It wasn’t exactly a home coming, but it was something close.
Annette “Sò Àn ” Auguste, one of Haiti’s most prominent political prisoners during Haiti’s most recent coup from 2004 to 2006, was back in Brooklyn, New York, where she had lived for 36 years.
On Sunday, January 7, 2007, close to 400 people filled the auditorium of St. Catherine’s Church in the heart of Brooklyn’s predominantly Haitian East Flatbush neighborhood to hear her talk about her ordeal and Haiti’s present political struggles.
Notice of the meeting was given only four days prior and advertized exclusively on Haitian community radio stations.
Sò Àn , 62, moved back to Haiti 13 years ago. In Brooklyn, she had been a democracy activist and protest singer during the 29-year Duvalier dictatorship and succeeding military juntas. She was usually called upon to lead the singing of the national anthem that traditionally opened the rallies and demonstrations at which she was a fixture.
Once back in Haiti, Sò Àn quickly became a prominent organizer and leader in the Lavalas Family party of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whom she helped get re-elected in November 2000.
U.S. soldiers kidnaped Aristide and his wife from their home on February 29, 2004 and flew them into exile in Africa. U.S., French and Canadian troops occupied Haiti and installed a murderous coup regime, which drove many Lavalas Family leaders into exile. But Sò Àn remained. She was recovering from recent surgery and finishing a new album with her all-women chorale.
Then on May 10, 2004, Mothers Day, U.S. Marines stormed her home in Delmas 16, exploding her gates, killing her dogs, and arresting, hand-cuffing and head-bagging her entire household, including her 5-year-old grandson and 68-year-old sister. It was over a year later before any charges were formulated against her, although one is supposed to be charged within 48 hours under Haitian law.
Sò Àn was thrown into a tiny dark four-bunk cell behind the Pétionville Police Station. During the two years and three months she spent there, Sò Àn became a symbol of the arbitrary and repressive fate that awaited Lavalas leaders.
Her liberation last August – after a short trial where the ridiculous charges against her, concocted by prosecutors in league with coup leaders, were scattered to the wind like bits of confetti – was greeted with jubilation in Haiti and its diaspora. Thousands turned out to parade in the streets of Cité Soleil when she triumphantly visited that seaside slum, the capital’s largest, on September 4.
However, “even though they released me, I still am not free,” she told the crowd at St. Catherine’s. “There are other Sò Àn s still in jail. Up until now, they have never been freed.”
Sò Àn ’s current mission in life is to win freedom for the hundreds of nameless “rats” and “chimères” (monsters) – the bourgeoisie’s pejorative names for poor Haitians – who still languish in Haiti’s rank overcrowded prisons. Almost all are uncharged, having been arrested for merely looking-like a Lavalas partisan. The profile: young, poor and male.
For the few that are charged, it is usually “association with wrong-doers” (association avec des malfaiteurs), a vague catch-all conspiracy charge which is practically impossible to prove... or more precisely, disprove.
Several of the women in jail with Sò Àn had no idea what the charge even meant. “We have never been to see a vodou priest,” some told her. “We only consult good people,” i.e. priests. The audience roared with laughter.
“I asked President [René] Préval what he was doing for these people,” Sò Àn told the crowd. “He told me: ‘Sò Àn , we are going to work to free the prisoners.’ But up until now, [former St. Marc deputy] Amanus Mayette is still in jail. All the nameless ‘rats’ arrested for the same baseless reasons as Sò Àn and [former Prime Minister] Yvon Neptune, most of them are still in jail.”
“For these people, I have had to become the voice for the voiceless,” Sò Àn said. “They have no money, no lawyers, and nobody helping them.”
She denounced the arrest last August of René Civil, another prominent Lavalas organizer on charges that he stole a state vehicle, a car he had used for close to seven years.
“[De facto Prime Minister Gérard] Latortue stole two [government purchased] cars and went with them back to Boca Raton [Florida, where he lives],” Sò Àn exclaimed. After Haiti’s constitutional government demanded they be returned, “he sent them back, but they never went to arrest and handcuff him for that.”
Much of Sò Àn ’s long address that evening in Brooklyn addressed President Préval and former President Aristide. She had harsh words for Préval.
“If you have [state] power in your hands and you don’t know how to use it, you shouldn’t take power,” she said, speaking to Préval.
“We are wasters of power,” she said of the Lavalas movement generally. “Several times we have taken it and each time we waste it.”
She reproached Préval for consorting with imperialism and playing into Washington’s game of repressing the masses and implementing neoliberal reforms such as privatization of key state-owned companies. Referring to his previous term as president from 1996 to 2001, Sò Àn said “Préval has already taken this class and now he is repeating it. I thought he would be the smartest in the class, but it seems he is the dumbest.” Préval has surrounded himself with opportunists, she said.
Nonetheless, she condemned the bourgeoisie’s increasingly clear campaign to destabilize and overthrow Préval. “Everything that we just saw under Aristide, it’s the same thing happening today,” she said. “We have to stop with this business of ‘he has to go.’ Let democracy work... If the putschists had received a stiff response before, they wouldn’t be doing this again. Latortue came in and carried out massacres. He even admitted it saying ‘we shot them, we crushed them.’ Is it that we don’t have competent people in the Lavalas that these same [putschists] are still in power?”
The New York event was organized and sponsored by local chapters of the Lavalas Family party, the Haiti Support Network (HSN), and the Haitian Coalition to Support the Struggle of the Haitian People (KAKOLA). Dr. Fanfan Latour, a Haitian community leader from Philadelphia and newspaper columnist, emceed the evening.
“The struggle in Haiti today must be carried on under the banner of [founding father] Jean-Jacques Dessalines,” said HSN’s Bernier Archille. “Whenever the occupation forces hear the name of Dessalines, they are vexed. The first thing we must do is drive out the occupation forces from the country, then we can address the other problems.”
A similar message came from KAKOLA’s Roger Leduc. “The main thing we have to understand and admit is that Haiti is occupied,” he said. “We are occupied by U.N. troops, but behind them stand the U.S., France and Canada.”
Leduc said that the large turn-out for the event proved that the community was not discouraged and demobilized, as some have asserted. He made a sweeping analysis of Haiti’s political conjuncture, calling for unity among progressive and nationalist forces. “Imperialism means that, even when you make an election, they are the ones that direct your economic and political programs, that decide who will be the ministers, who will be the bank director,” he said. The Lavalas Family’s Pierre Florestal also agreed that “Haiti is being humiliated by the former colonialists, by the imperialists... The most important thing for us to do is say ‘no,’ that we do not agree with what is happening in Haiti.”
Singer and dancer Jocelyn Gay performed several numbers with two other members of her group Voix et Tambours (Voices and Drums). Singer Rozna, flutist Ti Flit, and drummer Gérard also paid musical tributes to Sò Àn .
In response to questions from the audience, Sò Àn touched on many themes during her long dialogue with the community: her experiences being arrested and in prison, how she taught literacy and knitting to her fellow women inmates, the formation of a new Lavalas Family committee to organize a congress to pressure for Aristide’s return from exile, and the criminality and horror of the new U.N. and police attacks on Cité Soleil in which dozens of people have been killed.
Above all, she emphasized the need, and her determination, to keep struggling for justice, democracy and sovereignty in Haiti. “When I got out of jail, I went home and people there said to me ‘Sò Àn , relax. Don’t get involved in politics again,’” she said. “I told them no. Jean-Bertrand Aristide is in exile. He made errors, it is true. If those who displaced him did better than him, perhaps I might not fight. But as we all saw, a bunch of scoundrels replaced him, and they did nothing good at all. I said I must fight for [Aristide] to return because, even if he is no longer president, he has an organization which he should lead.”
Sò Àn returned to Haiti on January 8, but will be making several other appearances in different cities in the U.S. and Canada in the months ahead.
A collection of some $1,200 was made at the January 7 meeting for Sò Àn’s work in Haiti. To support her work, people can also purchase for $15 her latest CD, released while she was in jail, entitled “Sò Àn: Political Prisoner, What Else Can They Do to Me?” by calling the producer, Crowing Rooster Arts, at 212-334-6260. The album contains songs she recorded prior to her arrest with Koral La (The Chorale), her singing group made up exclusively of women from popular organizations.
