Haitian writer and former Montreal university professor, Georges Anglade, and his wife Mireille were killed in the tragic Port-au-Prince earthquake. As the world’s eyes were riveted on frantic efforts to rescue Haitians from their worst earthquake in two centuries, their daughter Pascale Anglade hoped that her parents would emerge from the rubble of a home where they were trapped. But late Wednesday, she learned that her parents Georges and Mireille Anglade did not survive. They became the second and third Canadians killed by the Caribbean catastrophe. “He died and my mom died also,” Pascale Anglade said of her parents in a hushed voice from her home in Charlotte, N.C., during a telephone interview with The Canadian Press. Eyewitnesses confirmed that her parents and their friends who owned the home had died, Pascale Anglade said. She remembered her parents, who had been married 43 years, as “beautiful. . . great people. My dad taught for 30 years at the University of Quebec in Montreal (which he had helped establish). My dad worked for years for the UN. They lived in Haiti for many years, that’s where they raised me and my sister.”

Georges Anglade, 65, came to Canada in 1969 and was one of the founders of the Universite du Quebec a Montreal, where he was a professor of social geography until 2002. A former political prisoner under the Duvalier regime, he was active in pushing for democracy in the poverty stricken country and wrote several books. He returned to live in Haiti temporarily in the mid-1990s, serving in the cabinet of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide for 10 months.

Pascale Anglade said her parents had recently returned to Haiti for a family holiday. “We had just left there. We were with them up until 10 days ago. It’s really a shame.”

Anglade, a prominent geographer, was also a literary writer. Among his best-known books are Les Blancs de Mémoire (1999), Leurs jupons dépassent (2000), Ce pays qui m’habite (2002), Et si Haiti declarait la guerre aux USA ? (2004), Rire haïtien / Haitian Laughter (2006).

Foe the more on the news of Anglade’s death go to http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5jteyZHsEfh-VJXatTZIkh2dyGbUg

For a profile of Anglade (in French) go to http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ile.en.ile/paroles/anglade.html