22867: Fenton: Things so much worse (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Anthony Fenton <apfenton@ualberta.ca>

Letter to the Editor
4 August 2004
The Toronto Star
Copyright (c) 2004 The Toronto Star

Food supplies are low, electricity limited, garbage is piled up, people are
sick and riots, murders continueHaiti mission called success

July 30.

I read with dismay the, perhaps, naive comments attributed to Lt.-Col.
James Davis about the "success" of the mission to Haiti. His glowing
description of happy schoolchildren and open markets in Port-au-Prince
leaves the impression that "Whew! Thank God things are okay now."

This may be the case for the children of the French-speaking elite in the
capital, of whom I assume he may have been speaking, but it is most
definitely not the case for most of Haiti, nor most of the Creole-speaking
poor majority.

For the past month, Sharon Gaskell, a youth and aid worker from
Orangeville, has been staying in the northern city of Cap-Haitien. She
visits there about four times each year, and has done so for about seven
years now.

In a cellphone call to me Sunday (all Internet cafes are shut down), she
said the rebels are demanding to be reinstated as Haiti's military force,
and to be paid. To underscore their demands, they fired their weapons
randomly for several hours in the downtown area on Saturday. If their
demands are not met, and soon, they say, they will revolt again.

Conditions, says Gaskell, are so much worse than they were last October,
prior to the revolt in February. Supporters of Jean-Bertrand Aristide are
still
being hunted down by those who support the new regime. Two weeks
ago, there were several riots over several days, and the murder of an
Aristide supporter in her neighbourhood.

As well, she said, food supplies are low, hydro is only on for one to three
hours daily, garbage is piled up along the roads as there has been no
collection for many months now, and people everywhere are sick. She
burns her household's garbage in the yard. The smell of feces is strong,
like living in an open sewer, she said. Luckily, a torrential downpour a few
days ago filled up the cistern, as there is no gas available to run the
generator to power the pump.

The textbooks Gaskell needs to buy for more than 80 schoolchildren she
helps send to school in St. Rafael, a village 28 kilometres south of
Cap-Haitien, have not come in yet, and the price is rumoured to be four to
five times what it was last year, due to a poor exchange rate and high
demand. Those students lost the entire school year of 2003-2004 since
many schools closed because of the violent civil unrest.

Of course, for most Haitians, this situation is, unfortunately, all too
"normal." That doesn't mean it is "all right." Perhaps the peacekeeping
forces should have their mandate extended beyond the borders of
over-policed Port-au-Prince, so they can see what is really happening in
the rest of Haiti.

Karen Zabawa, Mississauga