Affordable Housing Institute : US

I’ve previously posted about the societal cost of clandestine occupancy — people who use homes as a shield for illegal activities.

When a whole neighborhood becomes a haven of clandestine occupancy, not only does it threaten its own denizens, it imperils all around it.

A window in the pediatric ward of a small hospital in Cite Soleil was shattered by a stray bullet of an unknown gunman. Nobody was hurt. [Photo: New York Times]

Unless the downward spiral of insular lawless tyranny is reversed, the consequences are appeasement, accommodation, or violence, as described in a horrifying New York Times story on the raids into Haiti’s Cite Soleil:

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Feb. 5 — For years, street gangs have run Haiti right alongside the politicians. With a disbanded army and a corrupted wreck of a police force, successive presidents have either used the gangs against political rivals or just bought them off.

Power fills vacuums.

A warren of shacks crammed into one another, apart from the outside world

Recently, something extraordinary has occurred. President Rene Preval decided to take on the gangs and set the 8,000 United Nations peacekeepers loose on them, a risky move that will determine the security of the country and the success of his young government.

For the residents of Cite Soleil, Haiti might as well be a foreign country, for its laws have no application:

Aged eyes in a child’s face

Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, has a long tradition of politics mixed with thuggery. In the 1970s and ‘80s, Francois Duvalier [Papa Doc — Ed.] and his son Jean-Claude [Baby Doc] employed the Tontons Macoute, dreaded paramilitary hoodlums.

Papa Doc and Baby Doc

For a clinically dispassionate depiction of that hideous time, read Graham Greene’s The Comedians.

For half a century Haiti has lurched from one despot to another, extended catastrophes relieved only by flickers of optimism, only to collapse, with never a foundation of civil society. Instead Haiti is controlled by thieves and thugs, some living in slums, some in bureaucracies, barracks, and bastions:

Justice is bought and sold in Haiti, with both police officers and judges routinely allowing bribes to determine guilt or innocence. Jails are packed with people awaiting trial, most languishing for years.

Haiti’s problems go even farther back, to its very founding and its Jacobin revolution, led by the charismatic and unsuccessful Toussaint L’ouverture.

Such aspirations

Mr. Aristide was elected president in 1990 and again in 2000 with the support of the poor. Gang leaders, who act as de facto spokesmen for long-neglected slums, gained entry to the presidential palace and helped dole out jobs and other spoils to their men.

For what the gangs offer, whether as protection or as patronage, is order of a kind, order in servility.

The biggest of the United Nations operations have been aimed at one of the most wanted and feared of all the gang leaders, an unlikely and unpredictable power broker in his 20s who goes simply by the name Evans. Evans and his groups have been linked to a rash of kidnappings in the capital, and lately his men have been locked in fierce battles with United Nations peacekeepers.

Their price is obedience to dictatorship:

Within the confines of Cite Soleil, Evans’s every whim is enforced with absolute authority.

Deeply superstitious, he recently said he suspected cats of bringing him bad luck after one appeared during a raid by United Nations troops on one of his hide-outs, local residents and United Nations officials said.

So he issued an order that all cats were to be killed in his patch of the slum. His gunmen would be rounding them up and roasting them, he told the people. When one woman resisted, he or one of his men shot her, United Nations officials say.

Echoes of Herod the Great.

By the imposition of order, and with the guise of ’speaking for the poor,’ the criminals gain a veneer of respectability, and they trade as if independent sovereigns:

In his initial months in office, Rene Preval, who had been Mr. Aristide’s prime minister as well as president from 1996 to 2001, followed a similarly conciliatory tack. He negotiated with gang leaders, including Evans, inviting them at times to face-to-face meetings in the presidential palace, officials say.

Appeasement never works — it emboldens the criminals.

The kidnapping spree at the end of last year was the last straw. As the country prepared for Christmas, street thugs began grabbing people off the street, taking them into the slums and demanding ransoms.

Then the kidnappers began singling out children. In one horrible episode, a teenage girl was killed and her eyes were gouged out. Then a school bus of children was seized by gunmen, prompting many terrified parents to keep their children hidden at home.

Appeasement just delays the day of reckoning and raises the price of confrontation

Mr. Preval, who has support among Haiti’s poor as well as its elite, found his coalition government under attack as well, with opposition politicians in the Senate and Chamber of Deputies denouncing him for allowing the violence. The president changed course, calling off negotiations with the gangsters and giving the United Nations the go-ahead to go after them.

Brazilian soldiers with the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti guarded a building near the Cite Soleil slum in Port-Au-Prince. The building had previously been used as a gang headquarters.

Some local residents say that the raids are stirring up the gangs and that innocent people are getting caught up in the cross-fire.

Criminals exist in a protoplasm of ordinary decent people. What makes slums so deadly is that they interpenetrate.

Evans and the other leaders now hide in the maze of tin-roofed shanties that are home to some 300,000 of Haiti’s urban poor.

He’s in there somewhere, shielded by thousands of innocents

The victims become apologists for their terrorizing masters:

Not everybody agrees that confrontation is the best way of calming the slums. “The gang men can change,” insisted Meleus Jean, 45, a pastor who runs a tiny church in Cite Soleil and who was once almost hit by a stray bullet while delivering a Sunday morning sermon. “I talk to them and I think they are gang men because they have nothing else. Fighting them will not change them.”

The poor are the ultimate human shields for the criminals. The shields rely on their indecency and the opponents’ decency.

David Wimhurst, the spokesman for the United Nations mission, said that the peacekeepers were careful to single out only combatants and that gang members had themselves killed civilians and then blamed the United Nations.

Let there be no doubt: what is taking place is a ware between two sovereigns:

One of the fiercest battles took place on the morning of Jan. 25 with a raid by hundreds of United Nations forces on a gang hide-out on the periphery of Cite Soleil, this sprawling seaside capital’s largest and most notorious slum.

United Nations peacekeepers have launched a campaign to clear Port-Au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, of violent street gangs. [Photo: New York Times]

One has a conscience, the other does not:

After a fierce firefight in which gang members fired thousands of shots, United Nations officials succeeded in taking over the hide-out, a former schoolhouse that gang members had once used to fire upon peacekeepers and to demand money from passing motorists. The United Nations said four gang members had been killed in the battle.

Other raids have followed, and though it is still too early to judge the operation, gang leaders seem to be on the run, and armored United Nations vehicles now rumble through the crowded streets of Cite Soleil.

Martial law is not society, it is merely a lull.

At the same time, nobody believes that arresting or killing the gang leaders will be enough to calm Port-au-Prince. The violence is linked, most say, to the dire poverty.

Poverty changes the risk-benefit equation of violence.

If you’re going to die young anyway, why not do it in a blaze of glory, actively, and get something for it if you’re spared?

“The people didn’t ask to be born here,” said Christy Jackson, 42, headmaster of a school in Cite Soleil. “We didn’t ask to live like this.”

No one does. No one should have to.

The United States government recently set aside $20 million to create jobs for young people in Cite Soleil once the violence is quelled. In Solino, a neighborhood where the gangsters were chased away, people are being paid to clean garbage from a clogged drainage ditch.

Residents are being paid to clear raw sewage and trash from a drainage ditch in Solino, a neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital. [Photo: New York Times]

Even these efforts are small compared with the problem:

Mr. Mulet, of the United Nations, said he believed that the gang leaders were beyond rehabilitation. “They’ve been killing people, kidnapping people, torturing people, raping girls,” he told reporters recently in Washington. “It is very difficult to reinsert into society someone like that. A psychiatric institution would be the best place to place them in the future — after we arrest them.”

This story has no happy ending. As a failed state, Haiti profits from clandestine occupancy on a grand scale:

On top of that, more and more narcotics have begun flowing through Haiti to the United States, law enforcement officials say. It is Haiti’s weakened state that is the big attraction to narcotics traffickers, officials say.

When protection can be bought, like any other commodity it creates a marketplace.

In a recent report on Haiti’s woeful law enforcement apparatus, the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit group committed to preventing and resolving deadly conflicts, said that without urgent reform “the current escalation of organized violence and criminality may come to threaten the state itself.”

Has threatened the state. Has destroyed the state. Haiti and its dreadful twin Zimbabwe are grim reminders of the cost of allowing homes, blocks, neighborhoods, and even states to secede from humane society.

If only asking could make it so

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