Maybe Port-au-Prince is ‘Haiti’s Next Great City’

Yesterday police arrested four men — all students at University City High School — in the videotaped beating of a Drexel grad student from Haiti. The teenagers planned the attack and sought out a random victim. What nice boys!

NBC 10 got an interview with the victim — he’s blacked out in that photo — and they said on its front page that the “victim of a horrible assault taped by four teens says Haiti is safer than Philadelphia.” He doesn’t actually say that in the interview, it seems; he does say he’s never seen anything like this before and his brother says Philly is “a city known for violence.”

Still, the interview of a Haitian man who said his native country is safer than Philadelphia (maybe) comes on a very interesting day. Haiti just happens to be highlighted on the front page of The New York Times and the story begins like this:

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Jan. 21 - Nearly 20 months after the United Nations arrived to stabilize the hemisphere’s poorest country and avert a civil war, there is still no cease-fire in this violent city on the sea.

Blasts from tanks and machine guns go on for hours almost every day around Cité Soleil, a steamy slum of concrete hovels and canals of raw sewage at the capital’s northern edge. No one knows for sure how many civilians have been killed inside because the bodies of the slum-dwellers and local gangsters rarely make it to morgues.

But, hey, Philly’s got Benergy! Eh? Eh?

Victim Speaks About Videotaped Beating [NBC 10]
Fear and Death Ensnare U.N.’s Soldiers in Haiti [NYT]