The Ghosts of Cite Soleil
cover, April08, news April 17th, 2008
By Christopher Garland, April 2008
Christopher Garland explores the slums in Cite Soleil, Haiti, also known as “the most dangerous place on earth.” Surrounded by armed soldiers from the United Nations, he moves through the tattered town.
As a United Nations truck carrying armed soldiers in to Cite Soleil moves through the shadow of a wall topped with barbed wire, clouds drift across the potent Caribbean sun. Cite Soleil, the largest slum in the western hemisphere and one of the most impoverished urban settlements in the world, is 15 minutes north of the downtown of Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti.
Home to more than 300,000 people, the vast majority of whom do not have access to running water or electricity, Cite Soleil was tagged “the most dangerous place on earth” by the UN in 2004. On Route National 1, the road that skirts the western perimeter of Cite Soleil, an up-tempo drumbeat from a song by Haitian musical hero, Wyclef Jean, plays from a cheap transistor radio. Nearby, UN troops stand guard beside an armored vehicle and a tank, watching the weekend activity. Makeshift stalls selling kenedi — the Haitian Creole word for second-hand clothes first sent to Haiti from the United States under a program initiated by President John F. Kennedy — are set up along the roadside.
While locals stand and chat beneath tattered sun umbrellas, commerce takes place between ditches filled with trash and crumbling buildings scarred by heavy gunfire — a testament to the violence of the past four years. Above the street, troops position themselves on rooftops, looking for any early signs of trouble. The Chinese UN soldiers stationed in Port-au-Prince call National 1 “the road of death” due to the kidnappings and murders that have plagued this area, the two main reasons to explain the concentrated presence of UN military here. Michel, my translator and guide, said that this part of the road “shuts down” when street gangs known as chimeres (a Creole word that roughly translates as “ghosts”) start shooting. Secondly, the UN force is able to maintain a strategic presence to Rue Soleil, the main road that traverses the southern half of Cite Soleil.
Coming down in to the middle of Cite Soleil, the road dips to sea level and the temperature increases a few very noticeable degrees; the static air and humidity further add to the claustrophobic feeling. The majority of the housing in Cite Soleil consists of densely packed rooms constructed from basic recyclables: during the hottest months, the tin roofs capture the relentless heat and transform the interiors into sweatboxes. Though crude, temporary housing is visible throughout slum, there is still a shortage of adequate shelter for the people of Cite Soleil. As a way to deal with the lack of housing and incredibly cramped rooms, many of which are little more than four or five square metres, people are often forced to engage in domi kanpe (a Creole term that literally translates to “sleeping standing.”) The stench of open sewers wafts through the alleys that twist out across Cite Soleil.
Ignored by most of the residents wandering through the streets, UN armored vehicles patrol Rue Soleil, the soldiers aboard surveying the street with guns poised. From Rue Soleil, the larger roads and narrow unpaved lanes lead off in all directions towards the centre of the slum. ‘Cite Carton,’ an area consisting entirely of cardboard “shacks”, is perhaps the most impoverished of these inner “neighborhoods.” At the edge of Rue Soleil, the image from a thousand slums from around the world plays out: a group of barely clothed children play soccer with a can, pushing each other as they skip around in the dirt. When the UN armoured vehicles pass, the children barely notice, caught up in the pursuit of a “normal” life — they briefly turn their eyes to the soldiers before returning to their game.
Beyond the road, the origin of the thin black smoke rising seemingly from nowhere is now apparent: spots in the “ravines” — the two- to six-feet wide ditchees lined with plastic waste that stretch out throughout Cite Soleil — are burning. Near Soleil 19, an area where a number of prominent chimeres once lived, a boy wearing a man’s polo shirt asks, in French, to have his photo taken. Standing in front of a wall with a scrawled graffiti tribute to Winson “2Pac” Jean, one of the most infamous chimere leaders, the boy poses and gives a wide smile. After a few moments, an older man who has been watching from nearby angrily calls the boy away. Michel, who grew up in Cite Soleil, suggests that perhaps we should move on. “It does not take much for trouble to start,” he tells me. Minutes later, we pass the boy again: he wanders through the rubble into little more than a ruined shell — a building that would fit well in to any war-torn locale — the front wall pockmarked by more than a hundred bullet-holes.
Created in the 1950s by the government of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Cite Soleil was conceived as a way to house the influx of workers from Haiti’s rural areas and other larger cities (including Cap Haitien and Gonaives) looking for employment in the nation’s capital. Whilst migrant workers rapidly filled Cite Soleil, neither employment opportunities nor sufficient infrastructures were in place to deal with the population growth. Before long, the inevitable occurred: Cite Soleil ceased to exist in a hopeful, successful, and entirely imagined future and instead descended into a failed, impoverished, and inevitably violent present. Perhaps the worst of the violence in Cite Soleil has taken place since the departure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. During the last stages of his presidency, Aristide and his Lavalas party — a Creole word that translates as “flood” — armed and funded street gangs from Cite Soleil and other slum areas around Haiti.
Throughout his intermittent leadership of Haiti in the 1990s and early 2000s, Aristide was besieged by internal pressure from economic elites and the constant threat of Haitian army units — the same military that was disbanded by the Lavalas government — in training across the border in the Dominican Republic, who were planning an overthrow of the government. In response to these threats, Aristide sought protection from the base of his support — young men from Haiti’s poor majority. Donning black balaclavas and armed with high-powered rifles and semi-automatics, these street gangs became known as chimeres.
The role of the chimeres was relatively simple: to provide muscle for the embattled government and terrorize Aristide’s political adversaries. After international pressure from the US and Canada, Aristide’s departure from office led to armed conflict that spread from the slums to downtown Port-au-Prince. Unsurprisingly, the chimeres soon divided between Lavalas supporters and those who felt disillusioned with Aristide’s leadership. When United Nations military forces entered Cite Soleil in 2004, the gangs not only resisted this attempt at military occupation, but also were engaged in warfare with one another. (Notably, it was one of Michel’s childhood classmates, a chimere leader popularly known as “Llabanye”, who killed Winson “2Pac” Jean in Cite Soleil in 2004.)
In Cite Lumiere, a neighbourhood in the centre of Cite Soleil, Jean-Luc, a tall 25-year-old man with a ready smile, guarantees my safety. “You will not be kidnapped when you are with us,” he tells me, putting his arms around my shoulders. We are sitting on the cobbled path outside a small shop and Jean-Luc is excited to practice his English. He would one day like to go to university: a rather unlikely possibility for a young man coming from the midst of Cite Soleil. “We know money comes in to Haiti but when it gets to Cite Soleil…There is nothing left for us,” he said. The sun has dipped towards the mountains that surround Port au Prince and shadows stretch out over these thin, broken streets of inner Cite Soleil. Talking about the UN’s presence in the slum, Jean-Luc feels that little has changed. “If I tell (the UN) who has guns,” Jean-Luc said, “I will be dead before the UN finds them.” The chimeres tactics of intimidation are extreme: Jean-Luc witnessed a murder on his doorstep and knew someone killed for having the police’s phone number programmed in to his cell phone. Jean-Luc asks for nothing; he wishes me luck and said that he hopes I will return to visit one day.
The Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) clinic on Rue Soleil is struggling without enough doctors — it is a Saturday afternoon and 13 Cite Soleil residents are awaiting treatment. The sun hits the courtyard at the front of the clinic and the patients-to-be huddle in the small shade, nursing bleeding scalps, infected limb lacerations, and babies with tuberculosis. The babies are the loudest — their wracking coughs reverberate out across the gravel courtyard. Outside the more than 8-foot-high exterior walls of the clinic, signs indicate the primary object that is prohibited from the clinic — the AK 47. There are few pieces of technology in the world that simultaneously symbolize death and independence, violence and emancipation. The AK-47, a gas operated assault rifle, was designed by Mikhail Kalshnikov in 1947 (from this date the numerical suffix of the weapon is derived). The curved magazine, slanted muzzle brake, and distinctive wooden butt of the weapon have become part of the “rebel’s” image. As has been well-documented, the silhouette of the AK-47 is a prominent feature of the national flag of Mozambique, as well as a part of the flag of Hezbollah and the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Though the AK-47 may be little more that a symbol (it is difficult to gauge how many AKs are in Haiti), the message is clear: the power of the gun, an authority that has shaped so much of Haiti’s history, is forbidden in the realm of Médecins Sans Frontières.
Unfortunately, violence remains the rule of law in parts of Cite Soleil. The destruction of the police station near the port in Cite Soleil is a microcosm of how quickly this area became a zone occupied by a foreign military complex. An operational centre for a large policing unit up until 2004, the Haitian police were forced to abandon the police station during fighting with the chimeres. This failure to combat the chimeres led to the intervention of hundreds of UN troops a few months later. Today, the protective outer wall that once surrounded the building no longer exists, vanquished by gunfire and subsequent decay. The station’s interior has been completely stripped and the charred ceilings and the remaining external foundations represent little more than a relic from the recent past, a time when the Haitian police had some presence in Cite Soleil.
Down the road from the police station, a group of half a dozen or so young men approach and ask for money and food, forming a tight half-circle. A skinny 23-year-old, Philippe, pushes to the front. “You see my friend?” he asks, pointing to the equally emaciated teenager next to him. “He has a baby but he has no food for him or his baby. He does not eat and his baby does not eat. I have a baby also, and we do not eat.” Philippe’s fury at all of this — Cite Soleil, his country, and his life — is the charge behind everything he said. “We have nothing, here. Do you understand?” He looks at me, willing me to comprehend, yet acutely aware that I probably cannot. Philippe laughs and shakes his head when I ask if things were better when Aristide was president. “Of course! Under Aristide, everything was better for the people of Cite Soleil. Preval (Haiti’s current president) is no good.” The young men’s stories continually circulate around the two constants of life in Cite Soleil: the symbiotic relationship of poverty and violence.
Past the large UN military compound, there is a damaged concrete structure set back from the road. Michel explains the significance: this was once a popular Protestant church, which held services attended by people from many parts of the slum. Above the entranceway, a painted inscription is peppered by bullet-holes: Jusqu’ici L’eternel Nous a Secourus. (“Up to here, God has been with us.”) Like many of the crumbling empty structures in Cite Soleil that are riddled with bullet holes, there is a strange mixture of the sacred and profane; in this church where there is no roof, glass, doors, or seating, soft light fills the empty space.
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The Ghosts of Cite Soleil
cover, April08, news April 17th, 2008
By Christopher Garland, April 2008
Christopher Garland explores the slums in Cite Soleil, Haiti, also known as “the most dangerous place on earth.” Surrounded by armed soldiers from the United Nations, he moves through the tattered town.
As a United Nations truck carrying armed soldiers in to Cite Soleil moves through the shadow of a wall topped with barbed wire, clouds drift across the potent Caribbean sun. Cite Soleil, the largest slum in the western hemisphere and one of the most impoverished urban settlements in the world, is 15 minutes north of the downtown of Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti.
Home to more than 300,000 people, the vast majority of whom do not have access to running water or electricity, Cite Soleil was tagged “the most dangerous place on earth” by the UN in 2004. On Route National 1, the road that skirts the western perimeter of Cite Soleil, an up-tempo drumbeat from a song by Haitian musical hero, Wyclef Jean, plays from a cheap transistor radio. Nearby, UN troops stand guard beside an armored vehicle and a tank, watching the weekend activity. Makeshift stalls selling kenedi — the Haitian Creole word for second-hand clothes first sent to Haiti from the United States under a program initiated by President John F. Kennedy — are set up along the roadside.
While locals stand and chat beneath tattered sun umbrellas, commerce takes place between ditches filled with trash and crumbling buildings scarred by heavy gunfire — a testament to the violence of the past four years. Above the street, troops position themselves on rooftops, looking for any early signs of trouble. The Chinese UN soldiers stationed in Port-au-Prince call National 1 “the road of death” due to the kidnappings and murders that have plagued this area, the two main reasons to explain the concentrated presence of UN military here. Michel, my translator and guide, said that this part of the road “shuts down” when street gangs known as chimeres (a Creole word that roughly translates as “ghosts”) start shooting. Secondly, the UN force is able to maintain a strategic presence to Rue Soleil, the main road that traverses the southern half of Cite Soleil.
Coming down in to the middle of Cite Soleil, the road dips to sea level and the temperature increases a few very noticeable degrees; the static air and humidity further add to the claustrophobic feeling. The majority of the housing in Cite Soleil consists of densely packed rooms constructed from basic recyclables: during the hottest months, the tin roofs capture the relentless heat and transform the interiors into sweatboxes. Though crude, temporary housing is visible throughout slum, there is still a shortage of adequate shelter for the people of Cite Soleil. As a way to deal with the lack of housing and incredibly cramped rooms, many of which are little more than four or five square metres, people are often forced to engage in domi kanpe (a Creole term that literally translates to “sleeping standing.”) The stench of open sewers wafts through the alleys that twist out across Cite Soleil.
Ignored by most of the residents wandering through the streets, UN armored vehicles patrol Rue Soleil, the soldiers aboard surveying the street with guns poised. From Rue Soleil, the larger roads and narrow unpaved lanes lead off in all directions towards the centre of the slum. ‘Cite Carton,’ an area consisting entirely of cardboard “shacks”, is perhaps the most impoverished of these inner “neighborhoods.” At the edge of Rue Soleil, the image from a thousand slums from around the world plays out: a group of barely clothed children play soccer with a can, pushing each other as they skip around in the dirt. When the UN armoured vehicles pass, the children barely notice, caught up in the pursuit of a “normal” life — they briefly turn their eyes to the soldiers before returning to their game.
Beyond the road, the origin of the thin black smoke rising seemingly from nowhere is now apparent: spots in the “ravines” — the two- to six-feet wide ditchees lined with plastic waste that stretch out throughout Cite Soleil — are burning. Near Soleil 19, an area where a number of prominent chimeres once lived, a boy wearing a man’s polo shirt asks, in French, to have his photo taken. Standing in front of a wall with a scrawled graffiti tribute to Winson “2Pac” Jean, one of the most infamous chimere leaders, the boy poses and gives a wide smile. After a few moments, an older man who has been watching from nearby angrily calls the boy away. Michel, who grew up in Cite Soleil, suggests that perhaps we should move on. “It does not take much for trouble to start,” he tells me. Minutes later, we pass the boy again: he wanders through the rubble into little more than a ruined shell — a building that would fit well in to any war-torn locale — the front wall pockmarked by more than a hundred bullet-holes.
Created in the 1950s by the government of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Cite Soleil was conceived as a way to house the influx of workers from Haiti’s rural areas and other larger cities (including Cap Haitien and Gonaives) looking for employment in the nation’s capital. Whilst migrant workers rapidly filled Cite Soleil, neither employment opportunities nor sufficient infrastructures were in place to deal with the population growth. Before long, the inevitable occurred: Cite Soleil ceased to exist in a hopeful, successful, and entirely imagined future and instead descended into a failed, impoverished, and inevitably violent present. Perhaps the worst of the violence in Cite Soleil has taken place since the departure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. During the last stages of his presidency, Aristide and his Lavalas party — a Creole word that translates as “flood” — armed and funded street gangs from Cite Soleil and other slum areas around Haiti.
Throughout his intermittent leadership of Haiti in the 1990s and early 2000s, Aristide was besieged by internal pressure from economic elites and the constant threat of Haitian army units — the same military that was disbanded by the Lavalas government — in training across the border in the Dominican Republic, who were planning an overthrow of the government. In response to these threats, Aristide sought protection from the base of his support — young men from Haiti’s poor majority. Donning black balaclavas and armed with high-powered rifles and semi-automatics, these street gangs became known as chimeres.
The role of the chimeres was relatively simple: to provide muscle for the embattled government and terrorize Aristide’s political adversaries. After international pressure from the US and Canada, Aristide’s departure from office led to armed conflict that spread from the slums to downtown Port-au-Prince. Unsurprisingly, the chimeres soon divided between Lavalas supporters and those who felt disillusioned with Aristide’s leadership. When United Nations military forces entered Cite Soleil in 2004, the gangs not only resisted this attempt at military occupation, but also were engaged in warfare with one another. (Notably, it was one of Michel’s childhood classmates, a chimere leader popularly known as “Llabanye”, who killed Winson “2Pac” Jean in Cite Soleil in 2004.)
In Cite Lumiere, a neighbourhood in the centre of Cite Soleil, Jean-Luc, a tall 25-year-old man with a ready smile, guarantees my safety. “You will not be kidnapped when you are with us,” he tells me, putting his arms around my shoulders. We are sitting on the cobbled path outside a small shop and Jean-Luc is excited to practice his English. He would one day like to go to university: a rather unlikely possibility for a young man coming from the midst of Cite Soleil. “We know money comes in to Haiti but when it gets to Cite Soleil…There is nothing left for us,” he said. The sun has dipped towards the mountains that surround Port au Prince and shadows stretch out over these thin, broken streets of inner Cite Soleil. Talking about the UN’s presence in the slum, Jean-Luc feels that little has changed. “If I tell (the UN) who has guns,” Jean-Luc said, “I will be dead before the UN finds them.” The chimeres tactics of intimidation are extreme: Jean-Luc witnessed a murder on his doorstep and knew someone killed for having the police’s phone number programmed in to his cell phone. Jean-Luc asks for nothing; he wishes me luck and said that he hopes I will return to visit one day.
The Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) clinic on Rue Soleil is struggling without enough doctors — it is a Saturday afternoon and 13 Cite Soleil residents are awaiting treatment. The sun hits the courtyard at the front of the clinic and the patients-to-be huddle in the small shade, nursing bleeding scalps, infected limb lacerations, and babies with tuberculosis. The babies are the loudest — their wracking coughs reverberate out across the gravel courtyard. Outside the more than 8-foot-high exterior walls of the clinic, signs indicate the primary object that is prohibited from the clinic — the AK 47. There are few pieces of technology in the world that simultaneously symbolize death and independence, violence and emancipation. The AK-47, a gas operated assault rifle, was designed by Mikhail Kalshnikov in 1947 (from this date the numerical suffix of the weapon is derived). The curved magazine, slanted muzzle brake, and distinctive wooden butt of the weapon have become part of the “rebel’s” image. As has been well-documented, the silhouette of the AK-47 is a prominent feature of the national flag of Mozambique, as well as a part of the flag of Hezbollah and the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Though the AK-47 may be little more that a symbol (it is difficult to gauge how many AKs are in Haiti), the message is clear: the power of the gun, an authority that has shaped so much of Haiti’s history, is forbidden in the realm of Médecins Sans Frontières.
Unfortunately, violence remains the rule of law in parts of Cite Soleil. The destruction of the police station near the port in Cite Soleil is a microcosm of how quickly this area became a zone occupied by a foreign military complex. An operational centre for a large policing unit up until 2004, the Haitian police were forced to abandon the police station during fighting with the chimeres. This failure to combat the chimeres led to the intervention of hundreds of UN troops a few months later. Today, the protective outer wall that once surrounded the building no longer exists, vanquished by gunfire and subsequent decay. The station’s interior has been completely stripped and the charred ceilings and the remaining external foundations represent little more than a relic from the recent past, a time when the Haitian police had some presence in Cite Soleil.
Down the road from the police station, a group of half a dozen or so young men approach and ask for money and food, forming a tight half-circle. A skinny 23-year-old, Philippe, pushes to the front. “You see my friend?” he asks, pointing to the equally emaciated teenager next to him. “He has a baby but he has no food for him or his baby. He does not eat and his baby does not eat. I have a baby also, and we do not eat.” Philippe’s fury at all of this — Cite Soleil, his country, and his life — is the charge behind everything he said. “We have nothing, here. Do you understand?” He looks at me, willing me to comprehend, yet acutely aware that I probably cannot. Philippe laughs and shakes his head when I ask if things were better when Aristide was president. “Of course! Under Aristide, everything was better for the people of Cite Soleil. Preval (Haiti’s current president) is no good.” The young men’s stories continually circulate around the two constants of life in Cite Soleil: the symbiotic relationship of poverty and violence.
Past the large UN military compound, there is a damaged concrete structure set back from the road. Michel explains the significance: this was once a popular Protestant church, which held services attended by people from many parts of the slum. Above the entranceway, a painted inscription is peppered by bullet-holes: Jusqu’ici L’eternel Nous a Secourus. (“Up to here, God has been with us.”) Like many of the crumbling empty structures in Cite Soleil that are riddled with bullet holes, there is a strange mixture of the sacred and profane; in this church where there is no roof, glass, doors, or seating, soft light fills the empty space.
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The Ghosts of Cite Soleil
cover, April08, news April 17th, 2008
By Christopher Garland, April 2008
Christopher Garland explores the slums in Cite Soleil, Haiti, also known as “the most dangerous place on earth.” Surrounded by armed soldiers from the United Nations, he moves through the tattered town.
As a United Nations truck carrying armed soldiers in to Cite Soleil moves through the shadow of a wall topped with barbed wire, clouds drift across the potent Caribbean sun. Cite Soleil, the largest slum in the western hemisphere and one of the most impoverished urban settlements in the world, is 15 minutes north of the downtown of Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti.
Home to more than 300,000 people, the vast majority of whom do not have access to running water or electricity, Cite Soleil was tagged “the most dangerous place on earth” by the UN in 2004. On Route National 1, the road that skirts the western perimeter of Cite Soleil, an up-tempo drumbeat from a song by Haitian musical hero, Wyclef Jean, plays from a cheap transistor radio. Nearby, UN troops stand guard beside an armored vehicle and a tank, watching the weekend activity. Makeshift stalls selling kenedi — the Haitian Creole word for second-hand clothes first sent to Haiti from the United States under a program initiated by President John F. Kennedy — are set up along the roadside.
While locals stand and chat beneath tattered sun umbrellas, commerce takes place between ditches filled with trash and crumbling buildings scarred by heavy gunfire — a testament to the violence of the past four years. Above the street, troops position themselves on rooftops, looking for any early signs of trouble. The Chinese UN soldiers stationed in Port-au-Prince call National 1 “the road of death” due to the kidnappings and murders that have plagued this area, the two main reasons to explain the concentrated presence of UN military here. Michel, my translator and guide, said that this part of the road “shuts down” when street gangs known as chimeres (a Creole word that roughly translates as “ghosts”) start shooting. Secondly, the UN force is able to maintain a strategic presence to Rue Soleil, the main road that traverses the southern half of Cite Soleil.
Coming down in to the middle of Cite Soleil, the road dips to sea level and the temperature increases a few very noticeable degrees; the static air and humidity further add to the claustrophobic feeling. The majority of the housing in Cite Soleil consists of densely packed rooms constructed from basic recyclables: during the hottest months, the tin roofs capture the relentless heat and transform the interiors into sweatboxes. Though crude, temporary housing is visible throughout slum, there is still a shortage of adequate shelter for the people of Cite Soleil. As a way to deal with the lack of housing and incredibly cramped rooms, many of which are little more than four or five square metres, people are often forced to engage in domi kanpe (a Creole term that literally translates to “sleeping standing.”) The stench of open sewers wafts through the alleys that twist out across Cite Soleil.
Ignored by most of the residents wandering through the streets, UN armored vehicles patrol Rue Soleil, the soldiers aboard surveying the street with guns poised. From Rue Soleil, the larger roads and narrow unpaved lanes lead off in all directions towards the centre of the slum. ‘Cite Carton,’ an area consisting entirely of cardboard “shacks”, is perhaps the most impoverished of these inner “neighborhoods.” At the edge of Rue Soleil, the image from a thousand slums from around the world plays out: a group of barely clothed children play soccer with a can, pushing each other as they skip around in the dirt. When the UN armoured vehicles pass, the children barely notice, caught up in the pursuit of a “normal” life — they briefly turn their eyes to the soldiers before returning to their game.
Beyond the road, the origin of the thin black smoke rising seemingly from nowhere is now apparent: spots in the “ravines” — the two- to six-feet wide ditchees lined with plastic waste that stretch out throughout Cite Soleil — are burning. Near Soleil 19, an area where a number of prominent chimeres once lived, a boy wearing a man’s polo shirt asks, in French, to have his photo taken. Standing in front of a wall with a scrawled graffiti tribute to Winson “2Pac” Jean, one of the most infamous chimere leaders, the boy poses and gives a wide smile. After a few moments, an older man who has been watching from nearby angrily calls the boy away. Michel, who grew up in Cite Soleil, suggests that perhaps we should move on. “It does not take much for trouble to start,” he tells me. Minutes later, we pass the boy again: he wanders through the rubble into little more than a ruined shell — a building that would fit well in to any war-torn locale — the front wall pockmarked by more than a hundred bullet-holes.
Created in the 1950s by the government of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Cite Soleil was conceived as a way to house the influx of workers from Haiti’s rural areas and other larger cities (including Cap Haitien and Gonaives) looking for employment in the nation’s capital. Whilst migrant workers rapidly filled Cite Soleil, neither employment opportunities nor sufficient infrastructures were in place to deal with the population growth. Before long, the inevitable occurred: Cite Soleil ceased to exist in a hopeful, successful, and entirely imagined future and instead descended into a failed, impoverished, and inevitably violent present. Perhaps the worst of the violence in Cite Soleil has taken place since the departure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. During the last stages of his presidency, Aristide and his Lavalas party — a Creole word that translates as “flood” — armed and funded street gangs from Cite Soleil and other slum areas around Haiti.
Throughout his intermittent leadership of Haiti in the 1990s and early 2000s, Aristide was besieged by internal pressure from economic elites and the constant threat of Haitian army units — the same military that was disbanded by the Lavalas government — in training across the border in the Dominican Republic, who were planning an overthrow of the government. In response to these threats, Aristide sought protection from the base of his support — young men from Haiti’s poor majority. Donning black balaclavas and armed with high-powered rifles and semi-automatics, these street gangs became known as chimeres.
The role of the chimeres was relatively simple: to provide muscle for the embattled government and terrorize Aristide’s political adversaries. After international pressure from the US and Canada, Aristide’s departure from office led to armed conflict that spread from the slums to downtown Port-au-Prince. Unsurprisingly, the chimeres soon divided between Lavalas supporters and those who felt disillusioned with Aristide’s leadership. When United Nations military forces entered Cite Soleil in 2004, the gangs not only resisted this attempt at military occupation, but also were engaged in warfare with one another. (Notably, it was one of Michel’s childhood classmates, a chimere leader popularly known as “Llabanye”, who killed Winson “2Pac” Jean in Cite Soleil in 2004.)
In Cite Lumiere, a neighbourhood in the centre of Cite Soleil, Jean-Luc, a tall 25-year-old man with a ready smile, guarantees my safety. “You will not be kidnapped when you are with us,” he tells me, putting his arms around my shoulders. We are sitting on the cobbled path outside a small shop and Jean-Luc is excited to practice his English. He would one day like to go to university: a rather unlikely possibility for a young man coming from the midst of Cite Soleil. “We know money comes in to Haiti but when it gets to Cite Soleil…There is nothing left for us,” he said. The sun has dipped towards the mountains that surround Port au Prince and shadows stretch out over these thin, broken streets of inner Cite Soleil. Talking about the UN’s presence in the slum, Jean-Luc feels that little has changed. “If I tell (the UN) who has guns,” Jean-Luc said, “I will be dead before the UN finds them.” The chimeres tactics of intimidation are extreme: Jean-Luc witnessed a murder on his doorstep and knew someone killed for having the police’s phone number programmed in to his cell phone. Jean-Luc asks for nothing; he wishes me luck and said that he hopes I will return to visit one day.
The Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) clinic on Rue Soleil is struggling without enough doctors — it is a Saturday afternoon and 13 Cite Soleil residents are awaiting treatment. The sun hits the courtyard at the front of the clinic and the patients-to-be huddle in the small shade, nursing bleeding scalps, infected limb lacerations, and babies with tuberculosis. The babies are the loudest — their wracking coughs reverberate out across the gravel courtyard. Outside the more than 8-foot-high exterior walls of the clinic, signs indicate the primary object that is prohibited from the clinic — the AK 47. There are few pieces of technology in the world that simultaneously symbolize death and independence, violence and emancipation. The AK-47, a gas operated assault rifle, was designed by Mikhail Kalshnikov in 1947 (from this date the numerical suffix of the weapon is derived). The curved magazine, slanted muzzle brake, and distinctive wooden butt of the weapon have become part of the “rebel’s” image. As has been well-documented, the silhouette of the AK-47 is a prominent feature of the national flag of Mozambique, as well as a part of the flag of Hezbollah and the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Though the AK-47 may be little more that a symbol (it is difficult to gauge how many AKs are in Haiti), the message is clear: the power of the gun, an authority that has shaped so much of Haiti’s history, is forbidden in the realm of Médecins Sans Frontières.
Unfortunately, violence remains the rule of law in parts of Cite Soleil. The destruction of the police station near the port in Cite Soleil is a microcosm of how quickly this area became a zone occupied by a foreign military complex. An operational centre for a large policing unit up until 2004, the Haitian police were forced to abandon the police station during fighting with the chimeres. This failure to combat the chimeres led to the intervention of hundreds of UN troops a few months later. Today, the protective outer wall that once surrounded the building no longer exists, vanquished by gunfire and subsequent decay. The station’s interior has been completely stripped and the charred ceilings and the remaining external foundations represent little more than a relic from the recent past, a time when the Haitian police had some presence in Cite Soleil.
Down the road from the police station, a group of half a dozen or so young men approach and ask for money and food, forming a tight half-circle. A skinny 23-year-old, Philippe, pushes to the front. “You see my friend?” he asks, pointing to the equally emaciated teenager next to him. “He has a baby but he has no food for him or his baby. He does not eat and his baby does not eat. I have a baby also, and we do not eat.” Philippe’s fury at all of this — Cite Soleil, his country, and his life — is the charge behind everything he said. “We have nothing, here. Do you understand?” He looks at me, willing me to comprehend, yet acutely aware that I probably cannot. Philippe laughs and shakes his head when I ask if things were better when Aristide was president. “Of course! Under Aristide, everything was better for the people of Cite Soleil. Preval (Haiti’s current president) is no good.” The young men’s stories continually circulate around the two constants of life in Cite Soleil: the symbiotic relationship of poverty and violence.
Past the large UN military compound, there is a damaged concrete structure set back from the road. Michel explains the significance: this was once a popular Protestant church, which held services attended by people from many parts of the slum. Above the entranceway, a painted inscription is peppered by bullet-holes: Jusqu’ici L’eternel Nous a Secourus. (“Up to here, God has been with us.”) Like many of the crumbling empty structures in Cite Soleil that are riddled with bullet holes, there is a strange mixture of the sacred and profane; in this church where there is no roof, glass, doors, or seating, soft light fills the empty space.
