World

Twelve people, eight of them Turkish citizens, were kidnapped while travelling by bus in Haiti, officials said Monday, as the Caribbean country struggles with a surge of attacks by increasingly powerful gangs.

The group were taken hostage Sunday as they drove to the capital Port-au-Prince from the neighboring Dominican Republic, Turkish consul Hugues Josue told AFP.

He said they were members of Muslim association Ashape, which has since 2019 provided language courses and religious education, according to its website.

“During their abduction, they got off the bus and had time to contact their organization,” he said. Haitian police confirmed the kidnapping.

They were abducted east of Port-au-Prince, between the communes of Croix des Bouquets and Ganthier, Josue added, saying the five men and three women are aged between 20 and 26.

They were on a bus that left Santo Domingo, the Dominican capital, at 9.00 am carrying “a Dominican driver, a Haitian hostess and 10 passengers,” said Michaelle Durandis, a representative of the Metro bus company.

“Among the 10 passengers, there were eight Turks and two Haitians,” she told Haitian radio Vision 2000, adding that she had had no contact after the vehicle crossed the border in the middle of afternoon.

The United Nations said last week that clashes between rival gangs in northern Port-au-Prince have claimed the lives of at least 75 people since fresh violence erupted on April 24.

The world body said it was “deeply concerned by the rapid deterioration of the security situation” in the city.

– Hospitals closing –

For decades, armed gangs have run amok in the poorest neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince, but they have increased their hold across the Haitian capital and the country at-large in recent years, sending murders and kidnappings skyrocketing.

On Monday, two charity hospitals in the capital said they were closing “until further notice” following the kidnapping of one of their pediatricians last week.

“Without the presence of health personnel, who have been targeted on many occasions and are unable to reach health facilities safely, health care cannot be delivered”, said Richard Frechette, president of the foundation “Our little brothers and sisters,” which has operated in Haiti for more than 30 years.

The UN has denounced the “extreme violence” of the gangs, saying local sources recorded “acts of sexual violence, including the gang rape of children as young as 10 years, and the terrorization and intimidation of the local populations living in areas controlled by rival gangs.” 

It estimates that as many as half a million Haitian children have lost access to education because of gang violence.

Last October, the “400 Mawozo” — one of the most powerful and feared of the gangs — abducted a group of 17 North American missionaries and their relatives, including five children.

After five of the group were released, the rest escaped to safety in December.

The district where the violence has been centered contains the only road access to the country’s north as well as between Haiti’s capital and the Dominican Republic.

Since June, authorities have also lost control of the only road connecting Port-au-Prince to the south. 

The head of the Red Cross on Monday said he discussed in Iran the plight of Afghan migrants who fled their country after the Taliban took power last year.

“Afghanistan was very much present in the conversation, especially in the wake of the recent developments that we witnessed in August with the change in the government,” Robert Mardini told AFP after two days of talks in Tehran with Iranian authorities.

“The discussions were positive. We see eye to eye,” said Mardini, director general of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

More than one million Afghans have sought refuge in Iran since the Taliban returned to power in August, according to Iran’s state news agency IRNA.

Thousands of Afghans daily try to cross into neighbouring Iran in search of work, or in a bid to reach Europe in the hope of asylum.

The Islamic republic now hosts a total of five million Afghans, according to Iran’s foreign ministry.

Mardini said the ICRC discussed with Iran’s Red Crescent ways of “providing critical health services to Afghan migrants and refugees”.

“We did that during the Covid pandemic where the Iranian Red Crescent, with our support, was able to provide vaccination services to Afghan migrants,” he said.

Mardini said he also discussed in Iran the situations in Yemen and Syria and the effects of the armed conflicts, as well as climate change, in those countries.

Talks with Iranian officials at the foreign and interior ministries also focused on the fate of missing persons from the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, he said.

According to him “around 40,000” people are still considered missing from that eight-year war which ended in 1988.

“We support the two governments in clarifying the fate of the missing persons… Every year, on average, there are between 600 and 800 human remains that are being repatriated to their families,” Mardini told AFP.

While most Mexicans celebrate Mother’s Day on Tuesday, thousands of women will mark the occasion by continuing their desperate mission to find out what happened to their missing children.

Five of Maria Guadalupe Camarena’s nine children are among the more than 95,000 people who have disappeared in the violence-plagued Latin American country.

“There are five empty chairs. There’s nothing to celebrate here,” said the 61-year-old domestic worker from the western state of Jalisco.

Asked about her plans for Mother’s Day, she answered without hesitation: “Look for my children.”

Jalisco is the Mexican state with the most missing people — nearly 15,000.

Camarena’s daughter Lucero vanished in 2016 after going to a job interview.

Four of her sons disappeared in 2019 when they were traveling by road to visit a relative and were detained by police.

Although two officers were accused of forced disappearance, they have not been tried and there has been no official search operation.

The United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances in April urged Mexico to tackle an “alarming trend” of rising enforced disappearances, facilitated by “almost absolute impunity.”

– A mother’s mission –

Araceli Hernandez, 50, has photos of her daughter Vanessa and son Manuel, in their 20s, on an altar in her home.

She has not heard from them since 2017 when first Vanessa disappeared and then her brother while he was looking for her.

“They had been missing for about four months when I grabbed a backpack, some bottles of water, a wooden stick and started walking in the hills,” Hernandez said.

She joined the growing number of mothers who have formed associations that comb the countryside for clandestine graves that might hold their children’s remains.

She also walks the streets of the city of Guadalajara putting up missing person posters, tearfully kissing the images of her son and daughter.

“It’s my mission as a mother,” she said.

‘My life project’

When she wakes up each morning, Rosaura Magana, 61, lights a candle and prays next to a photo of her son Carlos Eduardo.

He disappeared five years ago when armed men who said they were from the prosecutor’s office arrived at his workplace and took him away with three others, two of whom were released.

“I never thought this would be my life project,” she said of the days she now spends looking for her son instead of enjoying her retirement.

She criticized the authorities for the lack of progress in the case.

The two people who were freed refused to say what happened and the case has gone through six prosecutors and eight investigative police officers, Magana said.

– ‘We found nothing’ –

Azulema Estrada, 49, has learned on her own about the laws and excavation techniques needed to look for Ivan Alfredo, who disappeared in 2020 aged 30.

Her son was taken by gunmen from his home in the northern state of Sonora along with his partner.

A search of a hillside where their remains are suspected to be buried was unable to cover all the ground, and when lookouts working for drug cartels spotted them it became too difficult to return.

“Unfortunately we found nothing,” she said.

In Mexico, even searching for the missing can carry significant risks.

Disappearances began during the Mexican authorities’ so-called dirty war against the revolutionary movements of the 1960s-1980s.

They soared after the government launched a military offensive against drug cartels in 2006, since when more than 340,000 people have been murdered in a spiral of violence.

According to the government, there are around 37,000 unidentified corpses lying unclaimed in forensic services, though activists believe the number is more than 50,000.

The authorities aim to use genetic testing to reunite more parents with their children’s remains.

But in the meantime, with morgues overflowing, some corpses are buried before they can be identified.

Violence raged across Sri Lanka late into the night on Monday, with five people dead and some 180 injured as prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa quit after weeks of protests.

Those killed in the worst unrest since the crisis began included a lawmaker from the ruling party who shot two people. Another ruling party politician gunned down two others.

Earlier in the day, government supporters in the capital Colombo attacked with sticks and clubs opponents angry over Sri Lanka’s worst economic crisis since the island nation’s 1948 independence.

“We were hit, the media were hit, women and children were hit,” one witness said, asking not to be named, as dozens of people were admitted to hospital.

US Ambassador Julie Chung tweeted that Washington condemned “the violence against peaceful protestors” and called for the Sri Lankan government “to conduct a full investigation, including the arrest & prosecution of anyone who incited violence”.

The clashes precipitated the resignation of prime minister Rajapaksa, the elder brother to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. In stepping down, the premier said he was paving the way for a unity government.

But it was unclear if the opposition would join any administration with Gotabaya Rajapaksa as president, and the resignation failed to assuage public anger.

Retaliatory attacks by government opponents were reported across the island of 22 million people even after police declared an indefinite curfew.

Thousands of protestors tried to storm the official residence of the prime minister in the capital, setting fire to a truck at the entrance as they breached the main gate.

Police responded by firing tear gas and gunshots into the air from the residence where Mahinda Rajapaksa remained holed up.

Witnesses saw several tear gas cannisters hit the US embassy compound across from the Temple Trees residence, a key symbol of state power in the South Asian island.

Officials said the military deployed hundreds of troops to guard the outgoing premier and his aides at the building.

– Surrounded –

Elsewhere, ruling-party lawmaker Amarakeerthi Athukorala shot two people and then took his own life after a mob of anti-government protesters surrounded him outside Colombo, police said.

Athukorala’s bodyguard was also found dead at the scene, police said.

Another ruling party politician who was not named opened fire on protesters in the southern town of Weeraketiya, killing two and wounding five, authorities said.

Police reported that dozens of homes of ruling party politicians were attacked by angry mobs across the island, setting fire to houses and vehicles. 

Buses and trucks used by government loyalists to bring people to the capital earlier in the day were also targeted.

Doctors at Colombo National Hospital, where more than 180 people were treated for injuries, intervened to rescue wounded government supporters, with soldiers breaking open locked gates.

“They may be murderers, but for us they are patients who must be treated first,” a doctor shouted at a mob blocking the entrance to the emergency unit.

Crowds also attacked a museum devoted to the Rajapaksas in the family’s ancestral village in the deep south of the island, razing it to the ground, police said.

Several Rajapaksa homes were also torched in different parts of the country.

A hotel in Negombo owned by a close associate of Mahinda Rajapaksa’s children was set ablaze, along with a Lamborghini car parked inside. There were no casualties among foreign guests, police said.

– State of emergency –

On Friday, the government imposed a state of emergency granting the military sweeping powers to arrest and detain people, after trade unions brought the country to a virtual standstill.

The defence ministry said anti-government demonstrators were behaving in a “provocative and threatening manner” and disrupting essential services, in a statement on Sunday.

Sri Lanka’s crisis was sparked after the coronavirus pandemic hammered vital income from tourism and remittances, starving the country of foreign currency needed to pay off its debt and forcing the government to ban many imports.

This led to severe shortages, runaway inflation and lengthy power blackouts.

In April, the country announced it was defaulting on its $51 billion foreign debt.

“Mahinda Rajapaksa likely read the writing on the wall and realised it was time to go,” expert Michael Kugelman from the Wilson Center told AFP.

“But until and unless President Rajapaksa steps down, no one — whether the masses in the streets or key political stakeholders — will be appeased.”