November 11, 2009
Thank you to everyone who voted for Pierre Labossiere as a human rights hero last month. Pierre was close, but not the top voter. He’s still our hero, and it was very nice to see the outpouring of support for his work.
Updates: IJDH supporters are holding a Boston fundraiser for us next Wednesday, November 18. Mario Joseph and I (Brian Concannon) will speak, and there will be a premier of a short video about our prison project. KQED, the San Francisco NPR station has a special on Haiti, featuring Margaret Trost, who keeps Fr. Jean-Juste’s feeding and school programs going, and Brian Concannon available as a podcast. The show is a good discussion about events in Haiti, and the issues we all struggle with comparing our relative wealth to the poverty in
Haiti.
Volunteer Request: IJDH has a new website almost ready to go. The new site will be easier to use, more interesting and more compatible with social networking sites. But first we need to transfer all the information from the existing site, to ensure that our website remains the best single source of Haiti human rights information on the net. If you can pitch in with 10 hours over the next 2-3 weeks to help out, let us know (brian@ijdh.org). If you can cut and paste in a word document, you can do this project.
This week’s action: We started Half-Hour for Haiti almost five years ago, and every alert we have issued has focused primarily on Haiti. But the coup d’état regime in Honduras is so blatantly illegal, and the U.S. government’s acquiescence in the illegality so shameful, that we feel forced to break with the tradition this once. But this alert is, in many ways about Haiti. Because if the Honduras coup is allowed to stand, despite near-universal condemnation by other countries in the Americas, and this U.S. Administration continues to support the coup, despite its clear electoral mandate to follow a more just foreign policy, then every progressive government in the hemisphere is in danger.
The alert below is from our friends at Rights Action, who have issued an excellent series of emails about the coup since the day it happened, June 28. Other excellent sources of information are Global Women’s Strike, which issued a compelling sign-on letter to Latin American Governments connecting the Haiti and Honduras coups, The Americas Program, which has issued thoughtful political analyses of the coup and U.S. response, including one by former U.S. Ambassador Robert White, and the Center for Economic and Policy Research, which has turned its usual sharp minds to the coup and the U.S. response.
Our standing up for democracy today in Honduras will prevent Haitians from risking their lives for democracy tomorrow. Please do what Hondurans cannot- call your elected representatives.
HONDURAS COUP ALERT - ACTION NEEDED in the USA
November 11, 2009
TELL YOUR CONGRESSPERSON, SENATOR, THE WHITE HOUSE & THE STATE DEPARTMENT
NOT TO RECOGNIZE THE HONDURAN COUP REGIME & THE NOVEMBER 29TH PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS
The U.S. government announced it will recognize the results of the November 29 presidential “elections” in Honduras with or without democratically-elected President Zelaya back in office and power.
From the Honduran people’s pro-democracy movement and the National Front Against the Coup, to governments across the Americas, to the Organization of American States, everyone and institution recognizes there are no conditions whatsoever in Honduras – under the control of an illegal and repressive military-oligarchic regime - to hold free and fair elections.
Since the June 28 coup, the regime has killed some 2 dozen Hondurans, illegally jailed over 3000 people, tortured (including rape) hundreds of people in illegal detention, and wounded hundreds in protests (due to rubber and live bullets, tear-gas and beatings).
It is in the context of this on-going repression that the illegal regime aims to hold elections as their way of legitimizing and justifying the un-legitimizable and unjustifiable coup.
We urge U.S. citizens to contact your member of congress, senator, the white house and state department, to demand:
• The unconditional return of President Zelaya and his government to full constitutional power and authority
• No recognition of the November 29 elections
• Justice for the plotters and perpetrators of the military coup
STATE DEPARTMENT, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Assistant Secretary Thomas Shannon: 202-647-4000
WHITE HOUSE, President Barack Obama and Dan Restrepo (Special Assistant to the President and National Security Council Senior Director for Western Hemisphere Affairs): 202-456-1111, 202-456-1414
* * *
STATEMENT BY HONDURAN PRESIDENT ZELAYA:
Tegucigalpa November 6, 2009
[Translation by Patricia Adams, The Quixote Center]
DECLARATION
Our weapon are ideas, our struggle is peaceful
Agreement Failed because of Micheletti’s Failure to Comply
In the face of the mockery that Mr. Micheletti has made of the Honduran People and the International Community - boycotting the Tegucigalpa/San Jose Agreement; letting the deadline for the creation of the Government of Unity pass without convening the National Congress, as is within his power and responsibility to do per the written agreement; the lack of a will to fulfill the Agreement in both letter and spirit is clear; ignoring the Plan Arias proposal, as well as the OAS and the UN resolutions - we declare that the Agreement has been a failure, because of the failure of the de facto regime to comply with the commitment to organize and install a government of unity and national reconciliation by this date; a government which should by law be presided over by the President elected by the People, José Manuel Zelaya Rosales.
1. We are not willing to give up the rights of the people by legitimating this Coup d’état
2. We do not accept the militarization of society nor that the President of Honduras be named by the elite of the Armed Forces
3. Democracy is the highest good of society and is the only path for confronting the problems of the third poorest economy in Latin America, and therefore we are not willing to be cheated nor that our Democracy be robbed from us
4. The permanent violations of Human Rights, the cancellation of public freedoms, the confiscation of communication media, as well as the status of the President elected by the people who is surrounded by the military inside the Brazilian Embassy and the political witch hunting, is all proof of the preparation of an enormous Political-Electoral fraud on November 29th
5. We announce that we will completely ignore this electoral process and the results of the aforementioned evils, elections under a dictatorship are a fraud for the people
6. We invite the Ministers of the OAS to make immediate pronouncements about the actions of the government legitimately elected by the people of Honduras and to continue to condemn and ignore this de facto regime
7. On behalf of the people, we thank the International Community, the OAS, Secretary Insulza, the ex- President of Chile Mr Ricardo Lagos Escobar, and the US Labor Secretary Mrs. Hilda Solís.
* * *
FOR MORE INFORMATION: Rights Action (www.rightsaction.org), Quixote Center (www.quixote.org), School of the Americas Watch (www.soaw.org), Narco News (www.nacronews.com)
TO SUPPORT THE PRO-DEMOCRACY, ANTI-COUP MOVEMENT IN HONDURAS: Make your tax-deductible check to “rights action” and mail to: Rights Action, Box 50887, Washington DC, 20091-0887, USA. CREDIT-CARD DONATIONS: www.rightsaction.org. (For foundations and institutional donors, Rights Action can provide a full proposal of organizations and people we are funding and working with).
For more information about the Half-Hour For Haiti program, the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) or human rights in Haiti, see our website, www.HaitiJustice.org. To receive Half-Hour for Haiti Action Alerts (about once a month), send an email to HalfHour4Haiti@ijdh.org.
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