Terror in occupied Haiti

In the run up to the often postponed elections in Haiti, now scheduled for January 8, the United Nations Mission for Stabilization in Haiti (MINUSTAH) has continued to mount aggressive raids in areas where support remains high for Fammi Lavalas, political party of ousted President Jean Bertrand Aristide.

Because MINUSTAH fires hundreds of rounds from automatic weapons and armoured personnel carriers (APCs) in densely populated neighborhoods, these raids almost invariably produce civilian casualties. Isabel Macdonald, a Canadian activist reporting from Port-o-Prince, describes one of the fatalities:

“Luckson Docius, a 48-year old metalworker who supported his family of seven by making saucepans was at work on November 24 when a bullet fired by a UN ‘peacekeeper’ working with MINUSTAH ripped through the metal wall of his studio and killed him. The bullet, which a MINUSTAH soldier in a tank-like APC fired from an automatic gun, blasted through his right arm, tore into the right side of his abdomen and came out the other side, to lodge itself in his left arm; moments later, Docius was lying dead in a pool of blood before his co-workers’ eyes.”

These raids are carried out ostensibly to disarm criminal gangs, which is what the media calls supporters of Lavalas regardless of whether they are armed of not. Lavalas has been accused of being a threat to the electoral process. Interestingly MINUSTAH does not seem to think that the coup government’s imprisonment of the most popular presidential candidate, Father Jean-Juste, and hundreds of other political prisoners, is a threat to the electoral process.

Neither do MINUSTAH or our own government think that the Haitian National Police (HNP) are a threat to the electoral process. But HNP has recruited members of the former military (disbanded for its notorious human rights abuses) and has been filmed shooting unarmed demonstrators and then planting weapons on them.

In fact, MINUSTAH is mandated to work with and support the HNP, as has the RCMP which has been sent to Haiti to train them.

It is now becoming clear that many of those being targeted by the MINUSTAH force in Cité Soleil have decided to vote in the upcoming elections for former Lavalas president Rene Preval, now running as an independent candidate; this despite the whole process being heavily rigged against the poor majority. Not only is the leadership of Lavalas in jail, in exile, or in the grave, but the government is planning to have only a small fraction of the number of polling stations in the upcoming elections as were provided in the 2000 election.

The Canada Haiti Action Network (CHAN) now has ten active chapters across Canada that have shown an ability to mobilize.

December 1, Paul Martin was heckled at a campaign stop by a group of protesters shouting “Martin lied, Haitians died”.

The police responded by arresting Yves Engler the co-author of the recently-published Canada in Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority, and holding him in jail for four days.

Visit www.Canadahaitiaction.ca to contact your local CHAN chapter and help to make the Liberal’s support for repression in Haiti a major election issue.