December 21, 2020
Haiti’s Dangerous Crossroads
As Haiti veers from its constitutional path and armed gangs compete for power, its civil society persists in spite of the odds
By Michael Deibert
Newlines Magazine
(Please read original article here)
At the end of November, a curious decree was published in Le Moniteur, the official journal of Haiti’s government. The edict announced the creation of a new security service, the Agence nationale d’intelligence
(ANI). Answerable only to the president and immune from criminal
charges without presidential approval, the ANI’s anonymous agents will
be tasked with the “monitoring of individuals and groups liable to
resort to violence and to undermine national security and social peace.”
A
Caribbean nation of 11 million, sharing the island of Hispaniola with
the Dominican Republic, Haiti has rarely known a period free of
political tumult in its 217-year history. The country was forged in the
fires of the world’s only successful slave revolt. Marginalized by
outside nations aghast at the thought of a Black republic, bedeviled by
internecine political wars and repeated outside meddling (including a
1915 to 1934 military occupation by the United States), this nation of
what the Haitian author Lyonel Trouillot called “the children of heroes”
has not had an easy path.
Few periods, however, have been as
tumultuous as the last year, as President Jovenel Moïse, in office since
February 2017, has squared off against a fractious opposition that has
thrown everything they have at him to drive him from power, without
apparent effect.
From Haiti’s mist-shrouded mountains to its lush
rice fields to its glistening tropical beaches, warring politicians now
battle in a landscape of competing armed groups. The criminality and
economic anguish they stalk are far from natural occurrences like the
hurricanes that occasionally batter Haiti’s shores; they have been
created by powerful people both within and beyond its borders.
Moïse, an agribusinessman known locally as Nèg Bannann
(The Banana Man), won the presidency by gaining 55.60% of the vote in a
crowded field in a November 2016 contest marked by feeble
participation. The opposition’s earlier promise to wait for voters with
“machetes and stones in hand” likely did not help turnout. With the vote
overseen by an interim president and political rival — former senator
Jocelerme Privert — it was the second attempt at holding a presidential
ballot after the first attempt was shelved due to violence and
allegations of fraud.
Running as the candidate for the Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale
(PHTK) developed by former president and carnival singer Michel “Sweet
Micky” Martelly, Moïse promised an aggressive infrastructure program to
help revive Haiti’s economy, still struggling from January 2010’s
devastating earthquake.
Despite the construction of miles of roads
and the beginnings of an effort to restructure Haiti’s faltering energy
grid, the reality has turned out somewhat differently. Moïse has been
dogged by allegations of corruption related to his business dealings
before becoming president. A 600-page audit of the Venezuelan low-cost
oil program known as PetroCaribe claimed that firms linked to Moïse took
part in an embezzlement scheme. Since 2018, a civil society movement
under the slogan Kot kòb PetroCaribe a? (“Where is the
PetroCaribe money?”) has demanded accountability for the funds, an end
to corruption, and other government abuses.
Moïse denied links to
the scandal and called on the Organization of American States to
investigate, while frequently assailing what he charges is the “state
capture” of Haiti’s resources by corrupt business elites and their
political allies. Earlier this year, a government anti-corruption task
force published a report which concluded that, between March 2019 and
May 2020 alone, private oil companies operating in Haiti made $94
million in undue profits at the expense of the state.
After all eight members of Haiti’s Conseil électoral provisoire
(CEP) resigned last July, Moïse created a new electoral council and
unilaterally named its members. Many have been tasked with organizing
local and federal elections and overseeing a commission to re-write
Haiti’s often-criticized 1987 constitution. The new document is slated
to be approved by a plebiscite, a move that left many stunned.
The
president’s actions are “totally, wholly, bluntly unlawful,” says
Georges Michel, a Haitian historian and constitutional expert. “It is a
move towards arbitrary rule and dictatorship.”
Reached for
comment, Haiti’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Claude Joseph said that the
changes were needed, noting — correctly — that presidents have been
left to govern by decree several times in recent years as legislative
elections failed to occur on time. Joseph went on to say, “President
Moïse has been absolutely clear that he will not stand for a second
term. These reforms will serve no benefit to him but will pave the way
for a functioning democratic government in Haiti.”
In fairness,
Moïse’s aberrant actions have been equaled if not exceeded by those of
his political opposition, a different breed entirely from his civil
society opponents. They are a collection of men — for they are almost
all men — who have developed reputations for themselves at home often at
odds with how they wish to be perceived abroad.
Before the terms
of most of its members expired in January, Haiti’s parliament was
regularly unable to reach quorum because its members didn’t show up for
work. In May 2019, rather than allow a vote on Moïse’s designate for
interim prime minister, a group of opposition senators led by Antonio
“Don Kato” Cheramy, a former rapper turned politician, destroyed the
meeting room. After Moïse nominated a Ministry of Finance official for
the same post four months later, opposition politicians, again led by
Don Kato, once more vandalized the parliamentary meeting hall. One of
the president’s fiercest critics, the former senator Moïse Jean-Charles,
recently demonstrated in front of the U.S. Embassy — a favorite target
of opposition ire — and vowed to “dismantle this political class to make
room for a new dynamic carried by young people.” This promise might
have sounded more convincing were it not coming from a 53-year-old man
who has not had a job outside of politics since the mid-1990s. In late
2019, an opposition-led armed strike forced the country to a standstill
for weeks, further wounding an already grievously ill economy and
achieving virtually nothing.
Another of Moïse’s many recent
decrees seeks to classify protest strategies such as reducing freedom of
movement on public roads as “terrorist acts,” punishable by up to 50
years in prison.
With many of their own families living safely
abroad, Haiti’s political operators appear to hold fast to Satan’s maxim
in Milton’s “Paradise Lost”: It is “better to reign in Hell than serve
in Heaven.”
As all of this goes on, Haiti’s security situation has disintegrated.
In the space of a few days, kidnappers seized a young doctor from the
Hôpital de l’Université d’Etat d’Haïti, a well-known guitarist from the
group Strings, and the wife of the head of the Unité de sécurité générale du palais national (USGPN), the police unit directly responsible for the president’s personal security. Haiti’s Le Nouvelliste
newspaper recently ran an account of one kidnapping victim that
detailed how kidnappers possessed “heavy weapons, dozens of vehicles and
government license plates,” performed reconnaissance on potential
targets’ social media accounts and were able to open the phones of their
victims without asking for security codes. In August, Monferrier
Dorval, head of the Port-au-Prince bar association and a well-known
attorney, was slain returning home, one of several such assassinations
in recent months.
This landscape is even more dolorous when one pauses to consider that, in just over 25 years, Haiti has been host to the Mission civile internationale en Haïti (MICIVIH), the Mission des Nations unies en Haïti (MINUAH), the U.S.-led “Operation Uphold Democracy” in 1994, and, from 2004 to 2017, the Mission des Nations unies pour la stabilisation en Haïti (MINUSTAH), which eventually became the Bureau intégré des Nations unies en Haïti (BINUH), which is presiding over the current implosion.
As the political situation in Haiti has deteriorated, the role of the baz
(base) — the armed groups in the country’s most impoverished quarters
acting as a kind of netherworld of neighborhood protector, tax
collector, muscle for political interests and freelance criminal — has
grown to ever more powerful levels.
The baz are
descendants of other irregular paramilitary forces in Haitian history —
from the zinglin of the mid-1800s rule of Faustin Soulouque to l’armée souffrante of the renegade general Louis-Jean-Jacques Acaau to the Tontons Macoutes of dictator François Duvalier. One can almost pinpoint when the baz,
as a specific political modus operandi, overwhelmed Haiti’s democratic
sector and began the slow, inexorable poisoning of its political system.
After
returning in October 1994 from an exile during which hundreds (perhaps
thousands) of his supporters were killed by the army and paramilitaries
(some of whose leaders were on the payroll of the CIA), then-president
Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s first order of business was to disband the
military that had overthrown him. He dissolved the military in April
1995 (which was illegal without a constitutional amendment, as the army
was still enshrined in Article 263 of the Haitian constitution). With
the creation of the Police Nationale d’Haïti (PNH) the following month, many hoped for a more humane face of public security in Haiti.
The
PNH faced a rough economic landscape, however. In 1995, as part of an
IMF and World Bank-sponsored structural adjustment made with U.S.
President Bill Clinton’s support, Haiti lowered tariffs on imported rice
to 3% from 50%, quickly becoming the world’s fifth-largest importer of
U.S. rice. The backbone of the Haitian economy, local rice could not
compete with cheaper American imports, putting farmers out of work.
Those who fled the countryside to the cities found few jobs waiting for
them, as the early-1990s U.S. embargo that helped drive the military
regime that had ousted Aristide also wrecked Haiti’s manufacturing base.
At a January 1996 meeting between the PNH and a gang that referred to itself as Lame Wouj
(The Red Army) in the seaside slum of Cité Soleil, a young policewoman
named Marie Christine Jeune criticized what she viewed as the
president’s attempts to co-opt the nascent police force by suggesting it
join forces with pro-government thugs. Two months later, a month after
Aristide left office, Jeune was found slain. It was the beginning of a
pattern of the killing of police officers who would not turn a blind eye
to illegal armed actors that continues to this day.
That same year, Aristide founded the Fanmi Lavalas (Lavalas
Family) party. In the years leading up to and beyond Aristide’s 2001
return to office, the party nurtured a network of armed supporters in
marginalized communities. The network was referred to as chimere,
after a mythical fire-breathing demon. Many of the leaders of these
groups in Port-au-Prince had grown up in the orbit of Aristide’s Lafanmi
Selavi home for street children. When I was living in Haiti between
2001 and 2004, a number of them became my friends. They would receive a
little money for no-show jobs at state industries and, in return, were
expected to enthusiastically demonstrate for the president and terrorize
his opponents. They were in regular contact with the PNH. Almost none
of these young men would make it out of their 20s alive.
Aristide
was overthrown in February 2004 after months of massive street protests
and an armed rebellion against his rule (a rebellion that began with the
Lame Kanibal, a formerly loyal gang in the northern city of
Gonaïves). After that, the young gunmen engaged in a brutal war of
attrition against police, then under the command of Léon Charles (who
would later be named as Haiti’s ambassador to the Organization of
American States and was recently re-appointed by Moïse as head of the
PNH), that became known as Operation Baghdad. Hundreds would die before
some level of stability returned when an unelected interim government
was replaced by René Préval, in his second turn at the helm of Haiti’s
ship of state. Préval, between his inauguration in May 2006 and Haiti’s
apocalyptic January 2010 earthquake, proved that he was Haiti’s wiliest
and most able politician.
The only president in Haiti’s history
who twice turned power over to a democratically elected successor,
Préval – an agronomist by training – represented a figure in whom many
sides of Haiti’s stratified nation, from the rich in their villas above
Port-au-Prince to those in the slums, felt they had a representative. He
managed to bring a measure of tranquility to the divided country,
saying that Haiti was like a bottle that must rest on its broad base to
be secure. If it rested on its narrow mouth (the presidency and the
country’s elite), it would topple over and shatter.
When the
earthquake struck Haiti in January 2010, destroying much of the capital
city and killing more than 300,000 people, Préval appeared at times
paralyzed when faced with the massive task of rebuilding. After a
fraught election during which the international community pressured him,
and as with his 2006 win, street protests erupted when it looked like
the leading candidate might be deprived of victory, Préval (who would
die in March 2017) turned the presidency over to Michel Martelly in May
2011. Many among Martelly’s entourage, including some advisers, had
either direct or family links to the dictatorship of Jean-Claude
Duvalier, who ruled Haiti from 1971 until his overthrow in 1986.
Many
foreign commentators on Haiti couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea
that a right-wing populist who had previously performed in drag and a
diaper and had once released an album called “100% Kaka” could win a
contest for the presidency. But the Haitian sociologist and former
ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Guy Alexandre, saw things much
more clearly. He wrote that Martelly’s popularity was “explained by the
frustration of the population and its rejection of Préval, who has not
been able to manage the country after the earthquake… [Martelly] is
backed by former Duvalierists and the youth of the popular classes for
whom he represents a break with the traditional political system.”
A
little over a year after his election, Martelly would form the PHTK,
whose name — roughly translated as “Bald Headed Haitian Party” —
referred to Martelly’s gleaming pate. Corruption and patronage
flourished, and the PHTK would enthusiastically embrace the baz model,
as had many other political parties as it metastasized throughout
Haiti’s body politic.
In recent months,
despite the revival of the Haitian army in 2017, two specific armed
groups have risen to prominence as the government and its opponents
prosecute their struggle for power.
Last year, while the
government negotiated with the PNH over the police department’s desire
to form a union, a gang calling itself Fantôme 509 (the country
code for Haiti) and claiming to be dissident police began appearing at
demonstrations. Though certainly dominated by current and former
officers, there is some evidence that Fantôme 509 also struck
an alliance with a gang operating out of the Village de Dieu slum.
Appearing masked and frequently shooting in the air and at vehicles, Fantôme 509 is viewed widely as a wing of the opposition, and the rank-and-file PNH perceives the group’s members as outlaws.
On
the opposite side is Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, a former officer in
the PNH’s Unité Départementale pour le Maintien de l’Ordre (UDMO) who
went rogue following a November 2017 PNH raid against a gang in the
hillside slum of Grand Ravine during which at least two police officers
and 10 civilians died. Part of a larger neighborhood called Martissant,
Grand Ravine is a known opposition stronghold. About to be arrested amid
an investigation of the civilian deaths, Chérizier instead retreated to
his home base in the lower Delmas neighborhood of Port-au-Prince. He
was subsequently linked to a 2018 massacre in the capital’s slum of La
Saline that a United Nations report said left at least 26 people dead (a
report by the Haitian human rights group Réseau National de Défense des
Droits Humains, RNDDH, put the death toll at 71) and during which the
U.N. alleged involvement by two then-government officials.
Chérizier
held a press conference last June, dressed in a suit and carrying a
machine gun, during which he announced the formation of the G9 an fanmi e alye,
an alliance of armed groups around the city. A month later, G9-allied
gunmen held a public demonstration in Port-au-Prince during which police
did not intervene. Though Chérizier specifically stated that he was not
“pro-government or pro-opposition,” many see the G9 as the government’s
bludgeon to clear out potentially troublesome elements from opposition
neighborhoods before as-yet-unscheduled elections are held. Speaking on
Radio Métropole last month, Moïse said, “I have no connection with these
bandits, I do not distribute money or weapons to them to maintain order
in their neighborhood.”
On December 10, Cherizier and the two
officials — Ministry of Interior functionary Fednel Monchery &
former West Department delegate Joseph Pierre Richard Duplan — were
sanctioned by the U.S. State Department for their alleged roles in the
La Saline killings.
Many veteran observers feel the dynamic in
Haiti with the armed groups has begun to shift in recent years, with the
politicians no longer holding all the cards.
“Many of the gang
leaders are very aware that they’re being used, and they want to start
doing things for themselves, especially when it comes to the next
elections,” says Louis-Henri Mars, the executive director of Lakou Lapè
(“peaceful community” in Creole), a group that promotes non-violence and
dialogue. Mars is the grandson of Haitian author Jean Price-Mars, one
of the founders of the négritude movement of Black
consciousness and has been involved working with the most marginalized
communities in the capital for decades. “You’re not going to become
mayor if the crew don’t say yes, you’re not going to become deputy.”
Earlier this month, the eminent Haitian jurist & homme politique Gérard Gourgue died at 95. Under the Duvalier dictatorship, he bravely created the Ligue haïtienne des droits humains,
and was repeatedly beaten and harassed by the tyrannical security
forces. He was briefly a member of the military-civilian junta after
Duvalier’s fall in 1986, and his likely victory in 1987 presidential
elections prompted the killing of voters in what became known as the
Ruelle Vaillant massacre. Still opposed to tyranny into his 70s, Gourgue
was a member of a wide-ranging opposition when Aristide began his drift
toward dictatorship. He was briefly proclaimed “provisional president”
in 2001, leading the school he ran to be attacked by Aristide partisans
as students cowered inside.
Gourgue was one of the last of the
all-but-vanished generation of democratic activists that I met during my
first trips to Haiti in the 1990s, notable for their intellectual
brilliance. There was the economist, author, and political militant
Gérard Pierre-Charles. There was the former head of the Parti unifié des communistes haïtiens
René Théodore. There was the ex-priest turned human rights champion
Jean-Claude Bajeux, who had lost most of his family to Duvalierist
terror. All have since gone to join to the ancestors
It is not
easy to find these bright lights in Haiti’s political firmament anymore,
but if one knows where to look, one can still find them in the country
at large.
The impoverished Cité Soleil is often characterized as a
place of violence, but it is a community where fishermen mend nets by
the glittering Caribbean and delicately-dressed schoolchildren skip down
dusty streets as residents struggle diligently to better their lives.
In such communities, one finds groups like the Sant Kominote Altènatif Ak Lapè and the Konbit Solèy Leve,
which have tasked themselves to provide residents with a world-class
library, which is already half-built. Further afield, one finds groups
like the Asosyasyon Orijinè Granplenn in the northern community
of Gros-Morne, which advocates for the interests of Haiti’s
long-suffering peasants. In Haiti, even those with the most impetus to
give up soldier on, often against extraordinary odds, chèche lavi (looking for life).
In an open letter in Le Nouvelliste
published a few months ago, an eminence who even predated Gérard
Gourgue’s generation, the 103-year-old author Odette Roy Fombrun,
confessed to her compatriots, “I am sad to leave my country in tatters.”
She then went on to implore them to:
Rise
to the level of true citizens by agreeing to make personal sacrifices
in favor of the country, of political and economic stability, of the
return to the constitutional path, and the strengthening of
institutions. It is imperative to stop this descent into hell with the
humility of each of us to recognize that, alone, not in small, dispersed
groups, we can do nothing. …Wisdom and love of country require us to
work together.
As they stand, daggers drawn, one hopes that Haiti’s political actors hear her plea.
