Democracy Progresses in Haiti

[struggle4progress]

On July 16, the Council of Sages, the Western-backed body that has overseen Haiti's political affairs since the February 2004 ouster of President Jean Bertrand Aristide, made a startling recommendation. Blaming the exiled Aristide and his Lavalas party for "continu to promote and tolerate violence," the council urged the interim regime that it appointed to "make the bold political and beneficial decision to disqualify the Lavalas Family Party from the electoral process." <snip>

On July 6, international troops with MINUSTAH, the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Haiti, conducted a raid into the Port-au-Prince slum of Cité Soleil, a Lavalas stronghold. The UN cast the operation as an effort to confront gang violence, but witnesses and observers tell a different story. CARLI, a respected lawyer-headed human rights group, stated that it had "credible information that U.N. troops, accompanied by Haitian police, killed an undetermined number of unarmed residents of Cite Soleil, including several babies and women." While the UN claimed that it had killed only five "armed bandits", Reuters reported that its local television crew "filmed seven other bodies of people killed during the operation, including those of two one-year-old baby boys and a woman in her 60s." Ali Besnaci, head of the Médecins Sans Frontières mission, said that his hospital had treated 27 residents for gunshot wounds. "Three quarters were children and women," he said, including one pregnant woman who lost her baby. "We had not received so many wounded in one day for a long time." Not one North American newspaper printed the Reuters report that these quotes are taken from. <snip>

Why poor Haitians and their popular leaders are being targeted is not difficult to surmise: in large numbers, they are calling for the return of the government that they elected. One of Aristide's most popular decisions was to disband the feared Haitian military, whose remnants later led the armed rebellion that ousted him. Today, "the police high command is now dominated by ex-military," Reuters reports, with "only one of the top 12 police commanders in the Port-au-Prince area" not from its ranks. <snip>

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=55&ItemID=8407

[wli]

1. perpetual 1915-1934 redux

Go figure. Now the UN is doing it to them. So much for Kofi Annan's "good intentions."