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: 10-THE CAROLINA TIMES—SATURDAY, MAY 23, 1998 commentary Vantage Point Women of Haiti Still Cry Out for Justice By Ron Daniels I recently returned from Haiti deeply disturbed by the lack of justice for thousands of Haitian women who were victims of violence under the coup regime that toppled President Jean Bertrand Aristide in 1991. Un fortunately, nearly four years after the restoration of President Aristide and the rebirth of democracy in Haiti, few of the perpetrators of the rein of terror that resulted in the murder of thousands of Haitians have been brought to justice for their crimes. The untold story of this unspeakable rein of terror, directed by Cedras, Biamby and Francois and carried out by their principal hit-man Em manuel "Toto” Constant (who was also on the payroll of the CIA), is that Haitian women bore much of the brunt of the assault. The international community has come to know of the tragic/lieroic story of, Alerte :BeIance, a Haitian militant in the Lavalas Movement, who was hacked :ahd dismembered, by a machete wielding squad of Constant’s hdnchmen -and left for dead in a killing field outside of,Port au Prince. Miraculously ;Ms. Belance, whose husband managed to escape the attackers, lived to itelF ;her story. She has become a valiant voice for women victims of rviolence. However, there are thousands of other cases which are simply unknown to the international community/public. An organization called MAP VIV, is one of the agencies in Haiti strug gling to offer supportive services to women victims of violence under the coup. Our delegation was moved to tears as we visited this agency and heard women tell their stories first hand. Without exception the women we spoke with h^ been supporters or sympathizers of President Aristide and the Lavalas Movement. Some of them had been vendors, shop keep ers and small business p^A'ners. Because they dared to dream of demo cracy in Haiti and had the courage to stand up and fight for the return of the embodiment of their dream in the person of Aristide, they logs every thing. we heard horrific story after story of women being unmercifully beaten, tortured, raped, and shot. Some are now rearing children who arc the offspring of their violent violation by rape. Most of these women are now penniless and homeless, living day to day having little other than MAP VIV. each other and their undying hope for justice to sustain them. Yet these courageous women of Haiti have not loss their dignity. They have plans for a new future. To ease their pain, the women created a play which tells the story of the violence and terror they suffered under the coup. The play is therapeutic because it provides an outlet for the pent up anger, frustration and self doubts that often accompany the trauma of this kind of violence. Tire’ women also have another idea for the play. They want to use it. not only to tell the world their story and to build support for their demand that justice be done, these remarkable women of Haiti also want to use the proceeds from the play as seed money for a cooperative economic venture. They want to continue to work collectively, using the economic venture to give themselves a new start in life. The women made one simple request of our delegation. They asked us to bring them to the United States so that they could perform their play, tell their stories and let the world know that the women of Haiti are still crying out for justice. The women also see the premier of their play in the U.S. as a means to raise the seed m»)ney needed to launch their coopera tive economic venture. During a previous delegation to Haiti, as an act of faith, I pledged that somehow we would assist our Haitian sisters to fulfill their wish of com ing to the U.S. This nation has historically been responsible for much of the suffering in Haiti, including being in complicity with the 199! coup, sp’ijds appropriate that these victims from among the Haitian masses cojrte to the prime citadel of their oppression to speak truth to power. iUpon my return on this delegation. I was able to inform the women that jve; were not just coming to hear their anguish and pain, we bore good hews! The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the New York based civil rights/human rights, public interest legal organization where 1 serve as Executive Director, has agreed to bring a delegation from MAP VIV tatheJJ.S. for a tour to enable them to perform their play. Plans arc now utprogress for the tour to take place in (he Fall of this year. . In addition to the play, we envision the women of MAP VIV mcciing with: members of the Congressional Black Caucus, the Progressive Caucus, civil rights organizations, Haiti Solidarity organizations and grassroots advocacy groups. Hopefully these face to face meetings with victims of violence under the coup will m-crcase the pressure on the U.S. government.to do much more to aid the Haitian people in their struggle for:juslicc. CCR is committed to .seeing that the women of Haiti have fh'cir day before the court of public wj>inion in the U.S. as they continue tbeir courageous fight for justice too long denied. :To Be Equal Taking Care of Business By Myron F. Robinson President, The Urban League of Greater Cleveland (Continued On Page 11) Carolina Beat Wicker’s Wacky Tuition Plan By Andrew Cline and Michael Lowrey,. RALEIGH - Few indeed arc the proposals as dramatic as that made recently by Lt. Gov. Dennis Wicker: Eliminate communiiy-cdlrege tui tion for full-time students who graduate from North Carolina high schools after 1998. And few are the proposals as bad. Wicker’s idea is possibly the least thought out, least fair, most counterproductive, and most economically wasteful to emerge from Raleigh in the last decade. For starters, tuition is not. by and large, keeping people from attending the state’s community colleges (One in six North Carolina adults already attends a stale community college). A semester's tuition for in-siaie stu dents is only $280. Starling this yeai. federal lax credits of up to $1.500 a year will be offered for a student's lirst two years of college. In addition, numerous grants and loans, including federal Pell Grants, are available for students who can demonstrate economic need. Wicker’s proposal simply does not address a real need; costs arc not driving potential, stu dents away from the community college system. Not only does Wicker's plan till at windmills, but like Quixote. Wick er’s fanta.sy would create additional problems. Low tuition rales that al low students to drop classes without forgoing much money already have created a high dropout rate at N.C. community colleges. If students w'cre to pul forth none ol' their own dollars for tuition, this problem would worsen. Furthermore, Wicker wants to provide 100 percent state-funded tuition — it’s subsidized, not "free" — but not for every one. Only full-time stu dents who move directly from high school into the community college system would qualify. Thus, Wicker's plan would encourage those stu dents who otherwise would attend part-time to enroll full-time, not attend the extra classes, and stick us with the lab. And what about those students who want or need to work between graduating high school and attending college? Wicker leaves them in the lurch. Also, Wicker’s estimate of his plan’s total cost is short by about $i0 million a year because he calculated only the cost of tuition, not the full co.si of educating a community college student. The real cost likely would be more than $22 million per year, not the $12 million that he estimated. ‘ Again, Wicker chases ghosts while allowing a real evil to ravajj populace. Announcing his plan. Wicker reasoned that 12 years ofsci ing were not enough to produce an adequately educated person aij] two additional years were therefore needed. He was both wrong. North Carolina students arc woefully undereducated afterilfl .year.^i i,iidlie.pub|ic\„school,!iysleAa, but the problem docs not stemi too few.years of schooling. Rather, those 12 years contain too iitllfi cation. The issue isn't lime, but productivity. N.C. Slate University economist Michael Walden studied eduai inputs among industrialized nations and found that American cE spent more time in school than students in every other induslnjl country save the Netherlands. American per-pupil spending was among the highest in the world. Yet. despite these high inputs. U.S. dents continued to score poorly on international tests. The ni Walden wrote, was that classroom time is not used as producing America as it-is in oilier nations. American schools leach more subjects and have shorter class than schools in other countries. As a result, American studentsspeil time on their core academic subjects than do their counterparts nations. "[H]igh school students in Japan. France and Germany more than double the amount of instructional time in core acadcM! jeets than do American students," Walden found. This is true though American students spend more time in school. What is true of the U.S.A. in*genci al is true of North Garolinalnli Carolina, our students simply are not learning the core subjects.Oi latest National Assessment of Educational Progress tests. North Can students performed horribly. In reading (tested in the 4ih gradeoniyi 26 percent ol North Carolina students were proficient. In math (lb the 4lh and 8th grades), only 21 percent of our 4th graders and23i\’: ol our 8th graders were proficient. Wicker's proposal would spend millions of dollars to run teni dereducaled students through two additional years of North Can public education. It should be obvious to any observer that litis solution. To achieve the goals that Wicker wants, the best method^ be to improve productivity within the K-12 system, not to try W; it at one end. Andrew Cline is Director of Publications and Michael Lcncm tiH tor of the Center for Economic Policy at the John Locke FouiM non-profit, non-partisan, public policy think tank in Raleigh. (Guest Columnist) Preparing Black America for economic independence is serious busi ness. It's serious business because African Americans, like all other peoples here and abroad, face a significant challenge: Wc must equip ourselves, as individuals and as a group, to do well in the new globally- oriented frec-markei economy. That new environment is full of opportunity — as Amcrica’.s booming economy bears eloquent witness to. But it can al.so be very harsh and unforgiving, as the severe economic turmoil roiling Indonesia, and. less dramatically. South Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong, and even Japan indicate. The point is that the. "good limes" can turn sour very fast, even for economics and peoples seemingly suitably equipped to do well. As a group. African Americans arc not yet as "suitably equipped" as wc need to be for the new age. Wc are not involved enough in business; as a result, wc arc especially economically vulnerable. For example, African Americans own less than 4 percent of all busincs.scs in the United Stales; two-thirds of African Americans invest none of their income; and the black middle class — the group which must be the economic backbone of blacks as a group — is so bereft of a.s.scts that the loss of their next two paychecks would cast many into a precarious financial situation. To be sure, wc'rc making progress. African Americans arc being pushed and pulled along the road of upward mobility by a growing cohort of superbly skilled businessmen and women in many fields of endeavor, by young people who realize they can build a future out of striving for excellence — and by the "open doors" the civil rights move ment of the 196()s and affirmative action made possible. : ;-But we need to expand that cohort as fast as possible. . Why? For one thing black-owned firms arc much more likely to hire mner-cily residents for the jobs they're qualified to train for apd do. For aiicHher, economic power provides the resources for exercising political clout at the local, .stale and national level. For a third, economic power Civil Rights .Tournal The Emperor’s New Clothes: After Welfare Reform By Bernice Powell Jackson U.C.C. Commission for Racial Ju.stice Remember the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes? Only one brave soul was unafraid to tell the Emperor that he was naked, as I remember it. Everyone else pretended that the lEmperor was fully clothed. Well, while government officials are telling us that so-called Welfare Reform has been successful, the reality is that they really don’t know what has happened to tens of thousands of persons no longer on welfare rolls. The reality that many who arc working with the poor are telling us that the poor arc now poorer and that while welfare reform may succeed in ending welfare as wc know it, it is not ending poverty as we know it. They arc telling us that the Emperor has on no clothes. Well over a million cases have been dropped from the nation’s welfare rolls. But statistics-from the U.S. General Accounting Office seem to in dicate that the majority of the families whose benefits were terminated did not find work. The problem is there are just too many unskilled, un trained, poorly educated workers and loo few jobs to match. Take Wisconsin for instance, the state which has often been held up as the model for welfare reform. A study done by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukec found that only 34 percent of those dropped from welfare rolls found full-time jobs. Only one in six of the families cut off was now above the poverty line. In addition, people on welfare arc re quired to drop out of cducaiioh or training programs and take the I'irsi available job. That requirement ensures that these people willloff poor, whether on welfare or not. Or lake Massachusetts. One advocate for the poor who has worfe the poor and homeless for over ten years points to the reality s!' overwhelming majority of the parents in the families she worls have no high school diploma and lilile to offer in terms of jobe’:p' or marketable skills." These women have no chance of compf today’s job market, but the state expects them to become econeffl sclf-suffieienl without any training or assistance," she said, addi”! since the stale is not providing job training for these womcn.il'| limits are going to expire at the end of 1998 and these fanijlics''il nothing to fall back on. Unfortunately, many Americans believe that the problems families have gone away with the welfare rolls. Many Americi^' takenly believe that job training or preparation has occurred, usually has not. Some are merely given pcp-talks by their ease*' or assigned to a brief " job preparation seminar" which tells then' dress, and how to speak on the phone and then puts them at a telephone and a newspaper to try to get job interviews. Wiscons'* Senator Gwendolynne Moore calls the pretense of job readmes own stale the "You Go. Girl" category. Many Americans hclicvc that all these folks formerly on wolW have real jobs - that they just needed that extra push to gel out"' market. But look at workfare, the program by which wcHarcr^ are required to work to continue to receive their benefits It si'ur^ good idea on the surface working for your welfare check, o' with Justice, a national coalition of' organizations, warns ihaf* participants have proven to be an irresistible, cheap labor force 1" falling city services. In New York City, for instance, ^ participants have been cleaning subways and busses as well '"' often without proper protective cUuhing. They have simply other low-paid city workers, but wiiii even lower salaries and (Continued On Page 11)
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