The
temple, or peristyle, supported its community through the brutal
Duvalier dictatorship and the cataclysmic 2010 earthquake that killed
250,000 people.
Martissant,
a neighborhood on the southwestern edge of Port-au-Prince, has for
years been a notorious battleground for warring armed groups. In 2021,
gang members invaded the temple, pillaged its artifacts and burned it to the ground.
“This
space was so important to me,” Erol Josué, a houngan, or Vodou priest,
told The Washington Post. “The gang members lost their humanity. Nothing
is important to them anymore. … The sacred spaces are no longer
important.”
As gangs maraud through Haiti’s cities mostly
unchecked, they are now targeting groups that had once been spared such
violence — a sign of how the new level of lawlessness here is
shattering long-standing taboos.
“What
we are observing today in terms of attacks on religious is
unprecedented,” said Laënnec Hurbon, a Haitian sociologist who studies
religion in the Caribbean. “There’s a desacralization of almost
everything in Haiti. Everything that could bind the society … is
nonexistent.”
The violence has shuttered peristyles, churches and mosques,
making it difficult for people to worship freely. The victims span
different faith groups: an Italian missionary nun who cared for poor
children was killed last year. So was a Vodou priest. Seventeen American and Canadian missionaries were kidnapped in October 2021. A Catholic priest was taken hostage in February. Several dozen worshipers were attacked last month after a Vodou ceremony near Canaan, a shantytown controlled by gangs.
Parishioners and priests have been kidnapped from their churches during Mass.
Haiti’s
religious sector is now “directly” targeted in the security crisis,
according to the Port-au-Prince-based Center for Analysis and Research
in Human Rights. Initially, most of the victims were Christians, but Vodouists have increasingly been targeted. Roughly 40 have been killed by gangs since 2022, the research group said.
At
least 10 peristyles have been attacked since 2021, according to
Saint-Clou Augustin, a houngan. Insecurity has rendered more than 20
Catholic parishes in the capital “dysfunctional,” according to the
Archdiocese of Port-au-Prince, forcing priests to move their services
online.
“The
Church is doing its best to accompany the Haitian people,” the
archdiocese said in April, “and urges leaders and politicians to change
their bearings to alleviate the weight of the suffering and misery of
the Haitian people.”
Gangs
are not new to Haiti. But they’ve grown in power since the
still-unsolved assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021,
slaughtering civilians, extorting businesses and blocking humanitarian
aid in a country that the United Nations has warned is teetering on the brink of famine.
With
little help from underequipped police or an unelected and unloved
government, Haitian civilians have begun to form vigilante brigades,
killing suspected gang members in their neighborhoods themselves — a
development that has drawn both popular support and concern.
In
the absence of strong democratic institutions, faith communities have
provided much-needed aid and education to the general population. The
great majority of primary and secondary school students in 2022 were
enrolled in private schools, which are typically run by religious
groups, the U.S. State Department reported.
“In
this community, religion is really important,” said Mickaël Payet, an
emergency care delegate with the International Committee of the Red
Cross. The ICRC works with religious leaders to mobilize aid and
transport victims of gang violence to hospitals, he said, because “they
are well accepted.”
But
in recent years, no one here has been immune from the carnage. Violence
against religious groups isn’t rooted in discrimination, analysts and
religious leaders themselves say, but by a belief that they are
well-funded and can pay exorbitant ransoms to recover victims of
kidnapping.
Vodou, which is deeply stitched into the fabric of Haiti, faces unique challenges.
The
religion has roots in the faith traditions of the enslaved Africans,
who were brought to the island of Hispaniola, which Haiti shares with
the Dominican Republic, and the Roman Catholicism of the French and
Spanish colonists and missionaries.
Many
Haitians credit a Vodou ceremony at the wooded area of Bois Caïman as a
pivotal gathering in the Haitian Revolution, in which the Africans cast
off their French enslavers and founded the world’s first Black republic.
In
2003, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former Catholic priest,
issued an executive decree recognizing Vodou as a “religion in its own
right” — and “an essential element of national identity.”
But
the faith, which centers on devotion to lwa, or spirits, has long been
misunderstood and stigmatized, first by the French enslavers, later by
Americans during the 19-year U.S. occupation and, today, members of the
Haitian political and religious elite.
After the substandard
sanitary practices of U.N. peacekeepers introduced cholera to Haiti in
2010, seeding an epidemic that killed almost 10,000 people, some blamed
Vodou. Mobs lynched houngan, mostly with impunity.
Now,
in yet another time of crisis, religious leaders and analysts say some
are blaming Vodou for Haiti’s insecurity. Some gang members claim Vodou
has made them invulnerable to bullets.
“As
a result, many Vodouists suffered violence and threats of violence
during the year,” the State Department said in a 2022 report on religious
freedom, “both from gangs and non-gang members who thought Vodouists
supported gangs, affecting all citizens regardless of religious
affiliation.”
Josué,
the Martissant houngan, is also a musician who blends Vodou sounds with
contemporary ones. He was singing an homage to Moïse after the
assassination when he learned his peristyle had been destroyed. He
continued to sing, he said, but struggled to get the words out.
Josué
was raised by his grandmother in the sprawling Port-au-Prince
neighborhood of Carrefour, where the melody of merchants selling their
wares was the soundtrack of his childhood. He later moved in with his
mother and her partner, a houngan who taught him about Vodou.
After the peristyle was destroyed, Josué said he lost weight and was sick with worry.
“It’s
an enormous loss for the country,” he said. “The peristyle with its
sacred objects tells the story of the country. They are the museum of
the people in a country where the state does not build museums.”
He detests how gang members have hijacked and co-opted the religion, fueling its further stigmatization.
“The gangs have no respect for the sacred,” he said.
Augustin,
who heads the Royaume of Vodou, an organization representing 3.9
million members, said gangs descended on his vehicle in August 2021 as
he left a Vodou ceremony in Artibonite attended by 50,000 people. They
forced him out of the vehicle and stole it, he said.
He has little hope there will be justice.
“The state cannot protect itself,” he said, “so it cannot protect us.”
