Haiti: Neglected hell on earth is ignored by international community

Years before then, when Aristide had first become the country’s leader, he had disbanded the army and recruited his own enforcers in the shape of the criminal thugs that inhabited the sprawling slums of the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince.

These became known as the Chimères – the Ghosts. It was during the protests that sought to oust Aristide in the 2004 coup that the Chimères were let loose on the streets.

In the ensuing clashes between the Chimères and opponents of Aristide, a photographer colleague was injured and at one point I found myself being pursued down the back streets of a slum neighbourhood by masked Chimères brandishing machetes fully intent on killing me. It was, as they say, a narrow escape.

In Haiti, state power has always been inextricably intertwined with violence and never more so than right now, as this once-beautiful Caribbean island again faces a crisis that has all but been ignored by the world’s media.

Currently the country is mired in a fresh cycle of violence after rival gangs joined forces this month to launch a wave of attacks on the government.

The gangs have been calling for the resignation of prime minister Ariel Henry, who assumed power with US support following the assassination of president Jovenel Moïse in July 2021 but has not held an election; the mandates of all officials in Haiti have since expired.

It’s hard to over-stress the brutality of these gangs that terrorise the lives of ordinary Haitians and it has long been thus. I will never forget the scene at the city’s main morgue back in 2004, where the corpses of countless victims of street violence and murder at the hands of the gangs were unceremoniously dumped in piles, among them women and children.

Some of the victims had been “necklaced” – the gruesome practice of tying up a prisoner before dropping a tyre doused in petrol around their shoulders and setting them alight.

READ MORE: Westminster system working to 'limit voice of SNP', senior MP says

Some say the practice accounts for the nickname of one of the current prominent gang leaders, Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, a claim he discounts, insisting it was only because his mother ran a fried chicken stall in the impoverished slum where he grew up.

Whatever the truth, Cherizier, like the other gang players in Haiti’s current crisis, are responsible for the deaths of thousands of Haitians. He and other prominent gang leaders, among them Johnson André, aka Izo, and Guy Philippe, who like Cherizier is another former police officer gone rogue and who helped lead that coup against Aristide back in 2004, have all been inextricably connected to narco and weapons trafficking, extortion, kidnapping and gender-based violence.

In a nation of 12 million people, there have been at least a dozen massacres by gangs fighting over turf, killing and wounding thousands of Haitians last year alone.

But as the world’s attention is focused on Gaza and Ukraine, Haiti’s suffering by and large goes unnoticed. In some ways, the reluctance of the international community to pay attention to its plight stems from the perception that Haiti’s troubles are of its own making and the predatory men that now rule its streets.

While in the main accurate, this does not account for the part history has played in Haiti’s descent into anarchy and its place as a failed state. Certainly Haitians are no strangers to suffering. A nation born out of slavery, its people fought for their independence and have ever since been bedevilled by both the vagaries of nature – hurricanes and earthquakes – and those who would see their personal freedom curtailed.

As in the history of any nation, there are good guys and bad. Among the heroes, perhaps the most famous was former slave and stable boy Toussaint L’Ouverture, the man dubbed the “Black Jacobin”, who in the late 1700s led the revolt that paved the way for Haiti’s independence from French colonial rule.

Then there were the villains. Haiti’s “big men” of which sadly there has never been a shortage. For the best part of three decades, from the 50s to the 70s, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, and his son and heir Jean-Claude “Baby Doc”, haunted the nation with their brutal rule.

The Tonton Macoutes lived on, with some of their veterans forming the core of successor groups that can be traced all the way to today’s gangs and their leaders currently terrorising what for some time now has been the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.

Outsiders too have played their historic part in Haiti’s turmoil, from US invasions to Washington supporting certain leaders who, like Aristide and now prime minister Ariel Henry (above), then find themselves rejected.

For its part, the UN has also had something of a chequered role. In the wake of Aristide’s ouster, several thousand UN peacekeeping troops imposed a semblance of order, but were never popular among Haitians after being accused of sexual misconduct and also causing a cholera epidemic, by dumping raw sewage into a river.

It was Henry who recently appealed to the international community to send a “specialised armed force” to break the gangs’ control, and at the start of March this year, he finally got Kenya to sign an agreement to send 1000 specially trained officers to the island.

But now Henry has resigned and the Kenyans have not yet appeared, and so the hardest part looms in determining who will govern Haiti, break the grip of the gangs and steer it back from anarchy.

For the moment, as so often has been the case in the past, it’s the thugs that roam the streets, murdering, kidnapping and raping with impunity. Aligned alongside them sit the political and business “elites”, all operating with a wickedness worthy of the worst demons from Haitian voodoo mythology.

In a troubled world with no shortage of crises right now, it’s easy to see why Haiti is easily ignored. Whenever I made a visit, it always struck me as beggaring belief how such a hell on earth could exist barely an hour-and-a-half’s flight from glittering Miami, and less than three hours from New York City.

Ordinary Haitians, so long neglected and ignored by the outside world, deserve better. A country interminably plagued by thugs it might appear, but as I know from speaking with Haitians, there are many good people at the heart of its civil society, determined to break the grip of the thugs. But to do so they need help and for that to happen, the international community must first stop turning its head the other way.