Soul on Life Support
June 2010
“The May 26 press statement for the march, signed by ten organizations, states, “After the January 12 catastrophe, the occupation has been strengthened with other foreign soldiers and MINUSTAH, on the pretext that they are helping us… [T]hey did nothing to help prevent more than 300,000 people from dying under rubble… Now on the sixth anniversary of the occupation, we are taking to the streets of Port-au-Prince to get the country out from under the rubble of MINUSTAH.”[9] Community organizerNixon Boumba with the grassroots organization Democratic Popular Movement said in an interview, “We’re asking for Haitians to be the true actors in their future, and for an end to the occupation to allow the country to have dignity and autonomy for the development and transformation of the country. We need schools, we need people in the camps attended to. After January 12 there have been a lot of opportunities to resolve the problems in the country. Instead, Canada, France, the U.S., Brazil, and others have acted like imperialists, strengthening their power and trying to undermine our chance to change the quality of our country. The U.S. wants Haiti to serve as a military base for the Caribbean, to control resistance from Latin America. And they want to prevent a massive emigration toward the U.S. and Canada.”
—Growing Protests As UN Attacks Haitian Refugee Camp (via curate) (via bonesarecoralmade) (via so-treu)
“While I think it is important to highlight the inhumanity and violence of our detentions, it is critical to remember that humiliation and dehumanization is the purpose of the prison-industrial complex. I was personally not expecting a better ‘experience’ than the horrific one I did have given the inherent nature of the po…lice stat…e. For those ‘innocent bystanders” (who were explicit about not being protestors), this is an opportunity to be made aware that the horrors they experienced at the hands of the police or while in detention are not unique moments in Toronto or Canadian history. We run the risk of exceptionalizing this moment, at the expense of normalizing the daily violence of police and prisons and the criminal (in)justice system for Indigenous communities, people of colour, low income neighborhoods, street-involved youth, and trans people.”
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Harsha Walia (via poopytoothpaste)
yes!
(via shakepaper) (via curate)
(via so-treu)
