Progressive organisations working with the Haitian poor to help them resolve the many problems they face have denounced the work-stoppage called by the Haitian Chamber of Commerce.

The country's largest business association urged businesses to stay closed and parents to keep their children out of school January 9, to protest a wave of kidnappings and to pressure the United Nations peacekeeping mission to take more aggressive measures against the gangs that operate in Port-au-Prince slum areas.

Batay Ouvriye, a workers' organisation that has helped organise unions of workers from the capital's slum areas for over ten years, issued a statement “firmly opposing” the “strike” call.

Batay Ouvriye, while highly critical of the performance of the UN peacekeeping mission (MINUSTAH) and the “directionless violence” carried out by the gangs, declared that the Haitian bourgeoisie is the cause of much of the insecurity and instability in the country.

“The group which sent out this appeal has never been in the least solidarity with all the mobilisations of workers and popular organisations who've been attempting to fight against the rising cost of living and gas prices, or in support of the small merchants and cooperative members whose money was stolen, etc.

Quite the contrary, they benefit from the misery spreading amongst the popular masses from day to day.”

Another progressive organisation, Mouvman Demokratik Popilè (MODEP, the Democratic Popular Movement) that has been active in the Collective to Mobilise against the High Cost of Living's recent campaign, also denounced the private sector for its professed concern for the Haitian people.

The MODEP statement declared, “We are living in a society where a small group of people has its hands on all the wealth and, as a result, the vast majority live in poverty...This situation means that in slum areas all over the country, people are dying of hunger and others are living on the edge.”

The MODEP also reminded people that private sector's Group of 184 platform was heavily involved with one of the gangs that has been active in the violence in Cité Soleil, and that a leading bourgeois personality is implicated in the kidnappings that have terrorised the capital's inhabitants. The MODEP statement declared, “actors that participate in and feed the climate of insecurity are not capable of combating it.”

Both Batay Ouvriye and MODEP alerted the population to the private sector's attempt to use the situation to further its own interests, and instead called on the people to organise themselves to address their own interests.

Batay Ouvriye declared, “We can find the way to vanquish the terror and repression that both the gangs and the MINUSTAH are leading against us in the form of a truly popular resistance with the workers in central position.”