Angry crowds shouting "Down with Aristide!" clashed with police in the sprawling hillside shanty town of Martissant this week in violent demonstrations similar to those which rocked the northwestern city of Gonaïves last month.
The riots were sparked by the disappearance of three pro-Lavalas popular organization (OP) leaders whom protesters believe were kidnapped and possibly killed by the government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
The Haitian National Police (PNH) attributes the disappearances to gang wars.
Félix "Féfé" Bien Aimé, an OP leader and former director of the Port-au-Prince cemetery, disappeared on Sep. 17 along with two of his partisans, Gérard Normil and Paul Musac Jean. The car in which they were last seen was found burned near Titanyen, where bodies were dumped by the Army and death squads during the 1991-1994 coup. No bodies were found, however, in or near the remains of the car.
Many popular organizations militants fear that the disappeared leaders are victims of a perceived government campaign to neutralize OP leaders whom had previously been the front-line defenders of Aristide’s party, the Lavalas Family (FL). Recent Organization of American States (OAS) Resolutions 806 and 822 call on the government to round-up and prosecute such leaders for their role in sacking opposition leaders’ headquarters and homes after an attempted assassination of Aristide on Dec. 17, 2001.
Last week, one such leader in Cap Haïtien, Eddy "Ti Tonton" Sterlin, was riddled with bullets by unidentified assailants. In July, another leader in Gonaïves, Amiot "Cubain" Métayer, told that Aristide wanted to meet with him, was arrested when he presented himself, sparking riots that culminated in his being broken out of jail along with 158 other prisoners on Aug. 2 (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 20, No. 21, 8/7/2002). Similarly, a Port-au-Prince OP leader, Ronald "Cadavre" Camille, was arrested by police in March when he went to the airport to greet Aristide returning from a trip abroad. Several other OP leaders and militants around the capital and the country have been arrested, disappeared, or killed in recent months, creating growing alarm and outrage in OP ranks.
"OAS Resolution 822 has fallen on the back of all militants," one of Bien Aimé’s partisans shouted on Sep. 21, as smoke from a burning tire barricade billowed behind him, "but we still believe that President Aristide is intelligent enough not to be taken in by this provocation so that he would stab us in the back. Because Aristide better know that without the popular organizations he has no power. So we ask him, as well as Prime Minister Yvon Neptune, to please give us back Féfé Bien Aimé in the condition they took him."
Based on reports which the government denies, OP members say that a PNH station chief told them that Aristide ordered Bien Aimé’s arrest. Other rumors say he was taken in after a traffic accident. Demonstrations began on Sep. 17 afternoon and continued all week, until press time. National Route 2, the main artery to Haiti’s south, was blocked much of that time, and the police have responded with tear-gas, clubs, and bullets. The week’s death toll is at least three, including a baby suffocated by tear-gas and a young boy who was killed by gunfire while sitting in a camionette (small bus). Dozens of people have been wounded. In the street-fights, car windshields have been smashed, and several houses burned.
On Sep. 19, OP members chanting angrily encircled the Martissant police outpost, insisting that the authorities were holding Bien Aimé. On Sep. 24, the OPs tried to attack the same outpost; at press time, it is not known if there were victims.
The police deny all responsibility in the disappearance of the three OP members. "There is no police station in the metropolitan area which reports that it had Félix Bien Aimé in preventive detention," said PNH spokesman Jean Dady Siméon. "So there is no question that these people were ever arrested by the police."
Siméon attributed the disappearances to a "turf war" between neighborhood gangs in the teeming Martissant slum. "According to our information, there were already hostilities which existed between Félix Bien Aimé and others because he was at the head of a group based near Fort Mercredi called Galil, and there was another group called Kapab with which it was at odds," he said. "And both groups were armed."
Kapab members responded angrily to Siméon that they had nothing to do with Bien Aimé’s disappearance. "He was our comrade in the struggle to return Aristide to power during the coup," one of them said. "The police should face up to it and not try to find scapegoats."
Martissant residents also disavowed Siméon’s version. "Instead of Jean Dady Siméon he should be called Jean Dady Cinema because it is cinema that he is giving," said one demonstrator. "We are all together. We have Kapab militants, and Galil militants too. There are also those from MORAD, KOTPAM, and OJD. All the organizations are together here asking for them to give Féfé back."
Police also cracked down on a concert being given by the popular rasin group Boukman Eksperyans in the central Champs de Mars square on Sep. 18. "A CIMO [riot police] chief came up to me and said ‘I have received orders from high up that this concert is to be stopped right now,’" explained Théodore "Lòlò" Beaubrun, the group’s leader, on Radio Haiti Inter. "We were singing a song about not wanting war, in which we address the presidents, the generals, and the politicians in the entire world who make war. ‘Mr. President, Mr. General, I am talking to you.’ That’s where we had gotten. Then the guy pulled the plug on the two keyboards." Beaubrun compared the incident to when the Army stopped a Boukman concert at the Canado School during the coup. "Back then, they gave us an ultimatum, but they didn’t dare come on stage to interrupt us," he said. "This time, they came right up on the stage, with guns in hand to pressure us."
Meanwhile, numerous other demonstrations around the country raised political tensions. Last week, students opposed to the government’s take-over of the supposedly sovereign State University marched through the capital, after two previous demonstrations were aborted by bottle-throwing pro-government demonstrators. Small depositors in the collapsed Coeurs Unis banking cooperative demonstrated at the National Penitentiary for the release from prison of the bank’s president, David Chéry, on the hopes that he will find a way to reimburse their lost savings. Pro-FL OPs in the central plateau city of Hinche marched to demand government jobs. And Cité Soleil residents demonstrated in front of the National Palace for an end to gang violence in their slum. The CIMO police broke up the demo with tear-gas and billy clubs.
"For us, the Lavalas regime is starting to act the way the putschists, the macoutes, the de factos used to act," said a young man demonstrating in Martissant on Sep. 23. "Right now, we don’t believe in anybody except God and Félix too, and in militance and struggle."
