18961: (Chamberlain) The Horrors of Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

(Sunday Herald, Scotland, 22 Feb 04)

The Horrors of Haiti

The West’s poorest country, stricken by poverty and disease, is now on a
journey into civil war and chaos.

David Pratt reports



It all happened in a mad terrifying rush of rocks, bullets and
machete-wielding maniacs. From the corner of my eye I saw Sunday Herald
photographer and colleague Stewart Attwood hit by a rock. With blood from a
nasty head wound running down his neck and shirt, he struggled to get to
his feet and away as a gunshot rang out, the bullet instantly smashing into
a stationary car close by. Another American photographer, who moments later
toppled beside Attwood, was struck down by blows from a group of mad-eyed
“chimères” – hired thugs and supporters of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide – who had rushed towards us.

In the midst of the maelstrom, as anti-Aristide protesters and foreign
journalists alike fled in every direction, I became separated from my
colleagues. Suddenly, in a narrow side street, I found myself fending off
blows to my neck and shoulders – luckily from the flat side of a machete –
before running into a labyrinthine marketplace with three chimères chasing
behind me.

“Monsieur, Monsieur, here quick!” an old woman called, before ushering me
beneath her butcher’s stall and pulling a cover over the front to keep me
out of sight. Hidden for a few minutes until my pursuers had given up the
hunt, the woman’s son then kindly led me through a maze of muddy
passageways back out to the main road to rejoin my friends.

As the rebellion and civil war wrack the north of the country and
Aristide’s rule teeters on the brink of oblivion, Port-au-Prince is a
dangerous place to be. Fear of a coup, and the bloodletting and anarchy
that would follow, run through the streets like the open sewers that
criss-cross the city’s sprawling slums.

This weekend’s latest protests, which left another 20 wounded, were always
going to end in violence. For three hours or more, before they took to
Port-au-Prince’s rubbish-filled streets, thousands had rallied at the
city’s university to hear speakers from trade union and student groups
demand that Aristide must go.

In a burnt-out car, toy pistol in hand, an effigy of the one-time popular
slum priest Aristide was symbolically drenched in blood-red paint.

Since sweeping to power in the 1990 elections to become Haiti’s first
elected leader after decades of dictatorships, Aristide has seen his
once-huge popularity fade amid accusations of corruption and continuing
misery from the legions of Haiti’s poor.

Critics say the president has bought loyalty in Port-au-Prince’s shanty
towns through patronage and by franchising drug trafficking rights.
Aristide and his government, meanwhile, accuse their opponents of being a
small mulatto (mixed race) elite, virulently opposed to the country being
run by its poor, black majority.

With their numbers swelling as the hours passed during this weekend’s
opposition rally, masses of people danced and sang protest songs. Many were
clearly psyching themselves up for confrontation with the chimères, who are
often seen stalking the streets clutching automatic rifles and wearing
black masks.

Some opposition supporters were already wearing masks of their own, mainly
of the surgical variety which has become de rigueur in combating the
effects of the choking tear gas that is inevitably fired at them as they
sweep through the city’s streets.

“Aristide is a motherf***er. He should go now or Port-au-Prince will become
another Gonaives or Hinche,” asserted one student, draped in a red and blue
Haitian flag, his face beaded with sweat and his breath reeking of booze.

Both Gonaives and Hinche are among a handful of northern towns taken by
another opposition group whose members have, unlike those in the capital,
resorted to armed rebellion.

Haiti has always had a reputation for the unpredictable. This
once-beautiful Caribbean island has, after all, been run by the likes of
the corrupt “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his sinister secret police, the Tontons
Macontes. It is also home to what last year became an officially recognised
religion – voodoo.

Whatever the ultimate motives and ambitions of Aristide himself, or those
of his opponents, the root causes of Haiti’s current unrest are there for
all to see. For this is the land of the haves and the have-nots. A place
where quite literally the higher up you live, the further up the social
ladder you are. This is a two-tier nation that rises from the slums of Cité
Soleil and Saint Martin, where hundreds of thousands cram into reclaimed
swampland and cemeteries, to the cool hills above the slums where the
wealthy live in the gated communities of Petionville, with their fine
restaurants catering to a very different side of Haitian life.

This is the poorest country in the western hemisphere, and the world’s
least developed country outside Africa. According to the United Nations,
half the country is malnourished. Life expectancy is 49 years. To realise
just how cheap life is in Haiti and the crushing poverty that underpins it,
one need only drive at night into the Marche en Fer district in downtown
Port-au-Prince. I say drive, because to walk here displaying any semblance
of wealth is to invite robbery. During daylight hours Marche en Fer is a
sprawling ramshackle market area, filled with stalls and traders. By night,
however, it is transformed into one of the most pitiful scenes that prove
how brutalising poverty and the sex trade are inextricably inter-related.

“Look, she is nothing but a child, and that girl there, pregnant – my God,”
points out Jean François Roosevelt, a local journalist who is campaigning
and working with humanitarian agency Concern Worldwide to highlight and
improve access to information about HIV/Aids among the sex workers in the
area and across Port-au-Prince.

Here in Marche en Fer, he tells me, the going rate for sex is as little as
50 US cents. Many of the girls working the district are barely in their
teens, simply taking their clients behind the empty market stalls among the
rotting produce and rats that overwhelm the area.

No-one knows the extent of HIV/Aids in Haiti, but conservative estimates,
Roosevelt says, would put it at 6%, a figure comparable with some of
Africa’s worst-affected countries.

The darkened streets, lit only by open fires where Marche en Fer’s terrible
night-time trade takes place, lie barely a few minutes’ walk from
Aristide’s gleaming white presidential palace, perpetually lit up like a
Christmas tree. Inside the palace, it has been confirmed, many of
Aristide’s 60 or so personal bodyguards from a private American security
firm are almost permanently housed.

It really beggars belief that all this exists an hour-and-a-half’s flight
from glittering Miami, and less than three hours from New York City.

If some self-obsessed Americans have been known to call the United States
“God’s own country,” then much of Port-au-Prince is closer to the
terrifying existence depicted in the recently acclaimed film City Of God
about the gang wars and poverty that rage inside Brazil’s own slums, or
favelas.

Saint Martin, in Port-au-Prince, could easily be mistaken for a giant set
from that film.

In one area, some 60,000 people are crammed into one square kilometre,
living one on top of another in an indescribably filthy warren of alleyways
and concrete houses that resembles little more than a giant open-air
rubbish tip. The smell of excrement and rotting garbage in the searing
Caribbean heat clings to your clothes and nostrils until you have a chance
to wash and change after a visit to Saint Martin.

I was told how “shift sleeping” is common here. With many single
cupboard-sized rooms too small to house an entire family at any one time,
people have been known to bed down on a rota basis, four hours inside and
four hours in the alleyways outside.

One such family, which rented a room the width of an arm span and meant
only for storage space, “shift slept” mother, father and three children.

Recently, a cash-strapped Aristide government is said to have started
clawing back arrears of 15 and 20 years’ rent of 45 Haitian gourdes ($1) a
month from families who had moved into Saint Martin all that time ago and
lived rent-free in spaces that were not originally deemed worth charging
anything for.

Just how, when unemployment is probably 80% in areas like Saint Martin, do
people make ends meet? “I get money from lenders but the interest is
enormous,” said Marie Carme, a single mother who struggled to bring up her
three children even before her husband left her.

As we talked, dogs tore and gnawed at offal mixed among the mountains of
rubbish lying outside her front doorway, and one of her sons coughed
continuously. Tuberculosis, malnourishment, malaria, and rat bites are rife
here.

But what about the repayments, I asked. How do you make them? “I borrow
from one lender, and pay him by borrowing from another, but there is never
enough left over to feed us,” Carme told me.

Her dream of sending all her boys to school, and perhaps even college or
university, is as much wishful thinking as having a full belly on any given
day.

As well as the army of rats and vermin that outnumber the people of Saint
Martin, there is another breed of human predators. For this is the domain
of the likes of Baz Cameroon and Dentes en Fer (Iron Teeth), rival gangs
who mix political and criminal motives and objectives. Some of these gangs,
it is said, are actively recruited or paid by Aristide’s government to help
meet his political ends. But mention such things here, and people simply
change the subject or look at you with incredulity for daring to venture
such a view.

As almost everywhere else in Haiti, it is ordinary people concerned only
with the day-to-day feeding of their children and clinging to survival that
get caught in the crossfire.

The story of a woman called Carmilla and her son is only one of many
examples. It was early evening one day last year when the gangs came for
Carmilla’s son. No-one really knows why they wanted to take him away, but
when Carmilla tried to intervene she was gunned down along with her son.
With neighbours too terrified to go near the scene, their bodies lay for
hours beside the giant open sewer, grandly named the Rocke feller Canal,
that runs through Saint Martin.

“Whatever the reasons as to why the gangs wanted her boy, Carmilla was only
trying to protect him like any mother would,” said Eva David, a project co-
ordinator with Concern, which works in Saint Martin providing the only
health and educational support in a district where the government has yet
been unable even to provide clean water to the families living there.

As Haiti spirals towards a potentially violent shift in power and
escalating civil war, even the famed annual carnival that started this
weekend is failing to be a cause for celebration. Outside the presidential
palace, as joiners and painters put the finishing touches to the stands and
floats that will be the centrepiece of this year’s event, the mood, some
locals told me, was subdued. As ever though, the streets were full of the
ordinary working people for whom Aristide was once a hero. An army of
flat-tyre fixers and tap-tap minibus drivers, trough-cleaners, garbage
pickers and cart pullers. Haiti’s voters, many of whom have lost all faith
in the man who once preached revolution.

As my American Airlines flight flew into Port-au-Prince over its most
infamous slum, Cité Soleil, the song, Should I Stay Or Should I Go? by The
Clash was playing over the in-flight music channel. Few listeners would
have missed the poignancy of the message. With flights out of Haiti now
booked to bursting point as US and other foreign nationals flee the
country, it seems they, at least, have already made up their minds about
where the country’s immediate future lies.