A cemetery worker preparing a grave for a victim of the deadly gang attack on Pont-Sonde, Haiti. — AP
BERTIDE Horace, a community leader in central Haiti, was awoken in the wee hours by a phone call from a woman who sounded desperate.
“Pont-Sonde is being invaded by the gang, please send for help,” the caller said, according to Horace.
At that moment, members of a Haitian gang armed with automatic weapons were rampaging through the town of Pont-Sonde, according to the United Nations, local human rights groups and videos of the attack taken by some residents, shooting anyone on sight and setting homes and vehicles on fire.
When Horace, who was about 15km away in the city of Saint-Marc, arrived with heavily armed police officers four hours later as the sun was rising, she said the streets of the town were strewed with bodies.
“People were coming out of hiding and trying to flee,” she said. “It was total panic.”
The wounded, she added, were walking around “begging for help”.
The violence, perpetrated on Oct 8 by a gang called the Gran Grif, left at least 88 people, including 10 gang members, dead, the UN said.
Two of those killed, Horace said, were her cousins, both agricultural workers – they were lying dead outside their wooden homes in the centre of Pont-Sonde, a farming town of about 10,000 people roughly 90km north of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital.
Nearly 6,300 people fled their homes after the attack, according to the United Nations’ migration agency. Many of the survivors, suddenly homeless, are now living in tents in Saint-Marc’s main square.
The gang appeared, in part, to be targeting civilians who had allied themselves with a self-defence group that had formed in the region because Haiti’s police have largely been unable to protect them from criminal groups, the UN said.
One survivor, Aniece Raphael, 51, said she was asleep in Pont-Sonde with five relatives when the gang entered the town.
She and three relatives fled into surrounding hills, she said, but an aunt and a 12-year-old nephew who stayed behind were shot.
“We had to lie down on the ground,” said Raphael, describing how they hid in the darkness as the gang continued shooting. “We were very scared.”
During a lull, she and her relatives made their escape.
“I had to run for a long time,” said Raphael, who is staying with a friend. “The best thing to do was to climb the hills. We met other people who were doing the same thing.”
The morgue at the lone hospital in Saint-Marc could not accommodate any more corpses arriving from the mass killing, so some had to be sent to private funeral homes, said Dr Frantz Alexis, the hospital’s director.
The hospital treated many grave bullet wounds. “It was a very alarming situation,” Alexis said.
The massacre, the worst mass killing in Haiti in decades, represents a major blow to an international effort to impose order to the country, which has been upended by a devastating wave of gang violence since the country’s last elected president was assassinated in 2021.
A multinational force authorised by the United Nations and led by Kenya started arriving in Port-au-Prince over the summer with a specific assignment to take on the gangs whose campaign of terror has set off one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.
Families have been living in makeshift shelters for months, and about half the country’s population struggles to find enough food to eat, according to humanitarian aid officials. About 700,000 people remain displaced by the violence.
But with just over 400 officers, out of a force that was supposed to have 2,500 members, the multinational deployment’s patrols have largely been restricted to Port-au-Prince. The force has virtually no presence outside the capital in regions where gangs have expanded.
Pont-Sonde and Saint-Marc are in the Artibonite, an important rice-growing area where at least 20 gangs are known to operate.
A major road runs through the region that links the capital with Cap-Haitien, Haiti’s main northern city, and gangs have sought control of the road to conduct kidnappings and extort people.
A day before the massacre, Horace said the leader of the Gran Grif gang, Luckson Elan, delivered a threat on social media, warning residents that he was going to punish them for refusing to pay toll that the gang had established to travel on the main road.
Horace, who works as a lawyer and a radio show host, said the massacre was the culmination of a wave of terror that the Gran Grif gang had started unleashing in the region about two years ago and that she had tried to raise alarms about the group with authorities.
The local police commander in Pont-Sonde was fired the day after the massacre, according to an official government announcement posted in the Haitian news media.
Elan and Horace grew up in the same town in the Artibonite not far apart, she said. In October 2022, his gang attacked her hometown, Petite Riviere, and set her home on fire, killing 11 members of her family, Horace said.
“He’s one of the biggest criminals in the country,” she said.
Elan and a local lawmaker accused of helping fuel his rise were sanctioned recently by the UN Security Council and the Biden administration.
Elan has been responsible for a multitude of crimes and human rights abuses, including murder, rape, extortion and kidnapping, according to statement by the US Department of Treasury.
The gang leader had been threatening Pont-Sonde in audio messages circulating on social media for several weeks before the mass killing, Horace said.
“It was well known that he was going to do something,” she said.
In one audio message Horace said had been issued days before the assault, Elan is heard addressing the residents of Pont-Sonde: “We have bullets and ammunition to do what we want to do.”
At the same time, the Haitian police also have depleted resources, experts said, with about 10,000 officers for the entire country, and often find themselves outnumbered and outgunned when they confront gangs.
The Catholic archbishop of Port-au-Prince, Monsignor Max Leroy Mesidor, issued an urgent plea to the country’s government after the massacre.
“Who is watching over the population?” he said in an audio message. “The population is fed up.” — ©2024 The New York Times Company
