“Amnesty is a French word. In Creole, it means “bwa kale”,” a police officer from the town of Jérémie declared via WhatsApp
One afternoon in September 2022, a resident of Turgeau surprised a young man in the act of stealing the battery from a vehicle in a private courtyard.
Armed only with his tools, the young man is severely beaten. But the citizens decide to call the police to get him back.
Arriving on site, the agents – transported by a white and blue pickup truck – brutally smashed the young man in the back of the vehicle, an AyiboPost journalist noted.
As they left the scene, one of the police officers turned to the crowd with a disapproving look: “You have a ravine nearby and you are calling the police for a thief?”
Armed only with his tools, the young man is severely beaten. But the citizens decide to call the police to get him back.
On April 24, 2023, fourteen suspected bandits were handed over by police officers to a furious crowd in Canapé Vert, according to a human rights organization.
The event marked the beginning of the “bwa kale” movement through which elements of the population set themselves up as police officers, investigators and vigilantes.
Any individual suspected of banditry, caught in action, or traveling without a national identification card, in an area that is not their own, can be intercepted, questioned and sometimes killed.
On April 24, 2023, individuals suspected of being bandits were shot and then burned with tires by a furious crowd in Canapé Vert. | © Jean Féguens Regala/AyiboPost
Barricades are set up to surround certain neighborhoods.
Vigilance groups are sometimes formed, to watch night and day at entrances and exits.
Read also: Pictures | Barriers are increasing at the entrance to neighborhoods in P-au-P
204 alleged gang members and relatives died between April 24 and June 24, 2023, according to the Center for Analysis and Research in Human Rights (CARDH) in a report published on June 24, 2023.
Since the launch of the movement, several hundred, perhaps even thousands, of people suspected of banditry have been lynched by the population almost everywhere across Haiti.
These acts occur in a country caught in the trap of organized crime.
By 2023, the United Nations reported more than 4,700 homicide victims nationwide.
In the first quarter of 2024, around 2,500 people were killed or injured in gang violence, according to the UN, which last year approved the deployment of a security mission, led by Kenya, to help police fight gangs.
The operating procedures of the mission are not yet public.
But already, a muscular intervention by police officers – alone – or supported by foreign elements introduces a window for slippages and an acceleration of summary executions of the Bwa Kale type.
A curious teenager scrutinizes a charred body in the streets of Port-au-Prince on March 4, 2024, in Rue Oswald Durand, a few meters from the National Palace.
Contacted by AyiboPost, presidential advisor Lesly Voltaire fears the flight of gang members outside the capital, thus increasing the possibilities of violence against the rural population.
“No one is in favor of an amnesty,” according to Voltaire, who calls for the creation of a justice and truth committee to encourage gangs to hand over their weapons.
Watch this explanatory video from AyiboPost which allows you to understand the concept or the word “Amnesty”, very common in Haiti currently:
Hundreds of police officers have fled the country in recent years. Estimates for 2023 put the workforce of the PNH at 13,000 agents for a country of more than eleven million inhabitants.
Between June 2022 and June 2023, the National Network for the Defense of Human Rights (RNDDH) recorded fifty-eight police officers murdered.
This is why any call perceived as leniency towards gang leaders receives a lukewarm reception within the police institution. An institution of which dozens of members have died in recent years in clashes with gangs.
“Amnesty is a French word. In Creole, it means “bwa kale”,” a police officer from the town of Jérémie declared via WhatsApp.
Some neighborhood vigilance brigades are led by police officers, accompanied by sometimes armed civilians.
Pierre, for example, is a divisional inspector. He has coordinated a vigilance brigade in the Carrefour-Feuilles slum since the launch of the “Bwa Kale” movement.
Presidential adviser Lesly Voltaire fears the flight of gang members outside the capital, increasing the possibility of violence against the rural population.
Pierre’s men regularly carry out searches on all unknown people frequenting the area.
The executive of the police institution says he is monitoring so that no member of his troop abuses innocent people.
These precautions do not prevent slippage.
On April 24, 2023, for example, a young man was murdered in Turgeau because he had no identity document with him, noted an AyiboPost journalist. Relatives, transported to the scene, then affirmed that he had no link with banditry.
In a report released in May 2023, the RNDDH rebelled against “the state authorities who are hiding behind [le] movement [bwa kale] to encourage the Haitian population to eliminate for them, the links they maintain with the individuals they have armed and to prevent at the same time, that Justice does not reach back to them.
At AyiboPost, the RNDDH program manager, Marie Rosy Auguste Ducena, criticizes the “anti-ethics” behavior of the police officers who handed over the fourteen people suspected of acts of banditry to the population in April 2024.
Read also: Pictures | Tattooed Haitians under constant threat of “Bwa Kale”
The movement takes place in a context of dysfunction of the country’s sovereign institutions, often out of step with the needs of society.
Haiti’s legal system, modeled on French law, contains century-old texts. The Penal Code dates back to 1825 and the Civil Code to 1835.
“It is because justice does not normally fulfill its function that the population is doing justice to itself through the Bwa Kale movement,” believes Ducena.
Long before Bwa Kale, recourse to formal justice represented an exception in certain rural areas.
“Justice does not function under normal conditions [notamment] because of the incessant strikes in the system,” notes criminal law specialist Me Frantz Gabriel Nerette to AyiboPost.
And this private revenge would be motivated by all of the “disgusts and frustrations of the population towards the state apparatuses [incapables] to give results,” analyzes Me Nerette.
It is because justice does not normally fulfill its function that the population is taking justice through the Bwa Kale movement.
– Marie Rosa Augusta Ducena
Private management of justice and community security is not new in the country’s history.
The former policeman Abelson Gros Nègre participates to vigilantism initiatives at Carrefour-Feuilles.
The former spokesperson for a police union says he witnessed in 1991, “despite the fact that I was still a child”, the response of the slum’s vigilance brigades “to bandits who wanted to besiege the area”.
The historian and professor at the State University of Haiti, Derinx Petit Jean, distinguishes at least five movements with traits similar to the Bwa Kale in the history of Haiti.
First, at 18e century with the picket movement started in 1843 in the south and led by Jean Jacques Acaau.
Then, the Zinglins movement, a paramilitary group which originated under the government of Faustin Soulouque.
The “zero tolerance” policy under the presidency of Jean Bertrand Aristide. And the two versions of the Peyilòk movement, in 2019 and 2022 respectively.
Private management of justice and community security is not new in the country’s history.
“We are here because Port-au-Prince is becoming a hypertrophied zone,” analyzes Professor Derinx Petit Jean. “The majority of residents live in the capital. Which creates a concentration of fear.
The movement does not solve the problem of displacement of people due to the phenomenon of insecurity in the country, according to specialists.
If in the past we did not move so as not to be kidnapped or raped, today “the “Bwa Kale” movement has reduced the movement of people to other places where they are not known so as not to be killed,” declares to AyiboPost the sociologist Mordochée Gédéon.
Moreover, most gangs start out as community protection associations.
“This is the case for most of the gangs in Cité-soleil, Grand Ravin, Martissant, Village de Dieu, etc.,” notes sociologist Fritz Dorvilier.
“These groups can become tools of repression and exercise forms of symbolic and physical violence: lack of respect for elders, members of the population, predation on community resources, shootings, brutality,” concludes the sociologist.
We are here because Port-au-Prince is becoming a hypertrophied zone. The majority of residents live in the capital. Which creates a concentration of fear.
– Derinx Little Jean
The movement gives rise to scenes of incredible violence, sometimes shared widely on social networks.
Interviewed by AyiboPost, Dr. in Clinical Psychology and Psychopathology, Jeff Matherson Cadichon, talks about the possibility for spectators to experience psychological pain, fear, astonishment, anguish or even shame. .
On October 13, 2003, at one o’clock in the morning, while a gangue of darkness enveloped Alcius alley in the commune of Gonaïves, around three armed men, with their faces uncovered, dismantled the doors and brutally invaded Chenet’s house located in Descahos .
In the hustle and bustle of the hour, it quickly clicked in the mind of the man, who was in his thirties: his home was invaded by thugs.
His motorcycle, his wife’s gold rings and other valuables were taken away.
The next day, individuals were identified by the population as the perpetrators of the attack.
Read also: “Kafou lanmò” are multiplying in Port-au-Prince
Fifteen days later, one of them was captured in the heights of Morne Blanc, in the commune of Gonaïves, by a handful of alert people at ten o’clock in the evening.
His body is butchered with a machete. Her bare stomach is topped with her penis torn off and exposed to the open sky.
There is no indication whether the man actually took part in the burglary.
Par Fenel Pélissier, Widlore Mérancourt, Rolph Louis-Jeune & Legrand Junior
Jérôme Wendy Norestyl participated in this report
Cover image: a mota rd and his passengers drive near a burning body in Port-au-Prince in April 2023.
The photos are from Jean Feguens Regala/AyiboPost.
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