Carnaval got off to a bloody start this year. On just the first day of the three day festival which ran from Sunday, Feb. 6 to Tuesday, Feb. 8, four policemen and six civilians were killed.

The policemen were accompanying the musical group Djakout Mizik when men dressed in camouflage uniforms in a pick-up truck opened fire on them in the Clairecine district on the Cul-de-sac plain. Witnesses, including policemen, say the attackers were former soldiers, who have repeatedly clashed with the police, despite their frequent collaboration.

Later that day, three young women were shot dead near Poste-Marchand. The General Hospital reported over 20 people wounded and the live television coverage even captured some of the violence.

Nonetheless, this year's Carnaval attendance was anemic. The stands, built almost exclusively by government ministries, stood largely empty. Even the bourgeoisie, the traditional patron of the yearly festivities, was unwilling to invest in the Carnaval of the illegal government it helped set in place.

The slogan for this year's Carnaval was "my past belongs to me," strangely apt given that the present is manifestly out of Haitian hands. Washington, working through the Brazilian-administered United Nations Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH), is calling the shots and running the show. MINUSTAH forces guarded every intersection and even changed the traditional route of the Carnaval parade, making the giant floats leave from the Sylvio Cator stadium instead of City Hall on their way to the central square of Champs de Mars.

The government of de facto prime minister Gérard Latortue carried out a partial reshuffling of his cabinet last week, a move troubled Haitian governments historically make to stave off crisis. But even the reshuffling went badly.

Marie Claude Bayard, the president of the bourgeoisie's Association of Industries of Haiti (ADIH), was appointed to replace the unceremoniously dumped Danielle Saint-Lot as Minister of Commerce, Industry and Tourism. But the nomination foundered when it came to light that Bayard was a U.S. citizen. She was replaced by businessman Fritz Kénol.

Meanwhile, Michel Bernadin, the government delegate for the West Department, was named as the new Interior Minister, replacing ex-Gen. Hérard Abraham, the former right-hand man of dictator Gen. Prosper Avril. Abraham was shifted to the Foreign Minister to replace Yvon Siméon, who had botched a series of diplomatic matters.

Outcry immediately followed Bernadin's nomination. He is an accused killer, charged with personal involvement in a 1972 murder during the Duvalier regime. The charge came not just from democratic activists but from Haïti Observateur, the paper of de facto Haitian ambassador to Washington Ray Joseph.

Bernadin's nomination was quickly scuttled and he was replaced by lawyer Georges Moïse.

Washington has given the de facto government one main mission. "The organization of elections by the end of the year is the most important mission of the new Cabinet," declared de facto Prime Minister Latortue. "The elections are the necessary step to put democracy on track and to return government institutions to normal and regular operation." Coup leaders often make such incongruous declarations.

Now the occupation-supervised election machinery is being put in place. On Feb. 1, the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP), MINUSTAH, and Organization of American States (OAS) met to coordinate their efforts for holding elections. A day earlier, the CEP announced that local elections would be held on Oct. 9, while two-rounds of legislative and presidential elections will be held on Nov. 13 and Dec. 18. But there are still no dates for voter registration, candidate enrollment, or the start of campaigning.

De facto Justice Minister Bernard Gousse said that the government will publish a decree this week after Carnaval announcing "serious changes to the electoral card."

"It would not be a voter registration card but a digital national identity card with the fingerprint, photograph and other information of the voter," Gousse boasted. "Initially, this card will make it possible to identify all adults through the data collected. Later, it will make it possible to identify all citizens," including children presumably.

Gousse's "national identity card" sounds like a Haitian version of convicted felon and Bush administration information czar John Poindexter's fascist project of Total Information Awareness, a plan to set up a database to track the movements and activities of U.S. citizens, Big Brother-style.

Ironically, for the plan to work in Haiti, the de facto government will have to provide housing to much of the population since most Haitians, both in the countryside and the city, would have difficulty providing an address for the tracking system being put in place.

Despite the growing insecurity and violence in the country, the UN Secretary General's representative to Haiti Juan Gabriel Valdés announced that "there will be an exemplary electoral process in Haiti."

But growing resistance throughout Haiti suggests otherwise. On Feb. 7, the anniversary of the 1986 fall of the Duvalier dictatorship, the National Popular Party (PPN) and the Confederation of Peasant Groups of Borgne (KGPB) rallied hundreds of protestors from around the countryside for a 20 kilometer march through rivers and mud from the town of Petit Bourg au Borgne to the city of Borgne. In Borgne, the KGPB's Marc Lamour and the PPN's Augustin Edouard gave speeches denouncing the Feb. 29th coup, the de facto government and the foreign military occupation.

Meanwhile, in the capital, Lavalas popular organizations organized a march through the popular neighborhoods around Belair. But as the peaceful demonstrators carrying leafy branches approached the Cathedral, the police opened fire, scattering them. Black-clad masked policemen chased many of the demonstrators down alleyways and into homes. They killed one man near Rue Monseigneur Guilloux, and wounded three others.

"Today we are not at peace, and we see what is happening," said Sanba Boukman, a popular organization spokesman. "They are trying to destroy us in the popular neighborhoods, burning our houses, summarily executing us, disappearing us."

At midnight on Feb. 3, guerrillas of the "Northern Front" of the Dessalinien Army of National Liberation (ADLN) attacked the police station in Plaisance, just as the ADLN's "Artibonite Front" did in Gros Morne last October 24 (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 22, No. 35, 11/10/2004).

In a Feb. 5 communique to the press, the ADLN said that the police station was filled with "former Macoute soldiers, executioners of the people," whom they ordered "to come out of the front door with their hands up if they wanted nothing to happen to them."

The police did not come out, so the ADLN attacked and entered the station, according to their communiqué, but the policemen inside escaped.

"We salute all the fighters [in the cities] resisting the dictatorship and ask them to stand firm," the communiqué continues. "The day that we will meet together with them is very close. The year 2005 will be a year of struggle for national liberation to recover our dignity as a revolutionary people."

As resistance emerges in the countryside, complementing that in the cities, the de facto regime's future appears increasingly clouded. This week's revelers made the point. Many of the rara bands in the Carnaval changed the refrains of their songs to calls for the return of constitutional president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and an end to the foreign military occupation of Haiti.