Pact with the Devil that haunts Haiti
Heads on spikes, a private army of psychopathic dandies, sinister voodoo priests. Why the killing this week of the Caribbean country’s president is just the latest twist in its brutal history
Adeadly gun battle tore through the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince yesterday as police fought heavily-armed men suspected of assassinating the country’s president in the early hours of Wednesday.
Haitian officials said last night that four suspects were killed, six arrested and two more are still at large. They believe two Haitian americans are among those arrested, including James Solages, a former bodyguard at the Canadian embassy in Port-au-Prince.
Reportedly pretending to be U.S. drug enforcement agents, the gunmen had burst into the home of President Jovenel Moise and riddled him with bullets, seriously injuring his wife. a diplomat described the assassins as ‘well-trained professionals, killers, commandos’.
Haiti’s acting prime minister Claude Joseph, who has declared a ‘state of siege’, had appealed to his citizens to hand over any remaining suspects rather than lynch them.
Ordinary Haitians who joined the hunt had set fire to cars used by the attackers in anger over the killing and roughed up two suspects they found hiding in bushes before handing them to police. Protesters gathered outside a police station where they believed the suspects were being held, shouting: ‘Burn them.’
It remained unclear whether police believed they had found all the alleged gunmen, although police chief leon Charles said his force’s attention had now turned to identifying those who masterminded the plot.
a Haitian judge said the attackers had burst into the president’s home at 1am, tying up staff before going to Mr Moise’s bedroom where they shot him at least 12 times. His wife, Martine, was evacuated by air to Miami where she is now in a stable condition. Their daughter, Jomarlie, was also at home but hid in a bedroom and escaped unharmed.
The murder of Mr Moise has plunged the deeply troubled Caribbean country into turmoil — but turmoil has always been the natural state of the country of Papa doc, his feared enforcers the Tontons Macoutes and voodoo. a country so poor that most of its trees have been cut down to make charcoal.
Its last major disaster came in 2010 when a devastating earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale flattened much of Haiti in 2010, killing up to 300,000 people. Shortly afterwards, U.S. evangelical preacher Pat Robertson caused a stir when he claimed that Haitians were reaping the consequences of the pact their founding fathers had made with the devil.
He WaS referring to how, according to folklore, slave leaders were so desperate to throw off the yoke of their brutal French overlords that they held a voodoo ritual — known as the Bois Caiman ceremony — to invoke the aid of dark forces when they met in 1791 to plan their insurrection.
Some dismiss the tale as antivoodoo Christian propaganda but it illustrates how Haiti is so uniquely blighted that some are even ready to believe that a curse explains its endless nightmare.
The country was founded in blood and has continued to wade through it for much of its history. The French colony known as Saint domingue — ceded to France by Spain in 1697 — was incredibly lucrative for France. However, the sugar plantations that principally provided its wealth relied on vast numbers of african slaves — some 40,000 a year.
Their existence was utter misery.
They only had to survive two years to recoup their purchase costs, encouraging plantation owners to work them literally to death. They were cowed into submission by barbaric punishments such as being thrown into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup or down mountainsides in barrels lined with spikes.
By 1789, when revolution erupted in France, the whites were heavily outnumbered and the slaves rebelled two years later with a savagery they had learned from the French. The severed heads of european children were sometimes placed on spikes and carried at the head of advancing slave armies.
There were bloody massacres on both sides before the slaves won their freedom in 1804, only for an independent Haiti’s first ruler, former slave JeanJacques dessalines, to be assassinated two years later. after another revolution in 1911, Haiti convinced Washington that it might default on its debts, and so the U.S. occupied it in 1915 and only left in 1934. a relentless succession of revolts, assassinations, massacres, and repressive regimes culminated in the emergence of one of the most terrifying dictators of modern times. Francois duvalier, whose former occupation as a doctor earned him the nickname ‘Papa doc’, became president in 1957. The despot enforced his will with his notorious secret police, the Tontons Macoutes — who, in their trademark floppy hats, jeans and sunglasses, tortured, raped and murdered anyone who opposed him. His corrupt and repressive regime is estimated to have killed up to 60,000 people. duvalier wrapped himself in the traditions of voodoo — the homegrown religion that mixed Catholicism with traditional West african spirit-based beliefs. He modelled himself on voodoo’s Baron Samedi, the sinister spirit of the graveyard, hiding his eyes behind sunglasses and affecting a deep nasal tone. The Tontons Macoutes were named after a folklore bogeyman who kidnapped badlybehaved children and ate them for breakfast. duvalier reportedly kept in a cupboard the head of Blucher Philogenes, a political rival who tried to overthrow him. Papa doc was succeeded on his death in 1971 by ‘Baby doc’, his equally depraved 19-year-old son Jean-Claude. The playboy Baby doc continued his father’s repulsively corrupt and repressive ways.
When Baby doc fled a coup in 1986, driving his BMW into the hold of a U.S. military cargo plane which whisked him to Paris, he reportedly took $900 million in stolen funds with him. avenging Haitians armed with machetes hunted down the fleeing Tontons Macoutes through the streets.
Successive leaders have faced violent protests, often triggered by food and oil shortages, poverty and corruption.
Jovenel Moise was also branded a dictator and faced accusations of campaign fraud and corruption, but used his control of the judicial system to have the charges dismissed.
But why is Haiti so dysfunctional? apart from an unbroken chain of bad leadership, the huge indemnity to France and the early hostility of Western countries including Britain, some even blame voodoo.
Most people in Haiti quietly respect it even if they don’t practise it and Haitians say it is much-maligned. (I had dinner with two high-ranking voodoo priests in Port-au-Prince after the earthquake, and they were eminently respectable.)
However, critics say voodoo has instilled superstitious Haitians with a terrible fatalism that prevents them from making more of their circumstances. But, whatever its cause, there seems no end in sight to Haiti’s misery.