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<h1><font size=3><b>Disarmament, Demobilization and Reinsertion in Haiti:
The UN's cleansing of Bel Air ahead of
elections</b></font></h1><font size=3>
<a href="http://www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/12_15_5/12_15_5.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/12_15_5/12_15_5.html<br><br>
</a></font><font size=4><b>A
<a href="http://www.teledyol.net/HIP/about.html">Haiti Information
Project</a> (HIP) Special Report</font><font size=3> <br>
by Isabel MacDonald<br><br>
</font><font size=2><a href="http://www.teledyol.net/HIP/about.html">
HIP</a>, Haiti</b></font><font size=3> According to Juan Gabriel
Valdes, the head of the United Nations Mission for the Stabilization in
Haiti (MINUSTAH), the upcoming Haitian elections scheduled for January 8
will mark "a major victory for the electoral process." A
central strategy in preparing for the vote is MINUSTAH's Disarmament,
Demobilization and Reinsertion (DDR) campaign. In theory, DDR offers both
sides of the political conflict in Haiti armed Lavalas supporters and
the former paramilitary death squads and disbanded army who led the
Canada, US and France sponsored coup against Jean Bertrand Aristide's FL
government the chance to hand over their arms in exchange for amnesty
and reintegration. While the former military have been offered more than
12 million US dollars as a buy-out for their loyalty to the process,
Lavalas remains as demonized and destitute as the day the UN began its
occupation of Haiti in the name of "restoring democracy." While
former death squad leaders like Jodel Chamblain have been set free,
Lavalas leaders such as Father Gerard Jean-Juste continue to waste away
in prison with little hope of justice.<br><br>
DDR is being trumpeted as a particular success in Bel Air, a
Port-au-Prince slum where support for Aristide <i>and resistance to the
coup</i> has been particularly strong. At a press conference on November
28, Valdes held up Bel Air as an example of a triumph for MINUSTAH's
"dialogue" with "problem" (read Lavalas-supporting)
neighborhoods. In contrast to Bel Air's neighboring slum of Cite Soleil,
which is also a stronghold of Lavalas support, and where civilian deaths
caused by MINUSTAH have recently attracted some negative international
media attention, Valdes trumpeted the UN's "stabilization"
operations in Bel Air as a good news story.<br><br>
The Brazilian army's success in disarming and "stabilizing" Bel
Air were highlighted on December 5, at a ceremony marking the arrival of
a new contingent of troops; it is the Brazilians who have been leading UN
operations in Bel Air. The event took place at the MINUSTAH base, which
occupies an entire university constructed under the Aristide government,
in which the classrooms and offices are now teeming with heavily armed,
blue-helmet-clad soldiers of the UN "stabilization" forces,
with the residences transformed into army barracks. The outgoing
Brazilian MINUSTAH commander opened the ceremonies in the middle of what
once had been the university's soccer field; for the occasion of the
ceremony, the field was populated with a different sort of game, whose
players included some 2000 UN soldiers adorned with M16s, and a gaggle of
diplomats, including Canadian Ambassador Claude Boucher. The incoming
Brazilian MINUSTAH commander gushed at the ceremony about the manner in
which MINUSTAH operations had been carried out in Bel Air. The commander
praised the manner in which the troops had carried out their
"operations," "always with the greatest respect for the
Haitian people and their customs," and with "good
relations" with local communities, and he gave a particular
"thanks to outgoing Brazilian MINUSTAH troops for the pacification
of Bel Air."<br><br>
</font><font size=4><b>Lies, prison sentences and DDR in
practice<br><br>
</b></font><font size=3>The streets of Bel Air are strewn with banners
trumpeting the supposed reconciliation wrought by DDR. However, for
members of the community who have participated in the disarmament, DDR
has proven more than a great disappointment. In July, Zakat Zanfan, an
organization that works with street kids, had agreed to participate with
MINUSTAH DDR authorities. In exchange, the UN promised to assist the
community with development projects including providing food for the most
vulnerable especially the hungry children of the neighborhood. According
to Robert Montinard, a Zakat organizer, "they promised us education
housing, food, jobs". Zakat facilitated seminars about the
importance of ceasing violence for some of the youth they work with, in
which they urged kids to give up their guns to the UN. <br><br>
Following Zakat's seminars, 28 people from the community who had
participated in DDR were arrested and thrown in jail; two participants,
Lundi Duckens, and another man by the name of Stevenson, who was referred
to by his friends as "Coeur Rouge," are still in the Haitian
National Penitentiary. Meanwhile, Montinard told me "so far, we have
received nothing from the UN". On December 8, when I visited Bel
Air, Zakat had just run out of rice, and had had to turn fifty hungry
kids away. Moreover, that very morning, MINUSTAH secured the perimeter as
hooded police raided their neighborhood yet again.<br><br>
From a small office marked with a hand-painted sign that read "DDR
Office," Samba Boukman, Lavalas organizer in Bel Air, explained to
me that the community did not have many weapons in the first place,
particularly when compared to the Haitian National Police, which has
carried out a series of deadly attacks on the community since February
29, 2004. Hundreds of Bel Air residents have been killed or injured at
the hands of the U.S. marines, Haitian National Police and the MINUSTAH
troops since the coup. At first people defended themselves by showering
the invading troops and police with rocks and bottles from surrounding
rooftops. The U.S. marines responded with a deadly incursion in the early
morning hours of March 12, 2004 that ended with blood being hosed from
the streets by fire trucks and dozens of body bags being removed by the
time reporters arrived on the scene. Most recently, a police officer or
MINUSTAH soldier would drop a gun as they attempted to withdraw from the
hail of chunks of concrete and glass, which people in the community would
appropriate as a means of self defense, Boukman explained.<br><br>
</font><font size=4><b>The litany of police crimes<br><br>
</b></font><font size=3>Whole streets of Bel Air now lie empty in the
wake of violent police raids, carried out by the HNP, often with the
assistance of hooded police attaches, and the complicity of MINUSTAH
police (a force which was formerly referred to as CIVPOL, but whose name
has recently been changed to UNPOLódropping the misleading suggestion
that the force, which increasingly consists of military police, is a
civil police force). As the UN military used its guns to control the
outer perimeter of Bel Air, the Haitian police and machete-wielding
paramilitaries would drive through the neighborhood on killing and
torching sprees designed to terrorize the inhabitants. In Ruelle Felix,
Boukman pointed to the house where the police arrested a 16-year old this
summer. The outside of the house was painted brightly with the Haitian
flag, but the mural was now pockmarked with holes from bullets fired by
the police. Just a block over, we walked past a series of abandoned
houses; only parts of the walls remained. On June 4, HNP and hooded
police attaches had burned a block of houses, arrested 22 people from
these houses, and loaded them into a police wagon. Their neighbors
arrived at the police commissariat soon afterwards, expecting to find
them there; however, those arrested were nowhere to be found. Later, it
was discovered that the police wagon had stopped on a small street where
all of the arrestees had been summarily executed. A seventy year-old man
was amongst those shot by the police that day, Boukman told us. As we
were leaving, a woman came over, and angrily began explaining that she
had lived here, before the police burned down her home. <br><br>
We walked on, and arrived at an open area, where the concrete foundations
of what had been a series of houses were exposed, littered with
bedsprings and piles of rubble; in the middle of one foundation, a young
woman was asleep on a bare mattress. One Bel Air resident told me that
there had been about 8 houses there, until police burned them down on
July 7. We walked on, along the path of living history claimed and passed
on to us by the survivors of the death and destruction wrought by the
Haitian police. We saw more houses that had been burned in a major police
operation on July 11. We saw the remains of another raid in September,
and another in October- <br><br>
</font><font size=4><b>Constitutional rights undermined<br><br>
</b></font><font size=3>According to Boukman, "with President
Aristide, there were jobs, there was education, development, but with the
Latortue government, there is just violence, and violations of the
constitution;" he emphasized that the Haitian constitution
guarantees "the right to live".<br><br>
Following the coup, more than 12,000 public sector employees, who had
been hired under the Aristide government, were immediately fired without
compensation. <br><br>
Two of the people I talked with on my recent visit to Bel Air, Bazile and
Vital, a couple with nine children, were both amongst the thousands of
workers fired at the state telecommunications department following the
coup. Vital, who had been working at the Teleco for over ten years, was
placed on a "wanted" list by the Latortue government, along
with 32 of his former co-workers, and has had to go into hiding. On July
11, the police had stormed into the family's small home, breaking their
furniture, in their search for Vital. "I do not know why they are
searching for me. I am only a technician," he told me. Now he cannot
look for other work, for fear of being wrongfully imprisoned, and is
worried about how they are going to support their children. <br><br>
"How can we live without eating?" Vital exclaimed.<br><br>
When I asked Vital about why he thought the police were targeting him, he
shrugged and shook his head; maybe painting dozens of former Teleco
workers as "criminals" was a way of justifying their
firing?<br><br>
</font><font size=4><b>Selection elections<br><br>
</b></font><font size=3>When I asked Boukman about his position on the
upcoming elections, he emphasized, "We support elections;"
however, he added, "we will not participate in a selection."
Lavalas' conditions for elections include the liberation of political
prisoners, the departure of the defacto government and the establishment
of a new government to establish good relations amongst all sectors of
the population, an end of repression in the popular neighborhoods, total
disarmament, a general amnesty and a return of the political exiles,
particularly President Aristide. However, not even one of these
conditions has been met nor seriously considered by the U.S.-installed
government and their guarantors in the United Nations. How could there be
real elections, Boukman emphasized, when Fanmi Lavalas' (FLs')
anticipated presidential candidate, Father Gerard Jean Juste, was still
in prison along with countless other members of the movement? <br><br>
Just a couple of days earlier, I had been to see Jean Juste, who is
recognized by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience, and who
has been in prison for four months since his latest arrest on bogus
charges by the defacto Haitian government. This is the second time Father
Jean Juste has been wrongfully imprisoned by the Latortue regime.
"It seems that it's a matter of they don't want to release me in
time for the elections," Jean Juste stated. "They are afraid I
may run, afraid I may cause trouble, I may try to bring them to court for
what they have done to me."<br><br>
On the same visit to the jail, I also spoke with Jacques Matelier, a
Lavalas deputy who is being held in the same prison as Jean Juste.
"I have been here for 17 months," Matelier told me, "just
because I was on the Council of Departmental Delegates in the South …
they have nothing to accuse me with; their hands are empty. They just
want to keep me in prison because I am a Lavalasien."<br><br>
The following day, I visited popular Haitian folk singer and grandmother
Annette "So An" Auguste, in the Petionville women's prison. So
An has been imprisoned without charges since May 2004, when US marines
used grenades to bust into her house, while she and five children were
sleeping. So An appears to have been arrested merely because she is an
outspoken critic who is extremely popular in Lavalas-supporting
neighborhoods. <br><br>
A few months ago, there were only 45 women in the Petionville prison;
today there are about 200óor seven women to each tiny jail cell. Many of
these women are from Bel Air. Guerline, an organizer with a Bel Air
community organization that fights for women's rights, Famn Vayan Bele,
told me that many Bel Air women have been locked up in Petionville after
the police came searching for their male partners in their homes. When
the police failed to find the men, they took the women instead.
"It's another form of kidnapping," Guerline remarked about the
imprisoned Bel Air women's hostage-like situation. The police have also
hauled many young men from the neighborhood off to prison. <br><br>
Given the present conditions in Haiti, many Bel Air residents and Lavalas
supporters appear extremely skeptical of the upcoming elections. As
Montinard put it, "how can we vote with our brothers and sisters in
prison?" <br><br>
"Given that they have not met even one of [Lavalas'] demands, we are
not going to vote," Boukman told me; he is urging others not to take
part in a sham vote, and to demand a real election instead. <br><br>
</font><font size=4><b>The dancing banker<br><br>
</b></font><font size=3>The police and MINUSTAH actions in Bel Air are
justified as providing greater security. However, it is unclear that
general security has increased at all for average Bel Air residents; in
fact, many people suggested that it had declined. As we were strolling
along the main street through Bel Air, we saw a piece of fabric with a
name written on it, to commemorate a street merchant; the day before, the
merchant, who sold ice, had been killed and robbed while he was at work.
<br><br>
Things like this didn't happen before, an old woman passing by in the
street told me. In her opinion, MINUSTAH has just made things
worse.<br><br>
On the afternoon of December 11, I was standing amidst a group of Bel Air
youth watching a hip-hop talent show on a small stage outside the
Perpetuel church. The show was put on by Fugees star Wyclef Jean's Yele
Haiti youth and education organization, with the sponsorship of United
States Agency for International Development (USAID). Wyclef's
organization has played the uncanny role of moving into neighborhoods
like Bel Air and Cite Soleil blaring loud music and laden with groceries
following brutal police and U.N. operations. What may have once been
called Operation Phoenix bent on winning hearts and minds in Vietnam has
now been replaced by its heir in Haiti and could be aptly deemed
Operation Hip-Hop. There I spotted the president of one of Haiti's
largest banks, USAID-assisted Banque de l'Union Haïtienne (BUH), Richard
Sassine, sporting a Yele Ayiti t-shirt, and chatting it up with the event
co-coordinator. <br><br>
I knew Sassine had been at the conference in Montreal in December 2004,
whose centerpiece press conference of the Canadian and Haitian Prime
Ministers had played an important role in legitimating the unelected
Latortue government. During the course of the conference, Sassine had
ranted to a Canadian journalist about his dissatisfaction with the
MINUSTAH forces; they really needed to "crack down" more
harshly on neighborhoods like Bel Air and Cite Soleil, he said.<br><br>
Seeing Sassine at the centre of a community youth event in Bel Air, I
began to wonder: what on earth is this plump, light-skinned
multi-millionaire with a clear disdain for the Lavalas-supporting poor
black slums doing here?<br><br>
I walked up to Sassine with my video camera; "so what are you hoping
to accomplish here in Bel Air today?" I inquired. He began to talk
about the misery and poverty of the people of Bel Air, and soon came to
the "problem" of "criminality," which he implied was
being sponsored internationally, possibly by a certain exiled President
in South Africa. Really, he told me, we need to just stick everyone with
unregistered weapons in jail, "and not let them out". He added
that he was glad that MINUSTAH was now being "more proactive".
<br><br>
"This is a great day. Here I am the President of a large Haitian
bank, standing, at sunset, in the middle of Bel Air," he crowed.
Just then, the popular and radical Bel Air band Raram, which recently had
two of its members killed and three more jailed in MINUSTAH/HNP
"stabilization operations," came marching down with great
fanfare from Rue Macajou, playing their horns and drums. For a few
moments, I thought I thought I had lost sight of the banker, in the midst
of the excited crowds that now engulfed the street. But suddenly, there
in the midst of the musicians, at the centre of the hundred or so dancing
locals, up popped Sassine again, waving his arms and shaking his
booty.<br><br>
So all those imprisonments, house-burnings, assassinations, summary
executions and broken promises that the police and MINUSTAH have waged on
Bel Air are a success from a security standpoint after all; it is just
that one has to be a rare Haitian multimillionaire to feel any of the
benefits of this "security". And as for the majority of the
population, it appears they don't count anyway, at least in the setup of
the rigged elections being sponsored by Canada, the United States, France
and the United Nations.<br><br>
<b><i>Kevin Pina also contributed to this article from Port au Prince,
Haiti.<br><br>
</i>© 2005<a href="http://www.teledyol.net/HIP/about.html"> Haiti
Information Project</a> (HIP)<br><br>
</b></font><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
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