20397: Esser: Freed rights abusers back in the streets (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D, Esser torx@joimail.com

The Miami Herald
http://www.miami.com

Mar. 15, 2004

Freed rights abusers back in the streets
BY TRENTON DANIEL AND SUSANNAH A. NESMITH
tdaniel@herald.com

GONAIVES, Haiti - The notorious Jean Tatoune is wanted for the
massacre of at least six people here, but he's not hard to find. Just
ask around Gonaives' seaside slum of Raboteau.

Though Tatoune was sentenced to life for the 1994 killings, he walks
the streets openly, a commander of the rebels who helped drive
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from power.

''We're the ones making history,'' said Tatoune, whose real name is
Jean Pierre Batiste, standing on the dusty streets of the slum,
surrounded by admirers and children.

Tatoune is only one of several hundred convicted and suspected
criminals -- from common murderers to former dictators to army human
rights abusers deported from Miami -- who escaped from prisons in the
last months of Aristide's rule. Most fled Feb. 5-29, as the rebels
opened the prisons and police fled.

As Haitian police and peacekeeping troops from the United States,
France, Canada and Chile try to restore security, recapturing the
escapees and bringing them to justice will prove problematic, police
officials and human rights groups say.

There's former Gen. Prosper Avril, Haiti's 1988-90 military ruler,
jailed for a massacre in 1990, now reading novels at his home in
Port-au-Prince, according to his son.

FROM FLORIDA

Also free are three former officers in the brutal military
dictatorship that ruled Haiti from 1991 to '94, who were found in
Florida, deported home and convicted in the same Raboteau massacre as
Tatoune:

• Gen. Jean-Claude Duperval, once second in command in the army, then
captain of a tourist boat at Disney World in Orlando.

• Col. Hebert Valmond, former chief of military intelligence, later a
Tampa security guard and Evangelical preacher.

• Col. Carl Dorelien, former army personnel chief, found living in
Port St. Lucie after winning $3.1 million in the Florida Lotto.

Dorelien was rumored to have been spotted eating an omelet at the
capital's high-end Montana Hotel just days after Aristide resigned
and fled the country on Feb. 29.

The three were among 37 convicted in absentia for the Raboteau
massacre in a landmark trial -- the first to bring to justice a large
group of former Haitian soldiers and paramilitary supporters for
human rights abuses.

Among them also was Louis-Jodel Chamblain, a former paramilitary
leader and now a top rebel leader. He fled to the neighboring
Dominican Republic to escape the trial and now walks freely about the
capital with a pistol in his waistband,

Avril's son, Gregor, told The Herald his father did not escape but
was released on the orders of National Penitentiary director Clifford
Larose at 7 a.m. on the Feb. 29 -- two hours before the rest of the
prisoners escaped.

Gregor claimed a judge had ordered his father freed in 2002, but
Aristide had forced Larose to disobey the order. Larose could not be
reached for comment.

Tatoune was one of the key leaders of FRAPH, a paramilitary group
that supported the 1991-94 military dictatorship and was blamed for
killing scores of Aristide supporters.

He was convicted in 2000 for the Raboteau massacre, which human
rights groups allege left at least 20 dead, although many of the
bodies were never found.

Tatoune's friends broke him out of the Gonaives prison last year, and
now that a ragtag bunch of rebels control this port town, where a
U.S.-led peacekeeping force has yet to arrive, he is free to walk its
streets.

INMATES FLED

He's not the only one. More than 1,000 inmates at the national
penitentiary in the capital fled on Feb. 29 after they heard radio
reports of Aristide's fall, setting trash fires in their cells and
snapping open the prison's metal gates.

''The gates aren't strong enough to keep more than 10 people from
rattling and breaking the locks, and so everybody escaped,'' Prison
Inspector Olmaille Bien-Aime said.

Recapturing all the prisoners is a task far tougher than Haiti's
barely functioning police force can begin to handle. Port-au-Prince
Police Commissioner Claude Moise Marckinsky keeps a bulletin board in
his office with the mug shots of 60 convicted drug dealers and
murderers who escaped on Feb. 29.

But with not enough policemen to patrol the capital, he admitted that
he had no plans to seek out the wanted men. They will commit new
crimes, Marckinsky said, and will then be rearrested.

Recapturing human rights violators like Dorelien and the others would
also require ensuring that they receive fair trials, advocacy groups
say, because Haitian laws require anyone tried in absentia to be
tried again once captured.

Brian Concannon, an American attorney who helped Haitian prosecutors
on the Raboteau trial, said justice was unlikely to prevail in the
current chaos. ``I'm sure that the ones with the guns and money will
call the shots.''

© 2004 The Miami Herald and wire service sources.
.