General History

[bcholmes]

The UN stabilization mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) is currently on its third or fourth general.

Their first commander was a Brazilian, Lieutenant-General Augusto Heleno Ribeiro Pereira. He made the news (which everyone seems to have ignored) in December, 2004, when he testified before a congressional commission in Brazil that:

We are under extreme pressure from the international community to use violence.... I command a peace-keeping force, not an occupation force... we are not there to carry out violence, this will not happen for as long as I'm in charge of the force.

He was pretty clear that the US, Canada and France were responsible for a lot of that pressure. In August of 2005, he resigned. The story that I've heard (but haven't found a source for) is that he was afraid of being brought up on war crimes charges at some point in the future.

General Pereira's job then went to Lieutenant-General Urano Teixeira da Matta Bacellar, another Brazilian. He started the job on September 1st, 2006, and then shot himself on January 6th, 2006.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a body of conspiracy theory has grown up around the General's death. Haiti Action, for example, claims that he'd just met with business elites:

According to several sources in the Haitian press, Bacellar had participated in a tense meeting with the president of Haiti's Chamber of Commerce, Dr. Reginald Boulos, and Group 184 leader Andy Apaid the night before.

Haiti-Progres writes:

"Late last week, Bacillar had tense meetings with UN and coup regime officials and the right-wing business elite," said the Haiti Action Committee in a Jan. 10 statement. "They reportedly put 'intense pressure' on the general 'demanding that he intervene brutally in Cité Soleil,' according to AHP. This coincided with a pressure campaign by Chamber of Commerce head Reginald Boulos and sweatshop kingpin Andy Apaid, leader of Group 184 [the business group that helped mastermind the February 29, 2004 coup that ousted President Aristide]. Last week Boulos and Apaid made strident calls in the media for a new UN crackdown on Cité Soleil..."

Haiti-Progres goes on to make a lot of implications that General Bacellar was shot by a sniper while sitting on the balcony of his hotel.

While the idea of the poor general who's assassinated for refusing to use extra violence in Haiti sounds like a horrible story, the suicide story doesn't sound too much less horrible. It's impossible to know why General Bacellar committed suicide, but it's hard not to speculate that he was extremely distraught over what the UN mission in Haiti was actually doing there.

After General Bacellar's death, the job temporarily went to Chilean General Eduardo Aldunate Herman, a former member of Pinochet's secret police. Now, another Brazilian General Jose Elito Carvalho de Siqueira is in charge.

Comments

can't substantiate it but...

[ardasiril.livejournal.com]

...my family in Port-au-Prince insists General Bacillar committed suicide because they were about to reveal that MINUSTAH was not only not stopping violence in Cite Soleil but was actually behind it.

And, well, I'd think twice about that except for some UN-on-locals violence I saw with my own eyes when I was there myself just before the Jan. 06 elections. Something is definitely Not Right about MINUSTAH and it may still be a while before they figure out what.