Haiti: the Western World's Worst Crimes

I feel guilty every time I use my limited time to post on Guantánamo.  The U.S. media have started to cover that travesty.  The world media, with the notable exception of Australia, are nearly unanimous in their condemnation of the interrogation camp.

On far, far worse crimes in Haiti – including paramilitary death squads, killings by police, and jailing without legal cause or counsel – crimes committed with the conscious and active aid of U.S., French, Canadian, and Brazilian governments – the media silence is, as they say, deafening.

Tom Reeves, discussing a recent human rights report, and Reed Lindsay, reporting for Free Speech Radio News from Port-au-Prince, provide a partial corrective... Investigators saw and include photos of boys as young as twelve lying in pools of their own blood in the General Hospital, where doctors refused to treat them, Reeves described the report by the Center for the Study of Human Rights (CSHR) at the University of Miami (available as a 7MB PDF document).  Other photos show bodies left in the street and dozens of bodies rotting and piled high at the morgue after police and UN invasions of Port au Prince's poor neighborhoods.  Interviews with police and others make clear a systematic campaign of political repression and assassination aimed at Aristide's Lavalas Party, often committed directly by the Haitian National Police (HNP), and in some cases by the UN forces (MINUSTAH) accompanying them.

Free Speech Radio News reports that the U.S.-installed Latortue government announces elections only for the end of this year– at best nearly two years after the coup.  Already Fanmi-Lavalas, Aristide's party with large majority support, says it will not participate because of the terror and assassination against its members.

Reed Lindsay in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, reported Monday that the residents of a cinderblock-house neighborhood faced a 4 a.m. police raid Sunday morning.  A man said police tied the hands of his 17-year-old son, dragged him into the sheet, and shot him dead.  Another man said police executed his 45 year old brother in front of his house.  The police chief confirmed that police did stage an operation Sunday, but said no-one died.  Residents say there had already been two police attacks in the past month, burning houses and killing at least 8 people.

UN peacekeepers are investigating a string of summary executions allegedly committed by police in Port-au-Prince's poor neighborhoods, where support still runs high for Aristide, Lindsay said.

Yesterday Lindsay reported on the death of Haitian journalist  Abdia Jean, a correspondent for a Miami radio station.  The top official of the United Nations called the killing an intolerable attack on democracy and rule of law.

According to witnesses, Jean was executed by police last month near his home in a Port-au-Prince slum known as God's Village– ten days after residents there reported summary executions by police.

Dictator Gerard Latortue has publicly denounced journalists who report the crimes of his government, raising fears of more violence against working reporters.

The manipulation of Haitian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) by U.S. organizations supported by the U.S. government reveals how governments prepare for mass murder and the crushing of democracy.  Reeves summarized the CSHR report's details on the effect of aid from the USAID-supported International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES):

Extensive interviews with staff of CARLI, a Haitian human rights organization, revealed that IFES funded CARLI during the lead-up to the ouster of Aristide--  with technical support and as much as $54,000 during 2003.  CARLI  staff revealed that it was instructed to provide lists of alleged  Lalavals human rights violators, which were then read out on  Haitian commercial radio.  (Twenty of the twenty-five commercial stations and several of the Haitian daily and weekly newspapers are owned by members of the "184" anti-Aristide coalition.)  It is now feared that these lists have been used since the coup to target Lavalas leaders for summary arrest, attacks on property, and even death.  With IFES funding slowly removed during 2004, CARLI began to report on fraudulent human rights cases put forward by the government, and on violent campaigns against Lavalas and other community groups who refused to endorse the removal of Aristide.  It investigated the claim of Latortue that Lavalas had ordered decapitation of police officers in a campaign dubbed "Operation Baghdad."  These accusations were picked up and spread uncritically by Haitian and U.S. media.  CARLI now says no such campaign by Lavalas existed, and that the only two decapitations of police were committed by former Haitian army officers, not Lavalas.

Cause, and effect.  Lies and a complicit media, and death and the destruction of self-rule.

This isn't in the past, this continues to happen right now.  We must stop it.  The first step: telling the truth, and spreading it.  And facing its horror.  The second will have to be mass action.  Thank you, Lindsay and Reeves, and others like Randall White at HatiAction.net and Marguerite Laurent of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network, for pushing us into that first step.