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.

Michael Deibert responds to Peter Hallward

Michael Deibert responds to Peter Hallward

On my blog last month, I posted a lengthy review of the book Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment, written by Middlesex University Professor Peter Hallward [1].

As I noted at the time, the work - composed chiefly of interviews with supporters of former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and often unreliably-referenced secondary source material - appeared to represent an attempt by Hallward, who had visited Haiti only twice during its writing and never bothered to learn to speak its poetic native Kreyol language, to excuse the excesses of Aristide’s 2001-2004 second mandate and argue that the president, far from being an exacerbating force in Haiti’s multitude of problems, was instead the hapless victim of a vast plot by local and foreign adversaries. Having first visited Haiti in 1997, and reported on the country for a variety of media outlets from 2000 until 2006, I knew Hallward’s thesis to be an incorrect one, and set about outlining what I found to be some of the more pernicious falsehoods with which he attempted to back it up.

This month, Peter Hallward, writing on the website Haiti Analysis [2], itself a veritable font of fanatical pro-Aristide propaganda, chose to respond to my critique of his book in an article that was subsequently reprinted on the website of MRZine.

Preoccupied as I am with reporting on the struggles of disenfranchised and disadvantaged peoples from often remote and violent locations (Democratic Republic of Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, India-administered Kashmir, Haiti itself), I confess that I haven’t had the time or inclination to keep up with every self-justifying bit of moral and intellectual acrobatics performed by the affluent foreign commentators that have comprised the bulk of support for Haiti’s disgraced former president since his ouster in February 2004. Given the array of very serious problems that confront Haiti these days - a dysfunctional parliament, spiraling food costs and attendant demonstrations, rampant deforestation and environmental degradation - the attention of those concerned with the country’s fate may indeed also be better focused elsewhere rather than on a protracted back-and-forth between two foreign intellectuals over a book of negligible interest or value to alleviating those ills.

However, briefly, in the interest of correcting the historical record which he seems content to muddy, I will respond to Peter Hallward’s response of my review of his book here.

Though Hallward writes that my 2005 book, Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press) was “applauding the overthrow” of the second Aristide government, a more accurate characterization might be that it was mourning the fraying of the broad social-democratic coalition that ousted the Duvalier dictatorship for power in 1986 and first brought Aristide to office in 1990, along with criticizing Aristide’s own role in that collapse. Having seen first hand the hopes that Haiti’s poor majority had invested in Aristide, and the way those hopes were cynically betrayed, far from glee and joy at the events of the president’s second mandate, to me the only appropriate response seemed to be sadness and regret at the waste of opportunity and human potential. Writers like Peter Hallward don’t seem to give much credence to emotions such as those when strident sloganeering will do, but I have found in my years in Haiti that political life there exists, not in black and white, but in varying shades of grey, where today’s democrat can be tomorrow’s despot and yesterday’s oppressor can be viewed as today’s unlikely liberator.

Hallward states in his response that I suggested that he deliberately misquoted Anne Hastings, the director of Haiti's lauded micro-credit institution Fonkoze, as coming out in full-throated defense of the Aristide government in his interview with her. Though Hallward may be bothered by a guilty conscience at this point, I said nothing of the sort. Writing to Hasting, who I have known for the better part of the decade as someone who stayed above the fray of Haitian politics to better continue Fonkoze‘s work of aiding Haiti‘s poor, I simply asked whether or not Hallward’s quotation of her was accurate. She responded in a 27 January 2008 email as follows [3]:

I don't think I have ever said or ever would say that. I am always very careful to say I don't know whether there is substance or not. It is up to the Haitian people to make their decision.

In his response to my review, Peter Hallward confirms that his quotation of Anne Hastings was erroneous. Whether it was intentional or not, I have no idea, but it does point to what, in my view, is a troubling pattern in Hallward’s work. Though I can’t claim omniscience in decoding Peter Hallward’s intentions when it comes to presenting such a curiously selected litany of false information as objective history, I do find, given his stated sympathies to the Aristide government and the Fanmi Lavalas party before starting his book or even visiting Haiti, that all of his “errors” should conveniently support his erroneous thesis rather suggestive. Nearly every one of the main claims in Damming the Flood - that the 2000 elections that returned Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power were free and fair, that the Aristide government was not actively involved in arming and organizing street gangs to crush its political opposition, that the government still retained a great deal of popular support in late 2003/early 2004 - are false, and demonstrably so, by the historical record as I laid out in my original review.

When Hallward, writes, for instance, that the Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains (RNDDH) Haitian human rights organization was part of "a very partial list of the recipients of USAID, IFES and/or IRI support" during the years leading up to the 2004 overthrow of Aristide, that is false. In his response to my review, Hallward tries to wriggle out of being caught in this obvious inaccuracy by writing that “NCHR’s receipt of USAID money… (is) a matter of the US Congressional record.” In my reviews of the sources of funding for NCHR Haiti (which later became RNDDH), I have found no evidence of money distributed to the group’s Port-au-Prince office by USAID. Seeking further confirmation, I wrote to Pierre Esperance, the group’s director, and he responded on 10 April 2008 with the following email [4]:

RNDDH has never and will not accepted funds from US government.

Though RNDDH/NCHR did receive funding from organziations such as Christian Aid, the Mennonite Central Committee, the Lutheran World Federation and a one-time grant from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), I still have found no eveidence of the group receiving funding from the United States government.

As to the Hallward’s characterization the massacre of anti-government militants in the northern city of Saint-Marc in February 2004 (along with innocent civilians), as always with Peter Hallward, any vile attack carried out by forces loyal to Jean-Bertrand Aristide was a “clash,” much as the vicious attack on protesting university students on 5 December 2003 (one of the defining moments in the end of Aristide’s second government) was “a brawl.” If Hallward doesn’t view the massacre at least 27 human beings and attendant atrocities such as gang rape which, given the presence of Unite de Securite de la Garde du Palais National d’Haiti personnel and gang members from the capital dressed in police uniforms, was certainly carried out with government knowledge, as a “crime against humanity,” it is hard to know what would qualify as such.

Peter Hallward could have written a perfectly reasonable, factual book outlining why he thought the second Aristide government as it existed deserved to be allowed to finish its mandate, however appalling its excesses, and why the convergence of forces against the president and his political party (many of them thrown together by Aristide’s own actions) would, in the long run, cause even greater harm to Haiti’s poor majority than the violent, corrupt and despotic actors who ruled Haiti from 2001 until 2004.

That is not, however, what Hallward did.

Based on a review of his secondary source material and discussions with some of his primary sources, I have concluded that Hallward, either through intention or through a series of extraordinarily ideologically fortuitous mistakes, time and again printed false information that flies in the face of the documented record and, indeed, the transcripts of his own interviews.

As for Peter Hallward’s statement that I view his book as being written by “an ignorant outsider,” I will simply say this: We are all, those of us of foreign birth who write on Haiti, outsiders to one degree or another. The question is whether or not, that being the case, we operate in good faith when chronicling events in this small, impoverished country. Over the better part of a decade, encouraged by the example of many brave Haitian journalists, I did my best to act in good faith while reporting from a vast array of locales around Haiti about the desire of the Haitian people for a responsive and responsible government to address their legitimate grievances and historic disenfranchisement. I did so often at considerable personal risk and for little or no financial reward. It was the least I owed the long-suffering people there who entrust outsiders such as myself with trying to help the world understand their story.

Finishing Damming the Flood, I believe knowing whether or not Peter Hallward operated in similar good faith is open to debate, but the evidence is not encouraging.


Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press).


1. A Review of Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment , March 16, 2008.

2. One of the “editors” of Haiti Analysis, a seemingly-eternal graduate student named Jeb Sprague, first announced his presence to me by emailing me (unsolicited) a graphic photo of the bullet-riddled, blood-soaked bodies of a Haitian mother and her children along with a smiley-face emoticon. I was left shrugging that perhaps Sprague suffered from some sort of mental illness, as he viewed the dead mother and her toddlers appropriate material for some sort of cheap joke.

3. Email from Anne Hastings, 27 Janaury 2008

4. Email from Pierre Esperance, 10 April 2008.

(Author's note: This response was submitted to MRZine editor Yoshie Furuhashi who, apparently in the interest of stifling and obscuring discussion on the subject of Haiti, refused to print it. So much for free debate.)

Another journalist slain in Haiti as an accused murderer walks free

From Haiti we hear that Alix Joseph, director of Radio-Télé Provinciale, a private radio station in the northern Haitian port town of Gonaives, was shot and killed there on Wednesday night by two unidentified gunmen as he sat in a car with his fiancée, the Associated Press and Haiti’s Radio Kiskeya are reporting. Evidently, some in the town, which is rife with competing armed politico-criminal factions of varying loyalties, had recently grown irked at the station’s reporting on corruption issues in the region. In some aspects, the killing is worryingly reminiscent of the slaying of government Deputy Marc-Andre Durogène in February 2002.

The killing comes following what is possibly the darkest day for the Haitian judiciary since René Préval assumed the presidency last year: The liberation without trial of former Fanmi Lavalas party Deputy Amanus Mayette, a man accused of the most atrocious human rights abuses as the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide sputtered to an end in February 2004. As one of the leaders of the pro-Aristide Bale Wouze paramilitary gang in the northern Haitian town of Saint-Marc, Mayette has been accused by multiple witnesses of being one of the organizers of the multi-day mass killing of Aristide opponents - as well as politically unaffiliated civilians - in the town over that month when, by authoritative accounts, at least 27 people were slain . Mayette, accounts of eyewitnesses claim, also helped to decapitate Leroy Joseph in front of his wife and children in Saint-Marc that month. The result of some rather curious maneuvering by public prosecutor Rocky Pierre, the release occurs shamefully on the heels of the death of Hugues Saint-Pierre, the president of the Cour d’Appel des Gonaïves, in a road accident and has occasioned protests by the victims and families of victims of the 2004 killings.

Those victims of Saint Marc still cry out for justice but, alas, there still seems to be precious little of that in today’s Haiti.