29287: Potemaksonje (News) Another Bungled UN Mission (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

potemaksonje@yahoo.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/terrall09272006.html

Another Bungled UN Mission

Failing Haiti

By BEN TERRALL

As Haiti's recent political history has swung back and
forth between popularly elected governments and
right-wing U.S.-backed dictatorships, the Haitian
movement for popular democracy has maintained its
resilience in the face of horrific odds.

Throughout its resistance to the U.S.-backed coup
regime which ousted democratically-elected President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004, Haiti's
grassroots Lavalas movement has consistently advanced
three key demands: the safe return of President
Aristide and other political exiles, the freeing of
all political prisoners, and an end to the brutal
repression of the country's pro-Lavalas poor majority.
Since Rene Preval was elected President earlier this
year with the overwhelming support of the Lavalas base
(much to the chagrin of the Bush Administration and
Haiti's tiny right wing elite) some steps have been
taken toward achieving these goals of the popular
movement. But the powerful few who still control the
majority of Haitian media, most ministries, the
judiciary and the police are working overtime to
stymie progressive change.

The price inflicted on the Lavalas base by the coup
regime has been horrendous. An August 2006 study in
the British journal The Lancet reinforced earlier
documentation by Harvard Law School, the University of
Miami and others of systematic atrocities carried out
by coup forces. The Lancet disclosed that during the
twenty-two-month post-Aristide period of the
Washington-backed "interim" Government, 8,000 people
were murdered in the greater Port-au Prince area of
Haiti alone. Twenty-two per cent of the killings were
committed by the Haitian National Police (HNP),
twenty-six per cent by demobilized military or armed
anti-Aristide groups, and forty-eight per cent by
criminals. Both the HNP and members of the demobilized
army acted against supporters of Aristide and Lavalas.
The study also found that in the same period, a
staggering 35,000 women and girls were raped in
Port-au-Prince, fourteen per cent by members of the
Haitian National Police and twelve per cent by members
of anti-Aristide groups. Fourteen per cent of the
interviewees accused "foreign soldiers, including
those in UN uniform, of threatening them with sexual
or physical violence, including death."

The fate of the political prisoners still behind bars
remains a key focus of struggle between Haiti's
privileged few and the millions who are barely
surviving.* While Preval's administration successfully
secured the release of some high-profile prisoners
this summer, including Annette Auguste, the popular
singer and organizer, and former Prime Minister Yvon
Neptune, others illegally jailed by the "interim"
regime are still languishing in the country's
notoriously squalid prisons.

The August 25 re-arrest of Rene Civil, a grassroots
activist close to Aristide, was a chilling
development, one that many in Haiti fear could signal
yet more arrests of Lavalas figures. Civil, a leader
of an organization called the Solidarity Foundation
which is working with families of political prisoners
and helping poor children attend school, was
originally detained while returning from exile in the
Dominican Republic on May 12, 2006. After appealing
that illegal arrest, Civil was released within two
weeks.

The Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti noted
that Civil's August re-arrest "was made late at night,
without a warrant" and that "one of the charges, use
of a stolen vehicle, involves a car that Civil has
owned for six years, and registered with the police
several times. When Mr. Civil fled Haiti's repression
in 2004, the police themselves took the car
(illegally) and used it for two years, returning it in
late June 2006. Another charge involves illegal gun
possession, but the weapons in question, two pistols,
belonged to another passenger in the car when it was
stopped, a police officer. The third charge,
"association de malfaiteurs", is a vague conspiracy
charge that has been used frequently to keep political
dissidents (including Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste and Yvon
Neptune) in prison despite an absence of proof of
criminal activity." On August 28 Civil was
interrogated by the new Prosecutor of Port-au-Prince,
Claudy Gassant, a prominent Lavalas critic with strong
ties to the pro-coup Washington-based group the Haiti
Democracy Project.

Civil is now in Port-au-Prince's downtown
penitentiary. I visited that facility in 2005, and can
best describe conditions there as medieval.

At a briefing to an international delegation several
days before his August arrest, Civil said of his work:

"We're here to end all forms of discrimination, we're
here to end all forms of violence. The violence of not
being able to afford to buy a meal to eat, the
violence of not being able to have a house to live
inthe violence of not being able to go to school.

"You always hear that it is the people in Cite Soleil,
it's the people in Bel Air who have all the weapons,
but what's actually happening is the people with the
most weapons are the people who have money to purchase
those weapons. They're the people who live up in the
hills who have a house where they can store the
weapons, who have cars to transport the weapons. And
yet it's these very people who carry the weapons who
continue to demonize the poor in Cite Soleil and Bel
Air."

Civil asked the delegation "for your support in making
sure that this demonization of the poor does not
continue because the real problems that they have are
not weapons, they are the social problems that they
face. It's that they cannot eat, it's that they cannot
have a roof over their heads. And I ask you to get
this message out to the media, that this is a
demonization of poor people, and actually what's
happening is that they're suffering because of the
economic and social problems in this country."

He told the international visitors, "We are an
independent nation, we're free and we have dignity
[but] without the return of Aristide this country can
never truly have those things. This is an integral
part of our struggle for self-determination."

I briefly spoke to Civil at the Port-au-Prince jail
where he was being held on the morning of August 28.
He told me that the people behind his arrest were also
behind the February 2004 coup, and that his detention
was a provocation of the Lavalas base. He said that
those forces "hate Aristide, and they hate me."

Journalist and filmmaker Kevin Pina, who has lived and
worked in Haiti since the late 1990s, told me he
thinks Civil's assessment is accurate.

Pina pointed to Civil's leadership in organizing a
demonstration for the return of Aristide that drew
tens of thousands into the streets of Port-au-Prince
on July 15 of this year: "I think that his key role in
organizing the poor is behind this false
incarceration."

Pina has known and respected Civil for years. He told
me, "Rene was part of a Protestant youth group, and
really came to prominence during the first coup
against Aristide in 1991. In that period, Rene took to
the airwaves many times, going in to radio stations to
deliver a message of militant, nonviolent resistance
for 10 minutes, then fleeing for his life, knowing
that the U.S.-backed military would send thugs to come
to beat, kill or torture him."

Pina describes Civil as "a man of tremendous courage,
who continued the struggle when the destabilization
campaign against Aristide began around 2000. He was
one of the first to lead demonstrations in the popular
neighborhoods of thousands and thousands of people,
demanding that Aristide be allowed to serve out his
term in office."

On May 14, when Kevin Pina videotaped UN troops
opening fire on prisoners in the National
Penitentiary, Civil was inside. The inmates took over
the facility in a demonstration of solidarity with
incoming President Preval, but also to demand an end
to detention of political prisoners and the return of
Aristide.

Pina commented, "I think Rene is in imminent danger in
prison and we
need to hold the Haitian government and the U.N., who
are overseeing this nightmare, accountable. Many
viscerally hate Civil because he is a conscious and
eloquent symbol of resistance to Haiti's elite and the
coup the U.S., France and Canada supported in Feb.
2004. Remember that Emmanuel Wilme was also a symbol
of resistance and the UN assassinated him with massive
force, also killing more than 20 others, in Cite
Soleil on July 6, 2005. People of conscience should
demand Civil's human rights be respected and that he
be unconditionally released from prison."

Brian Concannon, director of the Institute for Justice
and Democracy in Haiti, recently wrote,

"The dispute over the political prisoners, like most
national disputes in Haiti, breaks down along class
lines. Lavalas has some support in Haiti's middle
classes, and Preval's campaign successfully reached
out to people across the economic spectrum. Yet the
movement's base, in terms of loyalty and numbers, is
among the vast majority of Haitians who are poor. The
opposition to Lavalas comes mainly from people who are
relatively affluent by Haitian standards. They range
from wealthy factory owners and prominent
intellectuals to foreign-supported human rights
workers and students, many of whom would be considered
lower middle-class in the United States."

The opposition also includes numerous violent
individuals who continue to attack Lavalas supporters
with impunity, committing far more serious crimes than
anything Civil is accused of. On September 14, the
Port-au-Prince based Haitian Press Agency (AHP)
editorialized against the judiciary's double standard
apparent in treatment of rightist forces. AHP accused
Claudy Gassant of treading lightly in negotiations
with Michael Lucius, the anti-Lavalas director of the
judicial police (DCPJ), regarding a warrant issued
against Lucius.

AHP wrote:

"The manner in which the case has been treated is
close to an obscenity, above all because it involves
the government prosecutor, chief representative of the
public, defender of society, who sanctioned the
obstruction of the legal proceedings, while all week
those around this very prosecutor made assurances that
Judge Napla Saintil had documents and photos
establishing connections between Lucius and police
auxiliaries implicated in kidnappings and other abuses
the accusations are not the result of public clamor
but rather are the findings of an investigating judge,
and these accusations fall upon a man whose position
places him in the very front line of the battle
against kidnapping and crime."

Up from the sea, on the other end of Port au Prince
from Cite Soleil, I spoke to residents of Grand
Ravine, who complained that the UN had done nothing to
protect local people from the depredations of Lame Ti
Manchet (Little Machete Army). Haitian police
supported Lame Ti Manchet in carrying out an August
2005 massacre of unarmed civilians at a
USAID-sponsored soccer match. On July 6 of this year
the death squad struck again, killing at least 22 area
residents with shots to the head. Since then they have
burned down numerous homes and killed more civilians.

Many I spoke to in Haiti connected Lame Ti Manchet to
Washington-funded politician Evans Paul, who visited
former Hatian National Police Director of the west
region Carlo Lochard in jail when Lochard was briefly
incarcerated for his involvement in the 2005 soccer
massacre. Earlier this year, all police involved in
last summer's killings were summarily released from
jail, with no charges pending against them.

Esterne Bruner, father of six children and coordinator
of the Grand Ravine Community Human Rights Council
(CHRC-GR), was assassinated on September 21 after he
returned from a meeting with Evel Fanfan, a courageous
human rights lawyer defending Lame Ti Manchet massacre
survivors. Bruner had been shot on July 7, and though
without resources to support his own family
adequately, took in an eight year old girl who saw her
father, mother, sister and godmother slaughtered on
that day. In correspondence to the U.S.-based Haitian
Lawyers Leadership Network, Evel Fanfan wrote that
Bruner "never got discouraged, never stopped demanding
justice and restitution for the Grand Ravine victims,
never stopped protesting the treatment given the
victims by the authorities." Bruner also recently
denounced MINUSTAH, the UN mission in Haiti, for
taking over the local school at Grand Ravin and
converting it into a military base. Fanfan stated that
whenBruner asked the UN for protection, a UN soldier
advised him "to find some weapons to fight back
against the men of the Little Machete Army. For this
reason I say that MINUSTAH is a source of insecurity
in Haiti, counseling Haitians to take up arms."

The UN, theoretically committed to disarming groups
with weapons, in reality only takes action against a
handful of armed militants standing up to police and
right-wing death squads in poor neighborhoods (the UN
military operations, employing high caliber weapons in
densely-populated areas, have repeatedly killed
civilians who had nothing to do with any armed group).

Haitian elites and their backers in the UN mission
continue to leverage most of the power in Haiti, and
show no interest in limiting right wing violence.
Meanwhile, Rene Civil and other Lavalas activists,
whose only crime is a commitment to social justice,
rot in jail. The only counter to this awful state of
affairs will likely be the grassroots organizing and
mass demonstrations that have been a hallmark of
Lavalas politics. The brave Haitians engaged in this
work on the ground will need all the international
solidarity they can get.

*Estimates of the numbers of political prisoners range
from several hundred to more than one thousand, but
documentation is difficult given the lack of
transparency under the coup regime. Also, Haitian
police and UN Peacekeepers have illegally arrested
hundreds of young men in countless sweeps, most for
being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is fair
to say that the majority were criminalized for being
poor, and given that the poorest are overwhelmingly
pro-Lavalas, they can be described as political
prisoners even though they do not necessarily have an
official position or title that can establish them as
Lavalas. A Haitian government employee conceded to me
that many teenagers in Port-au-Prince's children's
prison are in effect political prisoners simply
because they do not have money, or relatives with
money, to pay a lawyer or to bribe the right corrupt
official for their release.

Ben Terrall is a San Francisco-based writer and
activist. He can be reached at: bterrall@[nospam]igc.org

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