Word: petition
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...peasant supporters of exiled President Aristide. Those who have escaped the region claim the army has conducted a scorched-earth policy in an attempt to deprive Aristide's allies of their food and livelihood. "They took everything we possessed," says Wilna Nelta Joseph, whose home in the town of Petit-Bourg was looted in April. "They left me with two empty hands." One farmer describes the destruction wrought by the army in the village of Petite-Riviere on April 25: "They burned down houses with everything in them. They cut down the banana trees, fruit trees, coconut trees. They shot...
Having gambled everything in the hope that their relatives and friends would be able to find work in the U.S. and send money home, the residents of Petit- Trou are discovering that the refugees' return did more than demolish expectations; it has also robbed the town of all vitality. In a community already knocked flat by poverty, the returnees have come to make up a separate and uniquely destitute class, devoid of land, possessions and hope. Having sold everything but what they could carry, they own nothing. Farmers can no longer till because someone else has title to their land...
...with an electric cattle prod. "The police kept yelling that we had fled to show support for Aristide," Esterlin recalls, "and that we should all be killed." Terrified, he broke and ran. Police were unable to catch up, so they went instead to Esterlin's mother's home in Petit-Trou. Still unable to find him, they fired several rounds into the house, wounding Esterlin's younger sister in the foot. "Now," says Esterlin, who spends most of his time these days working on a charcoal boat, "I am without a home and no longer go near the village...
...little chance of recovering what they lost. Instead they are forced to live off the goodwill of their impoverished neighbors, further hastening the downward spiral of a village already on its last legs. "Those who left and were granted asylum were the town's best people," says Gerard Phillippe, Petit-Trou's justice of the peace and the only one of the returnees who has carved out some measure of success. "They were the ones who organized the peasants and who would have one day run the town. Without them the town is dying. It stumbles from...
Last year Petit-Trou's only storyteller died, leaving no one to protect its memories, such as they have become. Already bereft of a future, the town now finds itself without its past as well. Yet astonishingly, plans are already in the works for still another boat, whose keel is secretly being laid a few hundred yards from where the Dieu Veut was launched. Rumor has it that about 1,000 similar boats are under construction by neighboring communities up and down the coast. If the embargo continues and Aristide fails to return, the call for "leaving day" will...