The fêted and the dead in Haiti

The fêted and the dead in Haiti

By Michael Deibert

What took place in the Caribbean nation of Haiti this past weekend marks perhaps the regional nadir of diplomacy for the international community that helped bring it about, and perhaps the worst single day for the country’s fragile democracy since a 1991 coup derailed its first democratic government.

Following a dispute centered on alleged government-sponsored fraud in elections to find a successor to outgoing President Michel Martelly, the president’s mandate expired on 7 February and, after cutting a deal with parliament, he stepped down to clear the way for the selection of a provisional president tasked with forming a new electoral council and holding a new vote.

It was believed the Martelly, a former star of Haiti’s konpa music scene who went by the name of Sweet Micky, intended to appoint Jules Cantave, the chief of Haiti's Supreme Court, as his successor, even though the latter's mandate had expired late last year. The chief of the Supreme Court has traditionally been the head of interim governments during Haiti's often-fraught periods of transition, including in 1990-91 and 2004-2006.

Haiti's parliament, which has technical approval over the appointment and which itself was elected in August elections so full of violence and fraud they had to be cancelled in some municipalities, had other ideas, though. The senate - after announcing that candidates would have to pay $8,300 for the privilege of applying - selected its own president, Jocelerme Privert, to run the country until elections are held in April and a new president inaugurated in May.

Privert, currently affiliated with the INITE party of former president René Préval, has served as a senator since 2010. During his tenure in parliament, he has been praised by the international community as a flexible pragmatist willing to work out deals with various political factions and the international community. Before he entered parliament, though, Privert served from 2002 to 2004 as the Minister of Interior, in charge of internal security, for the second government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was overthrown in February of the latter year after an armed rebellion and massive street protests against his rule.

This is where things grow murky.

Between 2001 and 2004, I spent many days in the Cité Soleil slum of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, the largest such neighborhood in the Caribbean and then a stronghold of pro-Aristide armed groups, referred to in Haiti as chimere, after a mythical fire-breathing demon. Though Cité Soleil is far from just a gangland and the majority of its residents are hardworking people simply scrambling to survive, that the leaders of these irregular armed groups - whose existence violated Article 268 of Haiti’s constitution whereby the national police were the only body with the right to distribute and circulate weapons in the country - were in close contact with the Aristide government was beyond doubt. They were frequently hosted by Aristide at the National Palace (sometimes these meetings were even broadcast on state television) and they showed me what they said were the personal cell phone numbers of such individuals as Hermione Leonard, then police director for the department including Haiti’s capital, and of Privert himself, whom they witheringly referred to as Ti Jocelyn (Little Jocelyn), on their own mobile phones. I was not the only one to observe this. Similar groups existed throughout the country.

Privert and Aristide’s connections to these armed groups are relevant because, as the regime sputtered to its sanguinary dénouement in late 2003 and early 2004, these groups were among the state-allied actors who carried out a series of killings in the Haiti’s Artibonite region.

In late 2003 a rebellion against the government erupted in the northern city of Gonaïves after the killing of Amiot Métayer, the leader of a pro-Aristide gang in the city called the Cannibal Army. The gang blamed the crime on Aristide, swore revenge and set about fighting pitched battles with pro-government security forces [They would be joined be joined in a few weeks’ time by former members of Haiti’s disbanded army and others crossing over from the Dominican Republic).

During October 2003, while Privert was serving as Interior Minister, government security forces killed over 20 people during raids into the Cannibal Army’s stronghold in the slum of Raboteau, many of them uninvolved civilians including mother of five Michelet Lozier, Josline Michel and a month old baby girl.

These incidents, however, paled in comparison to what befell the resident of the northern town of  Saint-Marc four months later.

On 7 February 2004, an armed anti-Aristide group, the Rassemblement des militants conséquents de Saint-Marc (Ramicosm), based in the neighborhood of La Scierie, had attempted to drive government forces from the town, seizing the local police station, which they set on fire.

Two days later, the combined forces of the Police Nationale d'Haiti (PNH), the Unité de Sécurité de la Garde du Palais National (USGPN) -- a unit directly responsible for the president's personal security -- and a local paramilitary organization named Bale Wouze (Clean Sweep) retook much of the city. By 11 February, Bale Wouze - headed by a former parliamentary representative of Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas political party named Amanus Mayette - had commenced the battle to retake La Scierie. Often at Mayette's side was a government employee named Ronald Dauphin, known to residents as "Black Ronald," often garbed in a police uniform even though he was in no way officially employed by the police.

When the photojournalist Alex Smailes and I arrived in the town, we found the USGPN and Bale Wouze patrolling Saint-Marc as a single armed unit. Speaking to residents there -- amidst a surreal backdrop of burned buildings, the stench of human decay, drunken gang members threatening our lives with firearms and a terrified population -- we soon realized that something awful had happened in Saint-Marc.

According to multiple residents interviewed during that visit and a subsequent visit that I made to the town in June 2009, after government forces retook the town -- and after a press conference there by Yvon Neptune, at the time Aristide's Prime Minister and also the head of the Conseil Superieur de la Police Nationale d'Haiti -- a textbook series of war crimes took place.

Residents spoke of how Kenol St. Gilles, a carpenter with no political affiliation, was shot in each thigh, beaten unconscious by Bale Wouze members and thrown into a burning cement depot, where he died. Unarmed Ramicos member Leroy Joseph was decapitated, while Ramicosm second-in-command Nixon François was simply shot. In the ruins of the burned-out commissariat, Bale Wouze members gang raped a 21-year-old woman, while other residents were gunned down by police firing from a helicopter as they tried to flee over a nearby mountain. A local priest told me matter-of-factly at the time of Bale Wouze that "these people don't make arrests, they kill."

Nor were Alex and I the only journalists to document what was happening. The Miami Herald’s Marika Lynch wrote of how the town was “under a terrifying lockdown by the police and a gang of armed pro-Aristide civilians called Clean Sweep” and that “the two forces are so intertwined that when Clean Sweep's head of security walks by, Haitian police officers salute him and call him commandant.” Gary Marx of the Chicago Tribune wrote of how “residents also saw piles of corpses burning in an opposition neighborhood and watched as pro-Aristide forces fired at people scurrying up a hillside to flee.”

According to a member of a Human Rights Watch delegation that visited Saint-Marc a month after the killings, at least 27 people were murdered there between 11 February and Aristide's flight into exile at the end of the month. Her conclusion was supported by the research of the Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains (RNDDH), a Haitian human rights organization. Survivors of the massacre and relatives of the victims formed a solidarity organization, the Association des Victimes du Génocide de la Scierie (AVIGES).

Following Aristide's overthrow, several members of Bale Wouze were lynched, while Privert and Neptune turned themselves over to the interim government that ruled Haiti from March 2004 until the inauguration of René Préval in May 2006.

Held in prison without trial until their 2006 release, a May 2008 decision by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found the Haitian state had violated the American Convention on Human Rights in the detentions, though stressed that it was "not a criminal court in which the criminal responsibility of an individual can be examined."  Weighing in on the release of Neptune and Privert releases, Human Rights Watch noted that “the La Scierie case was never fully investigated and the atrocities that the two men allegedly committed remain unpunished.”

Days later, after being jailed for three years without trial, Amanus Mayette was also freed from prison. Haiti’s RNDDH denounced the release as “arbitrary” and a move that would “strengthen corruption” and “allow the executioners of La Scierie to enjoy impunity.” Arrested in 2004, Ronald Dauphin subsequently escaped from jail, was re-arrested during the course of an anti-kidnapping raid in Haiti's capital in July 2006 and fled prison again after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake destroyed the jail. Despite several chaotic public hearings, to date, none of the accused for the killings in La Scierie has ever gone to trial.

Frustratingly for the people of Saint-Marc, far from being supported in their calls for justice, the events they experienced have become a political football among international political actors.

The United Nations independent expert on human rights in Haiti, Louis Joinet - who visited the site of the killings only briefly - in a 2005 statement dismissed allegations of a massacre and described what occurred as "a clash", a characterization that seemed unaware of the fact that not all among those victimized had any affiliation with Haiti's political opposition. Thierry Fagart, then the head of the UN Human Rights Commission in Haiti, while getting many of the details of the timeline of the violence wrong, also made similar claims. RNDDH referred to the attitude of the international community to the case as “a scandal”

In a heart-rending June 2007 letter to Louis Joinet, AVIGES coordinator Charliénor Thomson asked the judge "who cares about our case?" before going on to recount some of the horrors that had been visited upon Saint-Marc in February 2004 and continuing

The victims of these horrors live under the constant threat of criminals who were all released under pressure, in particular, from some agencies of international civil society...Today, what justice should we expect? Who can testify freely while the assassins are free and can circulate with impunity? The majority of inhabitants in Saint-Marc are afraid. Even those who have been direct victims of acts mentioned above are scared. The victims want to flee the city and the witnesses to hide...When will we enjoy the benefits of justice we claim? In the current circumstances, what form does it come?

As the citizens of Saint-Marc fought their uphill battle for justice, rather than supported, they were actively undermined by some in the international community, especially, perhaps not surprisingly, those so-called human rights organizations with deep financial and personal links to the Aristide regime. The U.S.-based Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), for example, wrote fawningly of Black Ronald as “a Haitian grassroots activist, customs worker and political prisoner,” and talked of the work of Mario Joseph of the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), IJDH’s partner organization in Haiti, as Ronald’s attorney in a “legal analysis” of the case made available to supporters. Ira Kurzban, one of the IJDH’s founders and former head of its board of directors, serves as Aristide’s personal attorney in the United States, while the BAI’s Mario Joseph serves as one of a coterie of attorneys in Haiti defending the former president from various investigations related to his time in office. The people of La Scierie unfortunately have never had such deep-pocketed champions. All they ever asked for was a trial, but perhaps they will never get one.

The question now remains, having ascended to the highest office of the land, what is exactly the game Privert is playing? At his inauguration, which was attended by the foreign diplomatic corps, as well as Aristide’s wife, Mildred, and Maryse Narcisse, the presidential candidate for Aristide’s party (who officially came in fourth in the disputed results), Privert spoke of “dialogue.” and “reconciliation” as the way out of Haiti’s political crisis. Privert’s assumption of the presidency was loudly praised by the United Nations, the so-called Core Group (Brazil, Canada, France, Spain, the US, the European Union and the Organization of American States) and, individually, by the ambassadors of the United State and France. One group of opposition politicians, on the other hand, known as the G8, denounced the process as a “parliamentary coup.”

To be sure, Martelly was no angel. He surrounded himself with a coterie of highly suspect individuals who were serially accused of everything from drug trafficking to murder, and was often gruff and confrontational with his critics.  But the elections, compromised as they may have been, were cancelled only under the threat of violence with apparently little thought as to what would come next.

The scenario that is being painted by some Haitian politicians now - the exclusion of Jovenel Moïse, the candidate of Martelly's Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale from the second round of presidential elections - is one that would disenfranchise thousands of voters and undoubtedly only lead to further conflict.

The policy of the international community, and especially that of the United States, over the last few years in Haiti, as much as any policy at all can be discerned, appears to be to mutely accept any excess of depredation all the while bankrolling a process doomed to fail. Rule by decree? No problem. Summarily replace over 140 mayors with people loyal to a party apparatus? Fine with us. Have a man accused of involvement in gross human rights abuses extra-constitutionally assume the presidency and oversee new elections? Tout bagay anfom.

All those years ago, RNDDH called the attitude of the international community towards the killings that took place in La Scierie a scandal. It continues to be so, as it continues to be a symbol of the hardcore of impunity that no elections in Haiti have ever seemed able to vanquish. It is a system that allows journalists, human rights workers, priests and politicians to be killed and the intellectual authors of the crimes to never even be tried, let alone convicted. Neither the UN mission, the US Embassy or any other foreign presence in the country seems to care much about the killings of a bunch of poor nobodies more than a decade ago. And so they stand and applaud, each clap pushing a chance for justice - whatever that might look like - ever farther away.

At a reception at the National Palace for Privert’s investiture, where Lavalas die-hards swilled champagne, one such activist crowed to a Reuters journalist that “Lavalas and Aristide are back in the palace. We are back in power and we won’t let it go.”

Amid the diplomatic pomp and popping champagne corks, one thinks of the dead of La Scierie, still turning in their unquiet graves.

A further note on the killings at La Scierie

A fellow I hadn't heard of before recently wrote to me in the wake of my highlighting some of the problems with the reportage of Wadner Pierre and Jeb Sprague for the Inter Press Service on the Ronald Dauphin case in Haiti, given the former's link with paid advocates of Haiti's former president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and the latter's rather loopy public declarations on subjects Haitian in the past. This commentary in turn had spurred a reply from the ever-opportunistic Kim Ives, late of the Brooklyn-based publication Haiti Progrès, currently of Haiti Liberté. A fellow describing himself as a "friend" of Ives then emailed me (in a thoroughly respectful manner, unlike the apparently unstable Sprague) to ask me a few questions, which I will re-rephrase slightly here, while preserving the correspondent's anonymity.

1) Whether Ronald Dauphin is guilty or not, is it not a violation of human rights to keep someone in prison indefinitely without being charged or put on trial?

2) The Bush Administration circumvented this issue by changing the description of suspected terrorists to detainees in order to rationalize indefinite imprisonment. The overwhelming, humane response has been to set them free or put them on trial. In Haiti, prisoners are simply left to rot. Do you - Michael Deibert - you support this?

3) Are you concerned that if set free until trial, Ronald Dauphin will disappear or commit more crimes? Do you think he is a danger to Haitian society?

My response, which may be of interest to readers as it addresses some important issues, ran as follows:

Hello, and thank you for your email. It addresses an important question, one which goes to the heart of what is happening in Haiti right now.


When I interviewed him in June regarding St. Marc case, Pierre Espérance, the director of the Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains (RNDDH), made a very perceptive statement to the effect that, in Haiti’s broken justice system, the criminal becomes a victim because the system doesn't work.

This, in my view as someone who has spent a considerable amount of time in St. Marc, is what is happening in the case of Ronald Dauphin. I really defy anyone to spend a morning or afternoon talking with the many families associated with the Association des Victimes du Génocide de la Scierie (AVIGES), listen to their stories and not come away with the impression that the combined forces of the Police Nationale de Haiti, the Unité de Sécurité de la Garde du Palais National and especially Bale Wouze subjected them to something truly horrible during February 2004. Yet, strangely enough (to me at least), in the international Haiti solidarity network, nary a voice is raised to offer these people comfort, solace or support. I think this is something of which all us, as foreigners who claim to care for Haiti, should be ashamed.

According to my own interviews in St. Marc and the interviews of others, Ronald Dauphin, along with former Fanmi Lavalas Deputy Amanus Mayette (freed from prison in April 2007) and the deceased Bale Wouze leader Somoza were three of the most visible architects of the slaughter that took place in St. Marc that month, and the offenses such as the gang rape of women that took place then and afterwards.

Do I think that Ronald Dauphin is a danger to his fellow Haitians? Yes, but that is no excuse for holding him in jail indefinitely without trial. If I, as a journalist, can travel to St. Marc and find people virtually lining up around the block willing to share quite lucid and disturbing tales of the state-sponsored violence that they have been subjected to, then it seems not only possible or desirable but essential that the Haitian state find a way to address their demands for justice.

However grave his crimes, as a citizen Ronald Dauphin has his rights, as well. But what disturbs me most, perhaps, is the incredible arsenal of money and personnel arrayed to not only assure Mr. Dauphin of his rights but to discredit the victims of political violence in Haiti and to deny them their day in court. I thought that it was a national scandal, for example, when those convicted of participation in the April 1994 massacre of Aristide supporters in Gonaives had their sentences overturned by Haiti's supreme court in 2005, but at least the people of Gonaives got their day in court, however sullied it later became. What about the people of St. Marc?

The same actors who prosecuted the Gonaives case during the Préval government’s first mandate - the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) and (now) the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) - now work on behalf of the victimizers in the St. Marc case. It is a seriously complicated question, but I don’t think that the cause of justice in Haiti is served by having one standard of advocacy for former officials and partisans of the Fanmi Lavalas party and another for everyone else in Haiti.

If these groups are genuinely advocating for an equal measure of justice to be applied to all in Haiti, why were none of their voices raised during the 2001-2004 government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, when the prisons were equally swollen with (mostly unknown) defendants who had never seen a judge? Why were no voices raised against the corruption of the judicial process against former dictator Prosper Avril, no matter how distasteful he may be, or against the nakedly political detention of Coordination Nationale des Societaires Victimes spokesmen Rosemond Jean, or against the two-year detention-without-trial of Winston Jean-Bart, aka the famous Tupac of Cité Soleil? Where was their compassion following the horrific slaying of Haitian journalist and poet Jacques Roche? In my view, they were silent then as they are silent now because they see human rights only as an issue to be bandied about when it is politically expedient to do so for the political current they serve, not as a long-term commitment to build a better Haiti.

It is a very thorny problem: How does one give justice to victims while still insuring the rights of the accused? As you correctly point out, it is a debate that still goes on in the United States and in other countries with supposedly functioning judicial systems to this day.

The old adage of following the money is accurate up to a point. Some have pointed out RNDDH’s 2004 award of C$100,000 (US$85,382) from the Canadian International Development Agency, even though, as far as I can discern, most of the group’s funding comes from organizations such as Christian Aid, the Mennonite Central Committee and the Lutheran World Federation. Nevertheless, since that grant,RNDDH has consistently advocated for justice on behalf of a number of Fanmi Lavalas members, including Jean Maxon Guerrier, Yvon Feuille, Gerald Gilles, and Rudy Hériveaux. RNDDH, for me, has shown a commitment to a non-political defense of human rights that BAI/IJDH, linked monetarily and otherwise with Mr. Aristide’s attorney, have never shown.

Perhaps the best we can do as foreigners is to encourage a genuinely non-partisan, non-political development and reinforcement of the Haitian judicial system through institutions such as the newly re-opened magistrate’s school, so that justice can be given to the victims of the human rights abuses and the human rights of perpetrators, accused and otherwise, can also be safeguarded. Perhaps boring and not very sexy, but as a man once told me, the most revolutionary thing you can do in Haiti is to strengthen an institution. I still believe that is true.

I hope this has helped to answer your questions.

Best regards,

MD

A note on Jeb Sprague and Wadner Pierre's reporting of the Ronald Dauphin case in Haiti

In an era during which, in my own country, right-wing groups such as FreedomWorks are advising opponents of healthcare reform on how best to disrupt public discussion of America’s appalling healthcare system, it is useful to cast a skeptical eye towards conflicts of interest among those reporting the news. Talking points created by political operatives are then parroted by a compliant media, reiterated by politically-sponsored, ostensibly “grassroots,” groups are then re-reported by sympathetic media outlets as news. It is an old and often surprisingly transparent trick.

Aside from the cable network rantings of Fox News and CNN’s immigrant-hating Lou Dobbs, it is hard for me to think of a more obvious example of the phenomenon of echo chamber news than a recent article on Haiti titled “Calls Mount to Free Lavalas Activist” written for the Inter Press Service by Wadner Pierre and Jeb Sprague.

The article concerns Ronald Dauphin, a former customs worker in the central Haitian city of St. Marc and partisan of the Fanmi Lavalas political party of former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide,

Though Pierre and Sprague’s article describes Dauphin as “a Haitian political prisoner,” according to a St. Marc-based group, the Association des Victimes du Génocide de la Scierie (AVIGES), and a Haitian human rights group, the Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains (RNDDH), Dauphin was also an enthusiastic participant in a massacre of Aristide opponents and civilians that took place in the town in February 2004.

During that time, Dauphin, who was known in St. Marc as Black Ronald, was affiliated with a pro-Aristide paramilitary group, Bale Wouze ("Clean Sweep"). According to local residents, Bale Wouze, working in tandem with the Police Nationale de Haiti (PNH) and the Unité de Sécurité de la Garde du Palais National (USGPN), a unit directly responsible for the president's personal security, swept through the neighborhood of La Scierie, killing political activists affiliated with an armed anti-government group, the Rassemblement des militants conséquents de Saint-Marc (Ramicos), as well as civilians, committing instances of gang rape, and looting and burning property.

When I visited St. Marc in February 2004, shortly after Bale Wouze's raid into La Scierie, I interviewed USGPN personnel and Bale Wouze members who were patrolling the city as a single armed unit in tandem the PNH. A local priest told me matter-of-factly at the time of Bale Wouze that, "These people don't make arrests, they kill." According to a member of a Human Rights Watch delegation that visited St. Marc a month after the killings, at least 27 people were murdered in St. Marc between Feb. 11 and Aristide's flight into exile on February 29.

On a return visit to St. Marc in June of this year, researching for my article "We Have Never Had Justice," I spoke with individuals such as 49-year old Amazil Jean-Baptiste, whose son, Kenol St. Gilles, was murdered, and 44 year-old Marc Ariel Narcisse, whose cousin, Bob Narcisse, was killed. It is difficult to spend a morning chatting with the people of La Scierie without concluding that something very awful happened to them in 2004, a trauma from which they have yet to recover and for which they still seek justice.

Following the massacre in St. Marc, Dauphin was arrested in 2004. He subsequently escaped from jail, was re-arrested during the course of an anti-kidnapping raid in July 2006, and, like 81 percent those in Haiti’s prisons, been held without trial ever since.

In their recent article, Pierre and Sprague take particular aim at Haiti’s RNDDH human rights group, deferring instead to the U.S-based Institute for Justice and Democracy (IJDH), a group that has been particularly vociferous in its denunciations of possible governmental culpability for the St. Marc killings, and which described Ronald Dauphin in a June 2009 press release as “a Haitian grassroots activist, customs worker and political prisoner,” language curiously mimicked in the Sprague/Pierre article, and which makes no mention of the testimonies of the people of St. Marc.

Though they are never mentioned in the article, the deep and ongoing links between Mr. Aristide, Fanmi Lavalas, IJDH, Wadner Pierre and Jeb Sprague - links of which the Inter Press Service is aware but has chosen to ignore - have effectively blurred the line between political advocacy, human rights work and journalism.

One needs only to look at the chairman of IJDH’s Board of Directors, Miami attorney Ira Kurzban - also one of the group’s founders - to realize the deeply compromised nature of the organization's work. According to U.S. Department of Justice filings, between 2001 and 2004 Mr. Kurzban’s law firm received $4,648,964 from the Aristide government on behalf of its lobbying efforts, gobbling up from Haiti’s near-bankrupt state more than 2,000 times the average yearly income of the more than 7 million people there who survive on less that $2 per day. Since Mr. Aristide’s subsequent exile, Mr. Kurzban has frequently identified himself as the former president’s personal attorney in the United States. In vintage FreedomWorks fashion, Mr. Kuzban also had to be calmed by security personnel when he hysterically and repeatedly interrupted a reading that I was giving at the 2005 Miami Book Fair.

In IJDH’s 2005 annual report, Mr. Kurzban’s firm is listed in the category reserved for those having contributed more than $5000 to the organization, while in the group’s 2006 report, the firm is listed under “Donations of Time and Talent.”. The American Immigration Lawyers Association, South Florida Chapter, for which Mr. Kurzban served as past national president and former general council, is listed in a section reserved for those having donated $10,000 or more

Though Wadner Pierre and Jeb Sprague’s elevation of IJDH to an undeserved legitimacy and slander of RNDDH (a group which, despite its advocacy on behalf of the St. Marc victims, has also defended the rights and advocated on behalf of members of the Fanmi Lavalas party) are distasteful, they don’t quite rise to the level of intentional duplicity that another bit of information suggests.

In a stark conflict of interest, Wadner Pierre was once employed by a Haitian legal organization, the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, which, according to the IJDH’s own website received “most of its support from the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti.” Pierre has also previously contributed text and photographs to the IJDH website lauding the April 2007 release of Amanus Mayette, another suspect of the St. Marc massacre.

Put simply, when writing about the IJDH, Wadner Pierre is quoting his former employer without acknowledging it as such, a sleight of hand that opponents of health reform in my own country, for example, would recognize immediately.

For his part, Jeb Sprague, the article’s other author, first made himself known to me in November 2005, when he emailed me, unsolicited, a graphic picture of the bullet-riddled, blood-soaked bodies of a Haitian mother and her children along with a smiley-face emoticon and a semi-coherent tirade against myself, the World Bank and the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington, DC think tank.

Intimations of violence against my person aside, such a display struck me as less than a class act in giving those sacrificed on the altar of Haiti's fratricidal political violence the respect they deserve. Since then, Sprague has graduated to obsessively slandering progressive elements deemed insufficiently loyal to Haiti’s disgraced former president, such as the U.K.-based Haiti Support Group, and now works as a teaching assistant at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Sociology Department, focusing on crime and delinquency, subjects with which his past behavior no doubt gives him a close familiarity.

Taken in total, it is unfortunate that the Inter Press Service, an organization that promotes itself as “civil society's leading news agency,” would allow itself to be used as a front for such propaganda, and throw its weight behind the paid political hacks and human rights abusers who have for too long dominated politics in Haiti. As a fairly legitimate news source, as opposed to, say, the red-faced shouting of Fox News, the Inter Press Service owes its readers, and the people of Haiti, better.

HAITI: "We Have Never Had Justice"

HAITI: "We Have Never Had Justice"

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

(Read the original article here)

ST. MARC, Jul 21, 2009 (IPS) - Amazil Jean-Baptiste remembers when they came to kill her son.

"They killed my boy and burned my boy," says Jean-Baptiste, a careworn 49-year-old who lives in a dilapidated structure without running water in this bustling port town 80 kilometres north of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince. "And I am still suffering."

It was February 2004, and Haiti was in the midst of a chaotic rebellion against the government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. North of St. Marc, a formerly loyal street gang known as the Cannibal Army had risen up against the president and, joined by former members of the country's disbanded army, proceeded to overrun police barracks and seize control of towns throughout northern Haiti.

On Feb. 7, a lightly-armed anti-Aristide group, the Rassemblement des militants conséquents de Saint-Marc (Ramicos), based in the neighbourhood of La Scierie where Amazil Jean-Baptiste lived, took advantage of the chaos to drive government forces from the town, seizing the local police station, which they then set on fire.

Two days later, the combined forces of the Police Nationale de Haiti (PNH), the Unité de Sécurité de la Garde du Palais National (USGPN) and a local paramilitary organisation named Bale Wouze ("Clean Sweep") retook much of the city. By Feb. 11, Bale Wouze - headed by a former parliamentary representative of Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas political party named Amanus Mayette- had commenced the battle to retake the La Scierie.

What would follow would raise questions about Haiti's ability to give justice to victims and punish the guilty that persist to this day.

As Amazil Jean-Baptiste returned home, she found her son, Kenol St. Gilles, a 23-year-old carpenter with no political affiliation, groaning with a bullet in each thigh. Taking him to the home of a local pastor for aid, she watched as seven armed men, including three dressed in police uniforms, accused St. Gilles of being a Ramicos militant who had shot at them. He was dragged from the house, beaten unconscious and thrown into a burning cement depot, where he died.

Residents of the town tell of other crimes - the decapitation of unarmed Ramicos member Leroy Joseph, the killing of Ramicos second-in-command Nixon François, the gang rape by Bale Wouze members of a 21-year-old woman in the ruins of the burned-out commissariat - that were allegedly committed during or immediately following the recapture of St. Marc by pro-Aristide forces.

Witnesses recount how several people were slain and tossed into the burning remnants of the Ramicos headquarters, while still others were gunned down by police firing from a helicopter as they tried to flee over a nearby mountain, Morne Calvaire.

"They came here and they massacred people," says resident Marc Ariel Narcisse, 44. "A grenade thrown into my mother's house exploded, and the house caught fire. My cousin, Bob Narcisse, was killed there."

Following those dark days, the victims of the St. Marc killings formed the Association des Victimes du Génocide de la Scierie (AVIGES) to advocate on their behalf. But their struggle has exposed the highly politicised and often unresponsive nature of justice in Haiti, a country struggling to build democratic institutions after decades of dictatorship.

Links between armed pressure groups and the spheres of official power have long been a fact of political life here.

Faustin Soulouque, who crowned himself emperor of Haiti in 1852, was supported by groups of impoverished partisans called zinglins, while the Duvalier family dictatorship that ruled from 1957 until 1986 utilised the Tontons Macoutes, a murderous paramilitary band named after a traditional Haitian boogeyman.

The government of Aristide, who returned to office in 2001 after ruling the country for two periods in the 1990s, allied itself with his own armed partisans, often referred to as chimere after a mythical fire-breathing demon.

Of these latter groups, Bale Wouze had a reputation as one of the fiercest, and, by February 2004, its links with Haiti's National Palace were largely indisputable, especially given the presence in St. Marc of the USGPN, a unit directly responsible for the president's personal security.

On Feb. 9, as St. Marc was retaken by government forces, and as security forces and Bale Wouze members patrolled its streets together, Aristide's prime minister, Yvon Neptune, also serving as the head of the Conseil Superieur de la Police Nationale d'Haiti, flew into the city, giving a press conference during which he stated that "the national police force alone cannot re-establish order".

Witnesses in La Scierie describe how one of Bale Wouze's leading members, a government employee named Ronald Dauphin, known to residents as "Black Ronald", patrolled St. Marc in a police uniform, even though he was in no way affiliated with the police.

When the author of this article visited St. Marc in February 2004, shortly after Bale Wouze's raid into La Scierie, he interviewed USGPN personnel and Bale Wouze members patrolling the city as a single armed unit in tandem the PNH. A local priest told IPS matter-of-factly at the time of Bale Wouze that, "These people don't make arrests, they kill."

Interviewed by the Miami Herald in St. Marc in February 2004, Amanus Mayette was surrounded by Bale Wouze members and proclaimed his affiliation with the organisation.

"Amanus Mayette, Black Ronald, Somoza, these people killed my son," Amazil Jean-Baptiste explains in a trembling voice, listing the names of some of those who she says took part in her son's slaying.

Following Aristide's overthrow later that month, several members of Bale Wouze were lynched as they tried to flee St. Marc, while Yvon Neptune turned himself over to the interim government that ruled Haiti from March 2004 until the inauguration of President René Préval in May 2006.

Held in prison without trial until his May 2006 release on humanitarian grounds, a May 2008 decision by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found the Haitian state had violated 11 separate provisions of the American Convention on Human Rights in its detention of Neptune, though stressing that it was "not a criminal court in which the criminal responsibility of an individual can be examined".

After being jailed for three years without trial, former Bale Wouze leader Amanus Mayette was freed from prison in April 2007. Arrested in 2004, Ronald Dauphin subsequently escaped from jail, and was re-arrested during the course of an anti-kidnapping raid in Haiti's capital in July 2006. Despite several chaotic public hearings, to date, none of the accused for the killings in La Scierie has ever gone to trial.

"In our system, the criminal becomes a victim because the system doesn't work," laments Pierre Espérance, director of the Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains (RNDDH), which has pushed for criminal prosecutions in the La Scierie case.

Espérance himself survived a 1999 assassination attempt for which no one was ever prosecuted.

"But historically, the authorities here are so involved in corruption and human rights violations they feel very comfortable with impunity," he says.

According to RNDDH figures, nearly 81 percent of Haiti's prisoners are waiting for their cases to be heard before a judge, a situation that some hope may be improved by the re-opening of Haiti's school for magistrates, which recently renewed activities after being shuttered for many years.

Frustratingly for the people of St. Marc, however, the events of February 2004 have become a political football among Haiti's various political actors.

The United Nations independent expert on human rights in Haiti, Louis Joinet, in a 2005 statement dismissed allegations of a massacre and described what occurred as "a clash", a characterisation that seemed unaware of the fact that not all among those victimised had any affiliation with Haiti's political opposition.

Conversely, a member of a Human Rights Watch delegation that visited St. Marc a month after the killings concluded that at least 27 people had been murdered by pro-government forces between Feb. 11 and Aristide's flight into exile.

Their claims are treated with shrugging indifference by the Préval government and the United Nations, and the people of La Scierie appear to be resigned that their struggle for justice will be a long, though hopefully not fruitless, one.

"We need justice, we demand justice, because we have never had justice," says Amazil Jean-Baptiste, as another member of AVIGES stands nearby, wearing a t-shirt reading 'We won't forget 11 February 2004' in Haiti's native Kreyol language.

"I just want justice for my son," she says.