20416: (Chamberlain) Dead appear and disappear mysteriously in Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

     By Ibon Villelabeitia

    PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, March 15 (Reuters) - A dead man lay in the
middle of a road in a garbage-strewn slum of Port-au-Prince for two days
and two nights.
     No one knew who the dead man was or how he was killed. One morning his
shoes vanished. The next, his body was gone.
     The dead have a strange way of appearing and disappearing in Haiti,
where the sight of a dumped body has long been used as a tool to terrorize
political opponents and voodoo beliefs hold that the spirit flees into
another body after death.
     No one knows how many people have been killed or where they might be
buried since a revolt that helped oust President Jean-Bertrand Aristide two
weeks ago plunged the impoverished Caribbean nation into violence.
     Statistics of people killed since bloodshed began on Feb. 5 have
fallen victim to chaos. Estimates by rights groups range from 200 to
several hundred. Many killings occurred in the provinces, where relatives
are afraid of taking their dead to hospitals for fear of persecution and
bury them in secret.
     "It is impossible to come up with a credible number. There is no legal
identification and the service has collapsed. There are no judges, no
police, nobody to do the job," said Simon Pluess of the International
Committee for the Red Cross in Haiti.
     In the capital Port-au-Prince, anonymous bodies appear in the streets
almost every dawn. They sometimes lie untouched for days, the traffic
flowing slowly by them but not stopping.
     Merite Merilien, head of the cramped morgue in Port-au-Prince, said he
has lost count of how many bodies have been brought in over the last month.
He said that at the peak of the violence, the number of bodies reached 40 a
day.
     "Most of the times, the relatives don't claim them so we have to bury
them. We have no electricity, no water. I have not been paid for a month,"
said Merilien, a man in his 60s with his two front teeth missing.
     As he spoke in a stifling office of peeling white walls he shuffled a
deck of worn-out playing cards, immune to the stench that wafted in from
the primitive, unair-conditioned morgue.
     Violent death is not unexpected in Haiti, a country that has seen 32
coups since its independence 200 years ago and has a long history of
military juntas and death squads.
     U.S. Marines spearheading an international peace mission say they have
killed at least six people in battles. But they admit that helping the Red
Cross retrieve the bodies has been difficult. In some cases, U.S. Marines
say, bodies of gunmen vanish after nighttime shootouts, leaving behind only
casings and a trail of blood leading off into the labyrinth of slums.
     "Where do the bodies go? I don't know. This is a very complex issue,"
said Marine spokesman Maj. Richard Crusan.
     According to voodoo beliefs, after death the spirit reincarnates in
another body, like a snake that sheds its old skin and grows a new one. The
spirits of the dead inhabit the underwater with Baron Samedi, the Lord of
the Death, who visits the living to offer advice and wisdom.
     "Once dead, the body has no value," said Max Beauvoir,  a 69-year-old
"hougan," or voodoo priest. "The real value of the human being lies within
his spirit. Your spirit makes you beautiful or horrible," said Beauvoir,
sitting in his white linen trousers in his voodoo temple outside
Port-au-Prince.
     Beauvoir, a gentle-mannered man who speaks an elegant French, said
Haiti's history is steeped in violence but that once the killings stop and
a new government is in place, the country will emerge rejuvenated.
     "Once all this is over, the spirits know they will have the last
word."