Haitian Journalist: Half the Country in Hunger, Dead Bodies in the Street

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: And now, to Haiti, a country the U.S. is also looking at, it is teetering on the brink of collapse amid escalating gang violence. France has evacuated some 240 people from there and more than 1,500 have been killed by the violence in Haiti so far this year. That is from the U.N.’s Human Rights Office announcing today. Meanwhile, Haiti’s transitional presidential council is still being finalized. It’s aiming to appoint a new prime minister to “put Haiti back on the path of democratic legitimacy, stability, and dignity.” Now, Widlore Merancourt is a reporter at “The Washington Post” and editor- in-chief of the Haitian publication, AyiboPost. He joins Hari Srinivasan from Port-au-Prince to discuss the deteriorating situation there.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Widlore Merancourt, thanks so much for joining us. You have been reporting and living in Haiti for years now. Just in the last few weeks and months, describe what you have seen of your country.

WIDLORE MERANCOURT, WASHINGTON POST REPORTER AND EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, AYIBOPOST: Well, Haiti is living today, probably it was crisis, you know, for the past decade. You know, and the 29th of February in Haiti launched a series of attacks against these institutions. But not just these institutions, they also attacked private institutions, businesses, and hospitals. We have about 15,000 people displaced by the violence, but this is on top of more than 300,000 people who are already displaced by gang violence in Haiti. The humanitarian crisis is extremely dire. The political crisis also that is piling up on top of this is not offering, you know, any relief inside.

SREENIVASAN: What led to this most recent crisis?

MERANCOURT: Well, this most recent crisis is brought by a coalition of gangs in Haiti. They call themselves Live Together, which is very Orwellian. It’s a beautiful French expression, meaning, you know, as I said, viv ansanm, viv ansanm. It’s a coalition of gangs, led by Jimmy Cherizier, he’s a former police officer. His goal, stated at the time, you know, late in February, was to topple the government of Ariel Henry. But, you know, during this month of March, Ariel Henry announced that his government is going to resign, the attacks did not stop. And until today, we still have police officers being killed by these gangs. And, you know, in the course of this coordinated attack that I mentioned before, two of the biggest prisons in Haiti has been, you know, left open with thousands of inmates, some of them, you know, some of the worst criminals, quite frankly, in the country released in the streets.

SREENIVASAN: So, maybe a simple question, maybe a complicated one, who’s in charge?

MERANCOURT: Well, that’s a good question. Haitian people are asking themselves this question, because in practical terms, the government is not — is nowhere to be seen, quite frankly, in Haiti. We are talking about probably the worst humanitarian crisis since the 2010 earthquake, which killed more than 300,000 people. And today, as I said before, more than 350,000 people are displaced by gang violence. We have hundreds of hospitals — I mean, six in 10 hospitals are today closed. We have, you know, the airport that is closed by the gang’s violence. And on top of that, you also have the main port of Port-au-Prince, the Caribbean Port Services attacks at least twice by the gangs. And we are in the country where the vast majority of things that we consume in Haiti comes from abroad. So, when you have the airport that is closed and you have also the ports that are not working properly, that means, you know, crucial goods and crucial things that people need to function, we are talking about food, we are talking about medical supplies, we are talking about more than 300 containers of humanitarian supplies seized by the gangs. And the government is not really, you know, communicating on this issue.

SREENIVASAN: So, if you can’t get goods and services, I should say goods, into the country, what’s the ripple effect there? That means a business selling that good has to shut its doors. That means the employees of that business are out of work. That means the people buying food from that business no longer can, right?

MERANCOURT: Yes, absolutely. I mean, that’s — it’s adding on a crisis that already existed, right? When goods cannot come in, you have, as you said, the street markets, the supermarkets, which, you know, don’t have enough supplies to kind of put things on the shelves for people to buy. But even before that situation, even when the port were functioning, you know, more or less, the inequality inside of Haiti made it so that, you know, it was already extremely difficult for the vast majority of people to go around and buy food and find, you know, food. So many people rely on humanitarian assistance in Haiti. And, you know, for the 2020 year, the need for humanitarian assistance is about $600 million. And only 7 percent of that is funded. We are — you know, if you talk to humanitarian folks in Haiti, they will tell you that they have a sense of what some folks call the Haiti fatigue, which means maybe because there are so many other crises around the world today, or maybe the world has turned its back to Haiti, the level of needs that the Haitian people have, the dire humanitarian situation we have, you know, is not met by any help. And that also means, you know, on practical terms, Haitian people going without food, about half of the country today, is in acute hunger. According to the U.N., you have hundreds of thousands of people, you know, living in camps, being displaced by the gang violence. You have hospitals, as I said, closed down by the gang violence. You have hundreds of thousands of kids. You know, with hundreds of schools being closed, these kids are being denied the right to have an education. You know, on a random basis, you go industries of Port-au-Prince today, you see dead bodies.

SREENIVASAN: Tell me a little bit about who is filling this leadership vacuum. Who runs the gangs right now? Who’s the kind of de facto head or most powerful person in Haiti?

MERANCOURT: So, historically in Haiti, the gangs are linked to the political sector and also the business sector. They use these young events, you know, sometimes from extremely poor areas to advance their own interests. But increasingly, in the past years, we are seeing the gangs kind of go rogue and they don’t particularly have a centralized leader with a centralized sort of set of goals. We have this (INAUDIBLE) sort of toxic soup of different gangs doing different things, kidnapping people, ransacking business, extorting people, et cetera. But they also have some common interests. This is why late last year, Jimmy Cherizier, a former police officer, announced this Live Together alliance, and he resurrected this alliance, you know, a couple of weeks ago with the stated goal to attack the government.

SREENIVASAN: What do we know about Jimmy Cherizier? I mean, he’s named Barbecue.

MERANCOURT: Well, Jimmy Cherizier is a former police officer in Haiti, which is an interesting fact, because one of the most important components of the insecurity today in Haiti is the lack of faith of the Haitian people in the formal institutions set up to protect it, right? You have police officers being also implicated in massacres, in gun activities, and sometimes in kidnapping. So, he rose to prominence around the year 2019. He participated, you know, around that time in many massacres, including one in the La Saline. Dozens of innocent people were killed. The Haitian National Police was trying to interview him to understand his war in, you know, these massacres. He left. He fled. And this is around the time he became the thug that we today know him for. You know, in the aftermath of these events, he was kind of just one of the civil gang leaders, powerful gang leaders, you know, terrifying the Haitian population here in Port-au-Prince. But, you know, he made sort of a transition in the past couple of years to have a so-called political speech with some, you know, stated objective that would be to conduct what they call a revolution. This revolution would be against the corrupt political class and also the corrupt business class in Haiti. It’s a beautiful speech. But just like any speech, if you make extraordinary claims, you need extraordinary proof. And the proof today on the ground is the vast majority of the victims of gang violence, the vast majority of the victims of, you know, the shootings, the killings and then the rapes, the poor people living in apartments.

SREENIVASAN: Look, without a functioning police force, or at least any visible police presence on the street, and gangs essentially carving up different parts of the country, what does that do to, I don’t know if the word is morale, but how people feel today, considering all of the different types of challenges that Haiti has faced for so long?

MERANCOURT: Well, I regularly talk to police officers, right? In the past week, since the 29th of February, about 12 police stations were either burned down or directly attacked by the gangs and the attacks, you know, continuing. When I talk to police officers, they — you know, these are the people set up to protect the Haitian population and they are extremely discouraged. They think like the leadership of the police is ineffective. They are on arms and unable to defend themselves, you know, correctly against the gangs that are more than — more powerful than ever in Haiti. So, if the police is, in that stage, you can imagine what it is to be a regular Haitian going around Port-au-Prince. But not just Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, also in so many other places. I mean, I think the vast majority of the country, quite frankly, is under the influence of gang’s activities, making it, you know, difficult for goods to flow, making, you know, displaced people, making it extremely hard for families to get together, you know, sowing chaos and death, you know, amongst people. The anxiety that causes. I have neighbors speaking to me about their kids, you know, kids as little as, you know, 7, 8, 10 years old regularly speaking about death and, you know, being extremely stressed if their parents goes around. And it’s not farfetched ideas that, you know, even if you’re not in a place entirely under the control of gangs, you know, one of the most fears — and most important fears in Haiti today is being hit by stray bullets. And you are in a city where, you know, the vast majority of the hospitals are closed. The most important hospital, the public hospital in Port-au- Prince today is closed due to the gang violence. Many doctors are not going to work because, you know, they fear for their lives. And we are talking about a country where more than 40 percent of Haitian trained doctors today already left Haiti. The few ones that are still operating, you know, working in extremely dire conditions.

SREENIVASAN: Do people in Haiti want outside intervention? I mean, this is a country that has had so many different experiences with the outside world trying to help and that effort backfiring. Where are people now? What is the public sentiment of wanting an intervention from the West, the U.S., whoever?

MERANCOURT: OK. So, I think there are a few things happening. The first thing is the history. The last big foreign intervention in Haiti was, you know, from 2004 and 2017 with the United Nations. And although this mission helped calm down against the violence, helped stabilize the country for a moment, but it was responsible for hundreds of cases of violation of human rights. We have a mission that brings cholera to Haiti. And for a long time, the United Nations refused to recognize its war in bringing the cholera that killed about 10,000 people and infected 800,000 more. And still today, Haiti is facing this cholera while we have all the crises that I described before. You also have, you know, the implication of the U.S. in supporting the dictatorship of Duvalier from 1957 to 1986, you have the U.S. occupation from 1914 to 1924. You have, you know, the — if you go even up, you can also find the independence ransom, the 1825 ransom that Haiti had to pay to France after Haiti’s soldiers’ kind of took their freedom from France. So, I think this backstory is fresh in people’s memory. But at the same time, many Haitians actually recognized that the Haitian national police, the Haitian forces, are unable to top down against the gangs, to fight back against the gangs that are extremely powerful. Collection of business, Meta (ph), conducted a pool in the past years that would indicate the vast majority of people are for some intervention. However, how this intervention is, you know, going to be conducted, what component of it is going to be, you know, supporting and strengthening the Haitian national police? These are open questions, because if this is to be sustainable, if this is to be doable, it has to be something led by the Haitian people. Haitian people can, you know take their own destiny and bring security to their own communities.

SREENIVASAN: I know this is difficult to measure, but can you detect what the level of optimism or hope is in people that this crisis too shall pass? Are they increasingly depressed about what’s happening right now? What do you get as a sense when you go out in the field and report so many of your stories?

MERANCOURT: I spoke about, you know, hundreds, thousands of doctors fleeing Haiti in the past years to find a better life abroad, to find, you know, other opportunities, but so many doctors actually today go every day to the few hospitals that are functioning to help people. When I’m meeting with humanitarian people, not just people coming from abroad, in international institutions, but the vast majority of the folks going to distribute food, going to help in poor neighborhoods, going in neighborhoods actually controlled by against our Haitian, Haitian institutions and Haitian people. When I speak to, you know, police officers who, despite everything, despite the fact that they are not paid well, despite that fact they’re unequipped, they feel a sense of duty. So many of them tell me to serve and to help. When I see regular Haitians, you now, helping and sharing what they have to help neighbors and to assist however they can, these are small indications for me that people are not hopeless, people taking responsibility, and people know that, you know, a better future is possible whenever they get together and try to do something about their own situations.

SREENIVASAN: Widlore Merancourt of “The Washington Post” joining us from Haiti. Thanks so much for your time.

MERANCOURT: Thank you.