http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/324/43777-Lovinsky.jpgOn the evening of 11th August 2007 Haitian and global activist, Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine disappeared and has not been seen since. Ben Terral of Haiti Action contrasts the Haiti of the US and their proxy army the MINUSTAH with the real Haiti of Lovinsky, the Lavalas movement and the masses of Haitian people.

In the August 9, 2007 Washington Times, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon described his late July visit to the Haitian shantytown of Cite Soleil. Ki-moon trumpets armed incursions waged by the UN mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) and their success in establishing “security,” and concludes, “I am convinced Haiti is at a turning point. Long the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, seemingly forever mired in political turmoil, it at long last has a golden chance to begin to rebuild itself. With the help of the international community -- and the United Nations in particular -- it can.”

On a July visit to Haiti, most of the people I spoke with were less enthusiastic about the UN presence in their country. On July 28, I observed a spirited demonstration across from UN headquarters on Ave. John Brown in Port-au-Prince. The protest took the form of what Haitian activists call a “sit-in”; such actions are smaller than mass mobilization “manifestations” which involve thousands of people marching. July 28 marked the 92nd anniversary of the 1915 US Marine invasion of Haiti, which many Haitians I spoke to see as a direct precursor to the current UN presence in Haiti, given that MINUSTAH, as the mission is known, was established in 2004 to legitimize the US-backed coup regime which ousted the democratically-elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. (Aristide remains in U.S.-enforced exile in South Africa.)

Several activists began posting photos of dissidents killed by military, police and death squads over the past few decades. The photos were placed on a banner that said in Kreyol, “everytime a militant falls, 1,000 will rise to take their place.”

The protestors danced as they chanted, calling out in Kreyol, “what are we asking? For MINUSTAH to leave!” This was immediately followed by a song about their deposed President, which explained “our blood is Aristide's blood.”

A bitterly angry Haitian woman informed me that her 25 year-old daughter was killed in the middle of the night by the UN during a raid on her neighborhood. She told us, “we will never forget how many people the UN has killed.” On previous trips to Haiti, I spoke to other family members of innocent civilians who became “collateral damage” – picked off for no other reason than that they were in the line of fire when UN soldiers went into assault mode on flimsily constructed, densely packed neighborhoods. In one such raid in Cite Soleil, MINUSTAH fired up to 22,000 bullets, according to declassified documents from the U.S. embassy.

The chanting continued in Kreyol: “Calling George Bush, come and get your thieves!” Then the demonstrators began moving up Avenue John Brown, to another entrance to the UN facility about a city block away.

There Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, the head of Fondasyon 30 Septanm, a Haitian human rights organization which advocates for victims of the 1991 and 2004 coup d'etats against the democratically-elected governments of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, read a statement that included this passage: “Yes in 1915 we were subjected to an imperialist, criminal and ruthless occupation. In the year 2004 we again were subjected to another imperialist, criminal and ruthless occupation, even if the dark forces tried to hide their faces behind the army of a few countries that are poor like us.” Lovinsky then added the Kreyol proverb, “Those who pay the band decide what music to play.”

Lovinsky expressed vehement opposition to President Rene Preval's extension of the UN mandate in Haiti. Though elected by the country's poor majority largely because of his past association with Aristide (he was Prime Minister in the first Aristide administration which ended in the 1991 coup), most activists I spoke to now see Preval as at best ineffectual in standing up to rightist forces. And unlike Aristide, Preval has delivered few concrete gains for the poor masses and appears to have little ability or interest in communicating to them what he plans to do to improve their lot.

At the checkpoint Lovinsky directed his bullhorn toward, Jordanian troops stood poised with weapons at the ready in front of a roadblock covered in razor wire. Brazilian, Nepalese, and Bolivian soldiers had also driven by and scrutinized the demonstration at various points.

It was striking how many different uniformed and plainclothes soldiers and officers, including a Phillipine officer wearing a beret, a French officer, and a man with a U.S. flag on his shoulder, repeatedly photographed the assembled demonstrators. UN occupation forces have worked closely with Haitian police, whose widespread use of torture and extrajudicial execution under the post-2004 coup regime has been widely documented, in reports by the University of Miami, Harvard Law School, the Institute for Justice and Democracy and other organizations. Given that holdovers from the coup period still dominate the Haitian police (as well as the judiciary and most ministries), repeatedly photographing protestors seemed more about sending a message of intimidation than a matter of developing files on the fifty mostly elderly men and women in attendance, none of whom posed any physical threat to the heavily armed UN forces.

While Ban Ki-moon praised the Haitian Senate for passing legislation aimed at “creating a legal climate more conducive to economic development and foreign investment,” Lovinsky had a more grassroots perspective at the UN demonstration: “The bourgeoisie favored an occupation which would bring it big profits.”

Certainly a key factor in Jean-Bertrand Aristide earning the enmity of the small number of Haitian super-rich, who collaborated with the U.S., France and Canada on his 2004 ouster, was his Lavalas Party government's work to provide some measure of economic justice by doubling the minimum wage and pushing elites to pay taxes. The Lavalas motto was “from misery to poverty with dignity,” not “working to create a climate more conducive to foreign exploitation.”

Poor Lavalas supporters were swept up en masse throughout the “interim” coup government of 2004-2006. (One of the more prominent current political prisoners, Lavalas grassroots organizer Rene Civil, who helped mobilize thousands in demonstrations to demand the return of Aristide, was arrested on trumped-up charges after Preval took office.) I spoke to a young man in the horrifically overcrowded downtown penitentiary in Port-au-Prince who has been trying with no success to get evidence of his innocence to a judge. His lawyer told me his client was picked up by police in a sweep after the business he worked in was robbed, then he was the one “suspect” police held on to after scrutinizing his history as a nonviolent Lavalas activist.

Untold numbers of other prisoners who identify as Lavalas remain in jail in similarly dubious circumstances. Some have been inside since the 2004 coup without once having seen a judge. One current prisoner estimated that more than 65% of those in the main penitentiary are there for political reasons. Given that I have heard repeatedly from prisoners and families of prisoners that they were offered freedom for cash payments of thousands of U.S. dollars they did not have, in a very real sense these people have been criminalized for being poor.

Incredibly, the outgoing head of UN peacekeeping operations in Haiti, Guatemalan Edmond Mulet gave a recent interview in which he admitted how awful jail conditions are: “We are victims of our own success. They are completely overcrowded. They even have to take turns now to sit or to lie down or to sleep because there is not enough room. So they take turns. They sleep for four hours and then are woken up so the others can sleep. It's pretty horrible. And the sanitary conditions, you have cells that were made for four people and you have
40 or 50 in them. And this poses not only security problems, but also on human rights issue as well. So we are hoping some countries will be interested in putting a remedy to this.”

Mulet went on, “One of the problems we have in Haiti is most of the inmates are in preventive detention mode. They have probably never seen a judge, there's no formal accusation, there's no file, there's nothing. Some of them probably stole a chicken and probably the penalty for that would be five days in jail and they've been in jail two or three years."

Meanwhile anti-Aristide death squad thugs, including perpetrators of the April 1994 Raboteau massacre of Lavalas supporters, convicted and jailed under Haiti's democratic governments are still roaming free after being sprung from jail by paramilitaries who did the dirty work of the 2004 coup.

The sense of solidarity the poor still have for Aristide (a Port-au-Prince resident told me, ‘Aristide was trying to help the lower classes -- that's why he was kidnapped”; the graffiti “VIV RETOU TITID,” or “long live the return of Aristide,” was everywhere) is indicative of the resilience of the popular movement for social and economic justice in Haiti. But given that the current UN mission in the country was established to support a status quo at odds with that popular movement, renewing the UN mandate there will only be another barrier to real democracy and progressive change for the vast majority of Haitians.

ADDENDUM:

On Tuesday, September 18, the Bay Area-based Haiti Action Committee (HAC) held a rally in downtown San Francisco to call attention to the unresolved kidnapping of veteran Haitian human rights activist Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine.

Robert Roth, a San Francisco high school teacher and long-time solidarity activist who took part in a delegation to Haiti in late July (which this writer joined in Port-au-Prince), spoke first at the rally. Roth explained, “It's been over a month since Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine has disappeared. He is a human rights worker, he's a psychologist, he's worked with victims of torture from the coup of 1991-1994. He's continued his human rights advocacy in Haiti during this recent coup in 2004, a coup organized and created by the United States government.”

Roth continued, “When we were there in Haiti, we met with Lovinsky at his house, he talked to us about the current situation in Haiti and how the human rights violations continue against the people. He talked to us about political prisoners, and how they continue to be held in Haiti under the UN occupation, and how they continue to be held under the Preval government.”

Roth added, “He is a deep thinker, and he is a very, very important leader of the people's movement in Haiti. And he has disappeared for over a month, and that's a crime against the people of Haiti, it's a crime against anyone who believes in freedom and justice. It's a crime against anyone who believes in peace and dignity and human rights and all the things that we cherish. And so our hearts are with him wherever he is. And we will not give up. We will not give up our solidarity with Lovinsky. We will not give up hope for his safe return, we will not give up our demand that the authorities in Haiti account for his disappearance, and bring him safely back to his family, his people. And we don't see this as just about Lovinsky. It's about the people of Haiti, it's about the people of Iraq, it's about the people of Palestine, it's about the people of the Philippines, wherever people are fighting for justice. And so we take a moment here to honor him, and we take a moment to let people all over the world now that Lovinsky is with us, we're with him, and we'll continue to be out here until he returns home safely.”

HAC co-founder Pierre Labossiere echoed that internationalist perspective in his comments about “this beautiful brother, psychologist, human rights worker, someone who's at the forefront of the movement for justice, for economic and social justice for the people of Haiti, and for people throughout the world." Labossiere noted that when a member of the July delegation who was helping organize a Human Rights Tribunal on crimes committed during Katrina told Lovinsky of that New Orleans-based solidarity initiative, “Lovinsky said, ‘how do I support it? Let me sign up.’ […] As a matter of fact he was supposed to attend the tribunal when he disappeared three weeks before, the actual tribunal took place. So Lovinsky is one of those brothers who care for people world-wide, he's just … not limited to Haiti. He sees the struggle for justice, and human rights,and equality as a world-wide struggle, and that people need to rally around from wherever you are from and link arms with each other, so we can have a world of peace, a world of justice, where human rights are
respected.”

Labossiere asked the San Francisco protestors to write or call “the US embassy in Haiti, to the Brazilian authorities, who are in charge of the UN mission in Haiti, to the Haitian authorities.” The message: “we need them to exert all their influence – they are very powerful, very influential – with all sectors of Haitian society, from the very top politicians to the underworld, to demand one thing: that brother Lovinsky be returned to his family safely.”

In a September 13 letter to the Brazilian government, Dominican Sister Stella Goodpasture of the Mission of San Jose, emphasized that her appeal was not a request “for the Brazilian mission in Port-au-Prince to crack down militarily as they have in the past. What we are asking for is that Brazilian officials express their concern through any and all channels that the kidnappers should negotiate with Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine's family and that Lovinsky needs to be released unharmed.”

*Ben Terrall is an activist and a member of Haiti Action –

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

More such messages to the authorities in Haiti are still needed.

Haitian Ministry of Justice
Tel: 011-509-245-0474

UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH)
Tel: 011-509-244-0650/0660
FAX: 011-509-244-9366/67
Or, Fax Office of UN Secretary General in New York: 212-963-4879

United States Embassy in Haiti
Tel: 011-509-223-4711, or 222-0200 or 0354
FAX: 011-509-223-1641

Embassy of Brazil in Haiti
FAX: 011-509-256-0900
Email:[email][email protected]
Tel: 011-509-256-9662 or 6208 or 7556 or 7578

The United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) has been blatant in its support of rightwing forces, including the Haitian police, and has been systematic in carrying out human rights abuses against the poor people of Haiti, supporters of Aristide and his Lavalas party, writes Ben Terrell.

As Kofi Annan moves on to life after the UN, it’s important to look at the less-discussed ‘regime change’ which the Bush administration engineered with Annan’s help. The outgoing secretary-general’s supporters argue he did what he could to register disapproval of the Iraq invasion, but in the case of Haiti, he actually helped facilitate a bloodthirsty imperial agenda.

MINUSTAH, the UN mission to Haiti, was put in place to support the illegal post-coup regime which ousted the democratically elected government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004. Countries participating in the UN’s Haiti mission, whose mandate is currently up for renewal, curried favour with Washington, thereby repairing Iraq war-related rifts with the Bush administration. Brazil’s participation was seen by many observers as part of its bid to gain a seat on the UN Security Council.

Brian Concannon, director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti and a former UN human rights observer in Haiti, points out that ‘until 2004, the UN, for good reasons, only deployed peacekeepers where there was a peace agreement to enforce. Only in Haiti has the Security Council deployed blue helmets to enforce a coup d’etat against an elected government. With the MIF [Multinational Interim Force] and then MINUSTAH, the UN abandoned a half-century of principles and common sense, with predictable results.’ Since replacing the US marines in July 2004, the UN troops have supported the Haitian police in crackdowns on the urban-poor supporters of Aristide and his Lavalas party.

Brian Concannon notes, ‘In contrast to its decisive action in Cite Soleil, MINUSTAH has been tolerant of right-wing paramilitary groups. For months after its deployment, MINUSTAH declined to dislodge the paramilitary groups that helped to overthrow the government from police stations. In August 2005 a paramilitary group called the Little Machete Army killed dozens of spectators at a soccer game in broad daylight near a MINUSTAH observation post. MINUSTAH never tried to stop the massacre or pursue paramilitary members, even though the group has terrorised the Grande Ravine area for two years.’

Since February 2004, thousands of non-violent activists and other civilians have been killed, arrested, tortured and exiled by the post-coup regime, which the UN mission in effect was set up to support. This essential fact rarely appears in media analysis of Haiti, so few in the US understand why some have taken up arms to defend their neighbourhoods. In defence of ongoing military operations in the poorest neighbourhoods of Port-au-Prince, UN commanders in Haiti claim they only launch assaults after they have been fired at. But during a week-long August 2006 visit to Haiti’s capital, I was told otherwise.

I witnessed a 24 August UN operation in Simon Pele (a community bordering the sprawling seaside shantytown Cite Soleil) which was stunning in its disregard of the dangers of using heavy calibre weapons in a densely populated area. Such operations had been carried out in Simon Pele throughout August in a UN campaign to ‘secure’ the area. Video footage taken by a photographer also on the scene shows a Brazilian soldier firing from the top of an armoured personnel carrier. I witnessed Brazilian troops running from two armoured personnel carriers into Simon Pele. The soldiers within the neighbourhood were also firing their weapons.

One of those shots killed a young man whose mother I spoke to four days later. Adacia Samedy told me how her son Wildert was fixing a radio on the roof of their family home when UN snipers shot him in the operation. Ms. Samedy told me, ‘My message to the UN is: Thank you for killing my son. I don’t see the sense in their work, they come in, shoot, and people passing can get shot.’ I asked her if any UN personnel had returned to see if civilians were killed, or to offer any assistance. Nobody with the UN had offered so much as a basic acknowledgement of her loss. Queries I have directed to UN spokespeople about the killing of Wildert Samedy remain unanswered.

Another family, that of wheelchair-bound civilian William Mercy, told me they were similarly ignored by the UN after a raid on their section of the Bel Air neighbourhood in Port-au-Prince. Brazilian UN troops swept through the alley outside their home in June 2005 and shot the top of Mercy’s head off, later killing several other unarmed civilians the same day.

I interviewed an older gentleman who was moving his family out of the area, which he told me holds nothing but misery for local youth. I asked him about armed groups the UN claimed it was fighting. He said, ‘I can’t say anything about that,’ but that many people had been shot and killed by the UN in the neighbourhood. None were linked to any armed groups, all were ‘workers’.

Near the bullet-riddled dwelling from which he was pulling out furniture was a church pockmarked by gunfire from UN forces. A Haitian journalist told me the UN claimed there were armed gang members in the church, but that, given the seriousness with which residents feel about Catholicism, no armed combatants would use such a sanctuary for a hideout. A school on the same side of the street was also destroyed by high calibre guns.

In 2005, Harvard Law Student Advocates for Human Rights and Brazil’s Global Justice Centre concluded, ‘MINUSTAH has provided cover for abuses committed by the HNP [Haitian national police] during operations in poor, historically tense Port-au-Prince neighbourhoods. Rather than advising and instructing the police in best practices, and monitoring their missteps, MINUSTAH has been the midwife of their abuses.’

Several months earlier, a University of Miami Law School report concluded, ‘Both forces admitted that it is a confusing “free for all” when the HNP conduct an operation in a poor neighbourhood because there are no radios shared by HNP and the MINUSTAH forces and, even if there were radios, nobody speaks the same language. On a neighbourhood operation, they admitted, there is no clear strategy or objective, but operations devolve into “just shoot before you get shot”.’

In 2004 and 2005 UN troops repeatedly stood by as Haitian police opened fire on non-violent protesters demanding the return of Aristide. In April 2005, Amnesty International noted that ‘Haitian national police officers (HNP) reportedly used live ammunition against Lavalas supporters as they peacefully demonstrated against the United Nations mission headquarters in Boudon, Port-au-Prince.’

But just allowing Haitian police to kill civilians was not enough for prominent rightwing figures in Port-au-Prince. In meetings with UN officials, the elite-owned media and veteran anti-Aristide figures pushed a steady drumbeat of demonisation of poor neighbourhoods that one Haitian activist told me reminded him of propaganda disseminated before the 1994 Rwanda genocide. In January 2006 Reginald Boulos, president of the Haitian Chamber of Commerce and a key supporter of the 2004 coup, told Radio Metropole, ‘You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs. We think that MINUSTAH’s generals need to make plans to limit collateral damage. But we in the private sector are ready to create a social assistance fund to help all those who would be innocent victims of a necessary and courageous action that should be carried out in Cite Soleil. … When terrorists occupy some lawless zones, there are always innocent victims.’ Elsewhere in the interview Boulos called on UN troops to help police ‘neutralise all the armed criminals and terrorists who are terrorising the metropolitan area.’

Most poor adults in Haiti have strong memories of death squad terror during the first anti-Aristide coup in 1991–1994, which killed around 5,000 people. That history was frequently referred to as a ‘Solidarity Encounter With the Haitian People’ which Lavalas activists staged in Port-au-Prince in August 2006. The conference brought international visitors to share political insights and experiences with Haitians struggling on the ground. Jacques Depelchin, author of ‘Silences in African History: Between the Syndrome of Discovery and Abolition,’ and executive director of the Ota Benga Alliance for Peace, Healing and Dignity in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, spoke several times at the conference. He told me, ‘It is important for people to understand that Aristide and Lavalas members are connected through generations to the successful slave revolution of 200 years ago.’ Later, as we shared a car together in Port-au-Prince, he told me, ‘the problem of Haiti is really a structural one: they are not supposed to have succeeded or, worse, to have survived and still be resisting’.

As to the ‘great powers’, Depelchin said, ‘one should not harbour illusions: [the UN] is a club of states, structures which cannot even respect their own conventions (for example, the Convention Against Genocide, passed in 1948). In case the UN falters, there is now the G8 to make sure that ultimate power rests with the most powerful. Radicals around the world need to think in terms of the kind of emancipatory politics which drove the slaves to overthrow the system as it was then known. Democracy à la US/France/Canada is consensus politics around an agenda set up by financial and economic interests. That agenda is to ensure that what happened between 1791 and 1804 is forgotten forever or, if remembered at all, is a history written and propagated by the current powers that be.’

Haitian revolutionary leader Touissant L’Overture once wrote that any effort by plantation owners to reimpose slavery ‘would be to attempt the impossible: we have known how to face dangers to obtain our liberty, we shall know how to brave death to maintain it’.

Rene Civil, a Lavalas leader who spent much of the coup period in exile, struck a similar chord at the solidarity encounter, when he said: ‘The people of Haiti, who believe in freedom, who have tasted freedom, will never accept this criminal, slaving system.’ Civil also denounced the global system ‘which causes economic, political, military and social war on the people of the world’, and prevents poor nations like Haiti from exercising their independence.

Rene Civil was arrested shortly after I saw him speak at the conference, on charges Brian Concannon describes as ‘dubious’. Initially claiming that Civil was just being brought in for routine questioning, the authorities have moved the activist to Port-au-Prince’s downtown penitentiary. Dissidents in Haiti both fear for Civil’s safety there and worry that his arrest may signal a new round of judicial harassment of activists.

Dave Welsh, a US trade unionist who attended the solidarity conference, told me, ‘Haiti is still under military occupation. The occupiers hope the UN label will give a fig leaf of legitimacy to French, US and Canadian plans to benefit from the nation's labour and resources, control the Haitian state, and prevent any restoration of Haitian sovereignty and democracy. Countries like Brazil, who provide the UN troops that are brazenly and repeatedly killing civilians in their homes, undoubtedly have their own reasons for two years of willing support for this brutal occupation.’ Welsh was also in Haiti in July 2005 as part of a labour and human rights delegation which documented the aftermath of a massacre in which Brazilian troops killed up to 60 Cite Soleil residents in the midst of targeting a Lavalas militant and community leader. (I also spoke to survivors of that massacre, including a pregnant woman who was fired upon by UN troops in a helicopter. She lost her baby but was saved by Doctors Without Borders.)

Brian Concannon told me that in recent conversations, he has heard ‘over and over from poor Haitians that they wanted disarmament in their neighbourhoods, but in tandem with disarmament in the wealthy neighbourhoods that are the main source of guns that get to the slums, and the disarmament of death squads and former soldiers who kill Lavalas supporters with impunity.’

Concannon adds, ‘If the MINUSTAH operations really aimed to establish law and order, they would start by obeying the law: making legal arrests of those suspected of possessing guns, with a valid judicial warrant, rather than undertaking deadly indiscriminate attacks on poor neighbourhoods.’

But the UN shows no interest in following that direction. On 19 August, Amaral Duclona, a spokesman for armed groupings in Cite Soleil opposed to coup forces, told Reuters, ‘UN troops don't want peace and disarmament because they want a justification for their presence here.’ Duclona asked, ‘How can we hand over our weapons while UN troops continue to conduct heavy attacks against us?’

On 19 October 2006 Brazilian troops levelled dwellings in Cite Soleil to widen a road, and as angry residents demonstrated to stop the project, soldiers opened fire and killed at least three people. Two months later, the San Francisco Bay Area-based Haiti Action Committee, which keeps close daily contact with activists and human rights observers in Port-au-Prince, stated, ‘In the early morning of Friday 22 December, starting at approximately 3 a.m., 400 Brazilian-led UN occupation troops in armoured vehicles carried out a massive assault on the people of Cite Soleil, laying siege yet again to the impoverished community.’

Eyewitness reports said a wave of indiscriminate gunfire from heavy weapons began about 5 a.m. and continued for much of the day. Referring to UN soldiers and Haitian police, Cite Soleil resident Rose Martel told Reuters, ‘They came here to terrorise the population. I don't think they really killed any bandits, unless they consider all of us as bandits.’ The Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti estimates more than 20 civilians were killed, including elderly and children. A US doctor who interviewed survivors after the assault was told by survivors that ‘a UN helicopter circled [Cite] Soleil and fired bullets down on the homes of thousands of people’.

The 22 December operation was partly in response to a sustained campaign of rightwing pressure which blamed alleged gang leaders in Cite Soleil for kidnappings in Haiti. But Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, coordinator of the September 30 Foundation, an organisation which supports victims of the first and second coups against Aristide, told me that the most widely covered kidnapping in the two weeks before the 22 December attack, that of anti-Lavalas Senator Andre Riche, was ‘political theatre’. Lovinsky told me that rightwing media outlets broadcast inflammatory editorials about the kidnapping without asking many essential questions, including why the heavily armed bodyguards of the prominent anti-Lavalas politicians kidnapped did not have their weapons taken away, and how the politicians managed to escape unscathed from captivity. Lovinsky points out that the media outlets calling for crackdowns on Cite Soleil ‘are in full support of Michael Lucius’, the former central director of the judicial police implicated in kidnapping operations.

The Haiti Action Committee noted, ‘The kidnappers are mostly well connected to the business elite and coup regime. Even Police Chief Andresol admits the national police are involved in much of the crime wave, including kidnappings.’ Canadian journalist Anthony Fenton spoke with ‘numerous sources’ (who could not go on the record due to security concerns) that connected Senator Youri Latortue, nephew of post-coup regime Prime Minister Gerard Latortue, to kidnapping rings. In August 2005 prominent businessman Stanley Handal was arrested for involvement in kidnapping; the Haiti Information Project reported, ‘Handal is a member of one of Haiti’s wealthiest families that supported the ousting of Aristide in 1991 and 2004. He was initially arrested along with eight members of Haiti’s police force for running a kidnapping ring after he attempted to use a stolen credit card taken from one of his victims. The judge who released them, Jean Péres Paul, is responsible for keeping Father Gerard Jean-Juste behind bars and for the arrest of journalists Kevin Pina and Jean Ristil on 9 September. The police officer responsible for the initial investigation into Handal’s case has reportedly been forced into hiding.’

Hopes for progressive change in Haiti were buoyed with the election of Rene Preval on 7 February 2006. Preval’s success was a victory against long odds by the popular movement which first swept Jean-Bertrand Aristide into office in 1990. Preval, who served as Haiti’s second democratically elected president from 1996 to 2001, ran with Espwa (Creole for ‘hope’), a party hastily assembled for the elections with little organising capacity. Because of the post-coup government’s refusal to release political prisoners and its continued repression of Lavalas, Aristide’s party (by far the largest political formation in Haiti, did not officially field candidates in the presidential election.)

But a year later, the police, the judiciary, and other ministries in Preval’s government remain controlled by coup figures, and major media are run by rightwing elites. Though Preval helped achieve the release of prominent political prisoners such as Annetee Auguste (‘So Anne’), Yvon Neptune, and others, hundreds of political prisoners illegally jailed by the coup regime remain behind bars. Preval also has little control over the UN mission.

In a 19 December 2006 report on the UN mission in Haiti, Annan recommended an extension of MINUSTAH’s mandate beyond 15 February 2007. Annan’s report gave no acknowledgement of charges of sexual abuse of Haitian women and girls by UN troops, or of documented killings of civilians in military assaults. Annan states, ‘The Mission’s continued deployment will be essential, since destabilizing forces continue to use violence to attain their objectives.’

But UN representatives seem disinterested in anti-Lavalas violence. A study published on 30 August 2006 in the prestigious medical journal ‘The Lancet’ concluded that in the 22 months after Aristide's removal there were 8,000 murders and 35,000 sexual assaults in the greater Port-au-Prince area alone. More than 50 per cent of these murders were attributed to anti-Aristide and anti-Lavalas factions including armed anti-Lavalas groups, demobilised army members and government security forces. The report also stated that UN soldiers ‘were identified by respondents as having issued death threats, threats of physical injury, and threats of sexual violence’.

The report’s co-author, Athena Kolbe, told me, ‘We notified more than a dozen UN staffers in Haiti of the report during last summer and told them that we would be in the country and available to share an advance copy of the report with them and discuss it if they had any questions. We had no response before or during the trip from anyone associated with MINUSTAH … [W]e got an email message from a UN staff person declining to meet with us, stating that she was busy and saying, “I don't know that you have anything of relevant [sic] to share with us”.’

In early January, Brazilian Major General Carlos Alberto Dos Santos became the fourth commander of the UN force in Haiti (consisting of 8,360 total uniformed personnel, as of 30 November 2006). Dos Santos said, ‘We are going to work in the same way as we have worked before. Nothing has changed about our mission or our obligations.’ Since Dos Santos made that commitment, UN military operations have continued. Among the civilians killed by UN gunfire in these attacks, as reported by the Haiti Information Project, are seven-year-old Stephanie Lubin, four-year-old Alexandra Lubin, and nine-year-old Boadley Bewence Germain.

Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine and other activists point to the unabated UN killings of civilians in their campaign against a renewal of the MINUSTAH mandate.

* Ben Terrell is a San Francisco-based writer who has visited Haiti four times since the 2004 coup which drove the democratically-elected Aristide government from office

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Ben Terrall examines Haiti’s coup regime, human rights abuses, the sham of planned elections and the complicity of Washington on a military and diplomatic level. It’s a situation that has important implications for the African diaspora. As Fr.Jean-Juste, Haitian activist for justice and human rights, is quoted as saying: “It is time for peace, justice, and greater love, particularly among us, various branches of the African Diaspora in America. Can the day come when all of us African descendants in the Americas join together for mutual concerns, unity, and greater solidarity among us in this native continent of ours? Then can we come together in even stronger solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Africa, our grandmother continent?”

In a June 2005 Jamaica Observer column about the significance of the Haitian revolution, John Maxwell wrote, “the slaves of Saint Dominique, the world’s richest colony, rose up, abolished slavery and chased the slavemasters away.” Maxwell, one of the more astute journalists covering US foreign policy, added, “Unfortunately for them, they did not chase all of the slavemasters away, and out of the spawn of those arose in Haiti a small group of rich, light-skinned people – the elites, whose interests have fitted perfectly into the interests of the racists in the United States. Between them, last year, on the second centenary of the abolition of slavery and the Independence of Haiti, those interests engineered the re-inslavement of Haiti, kidnapping and expelling the president and installing in his place a gang of murderous thugs, killers, rapists and con-men.”

Vehement opponents of Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s Lavalas party, the Bush Administration helped orchestrate the February 2004 coup which ousted the democratically-elected government of Haiti. Among other pro-poor social programs, the Aristide/Lavalas government’s doubling of the minimum wage was anathema to Washington’s “free trade” corporate agenda.

Maxwell argues, “the now rampant neo-facist apologists for so-called neo-liberalism are in direct line of moral descent from those who petitioned Pope Nicholas V in 1454 to sanction the slave trade between Portugal and Africa…in the new world created by the neo-liberal counter-revolution, the rights of workers and the poor are being taken away, they are getting poorer and the richer are getting richer and less accountable. In Africa, that means that hundreds of children die every day from starvation or gastroenteritis because their governments cannot afford to train or pay doctors or to provide clean drinking water.”

The dividing lines resulting from such blatant economic warfare on the world’s poor have created solidarity among the poorest countries such that the African Union and the CARICOM countries have refused to buckle under Bush Administration pressure to recognize the current coup regime in Haiti.

To its everlasting discredit, in 2004 the UN sent troops to Haiti when a U.S. marine occupation became politically untenable. In effect, this international presence, consisting of soldiers from more than twenty countries, comprises an occupation force that legitimizes the current coup regime and controls dissidents unwilling to accept the new status quo. And, as a Chilean officer told me in Cap Hatien in December 2004, the troops are “trained as soldiers, so it is very hard for us to not react in a military fashion.”

A Haitian activist I spoke to who identifies himself as a member of Lavalas told me that one useful thing the UN has done in Haiti is to bring in health care. Unfortunately, he noted sardonically, the treatment only comes after UN troops shoot civilians.

In too many cases, those civilians do not survive. In September, I spoke to witnesses to an unprovoked attack on the poor neighborhood of Bel Air in which Brazilian troops killed several unarmed residents on June 29, including a man in a wheelchair who had the top of his head blown off. Neighbours present at the scene told me the young man was confident he would be safe in front of his residence during the raid, since he was clearly handicapped and unarmed.

On July 6, UN forces perpetrated a well-documented massacre of women, men and children in the Cite Soleil section of Port-au-Prince, killing at least 23 people. During a July 8 interview with U.S. human rights activist Seth Donnelly, UN commanders Lt. General Augusto Heleno Ribiero Pereira and Colonel Jacques Morneau claimed that they were unaware of any civilian casualties and characterized the operation as a success. Colonel Morneau suggested that bodies viewed by investigators could have been killed by “gangs” and blamed on MINUSTAH (United Nations Stabilization Mission In Haiti) forces. The commanders stated that MINUSTAH did use a helicopter during this operation for logistical coordination, but that soldiers in the helicopter did not shoot into the community.

Among the Haitians I spoke to in September was a seven-months pregnant woman who was shot while standing outside her Cite Soleil residence by UN troops during the July 6 raid. Despite the heroic efforts of Doctors Without Borders, she later lost her baby.

On the morning of July 6, the woman saw flashes of light coming from a helicopter directly overhead before she felt a stinging in her stomach and realized she’d been shot. Photographs taken by investigators show bullet holes in ceilings of tin shacks, suggesting that they were fired on from above.

A nonviolent Haitian activist I interviewed explained, “I see this situation as very close to what happened in Rwanda, there is a legitimacy of hatred, we hear in the media that everything that goes wrong is the fault of one party… they describe all Lavalas as enemies of the country. The rich keep calling on the UN to crack down harder, calling all people in the popular neighborhoods ‘bandits’. After the July 6 UN massacre in Cite Soleil, the rich said ‘good job’. When 10,20, or 30 people are killed in popular neighborhoods, the wealthy applaud. They pretend that all people in those neighborhoods are ‘bandits’. It’s clear that people in those neighborhoods are pro-Lavalas, but not all are armed. People in those neighborhoods start to feel that people outside are enemies. A real process of reconciliation would have to involve all, with no exclusion, and would have to look seriously at what the needs are in poor neighborhoods.”

Unfortunately the current government seems only interested in dealing with the poorest neighborhoods with military force. Given its cuts to social programs put in place by President Aristide’s Lavalas administration, and the extreme increases in prices of rice and other staples, the dire situation now faced by the poor majority is unlikely to improve in the foreseeable future.

While political prisoners jailed for their association with Lavalas continued to rot in jail, former anti-Lavalas death squad leader Jodel Chamblain was released in 2005, after a retrial Amnesty International called "an insult to justice." I interviewed prisoners in Haiti’s jails in December 2004 and July and September, 2005. Numerous incarcerated individuals told me they were arrested for openly supporting Aristide.

In the southwestern town of Aquin, Luc Jean Lamour described his situation to me from the cell he has little hope of leaving under the current government. On November 9, 2004, police conducting a sweep arrested Lamour. He was charged with arson, but at his first hearing witnesses didn’t accuse him of that. Since a police officer testified he didn’t see Lamour at the site of the alleged fire, his lawyer argued for release. But in a second hearing Lamour’s lawyer was away in Port au Prince, and Lamour was convicted and given a life sentence. Lamour pointed out that the case against him didn’t focus on arson, but instead stressed his political background as a Lavalas activist. Lamour asked, “The witnesses didn’t say anything directly against me. There was no evidence at all, why was I convicted for life?” The young man is in a cell with 8 other prisoners, most of whom sleep on sheets on the ground. As with many other prisoners I spoke to, he complained that their drinking water is terrible and that even shower water is not clean, as the cistern holding it is not cleaned or ventilated.

Amnesty International has named Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste, a veteran campaigner for justice and human rights in the US and Haiti, a “prisoner of conscience” and called for his unconditional release. The nonviolent activist priest, who has been held on trumped-up charges for five months, was recently diagnosed with a form of leukemia that progresses slowly but can develop into a more virulent strain of cancer.

Sasha Kramer of the Haiti Action Committee visited Fr. Jean-Juste in December. Kramer said, “The Haitian government claims their doctors have found nothing wrong with Jean-Juste, but the coup regime has absolutely no credibility. The Bush Administration could easily pressure the Latortue government, which it helped put in place, to release Jean-Juste.” Kramer noted that in 2005 a US court called conditions in a Haitian prison “reminiscent of a slave ship”.

On December 16, Congresswoman Maxine Waters and 41 other members of the US House of Representatives wrote President Bush calling for Fr.Jean-Juste’s release. The priest responded to the Waters and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus by writing, “Your call for my immediate release brings me the holiday season's hope. It is time for peace, justice, and greater love, particularly among us, various branches of the African Diaspora in America. Can the day come when all of us African descendants in the Americas join together for mutual concerns, unity, and greater solidarity among us in
this native continent of ours? Then can we come together in even stronger solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Africa, our grandmother continent?
These are my wishes for this holidays season.”

When I interviewed Father Jean-Juste in Port-au-Prince’s main penitentiary in July 2004, he commented on elections the US, France and Canada is financing in Haiti: “We hope they will accept the conditions offered by Fanmi Lavalas, and include everyone in the exile community, Haitian Americans, the diaspora in general, and as many Haitians as possible within and outside Haiti. Let’s recognize Aristide as our elected President and work on a return program to facilitate passage of power, free all political prisoners, respect human rights of everyone in this country.”

In a July 2004 press statement, The Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti commented, “Fr. Jean-Juste’s arrest is well timed to silence the Interim Haitian Government’s (IGH) most prominent opponent in the lead up to the elections. Fr. Jean-Juste has insisted that there can be no fair campaigning or voting while hundreds of political prisoners fill the jails and police regularly open fire on legal anti-government demonstrations. Most Haitians agree with him: less than two weeks before the end of the registration process on August 9, less than 15% of eligible voters have even registered. Many of those who have registered stated that they did so because registration is required for the national identity card and that they have no intention to vote.”

In mid-November, presidential elections, which had already been postponed five times, were set for January 8. In a November press statement, Rep. Maxine Waters observed, "The Provisional Electoral Council … has yet to hire hundreds of regional election supervisors, provide identification cards to three million registered voters, identify polling locations, or begin recruiting 40,000 poll workers to conduct the elections. One cannot help but wonder how many of these technical problems are the result of simple incompetence and how many are part of a deliberate effort to disenfranchise thousands of Haitians, especially those most likely to vote for Lavalas, the only political party with widespread support among the poor. Cite Soleil, a Lavalas stronghold with an impoverished population of 300,000, had no registration sites at all until after the September 30 registration deadline had passed."

At press time, in early January, the elections have been delayed yet again.

In a memorandum signed by a group of Lavalas leaders including Mario Dupuy, Angelo Bell and Maryse Narcisse, the party asked its supporters to abstain from participation in the next elections so as not to run the risk of being assassinated. Meanwhile, candidates openly running for President include Guy Philippe, a leader of paramilitaries who drove the Aristide government from office and, according to the DEA and US Embassy, closely linked to Haiti's booming drug trans shipment trade; and Franck Romain, a veteran of the notoriously bloodthirsty regimes of "Papa Doc" and "Baby Doc" Duvalier.

In a brief stopover in Port-au-Prince on September 27, Condoleeza Rice staged a photo-op at a voter registration center which National Public Radio described as "carefully scripted". Rice intoned, "throughout history people have fought for the right to vote, some have indeed died for the right to vote. There is no more powerful weapon in the hands of a citizen...and so to the people of Haiti I urge you to use that powerful weapon, the vote, in the days ahead."

The irony of Rice, a key backer of the coup government that replaced a democracy with a death-squad kleptocracy, lecturing Haitians on the importance of the ballot box is stunning.

As Waters points out, “No matter what the date of the elections, the people of Haiti cannot be expected to take them seriously as long as voters are afraid to go to the polls and viable candidates are kept off the ballots and in the prisons. The repeated election delays and continuing technical problems of the Provisional Electoral Council are only the most recent evidence that the interim government of Haiti is incapable of organizing free and fair elections.”

Juan Gabriel Valdès, head of UN operations in Haiti, announced on August 9 that the UN forces are determined to stand in the way of all who seek to exclude Haitians from the electoral process. But UN officials have done little to pressure the illegal coup regime (which by its presence the UN occupation legitimizes) to release political prisoners or to stop its attacks on civilians.

Instead, as a March 2005 report from Harvard Law School noted: “MINUSTAH has provided cover for abuses committed by the HNP (Haitian Police) during operations in poor, historically tense Port-au-Prince neighborhoods such as Bel-Air, La Saline, and lower Delmas. Rather than advising and instructing the police in best practices, and monitoring their missteps, MINUSTAH has been the midwife of their abuses. In essence, MINUSTAH has provided to the HNP the very implements of repression.”

When Aristide was president and his besieged administration struggled to support the interests of the country’s poor majority, the Bush Administration did everything it could to undermine the Lavalas agenda (for a detailed overview of that history see the Haiti Action Committee pamphlet “The US War Against Haiti: Hidden From the Headlines” at Today, as the coup regime imprisons and slaughters pro-democracy activists, it continues to receive military, diplomatic and political support from Washington.

A July 23 AP report quoted coup regime Prime Minister Gerard Latortue as saying, “I know that the only topic on which this government will be judged is its capacity to organize fair and representative elections.”

But as President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the National Representative of Fanmi Lavalas, recently asked, “In 1994, who could have expected free, fair and democratic elections in South Africa with Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki, Oliver Tambo and other leaders and members of the African National Congress in jail, exile or in hiding?”

* Ben Terrall is an activist and works with the Haiti Relief Fund, which is an extremely low-overhead operation that gets money to people in desperate need and can be accessed at www.haitiaction.net

* Please send comments to [email protected]

* Half-Hour for Haiti: Enough is Enough, Release Fr. Gerry Now

Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste, the Haitian priest and political prisoner who is suffering from potentially fatal leukemia, remains in jail. However, various efforts are underway in the struggle to release him. For more information visit the website of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti at www.ijdh.org

Two cases are taking place:

1) Last week the Institute for Justice & Democracy (IJDH) and the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) filed a Petition with the Inter-American Commission On Human Rights (http://www.ijdh.org/articles/article_iachr_jimmy_charles.htm) against the Interim Haitian Government and Brazil on behalf of Jimmy Charles, a grassroots activist arrested by UN Peacekeepers and executed in Haitian National Police custody on January 13, 2005.

2) On January 19, lawyers throughout the US filed motions to stop all deportations to Haiti (http://www.ijdh.org/articles/article_Haitian_Deportations.htm) , because of the country's disastrous human rights situation.

There has been a lot of activity on Fr. Gerry's case in the last week. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, (R-FL) wrote to Secretary of State Rice (http://www.ijdh.org/Ros-Lehtinen%20Letter%20Jean-Juste.pdf) asking her to intervene to obtain Fr. Jean-Juste's release. Human Rights First called on Haiti's Minister of Justice (http://www.humanrightsfirst.info/pdf/06123-hrd-jean-juste-ltr.pdf) to do the same thing. Prof. Bill Quigley, Bishop Thomas Gumbleton and others visited Fr. Jean-Juste in Haiti, and issued an Action Alert (http://www.ijdh.org/articles/article_recent_news_1-24-06.htm) .

The judge who had been holding Fr. Gerry since July 21, issued two documents called "ordonnances" on Thursday, January 19. The ordonnances confirmed that there was no basis for the allegations that had been made publicly against Fr. Gerry: that he was involved in the July 2005 kidnapping and murder of Jacques Roche, the killing of two police officers in the fall of 2004, or a plot against the state. Judge Paul dismissed all those charges.

But Judge Paul added two new charges: illegal weapons possession and association de malfaiteurs (criminal conspiracy). These charges are equally without legal or factual foundation. They are based on Fr. Gerry's employment as a chaplain at the National Palace under Haiti's ousted constitutional government. His position entitled him to five security guards, who were issued a total of three pistols and two shotguns by the government. The ordonnance charges Fr. Gerry with illegal arms possession, even though there is no evidence that the security guards lack a valid license, that their employment has been terminated, that the National Palace authorities have asked for the guns back or that the guns were involved in any illegal activity.

If the ordonnance stands, Fr. Gerry would have to go to trial before a single judge. He would not have a jury. He could be convicted if the government proves that either a) he did not return the five weapons, or b) that he refused to name his five security guards, both of which he concedes. As the ordonnance is written, the prosecutor would not need to prove that the guns are illegal or that anyone engaged in or planned any illegal activity.

Conviction on the conspiracy charge could mean a sentence of forced labor for 3-15 years, and would cost Fr. Gerry many civil and political rights, including the right to run for almost any elected office. Conviction could also prevent Fr. Gerry from being admitted to the U.S. for cancer treatment.

The IGH has refused to release Fr. Gerry for leukemia treatment, insisting that he must accept its deal of a trial on the defective ordonnance with the hope of a pardon. Accepting this deal would require Fr. Gerry to trust the IGH, which has pursued him for 15 months on charges it now admits were baseless, to fulfill its promise of a pardon.

Help save Fr. Gerry's Life: Two weeks we sent an appeal asking people to write to Thomas Shannon, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Subsequently Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Patrick Duddy traveled to Haiti and helped arrange the independent medical examination that confirmed the leukemia diagnosis. Please contact Mr. Shannon again, thank him for his past efforts but urge him to take the steps necessary for Fr. Gerry's release. A sample letter is below, feel free to modify it. Sec. Shannon's telephone number is: 1-202-647-5780, his fax is 1-202-647-0791. You can try emailing to [email][email protected], but we have not been able to confirm that address.

Via Facsimile No. 1-202-647-0791

Thomas A. Shannon

Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs

U.S. Department of State 2201 C Street NW Washington, DC 20520

Re: Haitian Political Prisoner Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste

Dear Assistant Secretary Shannon:

Thank you for your efforts on behalf of Haitian political prisoner Fr. Jean-Juste. The State Department's intervention was vital in assuring the January 10 independent medical evaluation that confirmed the leukemia diagnosis. On January 19, the Interim Haitian Government (IGH) released judicial orders confirming that the stated justifications for Father Jean-Juste's eight months of detention- accusations of the murder of two police officers and journalist Jacques Roche and a plot against state security, were baseless. In fact, the Commissaire du gouvernement,or public prosecutor, concluded in one order that "the investigation does not reveal the participation of Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste in any criminal enterprise" (emphasis supplied).

Unfortunately, those developments have not led to any leukemia treatment. The Commissaire du gouvernement,has refused to exercise his authority to provisionally release Fr. Jean-Juste for medical treatment. This authority is based on his responsibility to assure the health of prisoners, is independent of the case's procedural status, and is routinely exercised in Haiti. Fr. Jean-Juste, who wants to clear his name in a fair trial and has appeared at court or the police station every time he has been summoned, has promised to return from abroad if he is provisionally released.

The government is now insisting that Fr. Jean-Juste stand trial on two new charges, illegal weapons possession and association de malfaiteurs (criminal conspiracy), before he receives treatment. These charges are without legal or factual foundation, and neither alleges any underlying criminal acts. Fr. Gerry's lawyer has appealed the charges because they are legally defective and expose his client to a great injustice with severe consequences. Conviction could expose Fr. Gerry to fifteen years hard labor, permanent loss of civil rights, including the right to hold elective office, and potential exclusion from the U.S. and its cancer treatment facilities.

The IGH and U.S. Embassy staff implored Fr. Jean-Juste's attorney not to file an appeal, and the IGH is pressuring him to withdraw it. The IGH and the U.S. Embassy official stated that it would be quicker for Fr. Jean-Juste to go to trial, and proposed that the Haitian government could pardon Fr. Jean-Juste if he was convicted.

There is no justification for forcing a defendant to stand trial on a defective but serious accusation as a precondition of receiving treatment for a deadly disease. The IGH should process Fr. Jean-Juste's case promptly, with full respect for his procedural rights. In the meantime, it should release him immediately for treatment.

The new charges and the pressure to drop the appeal are the latest in a 15-month long persistent persecution of Fr. Jean-Juste. In all that time the IGH has yet to present evidence of a single illegal act. It is now time for the United States to take action commensurate to that persecution. I urge you to immediately revoke all U.S. entry visas for IGH officials involved in the persecution, including Commissaire du gouvernement Erman Alce, Prime Minister Gerard Latortue, and Minister of Justice Henri D'Orleans. I also urge you to immediately suspend disbursement of all financial and other assistance to the IGH, until Fr. Jean-Juste is released for life-saving treatment.