Catastrophic situation in Haiti: The border to genocide is fluid

Since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July last year, Haiti has not found peace and violence has multiplied.

This week alone, around 90 people have been killed in the capital, Port-au-Prince.

The political actors, government and opposition, parties, churches and trade unions, diplomats and development workers have ceded the law of action to gangster gangs, who are fighting for control of lucrative parts of the city in the slums.

And it's hard to say where the line is between civil war, massacre or genocide in Haiti right now.

An example of this: in May, 91 people were killed in a fight between rival gangs in Port-au-Prince for the suburb of La Plaine on the arterial road to Santo Domingo;

Women and girls were raped, men beheaded, boys were forcibly recruited, and 158 children were orphaned.

A gang called "Izo 5 seconn" has been occupying the palace of justice in the capital since the beginning of June and has burned all the files stored there.

According to the United Nations, 1,700 schools in Haiti are now closed, leaving half a million students without classes, 16,000 internally displaced people have fled war-torn neighborhoods, and each month the US Coast Guard records 1,500 refugees floating at sea in unseaworthy, overloaded boats .

Wild speculation

What happened in the President's residence on the night of July 7, 2021, when Moïse was killed, remains unsolved to this day.

Although there are plenty of suspects who are the subject of wild speculation, neither the investigating magistrates, who have been replaced five times, nor the governments in Washington and Bogotá have shed any light on the matter.

Colombia is involved in the investigation because 28 Colombian ex-soldiers are still being held in inhumane conditions for involvement in the murder in Haiti;

a Colombian woman who was allowed to visit her husband in prison reports signs of torture, malnutrition and a lack of hygiene.

What does the Prime Minister know about the murder?

Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who spoke on the phone several times on the night of the murder with suspected mastermind Felix Badio, has remained silent, and Badio himself remains at large.

Information from the CIA and the American anti-drug agency DEA on the background to the crime remains classified, but there are many indications that Jovenel Moïse was murdered because he wanted to break allegiance to the drug mafia operating in his country.

Haiti is the extreme example of a failed state whose decline does not unleash the creative energies hoped for by utopians, but instead unleashes blind violence against the most vulnerable members of post-colonial society.

There are neither Islamic terrorists nor ethnic militias, and unlike in Mali or Central Africa, the Wagner group is not involved.

Instead, however, drug gangs that have made Cité Soleil, Martissant and other slums no-go areas are fighting for dominance.

The victim of the omnipresent violence is Haiti's new middle class: Haitians in exile returning from Canada or the USA who invest the money they have saved to spend the rest of their lives here.

Haiti's super-rich, including the beneficiaries of kidnapping and the suspected masterminds behind Moïse's murder, don't even pay taxes:

Where does the endemic violence that runs like a thread through Haiti's history come from and how can it be contained?

From the conquistadors who exterminated the indigenous people, to privateers who attacked Spanish galleons in the straits between Cuba and Haiti, to the slave rebellion of 1791, which ended colonial rule, to independence won in 1804, bought by exorbitant reparations payments to France, to the Haiti was occupied by US marines in 1915 and 1994, the latter followed by UN blue helmets - the call for intervention went unheeded in each case, and the current relationship with the United States, which is supposed to pacify Haiti and at the same time stay out, bears the traits of a

.

The same goes for calling for new elections, because corrupt governments are part of the problem, not the solution.

"Unlike in the Ukraine, the genocide in this country is not carried out with self-propelled howitzers and rockets," says the voodoo researcher Laennec Hurbon, "but with firearms and machetes.

Haiti is eradicating itself.”

Hans Christoph Buch

is a writer.

Most recently, his volume of essays “Nocturnal Noises in the Jungle” (Transit Verlag) was published.