Rare display of defiance

Press, 29 May 1984, Page 8

Rare display of defiance

NZPA-AP Gonaives, Haiti Residents in Gonaives, north-western Haiti, said yesterday that police brutality and anti-Govemment feeling had sparked four days of rioting last week in a rare flare-up under the authoritarian Duvalier regime. Submachine-gun-toting soldiers enforced calm yesterday. Dozens of people were injured as the police and soldiers, arriving on Friday from the capital, Port-au-Prince, swiftly quelled the riots which began on Tuesday. At the police barracks on Sunday, a reporter said that he could hear a steady, “thwack, thwack,” accompanied by moans inside a

cell. From another cell, a soldier escorted a bearded man whose foot was wrapped with a bloody bandage. The soldier told the man, “you may go.” “No-orie knows how many have been arrested. They beat them, then send them home,” said a teacher, who wanted to be identified only as “Jean.” The rioting was possibly the largest public disturbance in the 13-year rule of Jean-Claude Duvalier, who succeeded his late father, Francois “Papa Doc,” as President-for-Life in 1971. Residents said that the rioting had been sparked by the police’s beating of a pregnant woman, who had since died of her injuries. They said that it was the

latest in a series of such beatings. Residents said that people had begun “spontaneously” assembling on Tuesday for a march on police headquarters. A handful of people who had crossed the police barricades surrounding the building were clubbed by rifle-butts, witnesses said. “There were no leaders. It was a people’s revolt. Food prices go up every day and their tiny income remains the same,” said a lawyer who would not give his name. Suprvisors at the only hospital in Gonaives refused to give any information about people arriving with riot injuries. “Jean” said that most of the injured people did not seek treat-

ment, fearing that they would be turned over to the police. A 9 p.m.-to-dawn curfew was imposed on Saturday. Two American Mormon missionaries, John Burchett, aged 22, and Les Wright, aged 23, said that they had found themselves in the middle of a mob on Friday. They had ridden their bicycles past police barricades. “No-one stopped us, but two Haitians, also on bikes, who followed us were pushed off their bikes and kicked,” Mr Wright said. Mr Duvalier, under pressure from Western aid donors, has made some moves to relax the brutal authoritarianism that characterised his father’s rule, which began in 1957.