Cite Soleil, the Earthquake, and Gangs--January 2010
Monday, January 18, 2010
Cite Soleil, the Earthquake, and Gangs
While working in Soleil during the last few years, Haitian Hearts has had the opportunity to meet with Haitian gang leaders and members of gangs in schools, in the church, and on the streets. To even talk about Haitian gangs is a "political issue" in Haiti. But, in my opinion, if the horrible inhuman poverty of Soleil were gone, the gang issue would diminish drastically.
See article below.
Gang members in Haitian slum profit from disaster
By JONATHAN M. KATZ - Associated Press Writer PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti --
"If you don't kill the criminals, they will all come back," a Haitian police officer shouts over a loudspeaker in the country's most notorious slum, imploring citizens to take justice into their own hands.
The call for vigilantes comes as influential gang leaders who escaped from a heavily damaged prison during the country's killer earthquake are taking advantage of a void left by police and peacekeepers focused on disaster relief.
In the sprawling Cite Soleil slum, gangsters are settling into the haunts they dominated before being locked up and resuming struggles for control that never really ended once they were inside the walls of the city's notorious main penitentiary.
Haitian police officials fear that gang leaders who escaped from prisons damaged in last week's earthquake are filling the void left by Haiti's decimated police and U.N. peacekeepers struggling to provide aid.
"The trouble is starting," said Jean-Semaine Delice, a 51-year-old father from Cite Soleil. "People are starting to leave their homes to go to others."
As police urged residents to fight criminals themselves, Delice said, "I think it's a message we should listen to."
There is the potential for violence in any disaster zone where food and medical aid are unable to keep up with fast-growing hunger and mass casualties. But the danger is multiplied in Haiti, where self-designated rebels and freedom fighters - or simply neighborhood toughs - have consistently threatened the country's fragile stability with a few weapons, some spare money for handouts and the ire of disaffected throngs.
"Even as we are digging bodies out of buildings, they are trying to attack our officers," Cite Soleil police inspector Aristide Rosemond said, surrounded by officers wielding automatic weapons.
Neighborhood residents say three people died and several women were raped in a small-scale turf war that gangsters nicknamed "Belony" and "Bled" launched in the seaside slum in the days following last Tuesday's quake.
People who live here have been told not to count on security forces for help.
The Brazilian peacekeeping unit assigned to Cite Soleil lost 18 of its 145 soldiers in the earthquake. Ten perished when the "Blue House" - a landmark concrete tower converted into a U.N. post near the slum's entrance - collapsed, leaving weapons and equipment readily available to fast-acting looters.
The U.N. peacekeeping mission also lost its chief, deputy chief and acting police commander.
The police lost an uncounted number of personnel and equipment, leaving a group of officers who in large part are just recently recruited and trained.
"The problem is they have weapons ... so we cannot send the population or (just) any policemen" to capture them, Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told The Associated Press on Monday.
Bob Perito, coordinator of Haiti programs for the Washington-based U.S. Institute of Peace think tank, said concerns about the gangs are legitimate - in the long run.
In the more immediate future, "the gangs may be more of a nuisance," Perito said in an interview from his Washington office.
"They are not going to challenge the U.S. military," he said. "But when the U.S. decides the emergency is over and goes home, will the reconstituted U.N. peacekeeping force have the coherence necessary to suppress the problem?"
There are 1,700 U.S. troops on the ground in Haiti and 2,000 Marines off shore.
Security has always been precarious in Cite Soleil, although it is far calmer then the days when it became a war zone, during the 2004 ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
On Monday, Brazilian peacekeepers drove from one food-distribution point to another as women, children and older men jockeyed to fill their buckets from a spouting broken water main. The gang members stayed out of sight.
The scene was drastically different Sunday, when a man robbed a motorcyclist's bag of rice with a .38-caliber pistol in broad daylight and residents swapped stories of gangs equipped with heavy automatic weapons coming out of hiding even as U.S. military cargo planes rumbled overhead.
Bellerive said he has met with U.N. peacekeepers, police and the newly arrived U.S. Army to discuss ways of combating the escaped convicts. Tactics thus far have included distributing photos and tracking the gangsters, which has led to some arrests.
But it is not a top priority, even though officials estimate as many as 4,000 prisoners escaped from the main prison.
"We are not worried about one or two guys," Brazilian battalion spokesman Col. Alan Sampaio Santos said. "Later on we can go after them."
Until then, much of the neighborhood's security will be in the hands of local populations, who are forming night brigades and machete-armed mobs to fight bandits across the capital.
A whole country has been kidnapped by a bloodthirsty, money-hungry cabal. And how does the US State Department respond? By calling for “dialogue.”
It would be hard to argue that Jovenel Moïse, the current president of Haiti, has mastered the situation in his country, but in a way, he has. Though the visuals of violence and scenes of chaos argue against him, it seems that Haiti’s latest strongman can do no wrong grandiose or cruel enough to call his regime into question—at least not according to the international community, whose nodding acquiescence, along with a king’s ransom in aid, sustains Moise’s hold on power.
Only this past week, he gave a nod to sending the Haitian National Police (PNH) into Village de Dieu, a shantytown controlled by G9, a consortium of street gangs who support the president and often have done him favors, in order for the PNH to be seen by the international community as clearing out the gangs. Instead, the police were attacked by a massively armed group; the officers were overwhelmed (including those in an armored vehicle like a tank) and viciously massacred. The tank was burned, and there were rumors in the following days that the regime was negotiating payment for the release of a second tank from the gangs, as if the tank itself were another victim of Haiti’s terrible scourge of kidnappings under this president, but only this victim was valuable enough to ransom. (It’s possible that some wounded officers were still in the shantytown, and that their release was part of the deal for the tank.) According to a transcript of their phone messages, the officers who died pleaded for bakòp from headquarters for about two hours while under siege, but no bakòp ever came.
At least four police officers—who also look just like the people of the shantytowns—died brutal deaths in Village de Dieu, and many others were injured. Schools then shut down in fear of what might be about to happen. A few days after the utter and very public defeat of the police squad, a band of armed men from G9 attacked the offices and garage of Universal Motors, which is run by a prominent and vocal critic of the regime in a business area of Port-au-Prince very unlike the shantytown where the police were ambushed. The offices were burned and many vehicles either destroyed or stolen, with seemingly no fear of arrest or prosecution.
The G9 origin story is that it was founded by former police officers and neighborhood people who were disgusted by Haiti’s ineffective security management, and who have now taken matters into their own hands to help shantytown residents and people suffering in poverty, doing food distributions and other community services. For the poor of Haiti, there is a certain thrill in seeing people who look like them, thin and dark, daring to go into the quarters of the rich, plump, and light-skinned to steal nice cars and motorbikes just like that. Gang violence, however, is so deep and ubiquitous now that every level of society has been affected, and anyone can be kidnapped or killed. Any house, whether a gated mansion or a shack, can be burglarized or burned. Any woman can be raped.
Rather than take responsibility for the deaths of his police officers or actually take steps to rein in the gangs, Moïse has had Carl Henry Boucher, the PNH’s police inspector general and a respected 30-year veteran of the force, arrested and imprisoned, held in solitary confinement before facing a judge who will present charges. Boucher, the sole person blamed by the regime for the Village de Dieu police debacle, now joins the other score or so of political prisoners in Haiti whom Moise has recently chucked behind bars to solidify his hold on power, although Boucher’s only responsibility in the case seems to have been to help direct a drone to monitor the site of the attack.
Opponents of Moïse are saying that the reason Boucher is being held in solitary—strange for an officer of his standing—is that he could testify about others’ involvement in the failed intervention, among them the director of the PNH who was appointed by Moise in November to replace a director he had fired. Another theory is that Moïse supporters orchestrated the disaster in order to convince friends in the OAS to intervene in Haiti with a military force, stabilize the situation, and help conduct new elections that will keep Moïse’s party, if not Moïse himself or his mentor, compas musician and former president Michel Martelly, in power. It’s not difficult, given the level of this regime’s cynicism, to imagine that the police team might have been deliberately sacrificed to make a point: The gangs are now in charge of Haiti. The 15,000-strong PNH is funded by the United States.
Meanwhile, Moïse is trying to orchestrate a referendum to change the constitution to allow him to run for a second consecutive term. Could Moïse possibly do anything more transparent? A recent video clip of him with a roomful of supporters shows him posturing and cocksure: “No matter what elections are conducted in this country,” he says, “they will never take power away from us.” It can’t help remind you of François (Papa Doc) Duvalier telling a CBS reporter, “I have just been elected president for life.”
There’s a reason why Haiti is such a disaster right now—and has been for quite some time. Martelly and Moïse’s criminal political behavior has been supported and even encouraged and mentored by the United States and other foreign actors: France, Canada, the UN, and the OAS. While Haitians have plunged further and further into extreme poverty and insecurity, the corrupt and increasingly lawless governments of Martelly and Moïse have been financially sustained by three successive American presidents: Obama, Trump, and now Biden. During the trauma of the 2010 earthquake there, then–UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon named Bill Clinton as the UN’s special envoy for Haiti; Bill and Hillary Clinton, at the time US secretary of state, both gave media and electoral credibility to Martelly, which set the stage for Moïse’s election five years later.
Since 2010, Haiti has received five times more international aid than all other Caribbean countries combined, in part because the earthquake virtually annihilated Port-au-Prince. But as Warren Everson Alarick Hull, the permanent representative of St. Kitts and Nevis to the OAS, told a meeting of that organization recently, “As these requests [for funding] are renewed, we ask ourselves what Haiti has done with this considerable aid?” As in the case of Hugo Chavez’s PetroCaribe, a discounted-oil-based social program for Haiti (and other Caribbean nations), precious few Haitians have reaped the fruits of foreign aid. Indeed, no one really knows where all the money has gone, though some of the Martelly regime’s and its cohorts’ thievery of PetroCaribe funds has been documented. No doubt some international aid has gone from the pockets of the state toward funding the gangs, which Jacques Leon Emile, the president of the Haitian Association for Memory and Culture, recently called “the armed wing of the political authorities.”
While the Moise regime has further impoverished the Haitian people, and caused the usual exodus of those who have the means to leave, the gangs have been favored with all kinds of advancement, and huge caches of heavy arms—supposedly banned under a US arms embargo—as well as military-grade armored vehicles. After the killing of the police officers in Village de Dieu, the gangs divided the clothing, arms, and protective gear of the men they’d just killed.
To read the Biden administration’s State Department homepage on Haiti-US relations, however, is to have an Orwellian encounter with the absolutely unreal. The more the Martelly and Moise governments failed, the more generous the United States has become. The page lists all the money given in the wake of the earthquake, then goes on to say that nonetheless, Haiti is failing. Here’s a typical quote: “In response to the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Haiti and requests for international assistance from the Government of Haiti and United Nations partners, the US Ambassador to Haiti declared a disaster due to the complex emergency in Haiti. In response, the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance is providing one million dollars through the UN World Food Programme (WFP) to support the transportation of humanitarian commodities and staff for immediate relief efforts.” Translated into what Haitians understand this to mean: While the politicians and their flunkies steal international aid targeted to the Haitian population, and fail the country at every turn, USAID picks up the tab for the thievery and failure, sending just enough to keep Haitians from an outright explosive revolt.
So far, though, it doesn’t sound as if he’s even moving in that direction. Here is his assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs Julie Chung, on Twitter: “We urge @moisejovenal to initiate dialogue with stakeholders, end political paralysis & hold free & fair elections in 2021.” All of Haiti is laughing at this, surely including President Moïse. “These people are incredible,” a Haitian friend of mine said..
It is sad to say that more than two centuries after the enslaved people of Haiti led a successful revolution against Napoleon’s army and gained independence from France, the country needs outside support to help move it toward liberty from its own leaders. But right now it desperately needs that support. It especially needs the United States to stop encouraging and then propping up regimes that foster corruption and chaos and lead at best to a violent and oppressive dictatorship—or, even worse, that continue the current corrupt chaos that makes ordinary life impossible. Here’s the message Washington is sending to Moïse: Only some black lives matter.
Right now, all of Haiti has been kidnapped by a small cabal of bloodthirsty, money-hungry, and immoral leaders of all kinds: politicians, officers of the law, businessmen, and gang leaders. The country’s being held hostage. As one recent tweet said in Kreyol, “The problem you’re trying to resolve in the Village de Dieu, its solution is in the presidential palace.” Until Moïse and his cohort leave, Haiti can’t move forward. If the State Department doesn’t know this, it’s just not listening. “Abandoned by the state,” scrolled the crawl beneath one video commemorating the loss of the police officers. It might as well have said “abandoned by America.”
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