I took advantage of early voting and cast my vote on October 19th. I felt very proud and it was a privilege to fulfill that right. Although more than one thousand people were killed in Haiti during Hurricane Matthew, neither one of the presidential candidates even mentioned the tragedy during their second debate. Had a natural or any other kind of disaster happened anywhere in else in the world, they both would have asked America to take a moment of silence for that particular area.
They both acted as if Haiti does not exist.
I was sickened by their reckless disregard for the people of Haiti, even as they solicited the votes of Haitian Americans. How could they have totally ignored such a devastating tragedy? All they said was that Haiti is the poorest Country in the Hemisphere. They could not even give Haiti credit for being the first Free Black Country. Clinton could not even give Haiti credit for being a beautiful island where she and Bill went for their honeymoon. What people don’t understand is that had Haiti been allowed to benefit from its own resources, Haiti could have been the richest island in the western hemisphere.
For those of you who don’t know about Haiti’s history; Haitians fought the French, during the year of 1791-1803, to end slavery and became the first truly Free Black Republic in 1804. It was such a shock for the world to see such a small island defeat a power country like France.
Rather than recognizing our independence, surrounding countries turned their backs on Haiti and placed an embargo on us. If that was not enough, the French claimed that they had lost property (actual Haitian citizens who has been enslaved) during the revolution. Haiti had to pay them for their loss. It took Haiti almost 130 years to pay off both the original ransom to France and the tens of millions more interest payments.
In 2003 the Haitian government, with Jean Bertrand Aristide as the president, calculated the value of the restitution at a sum of 22 billion dollars; he filed a suit to get some of that money back. Instead of the French repaying us they joined with the United Nations and gave a coup d’état to Haiti on February 29, 2004. Since then the United Nations has deployed some
10,000 troops to occupy Haiti which cost them almost a billion dollars annually. Money, they could have used to help Haiti rebuild.
According to research, after the devastation of the earthquake which killed more than 300.000 people, the United Nations has bought cholera in Haiti which killed again almost 10,00 people and made almost 1 million of Haitians sick, which is known as the world worst cholera epidemic ever.
In November of 2011, a petition was signed for the United Nations to pay reparations to the cholera victims. Would you believe that the UN refused to do that . . . Until last week they finally agreed to pay those victims but refused to take responsibility for bringing the disease in Haiti …So please don’t just call us the poorest nations in the world, as if we have created it on our own. Haiti has been the economic opportunity for countless Non- Governmental Organizations (NGOs) for decades. It feels that those NGOs can’t wait for a natural disaster to happen so they can create their profit by launching a new call to collect donations in the name of Haiti. Like every other country they are corruptions in Haiti, however, we are not lazy people. We have contributed to the American Revolution in Savannah Georgia against the British with a troop of more than 500 Haitians which was called the ‘Chasseurs Volontaires’ or infantry volunteers from Haiti.
We are resilient people, Stop referring to us as the poorest nation without stating the facts behind our economic misfortunes. Just recognized our history, stop sabotaging us!
Help us get some of our money back from the French so we could rebuild our country!
