USAID-Sponsored “Play for Peace” Soccer Tournament in Haiti Becomes Bloodbath
2005 August 28th · Reed LindsayBlack-Clad Hooded Police and Machete-Wielding Civilians Murder Dozens
Massacre Fuels Fears of State-Sponsored Violence as Crucial Elections Approach
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – The crowd applauded when camouflaged and black-clad hooded police officers entered a packed soccer match held less than two weeks ago in the hillside slum of Martissant.
The spectators inside the walled dirt field assumed the officers had arrived to provide security. The “Play for Peace” soccer match was financed and sponsored by USAID, and was to help lay the groundwork for disarmament by steering young people away from gang violence.
The events that followed were as chilling as they were unexpected.
The police officers ordered the some 6,000 spectators to the ground. Suddenly, gunshots rang out, and people began to run for the walled field’s only exit. Police began firing wantonly, witnesses say. Outside, they say, civilians armed with machetes and more police officers attacked people trying to flee the chaos.
Some victims were shot and killed by police, according to witnesses and family members, while others were hacked to pieces by the machete-wielding civilians.
“They came to massacre us,” said Nesly Devla, 20, showing a three-inch stitched-together gash on his forehead and another on his hand as evidence of his narrow escape after being struck with a machete. “Everyone was on top of each other. There was nowhere to run. God saved me.”
Anne Sosin, a human rights observer at the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, says she has confirmed the deaths of at least eight people so far. She says the total number could be much higher.
Police spokeswoman Gessy Coicou said six bodies were brought to the morgue. Coicou declined to talk further about the incident except to say that police would initiate an investigation.
The killings in Martissant came less than a month after two other similarly grisly machete attacks that also appeared to take place with police complicity. The incidents, all of which happened in poor neighbourhoods of Port-au-Prince considered bastions of support for exiled former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, have fuelled fears of state-sponsored terror in a nation with a history of electoral violence as presidential elections in November approach.
They have also drawn increased scrutiny of a nearly 15-month-old United Nations peacekeeping mission that critics say has done little to curb human rights abuses and to provide incentives for gangs to disarm.
“These killings set a dangerous precedent,” said Sosin. “How can you explain police accompanied by individuals armed with machetes massacring spectators at a soccer match with UN troops standing by literally across the street? This event needs to serve as a wake-up call for the international community, which for more than a year has failed to respond to grave violations of human rights in Haiti.”
UN human rights officials say they are investigating the killings.
Since taking power after Aristide was escorted from the country by US soldiers amid an armed revolt in February 2004, the US-backed interim government of Prime Minister Gerard Latortue has spurned dialogue with the former president’s supporters. Lavalas leaders have been imprisoned without being formally charged or brought before a judge and the police force has carried out brutal crackdowns in Port-au-Prince’s slum areas.
Meanwhile, armed slum-based Aristide supporters, in addition to armed groups of other political affiliations and non-political criminal gangs, have clashed with police and UN peacekeepers and carried out a wave of kidnappings and other crimes in the capital.
The poor, as is often the case in the hemisphere’s most destitute nation, have suffered the brunt of the violence.
The recent machete killings have been characterized as lynchings and portrayed by UN and government officials as a reaction from angry residents who have resorted to spontaneous vigilante justice after becoming fed up with gang violence.
“We are worried about the cases of lynchings in recent weeks,” said Jean-Francois Vezina, Canadian spokesman for the UN Civilian Police, which is mandated with training and monitoring its Haitian counterpart.
But witnesses at the soccer match say the killings there were neither spontaneous nor carried out with popular support. They say they recognized some of the machete-wielding civilians as “attaches,” or local criminals who are allegedly paid police informants and assassins.
“According to the people we work with in the community, this was not popular justice. They are saying this was a planned aggression, an attack to destabilize the community,” said Philippe Branchat, an employee of the International Organization for Migration who manages the Haiti Transition Initiative, the USAID-program that sponsored the soccer game.
Branchat says the killings at the soccer field represent a setback in efforts by international and government authorities to gain the trust of gang members and ordinary residents from Martissant and the neighbouring area of Grand Ravine, which is a crucial first step toward disarmament. He says unlike other slum areas in the capital these neighbourhoods had been relatively free from violence since last November, and many gang members there seemed willing to disarm.
“We’re not involved in violence and disorder. We don’t shoot at police, we don’t kidnap people, we don’t rape women … This is a very peaceful area,” said Luckner Innocent, a Grand Ravine resident who went to the soccer match with his 21-year-old nephew Wasnay Alcidas and two days later found him at the morgue.
Innocent said Alcidas had been shot by police six times in the stomach and hacked with a machete.
“The police were working in concert with the same guys doing kidnapping, terrorizing people, raping women. Those are the ones [with the machetes],” said Innocent.