| Activists set to protest UN operation in haiti Original Source Link: (May no longer be active) http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/politics/12185941.htmhttp://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/politics/12185941.htm
Posted on Thu, Jul. 21, 2005 Activists set to protest U.N. operation in Haiti
By Tom Lochner CONTRA COSTA TIMES
On July 6, U.N. peacekeepers conducted a large-scale military operation in Cité Soleil, a poor neighborhood of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, ostensibly to root out gangsters.
During the operation, "the criminals who tried desperately to respond by using their weapons were either killed or injured," Lt. Col. El Ouafi Boulbars, a military spokesman for the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, said in a news release.
But a group of Bay Area labor and human rights activists who were in Haiti this month tell a much different story. They say what happened July 6 was "a massacre."
"These people's lives are just as important as yours or mine," said Richmond's Marilyn Langlois, a member of the Haiti Action Committee, who was in the Caribbean nation last year.
Langlois and other members of Haiti Action Committee and other organizations will gather at 4 p.m. today at Powell and Market streets in San Francisco to protest the July 6 action. They will march on the Brazilian Consulate, since U.N. troops in Haiti are under Brazilian command. Similar rallies will take place Thursday in more than a dozen cities in the Americas.
"The U.N. operation appears to have targeted the community itself," said Seth Donnelly, a Palo Alto schoolteacher and member of the U.S. Labor/Human Rights Delegation to Haiti who shot film at Cité Soleil the day after the disputed event. "The quote-unquote bandits killed by U.N. troops include many unarmed civilians, such as a mother and two children killed in their own home."
They found a population traumatized and in terror, Donnelly said. Eyewitnesses told them of people shot in front of their houses, in their bathrooms; of soldiers lobbing gas grenades into homes; of two helicopters firing on rooftops.
An official at the U.N. press office in New York referred inquiries to the Haiti mission, but the number of the mission's chief of public information, Toussaint Kongo-Doudou, could "not be completed as dialed" Tuesday and Wednesday, according to a recording. Messages left on the number of a Kongo-Doudou subordinate were not returned. Press contact numbers listed on the U.N. Haiti mission's Web site yielded similar "cannot be completed as dialed" recordings Wednesday.
Bob Sullivan, an official in the New York office, could say only that the July 6 action was "a large operation" with 40 vehicles and 300 troops -- another U.N. account said 400 troops. He referred further inquiries to another number in New York, but that number, too, answered with a recording that the number could not be completed as dialed.
The returning activists say the U.N. has a flawed mandate: to stabilize the existing Haitian regime of Prime Minister Gerard Latortue, whom a Times editorial in June called "a U.S.-installed puppet."
"To stabilize an unpopular, dictatorial regime ... requires the U.N. to engage in repression," said Donnelly.
The Times editorial urged the United States to pressure the Latortue government to negotiate with former Prime Minister Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whom the United States whisked out of the country during a February 2004 coup, and his Lavalas party. Cité Soleil is a bastion of Lavalas support.
"The U.N. and the U.S. are intervening on behalf of the elite," said Berkeley's Dave Welsh, who represented the San Francisco Labor Council in the Haiti delegation this month. "The poor majority feel a war is being waged against them."
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