[News] Aristide's Lavalas puts UN duplicity to the test in Haiti

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Aristide's Lavalas puts UN duplicity to the test in Haiti

http://www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/3_5_5/3_5_5.html
Commentary
by the Haiti Information Project

(HIP) March 3, 2005 - Evidence continues to mount of the United Nation's 
complicity in an on-going campaign by the US-installed government of Gerard 
Latortue to terrorize and exterminate sympathizers of President 
Jean-Bertrand Aristide's political party known as Lavalas. Despite detailed 
documentation of innumerable massacres committed by the Police Nationale de 
Haiti (PNH) over the last five months, the UN insisted in a new report 
released on February 25 that "the general security environment across Haiti 
has improved." Any sensible observer of Haiti must ask, "improved for 
whom?" The recent attack by the PNH against unarmed demonstrators demanding 
Aristide's return on February 28 destroyed the credibility of several such 
statements made recently by the UN in Haiti and exposed the duplicitous 
role of their forces in propping up an unpopular regime.

The reality is the UN has dirtied its hands to keep the US-installed regime 
in power. Their main role and objective has arguably been to insure there 
is no resistance as the current regime undertakes a campaign to eliminate 
the Lavalas party. Whenever the UN moved into the poor slums of the capital 
to occupy it by force, the Haitian National Police (PNH) soon followed with 
violent incursions against the population. Wherever the UN opened the gates 
the PNH soon followed to tear apart their victims. Following these bloody 
exercises in terror, the UN dutifully covered them up by accepting the 
PNH's denials and justifications while twisting reality by representing the 
Latortue regime as a centrist government embattled between the extremes of 
deadly Lavalas gunmen and the former brutal military. Meanwhile, the 
lopsided death toll of Lavalas sympathizers versus any other identifiable 
sector of Haitian society is incontrovertible and exposes the UN's 
subservience to US foreign policy whose main goal has been to consolidate 
the coup that ousted the democratically elected government of Jean-Bertrand 
Aristide on February 29, 2004.

Continuing a relentless campaign of misinformation by the Latortue regime, 
PNH spokeswoman Gessy Coicou commented on the killings of February 28 by 
stating, "The police broke up the march because it was violent and about 
half the protesters were carrying weapons." This stood in stark 
contradiction to press reports by the likes of Knight Ridder Newspapers 
(KRT) who wrote, "Two days after Haitian police opened fire on a crowd of 
peaceful protesters and killed two, the head of the U.N. mission here said 
police brutality is undercutting progress and such action will no longer be 
tolerated." The Miami Herald also quoted U.N. Ambassador Juan Gabriel 
Valdes as stating, "We cannot tolerate executions. We can't tolerate 
shooting out of control. We will not permit human rights abuses." KRT 
continued by adding "He [U.N. Ambassador Juan Gabriel Valdes] said U.N. 
peacekeepers will intervene ­ and use force if necessary ­ if Haitian 
police attack unarmed civilians again."

The former statement by Valdes was disingenuous at best given that the UN 
has in the past given the PNH a freehand to kill Lavalas supporters with 
impunity in well-documented massacres in poor neighborhoods like Cite 
Soleil, Cite de Dieu, Bel Air and La Saline over the past five months. The 
latter statement of UN armed intervention against PNH for "attacking 
unarmed civilians" remains just words until put to the test.

Putting the UN's threat against PNH to the test is exactly what Aristide's 
Lavalas party intends to do over the next weeks and months before elections 
designed to legitimize the coup against him are held in October and 
November. Nothing less than the already compromised credibility of the UN 
is at stake in Haiti as the world braces itself for yet another feeble 
justification to continue the campaign of extermination against Lavalas 
supporters demanding Aristide's return.


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