Drop Dead or We'll Kill You

From Haiti Progress: 

Despite being coy about a U.S. troop deployment, Washington has stepped up its rhetoric against Aristide, whom U.S. Special Forces kidnapped from his home and sent into exile on Feb. 29, 2004. In a Jun. 24 article in the Miami Herald, Roger Noriega, a former aid to arch-conservative senator Jesse Helms and now U.S. assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs, blamed Aristide for “personally stirring the violence” in Haiti.

“We believe that his people are receiving instructions directly from his voice and indirectly through his acolytes that communicate with him personally in South Africa,” Noriega told the Herald. “Aristide and his camp are singularly responsible for most of the violence and for the concerted nature of the violence.”

Noriega also asked the U.N. occupying force to take a more “proactive role” in repressing anti-coup resistance. He asserted that it was “extraordinarily apparent that Aristide and his gangs are playing a central role in generating violence, and trying to sow insecurity.”

Noriega exhortations to the U.N. to get more "proactive" came in a June 24 Miami Herald article.   The US Ambassador to Haiti stood up on July 4 and said:

that the wave of kidnappings, arson, and other crimes gripping Haiti was the work of “terrorists” who had a “silent political partner participating in an even more illegitimate political project, but basically we know what, and who, it involves.”  (He was referring to the exiled Aristede.)

Less than a week later 400 U.N. troops  killed at least fifty people in Cite Soleil.  On the morning of July 14, the morning of a scheduled protest against the killings in Cite Soleil, children in that city were still being killed.  From HaitiAction.net:

Georges Honorat: Ok, two days ago the Lavalas base in Cite Soleil announced a big demonstration...as you said, to protest the massacre of Wednesday, July 6th organized by the MINUSTAH and the [Haitian] National Police, where a minimum of fifty people died among them children and women.  And since one or two o'clock this morning MINUSTAH, the soldiers of MINUSTAH from their tanks in Cite Soleil, mainly in Cite Boston, that is part of Cite Soleil.  They fired upon peoples houses where - we don't have the names yet - but three children died, nine years old, five years old and four years old.

Pina: You're saying at one o'lock this morning the United Nations forces, who are also called MINUSTAH, opened fire on Cite Soleil again?

Honorat: Yes, since midnight I would say, midnight, one o'clock and they were firing on Cite Boston...and they killed three children...we can't find their names yet but we will. They also fired upon the church, Notre Dame Immacules, and the front door made of steel blew up. And certainly they attacked the people to intimidate them in order [to get them] not to participate in the demonstrations. But the people threw bottles and rocks at the MINUSTAH so they had to drive back and the people cut [off] the roads so the tanks could not enter Cite Soleil. Finally, the demonstration started around 10:30 A.M. and they were like five thousand strong and protesting against, asking for the illegal government to leave the country so that President Aristide could return and finish his mandate and organize free fair and democratic elections. The demonstration finished in peace around 12:45 P.M.

But Aristede is orchestrating the violence from South Africa. 

I think we need a Roadmap for Peace in our own backyard.  Maybe Haiti will get lucky and there will be a provision in it for it to become a sovereign state. 

Comments

[DavidByron]

It is because of the ignorance of this sort of story that the business as usual Mythology about America can be endlessly churned out.

The difference between sucess and failure of propaganda is just a little extra education, just a little extra history, a little extra memory of the last time.