=?x-unknown?q?21365=3A__Esser=3A_Haiti=92s_other_face_=96_a?==?x-unknown?q?fter_Aristide's_fall?=

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

Nation Newspaper Barbados
http://www.nationnews.com

April 16, 2004

Haiti’s other face – after Aristide’s fall
by RICKEY SINGH

IN DECLARING last weekend that “we need to know the truth of what’s
going on today inside Haiti”, Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves of St
Vincent and the Grenadines, was in a way echoing sentiments earlier
expressed at the recent inter-sessional meeting of Caribbean
Community leaders in St Kitts.

CARICOM has been critical of the politics of both governing and
opposition parties in Haiti, while Jean Bertrand Aristide was still
president, over their repeated failures to compromise in resolving
the governance crisis.

The Prime Minister of Jamaica, P.J. Pattersoneven went public, while
functioning as CARICOM’s chairman, with a warning to the Aristide
administration that it faced likely sanctions bythe community,
unless adjustments were madeto its policies.

CARICOM, therefore, stands on good ground in its linkage of
recognition of an interim post-Aristide regime in Port-au-Prince that
can demonstrate its legitimacy and ensure a human rights environment
conducive to arrangements for competitive electoral politics for the
creation of a new and freelyelected government.

While Aristide governed, the cries against political assassinations
and corruption kept escalating and were used to justify an armed
rebellion, covertly financed and supported by external forces, to
eventually forced him from power.

Aristide, the priest-turned-politician, nor his Fanmi Lavalas party
cannot, with all honesty, claim clean hands from political
terrorism against dissenting voices and known politifcal opponents
that resulted in deaths, injuries and disappearances, among them
journalists.

But to judge from reports out of Haiti, following the engineered
downfall of the Aristide presidency, a sinister programme is clearly
underway to prohibit Lavalas from functioning, although it still has
mass-based support. Worst, to systematically hunt down, kill or
forced into hiding top and middle-level leadership individuals of
Lavalas, while the French and American troops in the country continue
to wink at crimes being committed by armed anti-Aristide elements in
various parts of the country.

As a journalist of this region who has been critical of democratic
governance and human rights violations under the Aristide
administration, I was alarmed by the findings of the first phase of a
human rights delegation to Haiti forwarded tome last week.

Undertaken by the United States-based National Lawyers Guild, the
three-member delegation,one a lawyer who resides in Haiti, has
produced some very disturbing claims of killings, arson, beatings and
ongoing terrorism against supporters of Aristide and examples of mass
graves and burning bodies.         

Even allowing for possible exaggerations, the report of the first
phase of the delegation’s work -- the second phase was scheduled to
start last Sunday – would reinforce the reservations and fears
of CARICOM leaders about the rule of law and due process under the
watch of an interim regime in Port-au-Prince.

It is a regime that seems bent on prohibiting Aristide’s Lavalas
Party from functioning in a competitive political environment in
preparation for new elections, while it turns a blind eye to the
kinds of political killings and human rights abuses that were hurled
against the ousted Aristide administration. 
.