anthropologica 2006

8/8/2019 Anthropologica 2006

1/24

Canadian Anthropology Society

Factional Terror, Paramilitarism and Civil War in Haiti: The View from Port-au-Prince, 1994-2004Author(s): J. Christopher Kovats-BernatSource: Anthropologica, Vol. 48, No. 1, War and Peace / La guerre et la paix (2006), pp. 117-139Published by: Canadian Anthropology SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25605301

Accessed: 21/09/2010 09:43

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless

you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cas.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed

page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Canadian Anthropology Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to

Anthropologica.
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cashttp://www.jstor.org/stable/25605301?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cashttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cashttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/25605301?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cas


2/24


3/24

Air, Cite Soleil and La Saline with Uzis, semiautomatichandguns, combat-grade shotguns, assault rifles, bayonets, whips and machetes. Amid the chaos and a state ofsiege on the streets, and in the complete absence of legalauthority, political scores are being settled alongside ofpersonal animosities being avenged. Summary executions are being carried out on roadsides, the bodies littering the streets with single bullet holes through theirforeheads. Dozens of others are being killed in less formal

ways, their bodies machine-gunned, hacked to death,decapitated, mutilated and burned alive. Some victims ofthe conflict have been disembowelled, some strangledwith their own underwear. There are rumours of a younggirlfrom themilitantly pro-Aristide Cite Soleil slum having been raped to death by rebels after the departure ofAristide. By October of 2004, pro-Aristide gangs hadbegun the systematic beheading ofPNH officers killed infactional clashes under the rubric of "Operation Baghdad"(though unlike similar beheadings in Iraq, the decapitations are typically post-mortem and are not filmed). Haitiis not teetering on the brink of civilwar, it is in the fullthroes of civilwar. WTiat else to call this protracted armedconflict among competing factions for control of statepower? Many Haitians refer to itas lage (war) as often asthey refer to it s la violenz (the violence). Much of thewaris now being waged inPort-au-Prince, and it is not beingfought around the civil society as much as it is beingfought directly through it.At the time of this writing,there have been over 500 Haitians killed in factionalclashes since the fighting began in earnest in late February 2004.While the government has periodically imposed curfews and urges residents of the capital to seek shelterindoorswhen shooting is heard, the truth of thematter isthatwhen a bullet isfired inPort-au-Prince there is littledifference between inside and outside; here, in themostvolatile slums,most homes aremade of cardboard and tin.Haiti's violent history of successive coups d'etat has shownhow political conflict can become a civilian bloodbath whenthefighting reaches the capital, even when people do stayindoors. There appears to be no end to the violence insight. hough therebel armyhad pledged to laydowntheir arms now that a Brazilian-led UN peacekeepingforce has arrived to re-establish order, they have shownlittle real interest indoing so, even as the foreign troopsconduct disarmament and policing operations throughoutthe country. Outfitted innew fatigue uniforms and brandishing automatic weapons, members of the "New Army"depart daily from their Petionville headquarters anddescend on the capital down the hill in a show of forceintended to quell the pro-Aristide gangs and assuage the

concerns of a business elite growing impatient with theinsecurity and the toll it has taken on their commercialinterests.

The destruction in the capital is being superimposedonto an urban landscape already devastated by the crushing poverty of theWestern Hemisphere's most destituteeconomy. Long the poorest country in theAmericas, Haitiwas further crippled by the floodwater obliteration attributed toHurricane Jeanne which struck the island inSeptember 004 and claimedover3 000 liveswhile leaving200 000 homeless. In the northern city ofGonaives?thefirst city tobe routed by the rebels inFebruary 2004?thefloodwaters have caused a hunger crisis likenever beforeseen. Mothers picked through themuck to salvage fallenfruit,washing it in septic water before feeding it to theirstarving and emaciated children.Men chopped away withmachetes at collapsed shanties, searching for whatremains of their families' homes. In the thirdweek ofOctober, some in the north had not eaten for three weeks.The "New Army," made up of former FADH rebels, hadsoon stepped forward inGonaives, brandishing theirweapons at international reliefworkers who they chargedwere ineffective at the distribution of food aid,which continues tobe looted fromWorld Food Program warehouses.Everyone involved in the relief effortagrees that insecurity continues to be the greatest obstacle to feeding thevictims of the floods and the violence.

In Port-au-Prince, where the hurricane "merely"resulted in the overflow of raw sewage into the homes ofthe poor living in low-lying slums, street boys zombifiedby their glue-sniffing habit and suffering from oozingvapour burns around theirnoses and mouths sleep againstthe wall surrounding the National Cemetery. That wall isitself scarred with the dimpled craters ofgunfire, and iscovered with a cacophony of vicious political graffiti andcounter-graffiti, variously in condemnation or support ofthe deposed president. One of the street girls congregating there inMarch 2004 toldme bluntly, "I am beyond hungry. I am already dead." Inside the cemetery, tombs havebeen looted, caskets smashed, corpses strewn about. Istoop down to examine the splintered coffin of a child,

wedged between two mausoleums. Some of the smallcorpse is inside, but much of it has been scattered aboutthe space, here and there among the bones ofmany others. In these times, the desecrations are as often theworkofpolitical partisans targeting the tombs of opposing families as they are that of the common grave-robber, or lessfrequently still, the necromancer.In theBelAir slum stepthroughutters illed ithraw sewage mixing with coagulated blood froman earlierstreet shooting. The upside-down shells of burned out

118 /J.ChristopherKovats-Bernat Anthropologica 48 (2006)


4/24

cars line streets obstructed by heaps of smoulderinggarbage, some as high as 10 feet. In one such car thecharred skeleton of the driver sits bolt upright in his seat,his blackened skull grimacing at theArmageddon playingout before him. In the firstdays after the departure of thedeposed president, bodies and pieces ofbodies invaryingstates of decay could be found stuffed in trash-cloggeddrainage culverts and thrown like somuch litter againstthe side of the citymorgue. Formidable roadblocks ofburning tires, oftenmanned by armed and masked factions, occasionally by street kids, stop trafficand pedestrians in search of victims and valuables. The cityscape isawrecked vision, the absurd and impossible but nonetheless real consequence of a profound civil destructionimposed on pre-existing urban disorder. The war in thecapital has leftchaos andmayhem in themiddle of a slumconstructed not by logic or symmetry but by human necessity and the struggle for space inwhich to live, eat, love,reproduce and die. For the poorest Haitians who dependeveryday on the city for life itself, the ruination ofPortau-Prince writ large has completely shattered an alreadycracked mirage of an ordered and just world, as ithascompelled entire communities to again bear witness to thecarnage ofmachinegun politics. Since February 2004,spectacular acts of violence in the capital, a place whereover one-and-half million people are crammed into theleast amount of space per capita of any other city in theAmericas, have made close to one-quarter of the city'spopulation directwitnesses to and thus participants in theviolence. Even this troubling statistic betrays the realityof hundreds of thousands more who inoneway or anotherare suffering because of the incidentals ofwar.

Somehow, Haitians manage tomaintain a semblanceof normalcy even as their social and cultural worlds arecrumbling around them. Street children recover from theloss of their friends togunplay by expressing firm and certain knowledge of their understanding ofwhat has happened to them. They impose a logic born of thewar-tornconditions that frame their lives ofpoverty, scarcity, fear,and death. Some say that their friendswere taken to bemade into zombi. Others say that theywere manje (eaten,consumed, exhausted, destroyed, disappeared) by monsters, which is not so far from the truth. But they alsorecover their comrades by speaking their names andtelling stories of their good friendship and humanity.Social and cultural lives go on.Women give birth, vendorssell candies and cigarettes on street corners, welders plytheir trade on the sidewalks in front of their shops, taptaps3 carry passengers between markets and homes, children make theirway to school, street kids wipe the hoodsof passing cars. Labourers lay cinderblock around a

memorial commemorating Haiti's 200 years of independence fromFrench rule?2004 marked Haiti's bicentennialas well as its descent into anarchy and war. They areseemingly undeterred by the bullet holes that alreadymar theirwork fromyesterday. In these and many other

ways, Haitians inPort-au-Prince are demonstrating theresilience, resistance and creativity that anthropologistsare increasingly realizing are qualities characteristic ofcommunities transformed by violent conflict.The businessof everyday lifemust go on even ina civilwar zone,wherea fagade of the ordinary masks the reality of lives livedunder truly extraordinary circumstances.Beyond Bodies and Fetishes: The MeaningofViolenceHow is anthropology to contribute to an understanding ofthemeaning of the political violence in theHaitian capital today, violence of a type that is so absolutely pervasivethroughout the slums that constitute most of Port-auPrince that everyday life simply cannot be lived withoutsome engagement, or at least negotiation, of it?The problem is as much one ofmethodology as it is of theory, insofar as it implies a request forreliable ethnographic methods forapproaching violence asmuch as it is a request fora hermeneutics ofviolence itself.The challenges ofdoingethnography in awar zone are often prohibitive enoughto preclude most researchers from even trying,whichhas leftmany ofus who work at the epicentres of conflictwithout the fundamental methodological tools to so dosafely and effectively. Ethnographers of violence haveincreasingly bemoaned this lack of field technique forstudying the lived reality of conflict, and have begun tocraft new strategies fordealing with it in the field (Bourgois 1990; Daniel 1996; Feldman 1991; Kovats-Bernat2001,2002;Lee 1995;Nash 1976;Nordstrom1997,2004;Nordstrom and Martin 1992; Peritore 1990; Robben andNordstrom 1995; Sluka 1990,1995). Even once amethodhas been established, how can we confidently use it tocomment on themeanings ofviolent social processes thatare still unfolding? This last problem should really be asmall one foranthropology, as our discipline alone amongthe social sciences is charged with in situ descriptions andarticulations ofmeanings behind immediate culturalprocesses that are "in themaking." But it is the intenselyoppressive nature ofviolence, and its ability to absolutelycontaminate an entire community, thatmakes it fundamentally unlike all other fluctuating aspects of social lifethatwe study.The civilwar inHaiti today serves as an aptillustration of the problem. A disorderly and disorderedviolence has reduced the country to a state of emergencywhere ethnography is complicated by "sensory and nar

Anthropologica 48 (2006) Factional Terror,Paramilitarism and CivilWar inHaiti /119


5/24

rative distortion" and "surrealistic particularities" (Feldman 1995: 228) that make the country, and the capitalthat is now at the centre of the crisis, resistant to ethnographic truth-telling. The black smoke of a thousandunchecked fires chokes city streets and limits visibility,gunfire barks out in sputters at unpredictable moments,schoolchildren leap over gelatinous puddles ofblood andmud, street kids are paid by gangs to keep tire barricades burning, bodies long since cold and still are nonetheless furiously hacked bymachetes as they lie in the street,andmarket women step around the corpses, theirburdensborne expertly atop their heads inthe Haitian way. Theseare hardly ideal circumstances amid which to conduct atraditional kind of ethnography.Under such circumstances, individual perceptions,the actions based upon them, and in fact all of social lifeare bent to the service ofhuman survival and communitysustainability, rendering the validity and usefulness ofotherwise decontextualized and matter-of-fact ethnographic observations highly suspect. An alternative cultural code continuously adapted to prevailing circumstances, a sort of reactive social coping, takes over infields fraughtwith violence, for both the subjects and theresearchers of anthropological investigation. The immediacy and graphic nature of violent conflict skew objectivity and seduce the ethnographer into believing thatthemeaning of the events unfolding is embodied by theviolent acts themselves, rather than seeing those violentacts as embedded within a larger process ofwar that culminates rather than erupts in acts of profound brutalitythat produce lasting effects for entire communities. Thereal impact of social violence penetrates far deeper thanthe bodies rendered and transformed by acts of aggression themselves. The very immediacy ofviolence indangerous fields?concretized by gunfire, intimidation,corpses out ofplace, burned-out autos, grimacing skulls,threat of arrest, blood in the street?distorts the socialreality and can misinform, confuse or paralyze ethnographic analysis through the creation of "feeble fictions inthe guise of realism...flattening contradiction and systematizing chaos" (Taussig 1987: 132). The result is an"epistemic murk" that extends the problem of ethnographic observation and representation beyond the

merely philosophical?obscurity becomes a "high-powered medium of domination" (Taussig 1987: 121), compelling the ethnographic gaze to fixate on isolated,patently manifest acts ofwar and terror?troop movements, summary executions, riot events, massacres,armed clashes, arrests, beatings, torchings, lynchings.Agreat deal of anthropological accounts ofwar and violence fall prey to this seduction, this fetishization ofvio

lent acts. The danger here lies in the flawed assumptionthat soldiers, rioters, executioners, torturers, theirweapons, and their victims are the very embodiment ofviolence and the only data thatmatters. This assumptionis fed by "official" accounts ofwar in the news media,embedded journalism, after-action reports and the formalhistories of conflict that confine their attention to the actsof decision makers, soldiers, battle scenarios and technologies, rather than on the longer-term social impactthatwar has on the everyday lives of the people it isbeingfought through. The very instruments of terror (soldiers,executioners, torturers, rifles, machineguns, napalm,machetes, grenades, landmines, rocks, fists, batons, firebombs) and their targets (bodies, buildings and landscapes) are indeed aspects ofwar, but they do not in andof themselves embody and isolate it rom the fabric of com

munity life.Perpetrators, weapons and victims are embedded inawider set ofpolitical histories and social relationsthat extend spatially and temporally far beyond themoments of bloodletting, fire and destruction. CarolynNordstrom writes that:Before Iwas caught in these riots [inSri Lanka in1983],media and literaryaccounts had taughtme tothinkofcommunalviolence as consisting onlyof "rioters" and "victims," and of riots as being explosive oneday events. These accounts did not convey the fact thatthere is no escaping the riots?for anyone. It neveroccurred tome.. .that riots involved looking for nonexistentfood and medicines longsinceburned and looted;that people "of the rioter's side" risked their lives toprotectpeople "on theother side"; thatyoung childrenwere caught in the violence, standingwith eyes toowide,wonderingwhat todo andwhatwas happening totheir world?and that these experiences were as muchthemeat ofpoliticalviolence as theriotersattackingthevictims. (2004: 29-30)

The present conflict in Iraq brings Nordstrom's pointinto stark relief.American news accounts of the human tollof thewar fixates on the over 2400 U.S. troops killed sincecombat operations began inMarch 2003, rarelymentioning the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killedduring the same period. This is before one considers thedisplaced, the homeless, thewounded, the crippled and theamputated; and it is also before one considers the devastating impact that thewar will have onmarket systems,family life, community relations, utilities distribution,education, health care and more forgenerations to come.Nordstrom describes this secondary political process ofwar and conflict as "erasure," "deletion," "editing out"; aprocess of "making things invisible" in the interest of lim

120 /J.ChristopherKovats-Bernat Anthropologica 48 (2006)


6/24

iting the crisis to chosen embodiments of it in order tomake it strategically palatable to certain audiences. Shepoints out thatmuch of themeaning ofwar lies in theseunanalyzed domains of social life on the frontlines:

Violence is set inmotion with physical carnage, but itdoesn't stop there. Violence reconfigures its victimsand the socialmilieu thathosts them. It isn'ta passingphenomenon thatmomentarily challenges a stable system, leaving a scar but no lasting effects.Violencebecomes a determining fact in shaping reality as peoplewill know it, n the future.So while a study of violencemay beginwith direct and immediate carnage, itshouldn't end there... .Researchers are still in scientificinfancy nchartingtheprogress of cultural trauma onthe body politic.We are far fromknowing if culturalwounds lead to ongoing cycles of social instability ndviolence. (Nordstrom2004: 59-60)

How are we towrite legitimate ethnographies of socialand cultural milieus so profoundly distorted by violence?Can and should itbe done at all? The ethical implicationsof these questions are hardly negligible. After all, how representative of the facts can any ethnography ofviolencebe if it is carried out in a field fraughtwith the ambiguities intrinsic to a war zone? The answer surely does notlie ina structural analysis that posits violence as a momentary, inexplicable lapse in the organic solidarity of thesocial whole. Indeed, our studies of the impact ofwar andconflict on cultural worlds reveal anything but enduring,static social structures that revert to internal harmony inthe aftermath offighting.What isneeded is a recognitionthatwhen war comes home, it is not simply an interruption of local norms and behaviour that return to themselves when the bloodletting ends, but a dynamic modifierof community identity that, incredibly and so often,endures in the midst and aftermath ofviolent conflict by

way of creative adaptation.In war zones like Port-au-Prince, the ethnographictask is thus twofold: first to identifyand record the sites,acts, agents and artefacts of the violence itself (the embodiments and fetishes of conflict), and then to contextualizethose elements in relation to the conflict as awhole withthe goal of extracting some degree of cultural meaningfrom the community torn apart and reconstituting itselfthroughout and after the crisis. This is no easy task. Itrequires thatwe not onlywork under hostile research conditions of danger and terror, but that we follow theantecedents to and the ripple effects ofwar beyond thefrontlines, the slums and the killing fields and into thehomes, the markets, the neighbourhoods, the familiesand the communities that are torn apart and reconstituted

foryears after thefighting has ended. That means that ourtask is as much an ethnographic and historical one as it isanthropological.Like any set of events in a dynamic system, violencecannot be understood except in its specific contexts. Waris flux, not static; it defies theoretical reduction to discrete, isolated events and embodiments. It exists as a setof complex, ever-transforming social relations. Like mostifnot all other categories of anthropological inquiry,violence is only understandable in its situational relationshipto histories ofpower, extant material conditions and ideological superstructures that give anchorage to the cultural meanings of individual acts, and offer empiricalbenchmarks for cross-cultural study. Put another way,every act ofviolence is embedded in a complex material,structural and cultural reality thatmust be elucidated byway of thorough ethnographies written from the level ofcombatants and sufferers, not policy makers and strategists. The meanings of violence are expressed in socialaction, and cannot be effectively extracted for ethnographic study after the fighting is over anymore than thesocial fact of kinship can be extracted for study outsidethe bounds of family relations, or economics outside thebounds of themarket. As a social contaminant, violenceacts to transform customary relations and communitynorms, and its pervasion of social life in the context ofwar means that it cannot be filtered out of human experience to access some fictive cultural "real" believed tolie beneath. To be studied as anthropological phenomena,violence, warfare and conflict must be experienced andrecorded firsthand in the same manner that we studyother aspects of social and cultural life?in context?because they are so inseparable from human experience. The consequences of locating violence in thisway,in situ and at the theoretical and methodological centerof study, are ones that bear directly on the mission of thediscipline. Ifwe are unable or unwilling to orient anthropology to the study ofviolence where it is inprocess (aswe have done for virtually all other objects/subjects ofour studies), then perhaps we have reached the end of theethnographic project. However, I don't believe thatwehave.Conflict as Dialectic: Studying Violenceas a Contextualized Social ProcessIn her critical development of an ethnography ofwar thatseeks to track patterns and networks of interest, profitand power "across cultural landscapes, sovereign borders, and theoretical domains," (Nordstrom 2004:3) Nordstrom offers a model for the study ofviolence as a radiating process, rather than as an event occurring in a



7/24

particular circumscribed locale.4 Such amodel invites theresearcher to consider the larger causes and consequencesofwar and the diverse interests of itsmultivariate protagonists, all ofwhich transcend the immediate experienceof the acts ofviolence themselves. Nordstrom's approachchallenges the Hobbesian perspective thatwar is awhollydestructive, innately human enterprise that can be confined to a particular time and place and limited to theactions of stereotyped, binary-opposed warring factions.Her model casts violence as part ofa dialectical movementthat also stimulates creativity in rebuilding devastatedsocial worlds, albeit under the least desirable circumstances. That perspective resonates with my own fieldexperiences ofwar inHaiti. Patterns of innovative thoughtand behaviour are spontaneously created by communitieslivingwith the spectre of social violence. The generationof tacit cultural meaning systems?oblique innuendoes,rumours, symbolic gesture sets, strategic silences?theseforma small part of the adaptive sensorium thatmembersof communities innovate and deploy in surviving war.WTiile working on the boulevards ofPort-au-Prince, Icould speak freelywith street children one moment, andperhaps even take notes. But the nextmoment, suddenlyunder the scrutiny ofparamilitary agents, we would havetopa dan nou?"shut ourmouths," hide the notes, and letthe anxious, sweaty silence thatnow prevailed bespeak thevolumes of data that hours of testimony could never provide. Because "silence can operate as a survival strategy" (Green 1995:118), it is not simply a symptom of fearbut is an aspect of cultural reality, and as such can be avaluable piece ofdatum. Silence, like rumour, constitutesa unique form of cultural adaptation that ethnography iswell-poised to access and interpret. Neighbourhoodrumours of an act of political rape contribute to a socialdiscourse of violence not unlike other forms of testimonythat ethnographers routinely gather in the field in cobbling together community narratives ofmarket life,kinship, or religion. Rumours say something meaningfulabout violence by presenting embellished or censored orotherwise reconfigured versions of fact as seen from theperspective of individual social agents. Rumours are acreative means of "remaking a world" (Das, Kleinmanand Lock 2001) devastated by conflict.Nordstrom's model generates a sophisticated approach towar ethnography by recognizing that an entirehost of actors are directly and indirectly implicated incultures of conflict: foreign journalists, humanitarian aidworkers, civilian collaborators, extrajudicial death squads,informers, profiteers, military advisors, arms dealers,health workers, tactical strategists, looters, bandits,opportunistic assassins and ethnographers. And these

before we consider the street children, market women,labourers, teachers, students, peasants, merchants, priestesses, healers and other civilian non-combatants who bearwitness to,mediate, negotiate, survive or are collateral victims of the crisis. Seen in thisway, violence is "essentially polysemic; it speaks with and through myriad andoften contradictory voices" (Nordstrom 1997: 45), oftenproducing a cacophony of competing discourses aboutthe conflict at hand and how itshould best be interpreted.The meanings and relevance to be taken from violentconflict are easily obscured by a complicated web of agendas, motivations, intentions, goals, incentives, justifications, political perspectives, emotional states, comportment to structures ofpower and social vantages that thediverse array of actors have on the conflict. Thus the profound ambiguity (though not inaccessibility) of the culturaldata gathered in fields of violence, and the need for a

multi-layered, hermeneutic approach to ethnographicanalysis that draws on local, even individual, experiencesofviolence inpiecing together ameaningful and relevantethnographic account ofwar. In so doing, the focus ofstudy shifts away from the particular agents, spaces andtimes offighting (the embodiments ofwar) and toward theactions, reactions and symbolic meanings brought to themby the broader civil society affected by it.While it is true that violence has an empirical realityin its observable effects, it is equally true that as the fundamental units of violent causality and experience, thebodies ofpersons are as socially effective as cultural subjects (contemplative, innovative and malleable selves andpersons) as they are as objective embodiments of agency(targets, antagonists, protagonists, agents, soldiers, children) moving about in space. This fact introduces theproblem of locating the role of shifting individual comportments and multivariate perspectives on acts of violence. As Setha Low and Denise Lawrence-Zufiiga pointout, "[t]he space occupied by the body, and the perceptionand experience of that space, contracts and expands inrelationship to a person's emotions and state ofmind,sense of self, social relations, and cultural predispositions" (2003:16). Put anotherway, identity, ontext and culture inform themeanings of bodies inviolent relation toone another, mandating a need for detailed accounts ofboth the sociocultural and the spatial contexts withinwhich particular conflicts occur and are experienced. Insofar as "humans are historical and culture-bearing socialbeings engaged inrelations ofmeaning-creation and symbolism" (Abbink 2000: xiii), there is an ongoing need in thediscipline forwell-developed, sophisticated approachesto violence that take into account themultiplicity of critical identities that individuals acquire as members of soci

122 /J.Christopher Kovats-Bernat Anthropologica 48 (2006)


8/24

ety in conflict: the objective person, the subjective self andthe political body in culturally-structured space. Thesecategories of identityare similar to the divisions of theperson identified by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and MargaretLock (1987) as the "individual body," the "social body" andthe "body politic."Insofar as this is the case, I suggest that any sophisticated anthropological analysis of conflict should includea description of the political history, a social analysis ofmaterial conditions, and an elaboration of the culturalcontext of any given violent act. Political history locatesthe conflictwithin a temporal field conducive to its examination as a phase in a dialectical movement toward creative community adaptations and relational innovationsthat are responsive to a suddenly transformed and disordered social world. By social analysis ofmaterial conditions Imean an examination of the empirical facts of theconflict (who did what towhom, when and how?), as wellas thematerial, institutional, relational and economic conditions amid which it isbeing carried out. This includes adefinition ofwhat has been called the landscape of socialaction, which develops from a tension between idealizedor imagined spatial settings against which the real, everyday life of the "foreground" of social life is actually cast(Hirsch 1995:4). I refer to this aspect of the social contextas the architecture of space and utility, implying not justthe arrangement of bodies and things in relation to oneanother, but also individual perceptions and engagementsof those bodies in that space. Finally, an elaboration of thecultural context of violent acts situates individual andcommunity narratives of violence (testimonials, stories,folklore,mythology, rumours, "official" and journalisticreports of events, accusations, confessions, rituals) withina larger symbolic worldview, and permits comparativecategories ofviolence to emerge from interpretive descriptions. Ethnographic analyses ofviolence that derive fromthis tri-faceted approach allow a responsible kind ofmeaning to emerge from conflict, one forged from a complexanalysis of empirical facts, social contexts and local interpretations. This isnot to simply reduce culture to text (Daset al. 2001:9), nor is it togive anthropology over to a radical cultural relativism (Abbink 2000: xiii) that alienates themeaning ofviolence by utterly localizing its significance.Conversely, it is to recognize that all conflicts have a universal quality to them, insofar as they all entail symbolicexchanges that take place within particular socioculturalcontexts, necessitating the need for a thorough accountingofviolence that engages both the subjective and objective dimensions of social lifeat the epicentres of conflicts.This article employs this processual-contextual modelinproviding an anthropological assessment of the current

violence in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince thatbegan as a rebel uprising in the northern town ofGonaivesin February 2004. While Nordstrom's ethnologicalapproach to the study of violence as a transcendentprocess rather than as a phenomenon that occurs in acircumscribed locale is essential to the broader anthropological project of theorizing violence cross-culturally,there remains first a need for ethnographic detail on particular conflicts. Drawing on a decade ofpolitical historiography and ethnographic fieldwork that I have conducted inHaiti since 1994, this article diverges fromNordstrom's broader model in that it isgrounded ina specific set of locales?the streets ofurban Haiti, principallyPort-au-Prince. The capital is at present the centre of theconflict and the nexus of confrontation,what Vodouisaintscall lakafou danjere: a dangerous ontological crossroads,a vital liminal space where bodies and their related identities are in dire jeopardy and in the midst of adaptivetransformation. It is inPort-au-Prince that the violence isat itsworst right now, and so it ishere also that the labourofreconstructing devastated social worlds ismost difficultand most imperative.Given limitations of space, my purpose isnot to present a comprehensive theoretical explanation for the pervasion ofviolence inHaitian political relations, but ratherto describe the unique set of historical, social and cultural circumstances that have led to the current crisis.Specifically, my intention here is to (1) elaborate on thesophisticated political developments that have led to thewar raging on the ground inPort-au-Prince today, (2) integrate that history with an ethnographically informedsocial analysis of the immediate embodiments of the violence that has resulted and (3) demonstrate how thewarextends beyond the immediacy of the fighting and into theeveryday lives ofHaitians suffering at itsperipheries andreconstituting their culturalworlds. The larger project ofextracting grander meanings from the conflictwill surelybe an ongoing one as theHaitian civil society continues toremake itself rom the shattered pieces of itsfailed democracy.What thewar means in a full anthropological senseis as much dependent upon what Haiti creates in themidst and in the aftermath of thefighting as it isupon thehistorical circumstances that led to the outbreak of violence in the first place.Spaces ofConflict and the Spectre ofHumanSuffering inPort-au-Prince: Some Socialand Cultural ConsiderationsOver 1500 000 people live inPort-au-Prince, and itcan bereasonably said that virtually all have been affected insomeway by thiswar. The bullet fired, themachete swung,



9/24

the rock thrown, the tire ignited, the order to kill given,the deathblow received are all discrete, localized examplesof violence; but they are also tidal forces that generateexpanding currents of secondary violence that resonatefrom the epicentres to the cultural (ifnot geographic)peripheries of the conflict. These secondary currents followpre-established social networks ofkin and communitythat diminish in import the farther one is removed (intimately and culturally) from the site and subjects of thebloodletting. A Haitian shot dead, a UN peacekeeperwounded, an adolescent girl raped to death; these aremore than just attacks on social or political categories ofcitizen, soldier and child. The gunman, the target, theminor and the rapist are variously mothers, sisters,fathers, brothers, daughters, sons, friends, lovers, wives,husbands, mentors, enemies, neighbours, rivals andmore.Witnesses to and victims and perpetrators of violence areenmeshed in overlapping webs of social relations thatmake every act "culturally deep," with effects that radiate outward, fraying the social fabric at its edges. As thecentre burns, the periphery is singed. This iswhy war isfarmore complicated than just a dispute between opposedpolitical factions. This is also why ourmethod forunderstanding itmust be as meticulously interpretive as it isexhaustively contextualized.Robert Fatton (2003) has suggested that the violenceinHaiti today is the product of an "authoritarian habitus"ofHaitian cultural life,whereby the paradigm ofpoliticallife iswholly prefigured and determined by the despotismunder which Haitians have lived since the post-independence dictatorships of Dessalines, Christophe andBoyer throughout the early 1800s. Fatton envisions thecurrent crisis as an aspect ofHaiti's second revolution, anongoing conflict of transition from serial absolutistregimes to a still-distant democratic one. In themeantime,Haitian politics are dictated by the priorities of a "predatory state" informed by the 200-year-old adage of Creoletotalitarianism: social control is most effectively maintained through the terrorization of society into primafacie conformity (Kovats-Bernat 1999).While the violence on the street inHaiti today mayhave come to be politically normalized through a habitusofhistory and state, itsunderlying causes aremore infrastructural than ideational. Haiti is the poorest country intheWestern Hemisphere, with close to three-quarters ofthe population living in abject poverty. The rate of infantmortality 79:1000) is among thehighestintheworld,and life expectancy (around 45 years) and gross nationalincome (US$440) are among the lowest. Right now, theHaitian gourde isworth a littlemore thanUS$.02, the lowest exchange rate in over 15 years. As a report by the

Catholic Institute for International Relations has pointedout, "[democracy cannot thrive in such misery; sustainable and equitable economic development is a prerequisite" (1996: 3-4).

Writing in the wake of the 1995 UN intervention inHaiti, Irwin Stotzky noted that "[i]n order to foster realstability...the root causes of poverty inHaiti must beaddressed" (1997: 111). Stotzky, a professor of law and former attorney for the first Aristide government, recommended an expanded involvement of the civil society,especially the poor, in the national dialogue concerningpoverty-reduction as a means ofmore effectively addressing the immediate economic needs of the deeply impoverished 70% ofHaitians who stand themost towin or loseinpolicy shifts.Despite his promises to increase dialogue,neither Aristide administration (1990-1995, 2000-2004)showed much effort in actually doing so. The establishment of the Aristide Foundation forDemocracy (Aristid

Foundasyon pou Demokrasi, AFD) in 1995, a FanmiLavalas union ofpeasants, workers and supporters of theliberation church inHaiti, did appear to be an overture toconsider the interests of the poor and it did infact encourage a civic dialogue on economic matters ofpopular concern. Iworked extensively with street children at LafanmiSelavi, an orphanage founded by Aristide and associatedwith the AFD, and was encouraged by him and theorphanage staff to observe a number ofAFD meetingsfrom 1995 to 1999.My earlier work (Kovats-Bernat 2001)has demonstrated that the AFD served as littlemorethan a political machine for theAristide regime, onewhichdid little ifanything in theway of concrete poverty-reduction. Besides providing a handful of low-interest loans tofarmers, theAFD was quite ineffective inaddressing thecore problems of rural decline, inadequate sanitation,widespread hunger, limited access to health care and lowpopular access to clean water. Most of Aristide's programs for the poor ended up with little effect on theground, notably the Lafanmi Selavi orphanage. FoundedbyAristide in 1986 to provide food, shelter and literacy toa handful of Port-au-Prince street boys, the population ofchildren served by Lafanmi Selavi steadily rose to over400 by 1998. The facilitywas shuttered after a 1999 uprising by 30 street boys who blamed Aristide personally forthe filthy and scarce conditions at the orphanage that Imyself had been documenting over a six-year period conducting ethnographic fieldwork there (Kovats-Bernat2006). After firing tear gas into the orphanage compound,troopers from CIMO (Compagnie d'intervention et deMaintien de TOrdre, a tactical intervention unit of theNational Police) stormed the gates and dispersed the children. After its closure and the return of its 400 children



10/24

toPort-au-Prince street life,Aristide converted the facility into the Fanmi Lavalas radio and television station.This incident helps to explain why themain AFD facilitynear theToussaint EOuverture International Airport andthe Lafanmi Selavi compound in the middle-class Pacotneighbourhood of the capital were both sacked and lootedduring the February-March 2004 rebel uprising. Asidefrom their symbolic identificationwith the deposed president, both institutions came to be widely regarded aspolitical and economic juggernauts of theAristide regime,with littleefficacy inrelieving the country's poverty woes.Haiti's profound economic crisis is ultimately linkedto the collapse of the agricultural sector which began inearnest in the 1980s, and has since resulted ina continuous mass exodus of peasants into the capital.With virtually no bureaucratic authority regulating urban settlement, Port-au-Prince has,

acquired thephysiognomyofa slum. Instead ofadapting to the city, rural-to-urban migrants now appropriate it, ssault it, nd transformit, naccordance withtheirneeds and vision. This inversion of the classicallogicofmigrant acculturation and adaptation has profoundrepercussions forthe relationship between thesocial classes in theurban setting.Entire neighbourhoods are constructed in the course of a month, as thepace of family-organized construction ofmakeshiftdwellings accelerates. In no time at all, spaces wherebefore construction was prohibited, or thatwerescarcely populated, are covered bynetworks ofhousescompletely lacking in basic services... .The marginalizedpeople hurl themselves at the task of conquering anychinkofavailable terrain.The city s the contested terrain of this struggle. (Manigat 1997: 90)

Subsequent urban overpopulation has in turn led to a critical impact on people's access to basic needs for survivalin the city. It has also led to a very particular constructionofurban space amid social instability inPort>au-Prince. Thecapital's chaotic terrain contributes significantly to thecivil perception of the city and its streets as lawless. Bytheirvery nature and utility,the streets form spaces of contest and inform customs of conflict among those who useand live on them.If the cityscape ofPort-au-Prince is one dominated bythe problems that so often attend urban overpopulation?poor sanitation, high unemployment, lowwages, unstablemarket economies, rampant crime, blight, unplanned settlement?and ifthe city's rapidly rising population is theresult ofa relentless increase inrural-to-urban migration,then the formation ofboth the capital's urban architectureand its culture ofviolence ultimately find their origins inthe countryside. The devastating, long-term effects of

the colonial plantation agricultural system that dominated Haitian agriculture for over 200 years?land clearance, soil depletion, monocropping, unsustainable cultivation techniques?began under French rule in the late17th-century and continue to have a woeful impact onHaitian agro-production today. Additionally, intensifieddeforestation has stripped the canopy from the countryside (Haiti is 95% deforested), removing the arbor rootsupport system that is essential toprotecting the integrityof the topsoil stratum from loss to erosion. The wantonnatural destruction of life and livelihood in the flash floodsofHurricane Jeanne provides apt illustration of the scopeof Haiti's manmade erosion problems. The combinedeffects of aggressive agriculture and deforestation haveundermined the fertilityand arability ofHaitian farmland,lowering annual yields and contributing to an increasednational dependence on imported foodstuffs.This too hasaggravated the problems of the rural economy, as localmarkets are flooded with foreign crops priced below thoseproduced locally.With the Haitian state conspicuously absent in urbanplanning, management, security and settlement patterns,the capital has sprawled intoa squatter metropolis and hasslipped into almost total destitution. The rapid expansionof the city's slums has had a critical impact on people'saccess to public utilities and basic needs for survival.Electric service is patchy at best, and access to cleanwater and sanitation is limited to less than half of thepopulation. This too has contributed to a dramatic transformation ofhow the street isperceived by the state andits citizens. Foreign visitors toPort-au-Prince are immediately struck with the harsh realities of an urban landscape wholly given over to spatial mayhem. An absence ofsidewalks and trafficregulation, poor streetmaintenance,open sewer inlets and sanitation ditches, piles ofgarbageand other obstacles render the landscape into somethingto be negotiated rather than simply traversed. Vendors,market women, tradesmen, trucks, cars, insects, rats,stray dogs, street children, pedestrians andmore all compete with one another for a private claim to sparse public terrain.

What results is a city inwhich all public space is contested space, the streets of the capital less transitorychannels and more extensions of the household or placeofwork. This too?the idea that the private domainextends well into the public?has been imported fromthe countryside as well. Peasants live in clusters ofextended family units, arranging theirmodest houses ina loose orientation around a common hearth and courtyardto form the traditional lakou. Here, limited residentialspace is supplemented by co-opting the common space



11/24


12/24

water and leftalmost three-quarters of the population inthe north of the country cut off from access to it.Drinkingwater inHaiti regularly carries the risk ofparasitesinvisible to the eye.When I asked how she tests her family's drinking water for potability, Cle-Ann, amother oftwo inPort-au-Prince replied, "We drink it. If it is bad

water, we get sick. First the children, then myself."The political situation in Port-au-Prince today hasprecipitously deepened human suffering in the city.Withthe interruption of food and medical aid to the capitalduring the February-March 2004 uprising, starvationamong the urban poor has intensified. In the days ofanarchy and police flight that followed the departure ofAristide, many took to lootingWorld Food Program warehouses. Human and social services, already among theleast developed in the Hemisphere, have further atrophied. The war has not somuch made new casualties of thecitizenry as it has simply increased the number of thosecitizens already dying of a general deprivation of arableland, trees, food,water, medicine, jobs and space. As aHaitian friend once put it, "it is easy enough for anyoneto die in a place like Port-au-Prince." Long before therebels arrived in the capital tounseat Aristide, the citizensof the capital were suffering and perishing at wartimerates. These are the hundreds of thousands ofwar victimsthat have been "erased," "deleted," "edited out" and"made invisible" inmost official accounts of the presentHaitian civilwar.Prelude toWar: A Political History ofFactionalism and Terror inPort-au-PrinceThe abrupt halt of the rebel assault onPort-au-Prince thatleftover 130 dead by the end ofFebruary 2004 has sincegivenway toguerrilla warfare, looting, chaos and anarchyon the streets of the capital, some ofwhich is now drivennot by political motivation but by personal opportunismand economic desperation. Well over 300 Haitians havebeen killed in street violence since the departure ofAristide,with over 50 dying ina three-week period ofpartisanclashes inOctober 2004 alone. A Brazilian-led UN forcetook over control of stabilization operations from theUnited States inJune 2004, an interim government waschosen, parliamentary and presidential elections wereheld inFebruary 2006, and food aid has resumed its flowinto the country. These events appear tomark the beginning of a potential reaggregation ofHaitian society backinto itself,with an albeit fragile space being carved outwithin which people can begin to recreate new social lives.But fewHaitians are optimistic and the immediate futureappears grim. The 9500multinational peacekeepers on theground now seem unable tomaintain order, disarmament

ofwarring factions remains stalled, the InternationalMonetary Fund has postponed its talks onfinancial aid toHaiti that ithad scheduled forNovember 2004. CARICOM member states continue to be sceptical of the legitimacy of the provisional government, and the distributionof food aid and disaster relief in thewake of the hurricanehas been hampered by the general state of insecuritythat prevails throughout the country.Haiti has been building to thismoment for some time.Long the poorest and most volatile country in theWesternHemisphere, the 1990 election ofJean-Bertrand Aristide (a Roman Catholic priest from Haiti's destitute LaSaline slum) to theHaitian presidency was seen bymostas a victory forHaiti's social justice movement, thenknown as Lavalas.5 Aristide was overwhelmingly electedin internationally monitored polling by over 67% of thepopular vote out of a field of 10 candidates. Running on acharismatic platform deeply influenced by the LatinAmerican Catholic Church's liberation theology movement, Aristide almost immediately made enemies in virtually all of the traditional centres ofpower in the country.Because of his participation in democratic politics,Aristide was chastened and alienated by conservativeCatholic authorities in the country and in the Vatican.His acerbic homilies against themilitary junta ruling thecountry at the time, and the fabulously wealthy eliteswho backed them, invited the ire of the customary powerbrokers of coup d'etat in the country. His intention todouble theHaitian minimum wage toUS$4.00/day troubled foreign business interests.When he forced the retire

ment of high-ranking members of the Haitian army, heinstigatedmilitary agitation against his government whichwould ultimately lead tohis first tenure inexile.After onlyeightweeks inoffice,Aristide was overthrown ina bloodyarmy coup in 1991 that would claim the lives of over 5000Haitians in the fouryears ofviolence that ensued. Aristidewas restored topower by aU.S.-led military intervention23 000 troops strong following his signing of the Governor's Island Accord in 1994.Though that agreement pavedtheway forhis return, the terms of the accord stipulatedthat he forfeit his three-and-a-half years as presidentspent in exile as a requirement of his reinstatement.Throughout September-October 1994,American soldiers staged security operations throughout Haiti, breaking up heavy weapons, raiding the headquarters ofproarmy militias, providing protection and assistance todemocracy activists and eventually seizing control of theNational Palace inPort-au-Prince on 11 October, pavingthe way forAristide's return to power four days later.Upon his reinstatement, Aristide disbanded theHaitianarmy (FADH) and suspended their pensions. With inter



13/24

national assistance, he then founded theHaitian NationalPolice (PNH), a civilian force established to provide lawand order in the army's stead. U.S. forces inHaiti declinedto assist theHaitian government in the disarmament offormer soldiers and their civilian proxies, and large cachesofmilitary-grade weapons disappeared into the shadowsof the civil society.A1995 report of theUN CommissiononHuman Rights suggested an interrelationship amongthese stolen firearms, the failure ofU.S.-led UN forces tolocate and confiscate them, and the dramatic post-invasionrise inboth criminal and political street violence that isongoing (UN Commission onHuman Rights 1995). Thatsame year, the local police chief of the sprawling slum ofCite Soleil estimated hemembershipoftheRed Army(Lame Rouj), a pro-army gang in that area, to numberover 200 individuals, all armed with FADH weapons. Residents ofCite Soleil today argue that the large majorityof armed civilians in theirneighbourhoods, including somefrom the Red Army, are former secret police and paramilitary agents who have seized upon the civil distrust ofthe PNH (the force has been scandalized since its foundingwith civil and human rights violations) as an opportunity to stirup trouble and toblacken further the alreadytarnished image of the police, widely believed to havebeen politicized into loyalty to Aristide since its establishment.

In 1995, disgruntled former soldiers launched aninsurgency campaign against the Aristide governmentand individuals and institutions closely associated with thereinstalled president. A wave of violence attributed toarmy agitators throughout November 1995 claimed thelives of three Haitian civilians and a member of Parliament. Prohibited by constitutional term limits from succeeding himself, and despite Lavalas demands that he bepermitted to remain inofficeuntil 1998 (thereby grantinghim the years ofhis term lost to exile as stipulated in theGovernors Island Accord), Aristide agreed to arrange apresidential election to be held inDecember of 1995.The 1995 elections were marked by lowvoter turnout.Many Lavalas supporters boycotted the polling overwhatthey viewed as an unjust limitation on their incumbent'sterm in office. Although election day was mostly freefrom violence, the week leading up to the vote was not.Days before the balloting began, the home of candidateLeon Jeune, the opposition front runner, was sprayedwith bullets, the first implication of Lavalas supporters inacts ofpolitical violence since Aristide's restoration. RenePreval, the Lavalas candidate and a close associate ofAristide, succeeded inwinning the election out of a fieldof 14 candidates. Preval's termwas marred by intensifiedpolitical violence, much ofwhich was variously attributed

to or admitted to have been carried out by former officersof the disbanded army. InAugust 1996,20 former soldierssacked the police headquarters inPort-au-Prince killinga civilian and wounding several others. Later that year, itwas confirmed that a plot hatched by the Committee ofSoldiers' Demands (a group representing former armyofficers) to undermine the government was thwarted bythe PNH.Political infightingwithin the Lavalas party over thechoice of a prime minister paralyzed the Preval government from 1997 to 1999. Breaking ranks with his fractioned party, Aristide began to prepare for a run in the2000 presidential election by forming a new party, FanmiLavalas, thatwould represent his own platform as distinctfrom that of other interests spawned within the ranks ofthe Lavalas movement. On January 11 of that year, parliamentary terms expired and President Preval announcedthat he would bypass the legislature and appoint a newgovernment by decree, which he did twomonths later.Port-au-Prince exploded in a flash of street violence carried out by partisans opposed to the new government. Theday after Preval's announcement, motorcycle gunmenopened fire on a vehicle carrying the sister of the president, seriously wounded her and killing her driver.Morepolitical deaths would follow.A month after presidentialelections were scuttled because of a disorganized voterregistration campaign inMarch 2000, a streetwar inPortau-Prince between pro-Aristide and anti-Aristide gangserupted. Street shootings, fire-bombings, rock-throwingand arson re-emerged as the lexicon of political factionalism. Scores of non-partisan civilians were killed in theviolence, including dozens of children and adolescentscaught in the crossfire. Suspect parliamentary and presidential elections, boycotted by opposition parties andvirtually ignored by most of the population, eventuallytook place between May and November 2000. FanmiLavalas candidates predictably swept a majority of theseats in the Senate and House ofDeputies, and Aristidewon the presidency, claiming 92% of a vote indicted asfraudulent by the international community.

Immediately following the elections, violence in thecapital flared once again, as "clans" (by then a Haitianeuphemism for political street gangs) loyal to Aristidewaged a campaign of intimidation against the opposition. InJanuary 2001, Father Paul Raymond (a priest of thefiercelypro-Aristide liberation theology movement) read a publicstatement in the capital that openly threatened death toover 80 politicians, journalists and religious leaderswho hadpreviously voiced dissent against theAristide government.Offices of parties opposed to the electoral results werefire-bombed, street assassinations of anti-Aristide dissi



14/24

dents continued and Port-au-Prince descended further intopolitical and economic mayhem. Unemployment skyrocketed and the value of the gourde had declined invalue byhalf since 1998. By this time, a political resistance opposedtoFanmi Lavalas was formed, a coalition of 15 oppositionparties united under the name Democratic Convergence.The country's devastating political violence and crushingpoverty slowly eroded the already shaky confidence ofthe civil society in theAristide government. A plummetinggross national product, ballooning inflation, the budgetdeficit (which amounted to nearly 2.2 billion gourdes asearly as 2001), the depreciation of thegourde, and rampantunemployment made lifeformost about as difficult s ithadbeen inHaiti since the international embargo of theCedrascoup regime of 1991-93 (radio interviewwith Haiti PrimeMinister Jean-Marie Cherestal, January 15, 2002). AntiAristide graffitiwere scrawled throughout the capital,accusing him and the Fanmi Lavalas party of corruption,incompetence, heavy-handedness and drug profiteering.6Strikes and demonstrations against the government beganin earnest, some turning violent as the National Policeengaged the dissidents with tear gas, rubber bullets and livegunfire.Economic paralysis and anti-government unrestprompted a resurgence of army violence as well. OnDecember 17, 2001 33 gunmen, all former soldiers ofFADH, attacked the penitentiary atFort National inPortau-Prince. The assailants were staved offby prison security, and moved on to the National Palace where theywere repelled by thePNH, but not before eight policemenwere killed in the exchange ofgunfire. Suspecting thatpolitical rivals were responsible, pro-Aristide factions inthe street attacked opposition party buildings. While thegovernment referred to the Palace attack as a failed coupattempt, opposition party members countered that theattack was staged by Fanmi Lavalas in order to create apretext for crushing political dissent. A former soldier whowas arrested inthe imbroglio later said that the attackwasindeed a coup attempt and that the conspirators includeda former FADH colonel and two formermilitary policechiefs (National Coalition forHaitian Rights 2001). Oneof those named was Guy Phillipe, who would take command ofNew Army forces in the February 2004 uprisingagainst Aristide.

By January 2002, the tentative stability of theAristide government began to crumble. Prime minister JeanMarie Cherestal resigned at the start of the year overmounting criticism ofhis government's failure to alleviatethe country's economic and political woes. Cherestal hadalso been dogged by opposition doubts of his legitimacysince questions arose about the suspect nature of the gov

ernment that Preval had named by unilateral decree in2000. In the north of the country,Aristide's popular basehad eroded significantly. In Gonaives, strongman AmiotMetayer, the local chief of a fiercely pro-Aristide streetclan called the Cannibal Army (Lame Kanibal), wasarrested by theNational Police inJuly 2002 in a crackdown on street violence. Metayer's men had been firebombing several buildings in town associated with a rivalclan rumoured to be supported by former FADH officers.His shocking arrestwas intended to rebut oppositionaccusations thatAristide was using unruly street gangsand hired thugs to affirm his control of the country.Metayer's detention would not last long.A month after hisarrest, members of the Cannibal Army used a tractor tobreak through thewall of the Gonaives prison, freeingMetayer along with 158 of the 221 inmates interred therewith him.

The political situation was steadily growing out ofthe government's control. In Gonaives, by then a stronghold of anti-Aristide insurgency, dissidents clashed withwhip-wielding pro-Aristide gangs inamessy confrontationthat left dozens injured. Sporadic violence throughoutthe north reached frenzied proportions in 2003 whenMetayer's bullet-riddled, hacked and mutilated corpsewas found on an isolated road 25miles south ofGonaives.He had been shot at point blank range inboth eyes, andhis chestwas hacked down themidsection with amachete.The graphic political overtones of the killing enragedmembers of the Cannibal Army, who accused Aristide ofordering Metayer's assassination because of the incriminating leverage he could bring against the Fanmi Lavalasgovernment that had imprisoned him the year before.Dozens were killed and wounded inGonaives in angryriots that raged fordays after the discovery ofMetayer'sbody. Amiot Metayer's brother Butteur assumed controlof theCannibal Army, rechristened ittheArtibonite Resistance Front (Front de Resistance de TArtibonite, FRA),and turned it aggressively against theAristide government. Civil war was now imminent, and would begin withan FRA uprising against the PNH inGonaives, less thanfivemonths after the discovery ofAmiot Metayer's mutilated corpse.Shapeshifters in theMargins: Zenglendinajand the Ever-Changing Face ofUrbanDisorderDespite the political rhetoric that has infused Port-auPrince street violence since the 1990s, there has alwaysbeen a great deal of ambiguity surrounding the specificmotivations for the perpetration of acts of urban terror.This ambiguity has been maintained by the tendency of



15/24

Haitian paramilitary groups and civil gangs to rapidlyshift their loyalties and methods inresponse to changingeconomic and political terrains. No complete understanding of thewar inHaiti can be achieved without anexamination of this phenomenon, given thatmuch of theviolence today is carried out by individuals, groups, clansand institutions that have been ina nearly constant stateof flux over the past 10years. Their allegiances, loyalties,tactics, support,methods of operation, sources ofweaponsand popular support are ever-shifting, occasionally multiple, sometimes contradictory, andmore than frequentlyleased out to the highest bidder.

Clearly many of the street clans and civilian militiagroups are well-organized. Some, like the Cannibal ArmyinGonaives, and the Red Army, theArmy of the Motherless (Lame San Manman) and the Beheading Army(Lame Sans Tet) inPort-au-Prince are backed by political factions; they often publicly claim responsibility forviolent attacks on political adversaries. Others, especially in

Port-au-Prince, work as independent contractors or astriggermen for smaller, neighbourhood clans. A few ofthese hired guns have achieved individual notoriety inthe press for their brash acts of brutal violence and areknown nationwide simply by theirnom de rue: Ti Loulou.Pouchon. Patatou. Labanye. Colibri. Amiot Metayer, alsoknown by his street alias "Cubain," was one of these. Thefluid loyalties of these men and their loose relationshipsto political parties and issues is considered of secondaryconcern tomost Haitians who regard the careless violencethat they perpetrate, whether as gangsters or privateers,and whether motivated by profit or politics, as amenaceto society. The frustrated and frightened citizenry is disinterested inknowing the cabalistic motivations formoststreet violence, a factmade evident by the ambiguouslyfolkloric and decidedly apolitical term that is used todescribe the perpetrators, be they politically or criminally motivated: zenglendo. Though theword was originally used to describe the extrajudicial crimes of soldiersof theHaitian army, it has since expanded inmeaning toinclude any form of excessive street violence, criminal,political or otherwise. This lexical transformation blurs thelines that differentiate among the political, the criminaland the cultural. Zenglendinaj is rooted in the publicimagination as a social fact allegorized to a folkloricmenace.

Zenglendo is a compound of zenglen (shards of brokenglass) and do (back) and was originally used in an oldyarn told to children about the djab, a demon ofVodoufolklore. In the story, the djab is described as amalicioustrickster, charged with the tireless torment of children.

Always seeking ways to lure the young into despair, the

djab takes the form of an elder who appeals to a haplessyoung boy tomassage the tiredmuscles ofhis back.Whenthe child obliges and begins to rub the back of the elder,the demon transforms itself into zenglendo; the musclesof the creature's back ripple into a twistedmess of brokenglass, horribly cutting the hands of the boy. The moral ofthe tale is clear: sometimes those thatwe trust can turnon us with malice.Though the term zenglendinaj is used today as a general signifier for any number of different forms of streetviolence prevalent throughoutHaiti today (arson, banditry,street execution, carjacking, disappearance, homicide),the origins of zenglendinaj can be traced directly to theformer Haitian army. In 1988, after a succession of briefcoups following the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier's dictatorship, amilitary junta assumed power ofgovernment.Large blocks of international aidmonies toHaiti were suspended, leaving the army with little capital to pay thesoldiers of the rank and file. In response to this crisis, soldiers turned theirweapons against the citizenry forprofit,staging armed bank robberies and home invasions. The

military government did little tobring the soldiers undercontrol, seeing the situation as an effective means ofquelling what might otherwise have become a mutinywithin the unpaid ranks. By the end of the 1980s the problem had worsened, with the army now the main obstacleto law and order. In 1989 a popular radio host inPort-auPrince coined the folkloric term zenglendo to describethe soldiers, implying thatwith their involvement inarmedcrimes at a timewhen theHaitian people needed to truststate authority themost, the army had transgressed thepublic confidence (to say nothing of its constitutional mandate) and had turned on the populace innew and treacherous fashion. The army had become a "glass-back," andwas mangling the hands of theHaitian people.

During the Cedras regime, zenglendo often functioned in loosely organized gangs who received special protections from themilitary while carrying out civil crimes.Some were off-duty soldiers of the FADH. They were attimes actively encouraged in their crime sprees by thearmy inorder to assist in the destabilization ofpro-democratic neighbourhoods. Occasionally zenglendo workedin complicity with less-organized neighbourhood gangsand strong-arm vigilance brigades (brigad vigilanz) tosinkwhole communities into a state of looting, rape, murder and plunder. Many zenglendo were directly armed bythe FADH and carried out intimidations and extrajudicialkillings on the army's behalf, earning them the title ofattache, proxy gunmen "attached to" the Haitian army.

By 2000, animosities between Aristide's FanmiLavalas party and the Democratic Convergence were



16/24

being hashed out inneighbourhood firelights throughoutthe urban slums, and zenglendo operatives and militantclans like the Cannibal Army became the parties' footsoldiers. Fanmi Lavalas now has awell-established historyof farming out the intimidation and execution of opposition party members to fiercely pro-Aristide zenglendocalling themselves chimere, after thefire-breathing demonofHaitian folklore. In December 2001 Brignol Lindor,the news director for Radio Eco 2000, was stoned andhacked to death by a gang of chimere near the town ofPetit-Goave. Lindor had received death threats theweekbefore his assassination after he invitedmembers of theDemocratic Convergence to speak on his radio show.Chimere have since used gunfire and barricades to shutdown the capital a half-dozen times in the past three yearsindisplays ofpro-government loyalty, nd they remain agitators of the violence on the streets of Port-au-Princetoday. Since Aristide's resignation and exile fromHaiti inFebruary 2004, chimere have been responsible fora number of shootings and firebombings against his detractors,and together they form the insurgencymovement battlingthe PNH and UN forces on the ground inPort-au-Princetoday.

Zenglendo gangs supported by the rebel forces whohelped to oust Aristide in2004 have responded to chimereviolence in kind. InMay 2003, five Fanmi Lavalas supporters were shot and killed inCite Soleil and Fort-Liberte by members of theArmy of theMotherless, a zenglendo clan that claims to have ties to the DemocraticConvergence. That same month, 20 individualswere killedin street battles between competing zenglendo gangsfighting forpolitical control of the Boston and Bois-Neufneighborhoods ofCite Soleil.While a great deal of zenglendo killings are carried outfor criminal profit andwithout political motivation?mostzenglendo gun down citizens not over politics but simplyto facilitate banditry?it iswidely believed that some ofthem are working under the protection or tacit consent ofcertain precincts of the PNH, and that their criminalactivities may also be intended to intimidate those neighbourhoods most opposed to police authority. I first heardsuch rumours on the street in 1995 shortly after theUNCommission forHuman Rights issued a report suggesting the complicity ofHaitian police officers in crimesattributed to former members of the FADH. The suspected officerswere allegedly operating out of uniformand using their service weapons in criminal attacks. Thereport goes on to conclude that this violence was:

aimed, in some cases at least, at intimidating sectionsof the democratic opposition and goes hand inhand

with the upsurge inarbitrary executions forpoliticalreasons. In theworking-class districts, zenglendo arecreating a climate ofgeneral fear,fortheirvictims arenot necessarily political militants or sympathizers....The [UN International Civilian] Mission has furtherreported that their investigations into [zenglendist]humanrights violations have indicated that theywerearmed with automaticweapons (Uzis andM16s) andoperated in red and white [PNH] pick-up vehicles,sometimes with government plates. In several casestherewas informationregarding a direct link etweenthe perpetrators and the Haitian Armed Forces(FADH) and the impunityand logistical support oftheiroperation is strongly ndicativeofFADH involvement. (UN Commission forHuman Rights 1994: 6)This suspicion is not without basis. Between May 19and May 21,1999, zenglendo in the Poste Marchand district of Port-au-Prince went on a violent crime spree,

indiscriminately robbing stores, houses, pedestrians andmotorists. Six days later, 18 armed men sealed off twostreets in the same neighbourhood for several hours, andwhile working systematically in two groups robbed over20 homes, frisked residents and passers-by formoney,stole over US$300 from a small boutique, raped awomanand shot aman in the foot.Many of the zenglendo involvedwere known to area residents, who identified theweaponsused in the attacks, 9mm semiautomatic handguns and .38calibre revolvers, as identical to those the PNH issues toits officers. Some residents of the neighbourhood namedseveral of the zenglendo as former or current police officers. A month later, seven zenglendo returned to occupyPoste Marchand, this time firing theirweapons in the air,robbing street merchants, and stealing rice, beans andplantains frommarket women. Itwas four hours beforethe police arrived to quell the violence bywhich time theperpetrators had fled the area. When I arrived in theneighbourhood shortly after the attacks, a rumour was circulating that the zenglendo involved were police officersfrom the very precinct responsible for security inPosteMarchand. Street children swore to amodified version ofthe rumour: the zenglendo involvedwere gang membersfrom the neighbourhood angered atmerchant resistanceto "clan protection."ChokingOff englendinaj:The Paramilitary SolutionCivil pressure on the government to eliminate the violencefrom the streets has prompted a violent, martial crackdown on street crime. In June 2001, during a public visitwith the Inspector General of thePNH, Aristide reiteratedhis "zero tolerance" policy toward street violence?first



17/24

announced inhis February 2000 inauguration address?ina speech to theNational Police (June20, 2001) thatappeared to endorse summary executions of zenglendo:

If it's a zenglendo, zero tolerance. If a zenglendo stopsa car inthe street,puts his hand on thekey tomake thedriverget out sohe can take thecar,he isguilty, ecausethe car is not his. You do not need to lead him to thecourt tohave him judged because the car isnothis.. .heisguilty. fa criminal rabs someone inthe streetby thecollar and puts him on theground tobeat him or shoothim, [thepolice] do notneed towait togo to courtwithhim toprevent him fromdoing that.In the aftermath of his remarks, Haitian and international human rights organizations condemned Aristideforwhat they saw as an explicit presidential sanction of

police extremism, brutality, arbitrary arrest and vigilantism. Less than three months after Aristide made his"zero tolerance" speech to the PNH, Ronal Francais, amember of the Movement Demanding Haitian Development and Democracy (Mouvman Revandikatif Ayisyenpou Developman ak Demokrasi, MOPRADD) was ruthlessly beaten by a PNH officer,Jean-Marie Dominique. Awitness reported that officers of the Port-au-Prince district of the PNH delivered a suspected zenglendo intothe hands of an angry mob. Within eyesight and earshotof theNational Palace and the Port-au-Prince headquarters of the PNH, the suspect was stoned by the crowd,pushed to the ground and killed with a bullet to his head.Aristide's zero tolerance policy fordealing with suspected zenglendo and the heavy-handed policing withwhich ithas come remains the law enforcement protocolof the street. Amnesty International's Annual Reportssince 2003 have cited numerous cases of deadly officerrecklessness, intimidations, extrajudicial killings, and disappearances of suspects inPNH custody, and a 2004 pressrelease by that organization cites growing suspicion ofPNH involvement in summary executions (AmnestyInternational 2004b). In one case, a PNH officer fired hisweapon indiscriminately into a crowd as hewas pursuinga zenglendo through a market in Port-au-Prince. Onewoman was killed and a pregnant woman and a childwerewounded in the shooting. In another instance, FleuryLysias of Haiti's Justice and Peace Commission wasarrested without a warrant by police officers who wereaccompanied by three other armed men incivilian clothes.Lysias was taken to the Bon Repos police station wherehe was systematically kicked and beaten with clubs(breaking one of his arms) and struck repeatedly on theears (damaging his eardrums). Lysias was released without charges the following day.

In one of themore scandalous cases of police excessand corruption, three brothers, Andy Philippe, AngeloPhilippe andVladimir Sanon, were taken from their homein the Carrefour section ofPort-au-Prince by PNH officers inDecember 2002. Their bodies were discovered inthe citymorgue the next day with bullets lodged in theirforeheads. After the parents of the boys filed a formalcomplaint with the public prosecutor, an internal investigation was conducted, resulting in the firingof the policecommissioner and three PNH officers. One officer implicated in the incidentwent into hiding during the investigation to avoid arrest. A potential witness to the assassinations was killed by hooded men days later inCarrefour(Amnesty International 2003a).Given historical precedent, the current excessivenature of police violence inHaiti is unsurprising, havinglong been pervasive throughout the ranks of the specialized paramilitary units that both preceded and are contemporary with thePNH. Haiti's Anti-Gang Service (Service Anti-Gang, SAG,) offers a good example. SAG istechnically a subunit of the National Police infrastructure, but it has always operated with a certain degree ofautonomy from it. SAG in fact precedes the NationalPolice in origin by at least seven decades. It is a descendant of the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence and Identification (Bureau de Recherche et d'identification des Criminel,BRIC), formed in 1921 inorder to institutionalize thestate's domestic intelligence efforts (Corvington 1974).Though a military police unit and therefore under thedirection of the Haitian army,BRIC nonetheless operatedalmost completely outside the bounds of the army hierarchy, answering directly to the highest echelons of government. Under theDuvalier dictatorship, the unit's namewas formally changed to theAnti-Gang Investigation andIntelligence Service (Service d'Investigation et deRecherche Anti-Gang). In 1986,Anti-Gang was divestedof some of its intelligence responsibilities when theMinistry of the Interior created the National IntelligenceService (Service d'Intelligence Nationale) inorder to takejurisdiction over domestic intelligence efforts, whichmostly amounted to surveillance and harassment of antiDuvalierist elements. Anti-Gang continued to be housedin the headquarters of themilitary police until the army'sdissolution in 1995,when the unit became a demobilizedstate paramilitary force, its offices and detention centrerelocated to its present headquarters in the Port-auPrince central police precinct.InNovember 1994, Parliament passed a law creatingthe PNH in anticipation of the dissolution ofFADH. Inearly 1995, along with the establishment of a Code ofConduct and an Office of Inspector-General, an Interim



18/24

Public Security Force (IPSF) was formed and composedlargely of former soldiers and refugees from rapid-training camps at theU.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay inCuba. Its mission was to quickly establish and maintaincivil security and order as the country demobilized thearmy and until the first contingent of regular PNH officers could be trained and deployed. As police officers successively graduated the four-month training course atthe National Police Academy (Academie Nationale dePolice) in Petionville, individual IPSF officers weresteadily deactivated from service until the PNH's rankswere sufficiently filled for the complete dissolution of theinterim force by presidential decree inDecember 1995.Over the course of their demobilization, IPSF officerswere absorbed into a range ofnewly created, specializedsecurity units, among them the Palace Guard (Unite deSecurite Generate du Palais Nationale)?which togetherwith the Presidential Guard was originally composed ofover 450 former soldiers?and the Ministerial SecurityCorps (Corps de Securite Ministerielle) whose commanding officers until fairly recentlywere all former military personnel. The remaining 1598 IPSF officerswereincorporated into the PNH, over 600 ofwhom were former FADH soldiers (Organization of American States1997).From its inception, the PNH has been fraught withcivil and human rights violations, a tendency fromwhichit has never truly divorced itself. Since its activation, theforce has been indicted annually by international humanrights groups (including the UN High Commission onHuman Rights) for a broad spectrum of abuses rangingfrom the beating, torturing, and killing of suspects to theblind discharging of weapons into peaceful crowds(Amnesty International 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004a, 2004b;Drummond 1997; Human Rights Watch 2003; Organization ofAmerican States 2002; UN Commission onHuman

Rights 1996; U.S. Department of State 1999).Since 1994, some paramilitary subunits of the PNHhave incrementally divested themselves of control by government authority and today operate as almost completely autonomous agencies that are answerable directlyto executive authority. Among these are the Compagnied'intervention et de Maintien de l'Ordre or CIMO (a tactical riot control unit), the Groupe d'intervention de laPolice Nationale d'Haiti or GIPNH (a rapid-responseintervention group, similar toAmerican SWAT units) andthe Bureau de Lutte contre le Trafic des Stupefiants orBLTS (the counter-narcotics unit). These recent descendants of the PNH (many seeded with former FADH officers), along with the various domestic intelligence agencies with clear FADH pedigrees like SAG, display the

strongest paramilitary tendencies and repressive proclivities of themany other state and civil groups wieldingarms in the current civilwar.Up until their recent orders to defend the Haitian

government against the rebel insurgency, Haiti's policeparamilitaries have functioned primarily as the principalstateweapon against the zenglendo gangs perpetrating adiverse array of civil and political crimes from banditryand bank robbery to neighbourhood occupations andstreet assassinations. Few of the operations executed bythe units have had much of an impact, perhaps becauseindividual zenglendo are much more fragmented in theirpolitical loyalties to one another than isgenerally believed.Most arrests are of solitary armed bandits who are pickedup on neighbourhood sweeps for anti-government clans.Specifically targeting the hyper-violent slum areas of thecapital, the paramilitaries employ rapid intervention operations to comb the neighbourhoods forpolitical suspects.Given the civil sector's collective fear of the carelessnessof zenglendo violence and theirfrustration with the cravenlawlessness of the public domain, swift and aggressiveparamilitary action has been sanctioned by many of thecity's residents, especially merchants, market women,vendors and tradesmen whose livelihoods have been mostcrippled by Port-au-Prince's disorderly streets. By thetime the rebel uprising began inFebruary 2004, the various tactical units of the PNH had assumed a distinctlymilitant posture toward the civil society at large, one reminiscent of the army police units under Cedras.

Confrontation: The Civil War BeginsIn early February 2004, four bystanders were killed and20 wounded when the loosely organized FRA (Front deResistance de TArtibonite), armed with an assortment ofhandguns and old (some rusty) bolt-action M14s leftoverfrom last century's army, overran the PNH barracks inHaiti's third largest city of Gonaives. The attack touchedoffan already brewing war between supporters of thensitting President Aristide and his opponents who contend, along with most of the international community,that the elections thatwon him theNational Palace and hisFanmi Lavalas partisans 13 of the available 15 seats inParliament were rigged.In its vehement turn against the Aristide government, the FRA orchestrated a series of terrorist attacksand violent demonstrations throughout the towns andcities inthe country's northwhich has left cores dead andhundreds wounded since September 2003. The FRA easilyovertook Gonaives after the poorly armed and utterlyoverwhelmed police officers fled their posts under theonslaught. FRA rebels cut cellular and landline commu



19/24

nications in the area and erected barricades of rubble,tires and flaming vehicles around the city limits, intermittently blocking roads and bridges leading from thecapital, a defence intended to slow government response.From his base camp inGonaives, Butteur Metayerbroadcasted a call over the radio to anti-Aristide factionsthroughout the country to take up arms against the FanmiLavalas government and the National Police, now widelyseen as an institution loyal to the president. Out ofhidingand exile came a host ofrebel groups, including the "NewArmy" made up primarily of former members of theFADH. One of their leaders is former army sergeantLouis Jodel Chamblain, whom Haiti's Truth and JusticeCommission had suspected of engineering themassacreof over 30 voters who linedup to cast their ballots ina civilian-run election in 1987. In 1993, Chamblain helped tofound the viciously anti-Lavalas Front for the Advancement and Progress ofHaiti (Front pour l'Avancement etde leProgres d'Haiti, FRAPH), a Port-au-Prince terrorist organization with Duvalierist and FADH support heldresponsible for the killing of hundreds ofAristide loyalists during the Cedras coup. In 1994,Chamblain fled to theneighbouring Dominican Republic after itbecame clearthat he was to be held accountable for the 1987 votermassacre. He returned toHaiti with his formermilitarycolleagues to take the northern city of Cap Haitien onFebruary 23,2004.Chamblain drank rum and danced in the streets thatday with Guy Philippe, a former FADH soldier who fledHaiti forEcuador after the Cedras coup government wasousted from power by U.S. forces in September 1994.Upon his return toHaiti in 1995, Philippe was integratedinto the fledgling police corps, and served as the policechief of Delmas and later Cap Hai'tien. He fled to theDominican Republic after a warrant for his arrest wasissued for his role in plotting the failed coup attemptagainst Aristide in2001. Philippe re-entered Haiti inFebruary 2004 tomerge his own crew of rebels with NewArmy forces. After the seizure ofCap Haitien, Philippetook command of the now-confederated New Army,7 christened hem he rontfor he iberation f aiti (Front eLiberation d'Haiti) and began plotting an assault on theNational Palace to arrest Aristide on charges of corruption. After this, the plan was explicit: to reinstitute theHaitian army,which the Front claimed had been illegallydissolved by Aristide inviolation of the standing constitution of theRepublic, ratified in 1987.8As the north burned, the sprawling capital ofPort-auPrince was put under a state of siege. Government forcespresided over all auspices of social life in the publicdomain, preparing for a showdown with the rebels on the

streets of the capital. Clad in the dichromatic drab ofHaiti's paramilitaries (all gunmetal-black and khaki) thetroopers are the very spectacle of Creole colony, a fusionof indigenous authoritarian police labour equipped withhypermodern hardware importedfrom theUnited States.Unlike the postcolonial army of the past, Haiti's paramilitaries are well-outfitted with state-of-the-art materielthat 10 years of foreignmilitary aid (ostensibly intendedto support a stronger civilian police force) can buy. Sporting riot helmets, face shields, gas masks, Kevlar vesting,composite plastic knee and elbow pads, M16A2 assaultrifles, combat shotguns, machine pistols, hand grenadesand steel-spring batons, tactical units of SAG, CIMO,GIPINH and the PNH braced themselves against thewalls of the government district as fiercely pro-Aristidechimere (rumoured to have been issued their less sophisticated but sufficientweapons by Fanmi Lavalas partisanbosses) littered the streets ofPort-au-Prince with bwokay,barricades ofmany types,most of them set aflame. Thenoxious smell of burning tires fed to the

anthropologica 2006

Documents