19580: radtimes: Rights Dilemma as Mass Killers Win Haiti Revolt (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: radtimes <resist@best.com>

Rights Dilemma as Mass Killers Win Haiti Revolt

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=4472549

Mon Mar 1, 2004
By Michael Christie

MIAMI (Reuters) - When the dust settles after Jean-Bertrand Aristide's
fall, a new government is in place and U.S. Marines have restored calm,
Haiti will still face an awkward dilemma -- how to deal with the killers
and human rights abusers who led the revolt.

Rights groups demanded on Monday that former right-wing militia leaders
blamed for thousands of deaths, and who emerged from exile to help topple
Aristide, should not be allowed to join any new government, or
reconstituted security force.

"These are people who have been involved in human rights atrocities," said
Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch.

"It would be a sad day if Haitians woke up and found that Louis Jodel
Chamblain and "Toto" Constant and those people who terrorized Haiti for
three years were part of the government."

The armed revolt that sent Aristide fleeing into exile was triggered by an
uprising in the western city of Gonaives on Feb. 5 by a street gang that
once supported him.

It was swiftly joined by ex-soldiers from the coup-prone army Aristide
disbanded a decade ago, and by paramilitaries, who arrived last month from
the neighboring Dominican Republic.

Among their leaders were some notorious names, such as Chamblain, who ran
death squads in the last years of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier's
dictatorship in the late 1980s, and Jean Tatoune, implicated in a 1994 slum
massacre.

When Aristide was ousted in a coup in 1991 shortly after beginning his
first term, Chamblain joined with Constant to form the Front for the
Advancement of Progress of the Haitian People, or FRAPH.

THOUSANDS OF DEAD

FRAPH hunted down supporters of Aristide's Lavalas Family party, torching
entire neighborhoods, and was blamed for up to 3,000 of the estimated 5,000
deaths that occurred before a U.S.-led occupation ended three years of
military rule.

Chamblain was convicted in absentia for the murder of a prominent
businessman and Aristide supporter, Antoine Izmery, who was dragged from a
church, forced to kneel, and executed.

  Chamblain told Reuters in a recent interview, "My hands are clean, my
conscience is clean and my pockets are empty."

Another well-known former soldier who joined the revolt from exile was
ex-police chief Guy Philippe, whose officers executed dozens of gang
members while under his command.

Not long before Washington did a U-turn on Friday, abandoned its support
for Aristide and began calling for him to resign, Secretary of State Colin
Powell dismissed any possibility of handing victory to the armed rebels.

"We cannot buy into a proposition that says the elected president must be
forced out of office by thugs and those who do not respect law," Powell
said on Feb. 17.

On Sunday night, as the U.N. Security Council unanimously authorized the
deployment of troops to Port-au-Prince, it demanded that all Haitians
respect the law and human rights.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned that "those likely to commit serious
human rights violations" would be held accountable.

But it was not clear whether he and the council were referring to past
abuses, or merely current or future ones.

Amnesty International said the U.N. force deploying to the impoverished
Caribbean nation had to guarantee that rights offenders like Chamblain, and
those who committed abuses during the revolt, were taken into custody and
prosecuted.

"Only in this way can the rule of law be fully upheld and the cycle of
political violence broken," it said.

.