Smackdown in Cite Soleil

Yesterday afternoon, as I was driving past Cite Soleil with journalist friends, I witnessed something that puts Haitian resentment towards the international presence here into perspective. As our car approached the intersection in front of the Commissariat (police station), a police and UN caravan emerged from the slum and pulled in front of us, with a large group of people running along side them. They looked more agitated and curious than upset. There was a man sprawled out in the bed of the police pick-up truck, obviously they had made an arrest in the slum. Chilean UN soldiers with flak jackets and guns took pictures of the scene with point and shoot cameras. As the trucks rolled into the Commissarat the crowd followed right up to the gates, until the UN soldiers started shouting and pushing them back across the street to let the traffic (us) pass through. We pulled forward slowly, doors locked and windows open, trying to figure out what was going on. Apparently we caught the attention of an intoxicated young man weaving towards us, small plastic cup of clarin in hand. He was shouting something and indicated to us to stop. I eyed the door lock uneasily as he sidled up to the car, but someone in the car said he was shouting that he was glad the press was there documenting this. A second later there was a Chilean UN solider at his elbow, shouting at him (in Spanish, most likely...) to back off from the car. He pulled at the guy, and when he kept pushing towards us the UN officer smacked the young man hard across the face. I gasped, the man doubled over slightly and brought his hand to his face, and the UN officer stalked off. We rolled forward a bit more and then came to a stop. The drunk man came up to the driver's side window, this time animated and angry. We were aghast that the UN soldier smacked him thinking that he was doing us a favor. He was like "you saw that? you saw that!?" and we replied something to the effect of "oh dude we totally saw that, that was so uncalled for i'm sorry that sucks." A crowd gathered around the car, listening to the conversation between the drunk man and the journalists. They wanted to know if we would write a story about this, show the world how Haitians are treated. It's no small surprise that some Haitians feel so degraded by the international presence that is basically running the country right now. They feel like they aren't respected or valued, just treated like poor dark garbage. They're opinions aren't listened to, their right to housing a joke, and in this case even their physical person is abused. I know a slap in the face is rather mild as far as physical violence goes, but it makes me think about what must happen when the threat is worse and there are no witnesses. Also, when violence like that is sanctioned, violence used by one foreigner to protect another group of foreigners from the inconvenience of having to engage with Haitians, it upholds the idea that the current occupation is just one more generation of oppressors in a long line of oppressors that can be traced back through the US occupation to the days of slavery, when blacks could only speak to whites with permission.

The cup of clarin had fallen out of his hand at some point, and in a few minutes the man had calmed down slightly and started to explain to us what had happened. Apparently that morning gang wars in the neighborhood had broken out into open fire, and several people were dead. Presumably, the arrested man was affiliated with one or another of the gangs. Did the police or the UN fire any of the shots, we asked. The crowd talked amongst itself, then decided that no, they had not. But the violence is really the NGO's fault, they explained. While they are not the ones pulling out guns, they aren't distributing the food equally among the different parts of the city, and this is causing group tensions to escalate to the point of violence. I wonder if the violence was an attempt to secure food resources, or if it was a expression of jealously and vengeance. You could argue easily against the logic that blames the NGOs for gang violence, but this is a place where the basic necessities of life are so hard to come by, given only by charity and sometimes taken by violence. I can see how easily those two forces can become interconnected in the eyes of the people who live at the whim of both.