The country's largest business association has urged businesses to stay closed and parents to keep their children out of school today, 9 January, to protest a wave of kidnappings and to pressure the United Nations peacekeeping mission to take more aggressive measures against the gangs that operate in Port-au-Prince slum areas.

Batay Ouvriye, a workers' organization that has helped organize unions of workers from the capital's slum areas for over ten years, issued a statement "firmly opposing" the 'strike' call.

Batay Ouvriye, while highly critical of the performance of the UN peacekeeping mission (MINUSTAH) and the "directionless violence" carried out by the gangs, declares that the Haitian bourgeoisie is the cause of much of the insecurity and instability in the country. "The group which sent out this appeal has never been in the least solidarity with all the mobilizations of workers and popular organizations who've been attempting to fight against the rising cost of living and gas prices, or in support of the small merchants and cooperative members whose money was stolen, etc. Quite the contrary, they benefit from the misery spreading amongst the popular masses from day to day."

Another progressive organization, Mouvman Demokratik Popilè (MODEP, the Democratic Popular Movement) that has been active in the Collective to Mobilize against the High Cost of Living's recent campaign, also denounced the private sector for its professed concern for the Haitian people.

The MODEP statement declares, "We are living in a society where a small group of people has its hands on all the wealth and, as a result, the vast majority live in poverty...This situation means that in slum areas all over the country, people are dying of hunger and others are living on the edge."

The MODEP also reminds people that private sector's Group of 184 platform was heavily involved with one of the gangs that has been active in the violence in Cite Soleil, and that a leading bourgeois personality is implicated in the kidnappings that have terrorized the capital's inhabitants. The MODEP statement declares, "actors that participate in and feed the climate of insecurity are not capable of combating it.".

Both Batay Ouvriye and MODEP alert the population to the private sector's attempt to use the situation to further its own interests, and instead call on the people to organize themselves to address their own interests.

Batay Ouvriye declares, "We can find the way to vanquish the terror and repression that both the gangs and the MINUSTAH are leading against us in the form of a truly popular resistance with the workers in central position."

The MODEP states, "The people and progressive organizations must get ready to fight for their own interests by combining the struggle against insecurity with the struggle against the high cost of living and unemployment, so that society is transformed for the benefit of the poor masses."

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