The Children of Sisyphus
After a harrowing journey, dozens of Haitians in Jamaica wait in limbo.
At the end of a rugged road in Jamaica’s Robin’s Bay, 38 Haitians await news of their fate.
In this campsite of the 7th Day Adventist Church, surrounded by the ebullient green of rural Saint Mary Parish on the island’s north coast and guarded by police of the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF), the squeals of children playing football echo through the encampment. They mingle with the sounds of hammering and sawing as adults try to create handicrafts to perhaps sell one day and the smell of breadfruit being roasted over an open fire.
“We went through a lot of misery and calamity, and we spent 14 days at sea,” says Paul Wilguens, a 31 year-old from the city of Jérémie, on the tip of Haiti’s Péninsule de Tiburon, in the Grand'Anse Department in the country’s southwest. “We were very hungry and we drank seawater…[We left because] Haiti was not good for us, the misery, the problem of growing insecurity, the bandits…We have 7 months since we are in this camp. God took care of us [and the Jamaicans] feed us and give us clothes. We say thanks to God.”
The group, consisting of 8 children and 29 adults (one of whom, a pregnant woman, has since given birth) landed near Boston Bay in neighboring Portland Parish in July 2023, and have since been visited at their temporary facilities by representatives of the Jamaican government of Prime Minister Andrew Holness, including Minister of National Security Dr Horace Chang, who said of the migrants that “their right to a hearing in the court of law, and to request asylum have been guaranteed.”
As they gather under the awning of a meeting hall open on all four sides to the warm afternoon breeze, the Haitains regale a visitor with tales of woe.
“I left Haiti because things are not good with the problems with insecurity,” explains 35 year-old Jean-Baptiste, who hails from an area in Jérémie called Sainte-Hélène and who says his wife was killed by thieves who stole the money they had made from his moto taxi service. He says he had a brother who was also killed.
“Day and night, bandits are pulling guns and machetes on people, beating people,” he continues. “We said we will head anywhere, and wherever we land, we land. We said the fish can even eat us because what we are enduring in Haiti is no good…I wanted to save my little girl. I had to leave with her to save her.”
The Jamaican government’s policy may not be as enlightened as it first appears, however. The Haitians ensconced in Robins Bay were part of a wave of Hatians that arrived in Jamaica last summer, with the majority, including 36 who arrived in Portland Parish’s Long Bay in September, summarily deported by the government in what critics see as a blatant violation of Jamaica’s commitments under the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention and the subsequent 1967 Protocol, both of which Jamaica is a signatory to and which enshrine the principle of non-refoulement, that is, the concept that a refugee should not be returned to a country where they might face serious threats to their life or freedom.
“The group of Haitian asylum seekers in Robin’s Bay [has been] the only group that has been allowed to communicate with an attorney and access an asylum procedure,” says Malene Alleyne, an international human rights lawyer and researcher from Jamaica who is the founder of Freedom Imaginaries, a legal advocacy organization, and who is the lawyer representing the Haitian asylum seekers in Robin’s Bay.
“Every other group was rapidly returned to Haiti, without access to asylum, in total disregard of United Nations non-return advisories and in flagrant violation of international refugee and human rights law,” Alleyne explains. “The case of the Robin’s Bay group is therefore the last bastion of hope and, perhaps, an opportunity to end the escalating cycle of migration-related abuse targeting Haitians. Their case is immensely important, not only for refugee law and the plight of Haitians, but for every Jamaican whose rights can only be guaranteed in a constitutional democracy governed by the rule of law.”
What the Haitians are fleeing was described to me last year in Port-au-Prince by the the rector of Haiti’s Université Quisqueya, Jacky Lumarque, as “institutional chaos and humanitarian and social disaster,” a terrifying descent that, despite what much foreign reporting on the country claims, started long before the July 2021 assassination of Haiti’s President, Jovenel Moïse.
In the nearly three years since Moïse’s killing, though, Haiti’s crisis has taken on new and frightening dimensions. Most of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and its environs are under the control of thousands of heavily-armed gang members, with travel through the northern, southern and eastern approaches to the city an option only for the desperate or foolhardy. An unelected Prime Minister, Ariel Henry, who has no constitutional authority to occupy the position he holds and who has repeatedly been linked to some of those alleged to have been involved in Moïse’s killing, has presided over a virtual collapse of the state.
In addition to a widespread belief in Haiti that Henry himself might have been involved in the plot to kill the president, human rights organizations have accused Henry - who Jamaica’s Andrew Holness referred to as “my friend” - of “continuing to supply the gangs with weapons and ammunition to put an end to the lives of the police, to discourage them in their work and to block justice.”
[One of the fugitives involved in Moïse’s murder, former Haitian senator John Joël Joseph, was located hiding in Jamaica in January 2022 and arrested and deported to the United States. He was subsequently convicted and sentenced to life in prison for his role in the assassination by a U.S. federal court in Miami.]
Despite appearing outwardly calmer than the criminal anarchy currently roiling Haiti’s capital, the Grand'Anse Department, where most of the migrants originated, and the south of Haiti in general have hardly been spared from the calamitous natural disasters and political-societal collapse affecting the rest of the country.
On 14 August 2021, a 7.2 magnitude earthquake hit the southern peninsula, which juts out towards Jamaica and Cuba like the outstretched arm of a swimmer reclining in the sand. More than 2,200 people were killed, 12,200 people injured and more than half a million people left in dire need of assistance, with tens of thousands of structures destroyed or damaged. Only days later, Tropical Storm Grace also hit the region, flooding areas previously hit by the earthquake and further degrading damaged buildings.
In the midst of 7 February protests this year against Ariel Henry's rule that took place in Jérémie, the local offices of the Protection Civile, the government body tasked with risk and disaster management, were ransacked, while demonstrators were attacked with hurled bottles and gunfire, leaving at least 5 dead.
The Grand'Anse Department also serves as the power base for Guy Philippe, a former army and police officer who was involved in the 2004 uprising that toppled the despotic Jean-Bertrand Aristide from power and who was subsequently convicted of drug trafficking-related offenses by a Miami court. Philippe served six years in a U.S. prison before being deported back to Haiti last December, and he has been active in the anti-Ariel Henry movement ever since. One of Philippe’s closest collaborators and a member of his political party, former Secretary of State for Public Security and former director of Haiti’s Agence Nationale des Aires Protégées (ANAP) Jeantel Joseph, has been leading chaotic demonstrators of armed members of the Brigade de Sécurité des Aires Protégées (BSAP) - ostensibly a force tasked with protecting sensitive environmental areas but in practice little more than a private militia - calling for Henry’s resignation.
During Haiti’s last parliament (whose mandate expired in January 2020, leaving Haiti without a functioning legislature), the neighboring Sud Department was represented in Haiti’s Senate by Hervé Fourcand, a member of the Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale (PHTK) formed by former president Michel Martelly. The Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains (RNDDH) human rights group has accused Fourcand of involvement in political violence that rocked the city of Les Cayes in December 2011 and Fourcand’s name also figured prominently in the 2019 trial of an Orlando gun shop owner who was found guilty of conspiring to illegally export guns and ammunition to Haiti, with Whatsapp text messages presented by prosecutors showing the man to be in regular contact with Fourcand about the shipment. Fourcand was subsequently sanctioned by the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and by the government of Canada, with the OFAC press release announcing the sanctions stating that he was an example “of corrupt Haitian politicians abusing their power to further drug trafficking activities.”
Also during the last parliament, the neighborhing department of Nippes was represented in Haiti’s lower house of the legislature, the Chamber of Deputies, by PHTK member Claude Luc Guillaume, the nephew of convicted narco Jacques Ketant. At his sentencing in a U.S. court in February 2004, Ketant outlined how he had allegedly paid millions of dollars in bribes to Haiti’s then-president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to facilitate his narcotics business, calling Aristide “a drug lord” who ran “a one-man show…You either pay [him] or you die.” Kentant was deported back to Haiti from the United States in 2015 and, in July 2019, six people were killed after members of Guillaume’s auto convoy gunned down two protesters at which point four of Guillaume’s associates were killed by a mob in Petite-Rivière de Nippes.
During the refugees’ time in Jamaica, the situation in Haiti has scarcely improved. Only this month, at least 9 people were killed in a gang attack on a bus traveling from Port-au-Prince to the city of Mirebalais, Haiti's Coalition de la jeunesse haïtienne pour l’intégration (COJHIT) warned that the degradation in the security situation had caused the closure of more than 1,000 schools around the country and the International Organization For Migration (IOM) revealed that nearly 10,000 had been displaced from their homes in a single week following gang attacks in and around Port-au-Prince
In his 1965 novel, The Children of Sisyphus, which chronicles the lives of residents of a West Kingston slum known as The Dungle, the Jamaican author Orlando Patterson has one of his characters observe “Oh what a life, what a worthless, lousy, dirty life.” But for the Haitians, any life at all, it would appear, would be preferable to what they endured in Haiti.
"I was raped. I lost my husband and child in Haiti. That is what put me out onto the water, because we have no help," says a 41 year-old woman at the camp who also hails from Jérémie. “We ran out of food. We drank seawater. We went through lots of misery before we landed. It was not our decision to come here, but it is God who sent us here.”
Shortly after the group arrived, the pregnant woman who was aboard the boat gave birth. It was a baby boy. She and the father decided to name it honour of the island where they had landed. They called him Jamaica Son.