Monday, January 01, 2024

The World All Before Us Where to Choose


And thus the embers of the candle of the year that was finally flicker out to be replaced by the brilliant light of the flame of the year that is to come, with all the hope and expectation that it brings.

For me, as for the world, 2023 has been a tumultuous year, to put it mildly. It began with a trip to Haiti, where I found a country that has practically become my second home in the nearly 30 years I’ve been visiting and writing about it held hostage by the armed gangs that control most of the capital as well of the roads in and out of it, while an illegitimate Prime Minister and an equally discredited opposition squabble over power. I traveled all over Port-au-Prince, the capital, talking to everyone I could to try and form a complete picture of a country at war and the hundred daily acts of resistance the population engages in to try to build a more decent society amid such chaos. When I returned home, I found not a single editor at the publications I usually contributed to interested in such an article, many of them content to phone in their coverage from abroad, and that led me to launch this newsletter you are reading now, and to publish my observations and conclusions here, so the words of all the people who paid me the honour of trusting me with their stories would not go unrecorded. Though I was doubtful that my little corner of the internet would amount to much, to my happy astonishment “Notes from the World” has steadily been building subscribers, proof, if any was needed, that people - the general public - are willing to pay for quality reporting and analysis, and are still willing to read long-form essays that defy easy ideological categorization. It has been immensely gratifying to see this.

Also this year, after three years of work, I completed and submitted for publication my new book, With the Pen In One Hand and the Sword in the Other: Haiti and the United States in the Nineteenth Century, a work of pure history which I hope will open peoples’ eyes to the complex intricacies of the relations between the hemisphere’s two oldest republics and the vital role that Haiti played as a beacon for liberationist thought and action in the Americas during the 1800s, despite its own internal convulsions.

And then, not to be outdone for drama, I had an unwelcome visitor in my home and in my body, which I continue to deal with and address as best as I am able. I have been touched beyond words at how many people from different eras of my life have reached out with support both moral and material in the last months. You have really made me feel like I had an impact in the world, which is the most moving, precious gift anyone can ask for. Thank you all so much.

Abroad, we watched the heroes of Ukraine continue to defend their homeland against the imperialist, fascist Russian invaders, despite the cynical drip-drip of aid dangled before them by Western nations who still seem unable to fully grasp that if Ukraine falls, not only Moldova but the Batlic states and Poland will almost certainly be next. The sadism of Putin’s Russia was not confined to Ukraine, of course, as he helped the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad terrorizedefenseless civilians there, as well.  Cuba’s jails continued to groan with more than 1,000 political prisonersincludingsome of the leading writers, musicians, artists, feminist and LGBTQ voices in the country as its creaking dictatorship demanded “sacrifice” from anyone but its own bloated, cosseted members. Venezuela’s ruling narcokleptocracy, attempting to inject some advantage into elections it is sure to lose if they are fair (they won’t be), began issuing bellicose threats against its neighbor, tiny, democratic Guyana, as if ruining one country utterly is apparently not enough destruction for them. Iran’s ossifying theocracy desperately attempted to silence critical voices abroad as well as at home as a reportrevealed how security forces there used rape and other forms of sexual violence amounting to torture to intimidate and punish peaceful protesters during the 2022 “Woman Life Freedom” uprising. In Afghanistan, fully half of the population remained erased from public life as the violently misogynistic Taliban, whose illegal usurpation of power was celebratedby such low-dwelling fellow travelers as Greece’s former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, continued their misrule. Sudan remained torn asunder in a war between its military and the Rapid Support Forces militia, living down to their pedigree as the spawn of the genocidal janjaweed - itself descended from the Muammar Gaddafi-supported Arab supremacist Tajammu al-Arabi - as it conducted  horrific ethnic cleansing in Darfur. And in Israel and Gaza, the slaughter went on, provoked initially by a group of atrocious rapists and mass murderers and now prolonged by a government of fanatics and cynics that will do anything to stay in power and for whom the safety of Israeli hostages is far down on the list of priorities

But there are signs of light in the darkness. In Europe, the nations that have seen firsthand the sharp end of the imperialist designs emanating from Moscow are leading the fight to defend the continent’s democracy and autonomy from the Kremlin’s tyranny. Chile’s young president, Gabriel Boric, despite facing a series of setbacks at home, has proven himself to be a strong defender of democracy and human rights throughout the region and beyond

In Guatemala, in a victory that almost no one (including me) saw coming, Bernardo Arévalo, the son of that nation’s first democratically-elected president, Juan José Arévalo, won the presidency in a triumph that sent the criminal monarchy that has run the country directly or through political proxies for decades scrambling for a Plan B that has, thus far, mercifully, failed. In Arévalo and his Movimiento Semilla party, one sees the beginning of the fruition of the long-delayed Guatemalan Spring that began in 2015. An extraordinary country with immense potential, those committed to democracy and human rights should be prepared to watch closely and assist Guatemalans however they can as the latter attempt to reclaim their nation from the grupos clandestinos who have plundered it for so long. 

In Puerto Rico, mi querida isla del encanto, although many environmental problems and structural and systemic problems with the political system persist, in the alliance between the Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño and the Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana there is an opportunity for the forces of change on the island to take advantage of the progress of the 2020 elections during next year's vote to break once and for all the two-part duopoly that has ruled - and failed - the island for so long. 

And, despite the dire moments it is living through, I continue to believe in the inevitable renaissance of Haiti, for a country that has done so much for the cause of human freedom cannot be and will never be extinguished. Ayiti pap peri.

And as for me? And for us?

On New Year’s Eve, 1917, the French novelist Marcel Proust penned a letter to his financial adviser and dear friend Lionel Hauser where he mused  J'ai renoncé à croire que les années soient nouvelles et puissent apporter un bonheur qui est désormais derrière moi. Mais cela ne me fait pas désirer moins vivement que soient heureux ceux que j'aime (I have given up believing that years are new and can bring happiness that is now behind me. But that doesn't make me less eager for those I love to be happy).”  But, eh bien, ma chère, even with the uncertainty that now stretches before me, I can say that there is so much to love and to value and to look forward to in this world. The caress of the tropical wind on an island in the Caribbean just before plunging into the relief of the blue-green foam of the sea; the hum of the life of the natural world in a field in the Loire Valley in the deep summer; the wonderful carefreeness of watching kids just starting out on their journey hanging out and partying and flirting along the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris; the song of the coquí on a starlit night outside of Aibonito; the purr of a cat or the smile of a dog that has come into your life; the sound of a beloved’s voice in the next room followed to see their face a moment later in which intense joy and endless possibility reside.

Be brave. Be free. Love and allow yourselves to be loved. I wish you all jouissez sans entraves (joy without limits) and the most wonderful happiness in the new year and beyond.

With love,

M

Jouissez sans entraves (Joy without limits) - Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, May 1968.


Saturday, December 30, 2023

Books in 2023: A Personal Selection

Henri Christophe, King of Haiti, painted by English portraitist Richard Evans, 1816.


Black Crown: Henry Christophe, the Haitian Revolution and the Caribbean’s Forgotten Kingdom by Paul Clammer

A great contribution to Haitian studies by the British author Paul Clammer, this book vividly brings to life the dramatic era of the complex and mercurial independence leader who would go on to become Haiti’s only king.

Port-au-Prince au cours des ans: Tome II 1804-1915 by Georges Corvington

Two volumes originally published by Haiti’s Éditions Henri Deschamps collected in this 2007 single volume by Montréal’s Éditions du Centre International de Documentation et d'Information Haitienne (CIDIHCA), this sweeping history of Haiti’s capital by the Haitian historian Georges Corvington is a must for any scholar of the country.

Prospero's Cell by Lawrence Durrell

An impressionistic and disparate memoir of the Ionian island of Corfu by the British author who lived there from 1935 to 1940, though this book has some moments of very nice prose, I still found it a little unfocused and a bit too in love with his own voice to be truly captivating. In terms of evoking Greece in all its glory and mystery, I found Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi a much more compelling read.

The Portable Gerbasi: Selected Early and Late Poems by Vicente Gerbasi 

This collection of poems which bookend the career of the Venezuelan writer and diplomat Vicente Gerbasi are masterfully translated by Guillermo Parra and vibrate with the life and colour of that South American nation, which hard times and bad government may have dimmed in recent years but never fully extinguished.

The Life of John Wesley: A Brand from the Burning by Roy Hattersley

This is a very engaging biography by a British politician and journalist focusing on the long an dramatic life of the severe and highly idiosyncratic founder of Methodism and gives the reader a good flavour for the religious and political battles being fought in 18th century England.

A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines

Published in 1968, this novel recounts the story of a young working-class boy named  Billy Casper from a mining area in Northern England who finds and gradually trains a kestrel (a falcon-like bird), which provides a respite from his life with a rather nasty brother and mother (his father is absent) and sadistic schoolmates and teachers. The long passages focusing on sport kind of lost me, but nevertheless it’s a book that gives the reader a feeling for the loneliness and struggles that can accompany youth as well as the moments of joy and transcendence. 

For Women and the Nation: Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria by Cheryl Johnson-Odim

This books tells the extraordinary life story of the Nigerian political activist, educator and feminist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. The mother of musician Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti, Ransome-Kuti had an accomplished and impressive life in her own right. Born in Nigeria’s southwestern Ogun State in southwestern Nigeria to an aristocratic family, she gained the nickname the “Lioness of Lisabi” for her leadership of the Abeokuta Women's Union (AWU). As well as telling the story of a patriot and committed internationalist, the book is also a fascinating survey of the politics, society, hierarchy, and customs of colonial and post-colonial Nigeria.

Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine 1906–1948 by Zachary Lockman

A fascinating and valuable look into the tensions and contradictions between the desire of early left-wing Zionists to build the Jewish state of Israel while at the same time maintaining some kind of fidelity to their ideals of an empowered and motivated working-class across national borders, this book delves deeply into complex motivations and political-religious dynamics better than mere slogans ever could.

Carte Blanche by Carlo Lucarelli

The first in a trilogy of crime novels featuring Inspector De Luca, this book takes place as Italy’s fascist Repubblica di Salò sputters to its collapse and is as interesting for its depiction of a compromised and often depraved society as it is for the murder mystery at its heart.

El Desterrado de París: Biografía del Dr. Ramón Emeterio Betances (1827-1898) by Félix Ojeda Reyes

This is an impressive work of scholarship by the Puerto Rican historian Félix Ojeda Reyes examining the life of Ramón Emeterio Betances, physician, diplomat, intellectual and perhaps Puerto Rico’s most lucid and forward-looking patriot.

Collected Poems 1950-1993 by Vernon Scannell 

The life’s work of a British poet whose ruling passions were the somewhat unlikely combination of literature and boxing, this is a lovely volume that continues the wonderful poem “Autumn,” which evokes a kind of London that will somehow always be with us.

Race, Class, and Political Symbols: Rastafari and Reggae in Jamaican Politics by Anita M. Waters 

A very interesting book that delves into the complexities of Jamaica’s political battles between 1967 and 1983, this sociological work examines how the Jamaica Labour Party and People's National Party sought to come to terms with and at times co-opt the culture signifiers of Jamaica’s homegrown religion and rebel music.

Monday, December 04, 2023

Michael Deibert speaking about Haiti on The World

I spoke with Marco Werman at The World about the shifting dynamics among the illegal armed groups in and around Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, and what this means for the country as a whole. Please listen to the segment here.


Sunday, January 01, 2023

2022: A Reporter's Notebook of the Year Gone By




Though much of my year was wrapped up in working on my new book, I did publish a few articles that I thought were worthwhile during the last 12 months. 

My Articles


Restoring Glory to a Baltimore Neighborhood for Newlines Magazine (29 March 2022)

Freedom Soup and the Liberation of Haiti for Newlines Magazine (31 May 2022)

Haiti Is At War for Ozy (14 August 2022)

Interviews 

Former Haitian PM sanctioned by Canada denies wrongdoing in The Globe and Mail (30 November 2022)



In 2023, it will be a new year and a new book, this one examining the tenure of the great U.S. abolitionist Frederick Douglass as U.S. ambassador to Haiti and the tangled regional politics of the Caribbean in the late 19th century.

May the year 2023 leave you all feeling loved and appreciated. As the sun sets on 2022, I think the words of Pablo Neruda are apt for this moment.

Y una a una las noches 
entre nuestras ciudades separadas 
se agregan a la noche que nos une  

(And one by one the nights 
between our separated cities 
are joined to the night that unites us)

Con mucho amor.

xo

MD

Books in 2022: A Personal Selection

 

Henry Miller on the Greek island of Hydra, 1939.


Athens In Poems: An Imaginative Map of the City


An absolutely gorgeous selection of poetry celebrating the Greek capital given to me by the manager of a cooperative bookstore in the neighborhood of Exarcheia when I was there this past autumn.


Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel


A picture of a vanished place and people, these stories by the great Ukrainian-Jewish writer Isaac Babel (who later was arrested and executed by the security services of Joseph Stalin), this interlocked collection focuses on the world of a crime boss in Odessa called Benya Krik, known as the King, and the human

fauna the move within it in 1920s Odessa.


Young Skins by Colin Barrett 


Gripping, taut and often bleak stories about mostly young people in contemporary Ireland. 


The Last Summer of Reason by Tahar Djaout

A searing dystopian vision by an eminent Algerian writer who was slain by Islamist radicals in that country in 1993, this novel (originally written and published in French as Le Dernier Été de la raison) depicts a nation overtaken by intolerant religious fanatics. A beautifully written, poignant and prescient book, the author can write lines about how "Today, everything was heralding fall, with its tender light, benevolent even in its sadness" even as he depicts a place descended into madness. 

Insurgent Cuba Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 by Ada Ferrer

An enlightening book look at the complex racial dynamics of Cuba's long struggle to free itself from Spanish rule.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins


A mob story depicting the underworld of then-contemporaneous early 1970s Boston, this book crackles with good and often profane dialogue as the plot heads to its inevitable dénouement.


Milton and the English Revolution by Christopher Hill


A book that gets to the heart of the extreme political commitment that informed Milton's life and work and chronicles in detail a life of dizzying triumphs and bitter disappointments that gave the world some of its greatest poetry.


Desert People: A Study of the Walbiri Aborigines of Central Australia Book by Mervyn Meggitt


A story of the Walbiri people scattered through Australia's Northern Territory by the anthropologist Mervyn Meggitt, I found this book very interesting in its depiction of a people and culture very foreign to many readers yet still informed by great complexity and a deep bond with the land where they live.


The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller


A book chronicling the American author Henry Miller’s travels through Greece as World War II and his own unwanted return to the United States loomed, this is a beautiful tribute to the country, its culture and its history, as Miller finds himself inspired and rhapsodizing about a new locale in way he hadn't since his early days in Paris a decade earlier. There is a poignancy to the loveliness of his descrpuitons made more so by both the impending conflict and his realization that, at nearly 50, he himself was steadily getting older:


There was the air outside and the sky full of stars. I had promised myself on leaving Paris not to do a stroke of work for a year. It was my first real vacation in 20 years and I was ready for it. Everything seemed right to me. There was no time anymore, just me drifting along and a slow boat ready to meet all commerce and take whatever it came along. Out of the sea, as if Homer himself had arranged it for me, the islands bobbed up, lonely, deserted, mysterious in the fading light. I couldn’t ask for more, nor did I want anything more. I had everything a man could desire, and I knew it. I knew too that I might never have it again. I felt the war coming - it was getting closer and closer every day. For a little while yet there would be peace and men might still behave like human beings. 


In Love with Hell: Drink in the Lives and Work of Eleven Writers by William Palmer


An unsentimental look at the often destructive role that alcohol played in the lives of 11 authors, including  John Cheever, Malcolm Lowry, Flann O’Brien and Jean Rhys, Flann O’Brien, this book makes one all the more appreciative of the brilliance the writers that it covers produced considering the ferocious demons many of them were battling.


The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape by James Rebanks  


A first-person account of the life of a working shepherd in Cumbia in the north of England, this book may be a little too in love with its subject (the folks up north are inevitably wily, hard-working and resourceful, everyone not from that circle rather less so), but it still manages to paint an evocative picture of a alternately harsh and abundant landscape and the people who work it and cater to their animals who live there.


Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone


A magnificent anti-fascist and anti-Stalinist work set in Benito Mussolini's Italy (where the author was in exile from), the novel introduces us to the memorable revolutionary character of Pietro Spina, whose own ethos can be summed up by his declaration:


One can be free even under a dictatorship on one simple condition, that is, if one struggles against it. A man who thinks with his own mind and remains uncorrupted is a free man. A man who struggles for what he believes to be right as a free man. You can live in the most democratic country in the world, and if you are lazy, callous, servile, you are not a freeman, in spite of the absence of violence and coercion, you are a slave. Freedom is not a thing that must be begged from others. You must take it for yourself, whatever share you can.


The Hill Bachelors by William Trevor


A finely-honed collection of short stories by a renowned Irish writer depicting people who, in a number of ways, are haunted by decisions they either took or didn't take and where those choices have led them in their lives.

Saturday, December 31, 2022

Haiti Is At War

Aug 14, 2022

Haiti Is At War

By Michael Deibert

Ozy

Haiti has a long, troubled history of politicians using local gangs for political muscle and influence. But what’s happening now is strange and new — the gangs are moving into the power vacuum created by a failing state to exert more autonomy and authority in what’s quickly becoming the biggest crisis in the Americas. 

(Read the original article here)

No safe way out 

The burned-out hulk of the car belonging to the former senator and his driver rested beside a bucolic mountain road that cuts through the hills above Port-au-Prince. The bodies of its former occupants, as charred and desecrated as the vehicle itself, lay inside.

 

For much of the past year, motorists attempting to leave Haiti’s capital for the southern peninsula — an area dotted with undulating hills, shimmering beaches and picturesque colonial towns — would traverse the lanes though Laboule 12 in an attempt to avoid the warring gangs that operated along the other route that led through the sprawling slum of Martissant, a take-your-life-in-your-hands proposition that saw motorists kidnapped or shot dead with terrifying regularity.

 

By the time Yvon Buissereth — a former senator who had been appointed head of the government’s social housing division by former President Jovenel Moïse (himself assassinated in spectacular fashion in July 2021) — opted to try his luck on the road last weekend, Haiti was in the throes of a state collapse the likes of which has rarely been experienced in the Western Hemisphere this century.

 

The gang that allegedly murdered Buissereth is led by a criminal known as Ti Makak (Little Monkey), one of dozens of armed groups currently operating in Port-au-Prince. The gang emerged to fè dezòd (make disorder) in the zone just as the forces of the Police Nationale d’Haïti (PNH), the country’s beleaguered national police force, was launching an offensive against another gang, the 400 Mawozo (400 Hillbillies), who run a kidnapping ring based in the city’s northeastern suburb of Croix-des-Bouquets, but whose territorial control extends all the way to the border with the Dominican Republic. This past spring, a failed attempt by the 400 Mawozo to seize the territory of a rival gang, the Chen Mechan (Mad Dogs), in this area, known as the Plaine du Cul-de-Sac, killed at least 191 people, according to the human rights organization Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains (RNDDH). Thousands more were displaced.


What links these two apparently unrelated episodes of violence on opposite sides of the capital also tells the story of state collapse in Haiti. An implosion that has rapidly accelerated since the assasination of Jovenel Moïse, the first Haitian president killed in office since 1915.


The deep roots of gang rule 

Though Haiti has a long history of politically motivated militias — from the Zinglins and Piquets of Faustin Soulouque the mid-1800s, to the Tonton Macoute of the Duvalier family dictatorship (1957- 1986) — the modern-day roots of Haiti’s gang rule can be found in a catastrophic interweaving of events in the 1990s.

 

A strangling economic embargo designed to return to power Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected president, ousted in a coup in 1991 after only seven months in office, all but destroyed what was left of Haiti’s manufacturing sector. A subsequent IMF and World Bank-sponsored structural adjustment, made with U.S. President Bill Clinton’s support, lowered Haiti’s tariffs on imported rice from 50% to 3%, turning Haiti into the world’s fifth-largest importer of U.S. rice and breaking the backbone of its peasant economy. Those who fled the countryside to the cities found few jobs waiting for them.

 

It was the children of these news arrivals — as many of the capital’s poorest neighborhoods are populated largely by country people new to the city — who became the first generation of the modern youth gangs in Haiti, a phenomenon encouraged with ruthless efficiency by Aristide and his party Fanmi Lavalas (formed in 1996) to ensure their grip on power. Aristide returned to the presidency in 2001 only to be overthrown again in a 2004 rebellion that began when a formerly loyal gang in the northern city of Gonaïves, the Lame Kanibal (Cannibal Army), turned against him in retaliation for allegedly killing their leader.

 

I knew many of these young, first-generation gunmen personally, and spent countless hours speaking with them in Cité Soleil, the sprawling seaside slum they called home. Although they were not typical of the inhabitants of the capital’s slums — most of whom, then as now, have no connection to guns or violence — they represented an unavoidable political force. Before their early deaths (all but one died before his 30th birthday), some spoke eloquently to me about a desperate desire to blast Haiti out of its inhuman squalor and inequality. At a certain time, one could see the good they might have done for the country. But Aristide got to them first.


Politicians have long used gangs 

In the last two decades, the armed groups in the slums — who generally call themselves baz (base, in Haiti’s Creole language) — have metastasized through generations of slain leaders and opportunistic politicians of various political stripes, seeking to monopolize the forces of arms and the votes they bring come election time. The Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale (PHTK), the country's dominant force since 2011 — to which both Moïse and former President Michel Martelly belonged — embraced the baz model as enthusiastically as the Lavalas party (now, like founder Aristide himself, a historical footnote) ever did.

 

But over the years, something new began to happen, although it wasn’t immediately apparent. During a 2015 lull in the nearly 20-year tit-for-tat violence, two baz in the Martissant communities of Ti Bois and Grand Ravine waged war against each other. I went to interview the leader of the Ti Bois baz, a somber-face man then in his early 30s named Chéry Christ-Roi, known as Krisla, who had improbably succeeded in maintaining his grip on the neighborhood since the early 2000s— an extraordinary period of longevity for someone in his line of work. As we sat inside his hillside nightclub, in a spray of day-glo colors contrasting with the sweeping view of the Bay of Port-au-Prince, he said the gangs were sick of politicians using them as cannon fodder, and they might some day form a sort of alliance for good, or so I hoped.

 

Haiti’s tortured politics had different plans. In 2016, Jovenel Moïse, a businessman from Haiti’s north, was elected president after a markedly low turnout. The political opposition — consisting of opportunistic career politicians who gave themselves grand names like the secteur démocratique et populaire despite being neither democratic nor popular — flatly refused to accept the election results. The battle lines hardened.

 

Though Moïse oversaw the construction of miles of roads, and a nascent effort to restructure Haiti’s faltering energy grid — lashing out at “a corrupt oligarchy” and vowing to free from their grasp a “captured state — an audit of the Venezuelan low-cost oil program, PetroCaribe, claimed that firms linked to Moïse cashed in on an embezzlement scheme. A civil society movement, under the slogan Kot kòb PetroCaribe a? (Where is the PetroCaribe money?), demanded accountability for the funds, along with an end to corruption and other government abuses. Striking a modus vivendi with the political opposition whose first demand was that Moïse resign so they could get in (opposition lawmakers twice vandalized Haiti’s parliament in the company of their partisans to prevent Moïse’s choice for Prime Minister from going to a vote), the civil society, perhaps unwittingly, became part of a drama bigger than themselves that was unfolding.


The Rise of "Barbecue"


In November 2017, a police raid in Grand Ravine ended in the deaths of at least two police officers and 10 civilians in what some called a police massacre. One of the policemen involved, Jimmy Chérizier— better known by his nickname, Barbecue — abandoned his post and returned to his power base in the capital’s Lower Delmas quarter, where he founded an illegal armed group, allegedly with ties to the Moïse government —a claim Moïse and Barbecue both denied. In 2018, Barbecue was accused of participating in a massacre in the Port-au-Prince slum of La Saline that killed 26, according to a United Nations report. Barbecue and two officials of the Moïse government were sanctioned by the U.S. State Department for their alleged roles in the killings.

 

While the Moïse government negotiated with the PNH over the police department’s quest to form a union, a gang called Fantôme 509 (Haiti’s country code) emerged, claiming to be dissident police. The group wore masks and shot their guns in the air, at vehicles and into government buildings. Fantôme 509 was widely viewed as a wing of the opposition. In June 2020, Barbecue, dressed in a suit and carrying a machine gun, held a press conference to announce the formation of the G9 an fanmi e alye, an alliance of armed groups around the city, including Krisla’s Ti Bois baz. Though Barbecue stated that he was not “pro-government or pro-opposition,” he released several videos of himself surrounded by an armed, masked cadre and expounding on the political issues of the day. His Twitter account, which had a large following, has since been suspended. 


Gang war goes viral on social media 

But Barbecue was hardly the only boss in town, and not the only one to grasp the power of social media.

 

Across Route Nationale 2 from Grand Ravine and Ti Bois, in the Village de Dieu slum, Arnel Joseph, a politically connected gang leader, who reigned over the 5 Segonn (5 Seconds) gang until fleeing in an attempt to avoid arrest, was killed by police in February 2021. The following month, Haitian police tried to storm the slum in a raid that ended with six police officers dead: their final moments recorded by gloating gang members who shared the footage on social media.

 

Arnel Joseph's successor at the helm of the 5 Segonn (5 Seconds) gang was a different character altogether, and  the footage of the slain policemen was only the beginning of his social media war. Going by the nom de guerre Izo, the new strongman of 5 Segonn presides over a kidnapping empire, the proceeds of which he uses to fund slick videos of himself and his gunmen as he spits rhymes while strutting through the slum and snorting copious amounts of cocaine (He is, at it happens, a lyricist of no small talent). Beyond his musical pursuits, however, Izo has used social media and apps like WhatsApp to boast of his battlefield success and terrorize his rivals. Last month, while bragging about weapons acquired during fighting with gangs from the rival G9-affiliated - slum of La Saline, 5 Segonn displayed the firearms perched on the dead body of one of their enemies. In another video, Izo dismembers the cadaver of a rival he had purchased from the gang in Grand Ravine, and then begins to cook the viscera in a pot.

 

The 400 Mawozo have also shown a fondness for social media. The gang’s leader, Joseph Wilson, alias Lanmò San Jou  (Death Comes Unannounced), recently recorded himself and his gunmen (who appear to be in their early teens) requesting the “paperwork” of motorists traveling between Port-au-Prince and the Dominican Republic. Last month, 400 Mawozo gunmen murdered a police officer inside a church, spirited the body away and disseminated footage of themselves mulitalitng the corpse.

 

Wilson, believed to be a houngan, or vodou priest (vodou, despite its reputation in the West, is a religion like any other, combining both light and dark elements), has availed himself of the authority of such a role. I have seen videos of him and other 400 Mawozo members at fêtes involving coffins and other accouterments of death. The possible spiritual elements of the violence in Haiti today in some ways echo the gruesome public displays of Charles Taylor, during the 1989-1997 Liberian Civil War of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), who cannily co-opted some of the trappings of the Poro Society — a male secret society in West Africa — to add an aura of authority to his military might.

 

The violence has more immediate ways of revealing its interconnection. In the shantytown of Canaan, whose population exploded when thousands of Haitians displaced by the 2010 earthquake resettled there, a gang recently filmed themselves firing in the air as they referred to themselves as “the Taliban.”


The gang state 

Although the government of Prime Minister Ariel Henry — who assumed power under controversial circumstances after the assasaniation of Jovenel Moïse — has frequently been accused of having ties to gangs, the gunmen are now making direct attacks on the symbols of the state. In June, 5 Segonn gunmen stormed Port-au-Prince’s Palais de Justice, seat of the highest judicial authority in the capital, and have occupied it since, chasing off judges, clerks, prosecutors, police and staff. The authorities have made no attempt to retake the building, as its armed occupants strut about its rooms destroying files. In July, 400 Mawozo gang members set fire to the Croix-des-Bouquets prosecutor's office. Government services — customs, the central bank and other entities once housed in downtown Port-au-Prince — are abandoning the center of the city to the gunmen and moving to more secure locales, such as the airport or to far-flung suburbs.

 

“They're trying to establish some kind of recognition as a force or a state within the state,” said a conflict resolution specialist, and friend, who works in some of the capital’s most marginalized neighborhoods. “Any talk of elections without taking care of these guys doesn't make sense.”

 

More than the politically allied “posses” of Jamaica, which the Haitian gangs once most closely resembled, the armed groups in the country look more and more like the all-demolishing whirlwinds of the Islamic State, for whom killing publicly and ritualistically is as much an affirmation of power and mission as the success of any geopolitical goals.

 

In a very direct way, the violence also connects Haiti to its giant neighbor to the north, the United States.

 

In July, a ship arriving from Florida at Haiti’s Port-de-Paix was discovered to be carrying 120,000 cartridges, three handguns, 30 magazines, 20 Ak-47s and $3,890. That same month, seven illegal pistols were confiscated from another ship from the U.S., stopped at the same port. The government responded by freeing two of the men who had been arrested for alleged involvement in the scheme and firing the government official who’d overseen seizure of the weapons. Meanwhile, several suspect containers at a wharf in Port-au-Prince were found to contain 9mm pistols, 14,646 cartridges, 140 magazines and 18 assault rifles.

The gangs are coordinating 

As the country roils amid criminal anarchy, the government of President Ariel Henry has remained largely silent, apparently secure in the support of such foreign actors as the U.S., France and the U.N. Mission in Haiti. The fact that both RNDDH and a now-stalled investigation by the Direction Centrale de la Police Judiciaire (DCPJ) into the murder of Jovenel Moïse showed that Henry had spoken twice to Joseph Félix Badio — believed to be a key link in the plot to murder the president — on the night of the assassination, appears not to phase them. The government’s detachment from the trauma of its citizens was also vividly illustrated when, during a regular bout of gang violence, the prime minister spent a glittering evening at the posh Hotel Montana to celebrate “Europe Day'' with various foreign diplomats. The elegant hotel also serves as the base for the Montana Accord, a group of civil society actors and veteran politicos who “elected” a president and prime minister last year, yet whose authority barely extends beyond the lobby.

 

Last month, an attempt by the G-9 to take over the Cité Soleil, under the control of baz leader Gabriel Jean-Pierre, aka Ti Gabriel, who heads a rival coalition of gangs called the G-Pèp, failed. It was foiled when 5 Segonn rushed to Gabriel’s aid ferrying gunmen in motorboats along the coast, one of at least three instances that the group has used boats in recent months. The attack failed, but not before more than 200 people — mostly civilians—  were killed and many thousands displaced. The onslaught, most observers agree, was unleashed to acquire territory in order to control voting centers should Haiti’s long-delayed elections ever be held.

 

It was around this time that the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince tweeted a photo of Chargé d’Affaires Eric Stromayer (the U.S. has not had an ambassador in Haiti since October 2021) grinning broadly behind a stoney faced Ariel Henry, saying the two had “discussed recent security gains.” This must have come as news to Haitians desperately trying to flee the abattoir of gang violence.

 

Stromayer’s meeting with Henry occurred the same week the RNDDH accused Henry of “continuing to supply the gangs with weapons and ammunition to put an end to the lives of the police, to discourage them in their work and to block justice.” And just weeks after the Episcopal Conference of Haiti demanded: “Why does the State not act?" A few days after the meeting, clashes between the G9-affiliated gang Krache Dife (Fire Spitters) and its rivals turned downtown Port-au-Prince into a war zone, with gunmen wearing police uniforms participating in the fighting and a cadre of “barefoot child soldiers” — as one local media outlet called them — firing automatic weapons. Around the same time, when a delegation of evangelical Protestants showed up one afternoon to clean the streets of the Pont-Breya section of Grand Ravine, gunmen shot the pastor's wife dead. Gang coordination seems to increase by the week. Sensing a common enemy, when police began a sustained campaign against 400 Mawozo this month, the gang sent word to Ti Makak, who helpfully distracted them with his own eruption of violence miles away — ending the life of Yvon Buissereth.


Foreign ‘help’ is making everything worse 

More than 550 people were murdered in greater Port-au-Prince between January and June, according to the Commission épiscopale de l’église catholique romaine Justice et Paix. An additional 200 victims from Cité Soleil were added to that death toll last month. More than 100 police officers were slain between June 2021 and June 2022. And the bloodshed appears to be spreading. In late July, clashes between armed groups in rural Petite-Rivière-de-l’Artibonite, nearly 75 miles from Port-au-Prince, left at least 20 dead and several buildings burned. The OAS recently issued a mea culpa, saying that Haiti’s crisis was “a direct result of the actions taken by the country’s endogenous forces and by the international community,” and arguing that “the international community’s presence in Haiti has amounted to one of the worst and clearest failures implemented and executed within the framework of any international cooperation.” But it, as well, seems to have little idea how to stem the tide of violence.

 

“Every day, the insecurity in Haiti grows and the population becomes more imprisoned,” Haitian sociologist Laënnec Hurbon recently told me. “The prime minister is deaf and blind and the international community does not show the slightest empathy in the face of the country's tumble toward the abyss.”