15765: Edouard:(News) Haiti-Land of Terror (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Felix Edouard <loveayiti@hotmail.com>

Haiti dubbed land of terror after U.S. invasion

By Robert Evans
Reuters Ltd.

GENEVA, June 2 — Caribbean Haiti, where invading U.S. forces overthrew a
military regime in 1994, is a land of terror under the former priest they
put in power, a global labour union body said on Monday.

       Labour leaders, students, doctors, teachers and journalists in the
poverty-wracked country face daily threats, violence, arrests and killings
for criticising the rule of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a report from
the body said.
       Killers from strong-arm squads dubbed ''chimeres,'' or bogeymen,
created by Aristide's ruling Lavalas party ''walk the streets in broad
daylight,'' said the Brussels-based International Confederation of Free
Trade Unions (ICFTU).
       The now-exiled leader of the high-school teachers union said in the
report he had been forced to leave after chimeres -- successors to the
long-notorious ''tonton macoutes'' of the regime fought by Aristide in the
early 1980s -- had come to kill him.
       Aristide's party recruited unemployed youths and even children to the
chimere units, the ICFTU said, a practice it compared to the employment of
child soldiers in many African conflicts.
       The ICFTU, which represents 158 million workers in 150 countries,
said the economic and political situation in Haiti was ''spiralling out of
control'' since Aristide returned to the presidency in 2000.
       The United States invaded Haiti in 1994 to remove an army junta which
had overthrown Aristide eight months after he was elected president in 1990.
       U.S. officials proclaimed an ambitious plan for rebuilding the
country, where 65 percent of the some five million population earn less than
$1 a day.
       But diplomats and analysts who follow the situation in the country
say the then U.S. administration of President Bill Clinton lost interest and
failed to follow through, withdrawing its troops by 1999.
       The ICFTU report said only about 100,000 people of a working
population of four million had formal jobs, with the rest largely exploited
by employers in the informal economy. Hundreds of thousands of children were
forced to work illegally to survive.

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