Landmark Of Torture A Symbol Of Poverty -- Infamous Haiti Prison Now Home To Squatters

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Even its impoverished occupants, the homeless families who took over the crumbling old fortress because they had no place else to go, admit it is odd to come to live at Fort Dimanche.

"This was a place people like me did not enter," said Michelet St. Sauveur, one of several thousand squatters who have taken up residence in and around the former prison Haitians know as Fort la Mort, Fort Death.

Within its concrete walls, uncounted numbers of Haitians have died. They were starved, beaten, electrocuted, dismembered or simply shot because they were deemed enemies of an oppressive state.

One former prisoner, arrested for suspected political activity upon his return from study abroad, said 180 people died in his communal cell during the eight months he spent there.

The fort's grounds are a mass grave so full of human remains that wind and rain regularly unearth bones. The children of the squatters sometimes come across skulls and tibias while playing.

Former Haitian dictators Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude, better known as "Baby Doc," used the fort as a political prison during the family's 29-year reign.

The prison's armories no longer contain the tools of torture and killing, only rickety beds and simple stoves. The worst of the prison's cells - stacked cages so small that prisoners could only crouch for weeks or months at a time - have been demolished. Bedsheets and wooden partitions cordon off living areas.

While there is no public nostalgia for Fort Dimanche's past, the squatters' occupation nonetheless troubles many Haitians who would like the building preserved as a reminder of the atrocities committed there. The 1991 military coup that overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aristide proved how easy it can be for Haitian democracy to slide back into repressive rule.

"In our collective memory, Fort Dimanche should be represented as something that must never happen again in this country," said Camille Leblanc, a Haitian lawyer active in human rights. "It would be a place future generations could go reflect, because people too often forget."

Aristide, restored to power five months ago by American force, wants to preserve the infamous structure as a memorial to the evils of tyranny.

By all accounts, Fort Dimanche was pressed back into service as a clandestine prison under the military regime. Near pits where the squatters recall the smell of decomposing bodies when they first arrived, rusting shell casings and spent cartridge magazines cover the ground.

Now the squatters, who have taken the name Democracy Village for their camp and refuse to leave unless they are provided housing, have put Aristide in an uncomfortable position.

His fledgling government does not want to use force to remove them. Aristide's Lavalas movement represents the aspirations of the poor, and one of the moments that made him a national legend was his live radio broadcast of a bloody encounter in 1986 between troops and slum dwellers outside Fort Dimanche.

Not incidentally, the squatters' colony at such a visible landmark points up the lack of perceptible economic progress in the months since Aristide's return and the potential for disorder in a country that still lacks its own functional police force.

Evans Paul, the mayor of Port-au-Prince, talks darkly of "political manipulation" of the squatters by the remnants of the old regime.

"We're going to try to talk sense into them; I think it will work," Paul said.

But the squatters, who began arriving at the camp almost as soon as the U.S. soldiers occupying it left in October, show no signs of leaving.

Charles Gerard, 60, claims a parcel of land that he said he and others covered with gravel and dirt to eliminate the stench of decomposing bodies. Gerard said he would surrender it only for the $33 he estimates it would cost him for his own home.

"Given a choice between no place to stay and staying on a mass grave, I will stay on the mass grave and deal with the consequences," Gerard said.

Others have begun digging shallow trenches for foundations and have erected wooden frames for huts. Already they have cleared away the woods and brush that previously hid most of the fort's grounds from public view.

Many of them are former inhabitants of nearby slums that bore the brunt of the military's campaign of terror against Aristide's supporters. Some, forcibly evicted by the former regime, contend that a spot on this forbidding place is the least they should expect.

"The people here are the real Lavalas. We suffered for Aristide," said 23-year-old Kebreau Emmanuel.