United Nations forces occupying Haiti were
poorly trained, spied on student groups, impaired elections, and
recklessly shot, killed and wounded hundreds of civilians,
according to secret U.S. diplomatic cables.
In one “astonishing”
case, according to the cables, UN troops fired 28,000 rounds in
just one month in a neighborhood of Port-au-Prince known for
resisting the UN occupation and the February 2004 coup that
ousted democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
“Civilian casualties [from
UN forays] in Cité Soleil … [rose] from 100 wounded in October
[2005] to between 170 and 205 in December [2005],” wrote
then Chargé d’Affaires Timothy M. Carney in a secret Jan. 19,
2006, cable. “Half of these are women and children.
Assertions that all were used as human shields strain credulity.”
Just six months prior, acting
under intense U.S. and Haitian elite pressure, 1,400 UN troops
sealed off the pro-Aristide slum, firing 22,000 rounds and
causing dozens of casualties in just one six-hour night-time
raid on Jul. 6. UN troops continued their attacks throughout the
year, at one point firing an average of 2,000 rounds a day, one
UN official told a reporter.
The controversial 12,000-strong
UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) intervened in the
Caribbean country in the wake of the bloody February 2004 coup
that ousted Aristide. But the mission, with an annual cost of
more than $850 million, is up for renewal before the UN Security
Council next month and Haitian and international opposition is
widespread and growing.
Several scientific studies have
established that Nepalese UN troops brought a deadly cholera
epidemic to Haiti. UN leadership tried to deny that charge,
which surfaced almost simultaneously with the disease last
October.
In recent weeks, anti-UN
sentiment has exploded in response to a video showing Uruguayan
troops apparently sexually assaulting a young man in the
southern town of Port Salut. This follows the expulsion of 111
Sri Lankan soldiers for sexual exploitation and the abuse of
under-aged minors in November 2007. “Among those repatriated
are the battalion's second-in-command and two company commanders
at the rank of major,” noted one secret 2006 cable.
Furthermore, new information
has emerged around the case of a teenager found hung in a UN
base in Haiti’s northern city of Cap Haïtien (see
accompanying
article by Ansel Herz).
Events like these have sparked
deep anger toward MINUSTAH, which, since its Jun. 1, 2004
deployment, has repeatedly faced the fierce nationalism that
imbues Latin America’s first independent republic.
To counter this local
opposition, the UN set up to its own intelligence apparatus, the
Joint Mission Analysis Cell (JMAC), with a “network of paid
informants” to spy on groups it felt were a threat,
according to a Sep. 15, 2006 cable. A cable three months later
explained that “MINUSTAH had focused over the past several
weeks on attempting to identify elements among [a student] group
that posed a threat to its mandate.”
The secret cables describe
repeated clashes between Haitians and UN forces, many of which
ended in deaths. A Dec. 26, 2006 cable describes one notorious
UN incursion into Cité Soleil four days earlier, when, according
to the Haiti Action Committe (HAC), 400 UN troops attacked the
shantytown with armored vehicles at around 3 a.m. in a battle
that raged for the rest of the day. “Initial press accounts
reported at least 40 casualties, all civilians,” HAC
reported. “According to community testimony, UN forces flew
overhead in helicopters and fired down into houses while other
troops attacked from the ground with Armored Personnel Carriers
(APCs). People were killed in their homes. UN troops from
Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Bolivia took part in the all-day
siege, backed by Haitian police.”
The Haitian Press Agency (AHP)
reported that “local residents say the victims were ordinary
citizens whose only crime was that they live in the targeted
neighborhood” and that “residents were outraged that [UN]
soldiers refused to allow medical care... for people they had
injured” by blocking Red Cross vehicles from coming to aid
the wounded.
So-called gang leader “Belony’s
brother and eight other Belony loyalists were killed during the
[UN] operation, with one other gang member injured,” the
Dec. 26 cable reported, adding that “according to [the
conservative] Radio Métropole, 30 residents were wounded during
the confrontation.”
The same cable also reveals
that the UN was at war, not just with “gangs” (its
moniker for pro-Lavalas groups) but with Cité Soleil’s
citizenry. “The primary objectives and targets were not
reached because a number of large rocks that were placed along
the route Impasse Chavanne which leads to Belony’s home,”
Chargé d’Affaires Thomas C. Tighe wrote. “The Brazilian
battalion removed the boulders shortly before the operation
began but the community replaced them within five minutes.”
Tighe further explains that
MINUSTAH soldiers were so scared and trigger-happy that at one
point during the operation Chinese UN troops “ fired on the
Brazilian battalion. The incident is under investigation.”
The UN publicly called the
operation a success, but JMAC’s deputy director told the U.S.
Embassy privately that it was “a bit of a flop.”
“JMAC informants indicated
that gangs were holding as many as 40 kidnapping victims in the
targeted buildings,” noted the cables, but not a single
alleged kidnapping victim was found.
In a Mar. 23, 2005 cable, U.S.
Ambassador James Foley argued that “MINUSTAH needs to quickly
and decisively respond to threats from both the armed rebels and
pro-Aristide criminal/political gangs,” but recognized in
the same dispatch that “after two days of pro-active engagement, Haitians are criticizing the
peacekeepers as over-aggressive.”
Outgoing President René Préval
sharply criticized the UN role in April, saying, "Tanks,
armed vehicles and soldiers should have given way to bulldozers,
engineers, more police instructors and experts on reforming the
judicial and prison systems.”
New right-wing President Michel
Martelly, who succeeded Préval in May, has invited the UN troops
to stay. However, he is seeking to channel anti-MINUSTAH outrage
into support for his bid to restore Haiti’s disbanded army, a
move strongly opposed by many Haitians.
Other key actors, including
Brazil’s military leadership, are looking to exit, however
gradually. New Brazilian Defense Minister, Celso Amorim said
that “he supports the withdrawal of Brazilian troops from
Haiti,” but has proposed a time-table lasting until 2015.
But the main driver behind
MINUSTAH is Washington, the secret cables show.
U.S. Ambassador Janet Sanderson
insisted in an Oct. 1, 2008 cable that MINUSTAH has been “an
indispensable tool in realizing core USG [U.S. Government]
policy interests in Haiti.” The UN is establishing “domestic
security and political stability” there, she wrote, all
necessary to prevent the resurgence of “populist and
anti-market economy political forces” and an “exodus of
seaborne migrants.”
“In the current context of
our military commitments elsewhere, the U.S. alone could not
replace this mission,” Sanderson concluded.
Furthermore, a February 2006
General Accounting Office report estimated “that it would
cost the United States about twice as much as the United
Nations... to conduct a peacekeeping operation similar to
the...’MINUSTAH’. The UN budgeted $428 million for the first 14
months of this mission. A U.S. operation in Haiti of the same
size and duration would cost an estimated $876 million, far
exceeding the U.S. contribution for MINUSTAH of $116 million.”
The 2004 Security Council
resolution establishing MINUSTAH called for it to ensure a “secure
and stable environment,” reconstruct Haiti’s police force,
engage in a comprehensive Disarmament, Demobilization and
Reintegration (DDR) program, organize elections, and protect
human rights.
But the 1,918 secret U.S. State
Department Haiti cables released by the anti-secrecy group
Wikileaks describe an extraordinary litany of failures and
manipulation of the mission, the third largest UN military force
anywhere in the world.
The key goal of the U.S. and UN
mission has been to rebuild the Haitian National Police (HNP),
which Foley complained Aristide had “undermined... by placing
criminal gang members [i.e. pro-Lavalas popular organization
militants] directly into their ranks,” in a May 3, 2005
cable. But seven years later, the force has been, if anything,
debilitated due precisely to its anti-Lavalas politicization,
the integration of coup-making former soldiers, and the
ham-fisted meddling of the UN and U.S. Embassy.
“The HNP is an example of
the international community's failure to work in concert,”
MINUSTAH’s then chief, Edmond Mulet, was quoted in an Aug. 2,
2006 cable. “Each donor country has pushed its own policing
model and donor efforts contradicted one another.”
“The HNP continues to suffer
from corruption among its ranks, a broken system of justice,
substandard command and supervisory control, inadequate levels
of training, and scant equipment resources,” noted another
secret cable from May 6, 2005, a description that is equally
applicable today.
As for the DDR program, its
Chief Desmond Molloy said that he set a target of 10,000 DDR
participants when the program launched in October 2004. “He
lowered his expectations to a hopeful 2000 by June 2006, but
would be happy with 500,” said one secret cable in January
2006.
When the DDR supposedly
demobilized 300 former soldiers in Cap Haïtien, it collected a
mere “seven dilapidated weapons included six M-14's and 1
sub-machine gun,” a Mar. 15, 2005 cable by Ambassador James
Foley explains.
The cables also slam the UN “mismanagement”
of elections, saying the UN mission’s “overall lack of
elections administration experience or expertise has crippled
MINUSTAH's ability to prepare for elections.”
Still, the U.S. pushed ahead
with exclusionary 2006 presidential elections in Haiti so that
Latin American countries could have political cover to send
troops, the cables show.
“[T]he important thing was
to have elections, noting that it would be difficult for
countries contributing to MINUSTAH to maintain their presence
without elections,” said then Assistant Secretary of State
Thomas Shannon to a European counterpart in a wide ranging 2006
meeting on Latin American issues.
Despite this charade, there
were growing concerns in Latin American governments about
MINUSTAH’s sovereignty-trampling role, the cables show.
“Bolivia's energy minister
published an article in November 2006 calling MINUSTAH a ‘U.S.
occupation force,’” noted an Apr. 20, 2007 cable. “Later,
President Evo Morales suggested prohibiting war in Bolivia's
constitution and asked if a country with such aspirations should
contribute to MINUSTAH.”
In response to the “anti-MINUSTAH
news reports from La Paz,” the UN organized a high-level
delegation from Bolivia, led by the Defense Minister, to visit
Port-au-Prince, where they were suitably “impressed by the UN
operations.”
“The important contribution
of Latin American countries to the UN force here cannot be
overstated,” concluded the cable’s author, Deputy Chief of
Mission Thomas Tighe.
Both Haiti’s 2006 and 2010
presidential ballots, largely carried out by the UN, took place
without the participation of Haiti’s most popular political
party, Fanmi Lavalas (FL), led by Aristide, who was in a U.S.
and UN imposed exile at the time of both polls.
“In terms of the
construction of a democratic climate and tradition, we have
regressed in comparison with the periods preceding MINUSTAH’s
arrival,” said Haitian economist Camille Chalmers, the
Executive Director of the Haitian Platform to Advocate for
Alternative Development (PAPDA), echoing a common refrain that
the elections are more about the needs and interests of the U.S.
rather than the Haitian people.
The UN’s human rights record is
equally dismal. Apart from their direct military attacks on
pro-democracy Haitians, like those described in Cité Soleil, UN
troops “effectively provided cover for the police to wage a
campaign of terror in Port-au-Prince’s slums,” said a 2005
report by the Harvard Law Students Advocates for Human Rights.
MINUSTAH, the HNP, and
paramilitary forces supported by the Haitian business elite
killed an estimated 3,000 people and jailed thousands of coup
opponents and Fanmi Lavalas supporters during the consolidation
of the February 2004 coup until mid-2007.
U.S. Embassy Chargé d’Affaires
Timothy Carney only said, “[T]here has been no tangible UN
contribution to improving the human rights situation,” in a
January 4, 2006 cable. (Ironically, that same day, in a meeting
with Haitian business leaders, Carney supported a proposal for
UN troops to attack armed groups in Cité Soleil,
Haiti’s largest slum, fully foreseeing that there would be “unintended
civilian casualties,” as he wrote in a secret cable two days
later.)
Notwithstanding this record of
failure and repression, the UN, acting on behalf of Washington
and Paris, still seeks to extend its authority in Haiti. While
paying lip-service to the “views” of the elected Haitian
government, UN officials sought to unilaterally decide how to
deploy their forces and when to renew their Security Council
mandate to occupy Haiti, the cables reveal.
MINUSTAH critics charge the
occupation violates the UN Charter’s Chapter 7 which specifies
that “action by air, sea, or land forces” should be used
only “to maintain or restore international peace and
security,” that is, conflicts between states, not the case
in Haiti. It also violates Haiti’s Constitution which explicitly
states in Article 263-1: “No other armed corps may exist in
the national territory,” other that the Haitian police and
army, the latter presently demobilized.
In a Jun. 2, 2006 cable former
U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton explains how Wolfgang Weisbrod-Weber, the Director of the UN’s Department of
Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) Europe and Latin America
Division, opposed changing, reducing or ending MINUSTAH’s
mission, as some had proposed, once an elected government was in
place in May 2006.
Instead Weisbrod-Weber “reported
that the mission's military component and its Joint Mission
Analysis Cell (JMAC) believe that current force levels should be
maintained after the expiration of the current mandate” on
Aug. 15, 2006, Bolton wrote. Furthermore, he “did not endorse
calls for an expanded mandate for MINUSTAH in development,”
the cable notes, “despite Préval's inaugural address call for
‘more tractors and fewer tanks.’” Bolton also noted that “Brazil
and France strongly supported DPKO on the need to maintain
MINUSTAH's force levels after August 15.”
Not only did Weisbord-Weber
believe that “Haiti will only be able to assume
responsibility for its own security when its rule of law
institutions are reformed,” he even proposed expanding
oversight, arguing that “MINUSTAH must be able to monitor and
accompany legal cases as they pass through every stage of the
Haitian judiciary,” a judiciary whose prosecution the UN was
immune from, despite its regular criminal acts, due to an
agreement with the illegitimate post-coup de facto regime
of Gérard Latortue.
Perhaps more than any other
single issue, it is the cholera epidemic, whose origin has been
tied to the poor sanitary practices at a UN base, that has led
to today’s anti-UN uprising. Throughout Haiti, graffiti
proclaims “UN=Kolera.” The epidemic has already killed
over 6,100 Haitians and infected 400,000 others. But the cables
show that UN sanitation standards were already an issue over two
years ago.
“Construction of roads and
drainage canals at the [U.S.-funded and run Police] Academy has
been impacted by MINUSTAH's inappropriate management of human
waste at the Jordanian camp on the Academy grounds,” noted a
Jan. 7, 2009, cable.
The outrage over cholera’s
introduction into Haiti has now merged with that over the images
of five Uruguayan UN soldiers apparently sexually assaulting a
Haitian man in July. The victim and his family began pursuing
legal action against the troops, but they were almost
immediately spirited out of the country, another affront to
Haiti’s “rule of law institutions,” which the UN purports
to defend.
As the Oct. 15 renewal
of MINUSTAH’s mandate in the UN Security Council looms, Haitian
disgust with and rejection of the force is reaching a fever
pitch. UNASUR Defense Ministers met on Sep. 8 and recognized the
need for withdrawal. And among Haitians, even among those who
once supported the UN mission, support is falling away.
“I'm not one those anti-UN
people,” wrote Boston-based Haitian blogger Reginald
Toussaint in May. “I like the idea of a United Nations and,
for the most part, I think they do good work... However, in the
case of Haiti, they are causing more harm than good.”
One of the most compelling
cases against the UN occupation was made in a long Aug. 15
article by Haitian columnist Dady Chéry on the Axis of Logic
website. Among the “Top Ten” reasons for the UN to leave
Haiti, she lists: “MINUSTAH continually harasses and
humiliates Haitians.... Common criminals in MINUSTAH enjoy
immunity from prosecution... MINUSTAH subverts democracy....
MINUSTAH interferes in Haiti’s political affairs...” and “MINUSTAH
has operated as a large anti-Aristide gang.”
She concludes by writing: “One is tempted to ask
why South American states, with presumably leftist and
nationalistic governments, like
Bolivia and Ecuador, support the occupation of Haiti. After all,
Cuba and Venezuela have amply demonstrated how much more can be
achieved by contributing medical doctors and public-health
workers, instead of soldiers, to Haiti... It is better to show
the remaining MINUSTAH members the door and advise they not slam
it on their way out.” |