Breaking the Walls
Haiti's Viv Ansanm Continues Its Campaign
For weeks, there were rumors that Haiti’s Viv Ansanm (Live Together) gang coalition was preparing to launch an attack on the central city of Mirebalais, some 30 miles away from the nation’s capital, Port-au-Prince. Roughly halfway between Haiti’s border with the Dominican Republic and Canaan, a former-displaced persons camp north of Port-au-Prince that has become a bastion of the Taliban gang of Jeff Larose - aka General Jeff or Jeff Canaan, a former heavy machinery operator-turned-crime lord - Mirebalais makes a tempting target for a coalition that has expanded its control of the capital in recent weeks, overrunning neighborhoods like Solino, Nazon, Christ-Roi and now appearing poised to take over the old quarter of Pacot.
And yet, as happened last month during the gang assault on the mountain town of Kenscoff, which was also telegraphed well in advance, and as they are doing in Pacot now, what passes for Haiti’s government - Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé and his cabinet and a nine-member Conseil Présidentiel de Transition (Presidential Transition Council or CPT), cobbled together with CARICOM and U.S. assistance last year - did virtually nothing. No reinforcements were sent to the area in which a relative handful of police and the local brigades de vigilance were essentially left to fend for themselves. For several days before the attack, local brigades had been identifying and killing what they said were members of the gangs advance guard while government officials in the capital busied themselves with endeavours such as attending the inauguration of the new offices of Port-au-Prince Court of First Instance in the Delmas 75 neighborhood, the third time the court has been moved due to the country’s insecurity.
Speaking to the Magik 9 radio station, Frédérique Occéan, the departmental délégué for the Centre Department (of which Mirebalais is part) said that at the time of the initial raid - around 3am on Monday morning - “there were no police officers at the Mirebalais police station” and that the gunmen “encountered no resistance other than that put up by certain members of the population and by the departmental delegation team.” I myself saw videos of a number of suspected gang members receiving gruesome rough justice at the hands of the population during and after the attack.
According to Radio Metropole, the gunmen “looted and set fire to several houses” and residents “had to flee en masse to escape the violence.” In the wake of this attack, police later confirmed that over 500 prisoners had been freed from the local jail during the assault. Members of the Brigade de Sécurité des Sires Protégées (BSAP) - a controversial entity linked to former rebel leader and convicted drug trafficker Guy Philippe - and the Police Frontalière Terrestre (POLIFRONT) border force were instead left to spontaneously rush to their comrades’ aid from nearby municipalities. Speaking to the daily Le Nouvelliste, Occéan also asserted that “no one” in Haiti’s government “has responded to our requests…The authorities in Port-au-Prince are showing indifference toward Mirebalais. We don't even have the resources to supervise the police officers sent to the city as reinforcements.”
[It was later announced that the local police chief, Jean Claude Bazile, would be replaced with another police officer, Jean David Mathias.]
The town of Saut-d'Eau - home to a beautiful waterfall that is a site of pilgrimage to both Catholics and vodouisants and where, in 1976, the great Haitian journalist Jean Léopold Dominique broadcast an account of the vodou practices there that used it as a parable for a nation stifled and terrorized under the tyranny of the-dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier - was also reportedly targeted. Saut-d'Eau was also the site of a gang attack in September 2023.
During the assault, the woefully understaffed Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support (MSS) in Haiti - largely restricted to try to prosecute its mission in and around Port-au-Prince and in the Artibonite Valley - was reportedly nowhere to be seen, and, on 25 March, had in fact lost another soldier, its second killed in combat, near the Artibonite town of Kafou Pèy. Local gangsters later circulated videos of themselves mocking the soldier’s corpse and wearing his vest and helmet.
Watching the systematic targeting of prisons in Haiti by Viv Ansanm - in March of last year they freed thousands of prisoners from Port-au-Prince’s Pénitencier National, two months earlier they seized the prison in the town of Cabaret and in February 2021 gangs that would later fall under its umbrella helped provoke a massive jailbreak in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Croix-des-Bouquets - has reminded me of nothing so much as the so-called “Breaking the Walls” campaign waged by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) during 2013 and 2014. During this offensive, ISIS used inmates freed in a July 2013 jailbreak at the Abu Ghraib prison outside of Bhagadad to help fuel an insurgency that would go on to capture Fallujah and Hīt in early 2014 and by June 2014 capture Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. As Frantz Duval wrote in Haiti’s Le Nouvelliste, when assessing the toll of these attacks, there have been more than six thousand prisoners who have been released in recent years by Haiti’s criminal groups.
Port-au-Prince itself is hanging on by a thread. Pacot, my old neighborhood and a lovely area of old gingerbread homes and dripping greenery, appears to be the next on the gangs’ target list, with the novelist Gary Victor writing of how the zone “has no one to protect her. A few young people trying to stop the bandits' advance. A few police officers risking their lives without support from their superiors. Despite what some people may say, they are heroes.”
People in Haiti speak darkly about possible collusion between some elements of the transitional authorities and the gangs, with the former hoping to perhaps angle for a better position for elections that it says are to happen before the end of this year but which will certainly not. On messaging apps and in phone calls, people I know in Haiti- moderate people who have always eschewed violence and intemperate talk - speak openly of their desire to see tribunals and worse for the political “leaders” who have brought the country to such a pass. Only two weeks ago, André Michel - a parasitic malefactor who represents the absolute worst of the country’s political class - was nearly lynched as he was attempting to slither across the border to the Dominican Republic at Ouanaminthe and was only saved by the intervention of Dominican border agents.
May we wish for strength for the defenders of Mirebalais, Pacot, Canapé Vert and other areas fighting for their survival. In the defenders of these areas courses the blood of other heroes of Haiti’s history. Let us hope that the ancestors reach out from the past to give them the strength to endure and not surrender in the face of such great odds.
Ayiti pap peri.