=?x-unknown?q?26084=3A__Lemieux=3A_Haiti_Progres=3A_After_Pro?==?x-unknown?q?tests=3A_Haitian_Police_Arm_Attach=E9s_to_Condu?==?x-unknown?q?ct_Massacres_in_the_Capital_=28fwd=29?=

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JD Lemieux <lxhaiti@yahoo.com>

After Protests: Haitian Police Arm Attachés to
Conduct Massacres in the Capital
By Haiti Progres

8-25-05,9:07am

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.?
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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 Haïti Progrès, 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
Valières, 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 Sò Àn, Father Gérard Jean-Juste,
and hundreds of other Lavalas political
prisoners.

On Jul. 28, thousands marched through the streets
of Cap Haïtien, 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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