By: Tom Luce, President, Human Rights Accompaniment In Haiti-Hurah, Inc - HaitiAnalysis.com

The so-called gang warfare which Michael Deibert has once again featured in his latest AlterPresse article (Feb. 13) is a war by proxy that should be stopped. Whoever the people wreaking this slaughter are aligned with must be convinced that it is not in their own best interests to engage in this manner of deadly fighting for their rights. Polemicist articles like Deibert's, though, only continue to play the tit for tat song that contributes to the prolongation of this proxy war, poor people killing poor people, as a way for the more affluent and powerful to keep their hands clean and keep hold of their power.

Notwithstanding Deibert's rallying cry at the end of his article that */"the international community must demand human rights for all in Haiti", /*I call upon him to stop contributing to the proxy war. Militant polemicists never seem to be able to be involved in peaceful, just undertakings to resolve the conflicts. Instead of the ballot, they support the bullet. Instead of calling for reconciliation they promote killing. Only when one side is dead and gone will this kind of proxy war end. Muddying the waters over who killed free-lance journalist, Jean-Remy Badiau, is a sickening example of the war by proxy. The weapons are words, innuendo, and rumors and the insinuation by Deibert is that pro-Lavalas/Aristide forces were just as likely to have done this as the other side. Conclusion: keep it up, poor people. Even the score. Killing is the way of life in Haiti.

Hurah, Inc. is a US based human rights group that works with a Haitian human rights group, AUMOHD. Both groups follow a non-violent and non-partisan philosophy in confronting conflicts that involve human rights abuses among the poor. The fact that 99% of the poor we work with are Lavalas or associated with Lavalas does not justify polemicists labeling us as a "pro-Lavalas" organization. AUMOHD was in court before the coup against Aristide in 04, defending victims of human rights abuse. Since then the facts are that human rights abuses of the poor are overwhelmingly against Lavalas.

Deibert's attack on Sprague's attempts to get the facts straight about Badiau's killers--objectively reported to be the Little Machete Army-- particularly irked me because he zeroed in on territory I know first-hand. His invocation of the impressive name of the Catholic peace and justice commission (CENJP) as the framework for his article as somehow bolstering his story about violence in Martissant was disingenuous. As an ex-priest who studied in the 1960's with Haitian human rights advocate, Fr. Max Dominique, SP, I know something about Haitian human rights and I know that the CENJP is for non-violent reconciliation in these neighborhoods, a very hard mission that Deibert doesn't mention at all, let alone promote.

Let's just take the Martissant situation. I take issue with Deibert's picture and analysis, not that I deny any violence on the part of people either self-proclaimed Lavalas or accused of being such, but because he is perpetuating a harangue of revenge that gets us nowhere in 2007. He launches into his article's point that the */"terrible truth about Martissant"/*is that it is a place*/"where citizens have been at the mercy of warring gangs with varying political affiliations engaged in sustained conflict since June 2006."// /*"Since June 2006?" He gives no detail of this wholesale inter gang warfare between 2006-07 leading his readers--with no proof- to assume that the score is tied for this period. He makes no mention of the July 7, 2006 massacre of 20 innocent men, women and children plus 300+ torched homes in Grand Ravine--not Martissant-- done by the Little Machete Army, an assault of major proportions, nor does he try to assert any comparable assault by any alleged Lavalas group in that time frame. He then begins quickly moving back to 2005 and then to 2000 trying to prove that Lavalas--a gratuitous identification--violence is equal to opposition violence giving us footnotes as proof that the unsuspecting reader would feel obliged either to accept or to stop and conduct his/her own research. So already he has obfuscated the truth of the 2006-7 period and quickly drags us back into the past assuming that no one will notice the difference and will think that the Little Machete Army is just one insignificant perpetrator indistinguishable from others.

Let's go further into the Martissant situation. Not that I deny any violence on the part of alleged Lavalas people but because the demands of the truth and reconciliation process must deal with facts, not impressions. Deiber says, */"since the August 2005 slaying of at least a dozen people at a soccer match in the district, and indeed long before, all armed groups in the neighborhood have been implicated in the grossest human rights violations by residents fleeing attacks speaking to Haitian and foreign journalists brave enough to venture there." /*He has just grossly misled us about 2006-7 and now he begins his blurring of the past with the infamous, "soccer" massacre, wanting his readers to believe that this is but one example of the "grossest human rights violations" that have been regularly perpetrated on both sides in the "neighborhood." Whoa! Let's be factual here.

I know something about the "neighborhood." My on the ground (not Stateside) involvement in this area began with the so-called "soccer" massacre of Aug. 05. This was indeed done in Martissant, but its victims were innocent, non-combatant Lavalas residents of another "neighborhood" called Grand Ravin miles away. I walked every inch of the soccer field, its stands and bathrooms, the surrounding streets looking for victims in hiding, talking with neighbors, with UN personnel, accompanying victims to the hospital. At the time the Haitian police were nowhere to be seen and were greatly feared because they had been the planners as well as the executors of this slaughter. ( Even RNDDH in its report had to admit the police and the Little Machete Army were the perpetrators, seeking vigilante/lynching style executions of a list of people.) Deibert doesn't mention there were two massacres, the first on Aug. 20 at the St. Bernadette soccer field in Martissant, and the second on Aug. 21 accompanied by house torchings in Grand Ravine, carried out again by the police and their civilian butchers with machetes. I would beg Mr. Deibert to find comparable gross human rights violations in the 2005-2007 period just to get the statistics straight as we head toward a just and enduring peace.

Who killed Jean-Remy Badiau, one of the latest in this proxy war? Objective reports (Le Nouvelliste, AHP) have consistently said that his friends and family accuse the Little Machete Army. But people like Deibert and Reporters Without Borders want to keep stirring the pot and throw into their apologias for the anti-Lavalas/Aristide side unfounded rumors that Baz Grand Ravin could equally be responsible, a group he wants us to believe is actually supported by Lavalas members and even Aristide himself--another gross gratuitous allegation. What really matters is that the people Deibert pretends to be reaching out to, those who want the best for Haiti, or at the least, for basic human rights, should be informed by him as well as others about the work--more demanding than violent solutions--to bring the war by proxy to an end, peacefully.

AUMOHD immediately following the 05 massacres (#1 in Martissant, #2 in Grand Ravine) began working with leaders in the community, a gathering now known as the Grand Ravine Community Human Rights Council (GR-CHRC). The purpose of the GR-CHRC was to work on the basis of non-violence and non-partisanship to be accepted as credible tool to begin sifting out the facts of grievances and violent acts, to identify victims and their need for justice, and to find ways to reconcile toward an enduring peace. In the fall of 05 through March of 06, a dozen meetings, facilitated by AUMOHD, were held involving hundreds of people armed and unarmed from several "neighborhoods" including Martissant and even representatives of the Little Machete Army. By previous agreement the Haitian National Police (HNP) and MINUSTAH did not get involved so as to allow the community the opportunity to achieve an authentic peace and to allay the fears of further dreaded HNP and MINUSTAH atrocities. It was quickly agreed upon by all parties that the killing of one another's neighbors was clearly an outsider-induced conflict that made no sense.

My personal contact with the GR-CHRC and other participants convinced me that they and the majority of residents were non-violent, were also Lavalas supporters, not to be lumped into one maligned group of violent gangs. These people had studied and practiced non-violence from the beginning in spite of the violence heaped on them and their forebears by the Duvalierists, the military juntas, and by Gen Raoul Cedras and his paramilitary death squads in 91 and by the persecution of the Feb. 04-Feb. 06 interim government. They willingly admitted that some Lavalas adherents did take up arms in defense of their lives and property before and after the 04 coup. They readily admit to the existence of individuals, self-proclaimed or alleged to be Lavalas who practice criminal violence. But to lump them all into one violent Lavalas encampment thus making them fair game for lynching is itself a gross violation of human rights that has to stop.

The GR-CHRC has continued on pursuing justice--non-violently. Something--yet to be determined--happened to the peace agreement of March 06 and tragically the July 7, 2006 massacre and massive house burning--perpetrated solely by the Little Machete Army--happened. In the fall of 06 the GR-CHRC coordinator, Esterne Bruner a totally non-violent practitioner, was brutally assassinated by the Little Machete Army. In December Mr. Jean Baptiste Hilaire, a staff person of the Haitian Disarmament Commission (CNDDR), was brutally murdered as he began setting up contacts with armed groups. The "something" that happened to the 06 peace agreement is what the war by proxy is all about. Some are continuing to use the poor to kill one another for their own profit. They don't want non-violent approaches like the GR-CHRC or the government disarmament program. Let's stop the deplorable score-keeping game in the media and get down to the business of lasting peace through truth-telling and genuine reconciliation.