Over 200 hardy souls braved frigid temperatures with sub-zero wind chill to rally on Friday, Jan. 29 at Columbus Park in Cadman Plaza, Brooklyn and then march across the Brooklyn Bridge. The Coalition to Stand With Haiti (in Kreyol, Kowalisyon pou Kore Ayiti) called the action to honor those who died in Haiti's Jan. 12 earthquake, now estimated at some 200,000, and to call for solidarity with the millions of Haitians who are now injured, homeless or mourning the loss of family members.
Speakers at the rally also denounced the growing U.S. military occupation of Haiti, where some 20,000 U.S. soldiers are now deployed, and the Pentagon's diversion of incoming international relief aid and doctors from Port-au-Prince's airport and port to give priority to the landing of U.S. soldiers and weapons.
"Haiti needs food, water and medicine, not guns," said Roger Leduc of the Haitian Coalition to Support the Struggle in Haiti (KAKOLA), one of the demonstration organizers. "Washington is using this calamity to strengthen its economic and political grip on Haiti and to push aside other countries, especially progressive ones, who are trying to help our people."
About half of the demonstrators in Cadman Plaza marched across the Brooklyn Bridge, a symbolic procession that Brooklyn's Haitian community has done several times over the past 20 years. The bridge marchers, many of whom carried mostly electric candles, were joined by other demonstrators for another rally at Foley Square behind the Federal Building in lower Manhattan.
Many North and Latin Americans turned came out in solidarity with the action. Among the many speakers were former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Father Luis Barrios of Manhattan's St. Mary's Church, Larry Holmes of the International Action Center (IAC), Kirby Joseph of the Party for Socialism & Liberation (PSL), Larry Adams of Newark's People's Organization for Progress (POP), and Joel Kupferman of the National Lawyers Guild.
Jocelyne Gay of KAKOLA, Berthony Dupont and Ray Laforest of the International Support Haiti Network (ISHN) and Pierre Florestal of the Lavalas Family party's New York chapter also spoke.
The Stand With Haiti Coalition is broad and international, comprising both Haitian community organizations and Dominican, Venezuelan, Filipino, Senegalese and Pakistani groups.
"The Haitian people need some serious help," said Urania Victor-King, a nurse with the Bedford Stuyvesant Volunteer Ambulance Corps, one of the first U.S. EMS teams to arrive by their own means in Haiti on Jan. 17. She worked for a week at Port-au-Prince's General Hospital. "We in America are talking about the economy, but what we need to do is help those people. To see their plight with your eyes is something that you can never, never forget. We know their pain and suffering."
Haitian leaders saw the march not just as an action to honor and show solidarity with the quake's victims but to launch an effort to organize Haitians to rebuild a new and better Haiti.
"We cannot mourn first and then organize later," said Leduc at Foley Square. "We have to organize and mourn at the same time. We have to show people back home that we understand, not from the head, but from the heart and the gut, that we are suffering together with them. Those people you saw in the rubble, digging through concrete with their nails to get out their relatives and neighbors, we have to join hands with them to rebuild Haiti, one based on justice, democracy and independence, with the help of you people here."