23276: Slavin: SP Times Reportage Gonaives (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Patrick Slavin <jps390@yahoo.com>

Storm, strife add up to 'infernal year'
By DAVID ADAMS, Times Latin America Correspondent
Published September 26, 2004

http://www.sptimes.com/2004/09/26/Worldandnation/Storm__strife_add_up_.shtml

GONAIVES - First the Charriot family home was shot up
by gunmen in January. Then it was set on fire.
Just to add to their woes, Tropical Storm Jeanne
flooded the house with 7 feet of water last weekend.
Whether it's political turmoil or Mother Nature - or
both - there seems to be no escaping misfortune for
the 220,000 inhabitants of this stricken city.
"It's been an infernal year," said a mud-spattered
Marie-Lauren Charriot, 60, standing outside her
flooded home on Rue Christophe, one of the city's main
streets.
"We've been hit from all sides," adds the stoic woman
who wears her hair tucked up in a black knit hair net.
"I've no idea what comes next."
As the floodwaters subside and a major international
relief effort gets under way, the scale of the
disaster remains overwhelming. Some 1,500 people are
believed to have died, with hundreds more missing.
Thousands are homeless, without food or water.
But the devastation wrought by Jeanne is only the
latest in a series of blows that have turned the lives
of the city's residents upside down in the last nine
months.
Their fate is especially cruel for the people of
Gonaives. It was meant to be a year of celebration,
marking the city's special place in Haitian history as
the birthplace of independence from France 200 years
ago.
Instead, the anniversary was marred by political
violence. In January a bloody rebellion against the
government led to a month-long siege of the city.
There was something to celebrate - at least for
residents who opposed the government - when president
Jean-Bertrand Aristide went into exile in late
February.
But the relative peace that returned after his fall
was literally only the calm before the storm.
On Rue Christophe, events have left no one untouched.
Up and down the street every resident has a story,
providing a microcosm of what the city has gone
through this year as it lurched from one crisis to the
next.
January actually began on a high note for Charriot
with a homecoming. Her son, Casimir, arrived in the
city Jan. 7 with his wife to take up a job as a police
inspector. The couple had just gotten married the
month before.
But events quickly turned ugly. Political tension had
been mounting for some time with street demonstrations
against Aristide. Residents were angry over the
increasingly repressive tactics of the local
government.
Much of their rage was directed at the local police
station that had been taken over by a heavily-armed
special police unit of presidential guards sent from
the capital to restore order. Inspector Charriot was
shocked by the way his fellow officers were rounding
up opponents of the government, beating and torturing
them in their cells.
When he made his objections known, he became a target,
too.
One night in late January gunmen opened fire on the
house. Charriot believes they were local thugs sent by
police to intimidate her son. The family left town the
next day to seek refuge in the capital.
A few days later the city exploded in rebellion. Armed
rebels, calling themselves the Resistance Front,
attacked the police station and took over City Hall.
The rebels, a rag-tag bunch of local gang leaders,
went on a wild rampage. Police homes throughout the
city were ransacked and torched. None were spared,
including the Charriots' house and the family grocery
store out front.
The Gonaives rebellion quickly spread. Police in other
cities came under attack and the country fell into
chaos. Before the month was up, Aristide resigned and
left the country.
In June, Charriot returned to Gonaives to fix up their
home and reopen her store. Her son stayed behind in
Port-au-Prince, where he was reassigned to the
presidential palace. She finished repainting last
month.
The new paint job is now stained by the muddy water
almost all the way up the walls.
Many less fortunate neighbors lost their homes
completely. Crumpled remains of concrete and sheet
metal roofing lie all around. The Charriots' next-door
neighbor, Sonia Antoine, 35, lost her home and now
sleeps on the roof of a pick-up submerged in the mud.
Her five young children, who range in age from 4 to
12, huddle in the back. The hair of her youngest
children is tinged brown, one of the warning signs of
severe malnourishment.
Many homes left standing are still flooded six days
after the storm. Passers-by riding bicycles and mopeds
on Rue Christophe wear surgical paper masks against
the rising stench of human waste. With public
sanitation services busy collecting and burying the
dead in mass graves by the hundreds, no resources are
available for street cleaning.
With so many victims, some bodies were overlooked.
Down the street neighbors created a funeral pyre from
wood and tires to burn the body of a small,
unidentified girl after her body lay in the roadway
for four days.
Many complain that the relief effort is failing to
reach those most in need. Officials at CARE, one of
the U.S-based humanitarian agencies with a large base
in Gonaives, said Friday only 25 percent of the
population had received any food.
Even that may be optimistic. On Rue Christophe, almost
no one had received any assistance by week's end. Many
residents said they didn't want to fight for hand-outs
at poorly organized distribution points.
Relief officials also are concerned about conditions
in the northwest region of the country, one of the
most desolate and impoverished regions in the Western
hemisphere's poorest nation.
Ironically, aid workers were in the midst of preparing
a drought program for that region when Jeanne hit.
This year's harvest was lost when crucial rains failed
during the February planting season.
While Jeanne did not cause any major loss of life in
the northwest, "there are definitely going to be large
scale needs there as well," said Cecily Bryant, CARE's
assistant director in Haiti.
With aid agencies already overwhelmed by the disaster
in Gonaives, Bryant warned that hunger in the
northwest could also provoke another wave of mass
migration of boat people trying to reach Florida
shores.
In Gonaives, residents are already complaining that
Haiti's interim government is not doing enough to help
them. Some of their criticism is directed at the
country's transitional prime minister, Gerard
Latortue, a native son of Gonaives who was installed
after Aristide left. "He's forgotten his own people,"
said Kesner Simon, a law student on Rue Christophe who
participated in the anti-Aristide movement.
Recalling how government forces tried to quell the
city earlier in the year, schoolteacher Camilla
Fevren, 44, quipped that Aristide had conjured up
Jeanne's wrath as revenge for his downfall. "Aristide
tried to destroy us, but he couldn't do it," Fevren
said. "Jeanne completed the job for him."
© Copyright 2003 St. Petersburg Times. All rights
reserved
http://www.sptimes.com/2004/09/26/Worldandnation/Storm__strife_add_up_.shtml




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