The right-wing evangelical defamation
of Voodoo does not end with the
misrepresentation of the Bois Caïman gathering as a Satanic pact:
it
includes the accusation of the ritual sacrifice of human beings, and
the propagators of the libel include Haiti’s ambassador to the United
States.
In doing the research for my blog entry “
The
Right-Wing
Evangelical
Libel
against
Haiti,” I was reminded at
times of the infamous
blood
libels against my own people, the Jews. For the enlightenment of
any reader not familiar with this quaint and venerable practice (do I
have to explain that I am
speaking ironically? I suppose I must, to prevent stupid
misinterpretation.
All right, then: I am, or rather was just now, speaking ironically), I
will explain how it works. A gentile, usually a Christian boy, is found
dead, or disappears, or is believed to have disappeared. (An actual
human disappearance, or even a specific identity for the one supposedly
missing, is not necessary for the proceeding.) The story is then spread
that the victim was abducted by Jews who used him for a
ritual sacrifice—insert here details of crucifixion or whatever else
excites
violent indignation—and drank his blood or used it in making matzah.
Attacks on Jews, ranging from harrassment to mass killing and
expulsion, usually follow. The great age of blood libels was in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but
they
continue
to
this
day. Forebears of mine suffered under them (though
as far as I know they were not physically
attacked or killed) in
Rhodes and
Damascus in
the year 1840. Needless to say, the practice reflects more on its
Christian inventors, who celebrate the onetime sacrifice of a
human
being by (at least in some denominations) ritually drinking his blood,
than on the
victims, whose law
expressly
forbids
them
to
consume
even
the
blood
of
animals (and no,
human
blood,
even
one’s
own,
does
not
get
a
pass).
The lie spread by right-wing evangelical Christians that
Haiti was born of a pact with the devil, and more generally that
Haitian Voodoo is a form of Satanism, struck me as similar to the
anti-Jewish blood libel in that both
are cases in which people of strongly held but narrow, ill-founded, and
ill-informed opinions project
their superstitious fears upon others. In the end, though, I
did not include this comparison in the piece, as it seemed to me a bit
of a stretch. For one thing, it does not seem to be a libel against
Haitians or
vodouisants to
say that the fabled meeting at Bois Caïman involved the ritual
sacrifice of a pig and the drinking of its blood: there is historical
evidence of such an event, and besides that, so far as I
know, Haitians by and large find nothing offensive in the idea. (
This
Haitian
writer deems the ritual as recounted in the historical sources “a
traditional Dahomean
blood
oath,” Dahomean religion being one of the African sources of Haitian
Voodoo.)
For another thing, what evangelicals impose on the story to defame
Voodoo is not the sacrifice of an animal but the idea of a pact with
the devil—hardly as inflammatory a charge as attributing to someone the
ritual
murder of a child and the drinking of its blood. (Some Haitians
have been reported to believe the meeting
at Bois Caïman to have involved the sacrifice of a human being: a
black slave in some versions, a French colonial soldier in others. See
Markel Thylefors, “‘Our
Government
is
in
Bwa
Kayiman’:
A
Vodou
Ceremony
in
1791
and its
Contemporary Significations,”
Stockholm
Review
of
Latin
American
Studies, No. 4, March 2009 (
PDF),
p.
79.
But
even
the
evangelicals
have
not,
so
far
as
I
know,
stooped
so
low
as
to try to get people to believe this.)
I was disconcerted, however, when I happened on an article published in
the
New York
Sun on August 19, 2003 under the title “Disturbing Disclosures of
Human Sacrifice” (for the moment I withhold the identity of the writer;
the article can be found on line, but, apart from the version available
through the Lexis service, which I quote here, only in an unreliable
altered version). The article begins:
In the wake of several defections from the embattled
Haitian regime, some disturbing disclosures about alleged human
sacrifice have thrown a new light on the ruling authorities in Haiti.
Executions early in the year 2000, prior to the fraudulent elections of
that summer and fall, were intended to ensure the return of
Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the presidency he had reluctantly
relinquished in February 1996. So said Johnny Occilius, a member of the
mayoralty of Cite Soleil, who defected last month.
Among the most scandalous of his disclosures was the gruesome sacrifice
of the first baby of a young mother, Nanoune Myrthil. The date was
important, Mr. Occilius said, in an interview. It was February 29, the
last day in a month that will recur in four years. And “the lamb” must
have been a first-born baby. Thus, the Myrthil baby was “at the right
place at the wrong time,” Mr. Occilius said. The administrator of the
State University Hospital in Port-au-Prince, also known as General
Hospital, Marie-Antoinette Gauthier, made possible the snatching of the
baby only 72 hours after birth.
Somewhere in the countryside north of the capital, the sacrifice took
place that same night. The live baby was crushed in a mortar with a
heavy pestle. Officiating was Voodoo sorcerer Henri Antoine from St.
Marc, the same thug who founded the pro-Aristide so-called popular
organization “Bale Wouze,” or “Clean Sweep” in
English. . . .
Meanwhile, Jean Michel Mercier, former assistant mayor
of Port-au-Prince, confirmed the disclosures of Mr. Occilius and added
that the execution last year of a powerful leader of a “popular
organization” was connected to the baby crime.
A baby stolen from the hospital and crushed to death in a mortar under
the
supervision of a Voodoo sorcerer! And this in a report in
The New York Sun—not exactly a
publication of the first rank, but still a newspaper with some
professional standards,
one would think. Initially, my search for confirmation or
disconfirmation of the report turned up nothing decisive. I found
reports that confirmed that the newborn child of a woman named Nanoune
Myrthil had indeed been abducted from the General Hospital of
Port-au-Prince around that date. But the only
materials that I could
find bearing on the alleged ritual sacrifice of the baby were reports
of the accusations of Occilius and Mercier that added nothing
pertinent. (Note, by the
way, that verifying that a baby was stolen from the hospital and never
found, however shocking that fact is by itself, does not license the
conclusion that the baby was sacrificed in a Voodoo ritual. Babies do
get stolen, usually either by people who want to raise them as their
own or by people who want to sell them to others to raise.)
Several features of the article raise suspicions.
The article appeared, not in the “Opinion” section, but in the
“Foreign” section of the newspaper; yet it hardly reads like a piece of
reportage. Take the first sentence: how can a
mere
allegation of human
sacrifice constitute a
revelation
that throws a new light on something? By what right does the writer,
in the third
paragraph (and in the title, though that may be an editor’s
contribution), identify Mr. Occilius’s charges as a “disclosure,” a
term that implies veracity? Why, in the fourth
paragraph, does the writer report the events of the alleged sacrifice
in direct speech, as if reporting facts, rather than attribute the
assertions to Occilius? The
sentence that immediately follows it (which I omitted from the
quotation above), far from calming these
suspicions, only exacerbates them:
The bestial crime boggles the mind, and some people
question the veracity of Mr. Occilius’s disclosures. But who would have
thought that men infected with the AIDS virus in South Africa believe
that they can be healed by having intercourse with a young virgin!
Who would have thought that the writer of a news
report, rather than simply stating the facts of what a certain person
said, would overtly take that person’s side? And who would have thought
that a news reporter would make use of emotional language, strained
analogy, and rhetorical question?
Plainly the article is not the work of a competent
professional reporter. But why would the writer, whoever he was (his
name was on the page, but at this point I made nothing of it), take so
partisan a
position in a news article? Further, the fact that my Web searches
turned up
no other
reportage of so monstrous an act, other than a few other mentions of
Occilius’s allegations, intensified doubt about those allegations,
though it did not constitute a refutation of them. Why would someone
make up such a story,
anyway?
Then I found
this:
a
transcript
and
translation
of
an
interview
conducted
in
Haitian
Creole
with
Sonia
Desrosiers
Lozan,
a former employee of the National Port
Authority of Haiti who claims to have
been present at the ritual killing of the child of Nanoune Myrthil.
(The Web
page
on which I found the transcript is dated October 30, 2009, but the
interview was
certainly conducted well before that date, as I found the same
transcript reproduced on
a
page dated March 5, 2007. The latter page
contains a narrative, written by Stanley Lucas, of the night’s events,
apparently reconstructed
from the interview, but adding many details, as if
the writer had himself been present.) Ms. Desrosiers reports that the
sacrifice took place at the home of then-President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide. She gives the names of several persons supposedly present:
President
Aristide; Grandra, the
houngan
(Voodoo priest; the embellished version by Lucas, who seems to have
been misled by the word “priest,” has him initially
appearing in the robes of a
Catholic priest); Marie Antoinette Gauthier, the director of the
General
Hospital, who, according to Desrosiers, brought in the baby (Desrosiers
says that it was
this that
led her to conclude that the baby was the one taken from the
hospital); General Wiltan
Lherrisson, the
head of the Haitian army; Jocerlerme Privert, the minister of the
interior; Jean-Marie
Chérestal, prime minister of Haiti during 2001 and 2002;
Annette
Auguste, popularly known as “So Anne,” a
Haitian singer and political activist for Lavalas,
Aristide’s party; and others. (The
Lucas version adds Aristide’s wife Mildred to the company and describes
the sweat on her upper lip.)
According
to Desrosiers, all the participants took turns working the mortar to
crush the baby, all the while “singing mystical songs and crying
that Aristide’s five-year term was non-negotiable. . . .
Mystical songs, throwing water, lighting candles, something totally
diabolic.” After the ceremony was completed,
she says, the
houngan gave
the president the heart of the baby in a bottle which he placed
in his private room, and the baby’s remains were interred in the
cemetery of Port-au-Prince, in “a sector where
they put the remains of the ceremonies. . . . When they
do these
ceremonies they always bury the remains of the dead so when they want
to light a candle and call the spirit back . . . they often
do that.”
Is it possible that this woman believes in the truth of her
account of events? Certainly. Indeed, it is likely that she does so:
even without
hearing the
original broadcast, one gets the impression from the translation of her
words
that she is entirely sincere. Is it possible that her
account of events is true? Certainly; in the same respect that it is
possible that President Aristide and his associates are all humanoid
aliens from another planet or gaseous entities made to appear fleshly
by
telepathic mind control, namely that there is no logical
contradiction involved in entertaining such bizarre and fantastic
hypotheses. But is there any reason to give this account of events any
credence?
On the “yes” side, there is the fact that Desrosiers seems
sincere in her testimony, that she held an official position in
Port-au-Prince at the
time of the reported event, that her
narrative is coherent and detailed, and that two other persons,
Occilius and Mercier, make similar assertions. On the “no” side is the
lack of hard
evidence that Satanic ritual sacrifice has ever occurred anywhere,
and
the extravagant improbability of such elements of her tale as that
there could
be a sector of the Port-au-Prince cemetery, known only to the
malefactors, where the remains of sacrificial victims are
regularly interred; that several highly placed government
officials including the president of the country and the director of
its largest hospital would conspire and participate in such an act; and
that, such a thing being done, no
evidence of its occurrence would come to light besides the
testimony of one self-declared witness and two other persons. That
Mercier was not a witness, even purportedly, is evident from the
transcript and
translation of a broadcast of Radio Vision 2000 in Port-au-Prince
on August 13, 2003 in which the reporter, after relaying Mercier’s
claims about the abduction and ritual murder of the Myrthil child, adds:
With this, Mercier confirms what Johnny Occilius said about
that
issue.
He says that he got that information from current Lavalas Deputy
André Jeune Joseph, who apparently took part in that
meeting.
I have not been able to discover any relevant further information about
this Mr. Joseph.
It is worth noting, by the way, that while Occilius is reported to have
said that it was “important” to the perpetrators that the baby be
snatched on February 29, a date that occurs only once in four years,
a
news
report
from
February
of
2001—two years before Occilius made
his allegations of ritual sacrifice and even longer before Desrosiers
gave her interview—gives the date of the theft as the night of February
26, 2000. Desrosier gives it as February 27. Also, Desrosiers
identifies the presiding
houngan
as a man named Grandra, while Occilius identifies him as Henri Antoine.
Such divergences are hardly the weakest features of their stories, but
they do add weight to the “no” side of the balance.
Another way to look at the matter is to consider the testimony of
Desrosiers as a given fact and to consider what is the most credible
explanation of it. There are three principal candidates: (1)
that she really did experience the events that she recounts, or events
much like them; (2) that she is lying; and (3) that she is
confabulating. It is obvious that, for the reasons given earlier, (2)
and (3) have vastly greater probability than (1). Between the two of
them, I consider (3) more probable than (2). Desrosiers’s story, with
its lurid detail, has much in common with the
“recovered
memories”
of
Satanic
ritual
abuse that flourished in the 1980s in
this country and elsewhere, initiated by a fraudulent memoir called
Michelle
Remembers and spread by quacks whose trade consisted in “helping”
people to “remember” similar events. Of course, the case of Desrosiers
does not involve any claim of a memory repressed and recovered, and in
any case, it concerns events from only a few years before her recital
of them. But her case exhibits the same conformity of apparent
memories to a widely used, pre-existent template.
Of course, to discredit the testimony of Desrosiers is not to prove
that no such event occurred. As I said before, it is possible that such
an event did occur. But all probability is against it, no strong
evidence is for it, and to believe
in its occurrence on the strength of the facts that have come to light
would be preposterous and irresponsible.
So how did this tale arise? An interesting document to look at in this
connection is
this item,
a
page
dated
January
21,
2001
written
by
Yves
A. Isidor, a
Haitian-American
professor of economics and spokesman of an anti-Aristide organization.
Isidor asserts, citing “a senior member of Aristide’s Lavalas Family
Party, also known as the party of Satan, the party of death, who
pleaded with us for anonymity,” that Aristide “reportedly was bathed in
November
[of 2000, presumably] in the blood of a dead Haitian by voodoo
priestess . . . Marie-Anne
Auguste, commonly known as So An.” This could be a sketchy and garbled
version of the Desrosier-Occilius-Mercier story or an
independently developed rumor, but in view of the order of the reports,
it is most likely the original story from which the
more
detailed version was subsequently derived by combination with the
actual event of
the disappearance of the Myrthil baby. The unnamed senior member of the
“party of Satan” who was Isidor’s source may be Mercier. Note that in
Isidor’s version, the blood sacrifice took place in November rather than
February of 2000. This is because, according to Isidor, the ritual was
designed to influence the American presidential election to secure that
the presidency go to Gore, who was likely to be friendly to Aristide,
rather than to Bush, who was likely to be hostile. (Clearly, the
spirits of Voodoo were no match for the Florida voting system or the
justices of the US Supreme Court. —I kid, I kid.)
Finally, I return to the question of the motives of the people
spreading these
tales. Obviously, they were actuated by animosity toward then-President
Aristide. One element of that animosity that is of particular interest
to me is the
religious one. Jean-Bertrand
Aristide was ordained as a Catholic priest of the Salesian order in
1983, though he was expelled from that order in 1988 on account of his
involvement in leftist politics and left the priesthood in 1994
(source:
Wikipedia).
I
do
not
know what position he may have taken in public regarding Voodoo
early in his career, but the piece by Isidor from 2001 makes clear that
at least some of his political enemies imputed Voodoo practices to him
long before he gave legal recognition to Voodoo as a religion in April
of 2003.
Aristide’s recognition of Voodoo,
according to
this
contemporary
news
report
from the BBC, “means that voodoo
ceremonies such as marriages now have equal standing with Catholic
ones.” The meaning given to the event by evangelical Christians was
quite another matter, as the following passage from an
article
published in
Christianity Today
on October 1, 2003 indicates:
“The government said they are going to turn the
country
entirely to voodoo. The Christians say we are going to turn the country
totally to the Lord Jesus Christ,” said Jean Berthony Paul, founder of
Mission Evangelique du Nord D’Haiti. . . .
Pastors and missionaries in St. Marc organized a rally on August 14, a
key voodoo
holiday, to counter the witchcraft they say voodoo involves.
Missionaries have also circulated unconfirmed reports that a child was
abducted from the town hospital to be made a voodoo sacrifice.
They fear Aristide is planning to renew a 200-year-old
national “pact with the devil” on January 1, 2004. Many Haitians credit
the country’s independence to voodoo.
The “voodoo holiday” of August 14 is the commemoration of the gathering
of rebel slaves at Bois Caïman in 1791. The content of the
“unconfirmed reports” is, obviously, the blood libel against Aristide.
And, as I reported in
a
previous
post, evangelicals have identified Aristide’s official
recognition of Voodoo as a religion as
itself a renewal of Haiti’s
supposed pact with the devil. The interesting fact here is that
“missionaries,” meaning, of course, evangelical missionaries, are
identified as the ones spreading the blood libel.
I have one final piece to add to the puzzle that I have been assembling
here. In
a
previous
entry, I quoted the puzzling reply of the Haitian
ambassador to the remarks of Pat Robertson about the pact with the
devil supposedly formed by Haiti’s founders. Instead of dismissing
Robertson’s tale as superstitious nonsense, the ambassador, after
describing the ways in which the revolt of the Haitian slaves against
their French masters has benefited the United States, said ambiguously:
“So what pact the
Haitian made with the devil
has helped the United States become what it is.” I was a long way into
the researches that I have presented in this entry before I realized
why the name of the author of the article from 2003 on the “disturbing
disclosures of human sacrifice” seemed familiar to me: it was the same
as the name of the Haitian ambassador, Raymond A. Joseph. The
biographical
page
on
Ambassador Joseph in the
Web
site of the Embassy of Haiti in Washington, DC states that he is “mostly known as a
journalist.” The page states also that he translated the first
New Testament and Psalms in
Haitian Creole
for the
American Bible Society,
an
evangelical
Christian organization, and that he is a
graduate of Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College (Illinois), both
evangelical Christian institutions.
It is plain why the ambassador did not repudiate Robertson’s tale of
the pact with Satan as the nonsense that it is: he believes in it
himself. He is an evangelical Christian, and he is himself part of the
effort to demonize Voodoo as Satanism, as well as the effort to
demonize former President Aristide and his associates as practitioners
of blood sacrifice. The evangelical libel campaign against Haiti and
the religion of many of its citizens may have originated outside the
country, but it now has exponents among Haitians, including the one who
represents his country to the United States.
I do not defend the political record of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, nor do
I hold any brief for the practice or the beliefs of Voodoo. But those
who use demonic fantasies to defame either the man or the
religion by that action alone set themselves in an even less credible,
indeed a despicable, position. If they have legitimate objections to
make, either in politics or in religion, let them make them without
lies, hysterical fantasies, and demagoguery. We have suffered enough
from blood libels.
Added 26 January 2010, 22.30 EST:
After writing and posting this entry I discovered a Web page that expounds in a concise and linear fashion most of the matters that I had so laboriously worked out by hours and hours of research, as well as much else concerning the preceding political developments: Richard Sanders, “
Demonizing Democracy: Christianity vs. Vodoun and the Politics of Religion in Haiti,” from the magazine
Press for Conversion, November 2008, published by the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT), a Canadian organization. I quote the most pertinent part, in which I have replaced the references that originally appeared in endnotes with links in brackets:
When
Aristide
and
thousands
in
Haiti’s
popular
government
were
then
illegally removed from power, the elite’s
outrageous propaganda was actually taken seriously by the
coup-empowered regime. The de facto government’s CIDA-funded
“Department of Justice” even used these outrageous rumours to arrest
and illegally imprison prominent supporters of Aristide’s Lavalas
government. In mid-2004, a U.S. human rights delegation to
Haiti
reported that:
Members of Fanmi
Lavalas have been using the word witch-hunt to describe the ongoing
repression of Lavalas. . . . We were shocked to find that this term can be
taken literally. While we were in Haiti, a wild story was being
circulated by the media and Haitian authorities. It claimed that a baby
was sacrificed during a ceremony attended by many members of Lavalas in
the year 2000. While we initially took this to be at the level of
tabloid sensationalism, it became clear that this ludicrous charge is
being pursued by the current de facto authorities.
On three occasions
individuals have gone on National Television, reportedly at the behest
of the Minister of Justice, to describe their participation at this
so-called ceremony. Despite the fact that the stories told by these
individuals are not even consistent. . . . Haitian authorities are using
these out of court, unverified statements as the basis for issuing
arrest warrants for Lavalas officials. These charges are also the
justification for continuing to hold [prominent Lavalas activist and
community leader] Annette Auguste. [Ref.]
Two
particularly
virulent
enemies
of
Haitian democracy who have pushed
these absurd, religious smear campaigns are Yves A.Isidor, a professor
of Economics at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, and Raymond
Joseph, a former Wall Street Journal financial reporter who
became the 2004 coup-regime’s ambassador in
Washington.
Isidor,
who
accused
Ms.
Auguste of being Aristide’s “voodoo medium,”
said she bathed him in human blood to place a curse George W. Bush and
to ensure the election of Al Gore in 2000. Isidor’s grotesque
story was later embellished by Joseph who said that as part of their
Vodoun ritual, a newborn baby was crushed with a heavy pestle in a
giant mortar. [Ref.]
The
most
well-connected figure who aided and abetted this particular
psychological warfare campaign is Stanley Lucas, director of the
right-wing Washington Democracy Project’s program on
Latin
America
and the Caribbean. In 2007, this long-time Haitian
representative of the U.S. government-funded International Republican
Institute, disseminated extravagantly detailed slander regarding the
alleged Vodoun infanticide that was supposedly engaged in by President
Aristide and his closest political allies. [Ref.]
To
establish
his credentials and lend credibility to these outrageous
lies, Lucas’ website displayed dozens of photographs of himself posing
with business executives, Premier Jean Charest, U.S.-backed heads of
state, Afghan “tribal leaders,” U.S. senators, congressmen,
ambassadors, three former U.S. Secretaries of State, a former National
Security Advisor, a former CIA director, and other such so-called
“friends” of Haiti.
Yves Isidor, Raymond Joseph, Stanley Lucas—the very same sources to which I traced the story, though I like to think that I have added a bit of further substantiation to the case by combing through Sonia Desrosier’s testimony and the rest of it.
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