KOD is a Haitian political party founded in February 2014. The following declaration was read in Kreyòl by one of KOD’s leaders, Oxygène David, at the “Bar de l’air” in Port-au-Prince on Apr. 7, 2015.

 On the anniversary of the death of Toussaint L’Ouverture on Apr. 7, 1803 in Fort de Joux in France, the Dessalines Coordination (KOD) patriotically salutes the Haitian people.

For the past few weeks, the ruling classes in cahoots with foreign embassies have been throwing bones in the road of mobilization. Hypocritical politicians, as soon as they find a bone they can suck, forget everything else. They forget all the positions they used to take against the regime [of President Michel Martelly and Prime Minister Evans Paul] and against the occupation [by 7,500 troops of the UN Mission to Stabilize Haiti or MINUSTAH]. They don’t even stop to look, reflect, and ask: who threw those bones, and why did they do it now? Isn’t it a trap? They don’t have time for that, so tasty are the election bones.

We in KOD say to the people: we are not going to suck on the election bones, nor split the electoral cake with our enemy. We are fighting so change can happen in the country, so Haiti can get out of the chronic underdevelopment into which the imperialist countries have put her to make us pay for our temerity in being the first people in the world to abolish the slave system. We disrupted their business; that’s why they are always angry with us.

Today, the traditional political class, the opportunist sellers of the country have entered into the rigged game with the Martelly/Paul regime to continue the policy of exclusion, of removing the people from the political scene, of doing anything to get ahead, the neoliberal policy.

The electoral bone is to prevent the people from struggling to change their reality. This electoral mascarade is to continue to keep the Haitian state dependent on the imperialist powers, which don’t want anything to change in Haiti. This election is a drug to make the people forget their problems, forget their demands, which have never been satisfied, above all on Ile à Vache [where peasants have been expropriated to make way for a tourist development] and downtown Port-au-Prince, where they have demolished the homes of people to sell the land to their big multinational bosses.

This election also shows us the limits of the hard-headed petit-bourgeois who, the minute they have two or three people behind them, think they are popular. They are obsessed with being president; they enter into any kind of compromise or accommodation to sell out the masses’ struggle.

KOD is not opposed to elections in principle. But the elections the U.S. capitalists prepare are always rigged. They are elections they use to put in power their own candidates. We in KOD want no part of that. We denounce with all our might the imperialists’ project to ensure the corrupt state’s continuity.

Remember how, before the eyes of the entire world, they stole the 2012 election in Mexico and then the 2013 election in Honduras. Even when the people in those countries protested afterwards, denouncing the election theft, they paid no attention to them. Instead, they mobilized the police and army to crush the protests.

Here in Haiti, the international reactionaries have also stolen our elections. That’s why we say to the people: Be careful! Remain vigilant! Remain on your toes, so you don’t have to say later “if I’d only known.” Don’t divert water to the mill of the opportunists. Tomorrow, it’s you who will pay the price.

Don’t forget how they put Martelly in power in the 2010-2011 elections. It was MINUSTAH, the Organization of American States (OAS), and Hillary Clinton who decided the election, not Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP). When we say occupation, that’s one of the occupier’s roles: deciding for us!

Don’t listen to anybody telling you to believe in Santa Claus. There is only one way for us to counter the maneuvers of the Macouto-bourgeois-imperialist laboratory: to hold high the flame of mobilization. To stop our mobilization against our enemy, to collaborate with them, to enter into the electoral game with them, a game they control, is to give them more legal means to finish with us, to completely crush us.

We in KOD, we don’t summon the name of [Haiti’s founding father Jean-Jacques] Dessalines for demagoguery, to bluff people, to show off, to make a joke out of Dessalines.

All those who want to go drink wine in the U.S., French, and Canadian embassies, who line up for the election-selections with Michel Martelly and Evans Paul, that is their choice.

KOD repeats what it proposed since September 2013: “There cannot be free, honest, sovereign elections with Martelly! There cannot be free, honest, sovereign elections under MINUSTAH’s military occupation!”

Everyone who wants to struggle for another Haiti, a Haiti which is its own master, come join a popular forum which will be held on Apr. 14, 2015 in the “Bar de l’air” for us to sit and reflect together how to continue the mobilization to build an anti-Martelly, anti-opportunist, anti-Duvalierist, anti-occupation, anti-imperialist project.

The rendezvous is at “Bar de l’air,” Tue. Apr. 14, 2015 at 10 a.m.

It was in battle that our ancestors beat the slave-owning nations, it is in battle also that we will find a solution to defeat the big imperialist nations.

(Translated from the original Kreyòl by Kim Ives)