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Revenge of the Tonton Macoute - Haitian terrorism | Progressive, The | Find Articles at BNET

Revenge of the Tonton Macoute - Haitian terrorism

Progressive, The, May, 1993 by William Steif

I sit on the long front porch of the hillside Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince and hear the shots below. In Haiti's capital it is not unusual to hear shots at night. I know the shots are the work of the zinglando, enforcing the will of the army.

Zinglando is a made-up Creole word. It comes from zinglan, the broken glass that Haitians cement atop their walls to keep out intruders. But the zinglando are the intruders, and they frighten - and sometimes kill - people in this poorest country of the Western Hemisphere.

The century-old Victorian Oloffson is a cachet for the terror that persists in this Caribbean nation of 6.5 million people. The Oloffson was the model for the Hotel Trianon in Graham Greene's classic novel of Haiti, The Comedians. In the early 1960s, when Greene wrote his novel, the terror was carried out by President Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier's Tonton Macoutes.

The zinglando are the Macoutes' successors.

A French-Canadian priest, the Reverend Raymond Desjardins, says there are two kinds of repression in Haiti today. The "more official," he says, is carried out by the 7,000-man army if there's some evidence, such as a photo, of support for exiled priest-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. (Elected on December 16, 1990, in Haiti's first free and fair election since the nation won its independence in 1804, Aristide was deposed on September 30, 1991, in an army coup led by General Raoul Cedras.)

The tisoldats - little soldiers, meaning the 6,000 enlisted men - have no qualms about beating up someone openly supporting Aristide, who won election with 68 per cent of the vote. That's why Haitian vendors or money-changers on Rue Pavee or Boulevard J.-J. Dessalines in downtown Port-au-Prince put fingers to their lips when asked about Titid, Aristide's nickname.

But the more pervasive, more terrifying repression is carried out by the zinglando, says Desjardins, pastor of St. Gerard Church and a twelve-year Haiti resident.

"They attack a house. take it, kill some occupants, and violate the women," he says. "They are partly Macoutes, partly on drugs. They work for the army, which gives them guns. They aren't as official as the Macoutes but they're a way for the army and the police to keep control."

The priest says the zinglando began about three years ago and grew swiftly after Aristide was exiled and the army took over. He estimates there may be as many as 100,000 zinglando throughout the country, though others say the number is much lower. The priest has encountered zinglando in his own parish, up the hill from the Oloffson. In November 1991, he says, two zinglando attacked five houses three nights in a row, robbing and beating parishioners. One of the zinglando was arrested by an officer from the big, white National Palace on the Champs de Mars and by 10:30 the next morning was out on the street. When the priest asked the city's police chief about this quick turn-around, the police chief told him: "I have a little problem. He works for me."

The zinglando are recruited by some of the tisoldats, who get jobless young men hooked on cocaine over a two-or three-week period, then withdraw the drug. At that point, the young men will do anything to get drugs and are assigned to invade homes and beat or even kill Haitians believed to be covert Aristide supporters. "The repression is so high that people can't go out in the street," says Desjardins, and it's even worse in the countryside where 70 per cent of the Haitians live and "where exactly the old system of |section chiefs' has returned."

He adds: "The coup was to bring back the old system of the Duvaliers" - Papa Doc and son Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) ruled this way from 1957 to February 7, 1986, when President-for-Life Baby Doc boarded a U.S. Air Force plane and was flown to France.

I wander the dusty, broken streets of this city of a million people and stop to talk to a college student named Milfort on the steps of the Episcopal cathedral. He is writing poetry and is delighted to give a reading - but he doesn't want to give an opinion of Aristide. An eighteen-year-old in a narrow alley of a slum, Cite Soleil, is quite willing to discuss Sartre's existentialism but fearful of discussing Titid. A woman vendor on Boulevard J.-J. Dessalines says, "I love Aristide," then hurriedly raises a finger to her lips - the discussion is over.

"There's a kind of desperation here now," says Desjardins. "The people chose Aristide to lead them because he was the first in their history" - going back to 1804 - "to take care of them, to elevate their dignity. The minority - the rich, the elite - don't want the majority as fellow citizens. The coup was a rejection of the majority, a humiliation. They are again insecure, at night they don't know if they'll be attacked."

The insecurity helps explain why thousands of Haitians somehow will scrape together $500 or $600 per person to step into a leaky sailboat and try to sail 700 miles to Florida.

"It is despair," says the priest. "They'd rather stay here poor but at least with the hope of change that Aristide brought. But when you take the hope out and know your children will be poor in misery like you, they'd rather die in the sea than stay. If Aristide comes back and his government is working in a democracy, the flow of people by sea will stop."

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