₦airaland Forum

PPAngel:
[size=18pt]How does a state fail?[/size]

It’s a question you can’t help asking yourself as you make your way in Haiti, through the chaos left by four severe tropical storms in 2008 and the destruction wrought by the 2010 earthquake—some of which is still evident on the streets of Port-au-Prince today, five years later. It’s not just the unrebuilt infrastructure that raises this question, but also the human and political waste caused by so many years of corrupting collaboration with the United States, the United Nations and outside nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

A state doesn’t fail because of some innate inferiority in its people. I make this obvious point only because people who don’t know Haiti often try, as subtly as they know how, to claim this is the case. They’re wrong: a state fails because of its history.


Haiti from its inception has been a peculiarly globalized entity. The slavery with which the French colony enriched itself was a global labor and agricultural phenomenon, bringing people from Africa to the Americas in order to serve as free labor on plantations owned by Europeans. Haiti’s revolution, too, was a global phenomenon, linking those same three continents. Haiti’s early debt was global; its economics under slavery and, later, the US occupation were global as well—and still are.

Many readers of The Nation may know something of the remarkable history of this country, since the magazine has been following it for more than a century. But for those of you coming to it cold: Haiti had unbelievably promising beginnings. Though tarnished by centuries of slavery, the country was the creation of some of the great geniuses of the 1700s. But the enormous potential of these singular men was destroyed by France, which kidnapped and killed some of Haiti’s ablest leaders, most notably Toussaint Louverture. In 1825, a scant two decades after Haitian independence was declared, France demanded an indemnity of 150 million francs (roughly estimated at $20 billion in today’s dollars) for the property lost by French plantation owners during the quite bloody, quite fiery revolution—one that Haiti had won.

Haiti was to compensate France not only for lost plantation lands and crops, but also for the loss of the Haitians themselves—i.e., for the right to be masters of their own bodies—since Haitian slaves had been France’s most valuable Caribbean asset. France backed up this demand with the threat of a full-blown blockade, and Haiti agreed to pay in exchange for France’s recognition. As a result, France duly recognized Haiti as an independent country (the United States, still a slave-owning nation and too geographically close for its own comfort, did not do so until 1862, in the midst of the Civil War). The huge debt payments were delivered assiduously by the Haitian government with money borrowed—conveniently—from French banks. Haiti also paid the interest on those loans in a timely fashion.

These reparations to France depleted Haiti’s already starved coffers and led to repeated financial crises within the country. They also led to privations, to an inability to develop domestically and to political instability—indeed, political turmoil, with presidents entering and leaving office sometimes biannually. France, in collusion with the United States, continued to bleed Haiti until related debts were finally paid off—in 1947!

This is how Haiti began to be a failed state.

France was not the only country to force Haiti down the road to failure. In 1909, US financiers began to lay the groundwork for an American occupation of Haiti. It was around that time that the National City Bank, based in New York, acquired a stake in Haiti’s central bank and created a railway to support American exploitation of Haitian resources, especially cheap labor (a little more expensive than out-and-out slavery, but…) and a variety of agricultural products for American consumption, such as sugar (and, later, the industrial production of baseballs and women’s undergarments). As Graham Greene wrote in The Comedians, his novel about Haiti in the 1960s: “It is astonishing how much money can be made out of the poorest of the poor with a little ingenuity.”

There was never any real excuse for the occupation. Haiti was unstable, the Americans said, after a sitting president was dragged from the French embassy by a mob and killed; shortly after, the marines descended. Well, Haiti had been unstable for years. The occupation was simply a mechanism to control Haiti while American businesses sucked value out of the country and made sure nationals of other countries could not. A year after the occupation’s end, Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, the marine in charge of establishing and securing control, wrote: “I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism…. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.”

Nothing that the occupation built was meant to benefit Haitians. As Ernest H. Gruening wrote in 1922 in this very magazine: “nobody, be he ever so kindly and human, can wholly transmute a military Occupation into a lawn party.” During the nineteen-year occupation, periodic rebellions and uprisings were brutally put down by the marines. Finally, in 1929, another massacre of Haitians provoked a review of the occupation by Congress, as well as an eventual pullout in 1934.

Nineteen years of occupation left enduring scars on Haitian society. The racism and segregation enforced by the marines led directly to the reactionary black-power rhetoric employed by François “Papa Doc” Duvalier as he rose to power in Haiti. The brutality and kleptocratic behavior of Duvalier’s administration, while not unknown in pre-occupation Haiti, had been honed to a fine point under the Americans’ regime. The nightmarish Duvalier and his corrupt son and successor, Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”), fertilized the terrain on which Haiti as a failed state would grow.

Haiti has never existed in a vacuum. In fact, Haiti today is a creation of the world, its failures often purposefully molded by outsiders, though almost always in collusion with the Haitian elite, who stand to profit from these failures. In this, it is not dissimilar to other corrupt countries with a history of colonial exploitation.


[size=18pt]Here is a contemporary example of how this works: under Bill Clinton, Haiti’s leaders were pressured to reduce the country’s longstanding tariffs on imported food (including rice) from 50 percent to about 3 percent. The United States then began dumping cheap, taxpayer-subsidized surplus rice on the Haitian market, ostensibly for humanitarian reasons, but actually so that it could dispose of an otherwise unsellable product.

Clinton’s policy was brilliant and double-edged. The Haitian politician who had to approve it was none other than the overthrown Jean-Bertrand Aristide, arguably the first freely elected president of Haiti. Aristide had been ousted in 1991, less than a year after his election, while George H.W. Bush (Papa Bush) looked the other way. Doubtless in return for Aristide’s acceptance of the lower tariff, as well as for other promises made, Clinton returned him to power. But once back in the National Palace, Aristide saw his authority undermined by the havoc and unrest that this very policy was causing in the countryside. The cheaper US rice undercut and effectively destroyed Haitian rice farming. A country that was largely self-sufficient in this staple in the 1980s was importing 80 percent of its rice by 2012.

So if Haiti can no longer feed itself, is this because it is a failed state? Haitians have rarely been fat, but the food crisis and food dependency began when weak Haitian leaders agreed to open the country’s markets to predatory global forces. This is the ugly face of “free trade.”

The crisis in rice farming also initiated a huge flow of rural people to the capital, because rice cultivators and their families could no longer survive in the countryside. The resulting overpopulation of the capital was a factor in the large number of people killed in the 2010 earthquake. After the quake, Clinton—by then the UN special envoy to Haiti, helping to run the reconstruction effort—apologized to the Haitian people. “It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake,” he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2010. “I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else.” He has called the policy a “devil’s bargain.” Nonetheless, imports of subsidized American rice only increased after the earthquake. Haiti imports as much as 50 percent of its food now, mostly from the United States. Today, Haiti is the second-biggest importer of US rice in the world.[/size]

Now let’s look at politics. In 1991, Aristide was overthrown. In 1994, Bill Clinton reinstated him. Aristide served out his truncated five-year term and was elected president once more in 2000, only to be overthrown again, in 2004, this time under Baby Bush (George W.).

For seven years after that second coup, Aristide lived in US-imposed exile in South Africa. He was allowed back into Haiti only in 2011, when President Obama, given various factors, could no longer reasonably prevent his return.

Though Aristide was, for at least two decades, the overwhelming choice of the Haitian people, his support has dissipated in the chaos caused by two anti-democratic coups and a barrage of natural disasters, as well as the generational shift that has come with new voters who simply don’t remember him. Even so, the current Haitian president, a conservative Duvalierist who is another puppet of the United States, has recently put Aristide under illegal house arrest, fearing his potential as a disrupter as Haiti begins the long-overdue slog to a new round of elections.

That Haitian president is Michel Martelly, a pop singer whose slender victory in 2011 was engineered with the collusion of the United States, the UN and the Organization of American States (OAS). With his pro-business stance, Martelly is a lot more to the liking of American corporate interests in Haiti than Aristide. Among his greatest achievements as president: diverting earthquake-relief money to help extend and modernize transportation in northern Haiti, far from the earthquake’s path, as well as expanding the incentives to seduce low-wage light industry to Haiti (mainly in the north) and freeing up gold-, silver- and copper-mining contracts for giant multinational extraction companies to begin excavating (also in the north).

Is the failure of the democratic experiment in Haiti the fault of a people who cannot govern themselves? No, it’s the fault of outside interests and their Haitian collaborators, who together continue to hold the reins of power in Haiti.

By the way, I don’t mean to suggest that Aristide was democracy personified. He was flawed, but so what? Let’s put it this way: unlike Aristide, the Duvaliers—both Papa Doc and Baby Doc—were grotesque violators of free speech, honest elections and human rights, but still they managed, in the shadow of the United States, not to be overthrown for almost thirty years. Aristide, in that same shadow (Haiti hasn’t moved!), was overthrown within eight months of taking office, and then overthrown a second time. This is not about a state’s failure; it’s about failure imposed on a state.


Let’s also consider corruption, another symptom of failed states. Many say the Haitian government is disorganized, but no one is fooled: actually, the Haitian kleptocracy has been carefully organized—especially during the occupation—to be porous and incompetent, to allow for corruption. It exists to feed those politicians who kowtow to outside interests. It is a mechanism into which money is poured and then siphoned off. The Duvaliers merely perfected what the occupation handed down.

Since 1915, the United States has treated Haitian governments as, at best, rubber stamps for US policy, American businesses working in Haiti, and Haitian-run businesses friendly to American interests. For almost the entire twentieth century, only US-approved Haitians could be president. The embassy looked the other way at internal political repression, to say nothing of continuing starvation in the countryside, as long as Haitian governments were friendly—or at least anticommunist, like Papa Doc’s. Any leader who seemed to have an agenda that put the Haitian people first was thrown out, including Daniel Fignolé, a wildly popular political figure who was in office less than a month in 1957, shortly before the Duvalier dictatorship; and, of course, Aristide, who slipped in during a moment of change in Haiti and the world (post-Duvalier and post–Cold War, respectively) but was quickly sent packing.

Ever since Aristide was deposed for the second time, in 2004, there has been another occupation of Haiti, this time by the United Nations. A decade later, some 7,000 international military and police personnel still operate from the huge, modern UN Logistics Base near the airport (which is no longer named for François Duvalier but for Louverture, another coup victim sent summarily overseas). From “Log Base,” as it is called, peacekeepers have been sent out to quell dissent, resulting in many casualties. They’ve rounded up the discontented and they’ve developed informants within progressive and popular movements. They ride around town in casual pickup trucks with gunners in the back, facing the trailing traffic.

All of this is done with the ostensible motivation of protecting the Haitian people and keeping things secure. As The Nation’s Gruening wrote concerning the marine occupation in 1922: “this proceeds under the guise of benevolence…. Colonel Russell [the head of the occupation at the time] told me that it was the two million Haitian country people that he wanted to help, and that he was very fond of them but [that he was] against the ‘three hundred agitators in Port au Prince….’ The Occupation’s affection for the Haitian proletariat is truly touching. Obviously if the [agitators are] eliminated, the most docile and the cheapest labor supply that a concessionnaire ever dreamed of will be easily available. Twenty cents a day is the current Haitian wage.” Today, thanks to the machinations of American businesspeople in Haiti and colluding legislators in Washington, the minimum wage has been kept low: to less than $5 a day. Haitians’ 1922 pay comes to roughly $2.82 in today’s dollars. So, in ninety-three years, the value of a Haitian’s labor has increased by little more than $2.

One final problem must be understood in picking apart the failure of the Haitian state, and that is the overwhelming presence in Haiti—especially in Port-au-Prince and in Cap-Haïtien—of nongovernmental organizations, usually foreign-based. Unscientific estimates suggest there are some 10,000 NGOs operating in a country smaller than Maryland with a population of 10 million.

These NGOs, each with its own projects, don’t operate under any kind of umbrella; nor are they truly regulated. What they do, unintentionally, is substitute their own services for the services that a government should provide. They prop up the kleptocratic state, a mechanism for distribution of corruption. Over the years, the United States has spent billions through the Agency for International Development, a principal funder of NGOs, in an attempt to “develop” Haiti—and has achieved effectively nothing. A report by the World Bank on its own role in Haiti from 1986 through 2002 stated that “the outcome of the [World Bank] assistance program is rated unsatisfactory (if not highly so), the institutional development impact, negligible, and the sustainability of the few benefits that have accrued, unlikely.”

The end of Haiti, its utter ruin, has been predicted since the state was declared in 1804. The outside world believed a country run by former slaves could never survive; Haitians looked around and sometimes agreed. In 1944, the legendary Haitian novelist Jacques Roumain published Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters of the Dew), set in a deforested, drought-plagued landscape. When I first arrived in Haiti in 1986, the environmental end of the country was already considered imminent. Everyone would starve and die; AIDS, too, was about to take its toll.

Today, Haiti is still deforested, the environment abused and ignored. Much of this has to do with dire poverty and government negligence, as well as foreign and domestic exploitation. But in spite of deforestation and drought, despite mudslides and hurricanes and earthquakes, despite the destruction of rice cultivation, the collapse of Haiti’s sugar industry, the neglect of its coffee cultivators, the ongoing crisis of AIDS, tuberculosis and, now, cholera—Haitians survive.

Is this because they have a special resilience, that “dignity in poverty” that visitors like to rattle on about? Nope. It’s because the situation has been so bad for so long that almost every tiny Haitian village has sent at least one person out of the country into the huge diaspora, and those wanderers (equal to about 20 percent of the on-island population) have been sending their dutiful remittances back, even over generations. This immense brain drain has adversely affected everything on the island, but it has also been crucial to Haiti’s survival as a failed state.

Many small, formerly agricultural countries survive this way in the globalized world. The Philippines is another good example: its government, like Haiti’s, provides few services and little employment for its growing population, and instead sends its people out to participate in a global economy from which, although poorly paid by employers abroad, they can send home enough money to keep people alive on the islands. Sri Lanka, Vietnam and many other countries survive in a similar fashion.


Living off such remittances, those who still reside in the home country are less likely to find themselves at that edge of desperation where political organization and unrest become urgent and necessary. Grassroots change is abortive or endlessly deferred, a situation that is much preferred by the small local elite, which provides nothing and thereby gains everything. Haiti’s ongoing crisis is the product of global forces, and only huge, unlikely changes in international behaviors—especially on the part of the biggest, most abusive nations and organizations—will allow the Haitians themselves to turn things around.

PPAngel:
Bola Tinubu, Obasanjo and Buhari have mortgaged us and our children to the devil. Obama is an evil man. History of America relations to black nations like Haiti should serve as a standing warning to all.

Watch how change will come to the land in form of groaning austerity, job cuts, US sanctioned corruption of the Buhari govt and massive debt.

We warned you but you were to daft to listen

PPAngel:
Obama led govt deliberately sabotured a poor black Nation in the northern hemisphere

In January 2010, all eyes were on Haiti. A massive 7.0-magnitude earthquake rocked the tiny nation, leaving scores of people dead and homeless and nearly the entire country in ruins. The international community rushed to provide aid and offer relief during Haiti’s unimaginable crisis.

And as the story was reported around the clock, the refrain repeated by every TV host, journalist, pundit, activist and advocate became “Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.” With four out five people living in poverty, this is true. However, little attention was given to to how Haiti became such a poverty stricken nation. A combination of outlandish and unjust foreign debts, owed mainly to France, and political corruption, chiefly among the Duvalier regimes, have left Haiti’s economy ravaged. But even where there has been hope, outside forces have conspired to block much needed progress.

Wikileaks, the non-profit whistleblower organization founded by Julian Assange, in partnership with The Nation magazine and the Haitian weekly newspaper Haiti Liberte are publishing a series of reports based 1,918 documents from a seven-year period, starting 10 months before the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004, that reveals the United States’ interference in the Haitian government and essentially bullying President Rene Preval to align Haiti’s interests with those of the U.S.

In 2006, Preval visited Venezuela in hopes of striking a deal with PetroCaribe, the state-run oil company that deals with only state-run entities, and in order “to negotiate a[n] energy deal that would bring electricity to more homes and save the Haitian people millions.” When the U.S. learned of this, it blocked the deal for years, enlisting American oil companies Chevron and ExxonMobil to refuse to transport PetroCaribe oil, which would have been necessary for Haiti to sign the deal. Eventually Chevron signed the deal in 2008, but after two years of negotiations the new arrangement served little benefit to Haiti.

Preval also led a campaign to raise Haiti’s national minimum wage by 150 percent — up 37 cents from 24 cents to 61 cents per hour — and caught the ire of the Obama administration. The increase would have had an impact on American companies, such Hanes and Levi Strauss, who contract Haitian laborers to sew their clothes. They insisted the wage increase not exceed 7 cents per hour, while the U.S. Ambassador persuaded Preval lower his target wage of $5 per day for textile workers down to $3 per day. Raising the wages by two dollars would cost Hanes about $1.6 million dollars more in wages to their staff of 3,200 Haitians. The company made $221 million last year on $4.3 billion in sales.

Foreign aid is not a sustainable model for economic growth, but so long as the U.S. undermines Haitian efforts to establish economic independence through sound trade ventures and fair wages that will save money and increase cash flow that could in turn lead to building of infrastructure, the Haitian people suffer. Instead of looking out for the interests of Haiti and the millions in poverty, the U.S. has protected its own political and business interests.

Haiti has experienced what Naomi Klein describes as the “shock doctrine,” where desperate times caused by political unrest or natural disasters have given way to the implementation of neoliberal capitalist economic policies that initially sound as if they will benefit a society as a whole, lifting it from abject poverty, but in application only serve to line the pockets of those already in power and the foreign companies looking to take advantage of poverty stricken nations for cheap labor.

Again and again, the U.S. has used its influence as the world superpower to exploit Haiti’s political uncertainty and ensure a safe haven for its global corporations to operate in ways that bypass American laws regarding labor and fairness. And because we see only the bottom line in personal pocket books, the American public turns blind eye towards these global injustices.

The U.S. does not want Haiti to become another Cuba or Venezuela, two socialist countries with unfriendly attitudes toward America and American business interests. But in pursuit of this goal, it has prevented Haiti from establishing any progressive economic policies that could help the country solve some of its own problems immediately. This is particularly cruel considering that oft repeated refrain that “Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.”

We can simply can not say we have Haiti’s best interests at heart and simultaneously work diligently to ensure those interests are not fulfilled. The U.S., and all other Western powers, needs to step aside and allow Haiti to chart its own political and economic future.

http://thegrio.com/2011/06/08/wikileaks-exposes-how-america-still-hates-on-haiti/

baralatie:
I am suspecting the Adamawa raid!

goodlifehyd:
So sure you didnt read the post, shows how useless you are, someone made a reasonable point and all your empty skull can think of posting is this trash SMH

Ilekeh:
Solution:

[s]In civilized countries, the idea of nomads ceased to exist during the agricultural revolution. Before we can talk about solutions, we have to answers several questions. Why are Fulani herdsmen still archaic? Why do they still need to bring their cows to the South to chew our crops?
Countries like America implemented a cleaner system of transporting fresh meat across the nation. Nigeria can imitate this system or invent a better one. South Nigeria worries about meat supplies if the herdsmen are restricted to the North and the North worries about meeting this demand if they can't travel to the South. Why can't the North create a system of meat supplies in the North and have the The Southern states find methods of getting meat to the South. i.e stores like HEB, Walmart, Target etc find ways to get fresh meat supplies to their stores all over the country.


Result: Fulani herdsmen stays in the North.


But then.....everything is connected to a good electricity supply. No nation can function without stable electricity. Nigeria's not functioning, she's just surviving. [/s]

Ilekeh:
Still spiting. Just answer or .

Aboki, I sight you

Ilekeh:
Answer my previous question before you spit on me.

Ilekeh:
This thread is a great idea, but Nigerians prefer complaining than finding solutions. That's why this thread is still empty.

Let it be an igbo vs yoruba thread and our jobless resident would manage 50 pages

Ilekeh:
Which Southern group made you their spokesmonkey?

neocortex:
Do you expect US to be praising Russia for its actions ?
Both US and Russia will continue to talk tough but are
unwilling to confront each other.
Call me when an American F16 start bombing Russia's
syria military base.

neocortex:
What a dumb analysis from the author.
Neither putin nor America is ready for a
direct war.
If you are conversant with history, you
would have known that indirect warfare(cold war)
can run for years without the major actors ever confronting themselve.

WombRaiders:
In case you cowards forget, there is currently a war in the northeast and a genocide in the middle belt ochestrated by your Hausa-Fulani Masters

Slaves

www.nairaland.com/attachments/2826128_1100984410020116298656794307317223369572674n_jpeg9967059bf947e432bec87cf774846575

www.nairaland.com/attachments/2826129_1143008910020115131990247072908573579376800n_jpeg2266fa9d9043d98aeab3588a1caeabaf

www.nairaland.com/attachments/2826159_1199041710020115398656886433089366915557351n_jpg32166617c9979afbdc9bf85fa646185d

SovietBomber:
But there are cases of fulani attacks in the East too so this should concern all of us.

orunto27:
Thank Fate our Pmb is a Retired Military. We should take all precautions to prevent ISIS degenerating into bokoharam insurgency refugees in Nigeria and West Africa. Nigeria beware.

[size=18pt]400 DIE AS IRANIAN MARCHERS BATTLE SAUDI POLICE IN MECCA; EMBASSIES SMASHED IN TEHERAN[/size]
By JOHN KIFNER, Special to the New York Times
Published: August 2, 1987


CAIRO, Sunday, Aug. 2— More than 400 Moslems died when clashes broke out Friday between Iranian Shiite Moslem pilgrims and Saudi riot policemen in Mecca, Islam's holiest site, Saudi Arabia announced Saturday.

After hearing reports of the deaths, Iranians rampaged in Teheran, attacking the Saudi and Kuwaiti Embassies there. Some reports said four Saudis had been abducted from the embassy.

Iranians were also reported to have stoned the French Embassy and to have torn down the French flag over the building's entrance, in an unrelated dispute with France.

In Mecca, the street battles beside the Grand Mosque came on the eve of the annual pilgrimage, or hajj, which marks the high point of the Islamic year. Support for Iraq

While Iran is controlled by radical Shiite Moslems, the rulers of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are conservative Sunni Moslems who support Iraq in its nearly seven-year-old war against Iran.

The clashes come at a time of growing tension over the gulf war, rising Islamic fundamentalism and United States efforts to escort Kuwaiti oil tankers through the Persian Gulf. The violence in Mecca raises the possibility of open conflict between Shiite Moslem forces and Sunni Moslem regimes.

The clashes began when Iranian pilgrims massed after Friday's midday prayers for a political demonstration, which is forbidden by the Saudi authorities. The pilgrims chanted ''Death to America! Death to the Soviet Union! Death to Israel!'' and brandished portraits of their leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. There are 155,000 Iranian pilgrims among the more than 2 million Moslems, mostly Sunnis, at the pilgrimage. Iranian and Saudi Statements

[size=18pt]Official Iranian statements said the Saudi riot police then opened fire on ''an innocent demonstration.''

The Saudi Information Minister, Ali Hassan al-Shaer, speaking after a special Cabinet meeting called by King Fahd, said the deaths were caused by trampling and insisted that ''not a single bullet was fired.''[/size]

Whatever caused the violence, fragmentary reports from the scene spoke of fighting going on for hours. Slippers, shoes, identity cards, scarves and even wheelchairs littered the streets after the clashes, according to reports from Iran's official Islamic Republic News Agency.

The Saudi television tonight broadcast a 15-minute videotape in which Iranians were shown throwing rocks at the police and then charging into them.

An official Saudi statement said 402 people were killed, including 275 Iranians, 85 Saudi citizens and security men, and 42 pilgrims of other nationalities. It appeared likely that Shiites from Lebanon and Pakistan may have joined the Iranians in the demonstration. The Saudi statement said 649 people were wounded.

The Iranian press agency reported that 200 Iranians had been killed and more than 2,000 wounded. It said the Saudi police opened fire on a ''peaceful march'' with automatic weapons and tear gas.

Earlier, the official Saudi press agency said only that ''some fell'' when police moved in on Shiite demonstrators who were burning cars and fighting with other pilgrims.

Saudi Arabia, whose royal family adheres to a puritan line of the majority Sunni branch of Islam, repeated Saturday that there was a total ban on ''demonstrations, rallies or any kind of marches.''

Like most leaders in the Arab world, the rulers of Saudi Arabia have supported Iraq in its war against Iran, which began in September 1980. '2 Glorious Demonstrations'

Teheran has sought to export its brand of Islamic militancy to other Arab nations.

Ayatollah Khomeini's personal representative in Mecca, Hojatolislam Mahdi Kharoubi, had called for ''two glorious demonstrations'' in the city to help spread Iran's militant doctrine.

The Ayatollah's designated successor, Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, declared that Moslem religious leaders should wrest control of Islam's holy sites in Saudi Arabia from the royal family.

But in Iraq, the ruling Revolutionary Command Council, ostensibly an organ of the secular Baath Arab socialist movement, declared that Iranians should be barred from Islam's holy sites. Fires Are Started

The Iranians who stormed the Saudi and Kuwaiti Embassies in Teheran smashed furniture and started fires. They threw pictures of King Fahd from the roof of the Saudi Embassy and smashed air-conditioners. At the Kuwaiti Embassy, the intruders set fire to documents.

Iranian officials declared that maps had been discovered showing that Kuwait had been spying on behalf of Iraq. No diplomats were in either embassy at the time of the attacks. [ In Washington, an official in the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement Saturday night by the Saudi Embassy there that his Government condemned the violence committed at the Saudi Embassy in Teheran and denounced the Iranian authorities for failing to prevent the incident. [ ''The kingdom considers this attack a violation of all laws and norms, as well as a contradiction of Moslem ethics,'' the statement said, ''and demands that the Iranian authorities interfere immediately to promptly return the four embassy employeess who were brutally attacked and those detained or kidnapped by the authorities in Teheran.'' ] At midday, a crowd burst into the French Embassy and pulled down its flag. France is embroiled in a dispute with Iran over an interpreter who refuses to leave the Iranian Embassy in Paris. He is wanted by the French police for questioning about in terrorist activity.

France and Iran have put each other's embassy under siege. A French fleet is on its way to the gulf. Tension Is Widespread

The clashes in Mecca came at a tense moment for in the area, as American warships continued to escort Kuwaiti vessels, flying the American flag, back through the Strait of Hormuz. One of the Kuwaiti tankers, the Bridgeton, struck a mine on the inbound voyage. There is speculation that the mine was planted in the shipping lane by an Iranian speedboat.

In the emotional atmosphere, heightened by the battles in Mecca, there is concern that the tension could spread to other Shiites in the strategic area.

The vulnerable points are seen as, notably, the oil-producing Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, where there was rioting by Shiites in 1979; in Kuwait, where some of the Shiite minority have joined a pro-Iranian underground that has set off bombs in the oilfields, and in Bahrain, which has a 70 percent Shiite population and is the base of the American gulf fleet. 'American Plot' Is Charged

Iranian leaders immediately declared that the clashes and deaths in Mecca were the result of yet another ''American plot,'' and they stepped up the polemics of recent days against the American escort of Kuwaiti tankers.

''This plot is a U.S.-designed conspiracy,'' Iran's President, Hojatolislam Ali Khamenei, said, emerging from an emergency meeting of his Cabinet this afternoon.

''No doubt the U.S. shoulders responsibility for it,'' he said, adding, ''Of course the Saudi Government is also responsible because it was carried out through the Saudis and their police.''

''Scores of innocent Iranian pilgrims were martyred and many others were wounded when the Saudi police opened fire on a peaceful unity rally,'' the Iranian press agency said.

A Saudi agency dispatch said, ''A number of men and women, pilgrims as well as local residents, were killed as a result of the demagogic stampede.''

The Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam split in the late seventh century in a dispute over whether the Prophet Mohammed's son-in-law, Ali, should carry on as the fourth caliph, or successor. The Shiites - meaning partisans or supporters of Ali - lost, and since then have been a kind of underclass in the Islamic world, nurturing an emotional faith with an emphasis on martyrdom. Trip to Mecca an Obligation

Making the pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime, if it can be afforded, is one of the five obligations of a devout Moslem, and the annual hajj occupies an important place in the Islamic world.

Iran has sought to use the pilgrimage to try to spread its Islamic revolution, among others Moslem, to the dismay of Saudi officials. The Saudis have been especially nervous since 1979, when a Sunni fundamentalist, claiming to be the returned Mahdi, or Savior, seized the Grand Mosque with an armed band. A long siege of the mosque left more than 100 dead. 'Break America's Teeth'

Ayatollah Khomeini had urged the pilgrims to carry out a ''disavowal of the pagans,'' over the gulf war, calling for a ''unity rally'' to seek ''deliverance from infidels.'' He urged Moslems, ''Break America's teeth in its mouth.''

Objective accounts of the Mecca clash were difficult to come by. Saudi Arabia has been sealed off since Wednesday night as part of the normal preparations for the piligrimage and, in any case, Mecca is closed to non-Moslems. Saudi officials are traditionally secretive in times of stress.

From the accounts that were available, it appeared that a large number of Iranians gathered after the Friday prayer and began chanting and burning effigies of President Reagan. The Saudi police were reported to have warned them to disperse, then attacked with clubs and gas.

Steel-helmeted policemen were said to be trying to round up Iranians among the sea of tents set up for the pilgrims.

Iran announced that it was sending a high-level delegation to Mecca to investigate the incident and declared three days of morning and a ''Day of Hatred'' for America.

Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi said Iran would mobilize its resources to avenge what he called the massacre of the pilgrims.

In Lebanon, the pro-Iranian Party of God said that Saudi Arabia should pay for the deaths of the Shiite pilgrims.

''It should be punished in a way appropriate to the crime,'' the Party of God said, adding, ''The Moslem uprising has started and the day of conquering has neared.''
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/02/world/400-die-iranian-marchers-battle-saudi-police-mecca-embassies-smashed-teheran.html?pagewanted=all

Photo fo Iranian protesters at Kuwaiti Embassy in Teheran (AP)

ULSHERLAN:
You haven't been following any news because if you do, you ought to know USA claimed the error as their fault.