PORT-AU-PRINCE — Weeks before a powerful gang slaughtered at least 115 people in a small rural town in central Haiti in the middle of the night, members of the community pleaded for help from the country’s police chief, prime minister and members of the ruling presidential council to no avail, a leading Port-au-Prince-based human-rights group says.
Not only were the residents’ cries ignored, so were the warning signs of an imminent attack on Pont-Sondé by the heavily armed Gran Grief gang based in neighboring Savien, a new report by Fondasyon Je Klere/Eyes Wide Open Foundation says.
The death toll, initially reported by the United Nations to be more than 70, is now at least 115, according to Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, an independent non-profit that collects data on violent conflicts around the world.
“ The massacre demonstrates to what extent the right to life is trivialized in Haiti,” the Fondasyon Je Klere/Eyes Wide Open Foundation report said. “This massacre could have been avoided if only one armored tank was stationed at Pont-Sondé, and if corruption in the management of the intelligence service’s money was not the rule.”
Haitian human-rights advocates and a group known as the Commission for Dialogue, Reconciliation and Awareness to Save the Artibonite have criticized a government intelligence budget they say isn’t being used to thwart gang activities but to supplement the income of members of Haiti’s nine-member Transitional Presidential Council.
The issue came up after an investigation into corruption allegations involving three members of the council revealed each of its members make at least $40,000 a month. Critics say that the money is being supplemented by the presidential palace’s intelligence budget.
In comparison, the intelligence budget of the judicial police, charged with tracking criminals, isn’t even $20,000, Rosy Auguste Ducéna, a human rights defender with the National Human Rights Defense Network in Port-au-Prince, had previously told the Miami Herald.
“If the money for intelligence was used for [tracking criminals] the police would have known the gang had been threatening to attack,” she said. “We’ve been saying for some time that the police don’t have the means to confront the gangs.”
Even though more than 100 people were killed in the Pont-Sondé attack, “no state official took responsibility,” the Fondasyon Je Klere/Eyes Wide Open Foundation report said. “Neither the minister of the Interior, nor the minister of justice, nor the director general of the police felt guilty. None offered their resignation to the nation.”
The offices of Prime Minister Garry Conille and Police Chief Rameau Normil did not respond to a Miami Herald request for comment about the allegations in the human rights report. Nor did the new head of the presidential panel, Leslie Voltaire.
After the massacre, Conille and the Haiti National Police announced the deployment of specialized officers to reinforce police who had failed to respond during the attack. The police also announced changes at the level of regional police director for the Artibonite and the police station in the neighboring city of Saint-Marc.
Gubery Siméus, a Pont-Sondé official, said police are actively engaged in patrols, along with a group of young men who have taken the initiative to patrol the mountainside to keep watch for attacks.
“There are some people who are still afraid, who head to St. Marc every afternoon to go sleep and return to Pont-Sondé every morning,” he said.
In its own analysis of the conflict, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project corroborated much of what the Fondasyon Je Klere/Eyes Wide Open Foundation’s report found. Rumors about the likelihood of a massacre in Pont-Sondé had been circulating months before the attack, the group said. The leader of the gang Gran Grif, Luckson Elan, had announced the attack a day before.
“Nonetheless, security forces only deployed 24 hours after the massacre,” the project said, and struggled to deal with the gangs despite the deployment of forces from the Kenya-led Multilateral Security Support Mission to Haiti.
The massacre is one of the deadliest attacks in recent memory and the worst since the arrival of nearly 400 Kenyan police officers. It came just days after the U.S. and the U.N. imposed sanctions on Elan and a former Haitian lawmaker who helped create the gang, Prophane Victor.
“While Gran Grif has conducted mass attacks on civilians before, including for alleged collaboration with state-allied groups, this massacre represents the gang’s largest assault,” the project said. It added that the attack appeared to be in retaliation against residents the gang accuses of allying with a local group known as Coalition des Révolutionnaires pour Sauver l’Artibonite, one of several armed resistance groups that have sprouted up across Haiti in response to the surge in gang violence.
In the Artibonite, the group had blocked Gran Grief’s ability to collect tolls on a road leading into its community, residents told Fondasyon Je Klere/Eyes Wide Open Foundation. The gang charged the equivalent of $1.90 for motorcycles, $19 for vans and $38 for minibus drivers.
In response, the vigilante group created an alternative route through an agricultural road, angering Elan, who vowed to kill anyone taking the alternative road and to launch a massacre against Pont-Sondé if the road remained blocked.
When the attack came, armed residents tried to fight back by blocking the bridge into town. But the gang’s members invaded from the water.
“For nearly four hours the bandits of the Gran Grif Gang sowed death and desolation in Pont-Sondé,” the report said. “The police officers stationed in Pont-Sondé did not leave their police station, claiming a lack of equipment to intervene.”
Hours later an armored tank arrived and with the help of members of the resistance from nearby neighborhoods finally repelled the gang, the report said.
Armored vehicles deployed
Eleven police armored vehicles were deployed to the Artibonite region, Fondasyon Je Klere/Eyes Wide Open Foundation said, after the Pont-Sondé attack, “when only one would have been enough to avoid the massacre.”
The tanks were placed in Pont-Sondé and Gonaïves with the goal of protecting National Road No. 1, the report said.
Five days after the massacre, the Gran Grief gang launched a second attack on Pont-Sondé. Two days later, another gang, in the sprawling community of Canaan on the northern edge of metropolitan Port-au-Prince, launched an attack on the Haitian town of Arcahaie, the birthplace of Haiti’s flag, displacing 4,674 people, according to the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration.
On Monday, the Kraze baryè gang, led by Vitel’homme Innocent, burned one of the new U.S. provided armored vehicles belonging to the Kenya-led multinational force. The vehicle had engine failure and could not be restarted, Haitian police said, adding that its joint operation on Saturday and Monday to dismantle the gang resulted in about 20 fatalies involving gang members and a confiscation of arms.
The attacks have served as fresh reminders that Haiti’s gang problems go beyond Port-au-Prince to nearby towns such as Ganthier, Croix-des-Bouquets, Gressier and Carrefour. All have fallen under gang control in recent months.
The Fondasyon report recommends training soldiers to patrol the country with police and putting an end to corruption in the management of funds intended for the intelligence service.
“The disarmament of gangs and armed bands requires a robust, well-equipped armed force, present throughout the national territory with a capacity for rapid reaction in neighborhoods, corridors, cities, roads, ports and municipal sections,” the report said. “Any leader who proves incapable of responding to the urgent and pressing need for security of the population must have the courage to bow out.”
By JACQUELINE CHARLES/Miami Herald