22319: Erasmus: Re: 22307: Esser: Why did Canada support a U.S. coup in Haiti? (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: erasmus <erasumustom@sympatico.ca>

To the Corbett list:  I made a serious error in my recently published
article about Canada's complicity in the US Haiti campaign. The error
was with regard to Kevin Pina's reporting during the Flag Day
demonstration. I simply mis-read my own notes and was in too much of
a hurry.  I really regret this.  The corrected version, which I've
sent to rabble.ca., is below.

This should not take away from the fact:  the U.S. participated in a
brutal attack on legal, peaceful demonstrators in Haiti.  This gives
the lie to any claim that the US is there to bring peace, restore
order, etc.  The US is there to enforce it's own interests and to
shore up its Haitian elite allies.  A specific goal of both the US
and the coup government is to destroy any possibility that Lavalas
will be restored to its rightful place as the party representing most
poor Haitians.   This mimics, albeit on a smaller scale, the
intentions and behavior of the US in Iraq.

Here's the correction to the part of my article dealing with the Flag
Day demonstration:

On May 18, the Marines went further - accompanying a Haitian National
Police SWAT team as they fired indiscriminately at the tens of
thousands of Haitians demonstrating on Haiti's Flag Day, demanding
the return of their elected president.  The Associated Press reported
one death from police fire, but Haiti's Radio Solidarité said at
least nine deaths were alleged by participants,and Kevin Pina, an
American reporter on the scene, verified two deaths including one he
saw shot by a SWAT team as Marines nearby taunted demonstrators.  He
said he was fired at twice by the Haitian police as he tried to film
the dying man. Pina said he gave the license plate number of the SWAT
vehicle to a Marine officer on the scene.  (Flashpoints Radio, KFPA,
Berkeley, CA, May 18, 2004 and San Francisco Bay View, May 26, 2004.)

Tom Reeves