Ja: How Haiti got into this mess?

If this is true, these guys need their heads examined.

HAITI'S TRIP to the brink of civil war began last September, when Amiot Metayer, the leader of a gang of street thugs called the Cannibal Army that enforced President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's will in the northern city of Gonaives, threatened to reveal details of the murder of opposition figures. It was presumably in connection with some quarrel over the division of the spoils, but Metayer was promptly murdered. His widow then conducted a voodoo seance in which his soul appeared and identified his killers: local supporters of President Aristide.

Thereupon the Cannibal Army switched sides, changed its name to the Gonaives Resistance Front, and started killing Aristide's prominent backers in the city. Meanwhile in the capital, Port-au-Prince, non-violent demonstrators protesting Aristide's rigging of the 2000 elections were being murdered by government-backed vigilantes known as chimeres (monsters): 45 were killed between September and January. Then on February 5 the former Cannibals seized control of the whole city of Gonaives, killing and mutilating over a dozen policemen.

Since then they have seized more towns in the north and been joined by various unsavoury figures from former regimes like former police chief Guy Philippe and former paramilitary death-squad leader Louis-Jodel Chamblain. Aristide denounces them as 'terrorists' while his own thugs continue to attack the non-violent protests of the civilian opposition in the capital.