Hell in Haiti

Translated by Irene Cecchi

Haiti is now going through one of the most devastating situations of misery, it’s the scene of a tragedy that has been going on for centuries and where hunger is a constant chimaera. Port-au-Prince is now in the hands of gangs and armed guards that surround the territory. But how did they come this far? Why did the world forget this country?

The history

Haiti, after being a slave-colony for long, achieved independence from France in 1804 in the wake of the French Revolution, becoming the first independent country in Latin America and the second one in the whole continent, only after the United States. Haiti was initially part of the Saint-Domingue island (also known as Hispaniola, as Colombo called it) but after the independence the name was changed by the Aruak group in “Ayti” (meaning “harsh” as the barren land that characterises the island).

Unfortunately, the social cracks caused by internal differences got wider and wider and the east side of the island (now the Dominican Republic) was still under control of the French and Spanish. Since it’s foundation, the newborn republic had been marginalised by the most powerful countries and attacked militarly, with a tyrannical establishment always corrupted and controlled by the United States.

In 1937, the general Rafael Trujillo orchestrated a brutal carnage in the Dominican Republic known as parsley massacre. Using parsley as an expedient, Dominican soldiers detected Haitians asking everyone to say perejil (parsley in spanish) and see who pronounced it with the typical french R. Tens of thousands of Haitians fell victims of this dreadful act of violence, highlighting the deep ethnic tensions and the brutality that characterised the region.

The country, predominantly agricultural, produces with the aim of exporting and not of selling to its inhabitants since there is no wealth redistribution. In fact, because of extreme poverty and constant exploitation, many Haitians ended up joining gangs and groups of organised crime. In 2004, Bertrand –the only president who suggested a democracy and for that was deposed by the US– was repatriated starting a civil war that required the UN intervention with a designated mission called MINUSTAH (United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti).

Haiti today: victims, kidnapping and displaced.

Haiti is the poorest country of the Western Hemisphere. In the last decades, natural and health disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes and epidemics took place due to the Country’s position and the low sanitary standards that made it sink even more without the possibility of recovery. About 80% of the population lives in a condition of extreme poverty and 54% of them carry on with less than a dollar a day.

The humanitarian situation is more and more dramatic: the Country has fallen in the hands of armed gangs that enlist child soldiers on the streets and that are often more powerful than the police. After the murder of the President Jovenel Moïse in 2021 in his own house, the earthquake that claimed thousands of victims and the cholera epidemic, the last emergency is the enrollment of child soldiers. According to a Unicef esteem, about 1700 schools are closed due to shootings and almost a million children can’t go to school anymore.

Italian newspapers mentioned Haiti again in January 2024 when six nuns were kidnapped and Pope Francis called for their release, since Italian media didn’t cover the news at all. In 2023, the count of the victims of gang’s violence in the capital was around 8400 considering deaths, wounded and kidnappings while direct murders, according to the UN, would be about 4000. Firefights between Haitian police and armed gangs are everyday more recurring. The border became the miserable scene of various cases of undocumented women leaning on traffickers to cross it, falling victims of abuses and violence.

In 2023, more than 60% of Haitians had been forced to leave their homes and villages. According to the WHO, in December 2023 more than 310 thousand people moved to some safer regions of the country, especially the ones from the capital Port-au-Prince where the humanitarian situation and security get worse every day. These violences are contributing to aggravate inequalities and deny the enforcement of people’s rights. Recently, Ghada Waly, Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), provided the Council with an update on arms trafficking and illegal cash flows that point out four main sea routes and 11 secret airstrips used to move this kind of supplies, mainly arriving from the US.

The political situation in Haiti is extremely tense, with demonstrations and protests that blocked all the biggest cities on February 5th. The Prime Minister Ariel Henry, whose authority isn’t recognised by the people, has been the target of protests calling for transparent and democratic elections.

The gangs that took control over the poorest district of Haiti, Cité Soleil, recently besieged the city prisons and set almost 4000 inmates free creating panic in Port-au-Prince. Jimmy Chérizier, also known as “Barbecue” and leader of the G9, the most important rebel gang of the area, claimed responsibility for the operation and threatened the Prime Minister with a civil war unless he steps down.

This all happened in an environment of national humanitarian emergency in Haiti. The Kenyan President William Ruto offered to guide an international security task force within a United Nations framework in order to restore control over the city since the agreement establishing democratic elections before February 7th 2024 was signed in December 2022 in Nairobi, during an official visit of Ariel Henry. Kenya had been the first country to meet the request of support on the ground and the first volunteer to try restoring security in the Caribbean country.

In such a critical atmosphere, the international community is called upon to focus its efforts to provide humanitarian aid, support the democratisation process and find feasible solutions for a long-lasting stability in Haiti.

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