18760: (Hermantin) Mimai-Herald-Rebels raid town where UM clinic is (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Posted on Wed, Feb. 18, 2004

UNREST IN HAITI


Rebels raid town where UM clinic is

BY ELINOR J. BRECHER

ebrecher@herald.com


The Haitian town of Thomonde, where a medical mission affiliated with the
University of Miami runs a clinic, was seized briefly by anti-government
forces Monday, according to the former UM AIDS researcher who oversees the
clinic.

Marie Chery, who directs Project Medishare in Thomonde, said the gunmen
welded shut a bridge on the only road leading south, then left.

POLICE `WITHDREW'

''They came and then nobody sees them,'' said Chery. ''That's the anxiety of
these things.'' The ''10 to 12'' policemen in the town of 39,000
''withdrew,'' she added. Chery was interviewed Tuesday by telephone from
Port-au-Prince. She was at the home of a friend in the Haitian capital,
where she had been marooned since Monday with three Peace Corps volunteers
and a shipment of supplies destined for Thomonde.

She said the former mayor and operators at the city's telephone station had
passed on news of the takeover.

Thomonde is about 15 miles southeast of the town of Hinche, where gunmen
fighting to topple President Jean-Bertrand Aristide killed three police
officers during an attack Monday.

Chery believes that Thomonde's residents will safeguard the clinic and
Project Medishare's guest house, two of the city's few buildings with
electricity and indoor plumbing.

KEY EMPLOYER

Medishare, co-founded by UM doctors, is the city's biggest employer. It
brings medical students to the dirt-road city several times a year for rural
health clinics.

UM President Donna Shalala accompanied a group in December.

''The people are very loyal to the organization,'' Chery said. ``They have
invested in it as much as everybody else. It's there for their own people.''

Dr. Barth Green, Medishare co-founder and head of UM's neurosurgery
department, said he is ''terrified for the people we love'' in the region
and concerned about the mission's facilities.

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