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The inauguration of Haiti’s President Michel Martelly on May 14
should sound an alarm for those concerned with human rights,
justice, and the rule of law in the country. In a pre-inaugural
interview with the Montreal daily La Presse on Apr. 18,
Martelly put forward a plan of national reconciliation which
would include granting amnesty to former Haitian ruler
Jean-Claude Duvalier.
Martelly later backed away from
this idea on advice from his counsel. But his connections to the
former dictator present potential obstacles to ongoing efforts
to prosecute him.
In the La Presse
interview, reporter Vincent Marissal asked about the return to
Haiti this year of Mr. Duvalier and of former president
Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Martelly stated: "I say to them
welcome, and we favor reconciliation and inclusion...”
On amnesty, he said: “Before
thinking about this, we must work on awareness and compassion to
understand the victims and respect their feelings. So, we won't
take hasty decisions, but I'm leaning toward the side of amnesty
and forgiveness so that we can think about tomorrow and not
yesterday.”
While this sounds admirably
conciliatory, the position expressed by Martelly is deeply
problematic. First, he cannot legally grant amnesty to Duvalier
(or anyone else) for the killings, disappearances, and political
prisons for which the former dictator is responsible. They are
crimes against humanity under international law.
Secondly, there are no charges
against former president Aristide – either in Haitian or in
international law – for which he could be pardoned.
Duvalier’s crimes are a fact of
his 15 years of rule, from 1971 to 1986. They are documented by
human rights agencies such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty
International and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights,
as well as by the United Nations, the United States government,
and hundreds of media reports.
In these circumstances, amnesty
would not constitute national reconciliation. It would merely be
a favor towards Duvalier. Furthermore, to include Aristide in
the same category legitimizes fictitious allegations and
tarnishes Aristide’s name and reputation.
During the recent election, Martelly – a former konpa singer – campaigned as a
champion of “change,” a “political outsider.” The
reality is much more troubling. In a Mar. 2, 2011 interview with
Agence France Presse, the self-proclaimed outsider said
he was “ready” to work with officials who had served
under the Duvalier regimes. One of his advisors, Gervais
Charles, currently serves as
Jean-Claude Duvalier’s lawyer.
According to a Washington Post article on Feb. 13,
2002, President-elect Martelly was “once a favorite of the
thugs who worked on behalf of the hated Duvalier family
dictatorship.”
A 1996 Miami Herald
article reported that Martelly was “closely identified with
sympathizers of the 1991 military coup that ousted President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide.”
Daniel Supplice, coordinator of Martelly’s transition
team, is a childhood friend and former schoolmate of Jean-Claude
Duvalier. He served in ministerial posts under Duvalier,
including as Minister of Social Affairs.
Martelly’s nominee for prime
minister, Daniel-Gérard Rouzier, is a member of the Haitian
elite who vocally supported the 2004 coup against Aristide and
even opposed his return
to the Western Hemisphere.
Martelly’s support of the 1991
and 2004 coups against Aristide clearly shows his selective
taste for democracy.
The crimes of Jean Claude Duvalier
With Duvalier’s return to Haiti in January
2011, the Haitian government under President René Préval opened
two criminal proceedings, one for financial crimes and the other
for crimes against persons. Haitian victims have come forward to
the state prosecutor to file complaints against Duvalier, and a
large group of Haitian and international human rights attorneys
are currently working with the diaspora to build a more
comprehensive case.
François Duvalier and his son
(who inherited the Haitian presidency in 1971) were responsible
for the deaths of an estimated
60,000 people. The vast
majority were political opponents or innocents suspected of
subversion. Thousands more were brutally tortured at the
infamous Fort Dimanche – one of three notorious prisons that
formed Duvalier’s “triangle of death.”
Although there is no evidence
of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s physical presence at murders or
assassinations committed under his watch, he is criminally
responsible under international and Haitian law as
Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and the paramilitary
Volontaires pour la securité nationale. His liability
extends to the vast repressive apparatus that he
established and maintained
President-for-Life Jean-Claude
Duvalier did not even try to hide his financial crimes. There
are dozens of boxes of evidence of these crimes, including
copies of checks from the Haitian Central Bank written to “cash”
and endorsed by Duvalier. According to the January 25, 2011
Miami Herald, “lawyers estimated that Haiti's former
dictator embezzled at least a half-billion dollars through an
elaborate scheme of false companies, phony charities, and
transfers in the name of friends and family.”
A forensic audit performed
after Duvalier’s departure by a U.S. accounting firm found that
he had personally stolen over $120 million, and his wife
Michelle
$94 million.
International and Haitian law
obliges the Haitian government to seek prosecution of
Jean-Claude Duvalier. That obligation, says an April 2011 report
by Human Rights Watch, “cannot
be undermined by statutes of limitations, amnesties, or other
domestic legal obstacles.”
There are two criminal
proceedings currently underway against Duvalier. There are none
against Aristide. If President Martelly can get away with a
false Duvalier-Aristide equivalence, it’s in part because of so
many unproven insinuations and false charges against Aristide
floated in media, Internet and political circles.
It is difficult to disprove
accusations against Aristide because none have been tested in
court. As meticulously documented by author Peter Hallward in
Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of
Containment (2008), few media or other agencies have made
credible investigations. When they do and the accusations are
disproven, the detractors don't fight back; they just move on to
the next dubious accusation.
Today, there is a very real
threat of old accusations or charges against Aristide being
resurrected in new forms in order to further mislead public
attention and further obstruct a needed reckoning with the
crimes of the Duvalier regime. This would not be the first time.
History of false accusations and
jailings
Notwithstanding the millions of dollars
allocated by the U.S. government to find credible allegations
that Aristide looted Haiti’s public treasury, misappropriated
funds from the national telephone company (Teleco), or engaged
in narcotics trafficking, the accusations remain
unsubstantiated. Not a shred of evidence has been presented to a
court.
In November 2005, 21 months
after the second, foreign-sponsored coup d’état against
Aristide, the illegal regime of Gérard Latortue loudly presented
a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act)
lawsuit in a U.S. (not Haitian) court, accusing Aristide of
corruption and embezzlement of tens of millions of dollars (1).
The case was a lost cause from the start. It was not even served
on any of the defendants and was quietly withdrawn in July 2006.
But it did succeed in tarnishing the reputation of Aristide.
There was controversy
surrounding certain members of Aristide’s security unit. Several
high-ranking members were convicted in a Miami court in 2005 of
“conspiracy to committ money laundering,” with sentences
ranging from 3 to 14 years (2).
Oriel Jean, who had been
Aristide’s security chief until 2003, was arrested in Canada one
week after the coup for allegedly entering without a visa. A
Canadian judge acquitted him, but, before his release, the
United States requested Oriel’s extradition. Rather than fight
the request, Jean chose to go face his accusers.
“According to Oriel Jean,
the U.S. government offered him many incentives to testify
against Aristide, to say that Aristide was somehow involved in
drug trafficking ,” said Haïti Liberté journalist Kim
Ives, who extensively interviewed Jean after his release in
2007. “But Jean told them that he could not lie, that he had
no knowledge of Aristide being involved in anything of the sort.”
In May 2004, the Miami
Herald – no fan of Aristide – published a misleading article
saying that Jean was “a U.S. government informant” who
was bargaining for “a
reduced sentence in exchange for information about Aristide's
inner circle.”
This was a twisted half-truth.
Jean did cooperate with federal authorities, but only to convict
certain drug traffickers, like Serge Edouard, who had no
relation to Aristide. The Miami Herald article killed two
birds with one stone. It implied that Oriel was informing the
U.S. government about Aristide (he wasn’t) and that Aristide was
engaged in something illegal (he wasn’t). Both men were unjustly
tarnished by journalistic legerdemain.
One of the most striking
examples of bias, persecution and demonization of Aristide’s Lavalas party colleagues was the charge of genocide leveled
against Prime Minister Yvon Neptune in September 2005, more than
a year after his initial arrest and detainment in June 2004. The
accusation came from a Canadian International Development
Agency-funded organization called the National Coalition of
Haitian Rights (NCHR, since re-formed under a different name).
The NCHR was an extremely partisan, anti-Lavalas organization
which claimed that a “genocidal massacre” had taken place
in the town of St. Marc on
Feb. 11, 2004. The
organization claimed that Neptune had cold-bloodedly ordered the
deaths of 50 anti-Lavalas activists.
The only connection between
Neptune and the massacre was the fact that he had visited St.
Marc two days earlier to appeal for calm and order in the face
of the foreign funded paramilitary rebellion that was underway
throughout Haiti’s north. Neptune was accompanied by
journalists from the Miami Herald, AFP, AP,
and the New York Times. The newspapers reported that,
indeed, five people had been reported killed during clashes
between pro and anti-Aristide forces in St. Marc over a period
of several days. Yet the NCHR remained steadfast on its
accusations of “genocide.” (4) The false allegations
contributed to Neptune’s illegal and ultimately unjustified
imprisonment from June 2004 to July 2006.
The international community
turned a blind eye to actual assaults on Lavalas supporters
during the Latortue regime. The Sep. 2, 2006 issue of the
prestigious UK medical journal The Lancet, published a
study documenting some 8,000 killings in Haiti during the
two-year coup regime, most of them members or supporters of the
Aristide-led
Lavalas party and movement.
The prevailing, ideological
double standard in reporting was strongly criticized by the
media watchdog organization
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
in 2006.
Meanwhile, in court session
held in the middle of the night, the Latortue regime made quick
work of reversing one of the most significant criminal
convictions in modern Haitian history, that of Jodel Chamblain,
the former FRAPH/FLRN death-squad leader convicted in absentia
of crimes against humanity for his role in the
Raboteau massacre.
Chamblain surfaced most recently leading Jean-Claude Duvalier’s
security detail.
Only a Duvalier prosecution can bring
justice
President Martelly’s ruminations on
reconciliation have the appearance of a political ploy to get
Jean-Claude Duvalier off the hook. This is given an appearance
of neutrality by “forgiving” non-existent charges against
Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Comparing the two leaders in this way
trivializes the crimes for which Duvalier needs to be held
accountable.
The demands of the
International Center for Transitional Justice, the United
Nations High Commission for Human Rights, Amnesty International
and Human Rights Watch to prosecute Duvalier are not without
precedent. In 2009, Peru’s Alberto Fujimori was sentenced to 25
years for crimes against humanity, including mass murder,
kidnapping and corruption.
A failure to prosecute
Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier in an impartial court would add
insult to the injuries Haiti has already suffered in the form of
the earthquake, cholera epidemic, and political unrest related
to the November 2010/March 2011 fraudulent election.
Regretfully, the same powers responsible for the 2004 coup
(United States, France and Canada) have yet to insist that Haiti
respect its obligations to prosecute Duvalier. They should do
so, for it is a necessary and symbolic act of justice that will
ripple throughout the nation, showing that not all is lost in
such difficult times.
The case of Duvalier is a
moment of moral clarity. It offers a much-needed opening to
further a process of healing and rebuilding in Haiti. Justice
delayed is not always justice denied.
An ongoing memorial to the thousands of
victims of the Duvaliers can be accessed here:
http://www.fordi9.com/Pages/Chronicle.html.
Kevin Edmonds is a freelance journalist
and graduate student at McMaster University's Globalization
Institute in Hamilton, Ontario. Roger Annis is a coordinator of
the Canada Haiti Action Network and resides in Vancouver. He can
be reached at rogerannis (at)
hotmail.com.
Notes:
1) Peter
Hallward. Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of
Containment. Verso Books, 2007, pg. 150
2) Ibid. pg. 148
3) Ibid
4)
Ibid. pg. 159 |
