by Malaika Kambon
This story originally appeared Aug. 25, 2004.
In much the same way that the Brazilian soccer team was used as a prop for the illegal, U.S.-installed terrorist Latortue regime in Haiti, the main exporter of terrorism, George W. Bush and the U.S., seek to use the Olympic Games and the Iraqi soccer team as “proof” of an alleged U.S. “defeat of terrorism” and to justify murder and occupation in Iraq while masking the stealthy stealing of Iraqi oil.
The Iraqi soccer team in Athens, Greece, furious that George Bush used them in his re-election drive advertisements, accused him of “many crimes,” one member even reminding him that were it not for the team’s Olympic competition, he would be in Fallujah fighting with the peoples’ resistance against the hated U.S. occupation forces.
Calling for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, Salih Sadir said he was angry at Mr. Bush’s campaign advertisements showing pictures of Afghan and Iraqi flags with the words: “At this Olympics there will be two more free nations – and two fewer terrorist regimes.”
“Iraq as a team does not want Mr. Bush to use us for the presidential campaign,” said the Iraqi player in a Sports Illustrated magazine interview.
Star player 22-year-old Manajid asked: “How will [Mr. Bush] meet his god, having slaughtered so many men and women? He has committed so many crimes.” Coach Adnan Hamad said he was concerned with what the Bush administration was doing in Iraq, stating: “My problems are not with the American people. They are with what America has done in Iraq – destroy everything.”
Meanwhile, Bush’s spokesperson trumpeted an alleged victory of freedom over terror while staunchly defending their usurpation of the truth, using the Iraqi team without their consent.
“How will [Mr. Bush] meet his god, having slaughtered so many men and women? He has committed so many crimes.”
The Brazilian-Haitian game, an exhibition match billed as the “Peace Game” and an exercise in “multilateralism,” was played in Haiti’s Sylvio Cator Stadium in Port-au-Prince at the behest of Gerard Latortue, an individual who decorates torturers with the accolade of “freedom fighter” for their part in the overthrow of the democratically elected government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
An illegal Haitian official, Boniface Alexander, reiterated his alleged “commitment to call free, democratic, transparent and trustworthy elections in his country in 2005,” according to a communiqué signed with Brazilian President Lula da Silva and released by the Brazilian Foreign Ministry Thursday, Aug. 19, 2004.
President Lula da Silva attended the soccer match on Thursday, Aug. 19. There, Haitian children were reportedly given a banner to hold which read, “Social justice is the real name of peace.” Lula purportedly “claimed common Afrikan roots” with Haitian people and attempted to supplant the tree of liberty of Toussaint L’Ouverture by planting Brazil’s national tree – the paubrasilia, or pernambuco, near Haiti’s airport.
President Jorge Batlle of Uruguay, another member of the U.N. force, also “visited.” All the while, with the force of a tsunami, the kangaroo court acquittal of CIA-trained death squad leader Louis Jodel Chamblain and his henchman Jackson Joanis rocks the world, and Haitian children lie dead in the streets or consider themselves dead as they are hunted by government hit squads.
And the ubiquitous corporate “press” paid no attention to the pro-Aristide supporters who lit tires in the streets of Port-au-Prince’s Bel Air neighborhood the day before the game and shot into the air during demonstrations calling for Aristide’s return.
Additionally, the Brazilian team “traveled to Haiti free of charge with shirts and soccer balls to give away to the poor,” and the sum of US$150,000 to be “donated” by Ronaldo, the Brazilian star who plays for Real Madrid and who earns far more in an hour than what most Haitians earn in a lifetime.
This largesse is to go to Haitian “charities?” One must ask: “Which ‘Haitian charities’ are going to be the beneficiaries of the Brazilian star’s largesse?”
Specifically, what is a “Haitian charity” in a country where 85 percent of the population is either unemployed or slaving for less than US$250 per year, where clean potable water is a mysterious substance that very few possess and where most people eat, not when, but if, they can?
And which of these alleged charities will be able to boast recipients who are not dead, in hiding, raped, hunted, imprisoned, decapitated, maligned and targeted by state-owned, Western corporate media, thrown on sidewalks and shot or left in unmarked graves and in barrel caskets set adrift in the sea – souls repatriated and imprisoned by the very entity responsible for present “regime change”?
Can the starving poor eat soccer balls? Will the helmets protect the people from state-of-the-art weaponry, midnight raids, assassins and state regulated hit squads? Will mutilations, torture, massacres, the specter of many new prisons – like the infamous Fort Dimanche – rapes and death squad executions vanish with an autographed soccer tee?
And just where did the Latortue puppets hide the decapitated and burned bodies while the Brazilian soccer team was in town?
Simultaneously then, in his continued effort to re-install himself in Washington – for life – the Bush regime, exporter of monsters, seeks to use both the Iraqi soccer team and the Brazilian-Haitian soccer game as his own handheld and bloodied olive branch of peace.
As he drops un-depleted uranium bombs on children, desecrates sacred treasures, murders countries in the name of god – gold, oil, drugs – and degrades its men, women and children in death camps with sadistic prison guards exported from the U.S. who are under his directives, the Bush-twisted parody of “peace” is chillingly clear.
Fascism is here. COINTELPRO is alive and well.
The Brazilian-Haitian “Peace Game” took place even as Brazilian Gen. Augusto Heleno Ribeiro Pereira, commander of the U.N. military force in Haiti – Minustah, U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti – said that he “does not believe it will be possible to disarm the population in the short term,” and helped to repress the people’s celebrations of Bwa Kayiman throughout Haiti.
While new human rights violations were reported, including more targeted murders of Fanmi Lavalas activists, “80 members of Haiti’s former military carrying heavy-caliber weapons marched openly through the streets of Port-au-Prince in a show of force.”
Was this the “population” of which Gen. Pereira spoke? If so, why could he not disarm them? After all, these were militia – like him – and he is “jeffe.”
Haitian people are not “heavily armed.” They have no M-16s, no M-60s, no heavy weapons, nor any helicopters. Only the murderers do.
What kind of “peacekeeping” force is this that cannot disarm murderers of children, but can handcuff and hunt children and take them away to death? What kind of “peacekeeping” force is this that supports, smiles at and breaks bread with face choppers and rapists?
In an exclusive interview with Agencia Brasil, the general said that it is “impossible” to reverse, in a few months, an arming process which has gone on for more than 20 years. “Disarmament will be a direct consequence of renewed prospects for the Haitian people. I don’t believe in disarmament if the country remains in the same situation it finds itself in now: with a completely compromised infrastructure,” he said.
The 1994 U.S. invasion of Haiti was done under a U.N. fig leaf and was not only a flagrant violation of the Haitian Constitution of 1987, but also of Article 7 of the U.N. Charter. Article 7 explicitly prohibits U.N. intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states.
Same situation? From the U.S. invasion of 1915? That is more than 20 years. Thus, who compromised the infrastructure but the U.S. regime? Was the general dining with Baby Doc Duvalier?
Did he make arms deals with Guy Phillipe and Emmanuel “Toto” Constant? Or are he and “Baby Doc Bush” in the first planning stages of a Bush “forward operating location,” a military base on Hispaniola, Haiti’s strategic northern coast between Cuba and Venezuela so as to keep Bush’s cocaine shipments flowing between the U.S. and Columbia via Haiti?
COHA says the 1994 U.S. invasion of Haiti was done under a U.N. fig leaf and was not only a flagrant violation of the Haitian Constitution of 1987, but also of Article 7 of the U.N. Charter. Article 7 explicitly prohibits U.N. intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states.
Is this game, Brazil’s invasion, its true “game of peace” in 2004, being played out on soil soaked in Haitian blood?
This writer contends that the recent soccer game could not have given angry, grieving, starving Haitians too many moments of respite or any proof against occupation forces from many nations. The international “shell game” was nothing more than an athletic version of Ron Daniels’ “Cruise Into Haiti,” the disastrous “tour,” which has sparked international rejection as a travesty which savages Haitian autonomy and freedom and gives legitimacy to the Roger Noriega-Latortue regime, its Groupe 184 supporters and their CIA handlers in their “quest for gold” and glory.
I do not mean to impugn the sport of soccer, nor to malign the heart, soul, spirit or good will and intentions of Brazilian soccer star Ronaldo. But I would be willing to bet a very serious amount of money that none but the coffers of the Latortue regime and those favorable to him are going to see one penny of the US$150,000 that he proposes to give.
Both the puppet Latortue and the puppet’s U.S. master are drowning people standing on the shoulders of Ayiti in an effort not to die. Someone – other than them – had better “follow the money.”
The Iraqi soccer players are correct not to forget the war of occupation occurring in their country. They are correct to remind the world of the bloodied hands of Bush. They are correct to distinguish between the true terrorists and those of the people in the U.S. whose eyes are not blinded. They are correct not to allow themselves to be used. They are correct to remind all that they are Iraqi freedom fighters.
And, should Bush appear like an apparition at an Iraqi soccer match, as it is rumored he may do, the whole world will be watching – for the safety of the Iraqis.
The Brazilian “jeffe” speaks of impossibilities; impossible is nothing and nothing is impossible. A “volcano of anger” is exploding in response to U.S.-led military action in Iraqi’s Najaf and Falluja. Iraqi guerrillas say so.
The monster will not quench its thirst with the water in our eyes. Boukman and the people of Haiti say so. The tree Silva planted is not the same tree President Aristide spoke of. It is not a tree of liberty; it has no roots. The peoples of Ayiti and Iraq, on the other hand, do.
Sources
“Iraqi Footballers’ Fury at Bush,” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3584242.stm
“U.S. Sponsored Coup d’Etat: The Destabilization of Haiti,” http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO402D.html
“Haitian ‘President’ Pledges to Call Elections in 2005,” http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/200408/20/content_1835328.htm
“Thousands of Haitians Cheer for Brazilian Stars in Soccer Match Promoting Peace,” http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2004/soccer/wires/08/18/2050.ap.cb.spt.soc.haiti.brazil.3rd.ld.writethru.0653/
“Brazil Beats Haiti in UN Backed Peace Building Soccer Match,” http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=11686andCr=haitiandCr1=
“In Haiti, A New Multi-Lateral Face,” http://www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-dyn/articles/A16003-2004Aug19.html
“Keep Your Olympics; Haiti’s Got Brazil,” http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0818/p09s01-coop.html
“Haiti Is No Stranger to the War Crimes of the Former Colonial Powers Which Now Make up NATO,” http://www.doublestandards.org/leblanc1.html
Malaika H Kambon is a freelance, multi-award winning photojournalist, owner of People’s Eye Photography. She is also an Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) state and national champion in Tae Kwon Do from 2007-2012. She can be reached at malaikakambon@gmail.com.