Haiti:
Poor Residents Of Capital Describe A State Of Siege
By Wadner Pierre
& Jeb Sprague
02 March, 2007
Inter Press
Service
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Feb 28 (IPS)
- Nearly two months since U.N. troops began launching heavy attacks
that they say are aimed against gang members in poor neighbourhoods
of Port-au-Prince, roadblocks and barbed wire remain in place and the
atmosphere is grim.
Mercius Lubin of the Boston
district of Cité Soleil told IPS that an assault earlier this
month left his only two children dead. "It is the noise of MINUSTAH's
(the U.N. peacekeeping force) fire that awoke us."
It was about 11 p.m. on Feb.
1, he said, and the family was sleeping on the floor because U.N. soldiers
had advised everyone in the area to do so. "Then they started shooting...
I saw that I was wounded in one of my arms, my wife in one of her feet
and my two young girls were bathed in their own blood."
He said it was MINUSTAH bullets
that had sprayed across his home killing his daughters. IPS viewed the
corpses of Stephanie, 7, and Alexandra Lubin, 4. A top MINUSTAH military
commander acknowledges the U.N. fired shots that day. Residents also
state that U.N. vehicles fired heavily down the road which the Lubin
home sits along.
Officials of MINUSTAH, whose
military contingent is headed by Brazil, have admitted to "collateral
damage" but say they are there to fight gangsters at the request
of the René Préval government.
Speaking at a press conference
at U.N. headquarters Wednesday, Joel Boutroue, deputy special representative
of the secretary-general for Haiti, referred to the allegation that
MINUSTAH soldiers had shot "two little girls", but said that
gang members were responsible for the killings.
"[The U.N. soldiers]
are taking extra care in minimising the number of civilian casualties,"
he said. "The rules of engagement are very clear -- they only shoot
when shot at...The number of casualties has been very limited."
However, Boutroue acknowledged
that while the U.N. does investigate some specific cases and attempts
to tally casualties in local clinics after large operations, they do
not determine whether people have been hit by MINUSTAH or other weapons.
"That's impossible to know," he said.
U.N. and government officials
have pointed to one gang leader in particular named Evans. In recent
weeks they have arrested a number of men from his group.
But many residents and local
human rights activists say that scores of people who have no involvement
with gangs have been killed, wounded and arrested in the raids and fighting.
A climate of fear persists in much of Cite Soleil.
IPS observed that buildings
throughout Cité Soleil were pockmarked by bullets; many showing
huge holes made by heavy calibre U.N. weapons, as residents attest.
Often pipes that brought in water to the slum community now lay shattered.
A recently declassified document
from the U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince revealed that during an operation
carried out in July 2005, MINUSTAH expended 22,000 bullets over several
hours. In the report, an official from MINUSTAH acknowledged that "given
the flimsy construction of homes in Cité Soleil and the large
quantity of ammunition expended, it is likely that rounds penetrated
many buildings, striking unintended targets".
A group of religious and
human rights groups active within Cité Soleil, the Haitian Nonviolent,
Nonpartisan Coalition (HNVNPC), is attempting to revive a peace process.
A spokesman for the group, Evel Fanfan, declared we were "forged
out of the desperation of victims and leaders in the battlefields of
Cité Soleil" and call "immediately for a ceasefire".
The group is attempting to
work with the Préval government's National Commission for Disarmament,
Demobilisation and Reinsertion, headed up by Alix Fils Aimé,
to renew the possibility for a peace process. Already one armed group
has offered to turn in their weapons for amnesty and government investment
in the community.
A hardened U.N. strategy
became apparent just days before Christmas, when U.N. officials stated
they were entering Cité Soleil to capture or kill gangsters and
kidnappers in the Bois Neuf zone.
According to some residents,
the Dec. 22 assault became known as Operation "Without Pity for
Cité Soleil" as the noise of the 50-mm MINUSTAH machine
guns could be heard echoing for miles.
Five days later, the people
of Bois Neuf buried 11 young people that they say were among those killed
by MINUSTAH. A huge crowd gathered in front of the caskets.
Ronald Saint-Jean of the
Group for the Defence of the Rights of the Political prisoners (GDP)
was one of the few representatives of a human rights group to attend
the funeral.
The GDP is part of a newly
founded grassroots human rights coalition called the National Coordination
of Organisations Defending Human Rights (CONODDH).
Following the overthrow of
Haiti's elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide government, hundreds, possibly
up to a thousand, Fanmi Lavalas political activists were imprisoned
under the U.S. backed interim government, according to a Miami University
Human rights study.
Another study published in
the British medical journal, The Lancet, estimated that 8,000 had been
killed and 35,000 sexually assaulted in the greater Port-au-Prince area
during the time of the interim government (2004-2006). In the second
half of the study presented in January at the American Public Health
Association conference in Boston, the study identified 57 percent of
the victims as Lavalas and 30 percent as belonging to Lespwa -- the
parties of Aristide and Preval.
The Aristide administration
(2001-2004), financially embargoed by international financial institutions,
had refused to privatise state enterprises. The embargo lost the government
much needed aid, contributing to economic decline and destabilisation.
Following Aristide's ouster, after members of Haiti's former military
invaded from the Dominican Republic, an interim framework was set into
motion under International Monetary Fund advisement.
According to some Haitian
labour leaders, it laid off between eight and ten thousand civil sector
workers, many from the poorest slums of Port-au-Prince.
Other programmes under the
Aristide government, such as subsidised rice for the poor, literacy
centres and water supply projects, came to a halt following the 2004
coup d'etat. A medical university, a first of its kind for Haiti, constructed
by the Aristide government was taken over by MINUSTAH forces.
Frantz Michel Guerrier, a
young man who is the spokesman of the Committee of Notables for the
Development of Cité Soleil and based in the Bois Neuf zone, said
"It is very difficult for me to explain to you what the people
of Bois Neuf went through on Dec. 22, 2006 -- almost unexplainable.
It was a true massacre. We counted more than sixty wounded and more
than 25 dead among [them] infants, children and young people".
"We saw helicopters
shoot at us, our houses broken by the tanks," Guerrier told IPS.
"We heard detonations of the heavy weapons. Many of the dead and
wounded were found inside their houses. I must tell you that nobody
had been saved, not even the babies. The Red Cross was not allowed to
help people. The soldiers had refused to let the Red Cross in categorically,
in violation of the Geneva Convention."
The U.N. denies that it blocked
ambulances from entering the slum but acknowledges that a peacekeeper
did shoot out an ambulance tire in Port-au-Prince that day. Multiple
residents told IPS that MINUSTAH, after conducting its operations, evacuated
without checking for wounded. U.N. sources say gang members shoot with
small arms at their detachments.
Residents and Lavalas officials
explain they oppose all violence and want peace. But sources close to
the National Palace speak of immense pressure to toughen its stance
on Cité Soleil to dislodge armed groups.
Opposition remains strong
against MINUSTAH's military style tactics in the densely populated neighbourhoods.
On Feb. 7, the 21st anniversary of the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship,
a huge march took place in Port-au-Prince with smaller demonstrations
in Cap-Haïtien, Saint-Marc, Miragoâne, Jacmel, Léogâne
and Gonaïves, all calling for an end to the violence and that Aristide
be allowed to return to the country.
*Wadner Pierre and Jeb Sprague
are primary contributors to HaitiAnalysis.com.