POLICE KILL CHILD IN NEIGHBORHOOD FORAY

This Week in Haiti" is the English section of HAITI PROGRES
newsweekly. For the complete edition with other news in French
and Creole, please contact the paper at (tel) 718-434-8100,
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                 * THIS WEEK IN HAITI *

                 October 27 - November 3, 2004
                     Vol. 22, No. 33


Emmanuel Marcéus, known as Manno, was a skinny 9-year-old boy with a big
smile who loved to sing and dance.

On Tuesday, October 19, masked policemen shot him to death in the La
Saline slum, as he sat next to his mother and a market woman selling
candy, not far from his home.

Manno was just one of the victims of the police shooting spree that day.
But his story, as much as the escalating death toll, reveals the
arbitrary and brutal horror of the expanding police repression in
Port-au-Prince's popular quarters.

According to witnesses, a pickup with heavily armed policemen, dressed
all in black and masked like ninjas, roared up Rue St. Joseph in La
Saline near the TPt BPf market around 2 p.m. where a crowd was gathered.
Without warning, the cops began spraying people with automatic weapons.
People dove for cover. A16-year-old boy took two bullets in his leg but
managed to hobble away. Manno was not so lucky.

"The first bullet hit him in the foot and he fell," a neighbor who was
too afraid to identify himself explained. "Then he gestured with his
hand for someone to come pick him up. That was when the police shot him
in the chest. His guts spilled out. Then they shot him twice more in the
thigh and chest. He was a child. They riddled him with bullets."

As the boy lay dead or dying, a policeman walked over and shot him once
again in the head for good measure. The police vehicle then sped off, as
quickly as it had arrived, leaving the body in the street.

Manno's body lay there for the rest of the afternoon and evening. "We
thought that those [police dressed in black] had a plan to kill us all
in the St. Joseph neighborhood," the neighbor said. "That day was truly
terrible for us, as we watched Manno's body lying in the street all
evening." Finally, at about 10 p.m., Manno's family brought his body
home.

Manno had lived in a one-room hovel with his mother, grandmother, two
aunts, and a little brother. "You can imagine how difficult life was for
him, with six or seven people living in one room," the neighbor said.
One can also imagine the traumatic night the family spent with Manno's
body in their cramped quarters.

Starting at 5 a.m. the next morning, the family and neighbors began
trying to get an ambulance to take Manno's body to the central morgue at
the General Hospital. When they went to the nearby police station at
Portail St. Joseph, the policemen inside joked: "With all the yelling we
heard last night in St. Joseph, we thought 50 people had died."

The staff at the central morgue refused to take the body, saying it was
full. Only four days earlier, the Haitian Health Ministry had to arrange
emergency vehicles to remove 600 bodies that had piled up there over the
previous two weeks. The penniless family had to turn to neighbors to
take the body to a private morgue in the Tokyo neighborhood of Cité
Soleil.

Despite their poverty, Manno's family had still managed to send him to
school at the Kindergarten Minoulu on Rue St. Martin. He was in
Preparatory 2, the equivalent of fourth grade.

The police murder of the boy has the St. Joseph neighborhood seething.
"We've been watching," the neighbor said. "When the masked policemen in
black go through a neighborhood like Rue St. Martin, Rue Tiremasse, or
Fbtouwon, three or four victims are shot. We have only to remember the
recent case of two laborers. They were carrying stuff on Rue Tiremasse
when the assailants [police] told them to put their hands up. But they
already had loads on their head, and the police shot each of them twice.
So we think that if there is such a thing as 'chimPres' [the bourgeoisie
's epithet for armed Lavalas partisans], we think it is the assailants
and the de facto government who are 'chimPres.'"

The 16-year-old shot twice in the leg was operated on at the Canapé Vert
hospital. One of the bullets shattered his knee.

Manno's killing has embittered the entire neighborhood of St. Joseph.
The people's desire for a return to democracy, as well as justice for
Manno, has deepened, neighbors say. "The police come and kill people and
then try to blame it on the 'chimPres,'" a neighbor said.

"We all knew Manno," the neighbor continued. "He loved to sing and dance
for people. His death has made all the kids in the neighborhood very
sad."