Haiti’s Aristide should be greeted with prosecution, not praise

Haiti’s Aristide should be greeted with prosecution, not praise

By Michael Deibert

The indictment late last year by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of six prominent Kenyans for their roles in violence following that country’s disputed 2007 elections was a welcome sign for those seeking to hold politicians accountable for their crimes. Though the ICC has badly bungled what should have been its showpiece case - against the ruthless Congolese militia leader Thomas Lubanga - the Kenya indictments nevertheless represented a welcome extension of its continuing mission.

To those of us who have seen Haiti’s political convulsions first-hand over the years, that Caribbean nation makes a compelling case for attention by the ICC as perpetrators of human rights abuses often go unpunished or are even rehabilitated in subsequent governments. With one despotic former ruler (Jean-Claude Duvalier) having recently returned and another (Jean-Bertrand Aristide) announcing his intention to do so, one Haitian case, in particular, would seem tailor-made for the ICC’s attention.

In February 2004, in the midst of a chaotic rebellion against Mr. Aristide's government, the photojournalist Alex Smailes and I found ourselves in the central Haitian city of Saint Marc, at the time the last barrier between Aristide and a motley collection of once-loyal street gangs and former soldiers who were sweeping down from the country's north seeking to oust him.

Several days earlier, on 7 February, an armed anti-Aristide group, the Rassemblement des militants conséquents de Saint Marc (Ramicos), 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.

On 9 February, the combined forces of the Police Nationale de 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 organisation named Bale Wouze (Clean Sweep) retook much of the city. By 11 February, a few days before our arrival, 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 Alex 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 Ramicos 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."

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 Feb. 11 and Aristide’s flight into exile at the end of the month. Her conclusion supported by the research of the Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains, a Haitian human rights organization.

Following Aristide's overthrow, several members of Bale Wouze were lynched, 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 the American Convention on Human Rights in its detention of Neptune, though stressed that it was "not a criminal court in which the criminal responsibility of an individual can be examined.” Neptune ran unsuccessfully for president in Haiti’s recent elections.

After being jailed for three years without trial, 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. At the time of writing, Mr. Aristide himself continues to enjoy a gilded exile in South Africa, his luxurious lifestyle and protection package bankrolled by South African taxpayers.

Frustratingly for the people of St. 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, 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.

The Institute for Justice and Democracy (IJDH), a U.S.-based organization, has lauded Mr. Dauphin as “a Haitian grassroots activist.” The IJDH itself maintains close links with Mr. Aristide’s U.S. attorney, Ira Kurzban, who is listed as one of the group’s founders, serves on the chairman of board of directors and whose law firm, according to U.S. Department of Justice filings, earned nearly $5 million for its lobbying work alone representing the Aristide government during the era of its worst excesses. By comparison, the firm of former U.S. congressmen Ron Dellums received the relatively modest sum of $989,323 over the same period.

When I returned to St. Marc in June of 2009, I found its residents still wondering when someone would be held accountable for the terrible crimes they had been subjected to. Amazil Jean-Baptiste, the mother of Kenol St. Gilles, said simply "I just want justice for my son.” A local victim’s rights group of survivors of the pogrom, the Association des Victimes du Génocide de la Scierie (AVIGES), formed to help advocate on residents’ behalf, but have had precious little success in what passes for Haiti’s justice system, broken and dysfunctional long before January 2010's devastating earthquake.

Though Mr. Aristide remains something of a fading star for a handful of commentators outside of Haiti- most of whom have not spent significant time in the country, cannot speak its language and have never bothered to sit down with the victims of the Aristide government's crimes there - to those of us who have seen a bit of its recent history firsthand, the words of veteran Trinidadian diplomat Reginald Dumas - a man who does know Haiti - seem apt, that Mr. Aristide "[acquired] for himself a reputation at home which did not match the great respect with which he was held abroad.''

The ICC has sometimes been criticized for acting as if war crimes and crimes against humanity are simply African problems, taking place in distant lands. The people of St. Marc, only a 90 minute flight from Miami, know differently. As Mr. Aristide currently loudly voices his desire to return to Haiti from his exile in South Africa, doubtlessly transiting several ICC signatory countries (including South Africa itself) in the process, the case of the victims of St. Marc is one admirably deserving of the ICC’s attention.


Michael Deibert is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University and the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press). He has been visiting and writing about Haiti since 1997.

Photo © Michael Deibert

Some thoughts on impunity and Africa

Flying home to Paris from a reporting trip to Haiti and a brief visit to the United States earlier this week, I read former United Nations’ secretary general Kofi Annan’s eloquent and impassioned op-ed concerning the subject of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and Africa in the International Herald Tribune.

In his article, Annan, notes that the ICC now has 108 signatory states, including 30 African countries, representing the largest regional bloc among member states. Beyond that, five of the court’s 18 judges are African and, in Annan’s word, “the ICC reflects the demand of people everywhere for a court that can punish these serious crimes and deter others from committing them.”

One cannot read Annan’s words, of course, without thinking of the ICC’s indictment of Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, which calls for al-Bashir’s arrest on five counts of crimes against humanity and two counts of war crimes for his actions connected to the conflict in the Sudanese region of Darfur, a crisis which the United Nations itself estimates has killed at least 200,000 people. The indictment against al-Bashir, a sitting head of state, uses quite similar language to charges laid out against Germain Katanga and Mathieu Ngudjolo, two of the militia leaders in the Ituri conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the early part of this decade. Nevertheless, opposition and criticism of al-Bashir’s indictment has become something of a cause célèbre among some in progressive circles, as well in the halls of power in Africa itself, who charge (without acknowledging such bodies as the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia) that the African leader is being unfairly singled out. Since the indictment, al-Bashir, far from being treated as a pariah, has been fêted at capital’s across the continent.

“We have little hope of preventing the worst crimes known to mankind, or reassuring those who live in fear of their recurrence,” Annan writes in his article, “if African leaders stop supporting justice for the most heinous crimes just because one of their own stands accused.”

Reading Annan’s Op-Ed, I was reminded of a recent review I wrote of Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani’s book Saviors and Survivors : Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror, in which Mamdani argued, among other things, that none of the charges laid against al-Bashir by the ICC “can bear historical scrutiny.”

Leaving aside the question of the veracity of such a statement for a moment, the experience I had in attempting to get the review published I found instructive in terms of the way that ideology can often blind even those in the news business to the real suffering of people on the ground in a place such as Darfur, which along with the Democratic Republic of Congo (which I have reported on) and Somalia is the site of perhaps the world’s worst humanitarian crisis at present.

I pitched the idea for the review and received approval to write it from Inter Press Service editor Terna Gyuse, who has served as Africa regional editor for IPS since the departure of the rigorous and excellent Jacklynne Hobbs in 2008, a period since when, in my view, the quality and objectivity of the African reportage from the organization has slackened noticeably. After reading the book carefully, checking its footnotes and writing a highly critical review based on what I found to be Mamdani’s ideological polemicism and bad history (as typified by his absurd characterization of the charges against al-Bashir), I submitted the review to Gyuse, who took three weeks before finally rousing himself to a response. Opting to kill the review, ostensibly because of its length, Gyuse then ran in its place an interview with Mamdani, of roughly equal length, during which the latter holds forth at length in a manner that evidently matches up more squarely with Gyuse’s own ideological prejudices and desire to pander to the global intellectual establishment. The review I wrote was eventually published on the website of the AlterPresse news service and then republished on the site for the Social Science Research Council.

One cannot blame the reporter, of course, who is just doing her job by interviewing newsworthy people, or even less Mamdani, who has every right and indeed responsibility to see that his views get a wide hearing, no matter how wrong-headed I may feel them to be. But one can blame the editorial process at IPS, an organization that promotes itself as as “civil society's leading news agency,” but which seems more and more determined to silence independent, critical voices if they do not conform to what appears to me to be the organization’s increasingly ideological slant, one which seeks to avoid confrontation with elements of the the establishment left that help fund its existence at every turn.

It is really necessary to rock the boat, even among one’s own colleges, at certain times to keep them and the process honest and make sure that justice, like journalism, serves those in the greatest need of defending. Though I have often differed with Mr. Annan’s policies in places such as Rwanda, I was encouraged and hearted by his article and hope that media outlets such as the Inter Press Service will give space to similarly well thought out critiques that challenge ideological orthodoxy no matter where it occurs. Those in whose name they claim to speak deserve no less.

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Addendum, as if to drive my point home:

AU to shelter Beshir from war crimes warrant: delegates

3 July 2009

SIRTE, Libya (AFP) – The African Union has decided not to cooperate with a war crimes warrant against Sudan President Omar al-Beshir and again appealed to the United Nations to delay the case, delegates said Friday.

Two delegates from different countries said the African Union summit had agreed to a text reading: "The AU member states shall not cooperate... for the arrest and surrender of Sudan President Omar al-Beshir."

The summit was expected later Friday to formally announce its decision, which effectively allows Beshir to travel across Africa without fear of arrest under the warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity issued by the International Criminal Court.

The text was backed by Libyan leader and current AU chief Moamer Kadhafi, who has said the ICC represents a "new world terrorism," and won support from many countries who felt the court was unfairly targeting Africans.

Thirty African states have signed the Rome statutes creating the court, and have treaty obligations to arrest Beshir if he travels on their territory.

But the text adopted at the summit voices frustration felt by many African nations who say the UN Security Council ignored an early AU resolution calling for a one-year delay to the indictment.

The UN Security Council can ask the court, via a resolution, to suspend investigations or prosecutions for 12 months, under Article 16 of the Rome Statute. The stay can be renewed.