Opinion: Haiti missionaries deserve jail

By Todd Seabrook

Let's get one thing straight: the 10 missionaries who are locked in a Haitian jail deserve to be there.

Although there is a miasma of politics and circumstances clouding the facts of this fiasco, the one thing that seems undisputed is that the missionaries tried to take 33 Haitian children across the Dominican Republic border without the proper documents.

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That's what we know. They have been charged with kidnapping and criminal association. On the political side, the Haitian government threw the book at these missionaries to show that they still have a ruling law and a working government. This is ironic, since the Haitian government has been in shambles since Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted in a military coup in 2004 (more than likely orchestrated by the U.S.). So in a show of misplaced power, Haiti made an example of these 10 missionaries.

A backlash came from the Haitian people, who thought that a governmental power-play should come in the form of helping a country that was just leveled, instead of using 10 piddling Americans as a diversion.

On the circumstantial side of this story, the missionaries claim to be taking orphans they found on the streets to orphanages in the Dominican Republic. However, it was learned that many of the children's parents were still alive, and some of them even handed their children over in hope that they would have a better life. But not in the DR. Make no mistake: the plan was to get these children into the United States. And the missionaries knew exactly what they were doing.

I have no doubt that these 10 missionaries are moral people and thought they were doing a noble deed. Hell, they even fired their lawyer, Edwin Coq, for trying to bribe them out of jail, a charge he denies. I think most of the world just assumed that's how one gets out of a Haitian prison, but the families of the Idaho missionaries believe in the system, apparently.

What I am saying is that these missionaries, like most Americans, have a deeply ingrained ethnocentrism and global classism that lets them believe (along with God's will) that we have a moral right to take children from their homes.

Imagine if China sent a rescue team to New Orleans after Katrina, and decided that China was a better place for a poor orphan to grow up and shipped a handful of them off to China by way of Cuba.

They do not have the right to think that, and neither do we. These missionaries revealed their ethnocentrism in its highest and most destructive degree. Just because we think we have the best country on the planet, does not mean that we do. Just because we believe that Christian doctrine gives us the moral authority to take kids away from their parents, does not make it true.

Don't blame the Haitian parents either, who were willing to give up their children in hopes of a better life for them. Haiti looks like a war zone right now, and for those parents in the moment, it probably looked like a viable option to give their kids away to Americans. It is the Americans' responsibility to say, "No, you will want your children with you when the disaster is over." Instead, the missionaries took the opportunity to be saviors to the poor, indigenous savages who live in a country that is prone to earthquakes. Missionaries to the highest degree. Such sacrifice. Such morality.

They should be locked up until they realize that it is not okay to force your class, culture and religion onto a foreign country, no matter how just you deem it. "We trust in God," the missionaries said while in jail. You are going to be in a foreign jail for a long time, maybe you should start trusting in Haiti.

http://uweekly.com/newsmag/02-10-2010...serve-jail