One would think that, now that the despised 14-year long United Nations Mission for the (de)Stabilization of Haiti (MINUSTAH) has been forced to shut down, Haiti would be on the road to some modest, sustained, recovery from the devastating January 12, 2010 earthquake. It is not. The Republic of Haiti has never been in greater danger than it is now.
The notion of a colonist as cannibal in Haiti is widespread. This idea, called manje moun (eating people), could hardly qualify as superstition, given the experience of colonialism. It is daunting to find a better description for those who grab control of water and food, and then calculate the minimum caloric intake a population needs so that a maximum of labor may be extracted from its emaciated and zombified workers without killing them. The neo-colonists may call themselves humanitarians, but their victims know exactly what they are.
There is no shortage of water in Haiti. Yet, everywhere on the island, Haitians travel for miles to get water, pay dearly for it if they can find it, and sometimes die on their journey to collect it, like so many antelopes snatched by predators on their way to drink. How does a thing like that happen in a country that gets reliably drenched with more than 50 inches (130 cm) of naturally distilled rainwater per year?
For news of the world, peel away from those who follow the daily offerings of bombings and supposed terror attacks, as bulls in the ring chase a red cape to their ritualistic slaughter. Look instead in places like Haiti, where it is easy to discern the lies from the truth. In such places, where no one appears to be watching, the sanctimonious missionaries do not hide their faces as they morph into kidnappers and pedophiles. The bribes are publicly offered and accepted.
Haiti’s incarceration rate of roughly 100 prisoners per 100,000 citizens in 2016 was the lowest in the Caribbean. Nevertheless, there is a systematic campaign underway for more prisons. Canada and Norway have each given one prison to Haiti. Thanks to prison aid from the United States, three additional prisons have been inaugurated since 2016, and another is under construction.
With this collection of short stories, Imtiaz Akhtar makes his bold debut. Kafka Sutra is the sort of book that as a teenager, I would have loved to sneak from my mother’s shelf, and that as a mother, I would secretly enjoy letting my daughter or son whisk away.
Despite the polls in the run up to November 8, 2016, and the post-election shenanigans that continue to this day, the United States has a new President, and it is not Hillary Clinton. There are many reasons for this, and Charles Ortel’s dogged, two-year investigation of the Clintons’ predatory humanitarianism is a major one. He is not yet done.
A full two-thirds of the earthquake casualties in Haiti on January 12, 2010 were directly due to policies that the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), World Bank, and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) put in place to create surplus labor for the country’s sweatshops.
