27490: Craig (news) Dispatches From Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Dan Craig


February 5, 2006
Dispatches From Haiti
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:58 p.m. ET

This is the first of periodic reports by Andrew Selsky, the AP's Chief of 
Caribbean News, who is in Haiti covering the first elections held since 
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted in a February 2004 rebellion.

------

SUNDAY, Feb. 5, 8:30 a.m. local

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Villa Creole Hotel

Petionville is the upscale neighborhood of the capital of Haiti. Petionville, 
which sits on a hillside with a sweeping view of Port-au-Prince, is not West 
Palm Beach by any means.

Even a middle-class American suburb would look downright ritzy compared to 
Petionville, where street vendors sell stalks of sugar cane in front of a 
mishmash of shops, a few art galleries and French restaurants.

But Petionville is luxurious indeed compared to Cite Soleil, a wretchedly poor 
neighborhood controlled by gangs armed with M-16s and 9mm pistols.

As you drive down the hillside from Petionville on Port-au-Prince's narrow, 
traffic-clogged streets, the neighborhoods become poorer. At the end of the 
line is Cite Soleil, near the sea.

Cite Soleil's shacks aren't made of sheets of corrugated tin, like you find in 
many other slums around the world. They are made of fragments of corrugated tin 
-- rusty pieces, their edges as sharp as knives.

There are no bathrooms. Kids and everyone else use the outdoors, often near 
canals where raw sewage flows.

Blue-helmeted U.N. peacekeeping troops have made only a tentative incursion 
into the slum of 200,000, fearing that many civilians will die if the troops 
and gangs engage in open warfare in its streets and alleyways.

Back in 1994, U.S. Army troops arrived in Haiti with rifles at the ready to 
reinstate President Jean-Bertrand Aristide -- who had been ousted in a coup. I 
visited Cite Soleil then as U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopters buzzed overhead. 
The people were overjoyed. They had just lived through an awful period, when 
death squads linked to the military dictatorship went on nighttime killing 
sprees in Cite Soleil, which was hugely loyal to Aristide, a former slum priest 
and liberation theologist.

International news photographers would drive at the crack of dawn to Cite 
Soleil to look for the carnage. Bodies were sprawled in the streets, hands tied 
behind their backs, with bullet holes in the head or chest of the victims. One 
day, outside Cite Soleil, I was attracted by a group of people standing on an 
overpass, staring down at a mound of garbage. I joined them and looked down. 
There was a pig rooting around the trash, tugging at a burlap sack. Staring 
harder at the sack, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was full of 
severed heads -- the heads of men who had perhaps been tortured and executed at 
a nearby police station.

So when the U.S. troops arrived in 1994, the people of Cite Soleil were 
overjoyed. They gathered in groups as the choppers swooped overhead, cheering 
and laughing with sheer joy.

Aristide came back from exile a few weeks later. But during his second term in 
office, he fell victim to another rebellion amid accusations he used gangs to 
attack his own opponents and was corrupt. A U.S. plane flew him out.

The other day, I came across an 18-year-old shoeshiner who had just been shot 
by U.N. peacekeeping troops in Cite Soleil, according to witnesses and the 
man's own account. AP photographer Brennan Linsley, translator Evens Sanon and 
I arrived quickly after Evens spotted a makeshift Red Cross ambulance rushing 
somewhere, and followed it.

George Alain Colbert, the wounded man, would have been around six years old 
when the U.S. troops arrived in 1994. He may have been one of those kids I saw 
turning cartwheels in joy back then.

Now, he's in a hospital, wounded in his heel and groin by a U.N. peacekeeper, a 
force that has caused civilian casualties as it tries to control criminal 
gangs.

Things haven't gotten any better for the people of Cite Soleil.

----Andrew Selsky


http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Haiti-Blog.html