27448: Hermantin(News)Haitian gang leaders rally hundreds of marchers in capital to dem (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

lhermantin@hotmail.com

Haitian gang leaders rally hundreds of marchers in capital to demand voting 
sites




By Tim Collie
South Florida Sun-Sentinel

February 2, 2006



PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti · Riding a motorcycle, wearing a crisp, white Tommy 
Hilfiger shirt and a gold crucifix, one of Haiti's best known gang bosses led 
hundreds of slum dwellers Wednesday to demand polling places for next week's 
national elections.

"People need to realize we're human beings too, not the animals they think we 
are,'' said Amaral Duclona, standing by his motorcycle in Cité Soleil, the 
bullet-pocked seaside slum where authorities say he runs drug and kidnap rings 
that have paralyzed the capital over the past year.

Chanting political slogans and shaking dozens of hands nearby were leaders of 
two other gangs, Evans Jean and Ti Blan, who also said they consider themselves 
political "militants," or Robin Hoods who steal from the wealthy elites who 
have long controlled lucrative industries.

"These poor people want the right to vote in these elections and if we don't 
get it, there won't be any elections worth having,'' said Duclona, 27, who grew 
up in Cité Soleil.

"If you are fighting to take the people out of misery in Haiti, they will 
always call you a gang leader."

Postponed four times in the past six months, the presidential and legislative 
elections are scheduled for Tuesday, nearly two years after President 
Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled the country during a bloody rebellion, and 
preparations are well under way.

Unable to maintain security in large sections of the capital, the interim 
government and the beleaguered 8,000-man U.N. military force say they cannot 
set up voting booths in Cité Soleil.

Hundreds have been killed and wounded over the past six months in battles 
between the slum's gangs and U.N. forces and outside gangs.

The slum is a bastion of support for Aristide's Lavalas Family Party and former 
president and Aristide ally Rene Preval, who polls show is the frontrunner for 
Tuesday's vote.

Instead, election officials are asking voters to walk miles outside of the slum 
to voting booths that will be set up for them in ostensibly safe industrial 
zones that ring Cité Soleil. Many residents think the plan is a way to prevent 
them from voting in large numbers.

"We all registered to vote inside Cité Soleil, and nobody was shot or injured 
during that process,'' said Dieusonnance Exavier, 57, a local merchant. "If 
they have to bring tanks inside here, then we'll climb in the tanks to vote."

Home to an estimated 300,000 people, Cité Soleil long has provided the criminal 
muscle for the country's fractious political parties.

Built on a fetid salt marsh in the 1960s, the slum originally was designed to 
be cheap housing for the Ton-Ton Macoutes, the private militiamen of dictator 
François "Papa Doc" Duvalier.

But as it became more crowded with poor refugees from eroding agricultural 
lands, Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, regularly tried to burn out 
its inhabitants. In the 1980s, grassroots religious leaders including the 
former priest Aristide and Gerard Jean-Juste mobilized the slum dwellers to 
demand their rights.

Aristide was elected president in 1990, ousted in a coup, and then returned to 
power in 1994 by a U.S.-led invasion.

He disbanded the army and began arming his supporters in gangs known as 
chimères, Creole for ghouls or monsters.

As they gained control over drug trafficking and attacked Aristide's political 
opponents, the elites who opposed Aristide began funding their own Cité Soleil 
gunmen.

"It is a hotbed of crime, but that's what happens when you take the poorest of 
the poor and cram them into such a horrid place and don't give them jobs or 
food or medicine,'' said Bobby Duval, an industrialist and political activist 
who runs a soccer camp for children in Cité Soleil.

Duval delivered the motorcycle to Duclona this week as a present from Haitian 
hip-hop musician Wyclef Jean, who has set up several major charities that work 
in Cité Soleil.

"What you have right now is brutal crime, militancy, and very little political 
direction,'' Duval said.

"These gangs really don't know what they want and all the elites want to do is 
wipe Cité Soleil off the map. But if that firepower is linked up to a political 
cause, then you're going to have a civil war in Haiti."

Duclona assumed power when his predecessor, Emanuel "Dread" Wilmé, was shot and 
killed by U.N. forces in July. A huge gate honoring him, alongside pictures of 
Aristide and South American revolutionary leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara, sits at 
one entrance to Cité Soleil.

Evans Jean, leader of a gang that controls a section of Cité Soleil and no 
relation to Wyclef Jean, gained power after a baby-faced gang leader known as 
Labanye, who aligned himself with elite-controlled Group of 184, was killed 
while watching a soccer match.

"This is the way it's been here for the last 30 years, who knows, maybe the 
last 200 years,'' said a weary Duval. "The elites gain the upper hand for a 
while, then the masses or the chimère or whatever they're called today strike 
back. It just goes on and on that way."

Tim Collie can be reached at tcollie@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4573.


Copyright © 2006, South Florida Sun-Sentinel