From the BBC:
“Haiti gang kills 110 people
accused of witchcraft”
At least 110 mostly elderly
people have been brutally murdered by gang members in the Haitian capital,
Port-au-Prince, according to a human rights group. The National Human Rights
Defence Network (RNDDH) said a local gang leader had targeted them after his
son fell ill and subsequently died. The gang leader reportedly consulted a
voodoo priest who blamed elderly locals practising "witchcraft" for
the boy's mystery illness.
The United Nations said the
number of people killed in Haiti so far this year in spiralling gang violence
had reached "a staggering 5,000".
While details from the massacre
are still emerging, the UN's human rights chief Volker Türk on Monday put the
number of people killed over the weekend "in violence orchestrated by the
leader of a powerful gang" at 184. The killings happened in the Cité
Soleil neighbourhood of the capital. According to reports, gang members seized
scores of residents aged over 60 from their homes in the Wharf Jérémie area,
rounded them up and then shot or stabbed them to death with knives and
machetes. Residents reported seeing
mutilated bodies being burned in the streets.
RNDDH estimated 60 were killed on
Friday while another 50 were rounded up and murdered on Saturday, after the
gang leader's son had died of his illness. While RNDDH said that all the
victims were over 60, another rights group said some younger people who had
tried to protect the elderly had also been killed. Local media said that
elderly people believed to be practitioners of voodoo had been singled out
because the gang leader had been told his son's illness had been caused by
them. Rights groups said the man who had ordered the killings was Monel Felix,
also known as Mikano. Mikano is known to control Wharf Jérémie, a strategic
area in the port of the capital.
According to Romain Le Cour
Grandmaison, a Haiti expert at the Global Initiative against Transnational
Crime (GI-TOC), the area is small but hard for the security forces to
penetrate. Local media said that residents had been prevented from leaving
Wharf Jérémie by Mikano's gang, so news of the deadly killings was slow to
spread. The group forms part of the Viv Ansanm gang alliance, which controls
much of the Haitian capital.
Haiti has been engulfed in a wave
of gang violence since the assassination in 2021 of the then-president, Jovenel
Moïse. Data gathered by GI-TOC shows there was a decline in the murder rate
between May and September of this year, after rival gangs had reached an uneasy
truce. But attempts by the gangs to expand their territory beyond their
strongholds in the capital have led to particularly bloody incidents in the
past two months, with ordinary residents rather than rival gang members being
increasingly targeted.
On 3 October, 115 locals were
killed in the small town of Pont-Sondé in the Artibonite department. That
massacre was reportedly carried out by the Gran Grif gang in retaliation for
some residents joining a vigilante group to resist attempts by Gran Grif to
extort locals. If confirmed, the death toll given by the UN for this weekend's
killings in Cité Soleil, would make it the deadliest incident so far this year.
With gangs in control of an
estimated 85% of Port-au-Prince and increasingly large swathes of the
countryside, hundreds of thousands of Haitians have been forced to flee their
homes. According to the International Organization for Migration, more than
700,000 people - half of them children - are internally displaced across the
country.
Gang members often use sexual
abuse, including gang rape, to sow terror among the local population. In a
report published two weeks ago, Human Rights Watch researcher Nathalye Cotrino
wrote that "the rule of law in Haiti is so broken that members of criminal
groups rape girls or women without fearing any consequences".
Attempts by the Kenyan-led
Multinational Security Support Mission to quell the violence have so far
failed. The international police force arrived in Haiti in June to bolster the
Haitian National Police but is underfunded and lacks the necessary equipment to
take on the heavily armed gangs. Meanwhile, the Transitional Presidential
Council (TPC) - the body created to organise elections and re-establish
democratic order - appears to be in turmoil. The TPC replaced the interim prime
minister last month and seems to have made little progress towards organising
elections. "They reign over a mountain of ashes," GI-TOC's Romain Le
Cour Grandmaison writes of the council in his report.
^ This is just another sad
example of the failed State that Haiti has become and why nothing will change
for the better there anytime soon. ^
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