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Haitian crackdown continues amidst protectorate talk
CITE SOLEIL – Hundreds of foreign troops invaded the shanty town of Cité Soleil on Dec. 14, wounding dozens of people in gun battles that lasted most of the day. Several people were reported to have been killed, including an infant.
Two days later, on the anniversary of Pres. Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s first electoral landslide in 1990, more than 10,000 Haitians took to the streets of Cap Haitian, Haiti’s second largest city, to demand his return and an end to repression of his Lavalas political party.
The crackdown came two weeks after U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Haiti and urged that the Brazilian-led U.N. stabilization force, MINUSTAH, crack down on the capital’s rebellious neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the U.S. media has begun talking about whether Haiti should become a protectorate similar to Kosovo.
Brazilian, Jordanian, and Sri Lankan troops carried out most of the urban crackdown, backed by Jordanian and Chinese riot police, helicopters, and armored cars, according to Haiti Progres. Dread Wilmer, a leader of anti-coup groups in Cité Soleil, claimed “lots” of people were killed and denounced foreign occupation, but rival leader Thomas Robinson, known as LabanyP, welcomed the crackdown.
The Associated Press reported that at least six people were shot including a 13-year-old. Reuters said a UN soldier was wounded.
“We are under extreme pressure from the international community to use violence,” MINUSTAH’s General Augusto Heleno Ribeiro told a congressional commission in Brazil the day after Powell’s visit.
“To do this would require a force of 100,000 men prepared to seek and kill in large numbers,” Foreign Minister Celso Amorim told Brazilian legislators at the same hearing.
“Should the UN run Haiti? Some see little alternative,” said the title of a Dec. 12 piece in The Miami Herald.
“The only way we’re going to make any progress in Haiti is to establish a good, old-fashioned trusteeship,” argued Riordan Roett, Western Hemisphere director at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “Haiti needs a “multilateral force with a 25-year mandate to rebuild the country year by year. Everything’s been destroyed. It’s a failed state, a failed nation.”
But Ray Laforest of the Haiti Support Network, a support group for Haiti’s National Popular Party, charged that the U.S. is behind the protectorate idea. “The Herald articles are just the way Washington politically prepares the public for what it’s planning,” he said.
“The Brazilians and other U.N. troops are not acting forcefully enough to repress the growing anti-coup uprising in Haiti. So the Pentagon is surely examining the eventuality that it will have to once again dispatch U.S. troops to Haiti, who will be more ruthless in repressing rebellious Haitians. If things keep deteriorating the way they have in recent months, the Bush administration might kick out the de facto technocrats they installed last March and openly take charge of the country, discarding their fig leaf Haitian de factos and voila: a protectorate.”
Climate change hits insurers
BUENOS AIRES — Weather-related disasters cost the global insurance industry a record $35 billion in 2004, according to the United Nations and industry officials gathered for an international climate conference in Argentina last week.
The greatest costs were incurred in the United States, where a succession of four hurricanes off the Atlantic and the Caribbean caused more than $26 billion in damage, according to preliminary figures compiled by Munich Re, one of the world’s largest insurance companies.
But underdeveloped countries were also hard hit, particularly in the Caribbean where Hurricane Ivan killed some 28 people in Grenada, caused $1 billion in losses, and destroyed about one-third of the island’s homes and virtually all of its nutmeg and cocoa crops. Hurricane Jeanne caused massive flooding in Haiti and killed 2,000 people.
“Insured losses, driven by weather or climate-related disasters, will amount to more than $30 billion, making 2004 the costliest natural catastrophe year ever for the insurance industry,” explained Thomas Loster, a climate expert with Munich Re.
Loster, one of many climatologists at the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, appealed to representatives of 80 governments to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Most scientists believe that is the main cause of global warming trends and the increase in frequent and extreme weather conditions that have been recorded over the past decade.
The talks ended with few steps forward as the U.S. and oil producers refused to accept deeper emissions cuts to stop global warming. Although negotiators brokered a last-minute deal on two items, the European Union said the agreement fell short of getting talks rolling for after 2012, when the Kyoto protocol to cut greenhouse gases runs out.
The meeting of nearly 200 nations and 6,000 participants started on a high note after Russia’s ratification of the Kyoto protocol last month, allowing the treaty to take effect in February with a seven-year delay.
The conference reviewed the effectiveness of measures taken to implement the 10-year-old Climate Convention and attempted to map out a “post-Kyoto agenda.” But they also heard that 2004 has been the fourth hottest year on record. October registered as the warmest October since accurate records were first compiled in 1861.
Scientists have long predicted that the warming of the Earth’s atmosphere by increasing greenhouse gases would spawn unusual and extreme weather that would prove to be destructive.
This year, climatologists were particularly struck by a storm that hit Brazil. Hurricane Catarina developed in the South Atlantic where sea surface temperatures are normally much too low to trigger tropical cyclones. It was the first time since global observations began that a hurricane had appeared in the region.
Posted December 27, 2004
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