"Every day, we are counting dead bodies" posted by Richard Seymour

Demonstrations erupted in Cité Soleil on Thursday, January 12 against the UN occupation and its collusion with the coup government that has jailed political opponents. One person was confirmed killed and 17 were injured in clashes with UN troops as of Wednesday last week. One of the wounded was a 12-year-old girl. “Every day, we are counting dead bodies,” said Joel.

A 30-year-old woman named Edline Pierre-Louis, who lost her unborn baby when she was shot by UN troops on July 6, protested the UN’s denial of the massacre. “The blue helmets [UN troops] are lying,” she told the Haitian Information Project. “They killed so many people, and I praise God that I am alive to call them liars.”

As witnessed by independent Canadian reporters Leslie Bagg and Aaron Lakoff, “multiple killings of civilians have been committed by UN forces.” In Cité Soleil they interviewed a resident named Dieunord Edme, who spoke of his wife, Annette Moleron, being shot and killed by UN troops on January 7 in an incident that also claimed the lives of four other women in a marketplace. The reporters witnessed a bloated corpse by a roadside that residents couldn’t retrieve because the UN military in Haiti (MINUSTAH) would fire on anyone that approached it. The reporters claim the corpse was left out in order to intimidate the neighborhood.

On Monday, January 9, Reginald Boulos, the president of the Haitian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and Andy Apaid, the Haitian-American who owns Haiti’s oldest and largest sweatshop empire—both members of the Canadian and US-backed Group 184—called for a “strike” allegedly to protest the wave of kidnappings.