23455: Lemieux: NYTimes: Storm-Battered Haiti's Endless Crises Deepen (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JD Lemieux <lxhaiti@yahoo.com>

October 16, 2004
Storm-Battered Haiti's Endless Crises Deepen
New York Times
By DEBORAH SONTAG and LYDIA POLGREEN

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Oct. 12 - Marguerite
Dorima, seven months pregnant in a faded yellow
sundress, sloshed through the muddy, fetid waters
that still occupied the heart of Gonaïves last
weekend, three weeks after Tropical Storm Jeanne
provoked flash floods that killed some 1,900
people and left 900 missing and presumed dead.

With one hand on her white lace head scarf and
the other on her bulging belly, Ms. Dorima
maneuvered the slippery muck with the aid of
makeshift bridges made of splintery boards and
discarded plastic jugs. She was determined to
make it to a food distribution center to get rice
and beans to last her family of eight through
another week.

But there would be no handouts that day. In an
act of supreme political miscalculation, the
daily distribution of food had been suspended
because Haiti's provisional president and prime
minister were coming to town to mourn the victims
of the tropical storm.

On learning this, Ms. Dorima sighed and peered at
the white tanks encircling the city's imposing
cathedral, where a "symbolic Mass" was to about
to take place for the dead who had been
unceremoniously buried, together with some goats
and cows, in a mass grave at the edge of town.
Ms. Dorima was grieving for her 7-year-old niece,
Jean-Claudine, but she had not known about the
memorial service and, exhausted, did not attend.

Few did. Instead, a large, ragtag group gathered
outside to shout its frustration with the
caretaker government's response to the disaster.
Their chants of "Liars! Thieves!" drowned out the
worshipers singing "Take pity on me, Lord, take
pity on your people." And as the politicians flew
back to the capital after failing to audibly
address the crowd, the angry men vented their
rage by burning tires and shooting.

The storm's devastation of Gonaïves, Haiti's
third-largest city, has exposed the continuing
fragility of Haiti seven months after President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, facing a mounting revolt
by former military officers and rebels, resigned
under international pressure.

In the wake of the storm, a surge of bloody
unrest in the slums of Port-au-Prince, the
capital, has laid bare the country's continuing
volatility, too. The violence grew out of
demonstrations by Mr. Aristide's supporters to
mark the Sept. 30 anniversary of a military coup
that toppled him during his first term in office,
and some of it has been especially grisly. A
former military official's headless, castrated
body was left to decompose near the capital's
port last week.

This week, tensions escalated even further, when
former military officials, who now control
several provincial towns despite the fact that
their army was disbanded in 1995, pledged to
gather in the capital to confront the violence.
With new pro-Aristide demonstrations scheduled
for Saturday, Port-au-Prince was bracing for a
fresh round of bloodshed over the weekend.

These twin crises, natural and political,
underscore the immensity of the underlying
challenges that the country faces. Haiti's
ravaged environment would require decades of
sustained effort to repair, and reforming the
culture of impunity in which the ruthless armed
gangs thrive would require a long-term
international commitment to lifting Haiti, the
poorest country in the hemisphere, out of its
despair.

But, as is often the case, Haiti's emergencies
take precedence, and the emergencies now are in
Gonaïves, where international aid efforts have
been hampered by widespread looting, and in
Port-au-Prince, where the specter of a direct
battle between former military officers and
militant supporters of Mr. Aristide looms.

Haiti has effectively been in international
receivership since Feb. 29, when Mr. Aristide,
the country's first democratically elected
president, was placed on a Pentagon jet into
exile. But its transitional government, even with
the bolstering of a United Nations peacekeeping
force and more than $1 billion in pledged
international aid, is inherently weak just as the
destructive forces here are strong. International
officials here fear that the current unrest could
profoundly undermine the world's fledgling - and
some here say halfhearted - effort to steer Haiti
toward reconstruction, reconciliation and
elections in 2005.

Of primary concern, there are still large numbers
of weapons on the streets. The American marines
who, with French legionnaires, took over Haiti's
security after Mr. Aristide's ouster did restore
order, but they did not undertake a serious
disarmament effort before turning security
control over to United Nations peacekeepers in
June. So far the United Nations troops have not
done so either.

Gérard Latortue, a Florida resident who was
chosen as Haiti's interim prime minister by an
American-backed council of prominent Haitians in
March, recently described how he begged Secretary
of State Colin L. Powell not to withdraw the
marines all at once. "Unfortunately, the
Americans preferred to send their troops
elsewhere, forgetting their neighborhood," Mr.
Latortue said in a speech in Miami.

Many other countries dragged their heels on
committing the forces that they pledged to the
United Nations. The peacekeeping force will be
outnumbered by armed thugs even at its promised
strength of 8,300 soldiers and civilian police
officers. But the force is still not even at
half-strength.

This greatly troubles officials in Haiti, since
development efforts hinge on security.

"I'm afraid of a continued deterioration in the
security situation," said Adama Guindo, resident
coordinator for the United Nations in Haiti. "The
international community must remain engaged to
help stabilize this country. Haiti cannot live on
emergency aid alone."

The Rising Waters

In the early evening of Sept. 18, Héber
Pélissier, president of the local chamber of
commerce, stood on the second-floor balcony of
his home and watched in horror as the waters
suddenly rose.

"The water took several cars with it, and then
the panic started," he said. "It began to get
dark, and I heard cries: "Help me, I am going to
die, save me, I am drowning.' ''

As water swallowed the first story of his house,
bodies began floating by and he felt helpless, he
said. He gathered his family around him, and they
prayed.

"I had this belief deep inside me that there is a
limit to the fury of God," Mr. Pélissier, a
broad-shouldered man with salt-and-pepper hair,
said last weekend, choking back a single sob. "I
said to God, 'Many have died here. This is it. We
don't want any more to die.' "

Mr. Pélissier speculated that God was punishing
his town for its perpetual leading role in
Haiti's violent history. Gonaïves was the
birthplace of Haiti's independence 200 years ago,
the seat of the uprising against the 30-year
Duvalier government and the kickoff zone for the
revolt against Mr. Aristide.

Recently, Gonaïves, a city of 250,000 that was
once a flourishing cotton center, has been a
lawless haven for gangs and rebels, so turbulent
that its schools have essentially been shuttered
since November 2003. While some places in Haiti
have environmental and disaster plans, Gonaïves
is not one of them. "Nature decided that it was
payback time for the bad management of ecological
problems in the Gonaïves area," said Prime
Minister Latortue, a native of the city.

Extreme environmental degradation, especially
deforestation, has made Haiti extremely
susceptible to natural disaster. When rainwater
rushes downstream unfettered by trees, catchment
areas or drains, it sets off deadly flash floods.


It did not take a hurricane or even a
particularly strong tropical storm to wash away
or destroy thousands of homes in Gonaïves. Many
still standing are surrounded by moats of
chocolate-colored water, and many residents are
living on their roofs amid crushed bed frames and
brightly hued piles of sodden clothing. Tens of
thousands are completely homeless, like Ms.
Dorima's sister, whose husband left her after
their little girl was "lost to the waters."

"All she has left to her name is one pair of
panties," Ms. Dorima said.

Pigs roam the muddy streets, nosing around in
piles of rotting garbage. Many alleyways have
become filthy canals, turning Gonaïves into a
putrid version of Venice. On the outskirts,
almost all crops were destroyed and livestock
drowned.

Noel Madiro Morilus, an agriculture official,
traveled to the cathedral on Saturday to "launch
an urgent S O S" for Terre-Neuve, his region of
some 25,000 north of Gonaïves that had yet to
receive any aid or official visits.

"Please get us help," he urged an American
journalist, who brought his concerns to a United
Nations official's attention. "We have hundreds
of homeless, many are running constant fevers,
the children have bumps on their skin. Seventeen
people have died, and more are dying. We are
drinking unpurified water and we have nothing to
eat."

A Spike in Violence

Rival armed groups and gangs began flexing their
muscles over the summer, as crimes like
carjacking increased, a full-dress military
parade took place in the capital and pro-Aristide
militants staged a brief showdown with
international forces in Cité-Soleil, a
Port-au-Prince slum.

The spike in violence, however, began precisely
on Sept. 30, when supporters of Mr. Aristide
marched to demand his return.

Mr. Aristide and his wife just accepted
appointments as research fellows at the
University of South Africa, indicating they have
settled in there. But he has said he was forced
to leave Haiti, and his supporters - the
slum-based populist movement called Lavalas,
which means cleansing flood - want Mr. Aristide,
a former priest, to finish out his second term in
office, which was supposed to end in 2005.

The Sept. 30 march began peacefully, but gunfire
erupted, setting off bloody battles between the
Haitian police and Aristide supporters. Each side
blamed the other for starting the violence, which
has created a worrisome climate of insecurity
ever since.

Like Tropical Storm Jeanne, which hit a city
where no one was really in charge, the violence
has underscored the tenuousness of the interim
government's control. Hastily assembled in March
under American supervision, the government has no
political power base, except in the tiny elite,
which considers it professional.

Mr. Latortue, 70, an impeccably dressed man who
keeps his nails well buffed, is a self-described
technocrat who moved back to Haiti from Boca
Raton, Fla., to take up his post. In a fiercely
divided society with more than 90 political
parties, Mr. Latortue, a former United Nations
official, says he is nonpartisan. "We just want a
national reconciliation until elections can take
place in 2005," he said.

But the government has come to be seen by many
here, including some international officials, as
partial toward the former military and
anti-Lavalas. Mr. Latortue himself saluted a
former rebel leader as a "freedom fighter," and,
in a hasty, overnight trial, his government
exonerated another rebel leader of his
notoriously violent past.

Mr. Latortue's government has allowed former
military officers and rebels to take charge or
remain in charge of several towns, including
Petit-Goâve, where, dressed in their old
uniforms, former soldiers have installed
themselves in the police station. The government
also appeased former soldiers by signing an
agreement to create a bureau of former military
officials, pay pensions, hand out security jobs
and study the idea of reviving a Haitian army.

In exchange, the former soldiers agreed to give
up their weapons. But they have not been pressed
to do so. And this week, ex-soldiers who helped
topple Mr. Aristide were issuing increasingly
bellicose statements about the violence roiling
the capital, boasting of new recruits and plans
to march on the capital.

"Someone needs to take control," Guy Philippe,
36, a rebel leader who is considered one of the
most influential former military officials, said
in an interview last week. But he also said he
himself was "not in the mood" to pick up arms
again.

Some international officials here believe that
Mr. Latortue is handling the former military with
kid gloves while others see it as finesse. But
many are concerned about what they see as the
current Haitian government's tendency to vilify
Lavalas, which still has significant popular
support. This, they say, is creating antagonism
rather than courting compromise.

Among Mr. Aristide's supporters, passions have
been inflamed by the recent arrests of several
Lavalas leaders. Louis Gérald Gilles, one of
them, said in an interview after his release that
he saw his arrest as part of a concerted effort
to discredit and eliminate Lavalas.

"They interrogated us and suggested we were the
intellectual authors of the violence," Dr.
Gilles, a surgeon, said. "But we are not. Every
sector in our society has its extremists,
including Lavalas. Every sector uses guns to
destroy democracy in Haiti. Lavalas remains the
most popular party. It is unwise to treat us as
the root of all evil because it is a way of
disdaining the people."

Caught in the middle of these roiling emotions is
the risk-adverse, understaffed United Nations
peacekeeping force.

Starting last week, United Nations troops and
Haitian police officers carried out joint raids
aimed at flushing out militants. They arrested
more than 120 people. But they seized few
weapons, at least partly because some Haitian
police officers leaked news of the raids before
they took place, Gen. Augusto Heleno Pereira of
Brazil, the commander of the United Nations
peacekeepers here, said in an interview.

Jean-Claude Bajeux, who served in Mr. Aristide's
first cabinet but later turned against him, said
the joint operations were not serving any real
purpose if they did not take guns off the
streets. "You have to block a sector for 24
hours, shut it down, then go from house to
house," Mr. Bajeux said. "If there is no will or
appetite to do this, then the U.N. should leave."

But General Heleno said that a forceful
disarmament operation in a congested shantytown
was a delicate task, and that he did not want to
increase tensions or cause civilian deaths. He
would prefer to persuade people to give up their
arms rather than to take them by force, anyway,
he said.

A Struggle for Food

In Gonaïves, the distribution of food has created
heartrending scenes. Large crowds of women wait
shoulder to shoulder for hours under a broiling
sun, pushed up against barbed wire and surrounded
by peacekeeping troops, some in riot gear. Faint
from heat and hunger, the women jostle and
tumble, desperate to get their rations before the
day's supply runs out.

>From the start of the relief effort, supply
trucks have struggled over severely damaged
roads, fording a three-foot-deep lake at the edge
of town. They have been stopped by flaming
barricades and have suffered considerable
looting. Last week, the violence in
Port-au-Prince closed the port for several days,
blocking aid shipments.

CARE officials said that their food supplies were
dwindling and that, with some peacekeeping troops
heading back to Port-au-Prince to deal with the
violence there, they were very concerned about
security. They were planning to cut their food
distribution to two sites from four.

Last weekend, they did not distribute any food at
all. On Saturday, the local government decided
that it needed to divert security to protect the
politicians and on Sunday, local officials said
they were "too tired from the president's visit,"
Joseph Jouthe of CARE said.

During the Mass, the president and the prime
minister sat stiffly side by side in black
armchairs in front of the pews. Afterward, they
tried to address the restive crowd outside. They
ascended to a balcony and the figurehead
president, Boniface Alexandre, began to speak
through a small, tinny loudspeaker. He was
inaudible, and the people chanted, "We can't hear
you."

The two provisional politicians then descended,
ringed by security. After another brief,
unsuccessful effort to communicate using the
inadequate megaphone, they climbed in their cars
and drove off, effectively leaving a former rebel
leader in charge. Before long, tires were flaming
and gunshots rang through the air.

Through the afternoon, in the tense streets of a
city that has sparked so many rebellions, young
men drummed on empty water jugs and chanted the
songs they used to sing against Mr. Aristide,
changing the target to vent their latest fury.

"Whether he wants to or not," they shouted, again
and again, "Boniface must go."




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