Democracy Now is reporting that UN troops launched a pre-dawn raid last Wednesday on one of the most economically-depressed neighborhoods of Haiti, Cite Soleil. Described by residents as the deadliest attack carried out by UN troops since they were stationed in the country last year, the death toll is estimated to be at least twenty people. The official reason for the raid was to arrest community leader Emmanuel "Dread" Wilme, who was one of the victims of the raid. Eyewitnesses reported the the UN troops entered the area at about three in the morning and opened fire using helicopters, tanks, machine guns and tear gas in the operation. The UN has admitted that its troops killed at least five people, far less than claimed by residents. UN military spokesman Colonel Elouafi Boulbars told media that his troops were attacked by "bandits", upon whom the UN troops inflicted "serious losses".
According to an interview with Seth Donnelly of the San Francisco Labor Council:
What we found actually when we went into the community the day after the operation was widespread evidence that the troops had carried out a massacre. We found homes, which when we say homes, we are talking basically shacks of wood and tin, in many cases, riddled with machine gun blasts as well as tank fire. The holes in a lot of these homes were too large just to be bullets. They must have been tank-type shells penetrating the homes. We saw a church and a school completely riddled with machine gun blasts. And then the community came out.
We went to the local hospital that serves people from Cite Soleil. There's one hospital in Port-au-Prince, it's Medicine Without Borders, that doesn't charge a fee so very poor people can go to that hospital. And we asked them if they would share with us their records, which they did. And we got the impression that nobody from the U.N. had spoken to them. Perhaps they did but we felt like we were the first human rights workers making contact with the hospital after the operation. And sure enough, their records show an influx of civilian casualties. Starting at 11:00 a.m July 6, there is 26 people alone from Cite Soleil that came in suffering mostly from gunshot wounds. Out of that 26, 20 were women and children. One pregnant woman lost her child. And 50% of those 26 people had serious gunshot wounds to the stomach and had to go into major surgery right away.
The violence in Haiti has been escalating ever since the US supported overthrow of democratically elected Haitian president Jean Paul Aristide. Many of the most egregious human rights abuses are being committed by the notorious Haitian police. Despite their horrendous human rights record, and an embargo on sending weapons to Haiti, the state department recently released a plan to continue sending thousands of small arms to the Haitian government.
