[R-G] UN Military Base Expanding: What is Washington Up to in Cite Soleil

[Anthony Fenton]

From: K M Ives <kives at toast.net>

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                            HAITI LIBERTE
                  "Justice. Verite. Independance."

                   * THIS WEEK IN HAITI *

                 September 3 - 9, 2008
                            Vol. 2, No. 7


UN MILITARY BASE EXPANDING: WHAT IS WASHINGTON UP TO IN CITE SOLEIL?
by Kim Ives

The U.S. government plans to expropriate and demolish the homes of  
hundreds of Haiti's most impoverished by expanding the U.N. military  
occupation force's outpost in the giant shantytown of Cite Soleil.

The infamous U.S. government contractor DynCorp, a quasi-official arm  
of the Pentagon and the CIA, is responsible for expanding the base  
named "Konbit pou lape" (Get Together for Peace), which houses the  
soldiers of the U.N. Miss ion to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH) in the  
most bullet-ridden battleground of the foreign military occupation  
that began after U.S. Special Forces kidnapped President Jean-Bertrand  
Aristide and his wife from their home and flew them into exile on Feb.  
29, 2004.

According to Cite Soleil mayor Charles Joseph and a DynCorp foreman at  
the site, funding for the base expansion is provided by the State  
Department's U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a very  
unorthodox use of development aid.

Lawyer Evel Fanfan, the president of the Association of University  
Graduates Motivatd For A Haiti With Rights (AUMOHD), says that about  
155 buildings would be razed if the base expansion goes forward.

"They started working without saying a word to the people living  
there," Fanfan said. "The authorities have not told them what is being  
done, if they will be relocated, how much they will be compensated or  
even if they will be compensated."

Most of the buildings targetted are homes, but one is a church.

"They have begun to build a wall around the area to be razed,"  
explained Eddy Michel, 37, an assistant to Pastor Isaac Lebon who  
heads the Christian Church of the Apostle's Foundation, which serves  
some 300 parishioners. "They have already built a 10-foot high L- 
shaped wall, which cuts us off from the road. Once they complete the  
rest of the wall, the remaining 'L', we will be completely enclosed  
and we fear the destruction will begin."

Alarmed residents of the area formed the Committee for Houses Being  
Demolished (KODEL), which contacted AUMOHD. Fanfan put out a press  
release and KODEL held a press conference.

"MINUSTAH soldiers came to our press conference and told us to get a  
lawyer to talk to the American Embassy because the American Embassy is  
responsible for the work," said Eddy Michel.

"Legally, the Haitian government has not authorized anybody to do  
anything," said Fanfan. " The Cite Soleil mayor [Charles Joseph]  
supposedly, between quotation marks, authorized the construction, but  
there is no paper, no decree, no order which authorizes it."

The use of DynCorp to build the base is particularly telling. DynCorp  
International, offering, as its website says, "Global Integrated  
Solutions," belongs to a select group of behemoth corporations like  
Blackwater, Brown & Root, and Halliburton that exist mainly to carry  
out U.S. government strategic projects and programs.

Founded in 1946 and based in Reston, VA near CIA headquarters in  
Langley, DynCorp was the principal contractor deployed in Colombia to  
carry out Washington's supposed war on drugs called "Plan Colombia" in  
2000. It conducted aerial dusting of supposed coca fields, a practice  
which resulted in 10,000 Ecuadorian farmers and the International  
Labor Rights Fund (ILRF), an AFL-CIO affiliate, lodging a class-action  
lawsuit against then DynCorp CEO Paul V. Lombardi in 2001. The dusting  
caused illness and death, the suit charged. Lombardi tried to  
intimidate the plaintiffs, writing to individual members of ILRF's  
board to warn that the "politically charged litigation" was  
inappropriate after the events of Sep. 11, 2001.

One of the ILRF's board members, Bishop Jesse DeWitt, responded to  
DynCorp's Lombardi. "Imagine that scene for a moment," Dewitt wrote.  
"You are an Ecuadoran farmer, and suddenly, without notice or warning,  
a large helicopter approaches, and the frightening noise of the  
chopper blades invades the quiet. The helicopter comes closer and  
sprays a toxic poison on you, your children, your livestock and your  
food crops. You see your children get sick, your crops die. Mr.  
Lombardi, we at the International Labor Rights Fund, and most  
civilized people, consider such an attack on innocent people  
terrorism. Your effort to hide behind September 11 is shameful and  
breathtakingly cynical."

On May 12, 2000, Colombian police also captured a small bottle of  
liquid being sent from DynCorp's Colombia headquarters to one of its  
airbases in Florida. The bottle contained $100,000 worth of heroin. No  
prosecution was ever conducted.

Two years earlier, ten DynCorp employees were shipped out of Colombia  
when it was discovered that they were illegally trafficking  
amphetamines. No prosecution was ever conducted.

Also in 2001, a 29-year-old DynCorp paramedic had a heart attack and  
was taken to a hospital in Florencia, in southeastern Colombia, where  
he died. "Forensic tests conducted at the time revealed that the cause  
of death was a cocaine overdose," writes Robert Lawson in the article  
"DynCorp: Beyond the Rule of Law," published by the Information  
Network of the Americas' online journal Colombia Report.  
"Mysteriously, when the Colombian Central Office of Prosecutions took  
an interest in the death and requested more information, all related  
documents, such as the legal medical reports, vanished."

Lawson notes that a high ranking Colombian police official, who had  
followed DynCorp since it arrived in Colombia in 1993, told Semana  
magazine: "No authority, whether the Civil Aviation Authority, police  
or army, is authorized to search DynCorp's planes. Nobody knows what  
they carry on their return to the United States because they are  
untouchable."

DynCorp has been an important "private" player in other U.S. wars  
around the globe, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia.

"Dyncorp (...) has garnered a reputation as a shadowy company with a  
spooky pedigree, rumored to be a CIA 'cutout,' or front company, for  
the Agency's dirty tricks," writes Uri Dowbenko in "Dirty Tricks,  
Inc.:The DynCorp-Government Connection" in 2002. "Using high-level  
government insider connections, DynCorp provides a range of 'services'  
one would expect to facilitate fraud and money laundry activities,  
acting like a virtual conduit between the corporate (private) and  
government (public) worlds. According to DynCorp, the US Government is  
its biggest client, accounting for more than 95% of its revenues."

What so interests the U.S. government and DynCorp in Cite Soleil?

First, as Port-au-Prince's largest, poorest, and most pro-Aristide  
slum, it has been a hotbed of anti-occupation resistance for the past  
four years. Although most of the popular organizations carrying out  
armed struggle were dismantled in early 2007, unrest still continues  
there, particularly with Haiti's (and the capitalist world's)  
worsening economic crisis. Hence, military domination of this  
important northern flank of Haiti's capital is critical.

Furthermore, Haiti's bourgeoisie and Washington's strategists have for  
some years coveted the prime real-estate on which Cite Soleil sits.  
The quadrant has a port, is close to the airport, sits on the main  
road to the north, and is ringed by factories and the old Haitian  
American Sugar Company complex (HASCO). Rumors are continually afoot  
that Haiti's economic and political powers want to level this  
shantytown of 300,000 to replace it with more factories, office  
buildings, and other business development.

As Haiti reels under the devastation brought by Hurricanes Gustav and  
Hanna as well as ever deepening hunger, it is ironic that Washington  
is spending money to expand a foreign military base and uproot Haiti's  
poorest of the poor. But Cite Soleil's residents are not easily steam- 
rolled.

For example, on Aug. 31, President Rene Preval and new prime minister  
Michele Pierre-Louis toured Cite Soleil to view new drainage canals.  
During the visit, residents got their hands on Cite Soleil's second  
mayor Benoit Gustave, accusing him of selling off Cite Soleil for  
bribes, specifically in the case of the base expansion, and of doing  
nothing for the people. He was pelted with slaps, kicks and spit.

DynCorp's expansion of MINUSTAH's base seems more likely to rile Cite  
Soleil's citizenry than pacify it. Once again, as in its other  
misadventures around the globe, Washington seems to have, as the Krey  
l proverb says, "byen konte, mal kalkile": counted well, but badly  
miscalculated.

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