‘It’s a siege, it’s a war’: Haiti’s gangs tighten violent grip in lethal insurrection
People look for salvageable pieces from burned cars at a shop that was set on fire by armed gangs in Port-au-Prince on 25 March. Photograph: Odelyn Joseph/AP
Port-au-Prince, the capital, has plunged into chaos, and gangs have shifted their offensive to places once considered safe
Tom Phillips and Etienne Côté-Paluck in Port-au-Prince
As
gang fighters and police battled outside his home near Haiti’s beleaguered capital late last month, Nielsen Daily Fierrier hurled himself to the ground.
“From six in the morning until six in the evening, the gunfire hardly stopped,” said the 25-year-old electrician from Pétion-Ville, a middle-class suburb in the hills south of Port-au-Prince.
“In the morning, you could have short breaks of three or four minutes before the gunfire resumed. But all afternoon, there was non-stop shooting,” Fierrier said of the clashes, in which several neighbours were wounded and one local man killed.
“He had left his home without identification papers and was reportedly shot by mistake,” the electrician said, his voice cracking with emotion. “He was someone from the area, who was just on his way home.”
Not far away,
a British aid worker was also hunkered down awaiting evacuation. During past outbreaks of violence and natural disasters, the area had been considered a relatively safe sanctuary, said Matt Knight from the humanitarian group Goal, as shots went off outside.
“Now the battle has come to Pétion-Ville.”
A month after a coalition of criminal groups called “Viv Ansanm” (Live Together) plunged Haiti’s capital into chaos with an audacious offensive against the state, the fighting continues – and in recent days has begun
shifting to places long considered oases of calm.
The reason for that migration into areas such as Pétion-Ville, Laboule and Thomasin is unclear.
Amy Wilentz, an American journalist who has covered Haiti for nearly four decades, suspected the highly unusual attacks were designed to intimidate
members of Haiti’s political and economic elite who lived in such enclaves and might be part of a future government after Ariel Henry, the prime minister, was forced to resign by the gang insurrection. “It’s very calculated … and it’s very frightening,” she said.
Emmanuela Douyon, a Haitian activist and writer, suspected sowing terror in wealthier districts was partly about projecting power and gaining territory, but fundamentally part of a gang ploy to pose as revolutionaries, challenging the rich on behalf of Haiti’s downtrodden masses.
Speaking to Sky News – one of the few foreign news organizations to reach Port-au-Prince since the revolt began on 29 February – the man acting as
the main gang mouthpiece lambasted Haiti’s corrupt elites and the “indecent” chasm between rich and poor.
“We have weapons in our hand and it’s with the weapons that we must liberate this country,” Jimmy Chérizier, a notorious gang boss nicknamed Barbecue,
told the British channel.
Douyon and many other Haitians spurn such posturing.
“They are just adopting this discourse and this narrative to try to gain sympathy and have people forgive them for what they have done,” the activist said of the gangs, who many suspect are using violence to strong-arm Haiti’s future leaders into granting them an amnesty.
“No one in Haiti believes any gang member is a revolutionary,” Douyon added. “They are rapists, killers, kidnappers.”
Robert Fatton, a Haitian politics professor from the University of Virginia, agreed the gangs were “trying to present a revolutionary face – [even though] there’s nothing revolutionary about them. Most of those groups were financed and created by politicians and by business elites - and now they have great autonomy from those forces and they’re enjoying that power,” Fatton said, adding:
“This is not something that, in my mind at least, represents any type of popular uprising, let alone a revolution.”
Revolution or not, Haiti’s capital has been indisputably upended by the insurrection, which has seen police stations and government offices ransacked and torched, airport shut down and thousands of prisoners released from jail.
A UN
report released last Thursday said Haiti faced a “cataclysmic situation” with state institutions “close to collapse”, violence out of control, and 1.4 million people “a step away from famine”.
Haiti’s already fragile health system is also teetering on the brink, with 18 health institutions no longer functioning in the capital region, including the country’s largest public hospital, the State University hospital. More than 1,500 people were killed in the first three months of this year, compared with 4,451 in the whole of 2023.
“The vacuum of governance in Haiti has left everybody scrambling for power and domination. I think that’s what we’re seeing right now … It’s a free-for-all,” said Wilentz, comparing the turmoil to the ‘dechoukaj’ (uprooting)
– looting and violence that followed the 1986 downfall of the dictator François ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier.
“This is like a giant dechoukaj - [only that] was machetes and stones. It was grotesque – but no one had a gun.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/01/haiti-gang-violence-evacuation-update