Île à Vache is not for sale! Release Matulnes, Free Haiti

Haiti is not for sale. Release Matulnes!

The Washington colonists are back in Haiti, re-enslaving. Bloodhounds have been set loose by the Washington puppet Haiti government on free Haitians at Île à Vache (Ile a Vache/Ilavach) who are fighting back.

It's 2014 not 1704 but a bloody manhunt with hound dogs and weapons of war is let loose on the unarmed Île à Vache Haitians. These Haitians are descendants of enslaved Africans and freed US blacks who immigrated in the 19th century after the America’s Civil War began.

When the people refused to leave their coastal properties to make way for foreign tourist resorts, empire sent in its US-trained local forces to eliminates the resisters.

The only real infrastructure on the island was a rural school. So they terrorized the children there first. As I write this, empire is restoring "peace" by jailing and killing as many islanders as possible. The US/UN trained Haiti local forces are carrying around photos of local community leaders who are against the land grab and searching the island house by house to find and silence them.

The people are outgunned. Without the media and money resources of empires forces. This is the Clintons and Obama, "building Haiti back better."

Not satisfied with absconding with $9 billion in earthquake relief  that left little footprint except giving Haiti the cholera disease, the US occupiers of Haiti are having their hand-picked president and prime minister going on a bloody man hunt to silence protestors. The people are peacefully demonstrating to stop the taking of their property to service the white gaze's notion of development. The white supremacist terror campaign forced the leaders to go into marronage again.

Île à Vache is one of the places in Haiti that was not touched by the January 12, 2010 earthquake. But under the guise of rebuilding Haiti, the Haitian government has declared Île à Vache and all offshore Haiti assets property of the state, annulling all Haitian owners property rights in order to bring in foreign tourists. To that end, a massacre and terror campaign to remove Haitians from their coastal homes is underway.

In two decrees,  one issued May 2012, the other May 10, 2013, the Washington puppet in Haiti declared all Haiti offshore islands property of the state, declaring them "tourist areas." They've begun deporting local Haitian from Île à Vache. The people refuse to recognize the decrees, are protesting. (See our coverage at HLLN Urgent Action Alert 2 - Haiti is not for sale! Release Matulnes! which is below; and HLLN Urgent Action 1 - US occupiers in Haiti privatizing Île à Vache, (a shorter, earlier version is here); Tourism is not development, liberate yourself from that idea, Haiti! ; Gaye toupatou: Koukouwouj Pou Nou Bloke Masak Mateli-Lamòt sou Popilasyon Ilavach La and Vision of Plantation Haiti - A White Pearl, Again!)

The people have no guns, no allies with nuclear power. They've been fighting this 10-year US occupation alone.

The mainstream media sells the lie that Haiti has democracy, supposedly restored by the US in 2004 after they got rid of  President Aristide. The opposite is true of course.

The people of Haiti have no democratic say in what happens to them. The corrupt non-for-profits/NGOs (the white saviors industrial complex of Haiti) push the idea that Haitians can get justice by appealing to the very people who took their sovereignty away. These wasted efforts, appealing to the OAS, the UN, the US, the repressive local regime to enforce Haiti's democratic rights, achieve nothing. Duvalier is back in Haiti. The neoDuvalierists are back in power. The capitalists own the Haiti government. The local Martelly-Lamothe government believes in the Washington neoliberal worldview; welcomes the West to come in and exploit their nation. Bill Clinton and all his acolytes are running Haiti.

Haiti, as they say, is open for business. Setting trained dogs and unleashing their military forces against the unarmed resisters is part and parcel of the conquerors business in Haiti.

Haitian resisters are saying that tourism, an export economy, sweatshops and privatization of pubic assets to benefit the rich, are not development for Haiti. The major media chains serving imperial interests puts out misinformation. But, the Ile a Vache story has gone viral on the internet. Viral means there are more than a million people following and circulating our stories. Please, let's make it 10o million. You know the conquerors own the media. The people of Haiti, like in Venezuela, can only reach out people to people.

Help stop the silencing and neutralizing. Support the Haiti-led liberation struggle. The land is ours, because generation after generations spilled blood to stay on the land and out of the hands of the wage enslavers and bankers. Haitians won't back down.

People to people, we're asking you to join in stopping the land grab in Haiti by the capitalists,  to stop the jailing of leaders, the coming massacres at Ile a Vache and the other islands that will be next.

The current expulsion of Haitians from their lands is even more searing considering Haitians get deported from every nation in the world. Asylum, amnesty, justice denied our people.

Please circulate the urgent action alert below to corner the imperialist forces. Support the Desalin descendants working to free Jean Lamy Matulnes Junior. Let's get 100 million voices saying: Release Matulnes, rescind the land grab decrees.

This will take Haiti is one step closer to freedom.

Ezili Dantò
President, Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN)
March 4, 2014

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HLLN Urgent Action Alert 2 - Haiti is not for sale! Release Matulnes!

Circulate widely Release Jean Lamy Matulnes Junior Haiti is not for sale! Free Matulnes, free Haiti.

Île à Vache's people need you to be their voice now! Demand the release of Jean Lamy Matulnes from prison. Demand that the Martelly-Lamothe government rescind the May 2012 and May 2013 decrees to take all the offshore Haiti islands from the people of Haiti. Haiti is not for sale! Release Matulnes.

Île à Vache community voice is silenced (Jean Lamy Matulnes imprisoned), replaced by a Martelly-Lamothe "community" radio station just inaugurated on the island, there with heavy military force only to promote Washington's interests. The local people need your support. Do not let the government control medias neutralize Haiti protest to Washington's privatization of our public assets. Haiti is not for sale! Release Matulnes! He is a political prisoner, illegally and arbitrarily arrested. Jailed without due process because of his activism as a reporter and for his community human rights work. He is also a policeman and was peacefully serving the people of his community.

Lage Matulnes- Se pa kado blan te fè nou. Se san zansèt nou yo ki te koule. Ayiti pa pou vann. Lage Matulnes !

On February 21, 2014, Jean Lamy Matulnes Junior, 32, president of community Radio VKI and Cooperative Foncodi and a community leader from Île à Vache was arrested after an Île à Vache demonstration and jailed in the National Penitentiary (the "death prison") without charge. Matulnes is the son of a peasant rural farmer from Île à Vache. This arrest is political intimidation to silence the Île à Vache population.

"..twenty families are already ejected from their homes with no arrangements made for other housing. Martelly-Lamothe leveled to the ground, the only forest on Ile a Vache to build an airport for foreign use." -US occupiers in Haiti privatizing Île à Vache .

(See also, AMARC international appelle à la libération du président de la radio VKI and Stefanie Schüler's report on Ile a Vache illustrate Martelly-Lamothe bad faith.)

Matulnes led the Île à Vache community radio (Radio VKI). He's in prison and the Martelly-Lamothe have set up their own "community" radio station to spew out misinformation, to criminalize to neutralize public protest against selling-off Haiti's offshore islands, beginning with Île à Vache.

Île à Vache must not fall! (See, Venezuela's Deep Political Education Means Venezuelans Will Withstand Right-Wing Protests.)

Ezili Dantò
President, Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN)
March 3, 2014
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