‘Those of us who still live are the ones in misery’
The world was shocked by the assassination of Haiti’s controversial president, but it’s the beleaguered country he leaves behind that hurts the most,
A few blocks from the gang-controlled neighbourhoods where Haiti’s warlords have been massacring residents and torching homes, it is hard to separate sanctuary from perdition inside the red metal gates of St Martin and St Yves Catholic Church.
The assassination of President Jovenel Moise remains one of the world’s more gripping whodunnits, but for the throngs of Haitians who crammed into this churchyard in recent weeks – some of the 19,000 fleeing warzone-like conditions across swathes of the capital – his killing is really just one more death.
The real national crisis, they insist, is playing out in places like St Martin and St Yves, where more than 1,100 impoverished Haitians – refugees in their own capital city – are sharing nine bathrooms, some of which don’t work. Famished, the people scrummed at 11am on a recent morning for a breakfast of watery gruel served from a trunk, jostling for position while calling out “some for me, some for me”.
A topless woman tries to cover her breasts as she bathes from a bucket in a corner. A thin man brushes flies from a rotting slice of soursop. A naked child plays with a bottle cap. An unaccompanied minor, sexually assaulted in the camp, according to aid workers, is sleeping under the same roof as her rapist.
Emmacula Cylus, 50, stands in a dirty blue smock, holding her hands skyward in anguish. She arrived here last month, just a few weeks after discovering her 20-year-old son, Andy, shot dead in the streets not far from their Port-au-Prince home.
“The gangs,” she says. “They even took his sneakers.”
Her 19-year-old daughter, Kethlene Cylus, died of an unknown disease two weeks afterwards, following a stay in an ill-equipped hospital. Last year, her husband Emmanuel was shot and killed while exchanging euros for local currency in their gangcontrolled neighbourhood.
“I am alive by the grace of God, but for what?”
There is no hope for Haiti. The conditions under which things could get better do not exist
Standing in the churchyard, Yslande Paul, 38, says she’d fielded a knock on the door at her home not far from St Martin and St Yves at 8am on 17 June. Gang emissaries, she said, had told them to leave.
“When we came back at noon, they had burned down the house and everything in it,” she says. “We have nothing left.”
“So the president is dead,” she adds. “It is not good that he died, but what does it mean to us? Why is everyone focusing on the assassination? That is not our real problem.”
Inside shanties with corrugated tin roofs, bougainvillea-lined villas in jade-coloured hills, at village cafes and urban restaurants, Haitians watched televisions and listened to radio broadcasts of the funeral, held under heavy security at Moise’s ancestral home near the northern city of Cap-Haitien.
Israel Jacky Cantave, the former spokesman for the prime minister’s office, who was in attendance, said that gunshots were fired and protests erupted outside the Moise family compound. Tear gas and black smoke entered the compound. Some attendees were heard loudly denouncing Leon Charles, head of the National Police, which is investigating the assassination. The US delegation to the funeral left the event early, and were safe, according to the White House. Haitian media reported the outbreak of broader violence in Cap-Haitien, including attacks on businesses.
The president’s relatives spoke one by one, suggesting he’d had “traitors” in his ranks. In her first public comments on the assassination, Martine Moise, the president’s wife, who was wounded in the attack, said her husband had been “abandoned and betrayed”. Without offering any details, she additionally denounced Haiti’s “oligarchs”. While apparently cautioning against further political violence, she added: “We lost the fight but the war continues. We need justice for you.”
The president’s son, Joverlein Moise, claimed his father had been “living among traitors”. “I know that sometimes they had you see my father as a tyrant, as wicked, the devil, and they spent a lot of money to push that narrative,” he said. “But I also know that on the morning of 7 July, when my father’s eyes closed, your eyes were opened. You see clearly now. That’s why you are going to wipe your tears and have courage so you can honour the memory of your leader.”
Cazeau Leeotdy, a 25-year-old waitress, watched the throngs of bereaved on television at a Port-au-Prince restaurant. “There is a sadness in our hearts today. This man was our president, and he died like this,” she says. “It makes me think about what kind of future is waiting for me and my family.”
Rather than a president, many Haitians on Friday mourned a shattered nation, one they said had been mismanaged by foreign powers, including the United States, and is rotting from within.
“The NGOs and international community never really invested in strengthening Haitian institutions,” says Édouard Roberson, a Haitian scholar. “The result is what we have now. A failed and dysfunctional state. There is no hope for Haiti. The conditions under which things could get better do not exist.”
In the aftermath of the killing, life is returning to what had already become a new normal of extraordinary hardship. Vendors are walking the streets again, balancing baskets on their heads with fruit and snacks for sale. At the port, commuters are again crossing town by water to avoid no-go zone neighbourhoods by the coast. Amid a shortage of gas – blamed on contract disputes and the difficulty of transport in a capital torn apart by violence – frustrated car owners have returned to the snaking lines outside service stations.
It can take two hours to fill a tank.
“Who do I blame? The people in charge of the government, who are basically the same ones we had before the assassination, and the United States, for supporting them,” fumes Jean Minuty, a 70-year-old physician.
He’d been waiting 20 minutes to fill his blue Toyota Highlander in downtown Port-au-Prince.
“What is life like here?” he shouts from his car window in anger. “Well, I’ll tell you. We cannot even go across town for fear of
being shot or kidnapped in our cars! How is this living? How is this fair for Haitians?”
Haiti’s gang violence has been building for years, but it has sharply escalated in recent weeks, amid a struggle for power between Moise and his rivals and the economic downturn sparked by the pandemic. Last year, 297 people died in the capital’s gang wars, according to the Center for Analysis and Research in Human Rights [CARDH] in Port-au-Prince.
In June of this year, the country recorded roughly 150 gangrelated deaths in that one month.
“You need to compare the gangs of Haiti to groups like the Islamic State in Syria,” says Gédéon Jean, CARDH director. “They also have connections to politicians and ministries. But in the areas they control, they kill whoever they want, they rape whoever they want. You can compare these areas to war zones.”
In the days after Moise was killed in a hail of 12 bullets, a tense calm settled over the capital as gang leaders appeared to reassess allegiances and objectives. But in some quarters of the capital, kidnappings and turf wars are building anew.
The escalating violence and a lack of results from billions of dollars in aid money earmarked for Haiti in the years following the country’s devastating 2010 earthquake have forced dozens of charities and NGOs to leave.
One that is still here, Doctors Without Borders, was forced to close its burns unit in the gang-ridden streets near Cite Soleil, the country’s largest slum, in February.
“The shoot-outs were right outside the walls,” said Julien Bartoletti, Haiti mission chief for Doctors Without Borders. The organisation has consolidated operations at a hospital in the relatively safer Tabarre neighbourhood of the capital.
On Thursday, five of the six patients in the small ICU ward were suffering from gunshot or knife wounds. In another ward of the hospital, Berylne Gabriel, 40, tended to her 13-year-old son, Makenley Vilford, who'd taken a bullet to the shin.
He’d been caught in the crossfire of a turf war while going to the outhouse in front of their home.
Unable to walk, her son had carried her to safety when a firefight erupted in their neighbourhood last month, and police, they said, began torching their homes in a former Red Cross shelter
“The gang members walk down our streets, with big guns, little guns, guns of every kind,” she says, throwing up her arms. “So we live for today. We hope things get better knowing they won’t.”
Human rights leaders in Haiti have long alleged a link between Moise and the gangs – a charge the late leader, unsurprisingly, denied. After his killing, however, Jimmy Cherizier – considered Haiti's top warlord – demanded justice for the “cowardly”
assassination, claiming he would unleash a wave of “legitimate violence” against the nation’s elites.
It suggests an even rougher road ahead in a country where United Nations agencies say 46 per cent of the population is already experiencing acute or severe food insecurity – among the highest in the world. Aid agencies are facing massive hurdles to address a mounting humanitarian crisis. Open gang warfare on National Road 2 – the nation’s major western and southern artery – has forced agencies to resort to helicopters to access hard-hit parts of the capital and beyond.
“The gangs are blocking the main road to the south by randomly shooting on cars,” said Christian Cricboom, Haiti director for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
“A nurse was killed in an ambulance two weeks ago,” he continues. “We need to move food, medicines by air and sea because of the insecurity and risk to staff, but we do not have enough funding for additional helicopter service or boats. In the internally displaced person site at Carrefour [west of the capital], 1,000 people went hungry yesterday.”
Before Moise’s assassination, kidnappings spiked across Haiti, with 171 abductions recorded in the first four months of 2021, a
36 per cent increase compared to the same period in 2020, according to UN data.
Abduction is no longer just a risk for the rich. Even mechanics and the sons and daughters of street vendors are being held and ransomed for sums as small as $100.
The sense of a collapsing state is leading Haitians such as Joseph Molder, a 38-year old lawyer kidnapped last year and held for nine days, to search for ways to emigrate to the United States. His family, having sold property and borrowed money to cover his $40,000 ransom, is now deeply in debt and struggling to pay back relatives and neighbours.
“We have a police force that is losing the battle for the country,” he says. “It is only a matter of time before the gangs control everything. I want to leave Haiti and live the American Dream.”
Up a hillside on the road toward the home where Moise was assassinated, hundreds of blind, deaf and disabled Haitians who fled the gang wars in recent weeks are sleeping on dirty mattresses and floors of a middle school.
DeRosier Saint-cile, 70, sits in a wheelchair, resting her head on her arm, exhaustion on her face. Unable to walk, her son had carried her to safety when a firefight erupted in their neighbourhood last month, and police, they said, began torching
their homes in a former Red Cross shelter the authorities claimed had become a hotbed for gang members.
In her many years, she recounts in throaty Creole, she has never seen Haiti worse. From 1957 to 1971, during the ruthless years under dictators François Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier “the violence was more targeted, it was their enemies who had most to fear,” she says. During the 2010 earthquake, her house caved in, and she lost everything, but there was hope, she says, that the nation would rebuild.
Now, she says, “instead of dying under bricks, we are dying with bullets.”
“The president is dead,” she says, with a wave of her hand. “Those of us who still live are the ones in misery.”
The Washington Post’s Widlore Merancourt contributed to this report.
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