8-25-05,9:07am
In many Latin American countries, death-squads work hand in hand with the police, but discretely, and function mostly at night. In Haiti, the collaboration between official and unofficial repressive forces is conducted openly and in broad daylight.
Such was the case in the Port-au-Prince slum of Belair on Aug. 10. Several Haitian National Police (PNH) vehicles led dozens of hooligans armed with guns, machetes, axes and clubs into the Belair districts of Solino and Ti Chery. Residents immediately began running toward the UN military outpost on Rue Tiremasse, vainly hoping that they might find some safety there. But many did not react quickly enough. The police and mob attacked swiftly and viciously.
“More than 12 people were hacked to death by machetes or riddled with police bullets,” said Sanba Boukman, the leader of Belair’s Lavalas-affiliated popular organizations.
Didine Joseph, a 16-year-old girl who was four months pregnant, was macheted to death. “It was poignant because the fetus lived for several minutes after she was killed,” Boukman explained. “It could be seen kicking in her belly. It was really sad. Corpses lay in the streets and dogs fed on them. The situation is horrible.” In all, some 15 people were killed over the course of Aug. 10 and 11. “These people were killed simply for being Lavalas partisans,” said one young man who barely escaped with his life. “If one supports the Lavalas, one merits death. This morning [August 11], a number of people were killed in the [Belair] neighborhood of Belle Déessse.”
The most recent crackdown in Belair began on Aug. 6, when at least seven people were killed, five by masked Haitian policemen and two by troops of the United Nations Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH). Duckens Orius, a cameraman with privately owned Channel 11, filmed the operation. The police attacked him and confiscated his equipment.
The State Hospital’s morgue reported receiving forty corpses, killed by bullets, from popular neighborhoods during the second week of August. Those killed by machetes were not counted in that figure.
Moroccan Colonel Elouafi Boulbars, MINUSTAH’s spokesman, said that all the victims were “bandits,” the same sobriquet U.S. Marines gave to anyone who resisted their 1915-1934 military occupation of Haiti.
“Many of the gangs have been dismantled,” said Boulbars, using the epithet given to popular organizations by occupation authorities. “I can assure you that they have sustained heavy losses.” He said that MINUSTAH’s Brazilian battalion arrested eleven “bandits” in Belair on August 8.
The MINUSTAH used to posture as a buffer against PNH excesses. But since the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1608 in June, the UN has had direct oversight over and responsibility for the Haitian police (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 23, No. 16, 6/29/2005).
In fact, the Aug. 10 massacre is likely just an extension of the new aggressive policies of the UN in Haiti, as heralded by the Jul. 6 Cité Soleil attack detailed in the Aug. 16 Washington Post.
That deadly night-time assault, which killed some 60 Cité Soleil residents, “reflected a shift in tactics for U.N. peacekeeping troops, who by the mid-1990s were going out of their way to avoid combat,” the Post’s Colum Lynch reported. “Now, the blue-helmeted troops are showing a renewed willingness to use considerable firepower against armed groups that they deem a threat to peace efforts.”
The Post interviewed Nancy Soderberg, the U.S. Mission to the United Nations’s peacekeeping expert from 1997 to 2000. “There has been a fundamental shift in peacekeeping that very few people have noticed, where U.N. peacekeepers are actually taking proactive, offensive preemptive action against threats,” she said. “The United States learned this when they invaded Haiti in 1994. Basically someone tried to attack them, they blew them away and that was the end of that.” During the 1994 U.S. invasion of Haiti, nobody ever “tried to attack” U.S. troops, but those troops did “blow away” dozens of people. In fact, Washington has been the main pressure on the Brazilian-led MINUSTAH to be more aggressive.
In his account, Lynch reports that the UN troops invading Cité Soleil on Jul. 6 encountered stiff resistance. In fighting their way out, “the Brazilians fired more than 16,700 rounds of ammunition in the densely populated neighborhood,” he wrote. This caused “a lot of collateral damage,” according to Lynch’s source, David Olson, a U.S. doctor working with Doctors Without Borders. “Collateral damage” was, in part, some 27 Haitians, mostly women and children, who filled Olson’s clinic after the U.N. operation dubbed Iron Fist. Olson said that up to half the victims claimed that they had been wounded by U.N. troops.
Meanwhile, several demonstrations against the U.N. occupation were organized in Haiti’s north by the National Popular Party (PPN) and the Lavalas Family party (FL) around Jul. 28, the 90th anniversary of the first U.S. Marine invasion. In the northeastern commune of Valières, the PPN and FL held a rally on Jul. 30, which taxed the MINUSTAH for tolerating putschist criminals like former Haitian soldier and “rebel” turned presidential candidate Guy Philippe while imprisoning constitutional Prime Minister Yvon Neptune, singer Sò Àn, Father Gérard Jean-Juste, and hundreds of other Lavalas political prisoners.
On Jul. 28, thousands marched through the streets of Cap Haïtien, Haiti’s second largest city, to protest the Feb. 29, 2004 coup and ensuing occupation. The demonstration, also jointly organized by the PPN and FL, denounced the upcoming sham elections which occupation authorities are planning to hold in November and December. “We are telling the MINUSTAH, the National Police, the [UN] CIVPOL, and the U.S. Embassy to stop their massacres in the popular neighborhoods,” said the PPN’s Michel Adrien in a speech written for the occasion.
