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| News and opinions on situation in Haiti | |
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| 15/10/04 | Flashpoints radio interviews Kevin Pina |
| Canadian activists be advised that the RCMP is presently in command of the “training” of Haitian police and are in charge of the overall UN police “stabilization mission” contingent. Add this to the gruesome context below. Pina: I'll tell you, today the biggest crisis was that as people were being shot in the streets, as I said earlier, by former military on Delmas 2 and La Saline, and as there were casualties that began to mount, as the police had the gun battle in Bel Air there were bodies that were being taken to the morgue. The morgue was full, there was no more room in the morgue. The General Hospital had to call the Ministry of Health today in order to demand emergency vehicles to remove the more than 600 corpses that have been stockpiled there, that have been coming in from the killing over the last two weeks alone. That's how much killing that has been going on here in the streets of Haiti that has not been/being reported and has not talked about. Well, AP has been quoting the police as saying only 140 people have been arrested. Today, the government admitted that hundreds had been arrested and are currently filling the prisons and that the prisons are too fullto put more prisoners in. That's what's happening to the infrastructure of Haiti today. The level of repression, the number of killings, the number of incarcerations has strained the system to the breaking point. At the same time there is no life that's normal here. This situation that`s been created by the ouster of the democratic President Aristide was ill conceived by the Bush administration. What they basically did was replace what they considered to be a `failed state' with an even more failed state. Certainly, we cannot say that their backing of the so-called opposition, and I've got to say this too, let me get this in really quickly: what is happening to Lavalas today, I never, in the last four years that I was here, including the most voracious, the most violent demonstrations of the opposition, I never saw the State under Jean Bertrand Aristide do anything to that so-called opposition, anything like what is being done to Lavalas today. The opposition to Aristide back then called Aristide a dictator. Well today it seems as if that is there own self-fulfilling prophecy. Today I have neverseen a Haiti so bereft of freedom of expression; I have never seen a Haiti so bereft of civil liberties, as I see today. I never saw during those years that they claimed Aristide was a dictatorship a campaign of repression anything like what I am seeing being mounted today against Lavalas. And I think people who have followed this can hear it in my voice…it's indescribable to talk about this reality in terms of sanity. It's reality turned on its head, and it's a direct result of failed policies of the Bush administration in Haiti. Read the entire transcript here: auto_sol.tao.ca/node/view/938 Listen to the Friday, October 15th broadcast here: www.flashpoints.net |
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