18964: Lemieux: Sunday Herald (Scotland): The Wests poorest country.... (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JD Lemieux <lxhaiti@yahoo.com>

Sunday Herald - 22 February 2004
The Horrors of Haiti
.SPECIAL REPORT.
The West’s poorest country, stricken by poverty and
disease, is now on a journey into civil war and chaos.
David Pratt reports


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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.



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Copyright © 2004 smg sunday newspapers ltd. no.176088


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