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  Haiti’s Government Claims Progress Against Gangs in Port-au-Prince, but the Road Back to Normalcy Remains Long By Patrick Prézeau Stephenson  (Le Français suit)   PORT‑AU‑PRINCE — The announcement came with a tone of cautious triumph. Speaking before the United Nations Security Council, Haiti’s Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils‑Aimé said that, for the first time in years, the capital was beginning to breathe again. Streets once controlled by armed groups were reopening. Markets were filling. Children were returning to school in neighborhoods where gunfire had become a daily soundtrack. “Concrete results are starting to emerge,” he told the Council, crediting the Haitian Armed Forces, the National Police, and the newly arrived gang suppression force backed by the United Nations. For a country battered by years of spiraling violence, the message was meant to signal a turning point. But in Haiti, where optimism has often been followed by disappointment, the declarati...

  The Citadelle's Shadow: Haiti's Crisis of Trust and the Long Road to Reconciliation By Patrick Prézeau Stephenson *  (Le Français suit)   CAP-HAÏTIEN, Haiti — The Citadelle Laferrière has always been more than stone. Perched above the clouds of northern Haiti, it is the physical manifestation of a people's refusal to kneel — built by Henri Christophe after 1804 as a fortress against the return of enslavers, a monument to the audacity of formerly enslaved people who defeated the most powerful army on earth. For Haitians, especially those of the northern departments, it is sacred ground, the place where pride crystallizes into something you can touch. So when more than sixty people died there recently in circumstances still being parsed and mourned, something deeper than grief rippled through the Haitian psyche. It was as if the one place that was supposed to be inviolable — the granite proof that Haitians could protect themselves — had failed to protect them. The...