.

“It doesn’t really pay for us to first cut each other’s neck, fight each other for years, and then at the end, honor people who come to try to help us fix each others. Wouldn’t it be much more wise for us, as a human family, to work towards peace? To listen to each other. To give space to each other. To acknowledge that none of us have a monopoly on wisdom and, therefore, preempt conflict. Now, I think the world have never been challenged this way before.”

Throughout her talk, Dr. Maathai referred to the Nobel Peace Prize as “recognition of a moment when the environment must surely become central” to government policies and everyday action.

Less of an acknowledgement of her hard work and achievements, she described it as encouragement for those involved in similar efforts and a signal to the rest of the world about the importance of Africa and the environment.

Peppering her talk with jokes that brought ripples of laughter from the audience, Dr. Maathai described the conversations that initially lead her to the tree-planting project as rural women detailed increasing difficulty finding clean water, making money for their families, finding for fire, and providing their children with a healthy food.

From these dialogues, reforestation emerged as a practical, long-term solution.

Rather than relying on experts to carry out this project, these women relied on “common sense, our woman sense” to first learn how to plant trees, and then teach others.

In defiance of laws banning even small meetings, Dr. Maathai and other women educated rural communities about the root causes of their problems and organized them to take responsibility for creating change.

In response, Dr. Maathai was repeatedly harassed, attacked by the police, and detained in prison, but refused to stop her activism.

This organizing often touched on the need for political change, described as similar to the problem of being stuck on a bus traveling in the wrong direction. Planting a tree was the first step to getting off the bus.

“And as we get out of that bus, we also get out of environmental mismanagement, the bus of bad governance,” Dr Maathai explained. “We get rid of the bus of people whose job it is to brew conflict and send young people to die for no other reason than they want to keep driving in their own direction, the wrong direction.”

With the recent reforms in Kenya as an example, Dr. Maathai offered that change is sweeping across the continent as many countries have replaced aging strong men with a democratically elected leadership that is on the right course.

In contrast, she warned that “it is very important that when people look at you, when they look at America, they don’t say, ‘are you sure Americans are traveling in the right direction?’ Because for most of us, what you do, we follow. We think you know where you are going.”

Dr. Maathai also challenged her audience to open to new ways of thinking about the environment and inequality.

“The environment is not a luxury issue, but when people are poor, they tend to think that poverty is more important. Poverty is both a symptom and a cause of environmental degradation. It puts you in a vicious cycle.”

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate ended her talk by honoring the memory of President Kennedy, whose efforts to provide expanded educational opportunities in newly independent African nations made it possible for Dr. Maathai to attend college in the U.S. in 1960.

She later became the first woman from East and Central Africa to receive a doctoral degree and the first woman in that region to chair a university department.

Nigerian Activists Fight Environmental Battles

Bay State Banner
October 6, 2005

Nearly ten years ago, Ken Saro-Wiwa and other activists from the minority Ogoni ethnic group led a series of non-violent protests challenging the environmental devastation, grinding poverty, and military repression wrought by the Shell Corporation and the federal government in the oil-rich Niger river Delta.

During a historic march of 300,000 Ogonis, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People demanded community control over natural resources, more sustainable oil drilling and, an equitable distribution of Nigeria’s oil wealth.

In response, the military dictatorship arrested Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogonis on false murder charges and executed them in the face of international condemnation on November 10, 1995.

In preparation for the tenth anniversary of Saro-Wiwa’s execution, his son, Ken Wiwa, spoke at MIT’s Kirsch Auditorium Friday evening. Ken Wiwa’s visit was part of the national Price of Oil tour honoring both his father’s memory and highlighting the role of Shell and other companies in human rights abuses.

“My father was so important because his struggle brought various issues together, whether it was human rights, environmental, or freedom of speech,” Ken Wiwa said.

“That and the network of international organizations that he was able to bring together forced the corporations onto the back foot.”

Foreign companies first pumped crude oil from the Niger Delta in 1957. In the past five decades billions of dollars in petroleum have come from a region comprising only one tenth of the country’s territory. Today, Nigeria is the world’s seventh largest oil producer, pumping nearly 2.5 million barrels of oil per day with proven reserves at 35 billion barrels.

Despite these natural resources, 70 percent of an estimated 134 million Nigerians live in poverty, as very little of the oil profits have gone to meet the needs of the majority of the population, particularly those in the Niger Delta.

Since independence from Britain in 1960, democratic governments have been toppled by a succession of military coups, with each dictator collaborating with oil companies to siphon oil profits to private bank accounts.

There have also been roughly 4,000 oil spills in the Niger Delta, fouling the land and water of people who traditionally relied on farming and fishing for their livelihood.

Ken Saro-Wiwa was a successful businessman, television producer, and writer who took up the plight of the Ogoni people in 1990 while Nigeria was still under military rule. Through his writings and non-violent action, Saro-Wiwa campaigned for genuine democracy and corporate accountability.

In his presentation, Ken Wiwa, a writer and human rights activist in his own right, emphasized that ten years later, the struggle for control over resources continues.

In 1993, Saro-Wiwa and others were able to stop Shell from drilling in Ogoni. But now, as Ken Wiwa points out, “Shell wants to go back in, symbolically, to show they have done nothing wrong. If they can go back into Ogoni, they get away with murder.”

Dimierari Von Kemedi, the head of Our Niger Delta, spoke after Wiwa and reiterated this point, “the killing of Ken Saro-Wiwa was a deliberate attempt to quiet things in the Niger Delta.”But rather than halting resistance, the Ogoni struggle inspired other Delta ethnic groups to challenge oil companies drilling in their territory.

More significantly, the killing of Ken Saro-Wiwa gave birth to hundreds willing to pick up guns to bring about change.“

We see the value of what Ken did, but some of these people just see that Ken’s struggle did not lead to a change in policy on the side of the government or the oil companies,” said Kemedi.

“They go the way of violence.” Violent conflict over control of oil resources has brought few reforms and contributed to the death of over 1,000 people a year in the Delta region.

While explaining Nigeria’s dynamic, Wiwa and Kemedi also raised the issue of the U.S.’s increasing presence in the region.

“The U.S. is very interested in the Gulf of Guinea – Nigeria, Angola, Sao Tome and Principe – as it seeks to get away from oil from the Middle East,” explained Kemedi. Nigeria is fifth-largest supplier of crude oil to the U.S. and the percentage of its oil that it sends to the U.S. is projected to increase by 50 percent in the next decade. Urging students to get more engaged in the politics of the country to change policies, Wiwa offered “the current U.S. policies are so focused on oil when there are alternatives available.”

Steve Kertzmann, executive director of Oil Change International stated that the anniversary of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s execution is an international day of action in which students can participate.

The audience of 50 students and professionals frequently applauded Wiwa and Kemedi.

“It’s good to come to have things like this and remember where the world is going. You wake up a little bit more,” commented Fletcher School student Tega Shivute.