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Leading members of Haiti’s bourgeoisie tried to turn the Haitian
police force into their own private army, according to
a secret
U.S. Embassy cable provided to Haïti Liberté by the media
organization WikiLeaks.
Then US Ambassador to Haiti
James Foley warned in the cable “against private delivery of
arms to the HNP” (Haitian National Police) after learning
from a prominent Haitian businessman that “some business
owners have already begun to purchase weapons and ammunition
from the street and distribute them to local police officials in
exchange for regular patrols.”
Fritz Mevs, a member of “one
of Haiti's richest families and a well-connected member of the
private sector elite” with major business interests in
Port-au-Prince’s downtown and port, was the principal source for
Foley’s May 27, 2005 report.
Haiti’s “private sector
elite” has been a key U.S. ally in promoting Washington’s
agenda in the country, from free-trade and privatization of
state enterprises to twice ousting Jean-Bertrand Aristide
followed by U.S. and UN military occupations.
Mevs told the Embassy that the
president of the Haitian Chamber of Commerce, Reginald Boulos,
had “distributed arms to the police and had called on others
to do so in order to provide cover to his own actions.”
Boulos currently sits on the board of Bill Clinton’s Interim
Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) which controls the spending of
$10 billion being donated to rebuild Haiti after the Jan. 12,
2010 quake.
The cable describes the period
after the Feb. 29, 2004 coup d’état that ousted Aristide,
repressed his Lavalas Family party, set up a US-backed de
facto government, and ushered in a 9,000-strong UN military
occupation known as MINUSTAH (UN Mission to Stabilize Haiti).
 De facto Prime Minister Gérard
Latortue’s interim government of Haiti (IGOH) and his
paramilitary allies had difficulty stabilizing their unpopular
regime, despite killing, jailing, and purging from government
jobs thousands of Lavalas militants and sympathizers.
The Latortue regime had
particular trouble suppressing pro-Aristide strongholds like the
slums of Bel Air and Cité Soleil, which mounted a fierce armed
resistance to the coup and occupation. The coup government, US
Embassy and Haitian elite called the resistance fighters “bandits”
or “gangs,” the terminology used in the cable.
Entitled “Haitian Private
Sector Panicked by Increasing Violence,” the cable relays
Mevs report to the Embassy’s Political Officer that Haitian “business
leaders are exasperated by the lack of security in the vital
port and industrial zone areas of Port-au-Prince and are
allegedly arming local police with long-guns and ammunition in
an effort to ensure security for their businesses and employees.”
Foley wrote that “Mevs says
that of the roughly 150 business owners in the area, probably 30
have already provided some kind of direct assistance (including
arms, ammunition, or other materiel) to the police, and the rest
are looking to do so soon.”
Mevs “defended the idea of
the private sector arming the police in general, but he lamented
the haphazard manner in which many of his colleagues seemed to
be handing out weapons with little control,” the cable says.
Mevs also worried “that funneling the arms secretly would
only serve to reinforce rumors that the elite were creating
private armies,” which was in fact happening.
Mevs was asking the Embassy if
“the U.S. would oversee [a] program” under which the
elite could legally buy the HNP’s guns because “he did not
trust either MINUSTAH or the HNP to properly control the
issuance of weapons.”
The private army “rumor”
was corroborated by “[c]ontacts of the Econ Counselor [who]
report from time to time of discussions among private sector
leaders to fund and arm their own private sector armies.”
Foley added that the “[American
Chamber of Commerce] Board of Directors at one point discussed
informally giving non-lethal assistance to police stations, such
as furniture and microwave ovens for police stations, but
decided against doing so for fear that anything given to the
police would quickly be stolen.”
Security around the capital’s
industrial, warehouse and port districts degenerated after the
Mar. 30, 2005 death of Thomas Robenson, alias Labanière, a
one-time Lavalas leader in Cité Soleil’s Boston neighborhood,
who defected to defense of the 2004 coup and providing armed
protection to the bourgeoisie’s nearby commercial zones.
Labanière was killed by one of his bodyguards, Evens Jeune, “allegedly
in a plot directed by rival pro-Lavalas gang leader Dread Wilme,”
Foley wrote.
After that, the UN force had
tried to secure the commercial areas but “was proving to be a
poor substitute for Labanière,” a political advisor to Cité
Soleil’s mayor told the Embassy, largely because “MINUSTAH
troops (who, he said, rarely set foot outside of their vehicles)
were unable to identify the bandits from amongst the general
populace as Labanière had done.”
The residents of Cité Soleil
did not view Emmanuel Wilmer (aka Drèd or Dread Wilme) as a “bandit.”
They saw him as a hero defending them from pro-coup
paramilitaries (who in 1994 burned many houses in the rebellious
shantytown) and UN occupation troops. Today, one of the main
boulevards through Cité Soleil is named after him, and murals of
his face adorn many walls.
Wilme told the Lakou New York
program on Brooklyn’s Radio Pa Nou station in April 2005 that “MINUSTAH
has been shooting tear gas on the people. There are children who
have died from the gas and some people inside churches have been
shot… The Red Cross is the only one helping us. The MINUSTAH
soldiers remain hidden in their tanks and just aim their guns
and shoot the people. They shoot people selling in the streets.
They shoot people just walking in the streets. They shoot people
sitting and selling in the marketplace.”
But for Foley and the Haitian
elite, the UN military was not doing enough repression. “According
to Mevs, although MINUSTAH has on occasion parked armored
vehicles near the Terminal with some success, he said criminals
regularly force the tanks to move (by burning tires or fecal
matter nearby), and as soon as the vehicles depart, the rampage
continues.”
Foley asked the “Core Group” of
international donors and the UN military for a “swift,
aggressive” response to the business sector’s call for
action against the “criminal elements” from slums like
Cité Soleil.
“Ambassador Foley warned the
Core Group that MINUSTAH's stand-down in Cite Soleil put the
elections at risk, and that the insecurity around the industrial
zone risked undermining what is left of the Haitian economy,”
said the cable.
In response, the UN mission
chief Juan Gabriel Valdes “promised a more robust response
from MINUSTAH,” which sat down with police leaders to
develop a plan in “coordination with the private sector,”
the cable explains.
“In response to embassy and
private sector prodding, MINUSTAH is now formulating a plan to
protect the area,” concluded the cable.
Weeks later, on July 6, 2005,
at 3 a.m. in the morning, 1,440 Brazilian and Jordanian soldiers
sealed off Cite Soleil with 41 Armored Personnel Carriers and
attacked. Helicopters dropped grenades and UN troops fired more
than 22,000 bullets, leaving untold dozens of civilian
casualties, including women and children. (Cité Soleil residents
told an Oct. 2005 fact-finding delegation for the International
Tribunal on Haiti that UN tanks whisked away many bodies, which
were never returned.) Human rights groups called the carnage a “massacre.”
“It remains unclear how
aggressive MINUSTAH was, though 22,000 rounds is a large amount
of ammunition to have killed only six people” (the UN’s
official death toll), wrote Foley in a Jul. 26, 2005 Embassy
cable obtained by Professor Keith Yearman through a FOIA
request. The UN claimed it only killed “gang leader Dred
Wilme and five of his associates,” the cable says, while
noting that “at St. Joseph’s hospital near Cite Soleil,
Doctors Without Borders reported receiving 26 gunshot victims
from Cite Soleil on July 6, of whom 20 were women and at least
one was a child.”
Meanwhile journalist Jean Baptiste Jean Ristil, a Cité Soleil resident, interviewed “a
weeping Fredi Romélus [who] recounted how UN troops had lobbed a
red smoke grenade into his house and then opened fire, killing
his wife and two children,” reported the Haiti Information
Project. Jean Ristil also filmed inside the house where the
body of Fredi’s 22-year-old wife, Sonia Romélus, lay, “killed
by the same bullet that passed through the body of her
one-year-old infant son, Nelson,” the HIP reported. “She
was apparently holding the child as the UN opened fire. Next to
them was her four-year-old son, Stanley, who was killed by a
single shot to the head.”
A U.S. Labor and Human Rights
Delegation which was in Haiti at the time and visited Cité
Soleil the next day reported that “this full-blown military
attack on a densely-populated neighborhood... multiple sources
confirm killed at least 23 people” and possibly as many as
50.
As the evidence of a massacre
grew, the UN and U.S. began to admit that more Cité Soleil
residents may have died. “Given the flimsy construction of
homes in Cite Soleil and the large quantity of ammunition
expended, it is likely that rounds penetrated many buildings,
striking unintended targets,” Foley’s FOIA-released cable
reported.
By Aug. 1, Foley was praising
the Brazilians in another cable (obtained by Yearman’s FOIA
requests) entitled “Brazil Shows Backbone in Bel-Air.”
According to Foley, “the security situation in the capital
has clearly improved thanks to aggressive incursions in Bel Air
and the July 6 raid against Dread Wilme in Cite Soleil… Post has
congratulated MINUSTAH and the Brazilian Battalion for the
remarkable success achieved in recent weeks.”
The WikiLeaked May 2005 cable
also offers a glimpse of Haiti’s inter-ruling class rivalries.
Mevs felt that “private sector protests against the IGOH for
the lack of security were misguided,” Foley reports, because
“Haiti's real enemy and the true source of insecurity [was] a
small nexus of drug-dealers and political insiders that control
a network of dirty cops and gangs that not only were responsible
for committing the kidnappings and murders, but were also
frustrating the efforts of well-meaning government officials and
the international community to confront them.”
At the center
of this “cabal,” according to Mevs, was prominent
attorney Gary Lissade, who has a long history as a right-wing
operative. In 1993, he was the lead counsel for the military
government of coup leader Gen. Raoul Cédras during negotiations
at New York’s Governors Island with Aristide’s exiled
constitutional government. In 2001, Aristide, in a futile
attempt to mollify the Bush administration and putschist
bourgeoisie, made Lissade Justice Minister until
popular outcry forced his removal along with Prime Minister
Jean-Marie Chérestal’s whole government. Today, Lissade sits,
alongside Reginald Boulos, on the board of the Clinton
co-chaired IHRC.
Others whom Mevs cites in this
group allied to “Colombian drug-traffickers” include
powerful senator Youri Latortue, a close ally of new Haitian
president Michel Martelly, Dany Toussaint, a former Lavalas
Family senator who changed camps and supported the 2004 coup
against Aristide, and Michel Brunache, who was de facto
President Boniface Alexandre’s chief of staff.
The Embassy took Mevs warnings
about Lissade’s “cabal” with a grain of salt. Foley wrote
that Mevs “is no doubt biased against those individuals he
names” because “Mevs himself is a core member of what
might easily be described as a rival network of influence
competing for control of Haiti against the cast of characters he
has described.” Presciently, Foley says that his Embassy “cannot
confirm whether the alleged cabal of political insiders allied
with South American narco-traffickers is controlling the gangs,
we have seen indications of alliances between drug dealers,
criminal gangs and political forces that could threaten to make
just such a scenario possible via the election of narco-funded
politicians,” which some political observers fear may be the
situation in Haiti today.
Meanwhile, Dread Wilme’s legend lives on. “His
funeral was a hero's farewell,” wrote Haitian blogger Erzili
Dantò. “His remains decked in a Vodun boat were pushed out
onto the open seas next to Site Soley’s water shores, and set to
flames for his spirit to soar towards the countless African
Ancestors who, like Dread Wilme, had made the ultimate sacrifice
for our people's freedom and dignity.” |
