As Haiti reels from crises, U.S. policy decisions are called into question
Los Angeles Time
Joe Mozingo
Dessalines Day is a point of pride in Haiti, a time to commemorate the revolutionary hero who defeated Napoleon’s troops, abolished slavery and in 1804 established the first free Black republic.
But this year the Oct. 17 holiday played out like political theater of all the woes afflicting the nation.
The acting prime minister was headed to speak at the monument marking the spot where Jean-Jacques Dessalines was assassinated just outside the capital, Port-au-Prince, but his convoy was turned back by gunfire.
In the absence of a government delegation, a police-officer-turned-gang-leader seized control of the ceremonies. Flanked by masked men with assault rifles, Jimmy Cherizier, who goes by the name "Barbecue," strode to the monument in the white suit and collar of palace officialdom and roused the crowd.
“Today the time has come where they have the ports and the tax offices,” he shouted. “They are all millionaires. We are sleeping with pigs. This is how the system is.”
Like dozens of gang bosses in Haiti, Cherizier is a product of the country's fractious politics, and as has been the case for more than a century, those politics are deeply entwined with U.S. policy.
Since U.S. Marines first occupied Haiti in 1915, Washington has put its thumb on the balance of power, supporting the brutal Duvalier dictatorships dating to the 1950s and more recently propping up center-right presidents with little popular support.
The latest round of violent upheaval in Haiti is inextricably linked to Jovenel Moise, who won the presidency in 2016 in flawed elections and then proceeded to strip away institutions, rule by decree and — even after constitutional experts said his term had expired — remain in power until he was assassinated in July.
Along the way, he enjoyed the support of both the Trump and Biden administrations.
Gangs that were connected to Moise have continued to operate with impunity, often using government vehicles; robbery, rape and kidnapping for ransom have reached epidemic levels.
Who was the murdered sculptor, Anderson Bélony?
Jean Anderson Bellony, born March 13, 1970, grew up in the village of Noailles in Croix-des-Bouquets.
At the age of fifteen, Michel Brutus introduced him to sculpture. He has notably participated in several group exhibitions at the Georges Liautaud Community Museum and at the French Institute of Haiti.
In August 2014, one of his sculptures was presented at MUPANAH on the occasion of the "Rencontres" exhibition. Bellony inherited a voodoo sanctuary which was restored by the AfricAméricA Foundation, as part of the Prince Claus Foundation's Cultural Emergency Response Program (CER) in 2009.
Bellony is more assembly practical than cut iron. He collects the utensils of everyday life, bowls, basins, chamber pots, cutlery, which he associates with elements of cut iron or of natural origin such as bones, wood. What characterizes his work is the use of abandoned enamelled objects which he resuscitates with great humor.
Barbara Prézeau Stephenson
AICA SC
Extract from the exhibition catalog "Nway Kanpe! "
Haiti gang leader threatens to kill American missionary hostages
Officials have said 400 Mawozo gang is demanding $1m per hostage in ransom to release 17 members of missionary group.
[Odelyn Joseph/AP]
The leader of the Haitian gang suspected of kidnapping 17 members of a missionary group from the United States has threatened to kill the hostages if his demands are not met.
Wilson Joseph, leader of the 400 Mawozo gang, issued the ultimatum in a video posted on social media on Thursday.
“I swear by thunder that if I don’t get what I’m asking for, I will put a bullet in the heads of these Americans,” Joseph said in the video.
Earlier this week, Haitian officials said the gang is demanding $1m in ransom per person to free the hostages.
Speaking in front of the coffins of gang members apparently killed by the police, Joseph threatened Haiti’s Prime Minister Ariel Henry and the chief of National Police Leon Charles in the video,
“You guys make me cry. I cry water. But I’m going to make you guys cry blood,” he said.
Al Jazeera correspondent Manuel Rapalo said protests in the capital Port-au-Prince against the deteriorating security situation in Haiti continued for the fifth day on Thursday.
Haitian workers went on a general strike on October 18 to protest worsening insecurity and gang violence after the abduction of the Christian missionaries.
“The concern now, especially after this video was published, is that tensions are going to continue to escalate; there’s fear that violence could worsen on the streets,” Rapalo said.
The hostages were abducted after leaving an orphanage outside Port-au-Prince on October 16. Sixteen of the abductees are Americans and one is Canadian. Five of them are children, including an eight-month-old infant.
Christian Aid Ministries, the Ohio-based missionary group whose members were kidnapped, called for a day of fasting and prayers for the hostages on Thursday, urging people to pray for the abductees as well as the kidnappers.
“Pray for the kidnappers, that they would experience the love of Jesus and turn to him, and we see that as their ultimate need,” said Weston Showalter, a spokesperson for the group.
“We also ask for prayer for government leaders and authorities as they relate to the case and work toward the release of the hostages.”
Reporting from Millersburg, Ohio, Al Jazeera’s John Hendren, said the kidnappings have been “stressful” for people associated with the missionary group.
“The people we’ve talked to have all expressed deep concern for those missionaries, particularly after the threat that was given by the leader of that kidnapping group,” Hendren said.
One of the poorest countries in the world, Haiti has been suffering from periodic natural disasters, gang violence and a longstanding political crisis made worse by the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in July.
The country has seen a surge in kidnappings during the past weeks. Center for Analysis and Research in Human Rights (CARDH), a Haitian NGO, said on Wednesday that at least 119 people were kidnapped by criminal gangs in Haiti during the first half of October, following 117 cases in September.
“Citizens do not trust the Haitian national police and this poses a problem because we cannot have an efficient police force if the population does not collaborate,” Gedeon Jean, CARDH director, told AFP earlier this week.
The US government has promised to work with Haitian authorities to free the American hostages.
“We have in the administration been relentlessly focused on this, including sending a team to Haiti from the State Department; working very closely with the FBI, which is the lead in these kinds of matters; in constant communication with the Haitian National Police, the church that the missionaries belong to, as well as to the Haitian Government,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Tuesday.
“And we will do everything that we can to help resolve the situation.”
Opinion: We can no longer ignore Haiti’s descent into chaos
Editorial Board
October 18, 2021 at 4:17 p.m. EDT
The Washington Post
Haiti’s spiraling mayhem, florid lawlessness and humanitarian meltdown were predictable following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July. In a country already crippled by governmental dysfunction, the vacuum of political legitimacy and authority after that murder left a breeding ground for anarchy.
The mess was largely ignored by the Biden administration, which has been preoccupied with other crises, until the kidnapping Saturday of 17 missionaries — a Canadian and 16 Americans, including five children — near the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. Now the maelstrom in the hemisphere’s poorest nation is no longer ignorable.
Kidnapping is so prevalent that predatory gangs which routinely seize individuals and groups for ransom are now said to control half of Port-au-Prince. One of the more notorious of them, 400 Mawozo, is responsible for the missionaries’ kidnapping; earlier this year it grabbed five priests and two nuns and demanded $1 million for their release. They were eventually freed.
Haiti’s outmatched police are bystanders to the spreading pandemonium, and the government, which includes no elected officials, is window dressing. The fate of the missionaries is anyone’s guess, but no one should assume that their seizure is an aberration, or that Haiti’s dissolution will not generate further agonies for its own citizens and those of other nations. Those agonies will include desperate migrants at the United States’ border, such as the thousands who camped under a bridge in South Texas last month, seeking a foothold in this country.
There are no easy answers to fixing Haiti, nor even to what “fixing” it might mean. Some advocates insist that the key to rescuing Haiti lies in its civil society, the country’s vibrant network of nongovernmental social, educational, health and other organizations that provide what passes for a social safety net and a counterbalance to chaos. The truth is that those multifarious groups, for all their important work, are as splintered as the rest of Haitian society and just as powerless to arrest the country’s disintegration.
Those who called for international intervention following Mr. Moïse’s killing, including this page, have been criticized for overlooking the checkered history of such attempts in the past, including the U.S. Marine Corps’s 19-year occupation of Haiti a century ago, and the United Nations-authorized insertion of U.S. troops by the Clinton administration in the mid-1990s. In this century, a U.N. stabilization force was deployed in Haiti for 13 years, until 2017.
Those interventions were problematic. In the most recent instance, U.N. soldiers sent to Haiti from Nepal were the conduit for what became one of the world’s most severe cholera epidemics, and other U.N. troops fathered hundreds or more babies born to penniless local women and girls, amid credible allegations of rape and sexual exploitation.
Yet for all its unintended consequences, outside intervention could also establish a modicum of stability and order that would represent a major humanitarian improvement on the status quo, and with it, the prospect of lives saved and livelihoods enabled. In the cost-benefit analysis that would attend any fresh intervention, policymakers must be alert to the risks, but also to the enormous peril of continuing to do nothing.
AID TO HAITI SENT BY SEA TO BYPASS RISING GANG VIOLENCE
The Guardian
WFP carried out 18 voyages this month from Port-au-Prince to Miragoane, bypassing violent neighborhoods
The World Food Programme (WFP) is now using seafaring barges to ship supplies to earthquake victims in southern Haiti, after escalating gang violence made overland journeys unsafe for aid convoys.
Since the 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck the country’s southern peninsula in August, thousands of survivors have been sporadically cut off from Port-au-Prince, the capital, by roadblocks set up by warring gangs, leading relief workers to employ novel workarounds, including shifting aid to barges and helicopter airlifts.
“A recent upsurge in gang violence, including kidnappings, is impacting relief operations,” said Fernando Hiraldo, the acting UN humanitarian coordinator in Haiti on Thursday. “Violence, looting, road blockades and the persistent presence of armed gangs all pose obstacles to humanitarian access, a situation which is further complicated by very serious fuel shortages and the reduced supply of goods.”
The WFP – the world’s largest humanitarian organization – has carried out 18 voyages this month from Port-au-Prince to Miragoane, a coastal commune 62 miles away, bypassing violent neighborhoods on the outskirts of the capital.
