On August 29 through September 2nd, a tribunal convened in New Orleans to put the U.S. government on trial for crimes against humanity in its lack of response to the survivors of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
My Notes from the International Tribunal on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita
By Aaron Shuman
September 16, 2007
NOTE: My notes were incomplete; where I do not mention people by name, that is because I did not get their names. Quotes are approximations.
Overwhelming. That’s the first word that comes to mind to describe the International Tribunal on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. A prosecution team of about 15 lawyers, consisting of some of the fiercest black liberation lawyers in the U.S.; a body of judges, drawn from Brazil, France, Guadeloupe, Venezuela, Mexico, Martinique, as well as the U.S.; and a body of well-prepared witnesses, eager and aching to tell their stories two years after the hurricanes. All this, beginning two days after Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was forced to resign for his illegal activities, and in the wake of all the mainstream spectacles the establishment had cooked up to recognize the anniversary of the hurricanes, up to and including the visit of President Bush.
To understand why the International Tribunal on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita occurred, you can read the statement on its website. But the question each person must ask themselves is, why did s/he attend, and what was s/he looking for? For me, as someone who did time for protesting the U.S. Army School of the Americas, whose work has detailed government and Army spying on the protest movement, and centered around the issue of impunity—the exemption from punishment of state violence workers, whether military, police, or prison guards--it was an important opportunity to see the U.S. government put on trial for its crimes. I wanted to support on-the-ground organizers who I have known for a long time, and I had been impressed by documents their work had helped produce, such as the People’s Reconstruction Platform for Reconstruction with Justice in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, which is a visionary document for remaking not only this region but cities throughout the U.S.
One thing speaker after speaker emphasized at the Tribunal was that Katrinas are a global experience: Edenice Santana de Jesus of Brazil’s Black Women in Struggle said, “We have had our Katrinas.” Louisa Hanoune of the National Assembly of Algeria described the aftermath of a 2003 earthquake in Algeria, in which the International Monetary Fund used the opportunity to impose a structural adjustment program on the country; her political party fought “for breaking the policies of the IMF”, and the state itself is bringing a lawsuit against those responsible for the disastrous effects of the quake. Likewise, Christophe Rangoly of Martinique described the aftermath of Hurricane Dean and the toxic terrorism of being a dumping ground for pesticide “by the French and the companies linked to the slaveowners.” With elections in Martinique next year, he said the question of rebuilding is center stage, and all those elected officials who failed to pursue and defend the interests of the population are on the chopping block. “Both the U.S. and the French are responsible for the barbarism dumped on us; we must find our own way to defend our interests as black people in the gulf,” he said. Jesus “Chucho” Garcia, founder and director of the Afro-Venezuelan Network, followed, “What we need is global responses to global crises” caused by “assassin corporations”, before later mentioning the effects of Hurricane Mitch in Honduras and Hurricane Floyd in Venezuela.
I was surprised by how little I knew about the hurricanes and their aftermath.
As familiar as the story and criticism of it seemed-- why did television viewers see dogs airlifted while black people paddled in? why were black people called looters while whites were called survivors? were some of the familiar questions posed over the tribunal’s four days—I found the details of peoples’ testimonies compelling and crucial to refreshing the issue.
Impunity for State Violence Workers
For me, it was exciting to watch lawyers work with witnesses and a panel of sharp-questioning judges to establish state responsibility for crimes against humanity. In panels on prisoners’ rights, police brutality, women’s rights, and military occupation and mercenaries, the judges heard stories of racial profiling, “criminalizing those who do not wear badges”, and “testimonies from victims in a Day in the Life of Police Activity During Hurricane Katrina”, as attorney King Downing of the ACLU put it.
The judges heard stories from the surviving member of a family killed by police, as well as people charged with traffic violations, trespassing, drug possession, or other crimes who found themselves locked up for months without a trial, maced, living off of toilet water, begging for food, left a garbage bag to defecate in, desperate to re-establish contact with family or friends. One family discussed struggles to reclaim the body of their loved one from the police to conduct their own autopsy to investigate murder by the state. One theme in witness testimony was the hell of being passed across multiple agencies which want to deny responsibility for your existence—from prison to prison, or from the jurisdiction of the police to the National Guard—while the judges sought to connect their stories to state officials.
After one witness, Chucho Garcia asked, “Here is another case of impunity. What happens for the prosecution when Mr. Keene is assassinated and the family does not trust the police system? If the family does not wish to come forward to produce a denunciation, what could be done to bring justice?” Another judge citing the Cynthia McKinney report and Governor Kathleen Blanco’s “shoot to kill” order asked, “Do you consider the assassination of your brother and the brutality inflicted upon you as part of a brutal and systematic policy based on race?”
Likewise, after a presentation on the rights of women—which noted that before the hurricanes, 70% of the heads of households were women of color, and attributed an 80% drop in that figure after the hurricanes to the failure to reopen public housing and public schools, the destruction of community and employment networks, and a rise in domestic and sexual violence—one speaker asked, “Did the woman governor of Louisiana rise as a woman or a Democrat to defend the rights of working women in Louisiana?” Another asked if this drop could be seen in the context of a campaign of psychological or state terrorist violence.
After one day of testimony, Louisa Hanoune said, “We are working to establish the responsibility at different levels, of the political affiliations of those concerned. The tragedy of Katrina was not simply neglect or lack of means but a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing”, heard in the oft-repeated survivor comment, “They left us here to die.”
That message came through loud and clear in the testimony of Malik Rahim and the presentation of a new DVD, “Welcome to New Orleans.” His telling of the story of the founding of Common Ground Relief inverted the mainstream representation of Katrina, with formerly incarcerated people of color helping their neighbors to safety, white vigilantes laughing about hunting black people, and bodies left to rot on the street. An underreported aspect of the Gretna Bridge incident—in which Gretna policemen fired over the heads of people fleeing New Orleans and forced them to turn back—is that Gretna was the homebase of ex-Klansman and former gubernatorial candidate David Duke.
One thing these panels made me think about is that if Katrinas are a global phenomenon—with climate change bringing man-made disasters of increasing intensity, that elites seize as opportunities to deepen the structural adjustment policies of the IMF—so too is the issue of community control and self-defense against racist police. The testimonies reminded me of the conversations and events being held in counties in California such as San Jose and Sonoma to hold public forums on police abuse and to create community action plans to document, investigate, challenge impunity for state violence workers, and to prevent their future acts of violence.
Building Black and Brown Unity
For someone who does not live in New Orleans such as myself, the Tribunal also offered an excellent opportunity to be briefed on the state of the city. How often does one get the opportunity to hear Charise Maria Harrison Nelson, daughter of the late Donald Harrison and guardian of the Mardi Gras Hall of Fame, give a thorough presentation on the Mardi Gras Indian tradition under the topic of cultural rights? Or in the section on environmental racism, to hear Haki Vincent discuss the history of Mossville, Louisiana—in which industry has polluted the soil and driven organic farmers off the land; government agencies exist, through their powers of permitting and eminent domain, to seize land, build roads, and extract natural resources for corporate gain; and locals blockade roads to prevent that—in a manner that reminded me of Zapatista writing on opposing construction of roads into the Lacandona Jungle? Describing an encounter with the sheriffs’ department and a code inspector who sought to assess the value of the land and the cultural museum destroyed by the hurricane, Vincent said, “It’s hard to put a numerical value on the property. What about reparations?” He also noted that the U.S. government’s balance sheet has hurricane survivors living in FEMA trailers that leak formaldehyde.
Tony Sferlazza of Plenty International put the history of work of indigenous people and the Houma Nation at the center of efforts to rebuild New Orleans and condemned the lack of relief from organizations such as the Red Cross. He also noted the government used the hurricane as an opportunity to claim Houma land to expand oil drilling, and claimed Louisiana produces the most oil of any state in the U.S.
In a closing argument, Chokwe Lumumba said, “The athletes gave their money to the Red Cross and got nothing. The government has worked historically to discredit grassroots institutions, such as the Black Panther Party, the Republic of New Afrika, and indigenous groups. It is more important to the U.S. government that it protect its ideology than save lives.” (I know this to be true, because the U.S. Army has promoted its classes in Disaster Relief as one of the things marking the SOA/WHINSEC as a "new" humanitarian institution, yet the government refused aid from many countries including Cuba and Venezuela after the hurricanes, preferring to let the people suffer.)
Summarizing the Tribunal’s three days of testimony, Lumumba advanced an argument about “the new slavery” in New Orleans to link the struggles of black and immigrant workers in the U.S. In the panel on labor rights, Daniel Castellano of Peru talked about coming to the U.S. on a guest-worker H2B visa, and the problems of being legally bound to his boss once he entered the U.S. Denied adequate housing, shorted on his pay, and fired for attempting to organize workers, Castellano said he told his boss, “There are African-Americans who want to work; the manager said the blacks are lazy. They manipulate our two communities. They tell us you are lazy, and they tell you we are here to steal your jobs.”
Recounting this, Lumumba asked, “How can we call people illegal for crossing illegal borders? The auction block begins in Mexico, where 800 people compete for 80 visas. If you don’t work for us, then you become illegal. Do you see the similarities? These are not different problems; they are symptoms of the same problem.”
At one point, Chucho Garcia said, “We are speaking about the Americas as one nation. The attack on people of Afrikan descent is an attack on the American nation as a whole. The will to eradicate black cultural identity in this country, the systematic effort to eradicate black cultural identity; they want to commodify the culture. When they take the cultural practices away, you are not committed to the community; what we do is an expression of our spirits and our souls.”
How Were GLBTQ People Impacted by Hurricane Katrina?
A final note: for me, I found it impossible to sit in a human rights tribunal, without thinking about an international right to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, or queer.
I know nothing about the history of efforts to establish such a right. But having lived through the experience of feeling targeted for my political work, and having received harassing messages calling me “asshole… cocksucker… faggot” as part of that experience, I found that listening to people discuss efforts to certify racial discrimination and discrimination against women inevitably made me think of analogies to discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Occasionally, speakers suggested a connection themselves, as when Nkechi Taifa said, “Rights are interdependent and interrelated” and argued same-sex rights fall under the international right to privacy.
Other times, a speaker made me think of analogies, as when Christophe Rangoly said, “We went out yesterday [touring New Orleans] and saw the black people had low self-esteem. We need to be active to change the psychological condition of our people. Get a commission together to circulate a pamphlet all over this city to declare that we are here, [to give a] morale boost to the black people of this city.”
In response to the question, “Why are black folks where they are right now?”, a witness testified, “400 [years of oppression], broken hearts, lack of psychological assistance, making 16 to 19,000 dollars/year, destruction of community, loss of leadership and family structure. You’re seeing someone who has been beaten emotionally, physically, and psychologically for 2-1/2 years, [facing the question] of how to rebuild a city and how to maintain a family. We’re in the same place we were in two years ago.”
How accurate is it to analogize from the Afrikan experience in New Orleans to a GLBTQ experience? How many GLBTQ people were displaced by the hurricanes? How were GLBTQ people uniquely impacted? For instance, did a people with no right to exist or no recognition of their families under law experience unique difficulties in receiving aid from FEMA and agencies such as the Red Cross? To what extent did they have to rely on GLBTQ organizations, or did neighborhood-based organizations serve them adequately?
The U.S. Human Rights Network, which conducted a training on shadow reporting for the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, had materials of the launch of the Yogyakarta Principles on the application of international human rights law in relation to sexual orientation and gender identity. http://www.yogyakartaprinciples.org/index.php?lang
=EN
However, the Tribunal’s failure to have a panel on GLBTQ Rights was a missed opportunity that could have prompted documentation and deepened understanding of how GLBTQ people were impacted. I was unable to find anything on this topic in a quick Google search, and Jordan Flaherty of Left Turn Magazine referred me to the organization Southerners on New Ground to ask these questions.
For me, thinking about this made me wonder about the relationship of international law to state law, specifically whether a GLBTQ movement that doesn’t establish and ground itself in an international right to exist under human rights law can ever be successful in negotiations with the U.S. state over “rights” such as the “right” to marry, the “right” to serve in the military, the “right” for GLBTQ studies in universities and GLBTQ history in public schools. In putting “rights” in quotation marks, I’m thinking of the distinction made by Dylan Rodriguez in his book Forced Passages between real rights (which people take for themselves and are enforceable) and privileges (or “rights”) which are granted and can be taken away by the state and its enforcers at its discretion.
Conclusion
The judges laid out an aggressive schedule, with:
a) final rulings expected in November,
b) the Second New Orleans Survivors Assembly scheduled for December 8 & 9,
c) discussions underway to evaluate the case of New Orleans in the context of the Plan of Action from the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa and to take the findings to the 2008 WCAR meetings, to the World Health Organization, and to the United Nations Environmental Agency,
With all the vibrant energy being released in panels at the Tribunal during the day, actions such as a takeover of the New Orleans Housing Authority, and discussion of major projects such as a Gulf Coast Civic Works Project to create jobs for peoples’ led reconstruction underway, there should be little surprise that Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund’s Malcolm Suber declared himself a candidate for City Council on a Reconstruction Party ticket at night. The nights during the Tribunal were filled with meetings, events such as a dinner hosted by the Gulf South Allied Funders, and discussions about how to take the energy of the Tribunal directly to the people of New Orleans, where people were already marching in second lines on the second anniversary of the hurricane and on Labor Day.
For more information on some of the organizations and resources mentioned in this article:
The People's Reconstruction Platform for Reconstruction with Justice in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
http://www.peopleshurricane.org/news/peoples-recon
struction-platform-for-reconstruction-with-justice
-in-new-orleans-and-the-gulf-coast.html
The Cynthia McKinney report on Hurricane Katrina. http://archives.allthingscynthiamckinney.com/mckin
ney.house.gov/
Common Ground Relief. http://www.commongroundrelief.org/
Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund. http://www.peopleshurricane.org/news/
San Jose event on police accountability. http://www.aclunc.org/action/events/police_transpa
rency_public_safety,_public_trust.shtml
Sonoma County event on police abuse and community action. http://www.freemindmedia.org/news/wp-content/uploa
ds/2007/09/027.pdf
Mardi Gras Hall of Fame. http://www.mardigrasindianhalloffame.org/
Gulf Coast Civic Works Project. http://www.solvingpoverty.com/
The Heads Up Collective has compiled a list of resources on the second anniversary of Katrina and an article by Ingrid Chapman on her work as a white anti-racist organizer in New Orleans at http://hupcollective.livejournal.com/
For more on the Reconstruction Party, see the following:
"The One Year Anniversary of Katrina: A Time of Decision for African Americans and the Poor!" http://www.peopleshurricane.org/linkresources/
The Statement of Support from Cynthia McKinney. http://www.marxmail.org/msg31064.html
Malcolm Suber for City Council. http://malcolmforcitycouncil.com/
For resources on immigrant rights and disaster relief, see: http://www.nilc.org/disaster_assistance/index.htm
AFL-CIO Rally on the Docks. http://blog.aflcio.org/2007/08/29/rally-calls-for-
new-orleans-marshall-plan/
For Jordan Flaherty's archive of writing on New Orleans, see:
http://leftturn.mayfirst.org/?q=node/660
