Haiti
Footage shows men forced by police to lie in the street before being killed and set on fire in broad daylight
Monday, April 24, 2023 at 11:17 p.m. CET
Haiti’s plunge into a humanitarian crisis and bloodshed has unleashed its latest moment of horror after at least a dozen suspected criminals were beaten to death on the streets of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and then burned to death in broad daylight.
Horrific footage of the incident showed the bloodied men being forced to lie on the pavement by police officers with guns, before bystanders piled tires on top of them, doused them in petrol and set them on fire.
An eyewitness told the Associated Press the lynch mob grabbed the victims from police after they were arrested in Port-au-Prince’s Canapé-Vert neighborhood and then beat and stoned them before burning their bodies.
Hundreds of onlookers flocked to the scene – where the news agency reporter saw 13 burning bodies – to watch the nightmarish attack.
In a statement posted to Facebook, Haiti’s National Police said its officers intercepted a group of suspected smugglers traveling in a van, but that more than 12 of those men were “sadly lynched by members of the community” afterwards. An accompanying video showed the handguns and AK47 magazines, which police said had been confiscated along with the victims.
The lynchings came as Haiti’s already dramatic social, political and humanitarian crisis – which the UN Security Council will discuss on Tuesday – deepened.
In just six days, between April 14 and 19, nearly 70 people were killed in gang clashes in Cité Soleil, Port-au-Prince’s main slum, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. About 40 of the dead were shot or stabbed. At least two were children.
“Fighting is going on in Cité Soleil… The population feels besieged. They are confined to their homes for fear of gun violence and gang terror,” said Ulrika Richardson, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Haiti, in a statement.
That warning came a month after the UN called for an international “specialized support force” to be deployed to Haiti after more than 530 people were killed in the first few weeks of this year, leading to the closure of many clinics and schools. Between January and March, the UN Human Rights Office counted 531 killings, 300 injuries and 277 kidnappings in gang-related incidents, mostly in the gang-dominated capital of Haiti.
Haiti’s plight is rooted in hundreds of years of foreign exploitation and meddling, decades of corrupt and dictatorial rule under the Duvalier dynasty, and a series of harrowing natural disasters, including a 2010 earthquake that leveled Haiti’s capital and killed more than 200,000 people.
But the current crisis deepened in 2021 when Haiti’s President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated at his Port-au-Prince mansion. Since then, politically powerful gangs have seized more than 60% of the capital, sections of the resource-poor police force are engaged in open revolt, and Haitian politics has been consumed by infighting.
‘War spreads’: Aid groups may have to scale back services in Haiti as violence mounts
The country, ruled by former Prime Minister Ariel Henry since the assassination of Moïse, was missing a single democratically elected government official in January. It is unclear when a new presidential election will take place. The last one took place almost seven years ago, in November 2016.
Last month, the Haitian newspaper Le Nouvelliste reported that veteran British diplomat Jonathan Powell, who played a key role in the peace talks in Northern Ireland that led to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, had joined efforts to break the political deadlock.
Jake Johnston, author of a forthcoming book on Haiti called Aid State, said it’s unclear what role Powell is playing but sees little prospect of a short-term solution. “There is no silver bullet here. These are ingrained issues… and changing them will take time.”
“They have this kind of paralysis that has overtaken everything and in the meantime the government has largely abdicated and retired,” Johnston added. “So it keeps getting worse.”
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