26010: Haiti Progres (news) This Week in Haiti 23:23 8/17/2005 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Haïti Progrès <editor@haiti-progres.com>

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                   HAITI PROGRES
         "Le journal qui offre une alternative"

                * THIS WEEK IN HAITI *

                  August 17 - 23, 2005
                    Vol. 23, No. 23



AFTER PROTESTS IN THE NORTH:
HAITIAN POLICE ARM ATTACHÉS TO CONDUCT MASSACRES IN THE CAPITAL

In many Latin American countries, death-squads work hand in hand with
the police, but discretely, and function mostly at night. In Haiti, the
collaboration between official and unofficial repressive forces is
conducted openly and in broad daylight.

Such was the case in the Port-au-Prince slum of Belair on Aug. 10.
Several Haitian National Police (PNH) vehicles led dozens of hooligans
armed with guns, machetes, axes and clubs into the Belair districts of
Solino and Ti Chery. Residents immediately began running toward the UN
military outpost on Rue Tiremasse, vainly hoping that they might find
some safety there. But many did not react quickly enough. The police and
mob attacked swiftly and viciously.

"More than 12 people were hacked to death by machetes or riddled with
police bullets," said Sanba Boukman, the leader of Belair's
Lavalas-affiliated popular organizations.

Didine Joseph, a 16-year-old girl who was four months pregnant, was
macheted to death. "It was poignant because the fetus lived for several
minutes after she was killed," Boukman explained. "It could be seen
kicking in her belly. It was really sad. Corpses lay in the streets and
dogs fed on them. The situation is horrible."

In all, some 15 people were killed over the course of Aug. 10 and 11.
"These people were killed simply for being Lavalas partisans," said one
young man who barely escaped with his life. "If one supports the
Lavalas, one merits death. This morning [August 11], a number of people
were killed in the [Belair] neighborhood of Belle Déessse."

The most recent crackdown in Belair began on Aug. 6, when at least seven
people were killed, five by masked Haitian policemen and two by troops
of the United Nations Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH). Duckens
Orius, a cameraman with privately owned Channel 11, filmed the
operation. The police attacked him and confiscated his equipment.

The State Hospital's morgue reported receiving forty corpses, killed by
bullets, from popular neighborhoods during the second week of August.
Those killed by machetes were not counted in that figure.

Moroccan Colonel Elouafi Boulbars, MINUSTAH's spokesman, said that all
the victims were "bandits," the same sobriquet U.S. Marines gave to
anyone who resisted their 1915-1934 military occupation of Haiti.

"Many of the gangs have been dismantled," said Boulbars, using the
epithet given to popular organizations by occupation authorities. "I can
assure you that they have sustained heavy losses." He said that MINUSTAH
's Brazilian battalion arrested eleven "bandits" in Belair on August 8.

The MINUSTAH used to posture as a buffer against PNH excesses. But since
the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1608 in June, the UN has
had direct oversight over and responsibility for the Haitian police (see
HaVti ProgrPs, Vol. 23, No. 16, 6/29/2005).

In fact, the Aug. 10 massacre is likely just an extension of the new
aggressive policies of the UN in Haiti, as heralded by the Jul. 6 Cité
Soleil attack detailed in the Aug. 16 Washington Post.

That deadly night-time assault, which killed some 60 Cité Soleil
residents, "reflected a shift in tactics for U.N. peacekeeping troops,
who by the mid-1990s were going out of their way to avoid combat," the
Post's Colum Lynch reported. "Now, the blue-helmeted troops are showing
a renewed willingness to use considerable firepower against armed groups
that they deem a threat to peace efforts."

The Post interviewed Nancy Soderberg, the U.S. Mission to the United
Nations's peacekeeping expert from 1997 to 2000. "There has been a
fundamental shift in peacekeeping that very few people have noticed,
where U.N. peacekeepers are actually taking proactive, offensive
preemptive action against threats," she said. "The United States learned
this when they invaded Haiti in 1994. Basically someone tried to attack
them, they blew them away and that was the end of that." During the 1994
U.S. invasion of Haiti, nobody ever "tried to attack" U.S. troops, but
those troops did "blow away" dozens of people. In fact, Washington has
been the main pressure on the Brazilian-led MINUSTAH to be more
aggressive.

In his account, Lynch reports that the UN troops invading Cité Soleil on
Jul. 6 encountered stiff resistance. In fighting their way out, "the
Brazilians fired more than 16,700 rounds of ammunition in the densely
populated neighborhood," he wrote. This caused "a lot of collateral
damage," according to Lynch's source, David Olson, a U.S. doctor working
with Doctors Without Borders. "Collateral damage" was, in part, some 27
Haitians, mostly women and children, who filled Olson's clinic after the
U.N. operation dubbed Iron Fist. Olson said that up to half the victims
claimed that they had been wounded by U.N. troops.

Meanwhile, several demonstrations against the U.N. occupation were
organized in Haiti's north by the National Popular Party (PPN) and the
Lavalas Family party (FL) around Jul. 28, the 90th anniversary of the
first U.S. Marine invasion. In the northeastern commune of ValiPres, the
PPN and FL held a rally on Jul. 30, which taxed the MINUSTAH for
tolerating putschist criminals like former Haitian soldier and "rebel"
turned presidential candidate Guy Philippe while imprisoning
constitutional Prime Minister Yvon Neptune, singer Sb An, Father Gérard
Jean-Juste, and hundreds of other Lavalas political prisoners.

On Jul. 28, thousands marched through the streets of Cap HaVtien, Haiti'
s second largest city, to protest the Feb. 29, 2004 coup and ensuing
occupation. The demonstration, also jointly organized by the PPN and FL,
denounced the upcoming sham elections which occupation authorities are
planning to hold in November and December. "We are telling the MINUSTAH,
the National Police, the [UN] CIVPOL, and the U.S. Embassy to stop their
massacres in the popular neighborhoods," said the PPN's Michel Adrien in
a speech written for the occasion.

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Please credit Haiti Progres.

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