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On Solidarity

Statement by the Grassroots Haiti Solidarity Committee

February 20, 2006

In September 2005 a graduate student from California, Jeb Sprague, reported that the Haitian labor group Batay Ouvriye ("Workers' Struggle") had received funding from the AFL-CIO's American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS, better known as the Solidarity Center). As the Solidarity Center draws funds from a number of sources, including the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), itself a US government-funded operation, Sprague's report set off a significant debate among progressives in North America about funding sources, about Batay Ouvriye and about ousted Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his Lavalas Family (FL) party.
The Grassroots Haiti Solidarity Committee is concerned that a number of issues in this debate have been misrepresented.
Members of our committee made statements which argued the issues based on an initial $3,500 grant from the Solidarity Center. Batay Ouvriye received these funds in the summer of 2004 in response to an open appeal for funds to support fired workers in the Ouanaminthe Free Trade Zone. Our members' arguments were based on the information that was available to us at that time. Batay Ouvriye has since acknowledged that it has accepted additional funds from the Solidarity Center originating from the NED and that it is willing to receive still more, as much as $100,000. We recognize that the disclosure of additional funding casts doubt on the validity of some of our arguments, and we regret any assertions that the $3,500 contribution to the strike fund was the only money involved.
There is a range of opinions within our committee and among our collaborators on Batay Ouvriye's acceptance of these funds. Some of us support Batay Ouvriye's justifications based on the urgency of its organizing needs; others are concerned that the funding lends weight to arguments raised by Batay Ouvriye's detractors and has the potential to isolate the organization from other progressive forces internationally.
For the record, Grassroots Haiti has never received any US government funding and will not knowingly accept any such funding.
But after years of experience working with Batay Ouvriye, our members are united in rejecting the simplistic line of argument that the organization has somehow been bought off by the US government. In fact, we feel this episode reflects less on Batay Ouvriye than on inherent weaknesses in the international left and especially in the US progressive movement, where solidarity too often focuses on charismatic leaders with access to state power while overlooking the struggles of actual workers and others on the ground. The international left would be in a better position to criticize if it had been providing a meaningful level of concrete support to Batay Ouvriye and other grassroots organizations over the years.
We also feel that current Solidarity Center practices should not be mechanistically equated to the practices of the AFL-CIO's old American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD). While certainly both agencies have acted as proxies for US government intrusions in international labor struggles (most recently the Solidarity Center's support for anti-Chavez unions in Venezuela), there seems to be a greater level of internal contradictions in the Solidarity Center's current operations than in AIFLD's practices. The Solidarity Center's efforts to protect Colombian unionists under a death sentence from rightwing paramilitaries is a case in point. At the same time, it is also reasonable to assume that any program receiving NED funds is viewed by the State Department as favorable to US interests—rightly or wrongly—and this clearly makes any acceptance of such funds problematic.
We also note with great concern the distortions of Batay Ouvriye's work by Aristide's partisans—distortions which contribute, at the very least, to an ongoing campaign to break an organization that has played and continues to play a vital role in the promotion and defense of working-class interests in Haiti.
To characterize Batay Ouvriye as complicit in Aristide's overthrow is simply a misrepresentation of the facts. As its detractors know, Batay Ouvriye played no role in the movement calling for Aristide's resignation or removal. What Batay Ouvriye did do, over the years, was denounce forcefully the practices and the class orientation of both the Lavalas government and its bourgeois opposition.
Batay Ouvriye itself was a victim of the Aristide government's repressive anti-worker policies. This repression resulted in the death of several Batay Ouvriye organizers, most notably in Cointreau's Guacimal orange plantations. This repression also resulted in the jailing of many organizers and the destruction of their homes and meeting places. While this repression was going on, factory owners and rural landlords enjoyed total impunity for their illegal and violent attacks on workers and peasants. Batay Ouvriye rightly denounced the Lavalas regime and its betrayal of the people's demands.
Unknown to most US progressives, Aristide's government was a leading architect of the current occupation of Haiti—although not one of its beneficiaries. From its signing on to the 1994 US-United Nations occupation and the various accords with the Organization of American States (OAS) granting an ever-increasing foreign oversight of Haitian affairs, to its last-minute appeals for a military intervention on its behalf, Aristide's government built up a record that can hardly be viewed as popular, progressive or anti-imperialist. While we denounce the US role in Aristide's removal as an attack on the sovereignty of the Haitian people and a furthering of the imperialist domination of Haiti, we also denounce the complicity of the Lavalas government in deepening Haiti's dependence and vulnerability.
Who are the real anti-imperialists, the Lavalas government with its sellout anti-worker policies, or the workers and grassroots organizations leading the struggle against these very policies?
Big country chauvinism is not to be confused with solidarity work. Solidarity activists can voice strong criticisms but must also respect the reasoning and decisions of the people who are actually carrying out their own struggles on the ground, often with knowledge and insight that we can only envy. Despite reservations about Batay Ouvriye's decisions on funding, we support its struggle to develop class-based, independent and democratic organizing among the masses based on the people's own demands. That support is especially important at a time when despite occupation and increased repression, grassroots and trade-union organizing is experiencing a resurgence in Haiti.
Some forces want to use the current debate to bring an end to Batay Ouvriye's organizing. We are confident, on the contrary, that the attention this discussion has brought to the issues will instead help build more meaningful international solidarity for Batay Ouvriye's important work.

New York City, February 20, 2006