Factional Terror, Paramilitarism and Civil War in Haiti: The View from Port-au-Prince, 1994-2004

Abstract

When I arrived on the street in Port-au-Prince in early March of 2004, most of the city was still largely outside the control of the government. A rebel insurgency movement made up of former members of the now-disbanded Haitian army (Forces Armees d'Haiti, FADH) had successfully unseated President Jean-Bertrand Aristide who won re-election to office in 2000 amid opposition electoral boycotts, disputed results and accusations of fraud. With Aristide's resignation and exile to the Central African Republic and later South Africa, state paramilitary police forces have fanned out into the capital to hunt down armed supporters of Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas party. A concentrated rebel effort is now underway to reinstitute the FADH, with recruitment of new soldiers and their outfitting with new uniforms financed by wealthy families with an interest in restoring the preAristide status quo. Factions of heavily-armed Aristide loyalists calling themselves chimere1 are also on the offensive, and the city has descended into violent anarchy. The Haitian National Police (Police Nationale d'Haiti, PNH), routed by the rebels just about everywhere in the northern two thirds of the country, fire their weapons indiscriminately into civilian crowds, often in the most destitute of the capital's slum districts.2 Arson, riot, looting and summary execution have once again formed the lexicon of political conflict on the street. Vigilante bands and entrepreneur assassins roam the Port-au-Prince slums of Bel Air, Cite Soleil and La Saline with Uzis, semiautomatic handguns, combat-grade shotguns, assault rifles, bayonets, whips and machetes. Amid the chaos and a state of siege on the streets, and in the complete absence of legal authority, political scores are being settled alongside of personal animosities being avenged. Summary executions are being carried out on roadsides, the bodies littering the streets with single bullet holes through their foreheads. Dozens of others are being killed in less formal ways, their bodies machine-gunned, hacked to death, decapitated, mutilated and burned alive. Some victims of the conflict have been disembowelled, some strangled with their own underwear. There are rumours of a young girl from the militantly pro-Aristide Cite Soleil slum having been raped to death by rebels after the departure of Aristide. By October of 2004, pro-Aristide gangs had begun the systematic beheading of PNH officers killed in factional clashes under the rubric of Operation Baghdad (though unlike similar beheadings in Iraq, the decapitations are typically post-mortem and are not filmed). Haiti is not teetering on the brink of civil war, it is in the full throes of civil war. What else to call this protracted armed conflict among competing factions for control of state power? Many Haitians refer to it as loge (war) as often as they refer to it as la violenz (the violence). Much of the war is now being waged in Port-au-Prince, and it is not being fought around the civil society as much as it is being fought directly through it. At the time of this writing, there have been over 500 Haitians killed in factional clashes since the fighting began in earnest in late February 2004.While the government has periodically imposed curfews and urges residents of the capital to seek shelter indoors when shooting is heard, the truth of the matter is that when a bullet is fired in Port-au-Prince there is little difference between inside and outside; here, in the most volatile slums, most homes are made of cardboard and tin. Haiti's violent history of successive coups d'etat has shown how political conflict can become a civilian bloodbath when the fighting reaches the capital, even when people do stay indoors. There appears to be no end to the violence in sight. Though the rebel army had pledged to lay down their arms now that a Brazilian-led UN peacekeeping force has arrived to re-establish order, they have shown little real interest in doing so, even as the foreign troops conduct disarmament and policing operations throughout the country. …