[Shadow_Group] Fw: HAITI: Devastating humanitarian and human rights situation continues

[shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca]

----- Original Message -----


October 7, 2004

HAITI: Devastating humanitarian and human rights situation continues.

Below, an article about the recent "humanitarian" crisis in Haiti and the
on-going repression against community development leaders and people in
opposition to the 'de facto' government of Haiti.

If you want on/ off this elist: info at rightsaction.org<mailto:info at rightsaction.org>

Tax-charitable donations needed for humanitarian relief and human rights
work in Haiti. [See below]

===

"Another Unnatural Disaster", by Brian Concannon Jr., Boston Haitian
Reporter, October, 2004

Sorrows cascaded on Gonaives last month - the storm itself was bad enough
under any circumstances, but it descended on a quarter million people (the
size of half of Boston) who had not been warned or helped to higher ground.
When the rain relented, bad roads stopped rescuers, and help that did get
through was stolen by the local "freedom fighters."

At least 2,500 people were killed, and the remaining water and corpses
threaten survivors with deadly diseases.  All this on top of a murderous
year in the City of Independence, that should have been proudly celebrating
Haiti's bicentennial.

Many of us - people who know Haiti well and those who first heard of
Gonaives this year - struggle to comprehend the tragedy's vastness, and to
find meaning or at least an explanation for such suffering.

Some point up to the heavens for answers.  But Jeanne hit Puerto Rico, the
Dominican Republic, Barbados and the U.S. as a full hurricane, killing
thirty-four people -- in all those places combined.  She was only a tropical
storm when she killed seventy times that number in Haiti.

Others point up too, but not as high - to the mountain farmers who cut down
the trees that in other countries slow the rain down.  But the farmers would
not cut the trees if they had a choice - they know better than the experts
what happens when rain hits a deforested slope, because it rushes away with
the topsoil that is needed for next year's crop and is many farmers' only
legacy for their children.  But legacies and next year's crop mean nothing
when the children are dying now, so the farmer cuts and sells the tree to
buy today's medicine and food.

The farmers may point up as well, up north to the governments and
international financial institutions.  Some sit in offices beautifully
paneled with tropical hardwood, all sit in countries where people are not
forced to sell next year's life to survive this year.  The farmers know that
Haiti's peasants did not start the deforestation - Moreau de St. Mery, a
French administrator, complained of deforestation during the slavery era;
American firms harvested industrial quantities of trees in the 20th century.
The farmers also know that people in comfortable offices in comfortable
countries impose the crushing national debts, the embargoes, and the
"economic reforms" that force poor countries to cut already inadequate
programs for healthcare, education and environmental protection.  They know
when the government cannot provide a safety net, the trees must, no matter
the cost.

"Captain Meteo," Renan Jean-Louis, has been Haiti's preeminent weatherman
since the Duvaliers.  He did not survive the political and natural storms
for that long by mixing meteorology with politics. But he saw the storm
coming, as did anyone who listened to news or clicked on a weather website.
Everyone knew that the water would stream quickly down the deforested
mountains - Haiti's interim Minister of Agriculture even wrote a book in
2002 about Haiti's vulnerability to natural disasters, which listed Gonaives
as the largest area of extreme risk for flooding.  But unlike every other
government in Jeanne's path, Haiti's government did not warn or evacuate its
citizens.  Mr. Jean-Louis called this "negligence and nonchalance," and
blamed it for many preventable deaths.

Haiti's interim government will point to its lack of resources: not enough
trucks or money for supplies, poor roads and little disaster response
training.  But last hurricane season Haiti had a functioning Civil
Protection Office, set up with the help of the United States Agency for
International Development and the Pan American Development Foundation.  Last
year, twenty-three local civil protection committees were formed, and over
5,000 people were trained in disaster awareness.  The Civil Protection
Office had plans to warn communities of approaching storms and to provide
emergency assistance.

The Civil Protection Office, its committees, network and supplies were
attacked along with the rest of Haiti's constitutional government earlier
this year.  The government's trucks were burned, officials were killed,
arrested or forced into hiding, the offices where planning was done were
ransacked.

This infrastructure has not been rebuilt anywhere, especially in Gonaives
where the government has left the running of the city to the gangs that
brought it to power.

The Gonaives gangs, like their allies in Port-au-Prince acquired their power
by the bullet, not the ballot.  They cannot be voted out for negligence or
nonchalance, or even for stealing food from women leaving disaster relief
offices.

Neither the government nor the UN troops has made a serious effort to
dislodge them by force.  To the contrary, the UN cooperates with them on
"security matters," the Prime Minister praises them as "freedom fighters."

All of the other countries in Jeanne's path have an elected government,
accountable to the voters, with enough resources to provide a minimum of
basic services, especially healthcare, nutrition, education and security
against natural and unnatural threats.  That these countries endured the
hurricane's wrath with such little loss of life shows that their
democracies, if imperfect, do work.

Haiti, proved once again, the limits of government by dictatorship and
anarchy, a lesson already known too well from the Gonaives plain to the bare
mountaintops.

[Brian Concannon Jr. directs the Institute for Justice and Democracy in
Haiti (www.ijdh.org<http://www.ijdh.org/>). He lived in Haiti from 1995 to 2004, working for the
Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, a group of lawyers established by Haiti's
constitutional governments to help human rights victims pursue their cases
in Haitian courts.]

===

Haiti Human Rights Alert:  Illegal Arrest of Political Leaders, October 2,
2004

[By the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, (541) 432-0597,
www.ijdh.org<http://www.ijdh.org/>, info at ijdh.org<mailto:info at ijdh.org>]

On Saturday October 02, 2004, Haitian police forcibly entered Haiti's Radio
Caraibe and arrested three former parliamentarians from the Fanmi Lavalas
party who had criticized the Interim Government during a radio program.
They arrested a fourth former legislator who protested the arrests.  The
warrantless arrests were illegal and a clear violation of the detainees'
freedom of association and of expression.  They take place in the context of
a wave of police persecution of human rights critics, and verbal attacks on
critics by Haiti's Prime Minister.

The three arrested for criticizing the government were former Senators Yvon
Feuillé and Gerard Gilles, and former Deputy Rudy Hérivaux.  The three form
the Communications Commission of the Fanmi Lavalas party, and all three are
prominent critics of human rights violations carried out by Haiti's
Transitional Government. Lawyer Axène Joseph, also a former Deputy, was
arrested when he protested the other arrests.

Feuillé, Gilles and Hérivaux had gone to Radio Caraibe to participate on the
station's 11AM "Ranmasé" program, along with Evans Paul and Himmler Rébu,
both prominent critics of the Lavalas party.  The program's subject was
violence accompanying recent anti-government demonstrations.  Feuillé,
Gilles and Hérivaux denounced the violence, and condemned the police for
firing on unarmed demonstrators.  Before the program ended, heavily armed
police officers from the Port-au-Prince police headquarters and specialized
units surrounded the station and announced their intention to arrest the
three parliamentarians.

Radio Caraibe's Station Manager, Patrick Mossignac, refused to allow the
police entry into the station, citing the Haitian Constitution's protection
of free speech.  Himmler Rébu and Evens Paul remained in the station to
protest the police action.  A standoff ensued, until just before 6 PM (the
Constitution prohibits arrests, even with a warrant, after 6 PM).  At that
point Judge Gabriel Amboise, a Justice of the Peace, instructed the police
to cut the locks and make the arrests.  The three Parliamentarians did not
resist arrest, and were taken by the police from the Station Manager's
office to the Port-au-Prince police holding cells.  Lawyer Axène Joseph,
also a former Deputy, was arrested earlier in the day when he arrived to
protest the other arrests.

Lawyers for the arrestees demanded that Judge Amboise produce a warrant, as
required by Haiti's Constitution.  The Judge refused, claiming that a verbal
order from the Commissaire du Gouvernement (Chief Prosecutor) gave him the
authority to make the arrest.  He also refused to state the charge against
the defendants. Throughout the day, however, government and police sources
made announcements purporting to link Feuillé, Gilles and Hérivaux to recent
violence.  The police also claimed that a car belonging to one of the three
contained automatic weapons, but dropped this claim when journalists and
human rights observers on the scene insisted that the police, not the
parliamentarians, had brought that car.

The October 2 arrests follow a sharp upturn in attacks against critics of
the interim government's human rights policies.  On September 7, the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued a statement expressing
concern "over several key areas in which the basic rights and freedoms of
Haitians remain weak and imperiled."  On September 16, Radio Caraibe aired
an interview with Interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue, in which Latortue
complained that human rights criticism was making his relations with donor
countries difficult.  Later that day police officers raided the offices of
the Confederation of Haitian Workers (CTH) labor union and arrested nine
union members, all without a warrant. The official justification for the
arrest was that the defendants were "close to the Lavalas authorities."
Hours later, masked men in military attire attacked the office of the
Committee for the Protection of the Rights of the Haitian People (CDPH).

The parliamentarians join many other officials of Haiti's Constitutional
government in jail, including former Prime Minister Yvon Neptune and former
Minister of the Interior Jocelerme Privert and former Delegate Jacques
Mathelier.  All are held illegally: neither Prime Minister Neptune nor
Minister Privert have ever been brought before the judge who issued their
arrest warrant. Mr. Mathelier was brought before a judge, who ordered his
liberation on July 12, but prison authorities transferred Mathelier out of
that judge's jurisdiction.

On Thursday, police interrupted a legal demonstration commemorating the
anniversary of Haiti's September 30, 1991 coup d'etat.  Human rights
observers accompanying the demonstration reported that police fired on the
march, after several attempts to disperse it failed. On the morning of
October 1, interim Prime Minister Latortue conceded in a radio interview
that the police had shot at protesters and individuals had been killed, and
indicated that the authorities would take action against further protests.

Many media reports claim that demonstrators retaliated against the police on
September 30, killing three.  But before the demonstration started, the
police had reported three police officers had been attacked in a firefight
with a crime gang early that morning, with one killed and two wounded.

The Interim Government claims to have recovered three bodies of decapitated
officers, but did not announce their names and the Port-au-Prince morgue had
not received the bodies of any of the three as of 4 PM on Friday.  Media
reports also say that the violence occurred when demonstrators tried to pass
before the National Palace.  In fact, the unprovoked shooting happened
several blocks beyond the Palace, at the Rue des Casernes.

The end of last week saw a sharp increase in warrantless arrests and
shootings of Lavalas supporters by police and anti-Lavalas paramilitary
groups.  IJDH has received reports from all over Port-au-Prince, especially
in poor neighborhoods.  The cases that we have been able to confirm so far
are:

September 30:
Marguerite Saint-Fils, 35, shot in her home by police from the CIMO unit
during the course of an operation in La Saline.

Accel Savain, age 23 a Lavalas leader.  Police searched his home without a
warrant, and although they found no illegality, they arrested him after
finding a T-shirt supporting President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Amel Prince, 25; Lamarre Prince, 21; Amboise Frantz, 20; Wilfred Amboise,
32; Jean Noel, 14; Laurent Yves, 21; Johny Rudolph, 23; Sonel Laguerre, 26;
Michelin Michelle, 26, all arrested on Boulevard LaSaline, on September 30,
all without warrants.

October 1:  Wendy Manigat, age 15, shot and killed by police during an
operation in Bel-Air.

Roland Braneluce, 28, shot by police during a demonstration at Rue
Tiremasse.

Lesly Gustave, a member of the National Committee of Reflection of Famni
Lavalas, was arrested at approximately 4 PM on October 1, without a warrant.
Police are reportedly searching for the remaining members of the committee.

In addition to police persecution, residents of Cite Soleil report that anti
Lavalas armed gangs have been targeting Lavalas supporters over the last few
days.  Those killed include:

Maxo Casséus, a leader of a grassroots organization in Cite Soleil, killed
on September 30.

Piersine Adéma, a resident Soleil 9 in her sixties, killed while sitting in
front of her house, reportedly by the same group that killed Maxo Casséus.

===

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memo-line) and mail to:

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