Thursday, September 28, 2006

Murder in Fontamara

At least eight have been killed and many wounded in attacks by gangs against residents in the southern Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Fontamara this week, Haiti's Radio Kiskeya reports. It appears that Dymsley "Ti Lou" Milien, one of the accused gunmen who killed Haiti's most famous journalist, Jean Dominique, in April 2000, and whose presence in the Martissant neighborhood I revealed this summer in an article for the Inter-Press Service, was among the assailants.

Residents of Fontamara, like those of Martissant, where dozens of people were killed in gang wars this summer, are accusing Police Nationale d’Haïti (PNH) forces and the MINUSTAH mission of, at best, passivity. In more melancholy news, Esterne Bruner, a grassroots community leader from the Grand Ravine section of Martissant, whom I met and interviewed in July and who had been shot once by rampaging gangs before, was killed on September 21st. Politicians and criminals continuing to fight for miserable power and the Haitian people caught in the middle.

In the struggle for accountability and transparency, Haiti's Le Matin has published the French-language version of one of my articles, Les droits de la personne doivent primer sur les intérêts partisans, last week.

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