23933: (news) This Week In Haiti 22:40 12/15/2004 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

"This Week in Haiti" is the English section of HAITI PROGRES
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                       HAITI PROGRES
            "Le journal qui offre une alternative"

                  * THIS WEEK IN HAITI *

                  December 15 - 21, 2004
                     Vol. 22, No. 40

WITH "PROTECTORATE" LOOMING:
BLUE HELMETS CARRY OUT REPRESSION ORDERED BY POWELL

Hundreds of foreign occupation troops invaded the shanty town of Cité
Soleil on Dec. 14, wounding dozens of people in gun battles that lasted
most of the day. Several people were also rumored to have been killed,
including an infant.

Brazilian, Jordanian and Sri Lankan troops carried out most of the
operation, backed by Jordanian and Chinese riot police as well as
helicopters and armored cars.

The assault, which aims to secure two abandoned police stations in the
violence-lashed slum, came after Juan Gabriel ValdPs, the UN Secretary
General's representative for Haiti, announced last Wednesday Dec. 8 that
the UN Mission for the Stabilization of Haiti (MINUSTAH) was going to
crack down on "bandits," code for repression of the anti-coup uprising
that has been churning in Haiti's popular quarters.

Dread Wilmer, a leader of anti-coup popular organizations in Cité
Soleil, said that "lots" of people were killed and denounced the foreign
occupation. A rival Cité Soleil leader, Thomas Robinson, or LabanyP, is
supported by the pro-coup bourgeoisie and welcomed the U.N. crackdown.

Mainstream press reports portray the struggle between the groups as
simple "gang" warfare. It is in fact a political struggle, fomented by
cash from Haiti's bourgeoisie, to neutralize popular resistance to the
Feb. 29 coup and kidnapping of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

The Associated Press reported that at least six people were shot
including Fransur Julien, 13. "He lay on a bed in his kitchen after a
bullet penetrated his home and struck him in the side," wrote the AP's
Amy Braken. "His mother, Memen Oben, said she had no way of getting him
to a hospital."

AP also reported that a 16-year-old boy and a 26-year-old woman were hit
by gunfire, according to relatives. Reuters reported that a U.N. soldier
was wounded.

The crackdown comes just two weeks after U.S. Secretary of State Colin
Powell visited Haiti on Dec. 1 to demand that the Brazilian-led MINUSTAH
crack down on the capital's rebellious popular neighborhoods. "We are
under extreme pressure from the international community to use
violence," MINUSTAH's commander General Augusto Heleno Ribeiro told a
congressional commission in Brazil the day after Powell's visit. "To do
this would require a force of 100,000 men prepared to seek and kill in
large numbers," Foreign Minister Celso Amorim told Brazilian legislators
at the same hearing.

Despite these statements, during his weekly press conference last week,
Juan Gabriel ValdPs said that the UN would soon be deploying troops in
Haiti's hot spots.

"Now that the necessary forces are available in Port-au-Prince, we are
going to show the Haitian population that we have decided to use force
to confront the bandits and disarm the illegal groups," ValdPs said. "In
the next days, 1200 Brazilian soldiers will be deployed in downtown
Port-au-Prince. The Sri Lankan soldiers will be posted in Carrefour
while the 150 Jordanian policemen will reinforce the security forces in
the capital."

Former Haitian soldiers, who openly parade with their illegal weapons
and conduct joint patrols with UN forces in some cities, are not among
the "illegal groups" that ValdPs proposes to disarm. On the contrary,
the former soldiers, who were instrumental in Washington's ouster of
Aristide, are now being integrated into the police force. They also send
masked death-squads to conduct massacres in anti-coup strongholds like
Bel Air and Carrefour.

Meanwhile, mainstream U.S. papers have begun conditioning their readers
that Haiti might become a U.N. "protectorate" similar to Kosovo. "Should
the U.N. run Haiti? Some see little alternative" was the title of a Dec.
12 piece by Pablo Bachelet in the Miami Herald. The Herald already
published a Dec. 3 editorial urging a disguised protectorate after their
former Haiti correspondent and State Department-mouthpiece Don Bohning
first floated the idea in a Nov. 22 article.

"The only way we're going to make any progress in Haiti is to establish
a good, old fashioned trusteeship," said Riordan Roett, the Western
Hemisphere director at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced
International Studies in Washington, in Bachelet's piece. Haiti needs a
"multilateral force with a 25-year mandate to rebuild the country year
by year. Everything's been destroyed. It's a failed state, a failed
nation," Roett said.

"Protectorate status is not a politically correct term these days, but
Haiti is a pretty good candidate if it were,"said a predictably
anonymous Defense Department official quoted by Bachelet.

But defenders of Haitian sovereignty say that a U.S. government hand is
behind the "protectorate" trial balloons in the press. "The Herald
articles are just the way Washington politically prepares the public for
what it's planning," said Ray Laforest of the Haiti Support Network
(HSN), a New York-based support group for Haiti's anti-coup National
Popular Party (PPN). "The Brazilians and other U.N. troops are not
acting forcefully enough to repress the growing anti-coup uprising in
Haiti. So the Pentagon is surely examining the eventuality that it will
have to once again dispatch U.S. troops to Haiti, who will be more
ruthless in repressing rebellious Haitians. If things keep deteriorating
the way they have in recent months, the Bush administration might
kick-out the de facto technocrats they installed last March and openly
take charge of the country, discarding their fig-leaf Haitian de factos
and voilB: a protectorate ."

Meanwhile, Washington also seems to be prepping Canada to be the
frontman and overseer of such a protectorate. Last weekend, Canadian
Prime Minister Paul Martin and his Foreign Minister Pierre Pettigrew
hosted de facto Haitian Prime Minister Gérard Latortue and a gaggle of
faux "Haitian leaders" in a two-day conference on Haiti's future in
Montreal.

"The Government of Canada is proceeding with its war on the Haitian
people in the form of this new conference ostensibly to be attended by
the 'leaders in the Haitian community abroad,'" wrote Marguerite Laurent
of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network on Dec. 7. She referred to the
Haitian participants at the Dec. 10-11 conference "about putting Haiti
under the long term tutelage of foreigners" as the "Chalabis of Haiti"
(a reference to Ahmed Chalabi, the Pentagon's erstwhile stooge in Iraq)
intent on trying to "sell the last shreds of the Haitian people's
sovereignty and dignity."

On Dec. 10, close to 400 Haitians demonstrated outside the conference
chanting "traitors" and "magouilleurs" (wheeler-dealers). Over 500
demonstrated the next day.

All articles copyrighted Haiti Progres, Inc. REPRINTS ENCOURAGED.Please
credit Haiti Progres.

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