Today, I met the infamous chimères – two young men, Lavalas activists from
the Delmas 2 sector of Bel Air, one of Port-au-Prince's popular
neighborhoods. Their names are Désir St Phard and Fan Fan Fénélon, and
they are on the run. When I left them late this afternoon, they didn't
know where they were going to sleep tonight. But they know where they want
to be in a few months, if they can make it.

Port-au-Prince, Haiti, September 26, 2005

Today, I met the infamous chimères – two young men, Lavalas activists from
the Delmas 2 sector of Bel Air, one of Port-au-Prince's popular
neighborhoods. Their names are Désir St Phard and Fan Fan Fénélon, and
they are on the run. When I left them late this afternoon, they didn't
know where they were going to sleep tonight. But they know where they want
to be in a few months, if they can make it.

Fénélon was a guard at the National Palace, on duty the night of February
29, 2005, when Aristide's presidency was kidnapped by U.S. marines. He
remembers the half hour of darkness in the palace–the black out during
which Aristide was put into a helicopter and flown into exile—and his
frustration at his inability to prevent what took place.

Since that black-out, Fénélon has felt threatened. He had every reason to
believe that he was a potential political target of paramilitaries led by
Guy Philippe (an ex-member of the Haitian army and former police chief,
trained by U.S. Special Forces in Ecuador in 1994) who led the rebellion
against Aristide or others backed by Group 184--the alliance of civil
society (mostly business elites) behind the 2004 coup d'état. But he says
that fear didn't stop him from working with Désir and other young Lavalas
activists from trying to organize against rising unemployment among the
people in their neighborhood—many of them people thrown out of the civil
service after the interim government took power.

Things got worse. Fénélon and St-Phard recount how from July 6 to 23 of
this year, a dozen unidentified men wearing balaclavas came and torched
fifty-four houses in Delmas 2 to the ground. Why? Because the residents
were associating—maybe even organizing—with Fénélon, St-Phard and their
colleagues. Then a month ago, a friend and colleague of theirs named Ton
Ton was hacked to death by paramilitaries wielding machetes.

So now they are hiding, and there is no one to back them up. The Fanmi
Lavalas party to which they remain faithful is divided and distracted by
the upcoming elections, and the popular movement that brought that party
to power twice in ten years is by all accounts in tatters. The sort
violent repression that people like Fénélon and St-Phard have experienced
over the past year is only the latest tactic in a long list used by the
U.S., France, Canada, and Haitian elites to undermine, divide and
ultimately destroy that movement. (A history of Lavalas might
appropriately be titled "Twenty-Five Ways to Destroy a Popular Movement.")

The interim government instated after the coup has not protected them,
allowing them instead to be targeted by the national police force in the
name of security, and scapegoating them for all the kidnappings that have
beset Port-au-Prince over the past year and a half. They are bestialized
by the national and international press with the label chimère—a reference
to the mythical monster which is part serpent, part goat and part lion.
And MINUSTAH forces participate in the criminalization, refering to them
as gang members, their neighborhoods as gang-infested areas to be
pacified.

So Fénélon and Désir are in hiding, moving from place to place, keeping a
low profile, not seeing their families much, and trying to avoid the same
fate as their friend Ton Ton. Now they want to go to Canada, to find some
safety there.

Fénélon and Désir fit a profile--not of gang members or monsters, but of
people in need of protection from political persecution. The question is,
will Canada accept them as refugees, when that would mean admitting that
the Canadian government--which supported the coup and which contributes to
the MINUSTAH mission here--is playing a role in creating the very
conditions that have left these two young men in need of protection?