Standing Against Militarism and Violence: From Haiti to Fort Benning

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Published on Friday, November 18, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/18-8

Standing Against Militarism and Violence: From Haiti to Fort Benning
by Father Roy Bourgeois

On November 18, thousands of people will gather outside the gates of the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA, now renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) to stand in opposition to our government’s involvement in coups, assassinations, torture, disappearances, and other atrocities in Latin America and the Caribbean. Meanwhile, in Haiti, the new president, Michel Martelly, will officially present his plan for the reconstitution of the Haitian army. Although these two events will be separated by over 1000 miles and occur in two different countries, they are directly related.

Twenty-one years ago, the School of the Americas Watch was founded when a small group of friends and I carried out a hunger strike at the gates of Ft. Benning to call for the closing of this school . Today, the movement has grown to the thousands, and our goal remains that of shutting down the now notorious U.S. military facility that has trained numerous Latin American and Caribbean generals, police, and paramilitaries in the brutal techniques through which the poor and disempowered people of the region have been prevented from having a greater role in making decisions that affect their lives. Some of the Western Hemisphere’s most notorious human rights abusers are SOA graduates, and they include Maj. Joseph-Michel Francois, a principal figure in the 1991 coup against President Aristide; other coup figures including Louis Jodel Chamblain, Guy Philippe, and Jean Tatoune also were trained by the U.S. military.


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MINUSTAH’s record in Haiti is one marked by violence and scandal. We saw large bullet holes in buildings in Haiti’s poorest slum, Cite Soleil, where MINUSTAH conducted a violent raid in 2005 that left over a dozen unarmed civilians – including children - dead. Just a month before our visit, protests against MINUSTAH erupted in Haiti following the revelation of a video, captured on a cell phone, showing five MINUSTAH soldiers raping an 18-year-old Haitian man. Protests against MINUSTAH had occurred with regularity following the outbreak of cholera a year ago, and the subsequent evidence that UN troops were responsible for introducing the disease which has so far killed some 6,500 people and infected 457,500. Lawyers with the Institute for Justice and Democracy and the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux in Haiti have filed a complaint on behalf of 5,000 cholera victims seeking damages from the UN.

Father Roy Bourgeois is a Catholic priest, a former missionary, and founder of School of the Americas Watch.

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