“It will be war – open war,” Max Beauvoir, supreme head of Haitian voodoo, told AFP in an interview at his home and temple outside the capital. “It’s unfortunate that at this moment where everybody’s suffering, that they have to go into war. But if that is what they need, I think that is what they’ll get.”

The quake also left more than a million homeless and much of the capital and surrounding areas in ruins in this Caribbean nation of more than nine million.

Police said a pastor urged followers to attack the Cite Soleil ceremony. A crowd of people threw rocks at the voodoo followers. Rosemond Aristide, a police inspector in Cite Soleil, said he had spoken with the pastor, who agreed to allow voodoo ceremonies there. But he would not explain why no arrests were made.

Beauvoir claimed the Protestant Evangelicals attacked the ceremony along with other people they hired. He also accused Evangelical denominations of using aid supplies to try to “buy souls”. “I would like to see each one of them tied up in ropes and thrown in the sea, and I hope the best of them will be able to catch a plane and run away and leave in peace,” the voodoo priest said. “Because this is what we need right now – peace.” Asked whether he would encourage voodoo followers to respond with the same kind of violence, Beauvoir said he would. “They have not been aggressors,” he said of voodooists. “I think they are aggressive (attacked), and they will have to answer with the same type of aggression. I don’t mean for (Evangelicals) to die. I am not out to kill them.”

About half of Haiti’s population is believed to practice voodoo in some form, although many follow other religious beliefs at the same time. The religion – whose practitioners often use the vodou spelling – evolved out of beliefs slaves from West Africa brought to Haiti. It is now deeply rooted in Haitian culture.

A voodoo priest named Boukman has been credited with setting off the country’s slave rebellion in the late 18th century, which led to the creation of the world’s first black republic. But Evangelicals have been making inroads lately. One Evangelical priest in the middle-class Port-au-Prince suburb of Petionville claimed more than 200 people came to his church to convert after the January 12 quake.

“They say that God struck the country,” said Sainvoyus Raymond of the First Baptist Church of Petionville, adding that some converts were previously voodooists. Raymond, however, condemned the attack in Cite Soleil, saying violence should not be condoned and anyone was free to worship in whatever way they chose. Raymond said the disaster was God’s response to all evil in Haiti, including violence and kidnapping.

Beauvoir said the government had brought the earthquake onto itself by denying the country’s roots in favour of the beliefs and habits of “settlers”, referring to Haiti’s colonial past.

“Sorry that it took so long,” said former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s envoy from the UN in Haiti including the capital Port-au-Prince and its region were devastated by an earthquake, January 12 .

“I try to solve the congestion for the shipment of food is carried in sufficient quantity,” he said, promising that he does not want to pose as “governor” of the stricken country.

Saturday, Colonel Gregory Kane, director of command operations in Haiti, confirmed the continued commitment of U.S. forces on the ground. “We will be in Haiti as it will be useful, the military aspect of the operation, under the experience will probably be 45 to 50 days” in everything he said to the press.

“It is a political decision to be taken by the U.S. government,” he qualified, however. The Pentagon has so far released over 200 million dollars in disaster assistance, according to USAID, the U.S. government agency responsible for development aid. He helped transport assistance, both in men and medical equipment, food and drinking water.

U.S. troops have been deployed up to 22,000 in Haiti or in wide, said Colonel Kane, ensuring that it remained current 17,000 including 7,000 on the ground, providing equipment and distribution of food in 16 different sites.
Meanwhile, the 10 American Baptist arrested January 30 at the Dominican border with 33 children described as orphans but undocumented, should be transferred to the men at the national penitentiary for women in prison in Petion-ville on Heights of Port-au-Prince.

Haiti’s ambassador to Washington since 2004, was invited by First Lady Michelle Obama to join him in his box of Congress to attend the speech by her husband before the elected and the nation, highlight the political year U.S., according to the White House.

Among the guests of Mrs. Obama also included, in addition to Jill Biden, wife of Vice-President Joe Biden, students and entrepreneurs, a veteran wounded in Iraq in combat and a police official military base of Fort Hood ( Texas, south), scene of a fatal shooting in November.

Mrs. Obama has also invited the wife of a firefighter Virginia (is) deployed to Haiti as part of U.S. aid following the earthquake that struck near the capital Port-au-Prince January 12, killing some 150,000 lives, according to an estimate by the Minister of Health of the country.

Residents and citizens of Haiti are fed up with the looting that written fear in the hearts and minds of aid workers and earthquake survivors. The photo above illustrates looters will not be tolerated in a time when many Haitians are in need of a helping hand as this one.

The New York Times said “the police brought a man to Pétionville in the back of a pickup and informed a gathering crowd that he had been caught looting in another neighborhood, witnesses said. While the police officers stood by, an angry mob pulled the man from the truck.

The mob stripped the accused looter, then began beating him. They dragged him up the street while pummeling him, then threw him on a trash heap, where he lay vomiting and bleeding.

One man began piling trash on top of him and set it on fire. As the firelight flickered on an art gallery and a church on opposite sides of the street, dozens gathered to watch the man burn to death.”