Graveyard quiet of huge Haiti slum signals progress

By Tom Brown

CITE SOLEIL, Haiti (Reuters) - It is a measure of success for President Rene Preval that calm prevailed in Haiti's largest and most violent slum during recent food riots in the Caribbean nation.

The pacification of Cite Soleil, a teeming warren of shanties south of Haiti's capital with sufficient size and guns to undermine governments, is one of the few concrete achievements of Preval, who starts his third year in office this week.

Residents offer scant praise for the 65-year-old president. Some suggest that peace in a place so crowded that some families sleep in shifts is more like the quiet of a graveyard than a sign of hope in one of the poorest places in the poorest country in the Americas.

"Many people just don't have the energy to take to the streets and demonstrate here the way they used to," said Sergo Pierre, a Cite Soleil shop owner.

"Nobody's really helping the people of Cite Soleil," he said. "The people in Cite Soleil are doomed."

Soon after taking office in May 2006, Preval authorized the U.N. peacekeeping force in Haiti to launch a crackdown on the notorious armed gangs of Cite Soleil, whose leaders were mostly loyal to ousted former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and who ruled their domains like warlords.

The gang leaders have since been arrested or fled but community activists say the government has failed to fill the power vacuum left behind.

And unlike Aristide, who remains immensely popular in Cite Soleil, Preval is no longer seen as a champion of the poor who swept him to office. His government has been buoyed by international aid but is widely seen as slow to address the needs of people like those in Cite Soleil who scrape by on less than $2 a day.