Haiti - The Gaza Strip Of The Caribbean

This is an excerpt from a report by a San Francisco-based labor/human rights delegation that was in Haiti on Wednesday, July 6, when UN forces committed a massacre against the residents of the neighborhood of Cite Soleil.

Back in April, I wrote an article warning the head of the UN “peacekeeping” effort in Haiti, Brazilian General Augusto Heleno Ribeiro, that if he continued to implement the UN Security Council’s unwritten mandate to insure a Haitian elite victory in the upcoming elections by killing as many Aristide supporters as possible, there would not be enough soap and water to wash the blood off his hands.

It looks like General Heleno may have figured this out for himself. Last month, he declared his intention to resign his post. Yet, it appears he was still in command in the wee hours of the morning of July 6, when between 300-400 UN troops attacked Cite Soleil, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince and slaughtered close to 50 residents and wounded many more.

It was a bloodletting worthy of the Israeli Defense Forces and on that day, Haiti moved a step closer to becoming the Gaza Strip of the Caribbean. It was a bloodletting that, if there is any justice left in the world, will land General Heleno before an international tribunal.

On February 29, 2004, the lives of most Haitians turned decidedly worse when a U.S.-inspired coup d’etat deprived them of their democratically elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The coup was masterminded and supervised by a colonial cabal consisting of the U.S., France, and Canada, supported by military forces that slipped into Haiti days before. From that moment on, Haiti was under occupation.

Shortly thereafter, the cabal formed a multi-lateral force that reigned for three months. Knowing that the political stakes were too high to remain the sole supplier of the military muscle in Haiti, the cabal cleverly engineered a UN “peacekeeping” operation that has, by all standards, mutated into an occupying IDF-like assault force.

It is proving extremely difficult for Haiti solidarity activists, who are working to stop this carnage, to convince the public that a UN peacekeeping effort could be capable of such heinous crimes. Most think of UN peacekeeping missions as non-belligerent, neutral operations that are deployed to separate warring factions in order to reach a peaceful settlement to conflict. And this is the genius of the cabal’s decision to bring the UN to Haiti. It is vital for the public to understand that, in Haiti, the UN is the primary warring faction, a proxy for the cabal, and nothing about their mission is neutral.

The permanent members of the UN Security Council dictate the nature and scope of UN peacekeeping operations. As the more dominant of the permanent members, the U.S. and France are masters at designing peacekeeping operations to serve their own foreign policy interests. As a result, peacekeeping missions are more insidious and deadly than most people know.

Haiti is Gaza and Gaza is Haiti because occupation always yields the same things: relentless provocations of the population, murder on a massive scale, oppression, persecution, incarceration, disenfranchisement, joblessness, homelessness, starvation and resistance.

But this will not go on forever. When and how will it stop? The UN would do well to check out the Haitian history books for answers to these questions. There, they might learn that they are occupying the land of the sons and daughters of Dessalines. If the UN is unable to grasp the significance of this, they should seek clarification from the French.

http://www.hardbeatnews.com/editor/RTE/my_documents/my_files/details.asp?newsid=4381