FAT TAKES TWO BULLETS, AND HAITI'S TORMENT CONTINUES
(Toronto Star) - By Jennifer Wells, Feature Writer
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
Romeo and Juliet
PORT AU PRINCE—At approximately 8 a.m. Friday morning, Saint Juste Fausther died in a Port-au-Prince hospital, having taken two bullets to the head the day prior.
He was 24. Everyone called him “Fat.” That was his DJ nickname. Fausther was a beat maker, they say.
“He was a good guy,” says Evings Jean Gilles, who lived with Fausther in the Champs de Mars tent city near the national palace. “He was all about his music. It’s because of him I have a DJ card.”
“Sound Street Mix,” it says on a plasticized identification card Gilles retrieves from the one-room, dirt-floor shanty in the tent camp. He appears all pumped up as he shows it off. Gilles’ wife, Nadege Bijoux, lives here too. Three tucked in a little box. Until today.
Suddenly, running. The surreal sound of gunshots in the distance. Or perhaps not so far away. It’s hard to tell. In a fraction of a second the residents in this little pocket of Champs de Mars, those who are left, are sprinting in all directions. Gilles dashes away. Shakes it off. Comes back.
He recounts the events of Thursday afternoon. He recalls the sudden influx of Jude Celestin supporters in freshly unpacked bright yellow T-shirts. They ran toward the tent city, and toward a sweetly curious multicoloured shack close by Gilles’ home. Fausther and others ran inside the little shack, which is brightly painted in striped colours of blue and orange and green and has a photo of exiled ex-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide on the outside.
A well-known thug named Yvon Zap Zap came running forward in a yellow Celestin T-shirt.
Eyewitnesses say he was armed, and yelled, “Come out with your hands up.” Just like in the movies. Fausther came out and took two bullets. His blood stains have soaked into the wooden floor of the tiny porch of the curious little shack, and down on the ground in front of it. Flies have gathered, feasting.
“He’s head of the Celestin gang,” says one of the tiny group of young men that has now gathered round, referring to the fittingly named Mr. Zap Zap.
A fellow on a red motorcycle approaches. He says he’s heading to the hospital to photograph his dead friend Fausther. There should be evidence for what the Celestin gang has done, he believes.
There’s talk like that now in Port-au-Prince. In the capital the post-election madness has devolved from “protesters” and “supporters” to “gangs” and “territories.”
Delmas to Petionville: That’s Martelly territory. Cité Soleil and the neighbourhood called Poste Marchand: Celestin has those locked down. “If you don’t vote for Celestin in Cité Soleil you get slapped,” says a local media fixer.
The shooting in Champs de Mars was a message. “They were shot to set an example,” says one young man in the camp. “If they continue to protest against Jude Celestin, René Préval . . .”
What goes unsaid is that if they continue to protest there will be more violence.
Celestin’s party publicly put out the call to mobilize. There was no mistaking that.
Fausther’s life was just beginning, or at least turning a chapter. He was getting ready to go to the U.S.
Gilles is on his knees in the dirt in the dark of his home. Reverentially, delicately, he retrieves all of his friend’s documentation. He displays Fausther’s passport application and laminated birth certificate. Touchingly, he handles Fausther’s high-school diploma as if it were as delicate as angel hair. “The only reason he didn’t go to Miami was that he didn’t have his passport yet,” he says.
Outside the hut, Champs de Mars is grey and dreary, washed of all colour, a pale water colour of a ghost town. A woman with a knotted expression on her face anxiously accompanies a fellow who is lashing a mattress and a suitcase and an enormous bundle of clothing to a wheelbarrow, as if the distance between safety and peril is but a hair’s breadth. The woman says she is very afraid. She’s moving to Fort National. The man she is with will not answer a single question, but runs away with the wheelbarrow at such sharp speed that the woman has difficulty keeping up.
A nearby water tank is empty. The water bladders brought after the earthquake of Jan. 12 are empty too, slumped near the base of the black plinth honouring “La Constitution.”
The little market stalls are shut up tight. Police appear out of nowhere and young men in fast compliance raise their shirts to prove they are not armed.
Mid-morning, the fellow on the red motorcycle returns. He has taken his photo, recording it, of course, on his cellphone. The photo displays a white unzipped body bag and within that the dead form of Saint Juste Fausther, a.k.a. Fat. True, he took two bullets to the head.
The captivating Kompa sounds of the great Haitian band Skah Shah are blaring outside the Glory + Pepe Depot where you can buy a Prestige beer in its stubby brown bottle or a King Cola.
You would think this was a Friday afternoon like all others. The market street is vibrant and pulsing with activity. Women sell the tiniest bundles of wood fire starters and bags of soap powder and charcoal. Spaghetti, garlic, oranges. It’s a colourful tableau.
Curious how the Celestin posters plastered on the walls and poles in this ’hood have not been defiled. Celestin banners that have been strung high across the roadway are also untouched.
Where tree trunks in Petionville are painted pink for Martelly, here they are painted green and yellow for Celestin’s Unity party.
The Martelly guys daren’t come here, the Martelly guys for whom the “Tét Kale” cry is meant to suggest a cultural brotherhood for all that is wrong with Haiti. Tét Kale, for the Celestin crew, means the Martelly gang.
The Martelly guys are thugs, says Rebert Sanon, dressed in a basketball jersey, wearing a badge that identifies him as president of the Nouvel Ordre Social Pour Une Haiti Organise Verte. Jude Celestin supports many such organizations, says the 24-year-old Sanon. Celestin has been very generous. On a nearby building someone has spray painted the words: “Jude + Jobs = Deliverance.” Here, being a Celestin supporter means being able to eat, to send children to school.
Sanon talks about all the good work Celestin did as head of the country’s roadworks. Consider all the roads he put into regions far away where there were no roads before. Celestin spent a great deal of time in those regions during the election. He was simply seeking acknowledgement, says Sanon, who believes those voters supported Celestin — President Rene Préval’s dauphin — in stupendous numbers.
He’s quite blasé about the recount announced Thursday by the country’s provisional electoral council. He says Celestin’s true tally is 52 per cent and that the presidency is assured. “If anyone should be protesting it is us who should be protesting,” he says, referring to the thousands-strong wave of Martelly supporters that have lit the streets on fire and thrown down blockades.
Awaiting the revised tally, he has surprisingly great concerns about order and cleanliness for such a young man.
He was so concerned that he organized a whole cleanup crew Thursday, and gave them all brand new Celestin T-shirts and shovels and gloves and very innocently, in his telling, headed down to Champs de Mars, even though it’s not their turf. He is exceptionally clear on this point: The government supported the cleanup initiative. They were behind it 100 per cent.
It is true that Senator Joseph Lambert of the Unity party took to the airwaves Wednesday, urging supporters to “clean up” the streets of Port-au-Prince.
“Together we were going to clean up the street,” Sanon simply explains of the crew that came on board. And, well, you know how it goes. “Some supporters of Jude Celestin feel like kids should not be staying at home, they should be back at school, so they picked up guns to make everything go back to normal.”
Because in Haiti some people believe that “normal” can only be recaptured with a bullet.
With this world view the cleaners came to clean up the streets, like an NGO-paid cash-for-work crew, when all of a sudden people in the tent city started throwing rocks and the Celestin crew had no choice, says Sanon, but to retaliate. “Champs de Mars is very dangerous,” he adds.
“Everyone has a gun you know.”
The conversation is a small comic opera, the preposterous Sanon telling his preposterous tale.
But still, we continue.
Mr. Yvon Zap Zap. Was he part of the group? “Yes,” Sanon replies, he was one of the “soldiers.”
Zap Zap used to have a Rara band, a band infused with vodou rhythms. How is he equipped on the gun front?
“He’s not a police officer so how can he have gun?” comes the straight-faced reply. You know, Sanon reminds, citizens have been told that even if they have a gun licence they are prohibited from carrying a gun at this time.
Violence?
It is the house of Martelly that is expert in that, Sanon insists. They don’t have the financing and the firepower of Celestin forces. “They just use Micky as a cushion to do violence . . . these guys are not really protesters. They are taking advantage in order to steal things out of stores.”
Daylight vaporizes so quickly.
There is little life at Champs de Mars. Three women sit at the lip of the tent city, three metres or so apart, roasting corn, hoping to make a few gourdes from the locals in what was, two days ago, Saint Juste Fausther’s community.
They will leave soon, these women.
And dark will come and the international community will be asked for its opinions on how to fix this latest crisis.
In life’s deepest irony, Sarah Palin is on her way.
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