Batay Ouvriye, workers rights organization, makes statement on current situation

Haiti Report for December 31, 2003, prepared by Haiti Reborn/Quixote Center

Excerpts:

We at BATAY OUVRIYE, intimately know the Haitian bourgeoisie and its profoundly anti-worker, anti-people nature. The daily occurings in the factories, workshops, businesses, large and small It is we, workers, working-class of various types, who endure them! We are those who can testify as to the breadth of its contempt, the humiliation it imposes, its overwhelming domination and repression of the Haitian workers in order to deploy the unlimited exploitation it wishes to generalize throughout the territory, in perfect class accord with multinational imperialists. Similarly, its class representatives (political and intellectual bourgeois) ceaselessly denounce the slightest protests, work stops, strikes, mobilizations whatever form they may assume, as long as they claim the workers' democratic rights, under pretext that these unrests result in income losses for the country! We also know how much it is the very Lavalas regime that has always guaranteed these classes total IMPUNITY in all their exactions and crimes against the working class, poor peasants, workers in general. We've always denounced and fought against this impunity, with the political and economic alliances underlying it. If, presently, the bourgeoisie is fighting Lavalas, this is due to the fact that this power, given its chronic incapacity and archaic contradictions, obstructs its clear administration of the State, as well as the development of its hegemony for the establishment of a full and whole exploitation. Finally, if its presently forced to present itself personally, this is due to the dominant classes' crisis of representivity, which we have referred to often.

Within the general protest movement against Lavalas, which is fundamentally and deeply just, fortunately other tendencies than that of the bourgeoisie have begun to appear, progressively imparting their traces. Despite the bourgeois Oppositions attempts to recuperate it, this level is trying to define itself. It should deepen this conscious initiative and progress towards a more concentrated level in order to, within the Anti-Lavalas mobilization itself, put in question and even thwart frontward the bourgeois orientation (which includes a supposed state of rights which refuses to name, talk about attacking, bosses impunity, but which, as we know perfectly well, defines itself as completely dependent of the economic imperialism). Organizations or individuals belonging to the true peoples camp should, within the struggle itself, convey the basic demands of the people: working class, poor peasants, workers of various sorts, poor school and university students, all consequent progressives, that is: the PEOPLES CAMP and, progressively, build their autonomy, always under the direction of the true peoples interests. Presently, the ruling classes are aiming to confuse the popular masses interests in a question of a simply technical, abstract and hazy democracy. Which is why, even as Lavalas prepares to finish closing the last cracks of democratic struggle development, we must be clearly conscious of the basic differences in the interests aiming to reopen it. And that may of them of them are even extremely CONTRARY to ours. We must take into account our experiences made between 1986 and 1990, wherein the popular masses were basically recruited under the direction of the bourgeoisie and its representatives, which limited and diverted the mobilization. This is why we repeat ceaselessly, in this precise movement of high protest: Within this general movement of struggle, that fundamentally possesses the concrete bases of existence and continuous development, the popular masses and the different levels of organization must develop their concrete autonomy and must manage to take their own initiatives, where the popular interests, interests of workers, are also clearly definite.

(Batay Ouvriye, 12/20)