The UN’s lethal role in Haiti, Ivory Coast

Occupying United Nations troops in both the Ivory Coast and Haiti have been meeting growing resistance. These popular struggles have dispersed, but not dissipated, the smokescreen that the troops provide for the imperialist powers’ maneuverings.

UN troops are authorized by resolutions passed by the Security Council, a body where the United States, along with France and Great Britain, call most of the shots.

In Haiti, U.S. Special Forces seized President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and put him on a U.S. plane into exile in the Central African Republic, and French troops were quickly sent to clamp down on the people’s protests over the coup-napping. UN troops from Brazil have replaced them. Aristide is now in South Africa.

There are also substantial UN contingents in Haiti from Chile and Argentina, and smaller ones from Jordan, Ecuador, Guatemala, Peru and Uruguay, as well as cops from China and Canada operating under UN direction.

When two UN soldiers from Jordan were killed Jan. 17 at a checkpoint leading into Cité Soleil, and Chilean soldiers, firing from armored cars, exacted revenge that left one person dead and at least 17 wounded, they were wearing UN uniforms, not U.S. or French. (CNN.com)

A Brazilian general runs the military side of the UN operation and the Brazilian government has to pay for its troops in Haiti and also face demands from its people that the troops be withdrawn.

According to the Haitian Press Agency (AHP), the Sao Paolo daily Folha has called for Brazilian troops to be brought home, a call echoed by Socialist parliamentarian Orlando Fantazzini and Green Party deputy Fernando Bageiras. Brazil is seeking a seat on the UN Security Council.

The UN presence provides a buffer for the Bush administration from criticisms like that of the U.S. Congressional Black Caucus and other Black leaders demanding U.S. withdrawal from Haiti, and making the obvious connection to the occupation and war in Iraq.

But the U.S. is not totally off the hook even as the situation in Haiti becomes more lethal.

Since the beginning of December, violence has grown more widespread and intense in Haiti. Doctors Without Borders, which runs a clinic in Port-au-Prince that treats gunshot wounds, reported 68 cases in October 2005 and 122 in December. And many people who are injured by the cops or the UN do not go to a clinic or a hospital for treatment out of fear they will be arrested and “disappeared” from their hospital beds.

In a Jan. 19 coordinated action, 200 law yers in Boston, Washington D.C., New York, Miami and Philadelphia filed
mo tions in dozens of deportation cases, demanding that the Department of Home land Security grant temporary protected status to Haitians living in the United States.

In multiple press conferences the lawyers asserted: “The DHS has failed to act, despite full awareness of the horrors being suffered by the civilian population in Haiti. The majority of the population now teeters on the brink of death from hunger, disease and displacement. With out [temporary protected status], nationals of Haiti are subject to forced repatriation into a country where the government cannot prevent immediate threats to their lives, freedom, and welfare.” (New York Times, Jan. 20)

Attorney Thomas M. Griffin of Phila delphia, author of a widely circulated report on human rights in Haiti, is coordinating this effort along with Paromita Shah, a lawyer at the National Immi gration Project in Boston.

Resistance in the Ivory Coast

In the Ivory Coast, 4,000 UN-controlled soldiers are present, as well as 7,000 French troops operating outside UN control but under a grant of authority from the Security Council.

Strenuous popular protests broke out Jan. 15 when the UN-backed International Working Group (whose French initials are GTI) decided to dissolve the parliament controlled by the Popular Ivoirian Front (FPI), the party of President Laurent Gbagbo. (Bloomberg.com)

Since the Ivoirian army staged an uprising in 2002, the country has been split in two, with the military rebels holding the north, the Gbagbo government holding the south, and the French, the former colonial power in the Ivory Coast, maneuvering to preserve France’s interests, which are substantial.

Thousands of Gbagbo supporters, known as “Young Patriots,” filled the streets of Abidjan, the commercial center of the Ivory Coast, and other large cities. They threw Molotov cocktails and rocks at French diplomatic and military installations as well as UN facilities. Most U.S. papers presented the protests as “riots.”

In Guiglo, a city in the western part of the Ivory Coast near Liberia, UN troops opened fire on the protesters, killing five. As these soldiers then withdrew to an area controlled by the French army, the 200 to 300 UN troops and civilian employees came under fire. (AP-French)

Kofi Annan, the secretary general of the UN, condemned this as “orchestrated violence directed against the United Nations.” The UN also threatened “individual sanctions” against prominent leaders in the protests. (CNN.com)

But Annan’s remarks served to hide France’s role in promoting and maintaining neocolonial control of the Ivory Coast. The head of the FPI, Pascal Affi N’Guessan, has characterized the UN presence as part of “recolonization of the Ivory Coast.” (CNN.com)

Only the intervention of Olusegun Obasanjo, current head of the African Union, led the FPI to call off the protests and rejoin the government.

Obasanjo, president of Nigeria, came to Abidjan to meet with Gbagbo and other Ivoirian leaders, jointly issuing a statement that the UN-backed GTI did not have the authority to dissolve the Ivoirian parliament. (TheAge.com)

The immediate crisis in the Ivory Coast has been defused, but the UN’s role in hiding France’s effort to recolonize the country has only been checked, not defeated.