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HAITI: Crime wave in small village provokes lynchings by villagers

As a crime spree hit a small Haitian village this summer, residents struck back and lynched two suspects.

PLICHE, Haiti - The peasants bound the wrists of the neighbor they suspected of two murders in this remote mountain village, and herded him to the side of a deserted dirt road.

As the man wept, they grilled him about his alleged crimes. Then they handed him a shovel, forced him to dig his own grave and hacked him to death with machetes and picks.

''It was a lot of blows,'' recalled Renold Cherestant, 34, a Pliché resident and radio reporter who witnessed the lynching, one of two in this region in late July of alleged gang leaders suspected of leading a monthslong crime spree.

The killings illustrate not only the growing outrage of Haitians with the illegal armed gangs that have long terrorized the capital city of Port-au-Prince, but the vulnerability of even remote and usually peaceful parts of this troubled Caribbean nation.

It also points to the challenges facing President René Préval, six months in power, as he struggles to return security to a country with a small and ineffective police force, dysfunctional justice system and decades of political and economic upheavals.

In the past two years, an unprecedented spate of for-ransom kidnappings and other violent crimes has transformed life in the capital, where private security firms now flourish and well-to-do businessmen and government officials ride in bullet-proof vehicles with armed guards.

''What people want is peace,'' said Brinó Benice, 50, who moved from Port-au-Prince to Pliché in hopes of finding the security that eludes both rich and poor in the capital. ``There are areas in the country that are still peaceful, but there are areas where we are seeing increased violence.''

Benice and others in the Pliché area believe their recent crime wave is related to a summer spike in violence in Port-au-Prince that forced the Haitian government and U.N. peacekeepers to beef up security in the capital. Neighbors said the two Pliché lynch victims ran groups of young thugs who moved from the capital.

U.N. FORCE

Scores of blue-helmeted U.N. troops were redeployed from the countryside to the capital to help bolster the National Police, 32 additional street checkpoints were established and 11 more armored vehicles were sent to patrol the capital, said Edmond Mulet, overall head of the U.N. mission here.

The focused attention appears to be paying off. Police have entered previously no-go parts of Cité Soleil, the capital's main slum and stronghold of gangs well armed from the spoils of Haiti's political upheavals. Kidnappings are trending down, and a campaign to disarm the gang members has netted about 110 people who turned in guns in exchange for food grants and job training.

But there remain occasional clashes between U.N. peacekeepers and residents in Cité Soleil, as well as street protests by university students opposed to the presence here of some 9,000 U.N. military and police personnel. Friday night, gunmen killed two Jordanian peacekeepers.

''This is still a very fragile situation; it's wait-and-see,'' Mulet said.

Préval says the September lynching of a suspected kidnapper in the Port-au-Prince slum of Bel-Aire, and the two in Pliché, show Haitians are fed up with the ``weakness of the justice system.''

''If there was a justice system, it would not have arrived at this point,'' he told The Miami Herald in an interview.

But fixing the problems won't be easy.

The National Police claims it has 7,476 agents -- others estimate 4,000 -- in the nation of eight million. New York City, which has the same number of residents, has 37,000 police officers.

All agree that police are under-equipped, poorly trained and often corrupt.

A report last week by the Washington-based International Crisis Group (ICG), an independent think tank monitoring Haiti, called for vetting police officers and urged the U.N. force here be expanded from 1,700 to 1,900 officers and include anti-gang, SWAT and organized crime experts.

It also noted that millions of dollars have been spent in the past decade on reforming Haiti's justice system, still mired in corruption and a huge backlog of cases. Meanwhile, the country's laws are antiquated and the judges are underpaid.

''You cannot do a stand-alone police reform. You have to do it parallel to a justice reform so when the police do pick up people for violating the law, there is a judiciary that is going to deal with the cases on the merits and not based on who knows whom, or who paid whom,'' said ICG Haiti analyst Mark Schneider.

Crime, he added, is not going to go away. But the government can restore the population's faith so that ``they can look at the police and the justice system as the answer.''

The residents of Pliché, 85 miles southwest of the capital, know all too well the reality of Haiti's understaffed police force. When the crime spree in their village began, they say, they met with police and a government prosecutor.

''The insecurity was bad. The people could not sleep at home, they were afraid. They could not come to church,'' said The Rev. Ignace Coissy, a Catholic priest who took part in the meetings.

PATROL REQUESTED

Residents asked for a police patrol in the Pliché area and perhaps even their own police station. They were told neither was possible.

''I don't have a car, a motorcycle or even a bicycle,'' said Tertilian Adelson, the officer in charge of the police station in Cavaillon, responsible for Pliché and its surroundings. Cavaillon is a several-hours walk from Pliché on a mountain road.

''There are times I borrow money, or take my own money to borrow a motorcycle to go to the mountain to check on the population,'' Adelson said, adding that his station has only six officers, including himself.

Adelson, who confirmed the two vigilante killings in Pliché, said that after the incidents authorities immediately opened an investigation. It has gone nowhere, he said.

''They've hidden the information,'' he said. ``They are afraid to talk. They believe if they talk, there will be arrests and the bandits will return.''

Residents say one of the men lynched was a prison escapee known as Theophile. He and the other victim, known as Rigaud, led several gunmen. In the killings' aftermath, other gang members have left and peace has returned to this cocoa and coffee farming community.

But Coissy, the priest, cautioned that the situation can quickly change.

''It's a dynamite that can explode at anytime,'' he said. ```The situation in the country is out of control. The misery, the crime. Things like this will happen more and more as long as people's conditions don't improve.''