[R-G] 600 murdered in Haiti last 2 weeks

[afenton at riseup.net]

An excerpt from Friday October 15th Flashpoints Radio broadcast:

Bernstein:  Kevin, you have spent so much time in Haiti and you were there
in Haiti to do a documentary in 1990 about the new burgeoning democracy
after the election of Jean Bertrand Aristide and you ended up filming him
being taken out in handcuffs. I want people to understand how much time
and how you;ve watched this cycle finally, before we move on to Iraq and
Palestine, two other U.S. related, or U.S. occupations if you will. Tell
us the situaiton in terms of the food, medical, just very briefly, what is
the emergency situation on the ground? What are the grave concerns of
people in the medical profession, in the schools, what’s happening at the
street level?

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 gunbattle 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 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 full to 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 cretaed by the ouster of the democratic
President Aristide was ill-conceived by the Bush administration. What they
basically did was they replaced what they consiodered 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 it in really quickly: what is happenig 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 never seen 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 the
people who have followed this can hear it in my voice
it’s indescribable
to talk about this relaity 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.