13036: Edouard Post:News-Aristide TinderBox -Village Voice 9/3/03 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Felix Edouard <loveayiti@hotmail.com>

The Village Voice


September 3, 2002, Tuesday

SECTION: Features; Pg. 52

LENGTH: 1689 words

HEADLINE: ARISTIDE'S TINDERBOX

BYLINE: michael deibert

BODY:


Pierre Fabienne cradles his baby in his arms as his girlfriend, a shy-eyed
beauty, stands in the doorway of their home on a noisy lane in
Port-au-Prince's impoverished Cite Soleil quarter. Fabienne, a gang leader
and supporter of embattled Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was
instrumental in organizing a cease-fire among most of the district's warring
factions last February. He hasn't gotten much in return for his efforts at
diplomacy.

"I've sat with Aristide many times and I still have nothing," says Fabienne
(not his real name). "I still have the same room that I pay $300 for six
months"--about U.S. $50--"no TV, no nothing, and Aristide knows that I'm a
militant for change. He knows I fight for him. When he has something in
Port-au-Prince, he calls us. When he wants people to go to his rally in
Leogane, he calls us. When he's afraid of a coup d'etat, he calls us. He
wants us to stay in Cite Soleil, so no one hears about Cite Soleil, so he
can call on us whenever he needs us to do something." In Haiti's ramshackle
and decaying capital of 2 million, where exuberantly colored tap-tap buses
speed through congested streets blaring sinuous compas music and dark,
mysterious mountains rise out of the bay, Cite Soleil's 200,000 residents
have long formed the backbone of support for Aristide. Just north of Fort
Dimanche--a former prison and torture center favored by former dictators
Francois and Jean-Claude Duvalier now turned into a squatter camp--and
pinioned away from the rest of the city by dusty, potholed Route Nationale
1, Cite Soleil is a place where political activism and a criminal element
born of desperate poverty exist side by side.

The tension between the two worlds exploded last month when Amiot Metayer, a
political militant and gang leader, was freed by machine-gun-wielding
members of his "Cannibal Army," who attacked the Gonaives jail he was being
held in with a bulldozer. Metayer had been arrested on suspicion of ordering
buildings torched during an outbreak of violence with a rival gang leader.
Upon his release, he denounced Aristide, vowing to "fight to the death" any
attempt to put him back in prison.

Once, people like Metayer and Fabienne celebrated Aristide. After his first
election in 1990, it was the people of the slums who danced in the streets,
carrying Aristide's picture and rejoicing at the ouster of the military
dictatorship. When Aristide was himself ousted in a bloody coup d'etat the
next year, the residents of Cite Soleil fought for his return. They endured
the nighttime terror of raids by the FRAPH (Front Revolutionnaire Pour
l'Avancement et le Progres d'Haiti) death squads, and often turned up
tortured on narrow muddy lanes for uttering the deposed president's name.

Today, however, it is these same militants, claiming they feel forgotten and
betrayed, who have begun to call for Aristide's removal, and for the
dismissal of both his ruling Lavalas Family political party and Haiti's
roundly loathed political opposition, the Convergence Democratique
coalition. They argue it's the only way to restore the hope of a just nation
that people in the district had fought for for so long. This is no polite
debate.

In May, three local activists were shot dead by police, who later claimed to
have been attacked by gangs. Local residents, for their part, charged the
activists were shot while arriving at an arranged meeting with police. The
killings triggered two days of shooting between police and gangs, leaving a
pervasive suspicion among locals that, having outlived their usefulness, the
militants have become targets.

r When asked about the situation at a recent press conference, Aristide
replied: "The people of Cite Soleil are the sons and daughters of the
country. Their rights are violated when they cannot eat; their rights are
violated when they cannot go to school. We must work with all sectors, the
opposition and the elite, to improve their lives. We are committed to
working with them and we will not rest until we do that."

"We have to protect the rights of every citizen," Aristide added, "but we
must also protect those who are visiting Haiti and who live in Haiti."

In Cite Soleil, people are preparing to protect themselves. "I don't think
that this government will change, and I don't think that the opposition will
change, either," says Dessalines Jacques, a muscular man who takes his name
from Haiti's greatest hero, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, creator of the national
flag and victor over the colonizing French. This Dessalines, clad in a blue
tank top, has just finished inspecting bags of weapons--9mms, shotguns, and
M-1s--that Cite Soleil has held in its grasp to ensure it will never again
be defenseless.

He says the people need a rache manyok, a peasant expression that literally
means to "pull up your manioc"--a root vegetable--but is used by militants
to mean getting rid of something tainted or corrupt. "We could form a new
political movement, but we cannot do it on our own," he says. "We need all
of Haiti's nine departments, plus the Tenth Department"--the name Aristide
gave to the estimated 1 million Haitians living abroad--"because we are the
children of the Tenth Department. And they know that their children are
suffering here."

However shakily, Aristide remains in control; he was re-elected in November
2000 with little opposition. That would have come from the Convergence
Democratique coalition, a motley group of social democrats and
ex-authoritarian functionaries with scant public support and pronounced
distaste for the Haitian masses. But Convergence members contended the
parliamentary elections held earlier were tabulated to favor Aristide's
Lavalas party, so they sat out the presidential round.

The Organization of American States has been attempting to broker a deal
ever since. Following a mysterious attack on the National Palace by nearly
two dozen gunmen last December 17, thousands of armed Aristide partisans,
including the youth of Cite Soleil, took to the streets, burning down
headquarters and private homes affiliated with the Convergence and, in their
words, "defending our palace and defending our president."

Accusations of electoral rigging from Convergence have led to the suspension
of $500 million of desperately needed international aid. The group is
further demanding that the government not only pay reparations but also
disarm militant government supporters. In the meantime, capital residents
witness daily scenes of armed convoys of Lavalas officials--who have been
continually embroiled in scandal--speeding by in bulletproof SUVs as street
children wash their faces in puddles of rainwater.

Some in the slums say they're not ready to abandon faith in their
president's promise of reform. "We cannot forget what Aristide has been for
us, and we will always be on his side when we see things being done," says
Wily Sauvenur, a studious, bearded young man. Sauvenur (not his real name)
is carrying a manila envelope containing the freshly printed stationery of a
new political movement, the Organizasyon Revolisyone Chalo Jaklen, named
after a murdered pro-democracy activist and founded the day militants
stormed the National Palace. "But we will not support this or any government
when we see nothing being done, and right now we see him sitting with the
gwo manje--"high-living political types"--and living like them. Now is not
like the days of the coup d'etat. We're armed and we're very determined to
change this country and they know that, and they will have to deal with us."

r Haiti's poor have always had to fight. "In 1991, when the military made
Aristide go and began killing our families, we were 10, 12--we were small
kids," says Labanier, another self-described political activist. "We are not
militants out of the blue. Our fathers and mothers were already militants,
against Duvalier, against the military, because it was always bad here and
people here always cling onto the dream that things can change."

The chimere, as the largely male and jobless contingent of Haitian society
is often called, have been used as a political tool in Haiti for many years.
Government and opposition leaders alike draw on the clannish--but not
necessarily criminal--gang culture powered by the very real threats young
men face in the slums.

"My mother died in '91 when FRAPH came and killed her in Cite Soleil, then
they kidnapped my father in 1994 and killed him, too," says Pierre Fabienne,
who rallied government partisans on the streets after being contacted by
Haitian National Police forces in the early morning hours of December 17.
"One day I think the people will stand up to defend their rights. If they
keep doing this, if Aristide kills me, if he kills Labanier, all the gangs
will come out and he will lose his power. We'll have a rache manyok again."

In the surreal landscape that can be Haiti today--pro--bin Laden graffiti
scrawled on crumbling walls, former comedians rallying pro-government
partisans with apocalyptic anti-foreign rhetoric--the situation of the
militants of Cite Soleil and other neighborhoods is perhaps the clearest
sign of just how grave things can become. "One day, man, I'd like to be able
to give up this politics," says Fabienne, looking down the hill at the
shacks and the naked, laughing children. "If not, I'll die and I couldn't do
anything for myself."

Fabienne remembers the days of the U.S. invasion that returned Aristide to
power. Ten years old then, he became something of a mascot to the visiting
American soldiers and the journalists who accompanied them. He shined the
boots of General Henry Shelton, commander of the 18th Airborne Corps, "so
they looked like mirrors," he says, and one American photographer even
bought him some basic photo equipment, which he wore strung around his neck
with obvious pride.

"I've done too much work for politics," Fabienne says, though he refuses to
give up hope that Haiti can change. "Now, too many people hate me, and they
hate what I say. But it's for this I try to help my little son, so we can
arrive at a new place."





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