U.N. Acceptance of 'Collatoral Damage' Worries Haiti Group

This page presents an open letter to the U.N. Secretary General. It expresses concern that the U.N. appears to accept collateral damage in Haiti, with little regard.

Dear Secretary General,

The Haiti Support Group, a British organisation promoting human rights and democracy in Haiti for over a decade, is very concerned to read the recent remarks made by Juan Gabriel Valdes, your Special Representative to Haiti, regarding the proposed deployment of UN troops in the Cite Soleil area of Port-au-Prince.

According to a January 8, 2006, report by the Reuters news agency, Mr Valdes told a local radio station, "We are going to intervene in the coming days. I think there'll be collateral damage but we have to impose our force, there is no other way."

The trouble with 'World Police' forces is that they tend not to be accountable to anyone. Why is it that when local police accidently kill an innocent by-stander, while in pursuit of a wanted criminal, there's loud public outcry, calls for investigations, and sometimes results in changes in policy regarding the way police handle situations when innocent people could get hurt, but in international "peacekeeping", whether it involves the U.N,, the U.S., or anyone else who considers themselves obligated to police other nations, can kill dozens/hundreds/thousands of civilians, and nobody cares? Nobody even notices.

A big problem with international forces is detachment. The forces involved don't know the country, community, the people, their culture, and most often, their language. That presents an insulating barrier in which those that are supposed to be helping, have litte real connection to the people they're "saving", and as a consequence, less compassion, if any. If they have to kill the innocent in order to save their lives, so be it, right? After all, no one who has ever been labeled as "collateral damage" has ever really been of any importance to the international powers-that-be. Case in point: 100,000+ Iraqi civilians dead. True, that example is from a war, but the results are no different when you send peacekeeping 'soldiers' to do a policemans' job, civilians just happen to get in the way of military objectives.

There's just something wrong when arbitrary military force is used to keep the peace before other, less damaging methods have even been tried. Such actions have become acceptable, along with it's inevitable consequence, namely that ridiculous euphemism; "collateral damage".

You know how they get away with it, no matter how many civilians get hurt in the process? Too many people, at this very moment, are sitting glued to their seats, watching and reading about Angelina Jolies' pregnancy, and other mind-numbingly nonsensical fluff that fills up what pretends to pass for "the news". No one's paying attention. No one cares. It's by design.