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27393: Craig (news) Mission impossible for peacekeepers (fwd)





From: Dan Craig


Mission impossible for peacekeepers
UN commander denies claims that troops are killing civilians in slum
Jan. 29, 2006. 01:46 AM
REED LINDSAY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR, PORT-AU-PRINCE

By noon, the gunfire had stopped and residents of the cinderblock slum known as Cité Soleil cautiously gathered around the lifeless body of Jackson Mombege.

The body lay face down in a pool of blood in the middle of the street. A man shouted in anger, women wailed and Mombege's 3-year-old son burst into tears.

Mombege's neighbours said United Nations peacekeepers gunned down the 33-year-old day labourer as he stepped out of an alley.

"The tank stopped in front of him," said Guiva Mombrun, 48. "They shot him, and he fell."

As they heard the rumble of an approaching UN armoured personnel carrier, Mombrun and the others scattered into nearby alleys.

In this sprawling seaside slum, where police do not dare enter and young men armed with automatic rifles zip around in stolen SUVs, United Nations peacekeepers have come to be feared and resented by the very people they were sent to protect.

More than 9,000 peacemakers have managed to stabilize nearly every part of this country, stamping out rebellions by former soldiers and pacifying the defiant Port-au-Prince slum of Bel Air, once a stronghold for armed supporters of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former president who was forced into exile during an armed revolt in February 2004.

But with often-delayed national elections now little more than a week away, the poorest neighbourhood in the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere remains beyond the UN's control.

"Cité Soleil is the most serious challenge of our mission," says Juan Gabriel Valdes, a Chilean diplomat who is chief of the UN stabilization mission, known as MINUSTAH.

Two Jordanian battalions, with 1,500 troops and more than 50 armoured vehicles, have been unable to root out armed groups that prowl the neighbourhood's immense warren of alleyways and precarious hovels.

In the last month, four peacekeepers — a Canadian police officer and three Jordanian soldiers — were killed in the outskirts of the neighbourhood.

Jordanian checkpoints have sustained heavy fire of up to 1,000 rounds a day, according to a UN official who asked to remain anonymous.

But many Cité Soleil residents blame the UN peacekeepers, not the armed groups, for the violence. They accuse the blue helmets of shooting indiscriminately, routinely firing rounds from the cannons mounted on their vehicles and killing innocent civilians, including women and children.

"Every day, the MINUSTAH is shooting people," says Wilner Pierre, lying on a hospital cot with a large bandage covering his lower torso.

The 35-year-old mechanic says UN troops shot him in the back on the afternoon of Jan. 1 while he was walking down the main avenue in Cité Soleil. The bullet exited through his lower abdomen, ripping through his intestines.

"They stay inside their tanks and stick their guns out," says Pierre. "They shoot in any direction and at any person, even babies, it doesn't matter.

"They shouldn't do their job like that."

This month, the local hospital has treated nearly 70 gunshot victims, more than half of them women, children or elderly.

During a recent visit to the hospital, all six people being treated for bullet wounds said they were shot by UN peacekeepers.

The hospital itself was hit by gunfire twice in two weeks.

One bullet broke a window in the pediatric ward and hit a wall inches from a boy.

The other, fired from a high-powered weapon with a calibre of between 16 and 20 millimetres, blasted holes through two walls of the hospital's administrative offices, according to Sergio Cecchini of Doctors Without Borders, which helps run the hospital. He could not say where the bullets came from.

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`The government is not willing to solve the problem of Cité Soleil and they want us to go there and destroy it, to kill all the people there. We will not do this'//BRIG.-Gen. Mahmoud Al-Husban /Jordanian commander/
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Jordanian Brig.-Gen. Mahmoud Al-Husban, commander of the UN troops in Port-au-Prince, denies that the peacekeepers fired on the hospital.

He says the Jordanian soldiers shoot only when fired upon and even then only when they can clearly target the attacking gunman.

But he concedes that he cannot know the extent of any potential "collateral damage" because the peacekeepers rarely leave the safety of their vehicles.

"Inside Cité Soleil, we never see a dead body or wounded person because the gangs will take away the bodies of gang members, and civilians stay inside their houses," says Al-Husban.

"The problem is that most people living in Cité Soleil are with the gangs.

"If they are not fighting with the gangs, they are supporting the gangs."

Cité Soleil is controlled by numerous armed groups, some of which remain aligned with Aristide's Lavalas party, the country's largest political force, and are now supporting former president René Preval, considered the frontrunner in first-round presidential elections slated for Feb. 7.

The two former presidents have become estranged, but both are hugely popular in Cité Soleil and other poor neighbourhoods.

Leading members of Haiti's fiercely anti-Aristide business elite blame the armed groups in Cité Soleil for the kidnappings that have sowed panic among the capital's small middle and upper classes, although UN and police officials say many of the criminal masterminds live elsewhere.

In recent weeks, conservative business leaders have organized protests demanding a UN-led crackdown "to cleanse Cité Soleil of the criminals.

"Lavalas accuses the business leaders, who include factory owner and anti-Aristide activist Andre Apaid and his brother-in-law, presidential candidate Charles Henri Baker, of trying to use the UN to further clamp down on the party and its supporters.

"They don't want elections," says René Monplaisir, a Lavalas leader in Cité Soleil who is campaigning for Preval.

"Ninety per cent of the Haitian people want elections because they are supporting René Preval for president. That's why (they) want to kill people living here."

So far, the UN has not ceded to demands for a large-scale offensive. Nor have the peacekeepers attempted to negotiate with the armed groups, hampered by the U.S.-backed interim government's refusal to grant an amnesty.

"There is no military solution to Cité Soleil," says Al-Husban, the Jordanian general.

"The solution could be giving the gangs amnesty and giving more social help. Medicine, food, development projects ....

"It seems the government is not willing to solve the problem of Cité Soleil and they want us to go there and destroy it, to kill all the people there. We will not do this."

Peacekeepers typically enter a country after the United Nations has brokered a peace agreement between opposing sides in an armed conflict that provides a framework for UN-sponsored disarmament and elections. But in Haiti, MINUSTAH was charged with backing an interim government that has shown little interest in reconciliation.

The UN's quagmire in Cité Soleil is rooted in the absence of a peace agreement, says Todd Howland, director of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial's Center for Human Rights.

"The UN has not been allowed to do what it traditionally does," says Howland, who worked in UN peacekeeping missions in Rwanda and Angola.

"This is the only country in the world where you have a significant United Nations' operation without a peace accord. "Instead, the member states have told the UN to take sides in Haiti. "You'd be hard-pressed to find a case where marginalizing a significant segment of society and failing to make any structural changes resulted in peace."

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&call_pageid=971358637177&c=Article&cid=1138491906768