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Tuesday, December 10, 2024

Nearly 200 dead in Haiti massacre as voodoo community reportedly targeted


By AFP
December 9, 2024

Police forces take part in an operation against powerful gangs in the city center near the National Palace in Port-au-Prince on July 9, 2024 - Copyright AFP Clarens SIFFROY

Nearly 200 people in Haiti were killed in brutal weekend violence reportedly orchestrated against voodoo practitioners, with the government on Monday condemning an “abject massacre” of “unbearable cruelty.”

The killings were overseen by a powerful gang leader convinced that his son’s illness was caused by followers of the religion, according to civil organization the Committee for Peace and Development (CPD).

“He decided to cruelly punish all elderly people and voodoo practitioners who, in his imagination, would be capable of sending a bad spell on his son,” a statement from the Haiti-based group said.

UN rights commissioner Volker Turk said that at least 184 people were killed in the weekend violence.

Calling the bloody episode an “act of barbarity, of unbearable cruelty,” the office of Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aime said his government “condemns in the strongest terms the abject massacre.”

“This monstrous crime constitutes a direct attack on humanity and the republican order,” it added.

Both the CPD and UN said that the massacre took place in the capital’s western coastal neighborhood of Cite Soleil.

Reached by telephone by AFP, a resident confirmed the brutal attacks and indicated that his 76-year-old father was among the victims.

“The bandits set fire to his body. The family cannot even organize a burial for him since we were unable to recover the body,” he told AFP on condition of anonymity so as not to compromise the safety of other relatives still in the area.

“I also fear for their lives,” he said. “I will try to get them out this Monday.”



– Taken to be ‘executed’ –



“The gang’s soldiers were responsible for identifying victims in their homes to take them to the chief’s stronghold to be executed,” the CPD said.

Haiti has suffered from decades of instability but the situation escalated in February when armed groups launched coordinated attacks in the capital Port-au-Prince to overthrow then-prime minister Ariel Henry.

Gangs now control 80 percent of the city. Despite a Kenyan-led police support mission, backed by the United States and UN, violence has continued to soar.

Turk told reporters in Geneva that the latest killings “bring the death toll just this year in Haiti to a staggering 5,000 people.”

The CPD said that most of the victims of violence waged on Friday and Saturday were over 60, but that some young people who tried to rescue others were also among the casualties.

“Reliable sources within the community report that more than a hundred people were massacred, their bodies mutilated and burned in the street,” it said.

More than 700,000 people are internally displaced in Haiti, half of them children, according to October figures from the UN’s International Organization for Migration.

Voodoo was brought to Haiti by African slaves and is a mainstay of the country’s culture. It was banned during French colonial rule and only recognized as an official religion by the Haitian government in 2003.

While it incorporates elements of other religious beliefs, including Catholicism, voodoo has been historically attacked by other religions.

- - - - 

FOR MORE ON THE ORIGINS OF VOODOO / ZOMBIE MYTH AND IMPERIALISM

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Monday, December 09, 2024

AN OLD CANARD

More than 180 killed in Haiti massacre after gang leader accuses eldery of Voodoo witchcraft


By CNN
 Dec 10, 2024


Haiti's government says the country's gangs have crossed a "red line" after allegedly killing over 180 people over the weekend, after a gang leader reportedly blamed Voodoo adherents for his child's grave illness.

A statement by the Haiti Prime Minister's office accused gang leader Micanor "Mikanò" Altès and associates of carrying out the massacre on December 6 and 7, in impoverished Cité Soleil, in Haiti's capital city Port-au-Prince.

Micanor ordered the killing of elderly residents in the Wharf Jérémie area over suspicions that witchcraft had made his child sick, according to Haiti's National Human Rights Defense Network (RNDDH).

Members of the Haitian Armed Forces patrol as people flee homes following the gang violence over the weekend in Port-au-Prince. (Ralph Tedy Erol/Reuters via CNN Newsource)

"The massacre was triggered by the severe illness of his child. Micanor sought advice from a voodoo priest ('bókò') who accused elderly people in the area of practicing witchcraft and harming the child," RNDDH said in a report seen by CNN.
Voodoo is widely practiced in parts of Haitian society.

"On Friday, December 6, Micanor shot and killed at least 60 elderly individuals. On Saturday, December 7, he and his group killed at least 50 more using machetes and knives. Despite his actions, his ill child passed away," it said.

Citing sources in the area, Haiti's Committee for Peace and Development (CPD) also said the attack targeted "all elderly people and Voodoo practitioners who, in (Micanor's) imagination, would be capable of casting a bad spell on his son," and left the bodies of victims mutilated in the streets.

At least 184 people were killed in the massacre, including an estimated 127 elderly men and women, the United Nations said.

A woman runs for cover amid gunfire during clashes between police and gangs in the Delmas neighborhood of Port-au-Prince yesterday. (AP)

"These latest killings bring the death toll just this year in Haiti to a staggering 5000 people," Human Rights Chief Volker Türk said at a press conference.

Since the massacre, Wharf Jérémie remains "under an informal siege" with elderly residents and Voodoo adherents still targeted by the broader Haitian gang alliance Viv Ansamn, according to RNDDH.

'A red line has been crossed'

Haiti's transitional government has promised to find and bring the perpetrators to justice.
"A red line has been crossed, and the State will mobilise all its forces to track down and annihilate these criminals," a statement from the prime minister's office said.

For the past year, gangs under the Viv Ansamn banner have been ravaging Port-au-Prince, attacking state institutions including prisons, police stations and the city's international airport, and forcing hundreds of thousands of Haitian civilians to flee their homes.

A Kenyan police officer, part of a UN-backed multinational force, patrols a street in Port-au-Prince. (AP)

The escalating gang-driven chaos prompted the international community to send a multinational policing force to the Caribbean nation over the summer, but the so-called MSS has so far failed to curb Port-au-Prince's extreme violence.

Yesterday local time, UN Secretary-General António Guterres urged member states to provide more support to the multinational mission, and called for an investigation into the massacre.

Haiti's National Police over the weekend had insisted that joint operations with the US-backed MSS were running smoothly, denying what it described as online rumors that the two forces were "not working in perfect harmony".


FOR MORE ON THE ORIGINS OF VOODOO / ZOMBIE MYTH AND IMPERIALISM

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Friday, November 22, 2024

Macron calls Haitian officials ‘total morons’ over PM sacking

POMPOUS PRICK COLONIALIST


By AFP
November 21, 2024


Macron has caused a stir with his comments about Haiti - Copyright AFP Joe Klamar

French President Emmanuel Macron accused Haiti’s transitional council of being “total morons” for dismissing the country’s prime minister, according to a video shot at the G20 summit in Brazil this week and shared on social media Thursday.

In the footage, the French leader is speaking on the sidelines of the G20 in Rio with an individual accusing Macron and France of “being responsible for the situation in Haiti”.

Haiti’s transitional council pushed out then-prime minister Garry Conille after just five months in office, a move Macron called “terrible” in the clip.

“They’re total morons,” said Macron referring to the transitional body, adding, “they never should have dismissed him.”

Condemning the remarks, Haiti’s Foreign Ministry said Thursday that French Ambassador Antoine Michon had been summoned following the “unacceptable comments.”

Haitian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Worship Jean-Victor Harvel Jean-Baptiste used the meeting to express “indignation” on behalf of the transitional council, which he said viewed the remarks as “an unfriendly and inappropriate gesture that must be rectified,” according to a statement from the ministry.

Haiti has suffered from decades of political instability.

But in recent months, the Caribbean country has seen a surge in violence with gangs now controlling 80 percent of the capital, Port-au-Prince.

The clip also shows the French president, who is on a multi-leg tour of Latin America with his most recent stop in Chile, blaming Haitians for “letting drug trafficking take over”.

“Quite frankly, it was the Haitians who killed Haiti,” the French president said in the clip.

Businessman Alix Didier Fils-Aime was sworn in as Haiti’s new prime minister on November 12, promising to restore security in the crisis-wracked country.



Haiti summons French ambassador after Macron's 'total morons' comment

French President Emmanuel Macron was caught on video on Thursday calling the Haitian transitional council "total morons" for sacking the embattled nation's prime minister, prompting Haiti's foreign minister to summon French Ambassador Antoine Michon to address the "unacceptable remarks".

Issued on: 22/11/2024 
By: NEWS WIRES
Video by: Charlotte HUGHES

01:21France's President Emmanuel Macron and First Lady Brigitte Macron greet Haiti's President of the transitional council Smith Augustin at the Elysee presidential palace in Paris, July 26, 2024. © Valentine Chapuis, AFP


French President Emmanuel Macron accused Haiti's transitional council of being "total morons" for dismissing the country's prime minister, according to a video shot at the G20 summit in Brazil this week and shared on social media Thursday.

In the footage, the French leader is speaking on the sidelines of the G20 in Rio with an individual accusing Macron and France of "being responsible for the situation in Haiti".

Haiti's transitional council pushed out then-prime minister Garry Conille after just five months in office, a move Macron called "terrible" in the clip.

"They're total morons," said Macron referring to the transitional body, adding, "they never should have dismissed him."


Condemning the remarks, Haiti's Foreign Ministry said Thursday that French Ambassador Antoine Michon had been summoned following the "unacceptable comments."

02:00



Haitian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Worship Jean-Victor Harvel Jean-Baptiste used the meeting to express "indignation" on behalf of the transitional council, which he said viewed the remarks as "an unfriendly and inappropriate gesture that must be rectified," according to a statement from the ministry.

Haiti has suffered from decades of political instability.

But in recent months, the Caribbean country has seen a surge in violence with gangs now controlling 80 percent of the capital, Port-au-Prince.

Read more  FRANCE 24 exclusive report in Haiti: The Iron Grip of the Gangs

The clip also shows the French president, who is on a multi-leg tour of Latin America with his most recent stop in Chile, blaming Haitians for "letting drug trafficking take over".

"Quite frankly, it was the Haitians who killed Haiti," the French president said in the clip.

Businessman Alix Didier Fils-Aime was sworn in as Haiti's new prime minister on November 12, promising to restore security in the crisis-wracked country.

(AFP)






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Thursday, November 21, 2024

Gang violence leaves at least 150 dead in Haiti's capital this week, UN says

The death toll from gang violence in Haiti this year rose to over 4,500 after 150 people were killed in the capital of Port-au-Prince over the past week, United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk said on Wednesday. Amid rampant violence and persistent political instability, Turk said the latest "upsurge" in violence is a "harbinger of worse to come"
.


Issued on: 20/11/2024 - 
By:  NEWS WIRES
Video by:  Matthew-Mary Caruchet

Soaring violence in Port-au-Prince since last week has left at least 150 people dead, bringing the number of deaths in Haiti this year to over 4,500, the United Nations said Wednesday.

"The latest upsurge in violence in Haiti's capital is a harbinger of worse to come," UN rights chief Volker Turk warned in a statement.

"The gang violence must be promptly halted. Haiti must not be allowed to descend further into chaos."

Violence has intensified dramatically in Port-au-Prince since November 11, as a coalition of gangs pushes for full control of the Haitian capital.


Well-armed gangs control some 80 percent of the city, routinely targeting civilians despite a Kenyan-led international force that has been deployed to help the outgunned police restore some government order.

"At least 150 people have been killed, 92 injured and about 20,000 forced to flee their homes over the past week," Turk's statement said.

In addition, "Port-au-Prince's estimated four million people are practically being held hostage as gangs now control all the main roads in and out of the capital".

Monica Juma, Kenya's presidential national security advisor, said on Wednesday that her nation backs calls from Haiti for the United Nations to consider turning the current international security mission into a formal UN peacekeeping mission.

Juma told a UN Security Council meeting on Wednesday that Kenya, believed a formal peacekeeping mission could bring more resources to confront an escalating gang conflict.

The current mission has deployed just a fraction of troops pledged by a handful of countries and less than $100 million in its dedicated fund.

The Haitian capital has seen renewed fighting in the last week from Viv Ansanm, an alliance of gangs that in February helped oust former prime minister Ariel Henry.

03:16© AFP


Turk said that at least 55 percent of the deaths from simultaneous and apparently coordinated attacks in the capital resulted from exchanges of fire between gang members and police.

He also highlighted reports of a rise in mob lynchings.

Authorities said Tuesday that police and civilian self-defence groups had killed 28 gang members in Port-au-Prince after an overnight operation as the government seeks to regain some control.

Last year, in a gruesome chapter of the vigilante reprisals, a dozen alleged gang members were stoned and burned alive by residents in Port-au-Prince.

The UN rights office said the latest violence brought "the verified casualty toll of the gang violence so far this year to a shocking 4,544 dead and 2,060 injured".

The real toll, it stressed, "is likely higher still".

In addition, an estimated 700,000 people are now internally displaced across the country, half of them children, it said.

Turk warned that "the endless gang violence and widespread insecurity are deepening the dire humanitarian crisis in the country, including the impacts of severe food and water shortages and the spread of infectious diseases".

This was happening "at a time when the health system is already on the brink of collapse", he said, adding that "threats and attacks on humanitarian workers are also deeply worrying".

"Gang violence must not prevail over the institutions of the State," he said, demanding "concrete steps ... to protect the population and to restore effective rule of law".

(AFP)





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Wednesday, November 20, 2024

Doctors Without Borders halts operations in Haiti's capital amid threats from police

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said on Tuesday that it is stopping operations "until further notice" in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince due to an increase in violence and threats to its staff from members of the Haitian police. The suspension would begin on Wednesday, MSF said.

Issued on: 19/11/2024 - 
By: NEWS WIRES
A woman looks at a damaged business in the Solino district of Port-au-Prince on November 16, 2024. © Clarens Siffroy, AFP


Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said on Tuesday that it is stopping operations across the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince and its wider metropolitan area due to an escalation in violence and threats to its staff from members of the Haitian police.

The suspension would last from Wednesday “until further notice”, said MSF.

MSF said in a statement that since a deadly attack on one of its ambulances last week, police had repeatedly stopped its vehicles and directly threatened their staff, some with death and rape threats.

“We are used to working in conditions of extreme insecurity in Haiti and elsewhere, but when even law enforcement becomes a direct threat, we have no choice but to suspend our projects,” MSF’s Haiti mission chief Christophe Garnier said.

A Kenyan police armoured vehicle patrols the Solino district in Port-au-Prince on November 16, 2024. © Clarens Siffroy, AFP

A spokesperson for Haiti’s national police declined to comment.

MSF, whose presence grew in Haiti in the wake of the devastating 2010 earthquake, is one of the main providers of quality free healthcare in the Caribbean nation and operates key services such as a trauma center and a burn clinic.

The U.N. estimated last month that just 24% of the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area’s health facilities remain open, while those outside the capital face an influx of displaced people jeopardizing their ability to provide essential care.

MSF cited four separate incidents of police threats and aggressions, including from an armed plain clothed officer it said threatened to start executing and burning staff, patients and ambulances as of next week.

The medical aid group treats on average 1,100 outpatients, 54 children in emergency situations and more than 80 sexual and gender-based violence survivors each week, MSF said, as well as many burn victims.

Garnier added that while MSF remained committed to the population it could only resume services if it receives guarantees of security and respect by armed groups, members of self-defense groups and law enforcement.

Earlier on Tuesday, police reported that over two dozen suspected gang members were killed after residents joined police to fight off attempted overnight attacks in a resurgence of “bwa kale” - a civilian vigilante movement that seeks to fight off armed gangs that control most of the capital and are fuelling a worsening humanitarian crisis.

The Iron Grip of the Gangs

(Reuters)








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Friday, October 04, 2024


At least 70 killed in gang attack on Haitian town, UN says

The death toll from a grisly attack Thursday on a small Haitian town by the heavily armed Gran Grif gang has risen to at least 70, the UN human rights office said Friday, adding that women and children were among those killed.

Issued on: 04/10/2024 - 
Kenyan police officers patrol as the country is facing emergency food insecurity while immersed in a social and political crisis, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti October 3, 2024. 
© Jean Feguens Regala, Reuters

By: NEWS WIRES

The tally of victims killed in this week's brutal attack on a small town in central Haiti by heavily armed gang members has risen to at least 70, the U.N. human rights office said Friday.

Bodies lay strewn on the streets of Pont-Sondé following Thursday’s attack in the Artibonite region, many of them killed by a shot to the head, Bertide Harace, spokeswoman for the Commission for Dialogue, Reconciliation and Awareness to Save the Artibonite, told Magik 9 radio station.

Initial estimates put the number of those killed to 20 people, but activists and government officials have been gradually accessing areas of the town and discovering more bodies. Among the victims is a young mother, her newborn baby and a midwife, Herace said.

“We are horrified by Thursday’s gang attacks,” the U.N. Human Rights Office of the Commissioner said in a statement.

It said 10 women and three infants were among those killed, and at least 16 others seriously injured, including two gang members hit during an exchange with police.

The office said gang members reportedly set fire to at least 45 homes and 34 cars.

The motive remains unclear for what was one of the biggest massacres in the central region in recent years. Attacks of that kind have taken place in the capital of Port-au-Prince, 80% of which is controlled by gangs, and they typically are linked to turf wars, with gang members targeting civilians in areas controlled by rivals. But Pont-Sondé is considered part of Gran Grif's own territory.

The gang was created after former Haitian legislator Prophane Victor began arming young men in the area to secure his election and control over the Artibonite region nearly a decade ago, according to a U.N. report.

Both Victor and the leader of Gran Grif, Luckson Elan, were sanctioned by the U.S. last month.

The gang attacked Pont-Sondé before dawn on Thursday and encountered little resistance, Herace said, though she said that contrary to some reports, police officers did try to repel the gang.

“The gang had total control of the area,” Herace said.

Haiti’s government has deployed an elite police unit based in the capital of Port-au-Prince to Pont-Sondé following the attack and sent medical supplies to help the area’s lone hospital overwhelmed by dozens of people injured.

“This heinous crime, perpetrated against defenseless women, men, and children, is not only an attack on these victims, but on the entire Haitian nation,” Prime Minister Garry Conille said in a statement Friday.

Gang violence across Artibonite, which produces much of Haiti’s food, has increased in recent years.

In January 2023, the Gran Grif gang was accused of attacking a police station in Liancourt, located near Pont-Sondé, and killing at least six officers. Violence unleashed by the gang also forced the closure of a hospital in February 2023 that serves more than 700,000 people.

(AP)


Haiti reeling after 70 killed in gang attack

Port-au-Prince (AFP) – The Haitian government has deployed specialist anti-gang police units, it said Friday, after an apparent massacre northwest of Port-au-Prince that the United Nations said left at least 70 dead.

Issued on: 04/10/2024 - 
Jamaican soldiers and police officers arrive at Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on September 12, 2024, as part of an international policing mission © Clarens SIFFROY / AFP
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Carried out early Thursday in the town of Pont Sonde, some 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the capital, the attack saw scores of houses and vehicles torched after gang members opened fire.

The killings come as an international policing mission, led by Kenyan forces, attempts to restore government control in Haiti, where armed gangs have seized swaths of the capital and countryside and earlier this year helped push out the country's leader.

"Members of the Gran Grif gang used automatic rifles to shoot at the population, killing at least 70 people, among them about 10 women and three infants," UN Human Rights Office spokesman Thameen Al-Kheetan said in a statement Friday.

The Haitian Prime Minister's office said in a statement that "this latest act of violence, targeting innocent civilians, is unacceptable and demands an urgent, rigorous and coordinated response from the state."

The embattled Haitian National Police would be "stepping up its efforts," the statement said, adding "agents from the Temporary Anti-Gang Unit (UTAG) have been deployed as reinforcements to back up teams already on the ground."

A spokeswoman for a local civil society group told Haitian media that the attack came after Gran Grif leader Luckson Elan had issued threats against people refusing to pay the group tolls to use a nearby highway.

"They executed dozens of residents," Bertide Horace told radio station Magik 9. "Almost all of the victims were shot in the head."

"Police officers stationed nearby, apparently understaffed, offered no resistance to the criminals, preferring to take cover," she said.

At least 16 people were seriously injured, the UN said, including two gang members shot by police.

The gang reportedly set fire to at least 45 houses and 34 vehicles, it added, forcing many residents to flee.
Kenyan-led policing mission

Additional security forces, supported by the Kenyan-led international policing mission deployed to the country, were sent to Pont Sonde overnight Thursday into Friday, the prime minister's office added.

The attack occurred at 3:00 am Thursday, it said.

Prime Minister Garry Conille added that the "heinous crime, perpetrated against defenseless women, men and children, is not only an attack on these victims, but on the entire Haitian nation."

Last week, the UN human rights office said more than 3,600 people had been killed already this year in "senseless" gang violence in the country.

Haiti has for years been beset by compounding political, humanitarian and gang crises, with armed groups rising up to push out then-prime minister Ariel Henry earlier this year in an effort that saw attacks on the international airport and police stations.

Many politicians are intertwined with armed groups: last week, the US Treasury announced sanctions against a member of parliament from the Artibonite Department, where Pont Sonde is located, for allegedly helping form the Gran Grif gang to aid in his 2016 election.

Unelected and unpopular -- and unable to restore order -- Henry resigned, and a transitional government with Conille as prime minister was put in place, backed by the international community.

That government is mandated to restore security and lead the country to its first polls since 2016.

© 2024 AFP

Wednesday, September 11, 2024

JD Vance’s Slanders Are Far From the Worst Thing the US Has Done to Haitians

After years of strenuously ignoring the country’s agony, Secretary of State Antony Blinken finally visited Haiti last week. For five hours.

THE NATION
 September 11, 2024
A five-hour tour: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken walks with Multinational Security Support Mission Commander Godfrey Otunge and Haitian National Police General Director Rameau Normal (L) in Port Au Prince, Haiti, on September 5, 2024.
(Photo by Roberto Schmidt / POOL / AFP via Getty Images)

It took a lot of unearned courage—some might call it chutzpah, or even balls—for Secretary of State Antony Blinken to fly down to Haiti, arguably the biggest mess US foreign policy has created anywhere in the world (though there are many contenders for that position), merely to reassert the administration’s commitment to the still-evolving government there. Yet Blinken’s lightning visit last week could nonetheless be considered a success. Nothing bad happened; another $45 million in US humanitarian assistance was promised.

Blinken is the highest-ranking American official to visit the country since 2015. Though the US policy in Haiti since the fall of the Duvalier dynasty in 1986 has been to establish a secure electoral democracy in the island nation, there has not been an election of any kind there since 2016—after which the two governments that the United States maneuvered into office failed ever to hold a vote.

The current prime minister, Garry Conille, is the latest in the series of US-backed leaders. He took over in June from the criminally negligent, impotent, overlong reign of the unelected Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who was finally hustled out of Haiti during a gang uprising this past spring and then was not permitted to return to Haitian territory.

One of the hallmarks of US policy in Haiti over the years has been to make demands that create conditions for future political failure, and then blame Haitian dysfunction for that inevitable collapse. Yet it is that very policy that encourages that dysfunction. Conille’s racketty-packetty house of a government, stuffed with rivalrous Haitian political factions essentially imposed on Haiti by the US and CARICOM (the 20-nation Caribbean economic coalition), has shown itself so far incapable of arriving at consensus, much less of leading the country to elections. Even within the factions represented, there are unbreachable fissures.

In spite of this very open fractiousness, and with the trademark casual American refusal to recognize real Haitian problems, Blinken told reporters in Port-au-Prince last week that the US “appreciates Haiti’s leaders putting aside their differences working together to put the country on a path for free and fair elections.” Meanwhile, Conille’s bifurcated government hobbles on, crippled for now by internecine squabbling over power—as could have been (and, in fact, was) predicted.

While the government squabbles, the country’s forces of order have tried to calm the streets. But power no longer resides with them; it hasn’t since the quasi-occupation of Haiti in 2004 by the United Nations mission there, which comprised some 5000 military officers and civilian staff and advisers. Neither the Haitian National Police, nor the small, rather ragtag Haitian Army, nor the painfully undermanned replacement for the UN occupation—a 400-person Kenyan police detail sent in to deal with Haiti’s security problems—seems capable of countering the volatile and violent gangs that now rule the Haitian capital, making the chance of free or fair elections slim indeed. Still, under Conille the Haitian police—fortified recently by a shipment to the Kenyan force of 24 armored vehicles from the US—have at least begun to engage with the gangs, and have even managed to claw back some small areas of the capital from their grasp.

Conille himself had to show up to receive Blinken: the United States is still Haiti’s “best friend” in terms of humanitarian aid and other support, but Haiti’s status as a test tube for ruinous US experiments in democracy is not gaining the Americans any popularity, and Conille did not make a big occasion out of the visit. Neither did Blinken, who traveled through Port-au-Prince via convoys of armored cars from one location secured by US forces to another. A five-hour visit, from landing to takeoff.

With more than 300,000 Haitians, including thousands of babies and children, still displaced by the 2010 earthquake and years of intensifying gang activity, and living in total precarity— no sanitation, clean water, or healthcare; vast food insecurity; and often without work, shelter, or school—Haitians from the top of the social ladder to the bottom feel as if all the US money that’s gone into stabilizing the country in recent years has been wasted. Or, as Haitians say, “it’s like throwing water on the sand.” In 2023 alone, the US provided Haiti with $380 million in financial assistance—not an unusual figure for the perpetually strapped country. In the decade after the earthquake, the international community as a whole furnished some $13 billion in aid.

But there is no sign that over the many decades of assistance the Haitian people have moved forward economically. Instead many Haitians—and most foreign economic analysts—believe that much of this aid has gone to reinforce and enrich corrupt governments and their business friends, rather than to provide social programs and development for the population. Several of these friends were also darlings of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and benefited from their valuable support.

The Biden administration’s policy of forcible deportation of Haitian refugees from US borders back to Port-au-Prince—more than 20,000 during his administration—has also not won the US president many admirers in Haiti, especially given the administration’s July 2023 decision to begin evacuating families of American personnel because of ongoing insecurity.

“Do not travel to Haiti due to kidnapping, crime, civil unrest, and poor health care infrastructure,” read the travel advisory from the State Department. “US citizens in Haiti should depart Haiti as soon as possible by commercial or other privately available transportation options, in light of the current security situation and infrastructure challenges.” At the time, private helicopters were landing regularly on hilltops to ferry US citizens and Haitians with money and travel papers to either the neighboring Dominican Republic or to Miami, while the State Department haggled with Haitian groups about how to help the country out of its quagmire.

Beyond the failure of its aid program and its political policies, the United States is also reviled for supporting the 13-year UN occupation that only ended in 2017. “The Blinken visit is just a repeat of the traditional American playbook,” says Daniel Foote, former US special envoy to Haiti:

“Three years ago, the Department of State disavowed any desire for another UN peacekeeping mission, apparently acknowledging the fact that Haitians despise UN operations because of past atrocities, massacres, and sexual exploitation of women and children. Plus [the UN force] reintroduced cholera into the country 120 years after it was originally eradicated. Now the US is going for another military intervention [the Kenyan police] that’s not been requested by anyone but the US puppets. The irony: Secretary Blinken does all this while saying the plan is Haitian-led.”

If the US record were not so terrible in Latin America generally, it would be astonishing how backward and destructive the economic and political attitude of the world’s richest, best-armed superpower has been toward this desperate neighbor. After all, throughout its history Haiti has remained reasonably friendly toward the United States: no popular front, no powerful Communist or socialist party, a weak and fractured left, with much of its potential for resistance destroyed at conception by the US Marines’ occupation of the country from 1915 to 1934.


When the murderous Duvalier dynasty fell from power in 1986, Ronald Reagan was in the White house, and Haiti has been one of the prime victims of the US’s long Reagan hangover. His administration hoped that the military-civilian junta they supported after Duvalier’s departure would ensure that Haiti’s multigenerational economic elite and the country’s political class—so welcoming of long-entrenched US business interests and of the American government—would continue to run the country, only now without the obstacles that the corrupt Duvaliers had been putting in their way.

Members of those business-inclined elites—blessed, as Duvalier fell, by Reagan’s foreign policy circles—were repeatedly summoned to negotiating tables by US diplomats in the ensuing years. Until recently they were also still running the country as a balkanized series of corrupt fiefdoms, deploying gang firepower and coercion when necessary. The dead hand of Reaganomics in Haiti also kept the state extremely weak, leaving this same coddled elite and its minions in charge of services that in many other places would have been nationalized: transport, communications, energy, healthcare, water delivery, and education. Even the lottery was in private hands. In economic spaces where profit was not high enough—for example, clinics and schools in the countryside—international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), mostly religious charities, arrived to provide a limited version of service that the Haitian government could not provide, or would not. Haiti is Reagan’s dream made flesh: an economy almost completely run by the private sector, with no regulation.

But now the gangs that this same elite traditionally manipulated for political and business ends have apparently escaped from its control. Equipped with military-style weapons and ammunition brought in clandestinely through Miami’s ports, these groups have morphed into seemingly independent criminal enterprises and drug-trafficking rings that, while still sometimes useful to what Haitians call the county’s “biznis mafya,” can no longer be relied on to obey that mafia’s every command.

These same gangs now run almost all of Port-au-Prince—and are spreading their reigns of terror into the nearby countryside. Already this year, more than 4,000 Haitians have been killed or injured in gang violence. Tens of thousands have been displaced from their homes, all of which are systematically looted, and often burned. Women have been attacked both in gang-run areas, where many have been forced into what amounts to sexual servitude and enforced gang participation, and in neighborhoods under assault, where gang rape is common as a tool of control. Schools have been closed, hospitals attacked, looted, and burned, churches targeted, and barely a police headquarters in the capital or its environs has been left untouched by arson and looting. Several of the country’s largest prisons, redoubts of starvation and criminality themselves, have been destroyed and their populations released into the streets, some to starve further, others to rejoin the gangs.

Only one hospital in all of Port-au-Prince—l’Hôpital Universitaire de la Paix—can be called functional. Medical supplies have been commandeered by the gangs, as has gasoline. Extortionist tolls are exacted from bus drivers and passengers and from individual drivers at important crossroads leading in and out of Port-au-Prince. The highways around the country are places of banditry and death where hardly anyone ventures. The ubiquitous market women who come down from the countryside to sell in the cities’ markets—the picturesque lifeblood of Haitian commerce—are under constant threat of robbery and physical attack. “The gangs,” said Monica Clesca, a Haitian political activist, “are waging a war against the population.”

All of this terror was boiling and churning in recent years, as Washington vacillated and hemmed and hawed and turned away from reasonable Haitian interlocutors, engaging instead with the usual suspects it had always trusted and could never seemingly do without. American and other international negotiators put off new democratic groups, with new ideas about grassroots control of the country and real democratic rule, and rejected their proposals pretty much wholesale, while the old guard plotted and planned.

Whatever else the Haitians and Americans are now each cooking up, the brief passage of Blinken through the Haitian landscape means at least that the US hasn’t turned away from the crisis, even if so far it has been inept at helping to solve it. You may mistrust the motivations behind your friend’s offers of help, but still, you don’t want him to abandon you. From the administration’s point of view, continuing US support of Conille and the Kenyan force may help ensure that the Haitian situation doesn’t deteriorate further, at least in the immediate future, i.e., before the November 5 elections. The last thing the Democratic Party wants to see are boatloads of Haitians arriving on Florida’s shores during the next few months.

Conille is probably the right man for this moment: clear-eyed, familiar with the international complex (he worked for the UN in various capacities from 2001 on, including in Haiti after the earthquake), able to talk as an equal with Blinken, but also connected through family to both the Haitian elite and to the small but still important middle class. Slow to anger and with a reputation for loyalty toward his underlings rather than dramatic firings and hirings, Conille has so far been free from the usual, and often well-founded, accusations of corruption… or drug-trafficking…. or participation in gang massacres…. or looting of government coffers that have been leveled against many of his predecessors.

In the wings, the threat of Trump looms. He’s long put Haiti into his infamous category of “shithole countries,” while just this week his running mate JD Vance accused “illegal Haitian immigrants” of “draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio.” Vance also accused the Haitians of abducting and eating their neighbors’ household pets. Such talk does not bode well for Haitian immigrants—or for the country’s limping attempts to get out from under the gangs and move toward democratic governance.

When people ask how Haiti can be “like that” when it is so close to the US, the proper response is that it’s “like that” precisely because it is so close to the US.


Ohio’s Haitian immigrant influx boosts economy, strains services and sparks social furor

Haitian immigrants are reshaping Ohio’s demographics, bringing economic benefits but also challenging local infrastructure and social concerns in cities like Springfield.


Sep. 10, 2024
Courtesy of Springfield, Ohio town website

Overview:

Ohio is experiencing a surge in Haitian immigration, particularly in cities like Springfield, where the population has grown by nearly 25% in the last four years. This demographic shift is reshaping the local economy and community dynamics, with benefits for industries facing labor shortages, and challenges to infrastructure and services like healthcare and education.

Ohio, traditionally a political bellwether, is undergoing a significant demographic shift with major implications as Haitian immigrants settle there. In recent years, the state has experienced a surge in Haitian immigration, particularly in cities like Springfield, that is reshaping communities economically, socially and politically. The growth is also highlighting anti-immigrant views such as vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance’s false, racist claims.

As Ohio grapples with these changes, the coming months will be crucial in determining whether the state can successfully integrate its new residents. The situation in Springfield could provide key insights into how communities across the U.S. might handle similar challenges in the future, particularly regarding immigration, economic policy, and electoral dynamics.

Springfield surge benefits economy

A city of about 60,000 residents, Springfield was once a symbol of the Rust Belt’s economic decline. But its population has grown by nearly 25%, driven largely by Haitians looking for work and safety, over the past four years. The city is now experiencing renewed vibrancy and opportunities. However, the rapid change has also brought challenges, including a resurfacing of white supremacist views, that have sparked debates among its residents and far beyond.

On the economic front, local businesses have benefited from the new labor force. Industries that were once struggling to fill positions, especially in manufacturing, have welcomed the Haitian workforce. Jamie McGregor, CEO of McGregor Metal Plant, highlighted the importance of these workers.

“Without the Haitian associates that we have, we had trouble filling these positions,” McGregor said.
Infrastructure, services, cultural concerns raised

For local infrastructure, however, the demographic shift has created challenges. Springfield’s hospitals, for example, are spending up to $50,000 each month on translation services for non-English-speaking patients. In school, many new students require additional support such as English as a Second Language (ESL), further straining already limited resources.

Local government officials are concerned about the resulting pressure on essential services. Mayor Rob Rue has urged state and federal authorities to step in and provide additional support.

“Our community has a big heart, but it’s being overwhelmed,” Rue said.

For long-time residents, the rapid changes have sparked concerns about local culture, the increased strain on services and broader social impacts. In response, the Springfield chapter of the NAACP, led by President Denise Williams, has been facilitating discussions aimed at promoting understanding between the Haitian community and established residents.

“They are not going anyw
here,” Williams said during a recent forum. “So how do we co-exist? As one people.”


Racist claims tied to politics on rise

In politics, as the 2024 elections approach in particular, the presence of Haitians has become a focal point in local, state and federal campaigns. Immigration was already a hot-button issue in political debates, but the Haitian community’s growing presence could affect voter turnout and influence, especially in Ohio’s swing districts.

Just one day before the anticipated first debate between presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, Vance tweeted a debunked, racist conspiracy theory about Haitians in Ohio harming pets and wild animals. Other Republican officials like Ted Cruz and Elon Musk repeated the falsehood, just one of several that have been circulating on social platforms in targeting Haitians.

“People are scared and have been calling me all day because of this,” Vilès Dorsainvil, a Haitian community leader, said that Monday afternoon.

Prior to Vance amplifying the false claims, a white supremacist had become active in Springfield in the weeks prior. They held an anti-Haitian march in August, delivered a “warning” to the city officials during a regular meeting and ratcheted up attacks posted from anonymous users on Springfield social channels.

“Our community is more heated than it’s ever been after this [Vance] comment,” said Williams, of the Springfield NAACP. “This is really getting out of hand. [It] is absolutely disturbing. This is a good town. We don’t want them [far-right extremists] to run people off.”

This article contains information first reported by Springfield News SunWHIO, and NPR.



GOTHIC CAPITALISM

The Horror of Accumulation and the Commodification of Humanity.

ABSTRACT:

This article is in six parts with appendices. All footnotes are at the end of the article

1 ZOMBIE CAPITALISM
In Haiti under American Imperialism, 1915-1935, the cult of the Zombie developed and under capitalism became a tool for creating a docile labouring class for work on American controlled sugar plantations. With the publication of the Magic Island by William Seabrook in 1929 American popular culture was introduced to the Zombie, and it quickly became a popular character in horror literature, news stories and movies.