Haiti: Two Killed, Fifteen Wounded During UN Assault in Cite Soleil

Mainstream news of recent UN aggression in Haiti's slums has gone from UNderreported to UNreported. The lone report thus far seems to be that by Dave Welsh, interviewed by Flashpoints radio on Thursday, November 10th. Welsh also discusses some of his recent experiences in Haiti while he (and others, part of an International Tribunal on Haiti) investigated UN involvement in reported massacres. The entire transcribed interview is posted HERE, with excerpts below.

Disturbingly, I recall several conversations with MINUSTAH officials in Haiti a few weeks ago, wherein they referred to Cite Soleil as the only neighborhood that had not yet been sufficiently 'pacified.' To carry this pacification through to its inevitable conclusion, I was told that an extra battalion of Jordanian (750) soldiers were being brought in to Cite Soleil ("like a boot") for just this purpose. Many high-level military strategy meetings take place prior to these sorts of operations, involving MINUSTAH, UNPOL, Haitian police, and, evidently, members of Haiti's private sector. Leaked documents show the intricate planning that goes into these invasions into Haiti's populist slums, premised on hunting down "gang leaders" or "bandits," such as Dread Wilme.

The following comes from notes taken (the note taker must remain anonymous) during one of the  MINUSTAH meetings on Cite Soleil this past Spring, where coup supporter, sweatshop owner, and U.S. citizen with reported links to death squads, Andy Apaid, Jr. figured prominently:

"Andre Apaid, of the Group of 184, pointed out that Cite Soleil had now as an extension the Cite Militaire (Pele) area, of which the leader called "Ti Blan" (a nickname, literally translateable as "Small Light-Skinned Person," is linked to Dred Wilme.  He explained that for two weeks, it had been impossible to pass through this zone.  The cars are stolen there, and a driver was already killed.  Mr. Apaid thus asked to extend the interventions of the MINUSTAH to this zone...Andre Apaid spoke again to indicate that according to certain information, violence which is currently unfolding in Cite Soleil will soon (at the beginning of June) be decentralized towards the other departments (geographic sub-divisions) in order to create panic and to destabilize the electoral process.  He thus recommended that actions be very quickly taken."

And here's Dave Welsh on Flashpoints, Thursday, November 10th:

"I was on the phone with a Haitian human rights worker yesterday (Wednesday, November 10th) and Tuesday, and he told us that there were three attacks that took place on Tuesday (November 9th). One was at midnight at two in the morning, the second was at seven in the morning, and the third was at four in the afternoon. And these attacks were with tanks, with cannons mounted on them, and when I say they are tanks, they are armored personnel carriers, except they don’t have treads, so they are just like tanks otherwise. And they had helicopters also firing. The toll, according to this human rights worker was fifteen wounded and two dead. There was a young woman of twenty-three, who was killed, and a man in his early forties was killed, and fifteen were wounded."

"Then at nine o’clock, three people were arrested; this is in the Cite Soleil neighborhood, which is actually a city within a city; it has about 300,000 people who live there; there are thirty-four different neighborhoods in Cite Soleil, and the tanks were active in a number of them. There were two different tanks from Peru shooting in the direction of Bellecour that is the Peruvian contingent that is a part of the so-called “peacekeeping” force in  Port au Prince. There was another tank in the Boston neighborhood and another tank firing in the direction of Pele. The cannons from these tanks were issuing projectiles which, when they hit the ground, would explode and anybody who was around there might very well get hit by shrapnel or explosive. The Red Cross came in after these attacks in a pickup carrying a Red Cross flag on it and a siren, and picked up the wounded and took them to St. Catherines hospital, where the Doctors Without Borders have set up shop. And there was one man who had bullets in the head, at the time he wasn’t yet dead, and they took him there; I don’t know if he was the one that was killed or not. So, it’s a continuing assault on the poor neighborhoods. They come in there, people are being hit in their house, because a lot of these houses they are very flimsy, they are like shanties, they are made of cardboard and tin and sometimes cement blocks. Some are hit in their house, some are hit on their way to work; some are coming home from work. So it is an assault on the civilian population; it is basically almost a genocidal assault."