Regan Boychuk - HaitiAnalysis

The Canadian, American, and French governments try to portray the overthrow of Haiti’s democratically elected government in February 2004 as a 'humanitarian intervention'. Many have been tempted by this human rights rhetoric, but those Western officials demonstrated their concern for Haitians with their silence and apologetics during the exponentially more brutal years of interim government rule that followed their 'intervention'.

The ideology that justifies such 'humanitarianism' is based on a number of claims that conflict with reality, but they are useful, so we hear them repeated over and over again. One such claim, repeated both before the coup and since, says the popularity of Haiti's ousted president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, has greatly diminished.

Edmond Mulet, the special representative of MINUSTAH (the UN force in Haiti), recently told a Canadian parliamentary committee that demonstrations demanding Aristide's return are "very, very much diminished at this point" and attract "probably only 20 people". The Canadian Ambassador to Haiti, Claude Boucher, seconded Mulet: "In fact, the last demonstration of his supporters was announced to be made up of thousands and thousands of people, and there were less than 500 people."[1]

In reality, just days after Mulet had made similar statements to an influential US think-tank, tens of thousands took to the streets of seven major Haitian cities on February 7th (the anniversary of the fall of the Duvalier dictatorships) demanding Aristide's return and an end to the UN's deadly raids on Port-au-Prince's poor neighborhoods.[2]

Three years earlier, February 7th demonstrations supporting Aristide attracted crowds of more than 100,000 -- dwarfing anything the opposition could muster by a factor of at least 10. Like today, the demonstration was simply not reported in the West.[3]

In the only mainstream coverage of this year's demonstrations, the Associated Press noted that many of the protestors came from "the seaside slum of Cite Soleil".[4]

Within a few days, more than 700 UN troops stormed Cite Soleil in a pre-dawn raid that lasted late into the afternoon.[5] A UN spokesman told Haitian radio: "five civilians, or rather, five alleged bandits were injured in the exchange of fire."[6]

No arrests were made during the raid, heightening suspicions that the raid was meant as a message to Haiti's poor majority to bring their activism more in line with the gross mischaracterizations made by officials abroad.

Those who think it unlikely that the international press wouldn't report such inconvenient reality or that the United Nations force in Haiti wouldn't shoot Haitian civilians have something to learn about recent events in Haiti.

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NOTES

[1] House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development, "Evidence", 39th Parliament, 1st Session (31 May 2007), p. 8.

[2] Haiti Information Project, "Massive demonstrations in Haiti catch UN by surprise", 9 February 2007.

[3] The 7 February 2004 demonstrations are documented in Kevin Pina's film, Haiti: The untold story. The Canadian journalists covering the February 2004 insurection and coup weren't even aware of such demonstrations -- see Isabel K. Macdonald, “Covering the coup: Canadian reporting, journalists, and sources in the 2004 Haiti crisis”, MA thesis, York University (Toronto), December 2007, p. 144.

[4] Trent Jacobs, "Hundreds protest in Haitian capital to demand Aristide's return", Associated Press, 7 February 2007.

[5] Manuel Roig-Franzia, "UN peacekeepers raid slum in Haiti: Battle rages as troops track gang boss", Washington Post, 10 February 2007, p. A12.

[6] MINUSTAH spokesman David Wimhurst, Radio Vision 2000 (Port-au-Prince), 10 February 2007 in "Three die, seven hurt in UN operations in Cite Soleil, Haiti ", BBC Monitoring Americas (London), 11 February 2007.