Going Up the Country
As attention focuses on Port-au-Prince, Haiti's Artibonite Valley descends into anarchy.
The images would be inexplicable to one not well-versed in both Haiti’s folk culture and its security collapse. On a country lane, gunmen clad in red, the colour of the Vodou warrior lwa (spirit) Ogoun Ferraille, gather around the carving of the head of an ox, an animal historically associated with the lwa Bossou, and call out insults and challenges to their rivals.
This was the scene in Haiti’s Artibonite Valley earlier this week after the Gran Grif gang (recently designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and Specially Designated Global Terrorists by the U.S. Department of State) attacked the community of Jean-Denis, widely viewed as a symbol of resistance to the gang’s bloody reign in what was once the country’s agricultural heartland. Sharing videos of absolute mayhem via social media, Gran Grif laid siege to the bastion of a militia known as the Coalition révolutionnaire pour sauver l’Artibonite (Revolutionary Coalition to Save the Artibonite) amid a tableau of shouts, burning buildings and an absurd amount of rounds being fired at their enemies and at basically anything that moved. Outnumbered and outgunned, the militia fought to save the community with, locals say, no aid from either the Police Nationale d'Haïti (PNH) or the Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support (MSS) Mission in Haiti. After initially being overwhelmed, local militia are said to have mounted a counterattack, with battles ongoing, even as many of the residents of Jean-Denis fled west to the coastal city of Saint-Marc.
Gran Grif - whose designation by the State Department, far from cowing them, has, according to my conversations with people in Haiti’s security sector, filled them with a new sense of their own importance - succeeded in seizing a talismanic sculpture of an ox head that guarded the entrance to Jean-Denis (the images alluded to at the beginning of this article), an object believed to “protect” the town from gang onslaughts. Gran Grif leader Luckson Élan called out threats to the militia leader known as Ti Mépri and his fighters to “come and reclaim the icon in Savien [Gran Grif’s base] if they are capable.”
It goes without saying that this event, even coming in the wake of the horrible massacre by militia (and not Gran Grif, as was first reported) of at least dozen parishioners in the Artibonite town of Préval, got virtually no attention in the foreign press. Much of the coverage of Haiti in recent days - what coverage there has been - was focused on reports that Haiti’s unelected, deeply unpopular “transitional” government was contracting the services of Erik Prince, founder of the defunct private military company Blackwater (which committed a massacre of civilians during its time in Iraq) to fight the gangs currently controlling most of Haiti’s capital. A report in the New York Times cited “senior Haitian and American government officials and several other security experts familiar with Mr. Prince’s work in Haiti” along with a U.S. military veteran and Haitian-American gadfly named Rod Joseph, and outlined what it said was Prince’s operating of explosive drones in Haiti since this past March and his plan to recruit some 150 mercenaries to - somewhat preposterously - take on the circa 13,000 to 14,000 gang members in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area and the hundreds in the Artibonite. What was to become of the country’s various anti-gang militias - also heavily armed - remained unclear. The Réseau National de Défense de Droits Humains (RNDDH) human rights organization has claimed - with no methodology or supporting evidence as far as I have seen - that “more than 250” gang members have been killed by drones in the Port-au-Prince area in recent days, a claim that was repeated in the Times article. By what authority Haiti’s Conseil Présidentiel de Transition (CPT) and Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé intend to invite foreign troops into the country and with what means they intend to pay them (the stories of corrupt contracts emanating from the CPT grow by the week) is also clear as mud.
Though Haiti’s beleaguered security forces enjoyed a rare moment of progress as they laid siege to one of the strongholds of Vitel'Homme Innocent’s Kraze Baryè gang in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Pernier this past week, the situation around Haiti remains dire, indeed. The Plateau Central town of Hinche has been deluged with people fleeing gang violence in the communities of Mirebalais (under gang control since early April), Saut-d’Eau and Lascahobas, while gunmen in the town of Malpasse, on the border with Dominican Republic city of Jimaní, recently stormed the customs office there as gangs “tax” and harass local merchants trying to earn a living. An extraordinarily sad video from the Champ de Mars plaza in downtown Port-au-Prince shows an expanse utterly abandoned by authorities and being reclaimed by nature under the gaze of the statue of the Nèg Mawon.
Prospective foreign interlopers at the service of corrupt local gran manje or not, Haiti is still chèche lavi (looking for life). One wonders what the coming summer holds and how it will bode for the nation and its people, and remembers the words in Jacques Roumain’s timeless novel of Haitian rural life, Gouverneurs de la rosée, published in 1944
How far things were from the good old days of the konbit, from the virile joyous chants of the men folk, from the sparkling, swinging hoes in the sun, from those happy years when we used to dance the minuet under the arbors with the carefree voices of dark young girls bursting forth like a fountain in the night.
[A note from the author: As this kind of writing and background knowledge has taken decades of work to refine, as as outlets such as the Guardian - rather disappointingly - feel free to simply pillage your humble correspondent’s content here uncredited to pad out their own reporting, if you are able, please do consider becoming a paid subscriber to this newsletter. I do my best to keep as much content as possible accessible to the general public to keep information flowing, but keeping body and soul together financially remains a concern for this kind of work. Merci d'avance, chers amis. Ayiti pap peri. MD]