UN official predicts more deaths in Haiti

As Haitians prepare to go to the polls to elect a new political leadership, human rights groups have urged the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the country against taking any military action that could harm innocent civilians. "The problems of lawlessness, kidnapping and gang warfare cannot be addressed by military action," says Charles Arthur, director of the Haiti Support Group, in a letter sent to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. The London-based group, which has been involved in human rights and democracy campaigns in Haiti for over a decade, took a senior UN official to task for suggesting that the peacekeeping forces in Haiti were ready to launch a military offensive in the Cite Soleil area of Port-au-Prince before the elections. "We are going to intervene in the coming days," Annan's special representative Juan Gabriel Valdes told a local radio station in a recent interview. "I think there will be collateral damage, but we have to impose our force. There is no other way." Cite Soleil is a working class neighborhood in the capital, where a vast majority of residents support Lavalas, a political movement aligned with the ousted President Jean Bertrand Aristide, who is now living in exile in South Africa. The human rights group said it was deeply concerned about the special representative's comments because they came at a time when the UN itself had admitted that innocent civilians had died as the result of a raid on Cite Soleil in July 2005. Initially, the UN had tried to brush aside charges that its forces had killed civilians, but in the wake of growing pressure from human rights groups, it agreed to conduct an inquiry. The UN report on the July incident states that, "Given the length of the operation and the violence of the clashes," a number of civilians "may have been caught in crossfire" between peacekeepers and armed gang members. UN officials in Haiti describe armed youth in Cite Soleil as gangsters, but activists working in the area say that many young adults have taken up guns to protect themselves from police brutality and oppression. Though mindful that the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti is "under immense pressure" from certain sections of Haitian society to take stronger action in Cite Soleil, Arthur said military action was not the answer. "We do not believe that military action potentially involving a loss of civilian lives is either acceptable or a correct strategy on the part of the United Nations mission in Haiti," he said. Asked to comment on Valdes' use of the term "collateral damage," Ari Gaitanis, a UN spokesman, told IPS: "There are clear guidelines for our peacekeepers in Haiti. We always try to ensure that no civilians are hurt." Citing violence and insecurity as major factors, Haiti's US-backed interim government has postponed the elections four times. They are now due to be held on Feb. 7.