By Beverly Bell
March 15, 2013

Twenty-seven years later, the unimaginable has become real. Former dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier has been brought to trial for crimes against humanity.

Will justice finally arrive for the hundreds of thousands who were murdered, tortured, imprisoned, beaten, savaged, and degraded by him and his father, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier?

February 24, 2013

by International Relations, Capital CTA

[Excerpt]

 On Saturday, February 23, a workshop and debate on the removal of MINUSTAH troops was organized by the Argentine Committee for Solidarity with Haiti.

By Beverly Bell, Tory Field, and Deepa Panchang

A shovel overturned can flip so much more than soil, worms, and weeds. Structural racism - the ways in which social systems and institutions promote and perpetuate the oppression of people of color – manifests at all points in the food system. It emerges as barriers to land ownership and credit access for farmers of color, as wage discrimination and poor working conditions for food and farmworkers of color, and as lack of healthy food in neighborhoods of color. It shows up as discrimination in housing, employment, redlining, and other elements which impact food access and food justice.

By Beverly Bell
March 8, 2013

On this International Women's Day, we rerun a 2005 piece on one of our greatest heroines, Marie Simone Alexandre. Though she died eight years ago, her life and message remain as powerful and inspirational today as any we know. 

"It was thanks to God and Sister Simone." I heard this over and over in the mid-1990s as I was interviewing rape survivors in one of Port-au-Prince's shantytowns. The women were battling the devastating effects of rape, employed as a weapon of war by one in a decades-long series of U.S.-backed regimes.[i] My question to these women, which so often invoked Simone's name, was "From where have you found the strength to go on?"

By Beverly Bell
March 5, 2013

Three years after the deadly earthquake in Haiti, what has become of the commitments made on Red Cross billboards, the promises from telethon hosts, the moving declarations of Presidents Obama and Clinton? What has happened to the nearly $10 billion that was pledged to assist survivors and to rebuild, most of which was entrusted to the large non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that Professor Mark Schuller terms “non-profiteers”?
 

We, women of the world, are turning our grief into strength

28 February by Marche mondiale des femmes

Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier at his Feb. 28, 2013 hearing. The sweltering courtroom was packed with over a dozen victims of the regime and with local and foreign journalists, lawyers and representatives of human rights groups. Credit: Milo Milfort/IPS

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Mar 1 2013 (IPS) - For the first time ever, on Thursday Haiti’s former dictator faced his accusers, answering questions about corruption and human rights abuses during his brutal 15-year regime (1971-1986).

“We, women from more than 40 countries, from different indigenous peoples of Africa, the Americas, Europe, Asia and Oceania, have gathered together to participate in the creation of a new right: the right to food sovereignty. We reaffirm our will to act to change the capitalist and patriarchal world which puts the interests of the market before the rights of people. We will find the energy to establish our right to food sovereignty, carrier of hope in constructing another world. We will carry this message to women all over the world.”