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Hundreds of Haitians crowd in front of the US embassy in Port-au-Prince on Friday, hoping for a visa to leave the country
Photo: Orlando Barria / EPA
When the Haitians awoke on Saturday, the number of politicians who now claim leadership of their country had miraculously increased.
On Friday evening, the chairman of the Senate, Joseph Lambert, was elected interim president.
The remaining ten of the originally 30 senators appointed Lambert to succeed the head of state Jovenel Moïse, who was murdered on Wednesday.
The decision is not binding, however, because the Senate has not had a quorum for several years.
However, the ten senators are the only remaining elected politicians in Haiti.
The mandate of the National Assembly has expired, the president shot and the chairman of the Supreme Court just died of Covid.
Lambert is next to the actually resigned, but now claiming power, Prime Minister Claude Joseph and the appointed but not appointed Ariel Henry, the third politician who wants to lead the Caribbean republic of chaos. But none of the three has real legitimacy, none of the three can count on broad popular support or reputation in the international community. At most Joseph, who simply took over the leadership of the country after the murder of Moïse on Wednesday in the confusion of the moment, has the support of the United Nations and the United States.
It has been three days since the controversial Haitian head of state was murdered, but the chaos is getting bigger rather than smaller. In addition, restlessness and anger in the population gradually awaken after the initial shock subsides. Civil society representatives like filmmaker Arnold Antonin say the situation is so precarious and absurd that the solution can only be found in an "extraordinary, non-constitutional" solution. Haiti needs "a broad political agreement that is not necessarily based on the constitution in order to avoid total political anarchy," emphasized Antonin in an interview with SPIEGEL.
This is how the politician Leslie Voltaire, a member of "Fanmi Lavalas", the party of the former President Bertrand Aristide, thinks.
"Why do we absolutely need a president now, we have to turn this tropical tragedy into an opportunity".
Voltaire is campaigning for a kind of State Council in which Haitians abroad and representatives of civil society and business should sit, supplemented by human rights activists and representatives from the education and health sectors.
Meanwhile, more and more details of the nightly murder attempt on the 53-year-old Moïse come to light, they seem like a mixture of a Latin American robber pistol and a large-scale plot in which at least two countries are involved.
It was a call from a woman on a radio station in Colombia, which on Friday provided valuable information about what happened two days earlier in the distant Caribbean republic of Haiti, when Moïse murdered his wife Martine with twelve shots in his sleep by a heavily armed squad was wounded and his children were traumatized.
Incidentally, it was the second presidential assassination in Haiti since 1915. At that time, head of state Jean Vilbrun Guillaume was assassinated, whereupon the USA occupied the Caribbean state and stayed for 19 years.
So the woman reported to "W-Radio".
"I am the wife of Francisco Eladio Uribe," says the caller.
Uribe is one of a group of 15 men, all of them Colombian ex-military men, who were presented by the Haitian government as suspected members of the killer squad.
Her husband was apparently recruited for the act without knowing what the place and the aim of the operation was.
"It was just said that they should protect the families of sheikhs."
Uribe is a former military man who dismissed the FARC at the end of 2016 as a result of the peace agreement with the left-wing rebels and has since worked as a kind of freelance mercenary.
As do thousands of other former Colombian military personnel.
The wages are said to have been around $ 2,700 a month.
The police in the South American country confirmed that the arrested men had traveled to the Dominican Republic in small groups between May and June and from there traveled on to Haiti, some of them by air and by land.
As incomplete as the statement made by Uribe's wife is, this piece of the puzzle could prove to be valuable when putting together the picture of what happened on Wednesday night in Port-au-Prince.
more on the subject
Chaos after the presidential murder in Haiti: rule of the gangstersAn analysis by Jens Glüsing
After the murder of President Moïse: Haiti requests military support from the USA and the UN
Assassination of Haiti's President Moïse: State of ViolenceBy Klaus Ehringfeld, Mexico City
After President Moïse's murder: Prime Minister appeals to Haitians to refrain from vigilante justice
However, it remains completely unclear who hired the killers and why.
Was it the Colombian drug mafia, was it "the oligarchy" in Haiti, was it the political opponents or members of the government?
In any case, there are currently far more questions than answers in Haiti.
It is also questionable how it was possible to arrest the attackers so easily and quickly.
A country with hardly any institution functioning was very effective in catching it.
Allegedly, the Colombians hid on the grounds of the Taiwanese embassy in the capital Port-au-Prince.
The Haitian filmmaker and activist Antonin sees many possible perpetrators of the attack. "The President had fallen out with a great number of people in the country, including parts of his party, the police, some of the dozen gangs and of course with Prime Minister Claude Joseph." What is clear is that the attack could only be organized by someone with a lot of money and even more influence.
The Caribbean Republic has had 20 governments in 35 years, and people have experienced dictatorships and coups in those years, as well as presidents who have been deposed and fled and heads of state appointed from abroad. "But even for a country like Haiti, such an act is extraordinary and worrying," says Robert Fatton of the University of Virginia in the USA. "From a political point of view, there is no one who benefits from it," emphasizes Haitian-born Fatton on the BBC. Neither the dozen gangs, nor the opposition, nor parts of the government. Nobody benefits from more chaos, more insecurity, violence and a possible new foreign intervention in the island nation.
But this is exactly what a minister in the old government demanded. Mathias Pierre, head of the electoral department. He campaigned for the sending of US and UN troops. They should be responsible for securing ports, airports and other strategic facilities. The government in Washington rejected this request through a high-ranking spokesman for the time being, emphasizing that only FBI investigators traveled to Haiti to support the murder investigation.
The UN envoy for Haiti, Helen La Lime, stressed days ago that the incumbent Prime Minister Joseph should remain in office until new elections are held. The USA, as the traditional protective power for Haiti, is also campaigning for elections as a “transition to a peaceful transfer of power”. Joseph stressed that he would not run in these elections. “I'm not here for long. "We need elections, but I don't have a personal agenda."