20446: Burnham: Globe and Mail: Justice proves elusive, after years of strife (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: thor burnham <thorald_mb@hotmail.com>

Justice proves elusive, after years of strife

Accusations of grave crimes haunt both sides: pro-Aristide forces and the
rebels behind the ouster

By PAUL KNOX
Tuesday, March 16, 2004 - Page A17


PORT-AU-PRINCE -- To some Haitians, Louis-Jodel Chamblain is a hero. The
former soldier is a prominent leader of the rebels who helped drive
president Jean-Bertrand Aristide from office last month. To veteran
human-rights activist Jean-Claude Bajeux, Mr. Chamblain is something else.

In 1993, with Haiti ruled by a military junta, Mr. Chamblain was the
second-in-command of the Armed Revolutionary Front for Haitian Progress
(FRAPH), a notorious army-backed death squad.

It was the FRAPH, Mr. Bajeux says, that showed up at his door in October,
1993. A band of armed goons tied up the watchman and cook and ransacked the
place, but Mr. Bajeux was sleeping elsewhere.

"Chamblain wanted to try and kill me and my wife," Mr. Bajeux said in a
recent interview. He fled the country and spent nearly a year in exile,
returning only after the end of military rule in October, 1994.

Shortly afterward it was Mr. Chamblain's turn to flee, after a warrant was
issued for his arrest in connection with FRAPH activities. He reappeared in
Haiti last month, at the head of a rebel column.

In between, he was among those convicted in the 1993 killing of a
politically active businessman and in a 1994 massacre of Aristide
supporters; he was sentenced to life in prison at hard labour.

As far as Mr. Bajeux is concerned, the onetime death-squad organizer has an
account to settle: "Chamblain should submit to justice . . . he should spend
some time in jail."

That is unlikely to happen any time soon -- to Mr. Chamblain or to other
former soldiers and police officers found guilty of major human-rights
abuses under military rule.

Since Mr. Aristide's ouster, Mr. Chamblain has appeared several times. On
March 1, the day after Mr. Aristide left Haiti, Mr. Chamblain made a
triumphant appearance at the main police barracks in Port-au-Prince. But no
one made any attempt to arrest him despite the murder conviction on the
books against him.

Mr. Chamblain, who is thought to have spent most of his exile in the
Dominican Republic, says his pregnant wife was killed by a pro-Aristide
crowd during an attempted coup d'état in 1991. At the barracks, he rejected
the suggestion that he had anything to answer for. "Why hasn't Aristide been
judged?" he countered. "He killed my wife."

Mr. Chamblain and Jean-Pierre Baptiste, another ex-FRAPH leader who fought
with the rebels, were sentenced to life in prison for being accomplices to a
1994 massacre in Raboteau, a pro-Aristide shantytown in the port city of
Gonaïves. Witnesses said two dozen people were killed when soldiers and
paramilitaries burst into Raboteau at dawn, beating residents and shooting
those who tried to escape. They said dogs ate some bodies and others were
washed out to sea.

In November, 2000, 53 ex-soldiers and accomplices were convicted, including
37 in absentia. The trial was hailed as a triumph for Haiti's justice
system. But, according to Amnesty International, at least four of the
Raboteau convicts were among those freed in a mass jailbreak from the
National Penitentiary in Port-au-Prince on Feb. 29, shortly after Mr.
Aristide's departure became known.

Perhaps the prison's most prominent inmate was a former military dictator,
Lieutenant-General Prosper Avril, who seized power in a 1988 coup d'état and
ruled until 1990. He was being held on charges relating to a 1990 massacre
of peasants. His current whereabouts are unclear. Amnesty International has
called for those convicted in absentia, like Mr. Chamblain, to be jailed
pending a retrial. The group also says the UN-sanctioned foreign force in
Haiti, which is to include 450 Canadians, should "take urgent steps to
guarantee that notorious human-rights offenders . . . are taken into
custody."

Meanwhile, officials who served under Mr. Aristide are also being accused of
instigating, or tolerating, abuses of the kind they once endured. There are
strong signs that those who say they suffered under Mr. Aristide's rule are
not waiting for police to make arrests. More than 100 people have been
murdered in Port-au-Prince since Mr. Aristide's departure in apparent
reprisal killings against his followers.

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