14581: Hermantin: Miami Herald-Mourners claim Haitian police killed 3 brothers (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Miami Herald
Posted on Thu, Jan. 23, 2003

Mourners claim Haitian police killed 3 brothers
Hundreds rally during funeral
BY JANE REGAN
Special to The Herald

PORT-AU-PRINCE -- Swooning and falling to their knees and chanting slogans
condemning both the police and President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, hundreds of
mourners Wednesday made their way to a cemetery with the bodies of three
brothers allegedly executed by police last month.

''Three bodies, one mother!'' shouted the marchers, sweating in their heavy
white or black suits and dresses as they marched to the capital's National
Cemetery under a hot tropical sun.

'I'm taking my sons to the National Palace to show Aristide their bodies!
Down with Aristide! I'll yell `Down!' until they kill me, I don't care!''
shouted Antoine Philippe, a driver and father of Andy, 20; Angelo, 22, and
adopted son Vladimir Sanon, 21, as he walked in front of the three hearses.

During the night of Dec. 7, Philippe's sons were taken from their Carrefour
home, on the outskirts of the capital, by heavily armed masked men wearing
police uniforms, the family said. The next morning they were found dead,
with bullet wounds in their heads, at the State University Hospital morgue.
A Dec. 20 police report named three police officers as ''principal
suspects'' and implicated Carrefour Chief Josepha Civil.

Civil was removed from his post but neither he nor any other officer has
been arrested, police and human rights groups said. Police Inspector General
Serge Simon said a second investigation being carried out by the internal
affairs department is still in process.

The Haitian police have repeatedly been criticized for summary executions,
beatings and tortures. During a presentation at the Organization of American
States headquarters in Washington last fall, Haitian human rights
representatives reported 38 cases of ''police brutality'' during the first
six months of 2002 alone.

Last month, a Miami woman filed a complaint before the Inter-American
Commission on Human Rights, alleging she was hurt by police in her family's
Petionville home in July 2000. Uniformed men entered, demanded money and
jewelry, then tortured Marie Carmel Moise Bley for two hours, the complaint
says.

Bley, a journalist then trying to revive a magazine targeted at Miami's
Caribbean community, was burned with a hot iron to the point that she passed
out.

She filed a complaint in Haitian courts, but it went nowhere, said her
attorney, Pedro Martinez-Fraga of Greenberg Traurig.

More recently, the National Coalition for Haitian Rights (NCHR) has
investigated the beatings and burnings of victims as young as 12 inside
police headquarters.

This week, Viola Robert, the mother of the three victims remembered
Wednesday, blamed the police for her sons' deaths.

''The police are the authors. That's why they don't arrest them,'' Robert
said, during an interview on Tuesday. She has been in hiding since
mid-December when she began to receive violent threats.

''I want justice, but I don't think I will get justice. Aristide won't give
us justice. A lot of us don't believe in him anymore,'' she said, even
though she bears a scar where she was bitten when she defended Aristide to a
woman who supported the 1991 coup d'etat against him.

''The police have failed in their mission,'' said NCHR's Marie Yolene
Gilles. ``Rather than protecting citizens, they are eliminating them.''

At Wednesday's funeral, Gilles read a statement condemning police as
''assassins'' and ''thugs'' and lambasting state authorities for refusing to
authorize autopsies of the three young men until last week.

''What kind of society is this!?'' she said.

''The Haitian people are thirsty for justice! The Haitian people want
another kind of society!'' said Rev. Max Dominique during his funeral
address.

Dominique, one of four priests who celebrated the Mass, used to march side
by side with Aristide in anti-army protests in the 1980s, but on Wednesday
he did not mince words, accusing Aristide's government of human rights
abuses.

''The police special squads remind us of the death squads of the 1960s!'' he
said. ``It makes us remember the death squads of the coup d'etat!''

Herald staff writer Marika Lynch contributed to this report.






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