This is the Justice, Not Charity! Haiti book diary. Allie123 and I are writing these book diaries because we became shocked by the truth of Haiti’s history and what really is needed to help the Haitians after the earthquake.
"It's as if Aristide was put in charge of a house that was falling apart and was expected to fix it. But then his enemies start setting fire to the back door, they send people with guns to attack the front door, and when these people finally manage to break in they said 'Look! He didn't wash the dishes in the sink! He never repaired the leak in the roof!' They made him spend all his time trying to put out the fire and to protect the door, and then once they got rid of him they said he was pushed out because he'd failed to repair the house." (Damming The Flood,
p 131.)
Chapter 11 is "2004 - 2006: Repression and Resistance" and the saying at the head of the chapter is Kreyon pep la pa gen gom (The people's pencil has no eraser). Tonight I will go through the first two of the four sections, how repression in the slum areas intensified to the point where it could not be ignored.
The intro describes the three phases of the "pacification" of Lavalas following the coup. For a couple of months, repression and murder reigned unchecked.
Soon, however, the combination of mild indignation in the international press, and the arrivial of new UN troops and resources induced the government to adopt somewhat less abrasive tactics.
Punitive imprisonment and pseudo-legal arrests took the place of public executions. However, public support of Lavalas and condemnation of the coup remained strong; how could "democratic" elections be held in such a corrosive atmosphere? Bel Air and Cite Soleil were about to experience the attempt to change the atmosphere.
The assault on Bel Air
Bel Air was an impoverished neighborhood that was conveniently close to downtown and not far from the main government buildings, which made it a convenient rallying point for demonstrations against the coup government. The start of this section describes a large protest on the first anniversary of the coup, which the police responded to by shooting. For a while, Gousse claimed that three policemen had been killed and beheaded by the demonstrators, and dubbed this action "Operation Baghdad". By the time the claims were shown to be false, they had served the purpose of excusing much further violence against Bel Air.
In the fall of 2004, about 150 Haitian national police backed up by about 200 UN troops arrested 75 people (and didn't find any guns). Nonetheless, for the next couple of weeks dozens of people were shot and jailed every day. The paramilitaries operating alongside the police gave particular attention to the street kids.
...as their outraged advocate Michael Brewer observes, "There are dump zones where the decomposing bodies of little boys can be found any day of the week."
No official count was kept, but a report in the Lancet estimated that in the 2004 - 2006 time period, there may have been as many as 4,000 political killings in Port-au-Prince. (Not all of them, of course, were in Bel Air.) Some of the heat came off Bel Air by mid 2005, though, when the focus of the police and the UN shifted to Cite Soleil.
More next week, on Cite Soleil and the surprising 2006 election.