Construction standards are low in Haiti; the country has no building codes. Engineers have stated that it is unlikely many buildings would have stood through any kind of disaster. Structures are often raised wherever they can fit; some buildings were built on slopes with insufficient foundations or steel works. It is estimated that about two million Haitians lived as squatters on land they do not own.
The country also suffered from shortages of fuel and potable water even before the disaster.[72]
President Préval and government ministers used police headquarters near the Toussaint L'Ouverture International Airport as their new base of operations, although their effectiveness was extremely limited; several parliamentarians were still trapped in the Presidential Palace, and offices and records had been destroyed.[73] Some high-ranking government workers lost family members, or had to tend to wounded relatives. Although the president and his remaining cabinet met with UN planners each day, there remained confusion as to who was in charge and no single group had organised relief efforts as of 16 January.[74] The government handed over control of the airport to the United States to hasten and ease flight operations, which had been hampered by the damage to the air traffic control tower.[75]
Urban Search and Rescue specialists work at the Hôtel Montana.
Almost immediately Port-au-Prince's morgue facilities were overwhelmed. By 14 January, a thousand bodies had been placed on the streets and pavements. Government crews manned trucks to collect thousands more, burying them in mass graves.[76] In the heat and humidity, corpses buried in rubble began to decompose and smell. Mati Goldstein, head of the Israeli ZAKA International Rescue Unit delegation to Haiti, described the situation as "Shabbat from hell. Everywhere, the acrid smell of bodies hangs in the air. It’s just like the stories we are told of the Holocaust – thousands of bodies everywhere. You have to understand that the situation is true madness, and the more time passes, there are more and more bodies, in numbers that cannot be grasped. It is beyond comprehension."[77][78]
Mayor Jean-Yves Jason said that officials argued for hours about what to do with the volume of corpses. The government buried many in mass graves, some above-ground tombs were forced open so bodies could be stacked inside, and others were burned.[79] Mass graves were dug in a large field outside the settlement of Titanyen, north of the capital; tens of thousands of bodies were reported as having been brought to the site by dump truck and buried in trenches dug by earth movers.[80] Max Beauvoir, a Vodou priest, protested the lack of dignity in mass burials, stating, "... it is not in our culture to bury people in such a fashion, it is desecration".[81][82]
The Haitian government began a programme to move homeless people out of Port-au-Prince on a ferry to Port Jeremie and in hired buses to temporary camps.
Towns in the eastern Dominican Republic began preparing for tens of thousands of refugees, and by 16 January hospitals close to the border had been filled to capacity with Haitians. Some began reporting having expended stocks of critical medical supplies such as antibiotics by 17 January.[83] The border was reinforced by Dominican soldiers, and the government of the Dominican Republic asserted that all Haitians who crossed the border for medical assistance would be allowed to stay only temporarily. A local governor stated, "We have a great desire and we will do everything humanly possible to help Haitian families. But we have our limitations with respect to food and medicine. We need the helping hand of other countries in the area."[84][85]
Slow distribution of resources in the days after the earthquake resulted in sporadic violence, with looting reported.[86] There were also accounts of looters wounded or killed by vigilantes and neighbourhoods that had constructed their own roadblock barricades.[87][88] Dr Evan Lyon of Partners in Health, working at the General Hospital in Port-Au-Prince, claimed that misinformation and overblown reports of violence had hampered the delivery of aid and medical services.[89][90]
AirdropcloseJan18haiti.jpg: James L. Harper Jr.. photo credit
One of the first parachute air drops after the quake, 18 January
Former U.S. president Bill Clinton acknowledged the problems and said Americans should "not be deterred from supporting the relief effort" by upsetting scenes such as those of looting.[60][91] Lt. Gen. P.K. Keen, deputy commander of U.S. Southern Command, however, announced that despite the stories of looting and violence, there was less violent crime in Port-au-Prince after the earthquake than before.[92]
In many neighbourhoods, singing could be heard through the night and groups of men coordinated to act as security as groups of women attempted to take care of food and hygiene necessities.[93] During the days following the earthquake, hundreds were seen marching through the streets in peaceful processions, singing and clapping.[94
Cité Soleil (Kreyol: Site Solèy, English: Sun City) is a very densely populated commune located in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area in Haiti. It has development as a shanty town. Most of its estimated 200,000 to 300,000 residents live in extreme poverty.[1] The area is generally regarded as one of the poorest and most dangerous areas of the Western Hemisphere's poorest country; it is one of the biggest slums in the Northern Hemisphere. There is little police presence, no sewers, no stores, and little to no electricity.[2]
The neighborhood, originally designed to house manual laborers for a local Export Processing Zone (EPZ), quickly became home to squatters from around the countryside looking for work in the newly constructed factories. After a 1991 coup d'état deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a boycott of Haitian products closed the EPZ.[3] Cité Soleil was soon thrust into extreme poverty and persistent unemployment, with high rates of illiteracy.[2]
Armed gangs roam the streets. Murder, rape, kidnapping, looting, and shootings are common as every few blocks is controlled by one of more than 30 armed factions.[4] The area has been called a "microcosm of all the ills in Haitian society: endemic unemployment, illiteracy, non-existent public services, insanitary conditions, rampant crime and armed violence".[5]
After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, it took nearly two weeks for relief aid to arrive in Cité-Soleil.[6] Although the US military have willingly accepted their new role, their relief efforts have been criticized by some as insufficient.[7]
Contents [hide]
1 History
2 Current status
3 2010 Haiti earthquake
4 Gallery
5 See also
6 Footnotes
6.1 References
Cite Soleil:
In 1999, Cité Soleil was set on fire by a gang and at least 50 shacks were burned.[8] During mid-1990s, the city's population was terrorized by armed gangs which drove the local police out; this situation prevented officials aid workers from intervening to provide help.[9] In 2002, the violence escalated as the gangs began warring with each other in addition to preying on ordinary people. Many inhabitants left temporarily to escape the turmoil.[10] In 2004, UN peacekeepers stormed Cité Soleil in an attempt to gain control of the area and end the anarchy.[11] Although the United Nations Stabilization Mission (MINUSTAH) has been deployed since 2004, it continues to struggle for control over the armed gangs and the violent confrontations continue. MINUSTAH maintains an armed checkpoint at the entrance to Cité Soleil and the road is blocked with armed vehicles.[2] In December, 2004, a group of armed ex-soldiers occupied ex-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's home against the wishes of the Haitian government.[12] In January 2006, two Jordanian peacekeepers were killed in Cité Soleil.[13] The UN has described the human rights situation in Haiti as "catastrophic".[14]
Sign for a Cité Soleil women's group, 2002. The sign translates, "Organization of Militant Women of Cité Soleil".Most of the residents of Cité-Soleil are children or young adults. Few live past the age of 50; they die from disease, including AIDS, or violence.[2] At times Cité Soleil has been filled with armed gangs. The vast majority of residents of Cité Soleil remained loyal to President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his Fanmi Lavalas movement. Unlike Haiti's unelected past governments, Lavalas governments invested money into parks, literacy programs and medical centers in Cité Soleil.[15] Politically affiliated gangs or militias, often with quasi-official powers, have been a regular element of Haitian politics throughout the country's history.
The fighting led to wide scale charges by neighborhood residents that the United Nations stabilizing force has permitted conditions that led to the death of unarmed bystanders.[16] They are accused of ignoring violence by the Haitian police, the criminal roots of the kidnapping and the undermining of Aristide's security police force.[17]
Current status
Since 2004, the United Nations Stabilization Mission (MINUSTAH) has been in Haiti and it now numbers 8,000 troops but continues to struggle for control over the armed gangs. In October 2006 a group of heavily armed Haitian police were able to enter Cité Soleil for the first time in three years and were able to remain one hour as armored UN troops patrolled the area. Since this is where the armed gangs take their kidnap victims, the Haitian police's ability to penetrate the area even for such a short time was seen as a sign of progress.[18] The situation of continuing violence is similar in Port-au-Prince. Before Christmas 2006, the UN force announced that it would take a tougher stance against gang members in Port-au-Prince, but since then the atmosphere there has not improved and the armed roadblocks and barbed wire barricades have not been moved. After 4 people were killed and another 6 injured in a UN operation exchange of fire with criminals in Cité Soleil in late January 2007, the United States announced that it would contribute $20 million to create jobs in Cité Soleil.[19][20]
MINUSTAH maintains an armed checkpoint at the entrance to the shanty town of Cité-Soleil and the road is blocked with armed vehicles.[2] In early February 2007, 700 UN troops flooded Cité Soleil resulting in a major gun battle. Although the troops make regular forcible entries into the area, a spokesperson said this one was the largest attempted so far by the UN troops.[21] On July 28, 2007, Edmond Mulet, the UN Special Representative in Haiti, warned of a sharp increase in lynchings and other mob attacks in Haiti. He said MINUSTAH, the (United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti) which now has over 9,000 troops there, will launch a campaign to remind people lynchings are a crime.[22]
On August 2, 2007, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon arrived in Haiti to assess the role of the UN forces, announcing that he would visit Cité Soleil during his visit. He said that it was Haiti's largest slum and as such was the most important target for UN peacekeepers in gaining control over the armed gangs. The Haitian president René Préval has expressed ambivalent feelings about the UN security presence, saying, “If the Haitian people were asked if they wanted the UN forces to leave they would say yes.”[23] Survivors at times blame the UN peacekeepers for deaths of relatives.[24]
Critics of MINUSTAH's plan feel that the UN mandate is unrealistic, treating a political problem as a security problem.[25]
March 30, 2007
Government, Policy
I’ve previously posted about the societal cost of clandestine occupancy — people who use homes as a shield for illegal activities.
When a whole neighborhood becomes a haven of clandestine occupancy, not only does it threaten its own denizens, it imperils all around it.
A window in the pediatric ward of a small hospital in Cite Soleil was shattered by a stray bullet of an unknown gunman. Nobody was hurt. [Photo: New York Times]
Unless the downward spiral of insular lawless tyranny is reversed, the consequences are appeasement, accommodation, or violence, as described in a horrifying New York Times story on the raids into Haiti’s Cite Soleil:
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Feb. 5 — For years, street gangs have run Haiti right alongside the politicians. With a disbanded army and a corrupted wreck of a police force, successive presidents have either used the gangs against political rivals or just bought them off.
Power fills vacuums.
A warren of shacks crammed into one another, apart from the outside world
Recently, something extraordinary has occurred. President Rene Preval decided to take on the gangs and set the 8,000 United Nations peacekeepers loose on them, a risky move that will determine the security of the country and the success of his young government.
For the residents of Cite Soleil, Haiti might as well be a foreign country, for its laws have no application:
Aged eyes in a child’s face
Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, has a long tradition of politics mixed with thuggery. In the 1970s and ‘80s, Francois Duvalier [Papa Doc -- Ed.] and his son Jean-Claude [Baby Doc] employed the Tontons Macoute, dreaded paramilitary hoodlums.
Papa Doc and Baby Doc
For a clinically dispassionate depiction of that hideous time, read Graham Greene’s The Comedians.
For half a century Haiti has lurched from one despot to another, extended catastrophes relieved only by flickers of optimism, only to collapse, with never a foundation of civil society. Instead Haiti is controlled by thieves and thugs, some living in slums, some in bureaucracies, barracks, and bastions:
Justice is bought and sold in Haiti, with both police officers and judges routinely allowing bribes to determine guilt or innocence. Jails are packed with people awaiting trial, most languishing for years.
Haiti’s problems go even farther back, to its very founding and its Jacobin revolution, led by the charismatic and unsuccessful Toussaint L’ouverture.
Such aspirations
Mr. Aristide was elected president in 1990 and again in 2000 with the support of the poor. Gang leaders, who act as de facto spokesmen for long-neglected slums, gained entry to the presidential palace and helped dole out jobs and other spoils to their men.
For what the gangs offer, whether as protection or as patronage, is order of a kind, order in servility.
The biggest of the United Nations operations have been aimed at one of the most wanted and feared of all the gang leaders, an unlikely and unpredictable power broker in his 20s who goes simply by the name Evans. Evans and his groups have been linked to a rash of kidnappings in the capital, and lately his men have been locked in fierce battles with United Nations peacekeepers.
Their price is obedience to dictatorship:
Within the confines of Cite Soleil, Evans’s every whim is enforced with absolute authority.
Deeply superstitious, he recently said he suspected cats of bringing him bad luck after one appeared during a raid by United Nations troops on one of his hide-outs, local residents and United Nations officials said.
So he issued an order that all cats were to be killed in his patch of the slum. His gunmen would be rounding them up and roasting them, he told the people. When one woman resisted, he or one of his men shot her, United Nations officials say.
Echoes of Herod the Great.
By the imposition of order, and with the guise of ’speaking for the poor,’ the criminals gain a veneer of respectability, and they trade as if independent sovereigns:
In his initial months in office, Rene Preval, who had been Mr. Aristide’s prime minister as well as president from 1996 to 2001, followed a similarly conciliatory tack. He negotiated with gang leaders, including Evans, inviting them at times to face-to-face meetings in the presidential palace, officials say.
Appeasement never works — it emboldens the criminals.
The kidnapping spree at the end of last year was the last straw. As the country prepared for Christmas, street thugs began grabbing people off the street, taking them into the slums and demanding ransoms.
Then the kidnappers began singling out children. In one horrible episode, a teenage girl was killed and her eyes were gouged out. Then a school bus of children was seized by gunmen, prompting many terrified parents to keep their children hidden at home.
Appeasement just delays the day of reckoning and raises the price of confrontation
Mr. Preval, who has support among Haiti’s poor as well as its elite, found his coalition government under attack as well, with opposition politicians in the Senate and Chamber of Deputies denouncing him for allowing the violence. The president changed course, calling off negotiations with the gangsters and giving the United Nations the go-ahead to go after them.
Brazilian soldiers with the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti guarded a building near the Cite Soleil slum in Port-Au-Prince. The building had previously been used as a gang headquarters.
Some local residents say that the raids are stirring up the gangs and that innocent people are getting caught up in the cross-fire.
Criminals exist in a protoplasm of ordinary decent people. What makes slums so deadly is that they interpenetrate.
Evans and the other leaders now hide in the maze of tin-roofed shanties that are home to some 300,000 of Haiti’s urban poor.
He’s in there somewhere, shielded by thousands of innocents
The victims become apologists for their terrorizing masters:
Not everybody agrees that confrontation is the best way of calming the slums. “The gang men can change,” insisted Meleus Jean, 45, a pastor who runs a tiny church in Cite Soleil and who was once almost hit by a stray bullet while delivering a Sunday morning sermon. “I talk to them and I think they are gang men because they have nothing else. Fighting them will not change them.”
The poor are the ultimate human shields for the criminals. The shields rely on their indecency and the opponents’ decency.
David Wimhurst, the spokesman for the United Nations mission, said that the peacekeepers were careful to single out only combatants and that gang members had themselves killed civilians and then blamed the United Nations.
Let there be no doubt: what is taking place is a ware between two sovereigns:
One of the fiercest battles took place on the morning of Jan. 25 with a raid by hundreds of United Nations forces on a gang hide-out on the periphery of Cite Soleil, this sprawling seaside capital’s largest and most notorious slum.
United Nations peacekeepers have launched a campaign to clear Port-Au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, of violent street gangs. [Photo: New York Times]
One has a conscience, the other does not:
After a fierce firefight in which gang members fired thousands of shots, United Nations officials succeeded in taking over the hide-out, a former schoolhouse that gang members had once used to fire upon peacekeepers and to demand money from passing motorists. The United Nations said four gang members had been killed in the battle.
Other raids have followed, and though it is still too early to judge the operation, gang leaders seem to be on the run, and armored United Nations vehicles now rumble through the crowded streets of Cite Soleil.
Martial law is not society, it is merely a lull.
At the same time, nobody believes that arresting or killing the gang leaders will be enough to calm Port-au-Prince. The violence is linked, most say, to the dire poverty.
Poverty changes the risk-benefit equation of violence.
If you’re going to die young anyway, why not do it in a blaze of glory, actively, and get something for it if you’re spared?
“The people didn’t ask to be born here,” said Christy Jackson, 42, headmaster of a school in Cite Soleil. “We didn’t ask to live like this.”
No one does. No one should have to.
The United States government recently set aside $20 million to create jobs for young people in Cite Soleil once the violence is quelled. In Solino, a neighborhood where the gangsters were chased away, people are being paid to clean garbage from a clogged drainage ditch.
Residents are being paid to clear raw sewage and trash from a drainage ditch in Solino, a neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital. [Photo: New York Times]
Even these efforts are small compared with the problem:
Mr. Mulet, of the United Nations, said he believed that the gang leaders were beyond rehabilitation. “They’ve been killing people, kidnapping people, torturing people, raping girls,” he told reporters recently in Washington. “It is very difficult to reinsert into society someone like that. A psychiatric institution would be the best place to place them in the future — after we arrest them.”
This story has no happy ending. As a failed state, Haiti profits from clandestine occupancy on a grand scale:
On top of that, more and more narcotics have begun flowing through Haiti to the United States, law enforcement officials say. It is Haiti’s weakened state that is the big attraction to narcotics traffickers, officials say.
When protection can be bought, like any other commodity it creates a marketplace.
In a recent report on Haiti’s woeful law enforcement apparatus, the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit group committed to preventing and resolving deadly conflicts, said that without urgent reform “the current escalation of organized violence and criminality may come to threaten the state itself.”
Has threatened the state. Has destroyed the state. Haiti and its dreadful twin Zimbabwe are grim reminders of the cost of allowing homes, blocks, neighborhoods, and even states to secede from humane society.
If only asking could make it so
2010 Haiti earthquake
A survivor camp in Cité Soleil in January 2010On January 12, 2010, at 21:53 UTC, (4:53 pm local time) Haiti was struck by a magnitude-7.0 earthquake, the country's most severe earthquake in over 200 years.[26] The epicenter of the quake was just outside the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince.[27] As the biggest slum of Port-au-Prince, Cité Soleil fared relatively well, as most of its cinder block and corrugated steel shacks survived, and Médecins Sans Frontières reopened its Choscal Hospital located in the heart of the slum, operated between 2005 and 2007 during the gang war, within 24 hours.[28] However, the area remains in desperate need of help, according to World Emergency Relief.[29]
Gang members who escaped from Haiti's damaged prison are settling back into their criminal ways in Cité Soleil.[30] Crime is rising, and police urged citizens to take matters into their own hands.[31] As of January 23, 2010, Cité Soleil remains neglected by earthquake relief workers and is doing what it can to survive and help on its own.[32]
_____________________
Haiti’s slums: the houses of crime
March 30, 2007
Government, Policy
I’ve previously posted about the societal cost of clandestine occupancy — people who use homes as a shield for illegal activities.
When a whole neighborhood becomes a haven of clandestine occupancy, not only does it threaten its own denizens, it imperils all around it.
A window in the pediatric ward of a small hospital in Cite Soleil was shattered by a stray bullet of an unknown gunman. Nobody was hurt. [Photo: New York Times]
Unless the downward spiral of insular lawless tyranny is reversed, the consequences are appeasement, accommodation, or violence, as described in a horrifying New York Times story on the raids into Haiti’s Cite Soleil:
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Feb. 5 — For years, street gangs have run Haiti right alongside the politicians. With a disbanded army and a corrupted wreck of a police force, successive presidents have either used the gangs against political rivals or just bought them off.
Power fills vacuums.
A warren of shacks crammed into one another, apart from the outside world
Recently, something extraordinary has occurred. President Rene Preval decided to take on the gangs and set the 8,000 United Nations peacekeepers loose on them, a risky move that will determine the security of the country and the success of his young government.
For the residents of Cite Soleil, Haiti might as well be a foreign country, for its laws have no application:
Aged eyes in a child’s face
Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, has a long tradition of politics mixed with thuggery. In the 1970s and ‘80s, Francois Duvalier [Papa Doc -- Ed.] and his son Jean-Claude [Baby Doc] employed the Tontons Macoute, dreaded paramilitary hoodlums.
Papa Doc and Baby Doc
For a clinically dispassionate depiction of that hideous time, read Graham Greene’s The Comedians.
For half a century Haiti has lurched from one despot to another, extended catastrophes relieved only by flickers of optimism, only to collapse, with never a foundation of civil society. Instead Haiti is controlled by thieves and thugs, some living in slums, some in bureaucracies, barracks, and bastions:
Justice is bought and sold in Haiti, with both police officers and judges routinely allowing bribes to determine guilt or innocence. Jails are packed with people awaiting trial, most languishing for years.
Haiti’s problems go even farther back, to its very founding and its Jacobin revolution, led by the charismatic and unsuccessful Toussaint L’ouverture.
Such aspirations
Mr. Aristide was elected president in 1990 and again in 2000 with the support of the poor. Gang leaders, who act as de facto spokesmen for long-neglected slums, gained entry to the presidential palace and helped dole out jobs and other spoils to their men.
For what the gangs offer, whether as protection or as patronage, is order of a kind, order in servility.
The biggest of the United Nations operations have been aimed at one of the most wanted and feared of all the gang leaders, an unlikely and unpredictable power broker in his 20s who goes simply by the name Evans. Evans and his groups have been linked to a rash of kidnappings in the capital, and lately his men have been locked in fierce battles with United Nations peacekeepers.
Their price is obedience to dictatorship:
Within the confines of Cite Soleil, Evans’s every whim is enforced with absolute authority.
Deeply superstitious, he recently said he suspected cats of bringing him bad luck after one appeared during a raid by United Nations troops on one of his hide-outs, local residents and United Nations officials said.
So he issued an order that all cats were to be killed in his patch of the slum. His gunmen would be rounding them up and roasting them, he told the people. When one woman resisted, he or one of his men shot her, United Nations officials say.
Echoes of Herod the Great.
By the imposition of order, and with the guise of ’speaking for the poor,’ the criminals gain a veneer of respectability, and they trade as if independent sovereigns:
In his initial months in office, Rene Preval, who had been Mr. Aristide’s prime minister as well as president from 1996 to 2001, followed a similarly conciliatory tack. He negotiated with gang leaders, including Evans, inviting them at times to face-to-face meetings in the presidential palace, officials say.
Appeasement never works — it emboldens the criminals.
The kidnapping spree at the end of last year was the last straw. As the country prepared for Christmas, street thugs began grabbing people off the street, taking them into the slums and demanding ransoms.
Then the kidnappers began singling out children. In one horrible episode, a teenage girl was killed and her eyes were gouged out. Then a school bus of children was seized by gunmen, prompting many terrified parents to keep their children hidden at home.
Appeasement just delays the day of reckoning and raises the price of confrontation
Mr. Preval, who has support among Haiti’s poor as well as its elite, found his coalition government under attack as well, with opposition politicians in the Senate and Chamber of Deputies denouncing him for allowing the violence. The president changed course, calling off negotiations with the gangsters and giving the United Nations the go-ahead to go after them.
Brazilian soldiers with the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti guarded a building near the Cite Soleil slum in Port-Au-Prince. The building had previously been used as a gang headquarters.
Some local residents say that the raids are stirring up the gangs and that innocent people are getting caught up in the cross-fire.
Criminals exist in a protoplasm of ordinary decent people. What makes slums so deadly is that they interpenetrate.
Evans and the other leaders now hide in the maze of tin-roofed shanties that are home to some 300,000 of Haiti’s urban poor.
He’s in there somewhere, shielded by thousands of innocents
The victims become apologists for their terrorizing masters:
Not everybody agrees that confrontation is the best way of calming the slums. “The gang men can change,” insisted Meleus Jean, 45, a pastor who runs a tiny church in Cite Soleil and who was once almost hit by a stray bullet while delivering a Sunday morning sermon. “I talk to them and I think they are gang men because they have nothing else. Fighting them will not change them.”
The poor are the ultimate human shields for the criminals. The shields rely on their indecency and the opponents’ decency.
David Wimhurst, the spokesman for the United Nations mission, said that the peacekeepers were careful to single out only combatants and that gang members had themselves killed civilians and then blamed the United Nations.
Let there be no doubt: what is taking place is a ware between two sovereigns:
One of the fiercest battles took place on the morning of Jan. 25 with a raid by hundreds of United Nations forces on a gang hide-out on the periphery of Cite Soleil, this sprawling seaside capital’s largest and most notorious slum.
United Nations peacekeepers have launched a campaign to clear Port-Au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, of violent street gangs. [Photo: New York Times]
One has a conscience, the other does not:
After a fierce firefight in which gang members fired thousands of shots, United Nations officials succeeded in taking over the hide-out, a former schoolhouse that gang members had once used to fire upon peacekeepers and to demand money from passing motorists. The United Nations said four gang members had been killed in the battle.
Other raids have followed, and though it is still too early to judge the operation, gang leaders seem to be on the run, and armored United Nations vehicles now rumble through the crowded streets of Cite Soleil.
Martial law is not society, it is merely a lull.
At the same time, nobody believes that arresting or killing the gang leaders will be enough to calm Port-au-Prince. The violence is linked, most say, to the dire poverty.
Poverty changes the risk-benefit equation of violence.
If you’re going to die young anyway, why not do it in a blaze of glory, actively, and get something for it if you’re spared?
“The people didn’t ask to be born here,” said Christy Jackson, 42, headmaster of a school in Cite Soleil. “We didn’t ask to live like this.”
No one does. No one should have to.
The United States government recently set aside $20 million to create jobs for young people in Cite Soleil once the violence is quelled. In Solino, a neighborhood where the gangsters were chased away, people are being paid to clean garbage from a clogged drainage ditch.
Residents are being paid to clear raw sewage and trash from a drainage ditch in Solino, a neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital. [Photo: New York Times]
Even these efforts are small compared with the problem:
Mr. Mulet, of the United Nations, said he believed that the gang leaders were beyond rehabilitation. “They’ve been killing people, kidnapping people, torturing people, raping girls,” he told reporters recently in Washington. “It is very difficult to reinsert into society someone like that. A psychiatric institution would be the best place to place them in the future — after we arrest them.”
This story has no happy ending. As a failed state, Haiti profits from clandestine occupancy on a grand scale:
On top of that, more and more narcotics have begun flowing through Haiti to the United States, law enforcement officials say. It is Haiti’s weakened state that is the big attraction to narcotics traffickers, officials say.
When protection can be bought, like any other commodity it creates a marketplace.
In a recent report on Haiti’s woeful law enforcement apparatus, the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit group committed to preventing and resolving deadly conflicts, said that without urgent reform “the current escalation of organized violence and criminality may come to threaten the state itself.”
Has threatened the state. Has destroyed the state. Haiti and its dreadful twin Zimbabwe are grim reminders of the cost of allowing homes, blocks, neighborhoods, and even states to secede from humane society.
If only asking could make it so
