23821: (pub) radtimes: Haiti thought it had hit rock bottom, but life just gets harder (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: radtimes <resist@best.com>

Haiti thought it had hit rock bottom, but life just gets harder

http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1310402004

13 Nov 2004
REED LINDSAY IN PORT-AU-PRINCE

JEAN, a 32-year-old street vendor wearing a tattered straw hat, stands
under a searing midday sun on a street corner in Port-au-Prince's grungy
city centre, his arms and shoulders laden with nylon duffel bags.

"Look over there," he says, pointing to a dirt side street strewn with
rubbish. "That street used to be full of buses and vendors. It was
impossible to pass. Now, it's empty."

Almost daily shootings have destroyed business in this once pulsing
commercial hub, says Jean, whose friend, also a street vendor, was shot and
killed a month ago. Many Haitians thought they had hit rock bottom in
February, when the former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced from
power amid an armed revolt fuelled by a perpetual political conflict and a
sinking economy. But since then the poorest nation on earth has become
poorer and security has worsened, despite the presence of the United
Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti.

Violence has racked Port-au-Prince since 30 September, when several
thousand Aristide supporters staged a demonstration that was broken up when
police fired into the crowd.

Since then, gunfire has crackled through the city centre most days and the
streets are unusually silent at night, as the capital's frightened
residents hurry indoors at dusk.

The desperately poor slum of Cité Soleil has become a lawless battlefield,
as rival gangs shoot each other and extort, rape and kill residents while
police dare not enter. An unknown number of families have fled, businesses
and schools are shuttered, and the slum's only hospital is closed indefinitely.

The recent violence has buffeted an already moribund economy. Inflation has
topped 22 per cent since January, according to Camille Chalmers, an
economist with PAPDA, a Port-au-Prince-based think tank. Street vendors in
poor neighbourhoods complain that prices have risen even more for staples
such as rice, corn flour, beans and cooking oil.

To make matters worse, Haiti has suffered two devastating natural disasters
this year: thousands died in mudslides and floods in the north-western
coastal city of Gonaives from Tropical Storm Jeanne in September and near
the border with the Dominican Republic from torrential rains in May.

The international community's response to the country's woes has been
criticised.

So far, 4,500 soldiers and 1,000 police officers have joined the UN
peacekeeping mission in Haiti, short of the promised 6,700 soldiers and
1,622 police. Promises of international aid have so far proved largely
empty. And all the while, the violence continues.

The prime minister, Gerard Latortue, has blamed Aristide supporters for
trying to destabilise the government, accusing the former president of
fomenting violence from exile in South Africa. The government has cracked
down on members of Aristide's Lavalas party, arresting leaders and staging
raids in pro-Aristide areas, leading some human rights observers to accuse
the government of abuses.

But some hard-liners are calling for an even tougher stance.

"Shoot them and ask questions later," said Jean Philippe Sassine, who is
assistant mayor of Port-au-Prince. "Right now our country needs security.
Unless you clean up the bad people, the gangs, there will be no progress.
It will be a massacre, people will die. But let us do it or it will be worse."

Former soldiers who control much of the countryside, and who have turned a
Port-au-Prince apartment complex into a temporary military base, warn they
will take matters into their own hands if the government does not allow
them to wipe out the Aristide supporters.

But in a move recognising that force alone will not solve the conflict,
Brazil, which leads the peacekeeping mission in Haiti, said last week it
would send an envoy to meet Aristide.

While many Lavalas leaders are either in jail or in exile, the party
continues to command strong support from Haiti's poor, who say that as bad
as things might have been under the former president, they are worse off now.

.