Two years ago, one of the main crossroads in the Cite Soleil slum was a no man’s land where street gangs terrorized residents. Now its turn of fortunes is considered a possible road to success for the rest of Haiti.
In an area once marked only by bullet-scarred buildings and the torched, overturned carcasses of automobiles, vendors in a bustling market of street stalls sell everything from mangoes to laundry detergent. Plans are in the works to build a community center and revamp the schools.
The reason for the dramatic improvement in Cite Soleil, a bellwether for this impoverished Caribbean nation, was a major offensive by United Nations peacekeepers against Haiti’s gang leaders.
Led by hundreds of Brazilian troops, UN forces seized the shantytown in a series of nighttime raids in December, January and February. More than a dozen gang members were killed and more than 400 arrested, including all but one of the gangs’ top leaders.
UN forces have been fired at only twice in Cite Soleil since the end of February — a far cry from last year when two peacekeepers were killed by gang members while fortifying a guard post there.
“We broke the backbone of the gangs, but it doesn’t mean that the gangs are finished,” said Maj. Gen. Carlos Alberto Dos Santos Cruz, commander of UN forces in Haiti, known as MINUSTAH. “We need to keep going after the leaders, going after the criminals, to prevent them from reorganizing.”
The UN’s control over Cite Soleil provides a ray of hope for a nation that for generations has suffered through coups, violence and unspeakable poverty.
Edmond Mulet, the UN’s special representative in Haiti, said the challenge now is to provide jobs and other basic services to Cite Soleil’s estimated 400,000 residents to win their trust and ensure that the gangs do not return.
Two weeks ago the U.S. signed a $20 million agreement to build the community center, refurbish schools and health clinics, pave roads and create jobs as part of a broader effort to alleviate the crushing poverty in Cite Soleil.
“We think it will really make a serious and positive impact on the lives of the people in Cite Soleil after so long where they’ve been held essentially hostage,” Janet Sanderson, U.S. ambassador to Haiti, said in an interview.
Claude Joseph, a 34-year-old Cite Soleil resident and father of four, said conditions already have improved. Sitting on a small stool, Joseph was renting out a single wireless telephone to customers at the outdoor market, which once had been abandoned by residents.
“You couldn’t sit here before,” Joseph said. “There was a lot of shooting. I lost my uncle. He was killed by a gang in 2004.”
Birth of a slum
The story of Cite Soleil began decades ago when Haitian dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier built housing for workers on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. There, on the water’s edge, grew the Cite Soleil slum that today covers more than 2 square miles.
Many Cite Soleil residents live on a dollar a day, and some eat flattened, chalk-colored pies made of clay to ease hunger.
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“I wait for men to take me out so I can feed my child,” said Estme Deliverence, a 26-year-old prostitute. “We don’t have anything at all.”
It was against that backdrop of misery that Cite Soleil’s street gangs were born. But there also was a broader, political context.
Cite Soleil and other slums provided a base of support for Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a populist priest who championed the poor and was elected Haiti’s president in 1990. Aristide was ousted a year later in a bloody coup, fled into exile and was returned to power in 1994 by U.S. Marines.
Determined not to be ousted again, Aristide armed his most militant supporters in Cite Soleil and other shantytowns. The groups later morphed into powerful criminal organizations.
Gang leaders such as Amaral Duclona and Belony Amalaise divided Cite Soleil into fiefdoms, dealing drugs, extorting businesses and carrying out other criminal activities, according to diplomats and residents.
Sometimes gang leaders turned their weapons on each other. Civilians were killed in the crossfire or targeted for execution.
In recent years the gangs operated lucrative kidnapping rings. There were 142 kidnappings in November and December of 2006 alone, according to UN statistics.
To many Cite Soleil residents, the gangs’ dominance symbolized the impotence of Haiti’s government and the 8,000-strong UN peacekeeping force, which arrived in 2004 after Aristide was ousted by a ragtag rebel army and American pressure.
Pessimism about mission
Many Haitians came to believe the UN mission, like previous foreign interventions in Haiti, would lead to few improvements.
“There was a time when UN troops couldn’t come in here,” Joseph recalled despairingly.
Shortly after taking office in May 2006, Haitian President Rene Preval met with top gang leaders to encourage them to disarm. But Preval broke off the talks after gang leaders demanded immunity for their crimes, along with passports, visas and cash so they could begin new lives in the United States or Europe.
As the kidnappings and killings intensified, Preval gave UN commanders the green light in December to oust the gangs from Cite Soleil.
On Jan. 24, UN peacekeepers took control of the so-called Blue House, a battered, four-story building that gang members used to fire at UN troops and extort businesses and vehicles along National Highway 1.
Two weeks later, 700 Brazilian troops seized a high school under gang control along with the headquarters and home of Cite Soleil’s most powerful gangster, known simply as Evens. About 20,000 rounds were exchanged in the gun battles.
Today, blue-helmeted troops rumble along Cite Soleil’s dusty streets in armored vehicles and patrol on foot.
They eagerly display such former gang hideouts as Duclona’s tan-colored home, where an armoire full of rumpled clothes attests to the speed with which the gang leader fled advancing UN troops Feb. 20. Duclona remains the only major gang leader at large.
“The population was very receptive when the troops arrived,” said Sgt. Alexandre Pereira, a 31-year-old Brazilian squad commander whose soldiers peer out from a building overlooking Evens’ former stronghold. “People applauded and they were very happy to see us.”
Still, some Cite Soleil residents are wary of UN troops, complaining that innocent civilians were killed or arrested during the recent offensive. Residents also fear gang retaliation if UN forces pull out too soon.
“I believe there are gang members hiding,” said Pereira, who sometimes sees young men running away to avoid his soldiers. “We are concerned about chaos returning to Haiti if we leave.”
Haiti’s army was disbanded in 1994, and its police force, widely viewed as corrupt and incompetent, numbers fewer than 7,000. Up to 1,000 police officers are likely to be purged in the coming months, UN officials say.
International peacekeepers are training about 1,000 new police officers annually, but it could take years for the force to grow to 20,000, the number UN commander Dos Santos Cruz said is needed to safeguard Haiti’s 8.7 million people.
Meanwhile, Haiti is awash in up to 200,000 illegal weapons, its judicial system has collapsed and drug trafficking is out of control.
For those reasons, Joseph, the telephone vendor, hopes UN soldiers remain indefinitely.
“I want the United Nations to stay for security,” he said. “I also would like them to provide jobs so we can feel like human beings.”
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