Good morning to all,
Saturday’s meeting was a great success, but at a great cost.
We all went to Cité Soleil in order to present the plan for the new social contract. We were supposed to meet with organizations of Cité Soleil and the Port-au-Prince area to have everybody speak and plan for a better Haiti. This was a simple meeting to officially present a document and get the blessing of the church…
Our “elected” president paid a group of thugs to come and disrupt this meeting. For three days prior to the meeting, shots could be heard constantly in Cité Soleil in order to discourage people from attending. We had set up chairs and a stage in a schoolyard so that we could have the meeting.
Friday night, a group of people broke into the school, broke down a wall and beat up the night watchman in order to steal the chairs and the wood for the stage. When we got there Saturday morning, a crowd amassed outside the school, threatening us and still preventing people from coming in. We decided to wait. That’s when the rocks started coming over the wall, so we took refuge in a room inside the school. In the mean time the police do NOTHING!!!
After a couple of hours of waiting, we decided to hold a press conference and have the 8 only people from the Cité speak after we made our presentation. We then had the priest say a few words, and we officially handed him the document. That’s when a group of the thugs went around the building and started climbing the walls…again the police did nothing. So we all rushed to the buses and started off, and then the police opened the gates and let the mob in the yard. After that it was a race of survival as we were bombarded by rocks and even gunfire. We were about 300 people to go…40 of us had to be hospitalized.
The assistants to the French and American Ambassadors were also there and were subject to the same torment. The mob was in a position to kill all of us, obviously they were under orders to scare and not kill. As I watched out the broken window of the bus I was in, I could see police collaborating with the thugs in order to control the crowd. Not one gas grenade was thrown and not one club swing was given, the police only fired in the air when two of their own where shot upon. We are very lucky to have made it out alive.
We have definitely created quite a stir because the government is now proclaiming that we did this to disrupt the order of things…even calling us terrorist. My deduction from all this is that the OAS can take their electoral dream for Haiti and shove it …. . Clearly the civil society is the victim of a terrorist government, and anyone expecting us to collaborate with these criminals in order to make elections also believes in the tooth fairy.
Not to worry though, we are going to push forward and keep fighting them. I’m actually happy that this happened because now the world officially knows that no progress is possible with Aristide in power. I included some links to articles explaining what happened…even pictures.
I hope you all are doing well and wish you a good week.
http://www.haitipolicy.org/articles/
http://www.haiti-info.com/article.php3?id_article=342
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/world/haiti/6291881.htm