The Roman Catholic archbishop of Port-au-Prince is speaking out against the latest brutal attack by armed gangs and what he sees as “indifference” by those in charge and a floundering international effort to stem the violence.
“Is there a plan to destroy the country?” Monsignor Max Leroy Mésidor said. “Every week, there is... death.”
Haiti’s Catholic Church has long been a powerful voice. But in recent years, the institution and its leaders have taken a step back from the spotlight as armed gangs target both members and religious leaders: Priest and nuns have been kidnapped, and church property, including hospitals and schools, have been ransacked.
But the latest carnage, in which at least 70 people were killed on Thursday in the rural town of Pont-Sondé in the Artibonite region in the middle of the night, was too much for even the usually quiet Mésidor.
Breaking his silence in a widely circulated audio that he shared with the Miami Herald, he said that while “the entire country is sick, the entire country has been suffering for a long time,” the regions of the West, which include metropolitan Port-au-Prince and the neighboring Artibonite, are the worst off. They are the largest regions in the country, and today account for most of the gang violence.
“Is there a secret project to dismantle these areas?” asked Mésidor, who is the 11th archbishop to lead the archdiocese of Port-au-Prince and is originally from Verrettes, a town located just 15 miles from Pont-Sondé.
For two years, communities in the Artibonite have been left to fend for themselves with no police presence, he said. Their cries for help have been ignored, and their proposals to authorities have been met with silence. Instead of life there is only despair, he said, as gangs pillage and threaten residents.
“For some time there has been a huge threat toward Pont-Sondé and you don’t sense any huge effort was made to stop what happened,” Mésidor said. As he sent the church’s condolences, he directed his questions to those in charge: Members of the presidential council, the prime minister, the security council, the police chief. “Who is watching over the population? You don’t see that everything the armed groups say they are going to do, they carry out without exception?”
Despite the various international meetings and the presence of the Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission in Haiti, Mésidor said, “things have gotten worse.”
He names the cities that have fallen under gang control since the first contingent of Kenyan police officers began arriving on June 25. “Mariani, Gressier, Ganthier and Pont-Sondé.”
“What is it that you are waiting on to give the public the possibility to live in peace at home? How many communities are we going to allow to fall to show that we have sensitivity for the people?” the archbishop said.
The leaders in Haiti’s new transitional government took control in March after Prime Minister Ariel Henry was forced to resign by the U.S. and Caribbean Community amid a gang rampage on the capital. At the time, the public was also demanding Henry’s ouster, citing the rising tide of gang attacks, dead police officers and kidnappings. The new transition includes members of Haiti’s leading political parties and some of Henry’s staunchest critics.
“Do you, those in charge, not see that you are on the same road as those who were here before you?” Mésidor said. “The transition that you are running doesn’t show itself at all to be a transition of difference. The same errors they made are the same errors that continue to be made. The same scandal, the same problems, the same indifference.”
“The population is fed up; it is asking for your help,” he said. “Open your ears, shake yourselves off. Things are bad.”
Local News
Comments / 0