25295: Durban (news): NY Times article on Kidnapping (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Lance Durban <lpdurban@yahoo.com>

Haiti's New Scourge:  Kidnappings that Frighten the Rich and
Poor

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, June 6
She is a bank teller.  Her husband delivers air mail packages
for DHL.  In a country where about 70 percent of adults have no
jobs, that means Gehanne and Jacques-Henri Beaulieu are worth a
small fortune.

On Tuesday, it was taken.

As Mrs. Beaulieu arrived for work on Tuesday, in broad daylight,
on the busy Rue des Miracles, three men carrying long guns
forced their way into her car. Within the hour, they called her
husband by cellphone and demanded $20,000.

"If you do not give us the money," a voice said, at once gentle
and cold, "we will execute her."  Emptying his bank accounts,
Mr. Beaulieu came up with only $2,700. He began calling friends
and relatives, many in the United States, asking desperately for
money.

"I asked everybody I knew, 'Please help me get my wife back,' "
he said less than two hours after the kidnapping, still in the
heat of panic, after friends of his family helped a reporter
contact him. "If I get her back, I am going to send her away
from here."

"This country is out of control," he said. "No one is safe."
Indeed, more than a year after the start of yet another
conflict-ridden political transition, it is hard to tell who, if
anyone, has taken charge in Haiti.

After an armed rebellion, months of violent political clashes
here in the capital, and heavy pressure by the United States
forced President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from office in February
2004, the world pledged some $1.4 billion in aid, and the United
Nations sent more than 8,000 peacekeepers to help a shaky
interim government bring order to this, the poorest nation in
the Western Hemisphere.

But chaos still reigns. In just the past two weeks, gunmen fired
on a United States Embassy van, and the State Department ordered
all nonessential personnel to leave the country. A French
honorary counsel, Paul-Henri Mourral, was shot to death on the
road between Port-au-Prince and Cap Haitien on Tuesday.
Also on Tuesday, gunmen chased police officers into a popular
market, and then set the market on fire, killing at least 10
people. And on Saturday, as many as seven people were killed and
six houses burned as the police struck back against gangs in
Bel-Air, a violent slum. It does not take long on the streets
here to see that Haiti's problems go deep and wide. Even
supporters of the interim government describe it as far too weak
to instill confidence and negotiate peace among the country's
disparate political factions. Foreign observers say the
international community has failed to undertake the long, hard
and dangerous work needed to rebuild Haiti, almost from scratch.
Many Haitians openly wonder if there is enough money and
manpower in the world to do that.

By the accounts of diplomats and political observers, human
rights activists and business people, this remains a country
poised for implosion, with almost all its institutions ravaged
from the inside out by corruption. Ruthless mobs have risen in
their place, led by drug traffickers, former military officers,
corrupt police officers and street thugs. They have set off a
devastating wave of murders, carjackings, armed robberies and
rapes.

Kidnappings are the latest scourge.

Like most crimes, kidnappings tend to go unreported. But
authorities in the interim government and foreign diplomats
estimate that 6 to 12 kidnappings occur in this city every day.
Among them are high-profile cases, like the recent abductions of
an Indian businessman and of a Russian contractor to the United
Nations. Some authorities said they had received reports of
vegetable vendors being kidnapped for $30.

An overwhelming majority of the cases seem aimed at the middle
and working classes. Afraid to go to the police, most families
negotiate with kidnappers on their own. Mrs. Beaulieu's family
negotiated for hours by cellphone with a kidnapper who called
himself "commandant."

About 4 p.m. on Tuesday, her relatives told him they had $4,000.
The commandant said he would take it, and he told Michel Lapin,
39, Mrs. Beaulieu's brother-in-law, to come alone after
nightfall to deliver the ransom at a house in Bel-Air.
When Mr. Lapin got there, he said, four men shone flashlights in
his eyes. One shoved a gun into his stomach; another grabbed the
bag from his hands and began counting the money.

Then the commandant emerged. Apparently unconcerned about being
identifiable, he looked Mr. Lapin in the eye, thanked him for
the money and said Mrs. Beaulieu would be released within a few
hours.

Sobbing, she was freed about 8:30 p.m. at a street corner near
Bel-Air.

"No one is safe anymore," said Kako Bourjolly, a family friend.
"This is not a rich family. This is not a political family. They
are simple Haitian people, with simple lives. But now danger is
outside all our doors."

A report released last week by the Brussels-based International
Crisis Group laid the blame for most of Haiti's violence on
spoilers, including drug traffickers, who are well-connected to
the political system but have no real allegiances. In a news
conference on Friday, Prime Minister Gérard Latortue said many
of the leaders of the gangs inciting violence were Haitians who
had spent time in American prisons.

"The United States is exporting its crime problems to Haiti,"
Mr. Latortue said. "Many of the criminals in Haiti learned to be
criminals in the United States, and when they are deported here,
they bring those skills with them."

Danielle Magloire, a spokeswoman for Haiti's temporary governing
group, the so-called Council of the Wise, agreed. "There's no
real ideological fighting in Haiti," she said in an interview.

"The criminals here are not political activists. They are
mercenaries."

Still, other observers said, the violence in Haiti has its roots
in politics. Human Rights Watch said in a letter to the United
Nations last month that former members of the military,
including many led by those who helped oust Mr. Aristide, were
responsible for rampant abuses in the provinces, including
illegal detentions and extortion.

Here in the capital, poor slums like Bel-Air and Cité Soleil,
dominated by pro-Aristide gangs called chimères, remain almost
impenetrable to the police.

John Currelly, a Canadian who represents the Washington-based
Pan American Development Foundation, was kidnapped on May 24 by
five men carrying cheap pistols, some of them held together by
duct tape. He was released 16 hours later. Most of the men who
held him had images of Mr. Aristide taped to the butts of their
rifles.

In all, human rights groups report, more than 700 people,
including seven peacekeepers, have been killed in the last eight
months. The Haitian National Police - an estimated 3,000
officers assigned to cover a population approximately equal to
that of New York City, over a geographical area 35 times the
size - have said they do not have the kinds of weapons and
training they need. The United Nations peacekeeping force has
more than 6,000 soldiers, but they have been criticized here and
in Washington for failing to dismantle and disarm the gangs.
The United States ambassador to Haiti, James B. Foley, said in
an interview that the Brazilian-led United Nations peacekeepers
seemed crippled by understandable concerns about casualties
among their own as well as among the people they have been sent
to protect.

Mr. Foley said Haiti - where most people live on $1 a day, more
than 40 percent of children are malnourished, and childbirth is
the second leading cause of death among women - faced myriad
challenges as it struggled for stability. But, he said, unless
the government took control of the streets, it would make no
real progress on any other front.

He said that police reforms were crucial to fighting crime, and
that the United States was considering a one-time waiver of its
ban on the sale of weapons to Haiti in order to approve a
request by the Haitian government to buy $1.7 million in
equipment for law enforcement.

"Haiti is close to a failed state," Mr. Foley said. "Many people
have looked at the current mission as Haiti's last chance to
have a huge international effort to help it become
self-sustaining."

When asked why the United States had not committed troops, he
said that it had sent troops last year and would spend some $200
million helping Haiti this year alone. But he pointed out that
the United States was also occupied with its international
campaign against terrorism.

The growing insecurity in the capital has raised new fears.
Authorities warn they may not be able to protect their people
from the coming hurricane season, much less organize them for
national elections scheduled to begin in October. The main roads
from the capital to the international airport and seaport are
considered unsafe. The United States and several other
countries, including Britain, Australia and Canada, have issued
warnings in recent weeks about an increase in attacks against
foreigners and cautioned their citizens not to travel here.
Schools and businesses in the center of the city have closed.
Well-to-do Haitians with relatives abroad have begun to leave
the country. Those who stay say they are increasingly afraid to
leave their homes.

Jean-Gérard Gilbert, the director of a private high school in
the city's center, was abducted at 6:30 a.m. Wednesday at the
school's front gate. His wife, Maryse Gilbert, said he called
her half an hour later.

"I've been kidnapped," he told her. "They shot me two times in
my feet."  Then Mrs. Gilbert said the kidnappers snatched the
phone and demanded $200,000. "Where am I supposed to get that
kind of money?" she asked them.

After hours of negotiations, Mrs. Gilbert said, she and the
kidnappers reached an agreement on the ransom. She would not
reveal the amount, but said that relatives had delivered the
money, and that the kidnappers promised to release her husband.
At 8 p.m. Wednesday, they called to say that her husband was in
a coma.

On Thursday morning, Mr. Gilbert was still missing. His students
held a demonstration outside their school to demand his safe
return.

A gunman drove by and opened fire on them. Two students were
wounded and taken to the hospital.

Mrs. Gilbert remained alone at the school on Thursday afternoon,
waiting for her cellphone to ring.

"I don't know where to go," she said. "I don't know what to do."