Over 6,000 people in Haiti leave their homes after a gang attack left dozens dead

Nearly 90% of displaced people are staying with relatives in host families, while 12% have found refuge in other locations, including a school, the International Organization for Migration said in a report last week.

The attack in Pont-Sondé occurred in the early hours of Thursday and many left the country in the middle of the night.

Gang members “came in, shot and broke into houses to steal and burn. I just had time to grab my children and run in the dark,” said 60-year-old Sonise Mirano on Sunday, camping with hundreds of people in a park in the nearby coastal town of Saint-Marc.

After the attack in the Artibonite region, bodies lay scattered on the streets of Pont-Sondé, many of them killed by a shot in the head, Bertide Harace, spokesperson for the Commission for Dialogue, Reconciliation and Education to Save the Artibonites, told Magik 9 radio station on Friday.

Initial estimates put the number of people killed at 20, but activists and government officials discovered more bodies as they entered areas of the city. The victims included a young mother, her newborn baby and a midwife, Herace said.

Prime Minister Garry Conille promised in his comments in Saint-Marc on Friday that the perpetrators would face the full force of the law.

“It is necessary to arrest them, try them and put them in prison. They must pay for what they did and the victims must receive compensation,” he said.
The U.N. human rights office of the commissioner said in a statement it was “appalled by Thursday’s gang attacks.”

The European Union also condemned the violence in a statement on Friday, saying it represented “a further escalation of the extreme violence inflicted on the Haitian people by these criminal groups.”

The Haitian government deployed an elite police unit based in the capital Port-au-Prince to Pont-Sondé after the attack and sent medical supplies to help the region’s lonely and overwhelmed hospital.

Police will remain in the area as long as necessary to ensure security, Conille said, adding he didn’t know whether it would be a day or a month. He also appealed to the population: “The police cannot do this alone.”

In Artibonite, where much of Haiti’s food is produced, gang violence has increased in recent years. Since that surge, Thursday’s attack is one of the largest massacres.

Similar incidents occurred in the capital, Port-au-Prince, which is 80% controlled by gangs. Typically they are related to turf wars in which gang members target civilians in areas controlled by rivals. Many neighborhoods are unsafe and people affected by the violence have not been able to return home, even if their homes were not destroyed.

More than 700,000 people, more than half of them children, are currently internally displaced across Haiti, the International Organization for Migration said in an Oct. 2 statement. That was a 22% increase since June.

Port-au-Prince is home to a quarter of the country’s displaced people, who often live in crowded places and have little or no access to basic services, the agency said.

Those forced to flee their homes are largely being housed by families, who have reported significant hardship, including food shortages, overwhelmed health facilities and a lack of essential goods in local markets, according to the agency.