Hooligans attached to the regime of President Michel
Martelly and Prime Minister Evans Paul attacked about 30
militants from the Dessalines Coordination (KOD) party
as they loudly demonstrated at an official event for
International Workers Day in front of Haiti’s National
Palace on May 1.
The KOD
militants had marched about three miles from the
Industrial Park with hundreds representing unions,
popular organizations, and student groups. The
demonstrators loudly shouted their demands for a 500
gourdes ($10.57) a day minimum wage. Many marchers
affiliated with KOD also called for an end to the United
Nations military occupation of Haiti and the resignation
of President Martelly before the holding of
parliamentary and presidential elections, now scheduled
for August, October, and December 2015.
At the official ceremony on the
Champ de Mars, regime thugs assaulted the chanting KOD
militants, who fought back. A melee ensued in front of
the stage where Martelly and Paul were sitting.
“We so panicked Martelly with our
action that it became clear that he did not know what to
say,” stated KOD leader Oxygène David after the
struggle. “There was a security officer behind Martelly
who sent a guy to come take the sign I was holding high.
When he came to me, I gave him a shove. I received a lot
of blows today, but I also gave a lot of blows.”
Police of the Company for
Intervention and Maintenance of Order (CIMO) eventually
dispersed the demonstrators who came to protest at the
Martelly government’s official celebration, a Labor
Fair.
Workers from some unions carried
signs saying “Down with Yellow Unions that Collaborate
with the Bosses!”
KOD distributed a flyer explaining
how May 1st began as a day to remember the
repression against workers in the U.S. in 1886. “Today,
this same American government, which crushed its own
working class, is carrying out the same repression in
Haiti,” the flyer read. “Since the 1970s, U.S.
corporations have sent much of their manufacturing to
Haiti because workers here earn only $5 per day. In the
U.S., the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.
“In 2011, the U.S. government
carried out an electoral coup d’état to put the Martelly
regime in power in Haiti so that it could continue to
keep the working class in poverty, continue to steal the
land of peasants on Ile à Vache and the homes of
residents in downtown Port-au-Prince, to tax working
people sending money and making calls from the U.S.,
along with a lot of other theft, corruption, and
repression.
“Now, they need to do another
electoral mascarade for those who don’t understand the
game. KOD says ‘NO,’ the Haitian people will not be
ambushed again. KOD demands that Martelly and MINUSTAH
[UN Mission to Stabilize Haiti] leave so the country can
have free, fair, and sovereign elections. Having the
MINUSTAH, OAS, and Washington decide who wins elections
in Haiti, that can’t happen again! This business of
money buying the election, the way the bourgeoisie does
it in the U.S., that is not good for Haiti, it is not
good for democracy!”
KOD has called for a massive demonstration on May
18, beginning at Fort National in Port-au-Prince, to
demand the departure of Martelly and MINUSTAH before any
elections are held. The highly patriotic date marks the
212th anniversary of the creation of the red
and blue Haitian flag. |