Open Letter to Kofi Annan

Common Sense
John Maxwell

Your Excellency,
You are by far the most experienced, accomplished and skilful secretary-general the United Nations has ever had. I do not say this to butter you up, but to give my readers an idea of who you are.You are uniquely among secretaries-general, a child of the United Nations, for which you began working 43 years ago.

Since then you have worked in almost every possible capacity - in senior positions in Human Relations, Refugee Relief, Emergency Management, Peacekeeping and in Management and Finance. You know the organisation inside out, and you know better than anyone else in the world, what the UN can do and what it can't.

In the preamble to the Charter of the United Nations the founding members declared, inter alia: that the organisation was an instrument:

"...to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

AND FOR THESE ENDS to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples ."

It is this charter and the subsequent Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which persuades millions of poor and powerless people all over the world, that the United Nations is their best hope for freedom, justice and fair treatment, their Court of Last Resort.

Many of us, myself included, marched and demonstrated aginst the decision of the US and Britain to attack Iraq. We considered the invasion and war to be illegal. Almost exactly one year ago, in September 2004, you told a BBC reporter in London, "From our point of view and the UN charter point of view, it was illegal."

You, too, had been opposed to the invasion from the start because as you said, the initiative lacked Security Council approval as required by the UN charter, and you challenged the White House claims that the war had made the world safer from international terrorists.

I, however, and some others fault you for withdrawing the UN Inspection teams which action we believe, facilitated the invasion. The world has now been given ample proof, if it needed any, that the true objectives of the war were not as advertised, but were purely Great Power aggrandisement.

My concern is not about Iraq, however, it is about something much closer home. When the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 it was following, by 244 years, another declaration of universal human rights for the first time anywhere in the world nearly two centuries earlier.

That declaration was in Haiti where slaves destroyed not only the institution of slavery, but three major European armies sent to force them back into subjection.


Supporters of the ousted President Jean Bertrand Aristide take to the streets

In pursuit of their vision, the Haitians also armed and provisioned Simon Bolivar, the liberator-to-be of South America, when he was bankrupt, friendless and disheartened. The Haitians asked in return, only that Bolivar should free slaves anywhere he found them.

This spirit of internationalist altruism has not been duplicated by any other country, as far as I know, except in the cases of Tanzania and Cuba who directly intervened to destroy dictatorships in Uganda and Southern Africa, respectively.

Yet, despite their noble behaviour and their centuries struggle for freedom, the people of Haiti are this day under an oppression more onerous and unreasonable and absolute than slavery itself. At least, on the plantations the slaves were fed and had the freedom to cultivate their own grounds.

Today, as I speak, an alien armed force from many countries is in Haiti, providing protection cover and firepower in aid of the remnants of the most savage and barbaric regime in the history of the western hemisphere. It is not that others may not have murdered more, but the scale of the butchery and brutality of the Duvalier regimes and those dictatorships succeeding are in a class by themselves.

This alien armed force is in Haiti under the auspices, we are told, of the UN Security Council, two permanent members of which, aided by another northern power, sponsored, organised and controlled the armed kidnapping and overthrow of the lawfully elected president and government of Haiti.

Two days before this letter appears in print, people in many countries will have marched in solidarity with Haiti, commemorating the first occasion in which the forces of reaction overthrew the first freely elected government of Haiti in a hundred years.

Last year, had they been allowed, the Haitian people would have - under the auspices of the very United Nations you serve, celebrated their magnificent triumph of liberty over tyranny and freedom over slavery.

Instead, you did not attend the original day of celebration (you were apparently on holiday on the Jamaican north coast 300 miles away) and shortly thereafter, shrouded by a pungent smog of lies, obfuscation, chicanery and duplicity, the United States and its accomplices destroyed Haitian democracy for the second time in 12 years.

Their president, twice elected by overwhelming majorities as attested by the United Nations and the United States among others, with a more secure claim to legitimacy than the president who deposed him, was sent, labelled as cargo, with his family into shameful exile to our ancestral homeland- to a republic which has been more brutally abused than most by its colonial masters. It was hoped, no doubt, that the president and the Haitian people and the rest of the world would have accepted this reverse Middle Passage.

It was selfless altruism by a number of concerned Americans which rescued President Aristide and brought him to Jamaica where he remained for some time. Here, in this country, which probably more than most owes its freedom to Haiti, some of us, out of profound ignorance promoted by massive propaganda, did not make him as welcome as we should have. But that is a small matter.

What has utterly perplexed many of us is that you, as the court of last resort for the hungry, the oppressed and the suffering of this world, did not act to rescue the Haitian people from their oppressors, but, instead, sadly and unfortunately, appeared to connive in their further debasement and disfranchisement, in the most evil denial of the fundamental human rights they alone proclaimed two centuries ago.

You, more than anyone on this planet, should know the insides of the programmes to subvert freedom, planned and executed by a faceless collection of managers who have usurped their own capitalist enterprises, taken control away from their shareholders and stolen the pensions of their workers, and having made themselves richer than any Rockefeller could have imagined a century ago, are now proceeding to wage war on the world, to reduce by the process of globalisation, intimidation and war the rest of us to a state of abject dependence in sweated labour without justice or mercy.

Your plan to reform the United Nations has been subverted by the state representatives of these thugs, some of whom are even now under indictment and or criminal investigation in their own countries. It is a plan which you first proposed in 1997 and represents the work and hopes of most of the world's peoples, but it is at this very moment being sabotaged and undermined by political termites and deathwatch beetles which are intent on returning most of us to the Dark Ages, gated and fenced away from their rapturous bell-curved paradise.

Mr John Bolton, the US Ambassador to the UN, has said:

"There is no such thing as the United Nations. There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world, and that is the United States, when it suits our interest and when we can get others to go along. And I think it would be a real mistake to count on the UN as if it is some disembodied entity out there that can function on its own."- Global Structures Convocation, Feb 3, 1994.

He has said more and worse, but there is no need to explore further what passes for his mind.

Another of these conscienceless brutes, one Bill O'Reilly, said that when Mr Bush spoke two weeks ago at the UN about combatting terrorism ". I'm sure all the UN people fell asleep. They don't really care about anything over there at all. I just wish Katrina had only hit the United Nations building, nothing else, just had flooded them out. And I wouldn't have rescued them."

The racism, prejudice and ignorance of these boobies are obvious to most of the world, and in the United States the majority have recovered from the hypnotic trance in which they have been immured for the last several years.

You, Kofi Annan, know better than anyone, that globalisation is a primitive commercial reaction to the UN's Agenda 21, because the aim of Agenda 21 was the eradication of poverty by sustainable development. The intent is explicit: it was Enron, that once admired and now discredited and derided Ponzi scheme, which was given the duty of writing the General Agreement on Trade in Services, the crucial part of the globalisation impoverishment process.

But these yahoos are on the run; their elaborately constructed mirages are falling apart, the law is catching up with some of them and will catch up with more.

The second most powerful man in the US, House leader Tom DeLay is under indictment for criminal misuse of funds. Two of DeLay's associates, Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, are being investigated by at least five federal agencies for wholesale bribery, extortion, fraud and corruption generally; and three associates of Abramoff - Florida 'businessmen' - were last week charged with murder.

Meanwhile, in Haiti, enveloped in an aura of sanctimony, the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice was busy advising the 'government' she helped invent, about the need for better PR: they're locking up too many leaders of the Haitian people prior to their so-called 'election'.

We - you, the Haitian people, the Jamaican people and I all share the same ancestry and the Haitians' ancestors performed deeds that no one else had ever done; their spirits walk uneasily over the lands fertilised by their bones and blood.

Their spirits need peace, Kofi, and you can give it to them by giving their descendants the rights and dignities to which they are entitled and for which they have suffered, struggled and fought so hard for so long.

Yours sincerely,
John Maxwell

That UWI patty shop

The university authorities have published an 'explanation" of their decision to site a patty shop at the state entrance to the university. According to a release, the patty shop has been three years in gestation and has the approval of the KSAC.

My questions are; Does it have planning permission from NEPA? Were Jamaica's partners in the UWI consulted? Was the project put out to tender? What revenue will the UWI derive? Doesn't the UWI realise that under GATS it has now opened all its prime green spaces to commercial exploitation? Is a supermarket scheduled for the Chapel grounds?