Thursday, October 17, 2019

Eyes on the Government only


Haitian entities continue to blame the government for the country's current disruption. They "note and deplore" its numerous failures, its incapacity to establish order, to assure the safety of persons and goods, to allow schools and commerce to function. Haiti, they say, is reaching a point of explosion. 

Indeed. Intermittently over the last 18 months, people have placed locks on churches while services were on-going, have burned tires to prevent circulation, have looted businesses and attacked hospitals, have threatened to murder students if they go to school on days of protests. 

But the perpetrators have not been police officers or government agents. Most have been hired hands or political activists, allies of the opposition, whose members have called for oil to be poured on roads, for barricades to be built higher, for people to arm themselves with "all available weapons" to confront the police and to "go get" the President in his home. A member of the opposition said recently "we cannot let children go to school because the President is still here."

To such an extraordinary admission of guilt, no one said, "but that kind of egoism is immoral." The silence has been deafening. To read the press releases, almost all of them, the government is the sole actor, and a bad one at that, in this tragedy. 

Where are Haiti's independent thinkers?

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