Kidnapping II

Here are a few more points about the kidnappings.

The kidnappings terrorize the rich and the poor. No class of people has been immune from being snatched. The kidnapping of children to this degree is a new phenomenon.

One of our Haitian Hearts patients called his host family in the United States and asked them to encouraged us to go home, as he was worried about our safety. Our little commitment asleep on the mattress prevents us from doing this. We stay in a safe place, so that's good.

The kidnappings get a lot more media coverage than the kids dying quietly in the slums. Unless the hospital morgue workers put out their bodies in a courtyard to protest their low wages, which happened this week at the General Hospital in Port-au-Prince.

The kidnappings hurt Haiti beyond the immediate victims. People don't want to come here or invest here when they learn about the crime. The kidnappings really hurt the economy.

There are all kinds of theories about why there are kidnappings. One is that the powerful people who control the drugs that move easily through Haiti want to keep the country unstable and the law enforcement corrupt and disorganized so they are allowed to conduct business as usual.

One of Wyclef Jean's workers was snatched. At the concert that Jean put on in Jacmel a few weeks ago, he pled for the release of his employee. The man was released, and this is what one of his captors had to say about kidnapping. "We freed the journalist after considering how much effort Wyclef is doing to help our sisters and brothers in the forgotten ghettos," said a captor who called himself the "Commander." "I don’t like what I’m doing, but I don’t think I have an alternative for the time being," said the Commander, who has three children himself. "Sometimes I really want to stop...I wish I could have a normal life. We also have feelings." Many of the gang members have had terrble lives and now resort to doing terrible things themselves.

Kidnapping

I was going to write a post about the kidnapping that's been going on in Haiti lately. Then I read the post my husband wrote at his fantastic blog, dyinginhaiti.blogspot.com and I decided, with his permission, to plagerize it. Why reinvent the wheel? Thanks honey!

On Tuesday my wife and I looked up when we heard the low rumbling chop-chop sound and saw a white UN helicopter circling over one of the major slums in Port-au-Prince. The pilot continued this maneuver for an hour. Obviously he was looking for activity on the ground.

We now know what he was searching for.There has been a string of new child abductions in Port-au-Prince. Gunmen abducted at least 10 children in and around Port-au-Prince this week. Approximately 100 adults and children have been kidnapped in November, and another 60 already in December.What has everyone’s attention in Haiti is that children are now being targeted. Many of the kids are released unharmed, but a six year old boy was recently abducted in the capital and taken to a large northern city and shot.

“Snatch teams” work in the city. They abduct adults by boxing in their vehicle in traffic and heavily armed thugs grab them. The victims are then transported to one of the local slums where gangs move the abducted around and make ransom phone calls from the ubiquitous cell phones which many people carry. Sometimes the abducted person is moved to another gang. Unless you live in the slum or are a gang member, no one can enter the slum safely, including the 9,000 UN soldiers in Haiti.

This week, at several schools in the capital, men would show up after school was let out saying they were the child’s guardian and that they were there to walk the child home. They have shown false ID’s and stolen the child. In an incident that made international news, a vehicle with seven children on board was hijacked by armed thugs just north of Port-au-Prince, and the kids taken. (All the children were released unharmed several days later after a ransom was paid.)

Several days ago a spokesman for the United Nations police force in Haiti said, “Now the kidnappers target children because they know the children are our hearts. They want to hit us in the heart so they can get the money more rapidly.”The residents of the capital are even helping police in door-to-door searches for the missing children.

Fear of kidnapping has led many schools in the capital to close until after the Christmas holidays. The number of children in their school uniforms, laughing and talking with each other while they walk down the sidewalk to or from school, has decreased. Haiti’s infant mortality rate is one of the highest in the world, most Haitian kids do not get enough to eat, suffer parasites, lack primary medical care, and carry heavy loads of water on their heads. When you think that Haiti’s children could not suffer any more injustice, you find out that you were wrong. They start kidnapping them.

Kidnapping Part III

Okay, okay, okay. I promise, no more about kidnapping . . . at least for today. It’s just that John’s down in our room, examining the buckshot-sprayed shoulder of the kidnap victim, Phillip, who was released this afternoon. At the end of this post is a newspaper article about his release. Read on for the real scoop.

Phillip’s SUV was ambushed by some rock-throwing dirt bandits near Cité Soleil, a large and dangerous slum filled with more than 200,000 desperately poor people, almost all of whom are victims also. For some reason, (God’s instinct), Phillip ducked to the right just as bullets were flying through both front seat windows, so the bullets missed his chest and hit his shoulder. He got out of the truck along with a Haitian man and a 4-year-old boy whom Phillip was taking to the U.S. embassy to get a medical visa for.

“Six hands were in my back pocket trying to get out my wallet, which was jammed in at an angle,” said Phillip. “I worked my hand in there and pulled out my wallet, and handed it to them.” The thieves ran with his wallet, and as Phillip stood there, dazed, a U.N tank rumbled by offering no assistance.

It was really Phillip’s unlucky day as it wasn’t this first group of criminals who kidnapped him, but a second, who pounced upon this bleeding, vulnerable American. The kidnappers commandeered Phillip’s phone and proceeded to call everyone in his address book demanding money. His son Chad negotiated with the criminals and the price proceeded downward from $300,000. As the day wore on, the bandits demands dropped to $2,000 U.S. and $10,000 Haitian.

At this point, Phillip’s family was a little worried that something really bad had happened to him. Why the dramatic decrease in the ranson demand? However, Phillip told us that about the time the price dropped, another Cité Soleil leader came into talk with him. He told Phillip, “If I had you, I’d let you go. You’ve been here 26 years (as a missionary) trying to help our people.” Apparently, this gang leader’s influence along with the fact that it was Friday and the kidnappers wanted to party and buy some guns (now there’s a recipe for trouble) convinced the kidnappers to drop their price.

A brave Haitian family friend (it’s always the Haitians who get the really dirty jobs) was drafted to drop off the money. He walked into Cité Soleil, and while he walked the kidnappers called him 5 times on his cell phone giving him directions. They led him to a place where he met a guy who insured he had the money and then put a gun to his head, saying he was going to kill him. Nice. Instead, Phillip and the little boy came out and they all took a tap tap to safety.

Phillip’s shoulder is okay. He’s a cool dude; I don’t think everything’s sunk in yet. The darling little boy who was kidnapped with him needs surgery because he ran into a nail sticking out of the wall at eye level, and he has to have his eye removed. Do the wonders of Haiti ever cease? Now, a U.S. senator has arranged for a plane to pick up this little boy and fly him to the States. We’d love Jackson to be on that plane, too.

Here’s the A.P. article on Phillip’s release.

AMERICAN KIDNAP VICTIM IN HAITI FREED

By ALFRED de MONTESQUIOU

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Dec 2 (AP) -- Gunmen have released 14 Haitian children
and an American missionary who were abducted in separate incidents, police
said Friday.
The missionary, Phillip Snyder, was released Friday after a ransom was
paid, said police Commissioner Francois Henri Doussous, head of Haiti's
anti-kidnapping unit. He would not specify how much was paid but said it
was "much less" than the $300,000 the kidnappers initially sought.
The gunmen released the children and their school bus driver unharmed
Thursday night, hours after their bus was hijacked by gunmen on the way to
school.
The kidnappings came five weeks before national elections to restore
democracy to Haiti, which has seen a sharp increase in abductions amid the
chaos following the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February
2004.
Doussous said police did not believe the latest kidnappings were
politically motivated. "This is purely criminal activity, the gangs need
money," he said.
It was not immediately clear who paid the ransom for Snyder. Doussous
said the kidnappers were members of criminal gangs based in Cite Soleil, a
sprawling seaside slum that is a base for heavily armed gangs blamed for
numerous kidnappings.
Snyder, 48, was treated for a gunshot wound to his shoulder and released
from a U.N. military hospital, police said. The president of Zeeland,
Mich.-based Glow Ministries International was abducted Thursday on the main
road leading north from the Haitian capital.
"My father is fine," Chad Snyder, the kidnapped missionary's son, said
in a brief telephone interview in Port-au-Prince.
The missionary's wife, Amber Snyder, said before his release that she
and her husband were aware of the dangers in Haiti but kept it in the back
of their minds. She said her husband's family has worked in Haiti for more
than three decades helping the poor.
"He's a foreigner. They assume every foreigner has money or has
resources," Amber Snyder, who met her husband on a Christian mission trip
in Haiti when she was 17, told The Associated Press before hearing of her
husband's release.
A young boy kidnapped along with Snyder was freed and in good condition.
The missionary had been helping the boy obtain a medical visa so he could
have eye surgery, Amber Snyder said.
"There's a tremendous sense of relief," Amber Snyder's uncle, Denny
Bull, said from Zeeland after Snyder was freed. "We had confidence that
this would happen. We just did not know when."
Haitian radio reported that an unspecified ransom was paid for the
kidnapped children, but Doussous said the gunmen received no money. He said
they released the hostages because of intense public attention and because
police checkpoints prevented them from returning to Cite Soleil on the
outskirts of Port-au-Prince.
The children were aged 5-17. There were no arrests.
Doussous said police favored negotiating with the gangs, fearing that a
raid on Cite Soleil would ignite a large-scale gun battle, endangering
innocent bystanders.
A U.N. peacekeeper was killed by gangs in October during a raid in Cite
Soleil to release a kidnap victim.
------
Associated Press Writer David Eggert in Zeeland, Mich., contributed to
this report.

Kidnapping Part II

I'm one of those people who can't get away with anything, so I should have known that when I made light of a behavior as serious as kidnapping, it would turn around and bite me. Yesterday, the father of a young American man we know was kidnapped as he drove to PAP from a town about an hour away. He called his son and told him that he'd been shot more than once and thought he was bleeding to death. The kidnappers were demanding ransom of $300,000. This man and his family, including the son, have lived in Haiti for a long time (the son was raised here), working as missionaries.

A friend of ours who employs the son and is staying where we are told us about all of this. Negotiations proceeded and our friend briefed us on what was going on. Today, just a short while ago, the man was released after much less money than was originally demanded was paid. There was scariness and more goofiness, too, that we can chuckle about only because no one was killed. Apparently, no American kidnap victim has been killed. But as our friend says, you don’t want to be the first.

Kidnapping. What, us worry?

It's probably not a good sign when we bump into Barbara at the Miami airport, and she says, "Did you hear we were kidnapped?" Barbara is a fifty-something women who facilitates adoptions in Haiti and gallivants around the world selling water purifications systems. With her bold and brash manner, her big auburn hair and her blue muumuus, Barbara is a novelist's idea of what an American who lives in a place like Haiti is like.

Barbara tells us that her guy Johnny, a Haitian, and she were driving on Airport Road when they were accosted by guys with guns. Barbara ran for it and made it, but they got Johnny and took him to Cite Soleil, where they also took another of our friends, who was kidnapped in October. Barbara said this crime happened in full view of UN troops, who did nothing to prevent it, other than shoot out the tires of her SUV.

Barbara and others on the opposite end of the political spectrum think the UN troops should go, Barbara because they aren't doing anything , like stopping kidnappings that happen under their noses, and the others because the troops are enabling the killing of innocent, poor people or in some cases killing people themselves. I'm afraid that if the UN weren't here, the violence and instablility would collapse the country even further, what with the incompetence and corruption of many of the police and the weak legal system. So I'm for the UN staying at least for now; maybe I wouldn't feel the same if I lived in Cite Soleil, a violent slum of 200,000 that has been cordoned off.

But anyway, I digress (get used to it). The kidnappers contacted Barbara and told her they wanted $10,000 for Johnny. Barbara said they'd give them a $1,000, and they agreed. The money was delivered, and Johnny was released. However, he didn't have a cent on him for a tap tap ride, so the kidnappers gave him $10 Haitian. I guess they wrote it off as a business expense. Though some of the kidnappings may be politically motivated, most seem to be cash raising expeditions. Our friend who was kidnapped in October, began praying and his kidnappers joined in. He was released after about a day.

I don't mean to minimize kidnapping by describing it in such a Keystone Cops kind of way. It is obviously a scary, serious crime and not all of the victims in Haiti have fared as well as our two acquaintances. The news reports from Haiti lately have indicated that kidnapping and other violent crimes have decreased. The American embassy, which pulled out its non essential staff earlier in the year, just had them return. Hearing these stories from people we know makes me wonder how accurately the news reports what is going on in Haiti. One thing is for sure, though: for better and worse, in its violence and in its everyday life, Haiti is a wacky place and that's what this post is meant to illustrate. We are always very careful.