Deported Haitians return home to chaos
Thousands displaced in country’s capital amid gang violence in city
PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI—Deported from the United States, Pierre Charles landed a week ago in Port-au-Prince, a capital more dangerous and dystopian than the one he’d left four years before. Unable to reach his family, he left the airport alone, on foot.
Charles was unsure how to make his way to the Carrefour neighbourhood through a city shrouded in smoke and dust, often tolling with gunfire from gangs and police. On the airport road, the 39-year-old labourer tried unsuccessfully to flag down packed buses. He asked motorcycle drivers to take him but was told again and again that the trip was too risky.
Finally, someone agreed to take him as far as a bus stop.
“I know there are barricades and shootings,” Charles said as he took off into the unknown, “but I have nowhere else to go.”
At least 2,853 Haitians deported from Texas have landed here in the last week with $15 to $100 (U.S.) in cash handouts and a “good luck out there” from migration officials — many setting foot in the country for the first time in years, even decades.
More than a city, Port-auPrince is an archipelago of gang-controlled islands in a sea of despair. Some neighbourhoods are abandoned. Others are barricaded behind fires, destroyed cars and piles of garbage, occupied by heavily armed men. On Saturday, a local newspaper reported 10 kidnappings in the previous 24 hours including a journalist, a singer’s mother and a couple driving with their toddler, who was left behind in the car.
Even before the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse a in July, the government was weak. Now, although there is a prime minister, it is absent.
Most of the population of Port-au-Prince has no access to
basic public services, no drinking water, electricity or garbage collection. The deportees join thousands of fellow Haitians who have been displaced from their homes, pushed out by violence to take up residence in crowded schools, churches, sports centres and makeshift camps among ruins. Many of these people are out of reach even for humanitarian organizations.
Of the more than 18,000 people the United Nations counts among those displaced in Portau-Prince since gang violence began to spike in May, the International Organization for Migration only has access “to about 5,000, maybe 7,000,” said Giuseppe Loprete, head of the IOM mission here. “We are negotiating access to the rest.”
This is the Port-au-Prince that awaits the deportees. Here are snapshots of a city that is far from welcoming.
Elice Fleury didn’t pay much attention to the people running and shouting outside his bakery until he heard the bursts of gunfire. When he looked out the door on June 2, he saw heavily armed masked men pulling people out of their homes and
taking control of his Martissant neighbourhood.
The main road in Martissant is a strategic artery that connects the Haitian capital with the south of the country. The gang wanted control. They had surrounded the neighbourhood that lies between mountains and the sea in a wellplanned occupation, and were firing on the police station. When Fleury saw the officers fleeing instead of facing the armed men, he called his wife. “I can’t get out,” she told him. Fleury spent that night in a nearby square with other neighbours, talking to his wife by telephone — their children crying in the background — as she explained that the gunmen had fired tear gas, searched house by house and were patrolling the streets.
A day later, the family escaped, leaving everything behind, and reunited in a temporary shelter.
Three months later, the Fleurys languish in that temporary shelter, sleeping on the floor of a sports centre a few miles from the house to which they neither can nor want to return.
Martissant has become one of the disconnected islands in the capital. Buses carrying people and merchandise from Portau-Prince
to the south of the country form convoys to travel through Martissant, often waiting for hours and sometimes overnight until they pay the gang members for clearance to travel, according to drivers.
Two weeks after the Martissant attack, gunmen laid siege to an encampment called La Piste along the coast north of the capital, a neighbourhood of deaf and disabled Haitians relocated by the International Red Cross after the 2010 earthquake levelled the capital.
This time it was the police leading an assault at dusk, according to residents and a United Nations account.
“My son was playing cards outside when I heard the gunshots,” said Marie Jaquesmel, 70. “The police entered from different directions and started firing tear gas and shooting, we could only run.”
With 139 houses set fire behind her, she lost track of her 28-year-old son, who is deaf and cannot speak. “I don’t know if he is dead or alive, the only thing I saw is that those men were policemen.”
Now she is twice displaced, this time without her so. She shares a cramped school with 315 families from La Piste, living in despair.
Joseph Dieu Faite, 56, a blind leader of the displaced residents of La Piste looks toward the horizon with eyes wide open, as if he were seeing a monster. The attack, he explains, was police retaliation against civilians living in a gang-controlled neighbourhood.
Justin Pierre June, 31, an articulate law student who arrived in Port-au-Prince on the first deportee flight last Sunday stood up to the IOM officers receiving them at the airport.
“This is not the right moment to deport us to Haiti. Haiti is not ready to receive deportees because its situation is chaotic,” he shouted. “This country is in a political, social, security and economic crisis, we are surrounded by gangs from all sides. ... We should have been allowed to apply to become refugees”
More than 100 fellow deportees clapped in support. His sentiments were seconded 72 hours later by Philipo Grandi, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, who questioned the U.S. “mass expulsions of individuals ... without screening for protection needs.” Grandi said international law forbids the return of individuals to a country in such dangerous chaos.
The U.S. has had a checkered history with the nation since Haitians freed themselves from slavery and French colonial rule at the start of the 19th century. Americans occupied Haiti for nearly two decades in the 20th century. Since then, through coups and earthquakes, U.S. leaders and the international community have both contributed to chaos and tried unsuccessfully to rebuild the country.
On Thursday, the U.S. special envoy to Haiti, Dan Foote, resigned, saying he could not defend a policy of deporting Haitians back to “a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the danger posed by armed gangs to daily life.”