“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.