Thursday, December 28, 2006

Haitian senator: Aristide party involved in kidnapping plague

As Haitian senator Gabriel Fortuné, speaking to Radio Metropole, fingers former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and sectors of his Fanmi Lavalas party as being behind the recent wave of kidnapping, Florida's CBS 4 aired grisly footage of several small children murdered by kidnappers after their families went to the police. Fortuné, who survived an attack that killed deputy Jean-Hubert Feuillé in 1995, was jailed without trial by Aristide for two weeks during the latter's second term in office in 2001, would appear to be responding to a threatening "message" distributed by Aristide's supporters in which the former president, with typical self-interested myopia and never mentioning the legitimate government of Haitian president René Préval, bemoaned his "presidential kidnapping" (i.e. his resignation and flight from the country) as the root of the current phenomenon. Haiti's Senate president Joseph Lambert, a member of Préval's own Lespwa party, likewise saluted the 22 December UN operation aimed at dislodging kidnappers from their base in Bois Neuf in the Cité Soleil shantytown.

Dear Haiti, may you have a better 2007.

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