World
Haiti vigilante push ‘symptomatic’ of state’s failures: Advocates
Gedeon Jean describes it as a “collective awakening”.
Over the past several weeks, groups of Haitian citizens armed with machetes, sticks and other makeshift weapons have banded together to root out suspected gang members and try to end the killings, rapes and kidnappings destroying their communities.
The Centre d’analyse et de recherche en droits de l’homme (CARDH) rights group that Jean leads said suspects have been “chased, beaten, decapitated and then burned alive” by members of the grassroots vigilante movement – dubbed “Bwa Kale”, or “peeled wood” in Haitian Creole.
At least 160 suspected gang members were killed between April 24 and May 24, CARDH said in a report this month, and as a result, Haiti has seen “a dramatic decrease” in kidnappings, killings and other forms of violence linked to the armed groups.
However, Jean said while the movement has had “considerable” effects, it does not present a long-term solution to the violence gripping the Caribbean nation of about 12 million people. Instead, he said Haitian state institutions must be reinforced and take responsibility for protecting citizens.
“We’re in a situation in which the population has to defend itself,” Jean, CARDH’s executive director, told Al Jazeera in a phone interview. “Bwa Kale is symptomatic of the collapse of the state,” he said.
“Citizens can’t really protect themselves … It’s the role of the institutions, of the police, of the state – to take steps so that [they] can exercise their mandates.”
Escalating violence
The Bwa Kale movement formally began on April 24, when a mob lynched more than a dozen suspected gang members and set their bodies on fire in the streets of Canape Vert, a neighbourhood of the capital, Port-au-Prince.
In a brief statement on Facebook that day, the Haitian National Police (PNH) said officers had confiscated weapons from “armed individuals” travelling in a minibus. “More than a dozen individuals travelling in this vehicle were unfortunately lynched by members of the population,” the force said.
Images shared online and by international news agencies showed a crowd of people standing near a pile of charred human remains.
The lynching came after nearly two years of escalating violence in Port-au-Prince and other parts of Haiti, where armed groups have been vying for control in the political vacuum caused by the July 2021 assassination of former President Jovenel Moise.
Haiti’s de facto leader, Prime Minister Ariel Henry, whom Moise chose for the post just days before he was killed, has faced a crisis of legitimacy — and attempts to chart a political transition for the country have failed.
Haitian state institutions largely do not function, the PNH is underfunded and lacks resources, and rights groups have denounced the authorities for failing to hold gang members and their backers accountable for the rising violence.
Against that backdrop, Bwa Kale emerged not as an organised movement, but rather as a “spontaneous” push by residents going around, “looking for known gang members” and killing them, said Louis-Henri Mars, executive director of Lakou Lape, a peacebuilding group in Port-au-Prince.
Mars cautioned that the wave of vigilante killings could potentially ensnare people who are not involved with gangs, or serve as a means for people to enact revenge for unrelated slights. It also is not a long-term solution, he said.
But Mars told Al Jazeera that it is difficult to blame the population for “taking matters into their own hands” because the Haitian authorities have failed to protect them. “It’s a testimony to the ineffectiveness of the [police] and to the ineffectiveness of the government to subdue the gangs,” he said.
History of vigilantism
This also is not the first time that vigilantism has gripped Haiti.
After the brutal reigns of former Haitian President Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, ended in 1986, Haitians sought to rid the nation of all signs of Duvalierism in a process known as “dechoukaj” – literally, uprooting.
The period of political and social change included lynchings of suspected Duvalier supporters and members of the duo’s widely feared Tonton Macoutes paramilitary brigade, which killed and tortured thousands of people during the Duvaliers’ combined 29-year dictatorship.
“Beyond advocating political changes, some Haitians periodically attacked suspected ‘Macoutes’ and, in some cases, hacked their presumed former persecutors to death,” Human Rights Watch wrote in a 1996 report marking a decade since the formal end of Duvalierism.
The rights group said the Haitian population’s “frustration with the judiciary’s historic corruption and complicity with the military” had fuelled further incidents of vigilante violence, including “public accusations of thievery after which mobs descend on and beat the accused to death”.
Danielle Jung, an associate professor of political science at Emory University in the United States and co-author of the book, Lynching and Local Justice: Legitimacy and Accountability in Weak States, said collective vigilantism tends to emerge more often in places with weak rule of law.
Jung, who did research on the practice in Haiti in 2017, told Al Jazeera that one Haitian focus group participant summed it up succinctly at the time: “It might not be the best justice, but it’s justice.”
While collective vigilantism is not unique to the Caribbean country – similar movements have emerged in South Africa, Brazil and elsewhere – Jung said it enjoyed relatively high levels of approval and legitimacy in Haiti.
Still, she said that generally speaking, creating a robust judicial system and strong state institutions through which community members can achieve justice could disrupt the phenomenon and “be a really important piece of the solution”.
“It’s no one’s first choice. I think in most of these cases, [people] would prefer to turn to state institutions and state courts,” Jung said. “But because they feel like they don’t have that option, communities take this on themselves.”
Path forward
Back in Port-au-Prince, Mars at Lakou Lape said the Haitian authorities and society at large need a multi-pronged approach to go beyond Bwa Kale and end the cycle of violence.
Building trust in Haitian state institutions will be a critical step, he said, that can only be achieved if the authorities take action against all the illegal armed groups operating in the country, “not just some of them”.
Mars said the government should threaten to use “a big stick” but at the same time offer a “planned, exit strategy” for gang members, as well as a form of transitional justice for those who have suffered.
“The victims of the gangs, as the population demonstrated with the Bwa Kale movement, are very resentful of what they’ve gone through. They’ve lost loved ones, they had to pay money that they didn’t have, they lost homes,” he said.
The state must bolster its presence and establish programmes to address the underlying issues underpinning the violence, including poverty and unemployment, Mars said. The relationships between armed groups and some politicians and businesspeople also must be addressed.
“People know that the population in the neighbourhoods [is] fed up with the situation, but the tendency a lot of times is for this awareness to come to the forefront and for some reason, the movement slows down or dies, and people go back to business as usual,” he said.
With Haiti’s population expected to rise in the coming years, inaction could lead to dangerous results, Mars added.
“If we are in the same economic and social system and structures and conditions that we’re now in, what’s going to happen 10 years from now? It’s not Bwa Kale that we’re going to have any more. We’re going to have something far worse.”
World
SZA Finally Releases Long-Delayed ‘Lana’ Album, Featuring Kendrick Lamar, Lil Yachty and Benny Blanco
SZA‘s long-awaited the deluxe edition of her Grammy-winning 2022 album “SOS,” which is titled “Lana,” has finally arrived. The album has been through a long series of false alarms — it seemed imminent back in February, when she released the song “Saturn” — and bears artwork similar to the insect-and-forest imagery featured during her tours last summer, but it’s finally here. Variety‘s full review of the album will appear this weekend.
The album features Kendrick Lamar on the track “30 for 30” (SZA appears on two songs on his recent “GNX” album) and production from Lil Yachty and Benny Blanco on one song each. Her collaborators on the other songs are largely “SOS” producers and writers like Michael Uzowuru, ThankGod4Cody, Rob Bisel, Carter Lang and others.
She previewed the album with a video for the song “Drive,” featuring Ben Stiller, on Thursday night. “Lana”‘s full tracklist appears below:
1 No More Hiding – produced by Michael Uzowuru
2 What Do I Do – produced by Benny Blanco, Carter Lang and ThankGod4Cody
3 30 for 30 feat. Kendrick Lamar – produced by J White
4 Diamond Boy (DTM) – produced by Carter, Scum, Solomonophonic, Declan and Michael Uzowuru
5 BMF – produced by Carter Lang, Blake Slatkin, Omer Fedi
6 Scorsese Baby Daddy – produced by Michael Uzowuru and Tyler Johnson
7 Love Me 4 Me – produced by Rob Bisel, Carter Lang and Nick Lee
8 Chill Baby – produced by Lil Yachty, Sad Pony, Cade, Calvin Dickinson, iseeyou and Julian Fried
9 My Turn – produced by ThankGod4Cody, Rob Bisel
10 Crybaby – produced by ThankGod4Cody, Carter Lang and Declan
11 Kitchen – produced by ThankGod4Cody
12 Get Behind Me (interlude) – produced by Michael Uzowuru
13 Drive – produced by ThankGod4Cody and Billy Lemon
14 Another Life – produced by Michael Uzowuru and Dylan Wiggins
15 Saturn – produced by Carter Lang, Rob Bisel, Solomonophonic and Monsune
SZA’s forthcoming stadium tour with Kendrick Lamar presents a prime opportunity to release new material — she’s been touring behind “SOS” since it was released two years ago.
The latest round of teasers began a week ago, on the two-year anniversary of “SOS,” with a short video trailer that included a snippet of one of the album’s tracks. The video depicts SZA in a nature setting, pulling down her baggy camo pants to pee by a creek. She looks directly into the camera before taking a tissue out of her pocket to wipe herself up as the words “Lana” appear across the screen. She lyrics to the song go, “You know we got a real history/That’s the reason I can’t choose me/You know that dick been good to me/You make it hard for me to choose me.”
While SZA has been talking about a deluxe edition of “SOS” since that album’s release, she explained the album and its to Variety in August of last year: “[‘Lana’] is outtakes [from ‘SOS’] and new stuff, too — I added a couple of songs. It’s like a whole new project. It’s called ‘Lana’ — my name but, it’s the first tattoo that I ever got, when I was 13. It was 10 bucks a letter and I only had 40, so that that became my nickname for no reason. ‘Lana’ is really just the B-side of SOS.”
The album seemed imminent in February when she released “Saturn,” but just a few weeks later, SZA became frustrated by fans leaking songs and posted that she would be “starting ‘Lana’ from scratch” because “y’all leaked three songs from the deluxe.” She continued, “At this point, y’all can keep the throwaways and leaks. I’ll be starting ‘Lana’ from scratch. Do not ask me about it again,” adding a few minutes later, “I’ll round up the leaks y’all already got and u can have those. Seems like a fair deal. ENJOY.” That tweet was deleted shortly afterward. In a subsequent series of tweets, she said the deluxe edition of SOS will now feature “the leaks and outtakes” and “Lana” will be its own album. “Lana deserves more time and music no one’s ever heard before,” she wrote. However, she seems to have reverted to her previous plan.
World
Malaysia agrees to resume 'no find, no fee' hunt for flight MH370, 10 years after plane disappeared
Malaysia’s government has agreed in principle to accept a second “no find, no fee” proposal from a U.S. company to renew the hunt for flight MH370, which is believed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean more than 10 years ago, Transport Minister Anthony Loke said Friday.
Loke said Cabinet ministers gave the nod at their meeting last week for Texas-based marine robotics firm Ocean Infinity to continue the seabed search operation at a new 15,000-square-kilometer (5,800-square-mile) site in the ocean next year.
MALAYSIA ANNOUNCES RENEWED PUSH TO FIND MH370 DECADE AFTER DISAPPEARANCE: ‘SEARCH MUST GO ON’
“The proposed new search area, identified by Ocean Infinity, is based on the latest information and data analyses conducted by experts and researchers. The company’s proposal is credible,” he said in a statement.
The Boeing 777 plane vanished from radar shortly after taking off on March 8, 2014, carrying 239 people, mostly Chinese nationals, on a flight from Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, to Beijing. Satellite data showed the plane deviated from its flight path to head over the southern Indian Ocean, where it is believed to have crashed.
Flight officer Rayan Gharazeddine scans the water in the southern Indian Ocean off Australia from a Royal Australian Air Force AP-3C Orion during a search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, March 22, 2014. (AP Photo/Rob Griffith)
An expensive multinational search failed to turn up any clues, although debris washed ashore on the east African coast and Indian Ocean islands. A private search in 2018 by Ocean Infinity also found nothing.
Under the new deal, Ocean Infinity will get $70 million only if significant wreckage is discovered, Loke said. He said his ministry will finalize negotiations with Ocean Infinity in early 2025. The firm has indicated that January-April is the best period for the search, he said.
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“This decision reflects the government’s commitment to continuing the search operation and providing closure for the families of MH370 passengers,” he added.
Ocean Infinity CEO Oliver Punkett earlier this year reportedly said the the company had improved its technology since 2018. He has said the firm is working with many experts to analyze data and narrow the search area to the most likely site.
A last-minute budget bill has passed in the United States House of Representatives to keep the federal government funded and running through mid-March, averting an impending shutdown.
The continuing resolution now progresses to the Senate with only hours to spare before the shutdown is slated to take effect on Saturday at 12:01am local time (05:01 GMT).
On Friday evening, the temporary budget legislation sailed through the House with an overwhelming 366 votes in support.
Only 34 representatives, all Republican, voted against the bill. One Democrat, Representative Jasmine Crockett of Texas, abstained by voting “present”.
“We are really grateful that tonight, in bipartisan fashion with overwhelming majority of votes, we passed the American Relief Act of 2025,” Mike Johnson, the House speaker, said in a news conference after the vote.
The stopgap bill, however, omitted one key issue that had stalled recent negotiations: the debt ceiling.
Normally, Congress weighs federal spending separately from the debt ceiling, which limits how much the government can borrow.
But this week, President-elect Donald Trump scuttled an earlier bipartisan bill in part because it did not extend or abolish the debt ceiling, which he compared with a “guillotine” dangling over his incoming administration.
The debt ceiling has become a divisive issue among Republicans, some of whom feared extending or eliminating it would pave the way for unfettered government spending.
Trump, for his part, threatened to set up primary challenges for any Republican who opposed his plan. He signalled that he preferred the debt ceiling debate to happen under the outgoing administration of President Joe Biden, a Democrat and his erstwhile election rival.
“Unless the Democrats terminate or substantially extend Debt Ceiling now, I will fight ‘till the end,” Trump said in a social media post on Wednesday. “This is a nasty TRAP set in place by the Radical Left Democrats! They are looking to embarrass us in June when it comes up for a Vote.”
Trump’s opposition to this week’s bipartisan legislation put him at odds with Johnson, another top Republican leader. Johnson’s predecessor for the speakership, Republican Kevin McCarthy, was ousted last year in a historic vote over his role in passing a bipartisan spending bill.
After the first bipartisan bill was scuttled on Wednesday, Trump backed another version that failed in the House a day later, on Thursday. All Democrats opposed it, as well as 38 Republicans.
Friday’s bill managed to restore Democratic support after closed-door negotiations. In his remarks after the vote, Johnson tried to cast the latest spending deal as a win for Trump’s America First economic platform.
“This is America First legislation, because it allows us to be set up to deliver for the American people,” Johnson said.
He also hinted at changes to come in January, when a new Congress is sworn in and Donald Trump takes office for a second term. When that happens, Republicans will hold majorities in both chambers of Congress.
“In January, we will make a sea change in Washington,” Johnson said. “Things are going to be very different around here. This was a necessary step to bridge the gap, to put us into that moment where we can put our fingerprints on spending for 2025.”
Like earlier bills, the temporary stopgap measure that passed on Friday contains approximately $10bn in farm aid and $100bn in disaster relief, a priority after the destruction of hurricanes like Helene and Milton.
But the sabre-rattling that had accompanied an earlier version of the bill had largely subsided by Friday night, with Trump allies like billionaire Elon Musk striking a conciliatory note.
Musk, who had decried a Wednesday version of the bill as “criminal”, praised Speaker Johnson after the vote on Friday night for streamlining the legislation.
“The Speaker did a good job here, given the circumstances,” he wrote on his social media platform X. “It went from a bill that weighed pounds to a bill that weighed ounces.”
Democrats, meanwhile, questioned Musk’s growing influence over the Republican Party. Musk is slated to advise Trump’s incoming administration in a new role, as part of a nongovernmental, yet-to-be-established agency known as the Department of Government Efficiency.
“Obviously, the thing Donald Trump wanted, he didn’t get,” Representative Jared Moskowitz of Florida told reporters as he walked down the Capitol steps. “It looks like Elon got some of the things he wanted. So that’s interesting.”
Moskowitz credited the Democrats for giving the Republicans the majority needed to pass the bill in the House, despite internal dissent within the right-leaning party.
“The drama that went on here for the last two days didn’t need to happen,” he said. “And we literally wound up in the same place we were always going to wind up in, which was the Democrats providing the majority of the votes to keep the government home open and deliver for the American people.”
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