Haiti's First Lady, Mildred Aristide speaks to Essence

[XXPANTHAXX]

Forced into exile: Madame Mildred Aristide, wife of former Haitian
president Jean Bertrand Aristide, recalls the nightmare of being
driven from her country, Essence Magazine | October 2005


When I was growing up in The Bronx, New York, my parents lovingly
told us about Toussaint Louverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines and the
hundreds of thousands of St. Domingue slaves who defeated Europe's
mightiest armies, abolished slavery, and established their own
nation--Haiti--in 1804. Haiti's revolutionaries had fought for all
Blacks everywhere and proclaimed Haiti a sanctuary to which any Black
person could flee and be guaranteed liberty. Haiti, then, had always
been far more to me than my parents' birthplace. It was hallowed
ground where our people had waged a spectacular war against global
powers--and won.

I was honored, therefore, in 1992 to be invited to a New York City
College reception for Haiti's president-in-exile, Jean Bertrand
Aristide, who had served as a Catholic priest in the 1980's. Elected
by a landslide. President Aristide had been overthrown by the
military. Foreign powers have frequently engineered such tumults in
Haiti, as though to erase all memory of 1804. But that year lives in
the hearts of all Haitians. So on the night of the reception, braving
an awful migraine and pouring rain, I went to honor the man the
Haitian people had chosen to lead them. Little did I know when I
entered the room what a dramatic turn my life would take.

Back then, I was a lawyer working near Rockefeller Center in New York
City. At the end of the City College reception, a number of Haitian
lawyers and I were invited to a meeting with President Aristide.
United in out desire to see democracy restored to the land we loved,
we offered our best insights and recommendations. This led to an
opportunity I considered historic two--months later I left my New
York law firm to join President Aristide's legal team. Haiti's
democracy was restored in 1994, and I moved there permanently to
continue my work. I saw firsthand President Aristide's tenderness and
strength as he served the people, and I was exposed daily to his
intellect. his humility, his compassion, his wit. In time, our hearts
became one. and in 1996 we wed.

My husband completed his term two weeks after our wedding, and we
established The Aristide Foundation to expand the youth-based
ministry he had started in the eighties. His church had been burned
down in 1988 by those who opposed his advocacy for social justice,
and powerful interests continued to push for his removal from the
church because of his liberation-theology teachings.

Despite this, my husband was again elected president in 2000. His
priorities were education and health care, and I was asked to head
the National AIDS Commission. The needs were enormous, but it was
clear we were on the right path. At the inauguration of hospitals,
schools and new roads, old ladies who could hot read would wait with
books, pamphlets or anything that they could find because they knew
their president encouraged reading. They would caress my face and
say, "Cherie, kenbe fo nap lapriye pou ou" ("Sweetie, stay strong, we
are praying for you"). As an onslaught of propaganda and
disinformation from internal and foreign enemies of Haitian democracy
intensified in 2003, these moments would sustain me. Here, among the
people, we would always be sale.

We lived in our own home on weekends, but during the week we worked
and lived in Haiti's National Palace. It is across the street from a
breathtaking monument of an African male blowing a conch shell to
honor Haiti's 1804 revolutionaries. From this space I worked to help
the world understand the suffering caused by wealthy nations blocking
$500 million in approved loans for Haiti--in their effort to
destabilize our government. I spoke out against and wrote a book
about the exploitation of the children of Haiti's poor and strove to
honor my husband's belief that every human being should be treated
with dignity. I was proud of my husband when he asked France, Haiti's
former colonizer, to repay to our government the $21 billion that it
had wrongly expropriated from the Haitian state in 1825.

However. a small elite minority in Haiti, entrenched in a tradition
of not paying taxes, treating the poor Black majority as subhumans,
and profiting from their misery, has always seen my husband as an
irritant, an obstacle. In fact, for them the real irritant was
democracy. A democratic Haiti that invested in its people represented
a dramatic break from the country's recent past. To forestall this.
some of the elite colluded with foreign agents to finance former
soldiers of Haiti's disbanded army, as well as convicted criminals,
to stage yet another coup.

On Sunday, February 29, 2004, responding to our call for
international help, Tom Joyner, Tavis Smiley and Cornel West were
flying in to investigate and broadcast what was really happening in
Haiti. Just hours before this important opportunity to tell the world
that our government was under attack by thugs, and with the millions
who had voted for my husband still asleep, foreign diplomats and
heavily armed foreign soldiers came to our home and took us away. As
we were driven through the predawn darkness, the streets were eerily
empty. President Aristide and I were forced onto a plane by foreign
soldiers and taken against our will to the Central African Republic,
a country 9,000 miles away, where we knew absolutely no one.

Before the day was over. Haiti's democratically elected government
had been completely dismantled. I was trapped n a strange
slow-motion, soundless nightmare. If this was happening to us. I
wondered, what was happening to the hundreds of thousands of people
in the narrow corridors of Cite Soleil, the tin shacks of LaSaline
and the fields of the Central Plateau?

At great personal risk, Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) and
Randall Robinson came to us in the Central African Republic and
worked to secure our temporary relocation to Jamaica. And with
various Caribbean and African governments' support, President Thabo
Mbeki later invited us to South Africa. Along with our daughters
Christine, 8, and Michaelle. 6, we landed in a biting South African
winter, but have since seen Africa's famed jacarandas bloom.

It is touching when South Africans tell us they hope the ancestors
will help Haiti, because we Haitians also pray to the ancestors for
guidance. The spirit of ubuntu--humane sensitivity toward others--is
alive and well in South Africa. Everywhere I look, South Africans are
reading, thanks to Mandela, Mbeki and democracy. In Haiti, education
had always been the preserve of the country's tiny upper class, but
with democracy we, too, had begun to break a wall of apartheid. When
my husband was returned to power in 1994, Haiti had 38 public high
schools. By 2004, before the coup, that number had increased to 134.
Hope was in bloom.

More than a year and a half after the theft of our democracy, Haiti
teaches us yet another lesson: the fortitude of the human spirit. My
husband and I can no longer touch or see the people of Haiti, but as
the Zulus remind us, "A spirit never forgets the road home." As we
deepen our understanding of this special nation, our temporary home,
we teach students at the University of South Africa about Haiti: its
past, its pain and its promise.


COPYRIGHT ) 2005 Essence Communications, Inc..

[CreatorsCollege]

We KNOW Who those Foreign Powers are, too. The United States and France. I read an article that describes the Haitain Revolution as Haiti's "Original Sin," and because of THAT, it will NEVER be allowed to develop into a free-standing working Republic. Damn if "niggas" don't always sell one another out for money.

I mean, how can you stand to profit from the misery of others, particularly when they are and look just like you? It's not a foreign concept, though 'casuse there are plenty of "y'all 'gon get us killed" onces right ol' Amerikkk!