20320: (Hermantin) Miami-Herald-Fatal ambush cuts off voyage to escape slums (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Posted on Fri, Mar. 12, 2004


Fatal ambush cuts off voyage to escape slums

BY JOE MOZINGO

jmozingo@herald.com


PORT-AU-PRINCE -- Under the cover of darkness they trudged out across a
wasteland of burning trash that juts into the sea. They handed over the
savings they had scraped together and stepped aboard a waiting boat -- 115
desperate people ready to set sail for Miami.

The bullet-riddled bodies began floating up the next day.

''I was just trying to take a boat to anywhere because this country is
hopeless,'' said Alex Sano, 19, who survived the Feb. 23 ambush in the
Port-au-Prince slum of Wharf Jérémie by swimming into the night.

Sano and a second witness said a group of thugs from the neighboring slum of
Cité Soleil had stolen their money, then opened fire.

Residents said they later found seven bodies drifting in the shallows and
heard that eight more were found across the bay at Carrefour. Nobody knows
how many people survived.

Sadly, the massacre was remarkable only because the number of dead was
higher than the night-by-night, soul-by-soul killing everyone here is used
to.

While a slight semblance of peace has settled over most of the capital,
terror and desperation continue to grip the slums. The police do not go
there. The U.S. Marines are yet to be a presence. Even relief organizations
find intermediaries to take food and medicine inside.

Death in Port-au-Prince's slums these days is a lonely, gruesome spectacle
of desecration.

A man shot dead on the highway lies with his skull caved in during
mid-morning traffic, while trucks veer around him and men go about their
business fixing tires 20 feet away. A penniless woman sighs with relief at
knowing the morgue will throw her murdered husband into a mass grave. And
neighbors wonder who it is when they pass a group of pigs feeding heartily
in the street.

The dead boat people of Wharf Jérémie garnered a bit more sympathy. At least
some of them were buried.

Sano's brother, Tifrere, was a mechanic who fixed outboard motors and mopeds
and earned enough to pay rent for an apartment in the suburb of Petionville.
Sano tried to emulate him.

DESTINATION MIAMI

But the violence and economic stagnation were becoming too much to tolerate,
so they decided to leave the country.

Tifrere brought his wife, Elsea, and joined others from all around the city
hoping to get to Miami.

They set out on foot in the dead of night, from the coal-blackened docks of
the wharf, across a vast dump -- a no-man's land of refuse, where his
brother would soon rest eternally -- to the narrow spit of sand to meet the
boat.

It was a blue and white sailboat -- wood, not too dilapidated, with a sail
and a small outboard motor.

When everybody got aboard, Sano said, a gang of 12 men appeared out of
nowhere and demanded their money. One other witness confirmed his account.
Everyone complied with the demand, Sano said. But still the gang opened fire
with 9mm automatic weapons.

Sano jumped into the water and swam hundreds of yards east into the darkness
and disappeared into the slum. His brother and his brother's wife were
killed, he said.

NO INVESTIGATION

But there are no reports, no police investigations, nothing to put hard
facts on the massacre. In Haiti, no line is straight, no transaction
confirmed.

The captain is in hiding.

A man in a canoe fished out some of the dead. A group of young men dug a
hole and threw seven bodies in it, including Tifrere, Sano said.

Sano now stays in a concrete room in Wharf Jérémie big enough to fit a bed,
but said he is lost without his big brother.

''It hurts because I don't have anyone else,'' Sano said.

The women who lost their loved ones are facing an even more dire crisis.

Exana Nelson, a 33-year-old mother of six, said her husband, Wesner, got on
the boat without telling her. A day later, she found his body on the beach
and took it to the morgue.

''I didn't have any money, so maybe they just threw it away,'' she said.

She will forever live with the lingering question about whether her husband
planned to ditch his family forever or just hoped to get some work in
Florida and support them.

''Only God knows,'' she said.

SQUALID DISTRICT

In Wharf Jérémie, which sits next to the capital's seaport area, thousands
of Haitians live in uncertainty and wretched squalor.

The roads are swaths of dirt and burned trash -- flattened plastic bottles,
cans, broken shoes, shreds of cloth, bone and cobs of corn -- anything the
pigs cannot eat and humans cannot use for shelter.

At a nameless school, the teachers don't have enough bits of tarp for a
roof, so they have tied up threadbare blankets to buy them a few extra
minutes in a downpour.

''We need a roof,'' said Pastor Heraire on Wednesday, in a tone strikingly
matter-of-fact in the face of the obvious.

But life is not absolute despair. Heraire had a fresh box of chalk, and for
that he was happy. The children, in little dresses and clean T-shirts,
smiled at a white visitor. 'Blanc! Blanc! Blanc!'' they chanted.

Even in the aftermath of the massacre, people go about their lives and hope
for the best.

Women gather their children to go to the clinic on Wednesdays. Men walk to
the wharf, hoping to earn a few pennies loading sacks of coal onto the cargo
ships.

'Down here someone could find an absolute, cruddy piece of plastic on the
ground, and say, `This is my lucky day. I can plug the hole in my roof,' ''
said Father Rick, a priest and physician who set up a clinic here. ``Even in
a disgraceful, absolutely inhumane setting, their want generates a vibrancy
in life.''

BAGGING THE DEAD

Father Rick, who didn't want to use his last name, drives around the
neighborhood with body bags. Because Haitian law requires the police to
inspect a body before it can be transported to a morgue, he bags the corpses
and leaves them on the side of the road, even though he knows no police will
come.

Usually, the residents come later and set the body on fire to prevent the
spread of diseases.

Residents here say local gangs, as well as the pro-Aristide militants known
as chimres from the neighboring slum of Cité Soleil, are responsible for
many of the killings, including the Wharf Jérémie massacre.

But such things are never clear. Last week, at least half a dozen looters
were shot as they ransacked the port, having broken through the fence from
the Wharf Jérémie neighborhood. The bodies were left for the pigs.

`CULTURE OF DEATH'

On Wednesday, Father Rick came across one body -- the almost headless man on
the highway. He dragged him to the shoulder, bagged him and said a prayer as
dozens of onlookers watched. The next day, the body was still there, ravaged
by animals.

''It's hard for people in the First World to understand,'' he explained
later. ``It's such a culture of death here. It's everywhere. I could drive
around picking up dead bodies all day.''

_________________________________________________________________
Learn how to help protect your privacy and prevent fraud online at Tech
Hacks & Scams. http://special.msn.com/msnbc/techsafety.armx