Letter to the Globe and Mail

Letter to the Editor
Re: "Haiti's Spiral of Violence Picks Up Speed" by Marina Jimenez

I wish to draw your attention to some disturbing inaccuracies in Marina Jimenez's August 1 article on "the spiral of violence" in Haiti.

After stating that the United Nations Stabilization Mission (Minustah) has "been criticized for failing to quell the violence" since the ouster of elected President Aristide in February 2004, Jimenez notes, with apparent approval, that "on July 6, however, Minustah did show its muscle in an eight-hour operation in the slum of Cite Soleil that left six armed gang leaders dead."

According to a growing mountain of evidence, including video and still camera footage (by Reuters correspondent Joseph Guyler Delva, among many others), numerous eye-witness accounts, and corroborating evidence from the head of Medicins Sans Frontiers in Haiti, the "raid" by UN soliders to which Jimenez refers was actually an outright massacre, not of "six armed gang leaders," but of at least 23 Haitian civilians, many of them women and children, who were killed that day by heavy and indiscriminate fire in the poor neighborhood.

Perhaps you were unaware that in response to the UN force's actions that day, emergency protests were held on July 21st in Brazil, France, and thirteen US and Canadian cities, including Toronto? Or that 5000 people demonstrated in Cite Soleil itself on July 14 to condemn it? From all the coverage the events of July 6 and their aftermath have received in The Globe and Mail, it would seem so.

That the first we should read of these shameful and grievous charges against the UN force is a passing reference, nearly four weeks after the fact, that bears almost no relation to the evidence available -- and worse, that speaks approvingly of this UN show of "muscle" -- reflects poorly indeed on the integrity of your paper.

The problem, of course, is that the UN (with the full support of Canada, France, the US, Brazil, and others) is responsible, first, for participating in the removal of democratically elected and still-popular president Jean-Bertrand Aristide last February, and second, for propping up the brutal and illegitimate regime of Gerard Latortue against the wishes of the poor majority of Haitians. This is the hard truth the Canadian government -- and apparently the Canadian media as well -- seems stubbornly unwilling to face.

Aristide's party will be barred from the upcoming municipal, legislative, and presidential elections, and its likely presidential candidate, the popular Father Gerard Jean-Juste, was recently imprisoned on spurious charges. Attacks on peaceful demonstrations by Haitian police have become commonplace. As Naomi Klein wrote in The Guardian recently, the poor of Haiti "say they are being killed not for being violent, but for being militant - for daring to demand the return of their elected president."

It is in this context of aggressive and brutal suppression of Haitian democracy that the current wave of violence must be understood. In contrast, Marita Jimenez's article offers nothing more than obfuscations, apologetics, and outright lies.

To the extent that we as Canadians, and you as the press, are complicit in our country's participation in this crime, we all have the blood of the Haitian poor on our hands.

For more information on the events of July 6, I would strongly urge you to read the following:

"Evidence Mounts of a UN Massacre in Haiti"
http://www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/7_12_5.html

"6/7: The Massacre of the Poor that the World Ignored" Naomi Klein http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1530800,00.html

"UN Peacekeepers Killed Civilians -- Witnesses"
The Independent (South Africa)
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=3&art_id=vn20050729065452991C856966&set_id=

Sincerely,
Dave Oswald Mitchell