27012: Re: 26987: (news) Holmstead: UN Cleansing Bel Air (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

FROM:  John Holmstead


ZNet | Haiti

UN Cleansing Bel Air
by Isabel MacDonald; HIP; December 24, 2005

    HIP, Haiti ? According to Juan Gabriel Valdes, the
head of the United Nations Mission for the
Stabilization in Haiti (MINUSTAH), the upcoming
Haitian elections scheduled for January 8 will mark "a
major victory for the electoral process." A central
strategy in preparing for the vote is MINUSTAH's
Disarmament, Demobilization and Reinsertion (DDR)
campaign. In theory, DDR offers both sides of the
political conflict in Haiti ? armed Lavalas supporters
and the former paramilitary death squads and disbanded
army who led the Canada, US and France sponsored coup
against Jean Bertrand Aristide's FL government ? the
chance to hand over their arms in exchange for amnesty
and reintegration. While the former military have been
offered more than 12 million US dollars as a buy-out
for their loyalty to the process, Lavalas remains as
demonized and destitute as the day the UN began its
occupation of Haiti in the name of "restoring
democracy." While former death squad leaders like
Jodel Chamblain have been set free, Lavalas leaders
such as Father Gerard Jean-Juste continue to waste
away in prison with little hope of justice.

    DDR is being trumpeted as a particular success in
Bel Air, a Port-au-Prince slum where support for
Aristide and resistance to the coup has been
particularly strong. At a press conference on November
28, Valdes held up Bel Air as an example of a triumph
for MINUSTAH's "dialogue" with "problem" (read
Lavalas-supporting) neighborhoods. In contrast to Bel
Air's neighboring slum of Cite Soleil, which is also a
stronghold of Lavalas support, and where civilian
deaths caused by MINUSTAH have recently attracted some
negative international media attention, Valdes
trumpeted the UN's "stabilization" operations in Bel
Air as a good news story.

    The Brazilian army's success in disarming and
"stabilizing" Bel Air were highlighted on December 5,
at a ceremony marking the arrival of a new contingent
of troops; it is the Brazilians who have been leading
UN operations in Bel Air. The event took place at the
MINUSTAH base, which occupies an entire university
constructed under the Aristide government, in which
the classrooms and offices are now teeming with
heavily armed, blue-helmet-clad soldiers of the UN
"stabilization" forces, with the residences
transformed into army barracks. The outgoing Brazilian
MINUSTAH commander opened the ceremonies in the middle
of what once had been the university's soccer field;
for the occasion of the ceremony, the field was
populated with a different sort of game, whose players
included some 2000 UN soldiers adorned with M16s, and
a gaggle of diplomats, including Canadian Ambassador
Claude Boucher. The incoming Brazilian MINUSTAH
commander gushed at the ceremony about the manner in
which MINUSTAH operations had been carried out in Bel
Air. The commander praised the manner in which the
troops had carried out their "operations," "always
with the greatest respect for the Haitian people and
their customs," and with "good relations" with local
communities, and he gave a particular "thanks to
outgoing Brazilian MINUSTAH troops for the
pacification of Bel Air."

    Lies, prison sentences and DDR in practice

    The streets of Bel Air are strewn with banners
trumpeting the supposed reconciliation wrought by DDR.
However, for members of the community who have
participated in the disarmament, DDR has proven more
than a great disappointment. In July, Zakat Zanfan, an
organization that works with street kids, had agreed
to participate with MINUSTAH DDR authorities. In
exchange, the UN promised to assist the community with
development projects including providing food for the
most vulnerable especially the hungry children of the
neighborhood. According to Robert Montinard, a Zakat
organizer, "they promised us education housing, food,
jobs". Zakat facilitated seminars about the importance
of ceasing violence for some of the youth they work
with, in which they urged kids to give up their guns
to the UN.

    Following Zakat's seminars, 28 people from the
community who had participated in DDR were arrested
and thrown in jail; two participants, Lundi Duckens,
and another man by the name of Stevenson, who was
referred to by his friends as "Coeur Rouge," are still
in the Haitian National Penitentiary. Meanwhile,
Montinard told me "so far, we have received nothing
from the UN". On December 8, when I visited Bel Air,
Zakat had just run out of rice, and had had to turn
fifty hungry kids away. Moreover, that very morning,
MINUSTAH secured the perimeter as hooded police raided
their neighborhood yet again.

    From a small office marked with a hand-painted
sign that read "DDR Office," Samba Boukman, Lavalas
organizer in Bel Air, explained to me that the
community did not have many weapons in the first
place, particularly when compared to the Haitian
National Police, which has carried out a series of
deadly attacks on the community since February 29,
2004. Hundreds of Bel Air residents have been killed
or injured at the hands of the U.S. marines, Haitian
National Police and the MINUSTAH troops since the
coup. At first people defended themselves by showering
the invading troops and police with rocks and bottles
from surrounding rooftops. The U.S. marines responded
with a deadly incursion in the early morning hours of
March 12, 2004 that ended with blood being hosed from
the streets by fire trucks and dozens of body bags
being removed by the time reporters arrived on the
scene. Most recently, a police officer or MINUSTAH
soldier would drop a gun as they attempted to withdraw
from the hail of chunks of concrete and glass, which
people in the community would appropriate as a means
of self defense, Boukman explained.

    The litany of police crimes

    Whole streets of Bel Air now lie empty in the wake
of violent police raids, carried out by the HNP, often
with the assistance of hooded police attaches, and the
complicity of MINUSTAH police (a force which was
formerly referred to as CIVPOL, but whose name has
recently been changed to UNPOLódropping the misleading
suggestion that the force, which increasingly consists
of military police, is a civil police force). As the
UN military used its guns to control the outer
perimeter of Bel Air, the Haitian police and
machete-wielding paramilitaries would drive through
the neighborhood on killing and torching sprees
designed to terrorize the inhabitants. In Ruelle
Felix, Boukman pointed to the house where the police
arrested a 16-year old this summer. The outside of the
house was painted brightly with the Haitian flag, but
the mural was now pockmarked with holes from bullets
fired by the police. Just a block over, we walked past
a series of abandoned houses; only parts of the walls
remained. On June 4, HNP and hooded police attaches
had burned a block of houses, arrested 22 people from
these houses, and loaded them into a police wagon.
Their neighbors arrived at the police commissariat
soon afterwards, expecting to find them there;
however, those arrested were nowhere to be found.
Later, it was discovered that the police wagon had
stopped on a small street where all of the arrestees
had been summarily executed. A seventy year-old man
was amongst those shot by the police that day, Boukman
told us. As we were leaving, a woman came over, and
angrily began explaining that she had lived here,
before the police burned down her home.

    We walked on, and arrived at an open area, where
the concrete foundations of what had been a series of
houses were exposed, littered with bedsprings and
piles of rubble; in the middle of one foundation, a
young woman was asleep on a bare mattress. One Bel Air
resident told me that there had been about 8 houses
there, until police burned them down on July 7. We
walked on, along the path of living history claimed
and passed on to us by the survivors of the death and
destruction wrought by the Haitian police. We saw more
houses that had been burned in a major police
operation on July 11. We saw the remains of another
raid in September, and another in October-

    Constitutional rights undermined

    According to Boukman, "with President Aristide,
there were jobs, there was education, development, but
with the Latortue government, there is just violence,
and violations of the constitution;" he emphasized
that the Haitian constitution guarantees "the right to
live".

    Following the coup, more than 12,000 public sector
employees, who had been hired under the Aristide
government, were immediately fired without
compensation.

    Two of the people I talked with on my recent visit
to Bel Air, Bazile and Vital, a couple with nine
children, were both amongst the thousands of workers
fired at the state telecommunications department
following the coup. Vital, who had been working at the
Teleco for over ten years, was placed on a "wanted"
list by the Latortue government, along with 32 of his
former co-workers, and has had to go into hiding. On
July 11, the police had stormed into the family's
small home, breaking their furniture, in their search
for Vital. "I do not know why they are searching for
me. I am only a technician," he told me. Now he cannot
look for other work, for fear of being wrongfully
imprisoned, and is worried about how they are going to
support their children.

    "How can we live without eating?" Vital exclaimed.

    When I asked Vital about why he thought the police
were targeting him, he shrugged and shook his head;
maybe painting dozens of former Teleco workers as
"criminals" was a way of justifying their firing?

    Selection elections

    When I asked Boukman about his position on the
upcoming elections, he emphasized, "We support
elections;" however, he added, "we will not
participate in a selection." Lavalas' conditions for
elections include the liberation of political
prisoners, the departure of the defacto government and
the establishment of a new government to establish
good relations amongst all sectors of the population,
an end of repression in the popular neighborhoods,
total disarmament, a general amnesty and a return of
the political exiles, particularly President Aristide.
However, not even one of these conditions has been met
nor seriously considered by the U.S.-installed
government and their guarantors in the United Nations.
How could there be real elections, Boukman emphasized,
when Fanmi Lavalas' (FLs') anticipated presidential
candidate, Father Gerard Jean Juste, was still in
prison along with countless other members of the
movement?
    Just a couple of days earlier, I had been to see
Jean Juste, who is recognized by Amnesty International
as a prisoner of conscience, and who has been in
prison for four months since his latest arrest on
bogus charges by the defacto Haitian government. This
is the second time Father Jean Juste has been
wrongfully imprisoned by the Latortue regime. "It
seems that it's a matter of they don't want to release
me in time for the elections," Jean Juste stated.
"They are afraid I may run, afraid I may cause
trouble, I may try to bring them to court for what
they have done to me."

    On the same visit to the jail, I also spoke with
Jacques Matelier, a Lavalas deputy who is being held
in the same prison as Jean Juste. "I have been here
for 17 months," Matelier told me, "just because I was
on the Council of Departmental Delegates in the South
? they have nothing to accuse me with; their hands are
empty. They just want to keep me in prison because I
am a Lavalasien."

    The following day, I visited popular Haitian folk
singer and grandmother Annette "So An" Auguste, in the
Petionville women's prison. So An has been imprisoned
without charges since May 2004, when US marines used
grenades to bust into her house, while she and five
children were sleeping. So An appears to have been
arrested merely because she is an outspoken critic who
is extremely popular in Lavalas-supporting
neighborhoods.

    A few months ago, there were only 45 women in the
Petionville prison; today there are about 200 or seven
women to each tiny jail cell. Many of these women are
from Bel Air. Guerline, an organizer with a Bel Air
community organization that fights for women's rights,
Famn Vayan Bele, told me that many Bel Air women have
been locked up in Petionville after the police came
searching for their male partners in their homes. When
the police failed to find the men, they took the women
instead. "It's another form of kidnapping," Guerline
remarked about the imprisoned Bel Air women's
hostage-like situation. The police have also hauled
many young men from the neighborhood off to prison.

    Given the present conditions in Haiti, many Bel
Air residents and Lavalas supporters appear extremely
skeptical of the upcoming elections. As Montinard put
it, "how can we vote with our brothers and sisters in
prison?"

    "Given that they have not met even one of
[Lavalas'] demands, we are not going to vote," Boukman
told me; he is urging others not to take part in a
sham vote, and to demand a real election instead.

    The dancing banker

    The police and MINUSTAH actions in Bel Air are
justified as providing greater security. However, it
is unclear that general security has increased at all
for average Bel Air residents; in fact, many people
suggested that it had declined. As we were strolling
along the main street through Bel Air, we saw a piece
of fabric with a name written on it, to commemorate a
street merchant; the day before, the merchant, who
sold ice, had been killed and robbed while he was at
work.

    Things like this didn't happen before, an old
woman passing by in the street told me. In her
opinion, MINUSTAH has just made things worse.

    On the afternoon of December 11, I was standing
amidst a group of Bel Air youth watching a hip-hop
talent show on a small stage outside the Perpetuel
church. The show was put on by Fugees star Wyclef
Jean's Yele Haiti youth and education organization,
with the sponsorship of United States Agency for
International Development (USAID). Wyclef's
organization has played the uncanny role of moving
into neighborhoods like Bel Air and Cite Soleil
blaring loud music and laden with groceries following
brutal police and U.N. operations. What may have once
been called Operation Phoenix bent on winning hearts
and minds in Vietnam has now been replaced by its heir
in Haiti and could be aptly deemed Operation Hip-Hop.
There I spotted the president of one of Haiti's
largest banks, USAID-assisted Banque de l'Union
Haïtienne (BUH), Richard Sassine, sporting a Yele
Ayiti t-shirt, and chatting it up with the event
co-coordinator.

    I knew Sassine had been at the conference in
Montreal in December 2004, whose centerpiece press
conference of the Canadian and Haitian Prime Ministers
had played an important role in legitimating the
unelected Latortue government. During the course of
the conference, Sassine had ranted to a Canadian
journalist about his dissatisfaction with the MINUSTAH
forces; they really needed to "crack down" more
harshly on neighborhoods like Bel Air and Cite Soleil,
he said.

    Seeing Sassine at the centre of a community youth
event in Bel Air, I began to wonder: what on earth is
this plump, light-skinned multi-millionaire with a
clear disdain for the Lavalas-supporting poor black
slums doing here?

    I walked up to Sassine with my video camera; "so
what are you hoping to accomplish here in Bel Air
today?" I inquired. He began to talk about the misery
and poverty of the people of Bel Air, and soon came to
the "problem" of "criminality," which he implied was
being sponsored internationally, possibly by a certain
exiled President in South Africa. Really, he told me,
we need to just stick everyone with unregistered
weapons in jail, "and not let them out". He added that
he was glad that MINUSTAH was now being "more
proactive".

    "This is a great day. Here I am the President of a
large Haitian bank, standing, at sunset, in the middle
of Bel Air," he crowed. Just then, the popular and
radical Bel Air band Raram, which recently had two of
its members killed and three more jailed in
MINUSTAH/HNP "stabilization operations," came marching
down with great fanfare from Rue Macajou, playing
their horns and drums. For a few moments, I thought I
thought I had lost sight of the banker, in the midst
of the excited crowds that now engulfed the street.
But suddenly, there in the midst of the musicians, at
the centre of the hundred or so dancing locals, up
popped Sassine again, waving his arms and shaking his
booty.

    So all those imprisonments, house-burnings,
assassinations, summary executions and broken promises
that the police and MINUSTAH have waged on Bel Air are
a success from a security standpoint after all; it is
just that one has to be a rare Haitian
multimillionaire to feel any of the benefits of this
"security". And as for the majority of the population,
it appears they don't count anyway, at least in the
setup of the rigged elections being sponsored by
Canada, the United States, France and the United
Nations.

    Kevin Pina also contributed to this article from
Port au Prince, Haiti.

    © 2005 Haiti Information Project (HIP)



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