24440: (news) Holmstead: (HIP): Aristides Lavalas puts UN duplicity to the test in Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: John Holmstead <cyberkismet5@yahoo.com>

March 4, 2005

Aristide’s Lavalas puts UN duplicity to the test in
Haiti
From: John Holmstead     <cyberkismet5@yahoo.com>

March 4, 2005

Aristide’s Lavalas puts UN duplicity to the test in
Haiti

Commentary by the Haiti Information Project (HIP)

Evidence continues to mount of the United Nation’s
complicity in an on-going campaign by the US-installed
government of Gerard Latortue to terrorize and
exterminate sympathizers of President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide’s political party known as Lavalas. Despite
detailed documentation of innumerable massacres
committed by the Police Nationale de Haiti (PNH) over
the last five months, the UN insisted in a new report
released on February 25 that “the general security
environment across Haiti has improved.” Any sensible
observer of Haiti must ask, “improved for whom?” The
recent attack by the PNH against unarmed demonstrators
demanding Aristide’s return on February 28 destroyed
the credibility of several such statements made
recently by the UN in Haiti and exposed the
duplicitous role of their forces in propping up an
unpopular regime.

The reality is the UN has dirtied its hands to keep
the US-installed regime in power. Their main role and
objective has arguably been to insure there is no
resistance as the current regime undertakes a campaign
to eliminate the Lavalas party. Whenever the UN moved
into the poor slums of the capital to occupy it by
force, the Haitian National Police (PNH) soon followed
with violent incursions against the population.
Wherever the UN opened the gates the PNH soon followed
to tear apart their victims.  Following these bloody
exercises in terror, the UN dutifully covered them up
by accepting the PNH’s denials and justifications
while twisting reality by representing the Latortue
regime as a centrist government embattled between the
extremes of deadly Lavalas gunmen and the former
brutal military. Meanwhile, the lopsided death toll of
Lavalas sympathizers versus any other identifiable
sector of Haitian society is incontrovertible and
exposes the UN’s subservience to US foreign policy
whose main goal has been to consolidate the coup that
ousted the democratically elected government of
Jean-Bertrand Aristide on February 29, 2004.

Continuing a relentless campaign of misinformation by
the Latortue regime, PNH spokeswoman Gessy Coicou
commented on the killings of February 28 by stating,
"The police broke up the march because it was violent
and about half the protesters were carrying weapons."
This stood in stark contradiction to press reports by
the likes of Knight Ridder Newspapers (KRT) who wrote,
“Two days after Haitian police opened fire on a crowd
of peaceful protesters and killed two, the head of the
U.N. mission here said police brutality is
undercutting progress and such action will no longer
be tolerated.” The Miami Herald also quoted U.N.
Ambassador Juan Gabriel Valdes as stating, "We cannot
tolerate executions. We can't tolerate shooting out of
control. We will not permit human rights abuses.” KRT
continued by adding “He [U.N. Ambassador Juan Gabriel
Valdes] said U.N. peacekeepers will intervene - and
use force if necessary - if Haitian police attack
unarmed civilians again.”

The former statement by Valdes was disingenuous at
best given that the UN has in the past given the PNH a
freehand to kill Lavalas supporters with impunity in
well-documented massacres in poor neighborhoods like
Cite Soleil, Cite de Dieu, Bel Air and La Saline over
the past five months. The latter statement of UN armed
intervention against PNH for “attacking unarmed
civilians” remains just words until put to the test.

Putting the UN’s threat against PNH to the test is
exactly what Aristide’s Lavalas party intends to do
over the next weeks and months before elections
designed to legitimize the coup against him are held
in October and November. Nothing less than the already
compromised credibility of the UN is at stake in Haiti
as the world braces itself for yet another feeble
justification to continue the campaign of
extermination against Lavalas supporters demanding
Aristide’s return.











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