In This Issue Common Ground: New Orleans to Port-Au-Prince Contents After Katrina: The Depopulation of New Orleans Elections in Haiti: Papering Over an Illegal Situation Why We Need To Care About Haiti New Orleans: Occupied Territory Sir! NO Sir! A Film About GI Resistance Refusing To Kill: Katherine Jashinski’s Public Statement Interview With Katherine Jashinski From Chaos to Conscience to Peace Counter-Recruitment Wrap-Up 2005 Counter-Recruitment Posters Some Thoughts on the Bolivarian Revolution

After Katrina: The Depopulation of New Orleans by Wendy Carson Left Photo- from left: Wendy, Maria, Francisco and Rishi clean and move furniture from a building being donated to Common Ground in NOLA's 7th Ward. Right Photo- A house in the Lower 9th Ward destroyed by the flood. There is much to be learned about the struggle for grassroots community development and control after hurricane Katrina. But it is also important to note what Katrina’s category 4 winds uncovered, for the whole world to see. There are the manmade disasters of what did not happen in her aftermath, and what is happening in New Orleans, LA (NOLA) now that residents are struggling against, are fighting for, and winning against the odds. The battle is being waged against some familiar foes, neglect, poverty, and race and class politics which are being epitomized in FEMA’s selection of our old buddy Halliburton to lead the rebuilding of New Orleans, a city that was rich in African-American culture and customs. The natives of NOLA are fighting to make certain that what Halliburton and other nonresidents have planned for NOLA doesn’t happen. The G word (gentrification), means that the people of NOLA must be disappeared. "The people of New Orleans will not go quietly into the night, scattering across this country to become homeless in countless other cities while Federal relief funds are funneled into the rebuilding of casinos, hotels, chemical plants, and wealthy white districts of New Orleans like the French Quarter and the Garden District. We will not stand idly by while this disaster is used as an opportunity to replace our homes with newly built mansions and condos in a gentrified New Orleans." --Statement of the Displaced New Orleans Community, Community Labor United, People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Coalition. In early November 2005, as a member of a Just Cause Oakland (JCO) delegation, I worked in New Orleans for six days. Our host organization, The People’s Hurricane Relief Fund & Oversight Coalition, had issued a national call for volunteers/organizers to come to NOLA. Many organizations and individuals, including JCO, responded to that call. There were four people in our delegation myself, Rishi Awatramani, Maria Cardenas and Francisco Daza. On our first day in NOLA we were given an oral history of the city, which spanned from the 1800s to present day. We then traveled to the community of Algiers where we were met by members of the Common Ground Collective (Common Ground), one of the many organizations that comprise the coalition, and given an orientation on their history and community solidarity work. Common Ground is a local community network designed to provide mutual aide and long-term hurricane relief in Gulf Coast communities and has organized relief efforts in Algiers and NOLA’s hard hit Orleans East, Ninth and Lower Ninth Ward neighborhoods by establishing disaster relief distribution centers for food, water, cleaning supplies, clothing, neighborhood health clinics, and volunteers to aid residents with everything from cleaning apartments, tarping roofs, to gutting homes. At the time of my departure from NOLA, Common Ground had provided more than 60 tons of food, water, cleaning supplies, diapers, health and hygiene goods and other necessities to more than 15,000 people in Algiers, Houma and New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. Outside the courthouse seeking info to stop the illegal evictions of the displaced. Common Ground assigned our delegation to a number of different tasks. We loaded and unloaded trucks filled with disaster relief supplies, we cooked and served food in community kitchens, distributed food and supplies to residents, we worked in and provided translations at their community health clinics, and we gutted homes. I met many people from my hometown in the Bay Area who had traveled to NOLA to work with Common Ground. Many of these people told me that they had decided to stay in NOLA for as long as it takes, as long as they are needed. I have heard of volunteers who once they have returned from NOLA have quit their jobs and headed back. I was almost one of them. This may be surprising to some since volunteers are being harassed, beaten and jailed by NOPD in an effort to cut off supplies to residents. One of the most difficult assignments I had while there was gutting houses. It’s physically demanding but that wasn’t the hard part. For instance, my teammates and I gutted the home of a woman who had lived in the Upper Ninth Ward, in this home, for 30 years. She had been relocated to Houston and her daughter and son-in-law had returned to NOLA to check on their properties and had asked Common Ground for volunteers to help them with gutting their mother’s severely damaged home. Anna, who is one of the coordinators at the Ninth Ward Common Ground Distribution Center, told us this was a really bad site and asked if we were okay with helping this family. We said of course and were given hazmat protective clothing, thick rubber gloves, goggles and respirators that Anna told us we must use because of the toxicity at sites like these. Everything in this woman’s home had been ruined, her house may not be able to be restored, but instead be torn down and rebuilt with new specifications to pacify insurers that she cannot afford. She will probably lose her home. What was particularly heartbreaking was taking 30 years of memories from this woman’s life and just dumping them on the sidewalk. Someone’s baby pictures, all the once beautiful Sunday hats and clothes, crystal figurines, china, little bells from a wedding cake. More than a generation of memories dumped into the gutter. Ishmael Muhammad of the Grassroots Legal Network places himself between city workers, their bulldozers and houses in the Lower Ninth Ward. The level of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among surviving and displaced residents is hard to miss. When talking to residents I noticed some things were just universal, like how they all got this faraway look in their eyes and gazed somewhere past me when describing what happened when the levee breached and the water came, and came, and just kept coming. Depression abounds along with sleepless nights and homelessness. I am not aware of any organization that is providing the much needed counseling these survivors should be entitled to. One of the most eerie things about NOLA when I was there is the noticeable absence of children. I saw very few kids, maybe four or five in all of my time there. Children were separated from parents and siblings during the evacuation that scattered thousands of New Orleanians to every corner of the country, Utah, Alaska, Oakland, Arizona. Not since the days of slavery and WWII internment camps in this country have we witnessed such mass separation and displacement of families. At the time I was there 6,000 children were still missing and unaccounted for. I cannot help my feelings of sadness and outrage. This would not have happened if these people had not been Black. Being poor had very little to do with their treatment. The poor whites of the Gulf Coast were not separated from family and displaced en masse by their government. The response by our government in NOLA was not a humanitarian one it was a militarized one. I watched as residents could only receive relief supplies from Common Ground as our soldiers rode by in Humvees, not participating in any relief effort. Our soldiers walked the streets four and five abreast M-16s in hand while the people of NOLA needed help gutting homes, clearing debris, restoring electricity and clean running water. They were not under orders to help they had been ordered to shoot to kill looters, protect property, enforce curfew and martial law. There was no honor in their assignment there and I wondered how hard it was for some of them to see their fellow Americans treated like something you scrape from the bottom of your shoe. It had to be hard. Maria finds .22 calibur shell amid the rubble in the Lower Ninth Ward. There are dogs that once were beloved pets that are now roaming the streets in packs. There was a dog named Biko at our host’s home who also appeared to be traumatized (he too had that faraway gaze in his eyes) and in need of a vet. There are volunteers from the SPCA from all over the country there and hopefully Biko will get checked out. Another unfortunate observation I made was how residents told me, to a person, that none of them had seen the Red Cross in their neighborhoods at any time. The condition of the Lower Ninth Ward is unbelievable and just assaults the senses. The sight of utter destruction, clothes in treetops, houses collapsed, telephone poles snapped in two, trees uprooted, overturned cars, baby strollers, a teddy bear covered with mud, and military checkpoints for as far as the eyes can see. The only sounds were those of military helicopters and Humvees moving through the Ward to enforce curfew. There was still no electricity or running water in this area when I visited. The smell in the Lower Ninth and most parts of the Upper Ninth Ward and many other neighborhoods is almost unbearable. Incredible acres of mold and mildew occupy buildings and homes, there are metals in the air and no one trusts the water, if its running. There was the smell of food that had rotted in thousands of refrigerators, sewage in the mud that was everywhere in the poor areas of the city from the 8-to-20 foot floodwaters that had remained stagnant for more than a month. And the smell of death, this is what families who could return faced (please read the 11/15/05 USA Today article about Ninth Ward residents returning home to find the bodies of relatives still in their homes). Every morning I would take Biko for a walk; we could walk for blocks and not encounter another living thing. Trees, shrubbery, etc., all had turned brown and brittle from their drowning for over 30 days in the toxic floodwaters. Most of the Lower Ninth Ward was barricaded and had armed soldiers guarding the perimeters. You cannot enter unless you are a Ninth Ward resident with valid ID to prove it, and then enter only on the tour bus is what the soldiers told us. We witnessed a bus full of white men in shirtsleeves and suits who didn’t seem to resemble Ninth Ward residents to me. Perhaps they were landowners or real estate speculators? Maybe FEMA had finally arrived. Definitely not residents. The NOLA community is fighting to have a voice in the rebuilding of their city, but the first battle is over their right to return. It is apparent from what is going on that they are being more than discouraged from returning. Another aspect of our solidarity work in NOLA involved interviewing residents to get their stories in their own words, about what had happened before, during and after Katrina. We also worked to assist in stemming the flow of the thousands of evictions that are taking place, as many as 1,500 evictions a day. One of our first assignments was to travel to the city of Gretna (infamous for turning back, at gunpoint, NOLA residents who were fleeing for their lives the floodwaters as they tried to cross the Crescent City Connection Bridge that spans the Mississippi River linking New Orleans to the west bank city of Gretna). My teammate Rishi and I were working with a group of 11 student volunteers from Princeton University. On Thursday our assignment was to go to the courthouse in Gretna and get copies of the names and contact information for tenants whose eviction hearings were scheduled for the upcoming Monday and Tuesday. Once we reached the courthouse we were told we would have to request the information from the judge who would be presiding over the hearings. Rishi and I, along with three of the Princeton students, descended on the judge’s office. The office was filled with people, landowners who had come to have their tenants eviction papers signed by the judge. Realizing this could take all day, our group split up, with the students headed for a different county to recover additional information. Rishi and I remained and spoke to the judge and politely asked for copies of the eviction information. The judge denied our request once he ascertained that we were there as advocates for the tenants, and what seemed to bother him even more was the fact that we were from out of town. We explained that we would make the copies ourselves and pay for them too, we were again denied. When we pointed out that the documents were public information the judge flatly told us “I don’t care”. We were then told that we needed to have someone local call him to “vouch” for us before we would be allowed to view the documents. After a couple of hours and many, many phone calls, we reached our support person from the Southern Poverty Law Center and he agreed to phone the judge and “vouch” for us. Needless to say we knew there would be another denial. This time the judge’s excuse was that he didn’t have enough people to supervise us as we went through the records, so we would have to come back on Tuesday afternoon, sometime after 1:30 pm. We made the appointment so that on Tuesday one of the representatives from the PHRF could get the information. I was told that 500 people a day were being evicted in Orleans Parish alone, most in absentia, as some landowners and developers rush to cash in on the Crescent City’s newfound development boom and profit from the mass displacement of poor and working class African-Americans from the Ninth Ward and Lower Ninth Ward who have been scattered from Alaska to Maine. Three-day eviction notices were posted on the doors of the displaced. Their belongings were then tossed outside, all without the knowledge of those forced to evacuate. Lawsuits were filed and the evictions were halted. Sign at the Outdoor Community Kitchen in a park near the French Quarter welcomes New Orleanians home. The two other members of our delegation had begun working day and night interviewing Spanish speaking day laborers at their hotels (where they are being housed by the FEMA contractors who have brought them into the city) and at Common Ground mobile clinics, providing translations for doctors and taking information about working, living conditions, and wages, etc. What we found was that there are many grievances among these workers, many of whom have not been paid and are not receiving any medical care (except for the free services of Common Ground). Workers are being brought in not only from around the country but also from Guatemala, Mexico, and Thailand as well. FEMA contractors are applying for work visas on behalf of these workers, many of whom don’t speak English and are being taken advantage of. Contractors have even built tent cities in NOLA’s City Park to house out of state workers, who will plant trees, clean up debris, gut buildings (like the Superdome) and begin the reconstruction efforts. Meanwhile, displaced New Orleanians are not being hired to rebuild their city; this is designed not only to discourage evacuees from returning but also to foster resentment, mistrust and hostility among the immigrants and the natives, pitting poor people against each other. Divide, conquer and exploit. The militarization of what should have been NOLA hurricane relief is a very sad and disturbing thing to witness. NOLA is occupied territory with FBI, Boarder Patrol, Coast Guard, National Guard, and any other law enforcement agency you could name. But while I was in NOLA there were maybe only 10,000 residents there. Soldiers patrolled the streets, not to distribute much needed food, water, and clothing, but to shoot to kill “looters” and to act as tour guides for developers who like vampires descended upon the Lower Ninth Ward to suck out what little life was remaining. Our soldiers, who could have helped tarp roofs, clear debris, or gut homes, were made to act as an occupying force in hostile territory instead. Today, the people of NOLA are standing (literally) in front of bulldozers. They are fighting to keep their neighborhoods from being bulldozed without affording the owners of theses properties the due process under the law to which they are entitled. Every day is a constant struggle. My experiences in NOLA were life changing. It was a humbling experience and I am inspired by the courage and resilience of all the people I met and worked with. If you have the opportunity to volunteer, go to NOLA, and bear witness.

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