Post by Moses on Mar 1, 2005 13:01:58 GMT -5
Death of a democracy
Gangs of killers roam freely, rape is systematic and the poor eat mud to survive. In Port-au-Prince, Andrew Buncombe finds a people crushed by the dark hand of US foreign policy
28 February 2005
The mud biscuits sold in the markets and stacked high by the street vendors in the most desperate parts of Port-au-Prince are made in a part of the city known as Fort-Dimanche. There, close to the site of a former prison, once used by the dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier to lock up political prisoners, women combine clay, water, a little margarine and a scratch of salt. Sometimes they will crumble a foil-wrapped cube of bouillon into the mixture, which they stir, shape into discs the size of a saucer and leave to bake in the Caribbean sun.
In Haiti, these mud cakes are traditionally eaten by expectant mothers who believe they contain nutrients and minerals important to the health of a newborn child. But in recent months they have been sold increasingly to other people, who are too poor to afford anything else. "I have been selling more in the last year. People have less money," says Mafie, the young woman sitting behind a pile of the pale brown mud cakes at Salamoun market.
In their own way, these biscuits, known in Creole simply as terre, tell a bigger story. One year after the enforced departure of Haiti's elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the country he was forced to flee, having been long undermined by the US authorities, is in a hellish state of affairs. Unstable, deadly, wracked by division and wrecked by a hurricane that tore through the country in September, many of the citizens who voted for the bespectacled former priest with a prayer that he might bring them hope and salvation are forced to fill their bellies with cakes fashioned from mud. Naturally enough, they taste like dirt.
Hunger is just one of Haiti's many problems. Since Aristide was flown out of Port-au-Prince in the early hours of 29 February last year to his destination - the Central African Republic and then South Africa, where he now lives in exile - his supporters and members of his Lavalas political party have faced repression, violence, imprisonment and death.
While UN-mandated elections are scheduled for November, many of the senior members of Lavalas lie in Haiti's fetid and overcrowded jails. To the outrage of human rights groups, few - if any - of the political prisoners locked up by the "interim government" installed by the US, France and Canada have been charged. Some of those jailed and subsequently released have revealed that they had no opportunity to make their case before a judge. Were it not for international pressure put on Gerard Latortue, the interim prime minister, many of them believe they would still be locked up.
At times, Haiti's violence appears to be utterly out of control. Fights between rival gangs with political backing in the slums, or raids by the police who are accused of carrying out summary executions, result in corpses being left in the streets, gnawed at by dogs and pigs until someone comes to remove them.
Late last year, there were so many corpses arriving at the unrefrigerated morgue attached to the city's main hospital, where they lay in piles and were rapidly devoured by maggots, that the authorities refused journalists permission to visit out of concern about the bad image that would be portrayed. Since September, more than 250 people have been killed in political violence in Port-au-Prince.
The Independent has also learned that, in the poorest areas of the city, rape is increasingly common as a tactic of political violence - a phenomenon that last occurred regularly during the early Nineties. Three Pakistani members of the UN peace-keeping force, known by its acronym MINUSTAH, have been accused of raping a woman in the city of Gonaives. An investigation is under way. And, as if that were not enough, a group of rebel soldiers of the supposedly disbanded army are refusing to lay down their guns.
Amid all of this violence and anguish hangs the ghostly presence of the undead. Though it is a year since Aristide left, in the poorer parts of town where his name is repeatedly invoked, it is clear he is never far from people's thoughts.
Emanuel Exantes, an angry young man in a black T-shirt, who is also a trader at the busy Salamoun market, summed up what many people here believe. "It was wrong. It was not the Haitian people who made him go. It was the Americans. They want to kill Haiti. When Aristide was in power, they did not give him any money. Now, this new f**king person, they're giving him money all the time. They give money to [the interim prime minister] because he is their man. Aristide was not theirs." He added: "This whole market is waiting for Aristide. I'm for dialogue but I want to see Aristide come back to the country. He loves the people. Aristide was elected for five years but they never wanted him to finish his term. You could not do that in America."
Aristide never wanted to leave the country. In the early hours of that Sunday morning one year ago, when loosely co-ordinated rebel forces were marching towards the capital, and after leaders of the opposition told Washington they would not agree to a political compromise that did not involve Aristide's departure, the president was given a choice. "Come with or stay," he was told by Luis Moreno, the deputy chief of the US embassy, who arrived with a group of heavily armed marines to take Aristide to the airport. "Live or die".
Even at that point, the Americans could have preserved Aristide's presidency with just a few hundred well-armed US Marines. They had, after all, done it before. Following a 1991 CIA-backed coup that ended his first term of office, Aristide was returned to power in October 1994 by President Bill Clinton, who ordered 20,000 Marines to clear the way for his return.
But in 10 years, a lot had changed. Annoyed at Lavalas's refusal to abide by the economic "reforms" set out by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United States had started to look into freezing economic aid to Haiti. In 2000, after Aristide's re-election, his opponents in Washington seized on a dispute surrounding the vote for the national assembly to block a total of $500m (£260m) in relief to the avowedly Socialist leader.
At the same time, right-wing elements in Washington were actively funding and courting Aristide's opponents. The International Republican Institute, a body that receives much of its funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, was arranging conferences in the neighbouring Dominican Republic for Aristide's opponents to meet those from Washington who shared similar political views.
Throughout this time, leaders of business-backed opposition coalitions in Haiti such as Group 184, led by the millionaire industrialist Andy Apaid, and the National Convergence, were receiving a clear message that there was little international support for Aristide or his brand of liberation theology.
By this time, Aristide was increasingly resorting to violence. Rather than reaching out to groups such as students, who should have been his natural supporters, he used armed gangs known as les chimères to break up their demonstrations and attack them. Groups such as Amnesty International detailed how, by late 2003, the tactics of Aristide increasingly matched those of the Haitian dictators he had so opposed and campaigned against. During this period, said Amnesty, there was "almost total impunity for the perpetrators of human rights violations".
(rest at link)
Gangs of killers roam freely, rape is systematic and the poor eat mud to survive. In Port-au-Prince, Andrew Buncombe finds a people crushed by the dark hand of US foreign policy
28 February 2005
The mud biscuits sold in the markets and stacked high by the street vendors in the most desperate parts of Port-au-Prince are made in a part of the city known as Fort-Dimanche. There, close to the site of a former prison, once used by the dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier to lock up political prisoners, women combine clay, water, a little margarine and a scratch of salt. Sometimes they will crumble a foil-wrapped cube of bouillon into the mixture, which they stir, shape into discs the size of a saucer and leave to bake in the Caribbean sun.
In Haiti, these mud cakes are traditionally eaten by expectant mothers who believe they contain nutrients and minerals important to the health of a newborn child. But in recent months they have been sold increasingly to other people, who are too poor to afford anything else. "I have been selling more in the last year. People have less money," says Mafie, the young woman sitting behind a pile of the pale brown mud cakes at Salamoun market.
In their own way, these biscuits, known in Creole simply as terre, tell a bigger story. One year after the enforced departure of Haiti's elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the country he was forced to flee, having been long undermined by the US authorities, is in a hellish state of affairs. Unstable, deadly, wracked by division and wrecked by a hurricane that tore through the country in September, many of the citizens who voted for the bespectacled former priest with a prayer that he might bring them hope and salvation are forced to fill their bellies with cakes fashioned from mud. Naturally enough, they taste like dirt.
Hunger is just one of Haiti's many problems. Since Aristide was flown out of Port-au-Prince in the early hours of 29 February last year to his destination - the Central African Republic and then South Africa, where he now lives in exile - his supporters and members of his Lavalas political party have faced repression, violence, imprisonment and death.
While UN-mandated elections are scheduled for November, many of the senior members of Lavalas lie in Haiti's fetid and overcrowded jails. To the outrage of human rights groups, few - if any - of the political prisoners locked up by the "interim government" installed by the US, France and Canada have been charged. Some of those jailed and subsequently released have revealed that they had no opportunity to make their case before a judge. Were it not for international pressure put on Gerard Latortue, the interim prime minister, many of them believe they would still be locked up.
At times, Haiti's violence appears to be utterly out of control. Fights between rival gangs with political backing in the slums, or raids by the police who are accused of carrying out summary executions, result in corpses being left in the streets, gnawed at by dogs and pigs until someone comes to remove them.
Late last year, there were so many corpses arriving at the unrefrigerated morgue attached to the city's main hospital, where they lay in piles and were rapidly devoured by maggots, that the authorities refused journalists permission to visit out of concern about the bad image that would be portrayed. Since September, more than 250 people have been killed in political violence in Port-au-Prince.
The Independent has also learned that, in the poorest areas of the city, rape is increasingly common as a tactic of political violence - a phenomenon that last occurred regularly during the early Nineties. Three Pakistani members of the UN peace-keeping force, known by its acronym MINUSTAH, have been accused of raping a woman in the city of Gonaives. An investigation is under way. And, as if that were not enough, a group of rebel soldiers of the supposedly disbanded army are refusing to lay down their guns.
Amid all of this violence and anguish hangs the ghostly presence of the undead. Though it is a year since Aristide left, in the poorer parts of town where his name is repeatedly invoked, it is clear he is never far from people's thoughts.
Emanuel Exantes, an angry young man in a black T-shirt, who is also a trader at the busy Salamoun market, summed up what many people here believe. "It was wrong. It was not the Haitian people who made him go. It was the Americans. They want to kill Haiti. When Aristide was in power, they did not give him any money. Now, this new f**king person, they're giving him money all the time. They give money to [the interim prime minister] because he is their man. Aristide was not theirs." He added: "This whole market is waiting for Aristide. I'm for dialogue but I want to see Aristide come back to the country. He loves the people. Aristide was elected for five years but they never wanted him to finish his term. You could not do that in America."
Aristide never wanted to leave the country. In the early hours of that Sunday morning one year ago, when loosely co-ordinated rebel forces were marching towards the capital, and after leaders of the opposition told Washington they would not agree to a political compromise that did not involve Aristide's departure, the president was given a choice. "Come with or stay," he was told by Luis Moreno, the deputy chief of the US embassy, who arrived with a group of heavily armed marines to take Aristide to the airport. "Live or die".
Even at that point, the Americans could have preserved Aristide's presidency with just a few hundred well-armed US Marines. They had, after all, done it before. Following a 1991 CIA-backed coup that ended his first term of office, Aristide was returned to power in October 1994 by President Bill Clinton, who ordered 20,000 Marines to clear the way for his return.
But in 10 years, a lot had changed. Annoyed at Lavalas's refusal to abide by the economic "reforms" set out by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United States had started to look into freezing economic aid to Haiti. In 2000, after Aristide's re-election, his opponents in Washington seized on a dispute surrounding the vote for the national assembly to block a total of $500m (£260m) in relief to the avowedly Socialist leader.
At the same time, right-wing elements in Washington were actively funding and courting Aristide's opponents. The International Republican Institute, a body that receives much of its funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, was arranging conferences in the neighbouring Dominican Republic for Aristide's opponents to meet those from Washington who shared similar political views.
Throughout this time, leaders of business-backed opposition coalitions in Haiti such as Group 184, led by the millionaire industrialist Andy Apaid, and the National Convergence, were receiving a clear message that there was little international support for Aristide or his brand of liberation theology.
By this time, Aristide was increasingly resorting to violence. Rather than reaching out to groups such as students, who should have been his natural supporters, he used armed gangs known as les chimères to break up their demonstrations and attack them. Groups such as Amnesty International detailed how, by late 2003, the tactics of Aristide increasingly matched those of the Haitian dictators he had so opposed and campaigned against. During this period, said Amnesty, there was "almost total impunity for the perpetrators of human rights violations".
(rest at link)