Sunday, January 28, 2007

CounterPunch: Gangs in Haiti

From the valuable website CounterPunch (which I've contributed to financially from time-to-time) an article:

Haiti Struggles to Defend Justice
By JEB SPRAGUE


It discusses a gang of killers called "Little Machete Army," who have worked with both the Haitian police force and the MINUSTAH (United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti) to target and murder the organized political opposition to the puppet government we installed there with the US and France.

The most brazen assault took place at a crowded soccer arena directly across the street from MINUSTAH headquarters. Together with rogue police officers, the gang members killed 20 people and wounded scores more. No Haitian policemen were every punished for this atrocity, and while a few gang members have been jailed, there is little hope that they will receive any punishment.

The Canadian media doesn't seem terribly interested in investigating these documented massacres, which is curious given the fact that there was plenty of space given to the alleged and (so far as I know) undocumented crimes of President Aristide during the build-up to the coup d'etat against him.

Given that we were supposedly motivated by Paul Martin's imperialist "Responsibility to Protect" agenda, to remove the "tyrannical" Aristide and provide the people of Haiti with a responsive, peaceful government, and instead we gave them a government that murders and imprisons people without cause, you'd think there'd be some interest in discovering what went wrong.

And given that Elections Canada officials gave the thumbs-up to what turned out to be a corrupt, fraudulent election, you'd think there'd be an investigation into that as well.

And given that a big part of the Canadian initiative is to train Haiti's police, there'd be some cause to look into whether the recipients of our knowldege and expertise engage in massacres.

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