-- despite pledged $1.2 billion in donor aid, none of it went for job creation, production or public works beneficial to poor Haitians; in a country with 70% or more unemployment, one of Latortue's first acts was to fire several thousand public sector employees forcing them into destitution with little means to survive;
-- he also ended the careers of thousands of elected officials by closing down the government and replacing it with unelected hand-picked successors;
-- trial judges were also dismissed and replaced with more acquiescent ones; and
-- overall he served the powerful and abandoned any pretense of social investment for the most desperately impoverished people in the hemisphere.
Besides a suitable government, the other priority was security - reestablishing a "more army-friendly" Haitian National Police (PNH), in lieu of a more expensive Haitian army that wasn't needed. Doing it, however, meant reactivating the old death-squad network that would work just as well but it had to be done discretely.
Once established, every credible human rights organization visiting the country in 2004 and 2005 came to the same conclusion - the kind of thugs recruited waged an open "campaign of terror in the Port-au-Prince slums." They served as Haiti's largest and most brutal gang and had free reign to operate.
One of their most pressing tasks was arresting and imprisoning loyal Lavalassians. By late 2006, Haiti's jails overflowed with them and pro-Lavalas neighborhood residents. The capital's squalid penitentiary held four times its capacity, and only a fraction of them committed a crime. Most of them were grassroots FL supporters or OP members. One was former Prime Minister Yvon Neptune, another was Rene Civil, one of Haiti's most respected activists. Still another was Father Gerard Jean-Juste who spent 26 years in exile working with Haitian refugees in Miami, then returned to Haiti after Aristide's 1991 election.
Imprisoning the opposition had its limits, however. It stretched the capacity to do it to the maximum. As prisons overflowed, anti-Lavalas efforts unleashed unprecedented levels of persecution, and a UN paramilitary force supplied heavy weaponry to supplement the more conventional kinds the PNH used.
2004 - 2006: Repression and Resistance
Hallward divides it into three phases:
-- an initial all out assault on FL activists followed by about two more months of similar tactics;
-- then an April 30, 2004 Security Council-authorized (Blue Helmet) MINUSTAH occupation force to take over from an initial Multinational Interim Force (MIF); it began its first of successive six-month deployments in June with this supposed mandate - to employ "less abrasive" tactics such as "pseudo-legal" arrests and "punitive imprisonment" in lieu of public executions; it's portrayed as "neutral" even though it's thuggish; and after an initial lull in violence, it's been as brutish as street gangs with high-powered weapons for added firepower; its mission is also illegal for being the first time ever Blue Helmet force supporting a coup d'etat against a democratically elected President;
-- a third 2004 phase began in late summer/early fall under the "retrained, rearmed and reinforced" PNH with plenty of MINUSTAH backup.
Nonetheless, in the aftermath of the coup, Haitian resistance remains strong, and brutish force is matched against it. It results in indiscriminate killing in Lavalas strongholds like Cite Soleil and an early example in Bel Air on the 13th (September 30) anniversary of the 1991 coup. Over 10,000 rallied to commemorate it, were shot at by police, up to 10 people were killed and many others wounded. Repressive incursions into neighborhoods followed with Bel Air a frequent target.
The reason is its remarkable resilience, unflinching support for Aristide, and proximity to the edge of the downtown's commercial center, national palace and police headquarters. Bel Air also learned how to defend itself, and its "comites de vigilance" led resistance against pre-Aristide military dictatorships. This combination of "poverty, solidarity and strength" made it essential to subdue. In the fall of 2004, repeated PHN/MINUSTAH incursions arrested dozens of people and shot many others. On October 11 alone, 130 people were jailed, and repression continued for months. It hasn't stopped.
No one knows the full toll that keeps mounting. But one study was startling. It was by Wayne State University, School of Social Work researchers Athena Kolbe and Royce Hutson. For the period February 2004 to December 2005, they used coordinate sampling and personal interviews to document the following in the greater Port-au-Prince area:
I am a 72 year old, retired, progressive small businessman concerned about all the major national and world issues, committed to speak out and write about them.
This is a most sobering story. I had known a little of it - the lie that Aristide had resigned, and the horrifying persecution of his followers.
The role of the money and the media very much parallels what is happening in this country now. My own deep concern is that Americans will continue to believe in the orchestrated media march in presidential candidate selection and to accept their Democratic candidate - Barack Obama - (you can see that from the advertisements on Hillary that appear even on this blog) as the man of the people, despite the fact that he very clearly is deep in the pockets of the corporatocracy.
That Aristide remained true to his nonviolent belief seems to be a failure. What the nonviolent movement here has, which was not operating in Haiti, is the Internet, and this may be the way to prevail.
by
MyTwoCents (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 36 comments)
on Thursday, April 17, 2008 at 9:40:07 PM
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