Haiti at the Womens World Cup: A story of horror, hardship and hope

When the Women’s World Cup trophy reached Haiti earlier this year, very few people on the Caribbean island actually saw it.

World football’s governing body FIFA had embarked on a mission to take the trophy to all 32 nations to have qualified for the tournament in Australia and New Zealand. But in Haiti, located on an island around 600 miles south east of the U.S. city of Miami, the tour encountered a problem. It was deemed too dangerous to organise a public parade or large-scale event, as was done in other countries. Instead, the trophy was quietly displayed in a small ceremony, brought in and out of the country under tight security.

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Since the assassination of the country’s president Jovenel Moise in July 2021, life in the country has been extremely difficult and dangerous, as armed groups have taken control of many parts of the capital, Port au Prince, and control roadways, carrying out frequent kidnappings and killings.

The only player from the team present to see the trophy during its visit to Haiti was goalkeeper Kerly Theus, who plays professionally with FC Miami City. For the past two years, the Haitian national team have been training in the neighboring Dominican Republic because of security concerns, and Nicolas Delepine, who took on the job as the team’s manager in 2021, has only ever visited Haiti once. Several of his players are part of Haiti’s large global diaspora, the product of decades of political turmoil and economic difficulties that have driven many to leave the country.

Haiti’s team crystallises much of what it means to be Haitian today, encapsulating the complexities and contradictions of the country’s history. The majority of its players who grew up in Haiti were children in 2010, when a 7.0 magnitude earthquake devastated the country, killing an estimated 220,000 people and directly affecting 3.5 million, according to the Disasters Emergency Committee.

Haiti’s Women’s World Cup squad have grown up in a time shaped by the aftermath of that disaster, a world of humanitarian aid in a place that was already struggling with extreme poverty, and a United Nations military mission in the country. All of this has sat alongside years of political collapse and paralysing violence. They are joined by others who grew up in the U.S. and Canada and have made the choice to represent the country of their parents and grandparents.

Several of the team’s key players, including its star Melchie Dumornay, are beginning successful careers as professional players in France, which is where the country’s manager is also from. There is even a small chance this summer’s tournament could offer up a game that would surpass the 2022 men’s World Cup semi-final between France and Morocco as the ultimate post-colonial derby: a never-before-seen showdown between France and Haiti.

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France’s roots run deep within this team because they run deep throughout Haiti. The European nation colonised this part of the Caribbean in the 17th century and built one of the most brutal and profitable colonies the world has ever seen, based entirely on plantation slavery. A massive revolution of the enslaved that began in 1791 destroyed that system and won independence in 1804. But in 1825, France imposed a devastating indemnity in return for political recognition that has crippled the country’s economy ever since. This history has long been unacknowledged in France, but activists have made demands for recognition and reparation.

The country’s political struggles and poverty have a long and complex history, a layering of brutal colonial exploitation and the consequences of a scorched-earth war for liberty, a set of ongoing internal conflicts over the structure of government and the meaning of freedom, and a history of external pressures based on the fact Haiti’s victory against slavery was a profound threat to the ruling powers of the day.

In the 20th century, Haiti suffered through a 20-year occupation by the United States from 1915 to 1934 that helped lay the foundations for nearly 30 years of U.S.-supported dictatorship in the country under François and Jean-Claude Duvalier that led to large-scale migration away from Haiti. The U.S. has long had a particularly harsh and restrictive set of policies towards Haitians seeking to reach its borders, pioneering the technique of migrant interdiction on the sea in the 1980s and interning migrants captured that way in Guantanamo Bay before sending them back to Haiti.

Many Haitians feel a deep pride in their unique history and the fact they were pioneers in the struggle against slavery and for racial equality, and are also keenly aware of the ways their country has been stigmatised and discriminated against for centuries. This makes the power and joy of gathering together to support their national teams all the more vital and helps to explain why there is such intensity in the way Haitians support their team.

The nation’s only other appearance in a World Cup came in 1974, when a legendary men’s team led by Manno Sanon qualified against the odds and travelled to Germany for the tournament. That, too, was a very difficult time for the country, under the repressive dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier, who had inherited the role of president-for-life from his father, Francois.

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Haiti faced a dangerous opponent in their first game: Italy, then famous for a nearly unbreachable catenaccio (literally ‘’door bolt’) defence. But, with a series of quick passes, Sanon broke free early in the game and made a striding, beautiful run for goal — and scored. The team lost that game 3-1 and was eliminated in the group stage, but everyone in Haiti who was alive to see it remembers that goal.

A mural in Port-au-Prince (destroyed in the 2010 earthquake) once celebrated Sanon by placing him alongside Haiti’s founder, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Cuban leaders Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, in the pantheon of Caribbean national heroes. This generation of Haiti’s women’s players have already made history with their qualification, but they head into the tournament dreaming of leaving their mark on the country’s imagination.

The star of this Haiti team is the 19-year-old Dumornay, who was recently named the best young women’s player in the world by Goal magazine. She was born in 2003 in Mirebalais, a town in Haiti’s mountainous Central Plateau. It is an area famous as a site of resistance, where Toussaint Louverture and other revolutionaries fighting slavery were once stationed, and where the legendary Charlemagne Peralte organised an uprising against the United States’ occupation of Haiti in 1919.

Dumornay grew up playing soccer in the streets of the town, and at the age of 10 was recruited to Haiti’s national football youth academy, Camp Nou. Once the country home of the dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, the complex is located in Croix-des-Bouquets, on the edge of Port-au-Prince. It was inaugurated in 2012, supported by donations that came in after the earthquake, which had destroyed the headquarters of the Haitian Football Federation and killed dozens of coaches and players in the country. Today, the academy receives support from FIFA and other organisations and about 500 young boys and girls are trained there.

Dumornay did well and as a teenager was recruited to play for AS Tigresses, one of the country’s best women’s professional teams, and was selected for Haiti’s national women’s U20 team. In 2018, they qualified for the U20 World Cup, and Dumornay travelled to France along with a larger group of dynamic players.

Facing top-ranked Germany, she shone and, in the stands, scouts from the Stade de Reims women’s team took note of a player with “disconcerting ease who dominated everyone in the midfield”. As soon as age allowed, Reims signed her and she started playing in the French Ligue 1 with them in late 2021. With her contract ending this year, Dumornay was sought after by the biggest teams in Europe, including Chelsea and Manchester City, before signing with Lyon, where she will play next season.

Dumornay played a central role in getting Haiti to the World Cup this year, scoring two goals against Chile in a must-win qualifying match last May, the first of them a stunning strike out of the blue. Haiti’s men’s team has been nicknamed the Grenadiers after a Haitian army unit celebrated in song and history, and now the women’s team is known as the Grenadieres. Their presence in the Women’s World Cup, alongside a strong Jamaica team returning for its second tournament, is a historic moment for Haitian and Caribbean women’s soccer.

Haiti’s appearance in the tournament is the culmination of decades of work supporting women’s soccer there. It is also set against the backdrop not just of the political situation in the country but also of a painful and still unresolved set of legal cases that has upended the Haitian Football Federation. In 2020, accusations of sexual harassment and rape at the Camp Nou soccer academy led to the removal of Haitian Football Federation’ present Yves Jean-Bart, a decision that was recently reversed by FIFA.

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Jean-Bart’s story has been intertwined with that of women’s football in Haiti for decades. In December 1971, the first officially recorded women’s soccer game in Haiti was played as a match between two high schools, after a volleyball coach noted the girls on his team frequently played soccer informally. Soon after, Haiti’s first professional team, called the Amazones, was founded, and the next year Jean-Bart, then a medical student and journalist, founded AS Tigresses. By the next year, there were several teams and an annual tournament was established. The period of political turmoil of the 1980s, which led to the overthrow of Duvalier in 1986 followed by several years of violent political struggle, interrupted much of this work but, by the late 1980s, the teams began to play again.

In the wake of the 2010 earthquake, local professional teams continued to play, and the national team has been slowly building its strength. A gesture of solidarity by USWNT players after a U.S.-Haiti game in 2010 made headlines, but for the most part the international press has not paid much attention to the team. Haiti’s main national newspaper, Le Nouvelliste, has covered their rise carefully over the years, and also led the coverage of the Jean-Bart scandal.

It began in 2020, when Jean-Bart, who had served as the head of the Haitian Football Federation since 2000 and had just been elected unanimously to another four-year term, was accused in an article in The Guardian newspaper in England (anonymously citing several former players and their families) of having sexually abused players at the Camp Nou facility.

Organisations in Haiti demanded action on the part of the Haitian government and FIFA, with the latter beginning an investigation, though The New York Times reported in May 2020 that their handling of the case had been ”uneven, and at times worrying for those involved”. In November 2020, FIFA banned Jean-Bart for life from all football-related activities and levied a fine of 1million Swiss francs (£880,000; $1.1m). FIFA’s verdict claimed Jean-Bart, who has always denied the allegations, had engaged in systematic abuse of multiple female players, including minors.

However, after an appeal from Jean-Bart, that decision was overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) and Jean-Bart declared he would soon take back his seat as the head of the Haitian Football Federation. In June, he won a defamation case in French court against Romain Molina, the journalist who had filed the initial article in The Guardian.

Human Rights Watch, whose investigation contributed to the original FIFA decision, has strongly condemned the CAS decision, as has the global football players’ union FIFPRO, with both arguing it highlights deep problems in the handling of sexual violence and harassment. The debates about Jean-Bart’s future role in Haitian football and the broader issues these investigations raise remain live and unresolved.

This week, The Guardian reported that campaigners in Haiti have won the right to appeal against the dismissal of a case brought in November 2020 against Jean-Bart in Croix-des-Bouquets, where Camp Nou is located. A spokesperson for Jean-Bart, quoted by The Guardian, noted the 75-year-old had already prevailed in “four separate cases in multiple courts around the world” and “looks forward to openly testifying so that the entire world can be reminded of his complete innocence of these baseless charges”.

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Contacted for comment by The Athletic, Evan Nierman, a spokesperson for Jean-Bart, said the claim that “the case has been re-opened is untrue” and that the recent decision in Haitian court was “a standard part of the legal process, which already declared Jean-Bart innocent and now is running its course to address an appeal to the ruling”.

“It is regrettable that FIFA is blocking the reinstatement of the President, who was duly elected but falsely accused in a smear campaign by his opponents,” Nierman added. “With support from 20 Haitian football clubs, the President hopes to prevail in the Court of Arbitration for Sport and regain his position. He has always maintained his innocence, which has been validated time and again in respected courts of law.”

As all this was unfolding, the women’s team were working and trying to prepare for the World Cup from their base in the Dominican Republic, though they have also had other issues to deal with. Several players on the team were born outside the country and FIFA has ruled they cannot compete in Australia and New Zealand.

Amandine Pierre-Louis and Gabrielle Marie Emilien were both born in Canada to Haitian parents. Pierre-Louis has played on Canada’s U17 and U20 teams, but recently opted to play for Haiti. She and Emilien were in the process of getting Haitian nationality but, according to Delepine, FIFA had set a strict deadline for the process that has made it impossible for the two players to travel to the World Cup.

Haiti’s opportunities on football’s world stage are few and far between. The men’s team had a disappointing run in this year’s Gold Cup. But in 2019 they shone, and fans in Haiti and the diaspora celebrated their victories. I was lucky enough to be there when Haiti defeated Costa Rica that year in the Gold Cup in New Jersey, as fans erupted into hours of raucous, mass celebration in the parking lot of the Red Bull Arena, playing the Haitian carnival music rara, singing songs of victory and praise to their team, with such joy that many Costa Rica fans could not resist joining in.

Celebrants paraded in Port-au-Prince as well, where Haitian fans always gather to watch their two adopted national teams, Brazil and Argentina, play. In 2018, the defeat of Brazil by Belgium in the World Cup helped to trigger mass protests in the country, when the government inadvisably decided to announce an increase in gas prices during the game, assuming Brazil would win and everyone would be distracted, only to have their plans undone by Thibaut Courtois and Kevin De Bruyne.

There were widespread public celebrations in the country when Argentina won the World Cup in 2022. It remains to be seen whether this summer’s Haiti games will bring people out in public in the same way, especially given the security situation in the country, but Haitian fans in the country and around the globe will be watching.

There is some precedent in the country for football helping to create a moment of reprieve, and a little peace, in a time of conflict.

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In 2004, an all-star team of Brazilian national players travelled to Haiti just months after president Jean-Bertrand Aristide had been removed from power and in a context of political violence in the country. The friendly match between the two countries was almost one between two home teams, given how much loyalty Haitians have to the Brazilian team, and as the visiting players paraded through the town they were greeted by massive, peaceful crowds, though they were escorted and rode on the armoured vehicles of the UN peacekeeping mission. Officials and the Brazilian players agreed to a plan aimed at helping to quell violence in the country: people could bring weapons and turn them in in exchange for tickets to the match.

What can Haitians hope for as their team take to the pitch against England in their opening game in Brisbane? Whatever happens on the pitch, there is the possibility Haiti’s team might do something like Didier Drogba did with the Ivory Coast in 2005, when he used a football victory to call for an end to conflict in his country.

If they want to be able to play that kind of role, of course, Haiti’s women’s team will first have to have some success in the tournament. And in that, they face serious challenges on the pitch itself. They play England on July 22, and then go on to face Denmark and China in Group D.

The beauty of football, though, is that there is always a chance. This generation of Haitian women’s players have already shown they are not at all interested in letting the obstacles that have stood in their way stop them. They know determination, they know possibility, and they know their country is with them, dreaming of the unexpected.

Laurent Dubois is an academic and author of The Language of the Game: How to Understand Soccer

(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)

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