20564: (Hermantin) Miami-Herald-Haitian hillside a dumping ground for bodies (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Posted on Fri, Mar. 19, 2004

CRISIS IN HAITI

Haitian hillside a dumping ground for bodies

BY JOE MOZINGO

jmozingo@herald.com


TITANYEN, Haiti - Near an old car axle on a dry hillside, the small
bleached-white skull of a child rests under a thorny bush. Nearby a pelvis
is still wrapped in the tattered elastic band of a boy's underwear.

Bones are scattered for hundreds of yards -- teeth, femurs, vertebrae,
skulls -- half covered, like the broken bottles and car parts, in the fine
red dust of this eroded coastline.

This is where the main morgue in Port-au-Prince, 20 miles away, brings the
destitute and unclaimed, the thousands of people who die every year with no
means for a private funeral.

Administrators at the General Hospital, which runs the morgue, say they make
sure they properly bury the bodies. But some say otherwise.

Milo Austan, 31, said he has seen the trucks from the General Hospital come
and go for years, dumping up to 40 bodies at once, occasionally burning
them, but no one taking the time to break the hardened ground.

''They could come and dig holes for the bodies, but they don't,'' said
Austan, who wanders these empty hills looking for sticks to make brooms.
``The bodies just get eaten by the dogs.''

A foreign priest who has visited the area for 16 years has also reported
improper burials -- with bones and skulls from bodies brought by the General
Hospital.

The failure of Haiti's government to attend to the basic needs of the poor
could not be illustrated in starker terms.

Administrators at the government-run hospital acknowledge that thousands of
bodies are brought here every year. Last Sunday, after weeks of political
violence in the capital had added to the corpses piling up in the morgue,
three trucks rumbled off in the middle of the night, carrying more than 700
bodies to Titanyen.

The morgue's coordinator, Rony Sterling, said his workers used a tractor to
dig a ditch and cover the bodies with at least six feet of dirt. ``It's a
common grave for everyone.''

Sadly, that is the best most poor urban Haitians can hope for. The worst is
scattered across the hillsides by animals, wind and rain.

The cost of a burial plot in a cemetery is beyond the means of many in
Port-au-Prince. And if no one comes to claim the bodies from the hospital,
as is often the case, they are simply loaded into trucks and taken to
Titanyen.

''There are two categories of dead people in the morgue,'' said Pierre
Lumene, the new hospital administrator. ``Those whose parents come to pick
them up and those who don't. We have to get rid of those who don't.''

Exana Nelson, 33, brought her husband to the hospital after he was shot in a
slum of Port-au-Prince. She asked if there would be a funeral.

''The man at the morgue told me to come back later and see.'' But with no
money, she knew the answer. She never went back.

The morgue is not a place anyone wants to go. To see a loved one, stripped
of clothes and any shred of dignity, heaved by a man with rubber gloves onto
a pile of other corpses, is beyond comprehension.

There are no gurneys, stainless steel drawers or toe tags. Just heat, flies
and smell.

The adult bodies land on top of each other, faces crammed into the concrete
floor, limbs twisted, genitals exposed, eyes covered in a postmortem glaze.

The babies get the shelves. They lie side-by-side with their legs and feet
draped over the edge, like dolls waiting to be played with.

A worker steps on the adults to get to something. He grabs one of the babies
by the arm -- a girl in a blue jumpsuit with a pink Brontosaurus on it --
and casually flings her on another shelf.

A man there to identify his relative has to watch his dead relative be
dragged over the concrete dam at the door.

On Wednesday, there were 250 bodies in the room, said Merilien Mérité, the
morgue's manager. Before the last truckload, there were more than 900, he
said.

If the morgue is the beginning of a bureaucratic horror show, Austan the
broom-maker will show you the end.

A quiet man with a broad smile, he takes a bus from the capital's slum of
Cité Soleil to search for his sticks.

Just 10 or so miles from the suburbs of Port-au-Prince, the place is
desolate, striking in its austerity.

Dry, shady canyons wend back into hills of thorny scrub, overlooking the
cobalt waters of the Gulf of Gonave.

Route One cuts along the coast, and from it, endless dirt roads branch up
into the hills or down to the beach, silent and lonely dumping grounds
within sight of Port-au-Prince, where the well-to-do rest in first-rate
mortuaries and cemeteries.

''Whenever the truck comes from the General Hospital, they bring them
here,'' Austan said.

Austan trudged toward the draw of a canyon. As the vegetation gave way to
scorched earth and trash, the bones began to appear. Two skulls, three
pelvic bones, dozens of femurs and tibias, fragments of a jaw with good
teeth. Hundreds in all.

They were so dispersed, buried in trash and half-covered in dirt, there was
no way to estimate the number of dead.

In the middle of the clearing was an open well, where Austan said they had
dumped more bodies and gallons of formaldehyde.

As he walked from clearing to clearing, the same scene repeated over and
over. He covered at least 200 yards in one direction, and bones could still
be seen.

All in all, Austan guided The Herald to three separate areas where bodies
were dumped along some five miles of coast between Sources Puantes to the
south and Titanyen to the north.

He said he has seen the General Hospital trucks leave the corpses on the
ground, without proper burial.

The Rev. Jean Hanssens, of the Catholic Church's Peace and Justice
Committee, took a report from the foreign priest who said he has seen bones
and skulls here many times over the 16 years he has been coming to pray for
the dead.

The priest reported that he assumed the bodies had been buried -- but so
shallow that pigs and other animals just rooted them all up.

He added that the priest went back to one spot in November and did find some
real graves.

Because it's deserted, Titanyen has also long been a place for clandestine
burials and extra-judicial executions.

Sterling, the morgue coordinator, said he could not guide The Herald to the
spot where the 700 were buried Sunday ``because it is too dangerous.''

``This place is where they go and kill people.''

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