Beggars Banquet

Amid wave of killings, Haiti's politicians scramble for power

“From Monday to Friday, at the transition table, we eat well,” began an article that ran last week in the Haitian news outlet AlterPresse, satirically referring to the Conseil présidentiel de transition (CPT), the nine-member body (of which only seven members, all male, can vote) that has ostensibly governed Haiti since April following the ouster of Prime Minister Ariel Henry. “No question of letting national calamities spoil your appetite. While the population counts the grains of wheat in its blue bowl of disaster, at the council, we keep the bottles of the greatest vintages moving.”

The piece goes on, in a mocking tone, to chronicle the savory dishes it said the members enjoyed, including “an orgy of seafood: lobsters, conchs, crabs and imported oysters, all served with refined sauces, accompanied by a good Burgundy that would make the purse of any petro-monarch succumbing to temptation quiver” before concluding “meanwhile, the city burns, people drop like flies from Pont-Sondé to Cité Soleil, but what does it matter if the table is well stocked. After all, you don't govern a country on fire on an empty stomach.”

As Haiti closes out a dolorous 2024 marked by killings, mass displacement and a political class that seems to have learned nothing from the garish fates of some of its predecessors, the motives behind the ouster last month of Prime Minister Garry Conille, in tandem with whom the council was supposed to be pulling Haiti out of the mire, and his replacement with Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, have become ever clearer. With the council itself made up almost entirely of veterans of Haiti’s previous political wars - and with three of its members currently under investigation for corruption - the council faction claiming allegiance to the Fanmi Lavalas political party of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who ruled the country in a despotic and catastrophic fashion two decades ago, appears to be seizing the levers for what currently passes for political power in Haiti. 

When Lavalas veteran Leslie Voltaire replaced Edgard Leblanc Fils, a politician from the Organisation du peuple en lutte (OPL) political party, in the “rotating presidency” of the council in October, Lavalas wasted little time in ousting the often-combative Conille and replacing him with the more-compliant Fils-Aimé, an endeavour in which multiple sources in Haiti have confirmed to me Aristide was intimately involved, particularly the designation of  Paul Antoine Bien-Aimé - viewed as an Aristide loyalist - as Minister of Interior in the Fils-Aimé government. 

In a 13 December note, a number of political groups also involved in the council - the Collectif du 30 janvier of OPL, the Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale (PHTK) and several other parties, the Accord du 21 Décembre which the defunct Henry government hammered out with several political entities in late 2022, the Engagés pour le Développement (EDE)/Résistance Démocratique (RED) coalition comprised of allies of slain president Jovenel Moïse,  the Pitit Dessalines party of former senator and presidential candidate Moïse Jean Charles and others - published a scathing attack on what they charged was 

The unilateral decisions of the CPT relating to the dismissal of Prime Minister Garry Conille [and] the formation of an openly partisan government led by Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé [confirming] the will of the new alliance in power made up of Fanmi Lavalas and its allies in the political and business sectors to take control of the transitional government and to reproduce itself, whatever the cost, in power after about two decades of electoral failures.

[In Haiti's November 2016 presidential elections, the last presidential elections held in the country and which saw Jovenel Moïse win 55.60% of the vote in the first round, the Fanmi Lavalas candidate, Maryse Narcisse (widely viewed as such a stand-in for Aristide that she was often depicted by cartoonists cradling the former president's picture as if it were a holy relic) received only 9% of the vote, finishing fourth.]

Not to be outdone, in a note signed by party members Narcisse, Joël Édouard Vorbe, Anthony Dessources and Jean Myrto Julien, Lavalas published its own attack on the council, where it inveighed against “gang violence” and what it said was its inability “to show any sensitivity or demonstrate any capacity to respond to the urgent needs of the population.”

It was an ironic critique considering that it was Aristide and Lavalas who, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, provided the template for the gangs currently terrorizing Haiti, including overseeing a massacre that took place in the La Scierie neighborhood in the central Haitian city of Saint-Marc in February 2004 where the Aristide government’s security forces and loyal gang members killed at least 27 people. Vieiwng this template with approval, many other political currents in Haiti adopted the young gang model with aplomb in the years since before it blew up in their faces amid the uprising of the Viv Ansanm gang coalition at the beginning of this year.

If all this might seem internecine and confusing in normal circumstances, consider the context in Haiti itself in which this politicking was taking place.

Over the weekend of 6-8 December in the Wharf Jérémie section of the impoverished community of Cité Soleil, armed men under the command of local gang leader Monel Félix, better known as Mikano, reportedly killed dozens and by some reports upward of 150 people in the quarter, whom he held responsible for the death of his young son through various vodou spells. Speaking to my own sources in Cité Soleil and in the public and private security sector in Port-au-Prince, it is clear that a terrible mass killing took place in Wharf Jérémie under Mikano’s direction, but I am hearing sharply contrasting death tolls from the 184 number quoted by the United Nations and local human rights groups like the Réseau National de Défense de Droits Humains (RNDDH). Another frequently quoted source, former Cité Soleil mayor Esaïe Beauchard, has claimed that nearly 300 were killed, a statement somewhat complicated by the fact that Beauchard himself was accused of involvement in an October 2015 killing of at least 15 people in the neighborhood. The numbers I am hearing put the death toll somewhere nearer to 50, still a horrible massacre, but, even though the grim immense tally might prove correct, I would advise caution, especially as the initial death toll of a massacre the Gran Grif gang committed in the community Pont Sondé this past October was later found by Haiti’s Le Nouvelliste to have likely been wildly inflated, a fact that in no way lessened the horror of the killings that in fact did take place. The fact that some foreign news outlets broadcast demonstrably false headlines such as “Haiti’s capital left in ruins after gang attack” for social media clicks does not help clarify the situation. In the aftermath of the atrocity, Mikano held a march throughout the zone to demonstrate his “support” by the population. 

[An article in today’s El País quoting multiple sources on the ground gave considerably more detail about the killings than any other foreign media report I have read up ot now.]

Wharf Jérémie gang leader Monel Félix, aka Mikano, marches with supporters in the neighborhood.

As Wharf Jérémie bled, in the Artibonite Valley town of Petite-Rivière de l’Artibonite, which Haitian security forces and Kenyan members of the Multinational Security Support (MSS) Mission in Haiti recently said they had reclaimed from gangsters, the Gran Grif gang struck again, reportedly killing at least 15 people, including a number of children, images of whose lifeless bodies were shared in Haitian messaging groups, over the night of 10-11 December. Videos of a number of people kidnapped by the gang being tortured have also surfaced. 

To add to this violent manje lwa, gangs in Port-au-Prince continued their advance up the hill from their lairs anba lavil towards neighborhoods such as Pacot and Canapé Vert, with armed men repeatedly spotted in the Nazon area. To make matters worse, Joseph Wilson, aka Lanmò San Jou, the leader of Haiti's 400 Mawozo gang, released a video displaying a newly acquired U.S.-made .50 caliber machine gun, a weapon easily capable of piercing armour-plated vehicles or bringing down a plane. 

Amid these horrors, Haiti’s transitional council - eyes on the prize - trumpeted the seating of a new Conseil Électoral Provisoire (CEP), tasked with overseeing elections by the end of 2025 in a territory that neither the council nor the Prime Minister even remotely controls. 

As we prepare to bid adieu to 2024, keep the people of Haiti in your hearts and in your thoughts, a people who, as a song once said, need leaders but get gamblers instead.

Joseph Wilson, aka Lanmò San Jou, leader of Haiti's 400 Mawozo gang, displays a newly acquired .50 caliber machine gun in a video.