27463: Severe (pub):LA Times Article --In Haiti, Danger Slices Through the Air (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Constantin Severe <csevere@hotmail.com>

In Haiti, Danger Slices Through the Air

Hundreds of bystanders are caught in the cross- fire between gangs and U.N. 
peacekeepers. The toll is rising as the first post-Aristide vote nears.
By Carol J. Williams
Times Staff Writer

February 4, 2006

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Michelet Etienne was kicking a soccer ball around the 
warren of cinderblock hovels where he lives when a U.N. patrol thundered by and 
gunmen leaped from their hiding places to spray it with bullets.

When the shooting was over, the 12-year-old lay bleeding and unconscious amid 
piles of garbage and potholes filled with fetid water. A stray bullet had blown 
out part of his skull and severed his spinal cord, rendering his skinny legs 
useless.

"I can't bring my feet together," the listless child whimpered in the crowded 
recovery ward of St. Joseph's Hospital a week later. "I can't move my feet."

Like hundreds of other hapless bystanders over the last year, Michelet was 
caught in the crossfire between gunmen and besieged peacekeepers, an 
increasingly dangerous fact of life for the 2.5 million Haitians doomed to the 
teeming slums of this capital.

With the approach of Tuesday's elections, the first since President 
Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled an armed rebellion two years ago, pressure has 
mounted on U.N. forces to break the gangs' stranglehold on the city. The 
crackdown has accelerated the deaths and injuries.

Aristide loyalists claim that some of the casualties are victims of 
trigger-happy peacekeepers in league with corrupt Haitian police. Diplomats 
call the gunmen common criminals who are trying to protect their drug- and 
gun-running operations from the United Nations force, which is made up of more 
than 9,000 soldiers and police from three dozen countries, mostly in Latin 
America and Asia.

It used to be that most of the shooting victims came from a couple of trouble 
spots, slums such as Cite Soleil and Bel Air, said Ali Besnaci, a French 
physician who heads the trauma clinic run by Doctors Without Borders at St. 
Joseph's.

"Now the problem has spread all over," he said.

Of the more than 300 gunshot victims treated at St. Joseph's in the last six 
weeks, at least half were women, children and elderly, clearly not combatants 
in the city's street-by-street clashes, Besnaci said.

In December, Doctors Without Borders' two downtown emergency units treated 220 
people with bullet wounds, 26 of those in a single, violent day after 
Christmas. Among the victims were a 15-month-old and a 77-year-old. Since the 
aid group arrived here 13 months ago, its volunteer surgeons have treated 
nearly 2,500 people.

"It's terrible. It's simply unacceptable," Besnaci said as he visited the 
bedsides of the maimed, laid out in rows of gurneys and covered with stained 
sheets.

He appealed to Haitian police and the U.N. mission, known by its French acronym 
MINUSTAH, to be more mindful of the risks to bystanders as troops seek control 
of the city.

The victims' stories reflect an atmosphere of seething tension and fraying 
nerves.

When Jean-Rony Francois arrived for work at the Acierie d'Haiti steel mill 
three weeks ago, he said, gunmen were shooting at Jordanian U.N. troops from 
behind a factory wall. The Jordanians returned fire.

"I didn't see who was firing. I was inside. But the bullets came from the 
direction of MINUSTAH," the 22-year-old recalled. Struck twice by shots that 
penetrated the walls, he lost the use of his right arm and both legs. "When 
they were done firing, they just took off."

Residents of the capital's most overcrowded and impoverished areas say their 
need to work compels them to wade into the middle of such shootouts, which 
occur daily.

John Lumera, 35, who made a living selling lottery tickets, was shot in the 
leg. The wound became gangrenous and his limb had to be amputated. Now his four 
children have no means of support.

"I don't know why they were shooting," he said. "It seemed to be at random. I 
couldn't see anyone they [the U.N. troops] were firing on, but I was flat on 
the ground."

Human rights monitors contend the foreign troops are overreacting to Haitian 
government complaints that they have failed in the two years they've been here 
to disarm the gangs and bring security to the urban war zones. The 
international force has lost 13 of its members to violence and accidents during 
the deployment.

"MINUSTAH soldiers seem to have lost their cool since four of their associates 
were killed since late December," said Pierre Esperance, head of the National 
Human Rights Defense Network.

Pro-Aristide activists insist the civilians are victims of a conspiracy to 
eliminate critics of the international community's attempts to stabilize Haiti.

"The job of MINUSTAH is to silence the majority of Haitians who want Aristide 
back," said Jean-Yvon Kernizan, head of the September 30 Foundation, a New 
York-based exile group named for the 1991 date of Aristide's first ouster from 
power. "They're eliminating part of the population to satisfy another, the 
elite. Where else could that happen without the whole world crying out? Only in 
Haiti."

Juan Gabriel Valdes, a Chilean who is the top U.N. official here, says his 
mission is damned if it confronts the gunmen and damned if it doesn't.

While supporters of Aristide's deposed Lavalas movement claim Haitian police 
and the peacekeepers have carried out political killings, residents and 
merchants of the capital have repeatedly protested the U.N.'s failure to disarm 
what they say are no more than a few hundred gangsters.

"MINUSTAH is accused of not acting and of acting too much," Valdes said.

U.N. mission spokesman Damian Onses-Cardona disputed victims' claims that 
peacekeepers fire indiscriminately.

"The rules of engagement are very strict. They are really trying to be very 
careful," he said.

Western diplomats and senior U.N. officials say MINUSTAH has sought to revise 
its methods in the face of mounting civilian casualties.

Before his death last month, reportedly from a self-inflicted gunshot, the 
mission's Brazilian commander, Lt. Gen. Urano Teixeira Da Matta Bacellar, 
ordered those patrolling Cite Soleil to remove the .50-caliber guns from their 
armored personnel carriers because they were too powerful, a senior envoy said.

He attributed the rising toll among bystanders to gangs' challenging 
peacekeepers. The troops are getting in the way of the gangs' drug deals, arms 
trading and kidnapping schemes, he said. More than 200 people have been 
kidnapped in the last two months alone.

Doctors Without Borders treats all comers to its clinics for free, regardless 
of any involvement in the bloodshed. The doctors say that at least half the 
nearly 2,500 shooting and stabbing victims they have treated were bystanders; 
many of the rest were probably participants in the fighting.

"They sometimes tell a different story once they get here," said British 
anesthesiologist Rachael Craven, indicating a muscular young man with a scarred 
chest and a gang insignia necklace.

The patient she referred to, 23-year-old Santil Alexandre, recently presented 
himself to a triage unit in Cite Soleil, the most violent of the slums, telling 
medics that he had been shot. After being transferred to St. Joseph's, he told 
authorities there that the circular wound in his leg was the result of an 
accident.