Good morning. This week’s Morning Call Feature is slightly different. We are sending you a piece from last May by Pooja Bhatia, on Haiti’s spiral into anarchy. The prime minister has fled. A gangster named “Barbecue” is in charge. How did we get here?
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The lynching happened in broad daylight, and it was widely cheered.
On the morning of 24 April 2023, police detained a busload of passengers in the Port-au-Prince neighbourhood of Canapé Vert, rounding them up as suspected gang members. The men were reportedly face down on the ground when ordinary citizens, sick in every way from years of violence, terror and powerlessness, began to murder them. According to a witness, they beat and stoned the suspects, before burning them alive.
In its gruesomeness and horror, this episode of mob justice (13 men were killed) is of a piece with Haiti’s new normal, and inspired vigilante killings across the country. Insecurity was already at life-threatening, economy-shrinking levels before July 2021, when President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in his bedroom. Almost two years later the situation has, impossibly, worsened. Gangs originally sponsored by Haiti’s business and political elite have closed in on Port-au-Prince and are spreading throughout the country. This time they have their own agendas. The police are outgunned; according to a recent estimate, only 3,500 officers are on duty at any one time in the whole country. Amid inaction and often worse, and a policy of lethal passivity among its international “friends”, Haiti’s people have passed their breaking point.
“It’s more than insecurity, it’s more than a crisis,” one activist in Port-au-Prince told me; like others living in Haiti, they requested anonymity for fear of becoming a target for violence or kidnapping. “For most Haitians, it’s a state of terror – a state of siege.” On the day of the Canapé Vert killings, the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, warned that insecurity in Haiti had “reached levels comparable to countries in armed conflict” and called for the deployment of an international force. The UN Office of Humanitarian Affairs had counted almost 70 people killed the week before.
“Kidnappers burst into a Catholic church to kidnap a parishioner,” read a headline in the 18 April edition of Le Nouvelliste, Haiti’s leading newspaper. Two days earlier, the article reported, a popular television producer had been kidnapped near his house. Two days later, it was Harold Marzouka Jr, a businessman with diplomatic ties to St Kitts and Nevis, along with two companions. Their cars were set on fire. Another article described a series of killings in the northern port of Cap-Haïtien, motive unknown, with one of the victims stoned to death.
It is hard to overstate the desperateness of the situation. Haitians at every level of society have been living in daily fear – of being kidnapped, killed, raped or caught in cross-fire. Those with savings worry about going bankrupt, forced to pay ransoms for themselves or loved ones. Bricks-and-mortar businesses have shuttered – including restaurants, shops and bank branches – and the once bustling informal economy stands stock-still with terror.
The humanitarian costs are incalculable. As the expense and risks of transport have soared, so has the cost of food. According to the UN, some 4.9 million people, almost half the population, are currently going hungry. Hospitals and schools have closed. Cholera has returned, with nearly 40,000 suspected cases since October 2022.
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