<html>
<body>
<font face="Verdana" size=1><br><br>
<br>
</font><h5><b>FROM:</b></h5><font face="Verdana" size=2>THE MONTREAL
E-ZINE <b>SERAI<br>
</b></font><font face="Verdana" size=1>(Courtesy of Brian
CONCANNON)<br><br>
</font><div align="center"><font face="Verdana" size=3><b>THE U.N. SPINS
ITS MISSION IN HAITI <br><br>
</b></font><font face="Verdana" size=2>Darren Ell<br>
Commentary<br>
</font><font size=2 color="#0000FF"><u>
<a href="http://www.montrealserai.com/index.htm">
http://www.montrealserai.com/index.htm</a><br><br>
</u></font><font face="Verdana" size=2><b><i>Darren Ell</b> is an
independent photographer, journalist and artist living in Montreal.
He is currently producing a body of work on the ongoing crisis in
Haiti. His recent project on the struggle of immigrants in Canada,
presented in the previous issue of Serai, showed at Dazibao, centre de
photographies actuelles in Montreal. Darren can be contacted via
his website at
</font><a href="http://www.darrenell.com">
<font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#0000FF"><u>
http://www.darrenell.com</a></u></font><font face="Verdana" size=2>.<br>
<br>
<br><br>
</i>
<img src="cid:7.1.0.9.2.20070430054619.039cb0a8@freedomarchives.org.2" width=698 height=464 alt="[]">
</i><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=1>Port-au-Prince, March 2nd, 2007:
seeing the arrival of journalists, MINUSTAH troops take leave of a group
of angry Cité Soleil residents. <br>
Residents stated that UN troops had just arrested their 23 year-old
neighbor without a warrant as he was leaving for his class at the <br>
Saint Gerard Technical Centre. The arrest added to the 70 arrests
of “presumed gang members” <br>
MINUSTAH carried had out in the previous 2 weeks. (Photo: 2007
Darren Ell)<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>On February 15th 2007, the UN News
Service, the global mouthpiece for UN operations around the world,
published an article stating that UN forces in Haiti – MINUSTAH – had
transformed a former gang leader’s headquarters in Cité Soleil into a
“free medical clinic” following its raid on his residence. I had
just arrived in Haiti to work on a project about the impact of the 2004
Canada-backed coup d’état. I knew MINUSTAH had brought in a few
doctors and clowns for a photo op after their massive military operations
in the seaside shantytown, but I didn’t realize they were setting up
fully functioning clinics. Two days later, I attended a
demonstration on the site where the medical clinic was supposed to exist,
but it was nowhere to be found. In the following two weeks, the UN
News Service published this fabrication with each new mass arrest in Cité
Soleil. By March 2nd, it claimed that more gang headquarters had
been converted into “medical and social centers.” I visited and
photographed the “headquarters” of [so-called] gang leaders Evans, Amaral
and Ti Bazil, three of the sites of supposed UN social services, and
there was nothing to be found.<br><br>
</font>
<img src="cid:7.1.0.9.2.20070430054619.039cb0a8@freedomarchives.org.3" width=769 height=176 alt="[]">
<font face="Verdana" size=3><br>
</font><font size=1>Left to right, the headquarters of what the UN calls
“gang leaders”: Evans, Amaral and Ti Bazil. These photos were
taken in the days following the UN’s announcement <br>
that they had created “medical, social and community centers” on these
sites. No such services were ever created. (Photos:
2007Darren Ell) <br><br>
<br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>It is hard not to notice that the UN’s
remarkable feats of humanitarian kindness were being performed exactly at
the same time that harsh mass arrests were being conducted among a
vulnerable population. When I notified the head of media relations
at MINUSTAH about the lies being published by the UN News Service, she
agreed they were misleading. She acknowledged that MINUSTAH had
only ever handed out water bottles and offered free checkups the day
after 72-hour mass arrest operations. Nonetheless, the
exaggerations have not abated to this day. Here is a selection from
the UN News Service’s most recent article about Haiti (March 23, 2007):
<br><br></font>
<ul>
<li><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#800000">"From helping to set
up local municipal administrations to providing electricity, education
and health services to restoring a library to laying out a football
field, no task is too small or parochial for the UN peacekeepers as they
try to make a difference for the people on the ground in one of the
poorest countries on earth."</font>
</ul><font face="Verdana" size=2><br>
Disturbed by these cynical fabrications, I decided to look into
MINUSTAH’s huge arrest operations that were occurring during my stay in
the country. On March 2nd, MINUSTAH spokesperson David Wimhurst
proclaimed to the UN News Service, “We’ve got a good catch.” He was
referring to the results of three operations in which UN troops claim to
have arrested one gang leader and sent three more into hiding, one of
which was subsequently arrested. In addition to the gang leaders,
70 “suspected gang members” were also arrested. In other UN News
Service articles, these people are called “presumed bandits,” “suspected
gangsters,” or “suspected criminals.” Sometimes the term
“suspected” is dropped altogether. In the days following these
arrests, my Haitian colleague Wadner Pierre and I interviewed four people
in Cité Soleil who claimed five of their relatives or neighbors had been
arbitrarily arrested, without warrants, on their way to work or
school. We didn’t corroborate their claims, but two of Haiti’s most
prominent human rights lawyers, Mario Joseph and Brian Concannon,
confirmed that MINUSTAH routinely arrests people without warrants.
They also get information from informants who in desperate economic
environments are notoriously unreliable. I wondered how many more
of the 70 “gang members” might be innocent civilians languishing in
deplorable conditions of Haiti’s prisons.<br><br>
I decided to look closer at what the UN News Service was telling the
world about Haitian reality. Most startling was a phrase that was
repeated in every article related to the origins of MINUSTAH: “The UN
Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) [was] set up in 2004 to help
re-establish peace in the impoverished Caribbean country after an
insurgency forced then President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to go into
exile.” This is a revisionist statement. An insurgency
suggests a popular rebellion against a corrupt leader. Mr.
Aristide, democratically elected in a landslide victory in 2000, was
overthrown in a coup d’état fomented and supported by the United States,
Canada and France. The coup followed the deliberate destabilization
of the Aristide government by these same countries. The
‘insurgency’ consisted of criminal US-trained and armed former Haitian
Army personnel. They swept through the country, killing police
officers and civilians, and raiding jails to free their comrades. Their
notorious ringleader, Guy Philippe, subsequently ran for President under
MINUSTAH’s watch. The US ambassador then threatened Mr. Aristide
with the specter of increased violence in the country if he didn’t step
down. US forces then took Mr. Aristide out of the country as
Canadian troops secured the airport. Note that the foreign troops
were not used to stop the attempted overthrow of the overwhelmingly
popular democratically elected president, which could have been done at
the flip of a switch. He has not been allowed to return to Haiti
since, despite the presence of MINUSTAH. In other words, he was
overthrown by a criminal coup d’état, not “forced into exile.”<br><br>
<i>These issues constitute only the tip of the iceberg as concerns the UN
presence in Haiti. To learn more, consult the site of
</font><a href="http://www.HaitiAction.net">
<font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#0000FF"><u>
http://www.HaitiAction.net</a></u></font><font face="Verdana" size=2> and
read my recent interview with human rights lawyer BRIAN CONCANNON
published online with The Dominion. For a detailed examination of
the 2004 coup d’état and Canada’s role in it, consult the Canada
HaitiAction website.<br><br>
Be sure to also to see:
</font><a href="http://www.haitisolidarity.net">
<font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#0000FF"><u>
http://www.haitisolidarity.net</a></u></font><font face="Verdana" size=2>
<br><br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
</i></font><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
</div>
<font size=3 color="#FF0000">The Freedom Archives<br>
522 Valencia Street<br>
San Francisco, CA 94110<br>
(415) 863-9977<br>
</font><font size=3>
<a href="http://www.freedomarchives.org/" eudora="autourl">
www.freedomarchives.org</a></font></body>
</html>