a1687: Haiti-Ex-Dictator (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

   By MICHAEL NORTON

   PORT-AU-PRINCE, April 16 (AP) -- Police arrested former military
dictator Prosper Avril at the gate of the National Penitentiary, just
minutes after he was released from prison.
   Avril, who held power from 1988 to 1990, was freed by an appeals court
that found the government had acted arbitrarily and illegally when it
arrested him last year for plotting a coup. On Monday he was arrested
again, this time charged with complicity in the 1990 slayings of about a
dozen peasants killed by soldiers.
   "Why are you doing this?" the 65-year-old former lieutenant general
shouted, as police handcuffed him, said his lawyer, Reynold Georges.
   The Port-au-Prince Appeals Court ordered Avril's release last Thursday,
overruling a Jan. 26 decision by an investigating judge to keep him in
prison. The appeals court sided with an earlier ruling that Avril's arrest
last year was arbitrary and illegal. The release order was signed Monday.
   The new charge is related to slayings of civilians in the west coast
settlement Piatre, about 50 miles northwest of the capital. The killings
took place in 1990, when Avril was in power, said Jacques Maurice,
spokesman for President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
   "A cruel and nasty blow has been dealt to justice, for political
reasons," Georges said. The arrest warrant was drawn up in west-coast St.
Marc, outside the Port-au-Prince jurisdiction, and its execution was
illegal, he said.
   Avril was chief of presidential security under dictator Jean-Claude
Duvalier, until Duvalier's ouster in 1986. He seized power in September
1988, ousting then-dictator Lt. Gen. Henry Namphy.
   Avril pledged to hold elections, but never followed through. In March
1990, a popular uprising forced him into exile, and he fled to the United
States.
   It is unclear when Avril returned to Haiti, but 11 years after his
departure he appeared at an opposition party meeting last year.
   Police arrested him about a month later, on May 26, at a restaurant
while he was signing copies of his newly published, "Black Book of
Insecurity," in which he blamed Aristide's party for tolerating street
crime and political assassinations from 1995 to 2000. Government officials
deny the allegations.
   Human rights activists blame the former dictator for rights violations
during his rule, but also have denounced the government for keeping him in
prison illegally.