a1492: Haitian ex-official deported from U.S., jailed (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

     By Michael Deibert

     PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, March 27 (Reuters) - A high-ranking police
official under the military junta that ruled Haiti in the early 1990s was
deported from the United States and jailed in connection with the 1993
assassination of Haiti's justice minister, police said on Wednesday.
     Jackson Joanis, already convicted in absentia in Haiti for another
murder, was expelled from the United States on Monday and arrested along
with several other criminal deportees when he arrived in Port-au-Prince
that day, Haitian National Police spokesman Jean Dady Simeon said.
     "Joanis is being held at the National Penitentiary for the involvement
in the murder of Justice Minister Guy Malary on October 14, 1993," Simeon
said.
     Joanis was an army captain and police station chief who directed an
anti-gang unit under the military regime that toppled President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide from power in 1991.
     Joanis has been wanted by Haitian authorities for years for his
alleged role in the murder of Malary, Aristide's justice minister during
his first administration.
     Malary was gunned down in the capital one day after the United States
and United Nations reimposed sanctions on the junta government, which had
prevented the USS Harlan County from docking in Haiti to begin a U.S.-led
peacekeeping mission.
     Joanis entered the United States in 1994 on a tourist visa and sought
political asylum after the coup regime was forced out and a U.S.-led
multinational force restored to power the democratically elected Aristide.
     In 1995, Joanis was convicted in absentia in Haiti in the 1993 murder
of businessman Antoine Izmery, an ardent Aristide supporter who had spoken
out against the coup plotters. Izmery was dragged out of Mass at the Sacred
Heart Church in Port-au-Prince and shot and killed.
     The murder conviction made Joanis ineligible for residency in the
United States, which ordered him deported. Joanis, who was sentenced to
hard labor for life on the Izmery conviction, unsuccessfully challenged the
deportation order, arguing that he faced torture if returned to Haiti.
     The presence of Haiti's former paramilitary leaders in the United
States has long been a thorny subject in relations between the two
countries.
     Emmanuel "Toto" Constant, former leader of the FRAPH paramilitary
group that human rights groups have linked to thousands of murders during
the military government, lives in Queens, New York, and has resisted all
efforts to deport him.