SAUDI ARABIA GIVES FIFTY MILLION TO HAITI VIA U.N.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2010/01/saudi-arabia-riyadh-commits-50-million-to-haiti-relief-efforts.html

JEDDAH: Saudi Arabia will donate $50 million in aid top

earthquake-devastated Haiti. "On instructions from Custodian of the Two

Holy Mosques King Abdullah, the Kingdom will donate $50 million to

assist the Haitian people," Foreign Ministry spokesman Osama Nugali

said Monday 25 January.

The cash donation is thought to be the largest given by a Middle Eastern

country, although some have made significant donations in kind. The

funds will be channeled through the United Nations.

Last week, the secretary-general of the Organization of the Islamic

Conference, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, urged all OIC member states and

Islamic organizations to provide help to Haiti following the Jan. 12

earthquake.

Meanwhile, the Riyadh-based Arab Gulf Program for United Nations

Development Organizations (AGFUND) has become one of the first

organizations in the Kingdom to donate to Haiti, with a contribution of

$100,000. "The contribution is an extension to the role of the Arab

Gulf Program and its humanitarian stand in alleviating the suffering of

victims, and it is in response to the urgent call from the Haitian

government for humanitarian assistance," AG FUND spokesman Abdul Latiff said.

Other Middle Eastern countries have chipped in. The United Arab Emirates

said a plane carrying 77 tons of basic relief supplies has been sent by

the government to Haiti. Jordan sent six tons of relief supplies to

Haiti shortly after the quake hit. A field hospital was also dispatched

there to help treat survivors, including members of Jordan's 700-strong

peacekeeping contingent in Haiti. Three Jordanian peacekeepers were

killed and 23 wounded in the quake.

The United Nations said Monday it has so far received pledges of more

than $270 million in emergency relief funding for Haiti, representing

nearly half of its target. The funds are meant to go toward food,

medication, water and tents for three million people affected by the

earthquake, which according to the Haitian government, claimed around

150,000 lives.

Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive urged donors Monday to swing

behind his nation's massive reconstruction, as aid groups called for

Haiti's billion-dollar foreign debt to be wiped clean.

"I just want to say that the people of Haiti will need to be helped to

face this colossal work of reconstruction," Bellerive told international

officials as closed-door talks in Montreal began.

"The government of Haiti wants to assure the entire world that it will

reme mber and be worthy of the exceptional sympathy that it receives,"

he added. The talks are aimed at defining key strategies to rebuild the

country from the ground up in the wake of the quake.

An umbrella group of Canadian and Haitian aid organizations called on

donors to cancel more than $1 billion in foreign debt. "We hope that

you use the weight of your governments to convince international

financial institution s to cancel Haiti's entire foreign debt," said

Eric Faustin, director of Rocahd, the Coalition of Canadian-Haitian

Development Organizations.

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The TOP FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT ON THE PLANET, RISK TAKING-TRUTH TELLING JOHN PILGER WRITES:

The Kidnapping of Haiti

By John Pilger

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24519.htm

January 27, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- The theft of Haiti has been swift and crude. On 22 January, the United States secured "formal approval" from the United Nations to take over all air and sea ports in Haiti, and to "secure" roads. No Haitian signed the agreement, which has no basis in law. Power rules in an American naval blockade and the arrival of 13,000 marines, special forces, spooks and mercenaries, none with humanitarian relief training.

The airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, is now an American military bas e and relief flights have been re-routed to the Dominican Republic. All flights stopped for three hours for the arrival of Hillary Clinton. Critically injured Haitians waited unaided as 800 American residents in Haiti were fed, watered and evacuated. Six days passed before the US Air

Force dropped b bottled water to people suffering thirst and dehydration. The first TV reports played a critical role, giving the impression of widespread criminal mayhem. Matt Frei, the BBC reporter dispatched from Washington, seemed on the point of hyperventilation as he brayed about the "violence" and need for "security". In spite of the demonstrable dignity of the earthquake victims, and evidence of citizens' groups toiling unaided to rescue people, and even an American general's assessment that the violence in Haiti was considerably less than before the earthquake, Frei claimed that "loo ting is the only industry" and "the dignity of Haiti's past is long forgotten." Thus, a history of

unerring US violence and exploitation in Haiti was consigned to the victims. "There's no doubt," reported Frei in the aftermath of America's bloody invasion of Iraq in 2003, "that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now to the Middle East is now increasingly tied up with military power."

In a sense, he was right. Never before in so-called peacetime have human relations been as militarised by rapacious power. Never before has an America n president subordinated his government to the military establishment of hi s discredited predecessor, as Barack Obama has done

In pursuing George W. Bush's policy of war and domination, Obama has sought from Congress an unprecedented military budget in excess of $700 billion. He has become, in effect, the spokesman for a military coup

For the people of Haiti the implications are clear, if grotesque. With US troops in control of their country, Obama has appointed George W. Bush to the "relief effort": a parody surely lifted from Graham Greene's The Comedians, set in Papa Doc's Haiti. As president, Bush's relief effort following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 amounted to an ethnic

cleansing of many of New Orleans' black population. In 2004, he ordered the kidnapping of the democratic ally-elected prime minister of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and exiled him in Africa. The popular Aristide had had the temerity to legislate modest reforms, such as a minimum wage for those who toil in Haiti's sweatshops. When I was last in Haiti, I watched very young girls stooped in front of whirring, hissing, binding machines at the Port-au-Prince Superior

Baseball P ant. Many had swollen eyes and lacerated arms. I produced a camera and was thrown out. Haiti is where America makes the equipment for its hallowed national game, for next to nothing. Haiti is where Walt Disney contractors make Mickey Mouse pajamas, for next to nothing. The US controls Haiti's sugar, bauxite and sisal. Rice-growing was replaced by imported American rice, driving people into the cities and towns and jerry-built housing. Years after year, Haiti was invaded by US marines, infamous for atrocities that have been their specialty from the Philippines to Afghanistan.

Bill Clinton is another comedian, having got himself appointed the UN's man in Haiti. Once fawned upon by the BBC as "Mr. Nice Guy bringing democracy back to a sad and troubled land", Clinton is Haiti's most notorious privateer, demanding de-regulation of the economy for the benefit of the sweat shop barons. Lately, he has been promoting a $55m deal to turn the north of Haiti into an American-annexed "tourist playground". Not for tourists is the US building its fifth biggest embassy in Port-au-Prince. Oil was found in Haiti's waters decades ago and the US has kept it in reserve until the Middle East begins to run dry. More urgently, an occupied Haiti has a strategic importance in Washington's

"rollback" plans for Latin America. The goal is the overthrow of the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, control of Venezuela's abundant oil reserves and sabotage of the growing regional cooperation that has given millions their first taste of an economic and social justice long denied by US-sponsored regimes.

The first rollback success came last year with the coup against President Jose Manuel Zelaya in Honduras who also dared advocate a minimum wage and that the rich pay tax. Obama's secret support for the illegal regime carries a clear warning to vulnerable governments in central America. Last October, the regime in Colombia, long bankrolled

by Washington and supported by death squads, handed the US seven military bases to, according to US air force documents, "combat anti-US governments in the region".

Media propaganda has laid the ground for what may well be Obama's next war. On 14 December, researchers at the University of West England published first findings of a ten-year study of the BBC's reporting of Venezuela. Of 304 BBC reports, only three mentioned any of the historic reforms of the Chavez government, while the majority denigrated

Chavez's extraordinary democratic record, at one point comparing him to Hitler.

Such distortion and its attendant servitude to western power are rife across the Anglo-American corporate media. People who struggle for a better life, or for life itself, from Venezuela to Honduras to Haiti, deserve our support. John Pilger. 

THIS REMARKABLE FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT HANGS OUT AT HTTP://WWW.JOHNPILGER.COM

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