22918: Esser: Fighting for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

CounterPunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/fenton08072004.html

August 7 / 8, 2004

Fighting for Justice & Democracy in Haiti
An Interview with Brian Concannon, Jr.

By ANTHONY FENTON

Fenton: Why did you feel it was necessary to form the Institute for
Justice and Democracy in Haiti [IJDH]?[1]

Concannon: The IJDH was formed in response to both the
unconstitutional regime change in Haiti in February and the
inadequate response, by civil society both inside and outside of
Haiti. Our mission is to promote democracy and human rights in Haiti,
and we have three main areas of activity: working with grassroots
groups in Haiti and the solidarity community abroad,; documenting
human rights abuses in Haiti and disseminating that information; and
pursuing legal actions in Haitian and international courts to support
the democratization of Haiti and to help victims of human rights
abuses find justice.

Fenton: Are there any cases that you are actively pursuing right now?

Concannon: Yes. We have lawyers on the ground who are trying to get
political prisoners out of jail; we've had some successes, there have
been some people released out of jail; we hope that by applying
pressure in the US and working within the system that we can get the
justice system to recognize detainee's rights under Haitian and
International law. So far it's been an uphill battle, but we're going
to keep working on that.

Fenton: One can't help but notice that the IJDH report is not exactly
consistent with mainstream version of events that would have us
believe that the human rights abuses are not something we should be
concerned with in the 'post-Aristide' Haiti.

Concannon: I think our report is not completely out of the
mainstream. There are some mainstream organizations, for instance
Amnesty International [2] and the Committee to Protect Journalists
[3] that have documented the systematic persecution of Lavalas
supporters, but that reality has not been accepted by the people who
actually have a duty to act in that situation, namely the Haitian
government and the governments that propped up the current Haitian
government, including the governments of the US and Canada. They have
ignored it because it's an inconvenient fact.

If they do admit that these persecutions are happening then they
would be required to act. Haiti is not the first time that this has
happened; we're seeing it right now in Darfur, Sudan, where there was
a very slow international response. In fact, decision makers are
avoiding calling it a genocide because international law requires
affirmative actions to prevent genocide.. Go back to 1994 in Rwanda,
where you even had a Canadian General saying there was a genocide and
these horrible things were happening, but the world refused to admit
it was a genocide, because that would have required them to take
action to stop it. In this case, the governments of the US and
Canada, they just do not want to recognize the mess they've made of
things [in Haiti] because that would require them to admit that their
regime change is not working, and to put a lot of pressure on the
government and their paramilitary allies to stop the persecution.

Fenton: What can be done with the horrific information detailed in
the IJDH and other reports?

Concannon: We need to confront the world with these facts. We write
this report to prove beyond a doubt that large scale atrocities are
happening, as a way of pushing reluctant people into action. We also
need to take organizational action, with solidarity groups like the
Let Haiti Live Campaign, and individual action like writing to
newspapers and our elected representatives.

Fenton: Commander of the Canadian Forces in Haiti, Lieutenant-colonel
Jim Davis recently called into question the "credibility and
validity" of the IJDH report [4]. How do you respond to this? Is it
"credible and valid"?

Concannon: The report was prepared by lawyers who have been trained
in some of the world's best law schools. We've been working for eight
years in Haiti. We have a very good system of collecting and
verifying information, and it is up to the highest standards. I
actually would prefer that this report was all wrong. If the people
who came into our office were not really victims' relatives, if they
had invented the stories, and we had faked the photographs if all
those people reported dead or disappeared are alive and well, that
would make my day; that would make me extremely happy, because then a
lot fewer people would have suffered persecution.

But the reality is that very good information, from us and from
anyone else who has seriously investigated, shows that there is
widespread persecution. If the Canadian, or any other military on the
ground in Haiti does not believe this information, their obligation
is to go out and check. Their obligation is to go in and talk to
people in poor neighbourhoods, to go to the prisons and ask who's a
Lavalas supporter, and find out if there are any warrants for those
people's arrest. They'll find that there are no warrants; they'll
find that they've not been brought before a judge, that the
Constitution has not been respected in many ways. We'd be perfectly
happy to cooperate with the Canadian government or anyone else who
was looking into these questions. If they don't believe us their
obligation is to conduct their own investigation rather than just
putting their hands over their ears and closing their eyes, seeing no
evil, hearing no evil.

Fenton: This same colonel denied that a "cleansing" of supporters of
Haiti's Constitution has or is taking place, while at the same time
acknowledging that 1000 bodies were buried in a mass grave by March
28th, one month after the coup. He admitted this and other things
[such as a March 12th massacre carried out by occupying forces in the
neighborhood of Belair] during a well-attended media teleconference
call. None of the mainstream outlest picked up on this context. Why
do you suppose this is the case and what are your thoughts on the
work of mainstream [corporate] journalists?

Concannon: I think that journalists covering Haiti have a moral and
professional obligation to look into these atrocities, and that for
the most part they have not fulfilled that obligation. Obviously if
they're put on notice by the fact that a Canadian colonel admitted
that a massacre happened and that there were a thousand bodies, then
journalists need to ask where these bodies came from. They need to go
to Haiti and check.. They need to go beyond staying in the nice
hotels and speaking with Haitians who drive nice cars or speak good
French or English. They need to go into the poor areas where the
persecution is happening. The people who are doing the repressing are
very clever; they're not killing prominent people; some of the
prominent people are being arrested and put in jail, but the killing
is being done to anonymous people, to poor people in the poor
neighbourhoods that support President Aristide and they are being
targeted in ways that the press won't see because the press isn't
going into those neighbourhoods and is not making the effort to talk
to the victims.

For both the press and for governments, finding this information is
not hard. We did not aggressively solicit information. For the most
part people justcame by our office. Once the word got out through the
grapevine that we were taking down these stories, our office was
inundated with people and it would not be very hard for a journalist
or a foreign government in Haiti to put the word out that they're
taking testimony about these things and I'm sure they'd also be
inundated very quickly with information.

Fenton: In a recent interview Pierre Esperrance, director of the
National Coalition for Haitian Rights [NCHR], said "I can tell you
right now that there are no political prisoners in Haiti." Can you
put the NCHR into context?

Concannon: The NCHR also needs to investigate these things. They may
be telling the truth in saying they haven't received reports of
persecution, but they've also admitted that they haven't gone out and
looked. One problem is that they're considered by many of the victims
of persecution to be hostile to their interests, partly because NCHR
has been denouncing people who were subsequently arrested and
imprisoned illegally, and partly because when you go into NCHR
offices there are wanted posters for people associated with the
Lavalas government and they don't have posters of people who've even
been convicted of human rights violations against lavalas supporters
and are roaming free.

If NCHR and others are going to claim that this persecution is not
happening they have to out and conduct an investigation. I think that
a lot of the mainstream human rights organisations in Haiti, which
are also not coincidentally supported by USAID and by other wealthy
governments, have been systematically biased in their human rights
reporting, in terms of over reporting accusations against Lavalas
members and underreporting or ignoring accusations of persecution of
Lavalas members.

Fenton: What else is going on on the ground to help Haitian's achieve
their human right to self-determine?

Concannon: One thing that's happening is that Haitian civil society
is starting to reorganize, that is, the democratic [legitimate] civil
society. It's not an easy thing to do given that the whole purpose of
this repression is to either kill or arrest activists, and to
decapitate the civil society organizations, but despite that they are
still managing to organize. I think you will see an increased effort
on behalf of Haitian organizations to insist on democracy and
sovereignty and Haitian independence. There are accompanying efforts
outside of Haiti. I think that the solidarity community did oppose
the coup as it was arriving but I don't think we that did it as
effectively as we could have.

The solidarity community is starting to do more outreach, and making
its message more effective. I also think that we are gradually
getting more people on board. It's been a bitter disappointment for
me that people who would not accept the US and other countries
overthrowing an elected government elsewhere in the Americas did
nothing to stop it from happening to Haiti. And people who would not
believe Bush Administration propaganda with respect to other
countries believe and recirculate it with respect to Haiti. Many of
those people are starting to come around, they're seeing that this
puppet [Gerard Latortue-Boniface Alexandre] regime is in fact not
functioning and is not providing any benefit to the Haitian
people.We're hoping that some of those people will 'jump on the
bandwagon' and start supporting Haiti's sovereignty and popular
democracy.

Fenton: A number of Haitian organizations who claim to represent 'the
people' and left-of-center viewpoints were calling for Arisitde's
resignation before the coup, allying themselves with the right wing
elements. Please discuss this context.

Concannon: Haitian society has a few different divisions. The biggest
division is between the 'haves' and the 'have nots'. A lot of people
who espouse left of center ideas do so from comfortable offices and
homes, and when push comes to shove they stick to their primary
alliance with others of their class, in spite of their espoused
politics. I think this certainly happened in the months leading up to
Haiti's coup. You saw incongruous alliances with former communists,
and anti-neoliberal activists holding hands with sweatshop owners,
calling for a common platform. Those people aren't happy now; they're
not getting what they wanted, except for the ones who received
ministerial posts, or director-general posts. It's obvious that the
government is not advancing their espoused political agenda. But
there still is this division, where people pick sides, almost like
tribalism, where you pick a side of your economic class over your
espoused views.

Fenton: It strikes me that Batay Ouvriye falls under this category.
They've said about Aristide's agreeing to be returned by Clinton in
1994: "The return of Aristide under US/UN occupation was a futherance
of this process of placing Haiti gradually under US imperialist
tutelage." And, in the context of the recent coup they've said "The
current U.S. led intervention in Haiti was first called for by the
Lavalas government, desperately seeking a way to stay in power by any
concessionnecessary. But the U.S. had more servile lackeys in mind
while taking advantage of the invitation to intervene."[5]

Concannon: Batay Ouvriye's criticism of Aristide coming back in the
1994 under US occupation, is certainly a legitimate issue for debate.
I think to a large extent that debate was settled , by the fact that
the Lavalas party continued to win a landslide in every election. I
think that shows that the Haitian people did in fact approve of that
decision, even though many of those voters probably struggled with
that issue, they did come down in favour of having the Lavalas back
in office. But in any event the issue should be debated within the
democratic, constitutional framework: through public discussion in
the press and elsewhere, and by putting the issue in front of the
voters. Violent regime change simply does not advance that debate.

Fenton: In the context of a 'post-9/11' world and the subsequent new
'war on terrorism', put into context what Noam Chomsky has expressed
as the "Tragedy of Haiti".

Concannon: One closely related theme to all of this is imperialism.
After the 9/11 attacks there was a lot of talk about whether poverty
breeds terrorism, and I think that that link is not necessarily a
strong one. But there is a very strong link between injustice and
terrorism, and I think you can also make a link between injustice and
the inability of a country to maintain a stable government. If you
look at all the 'trouble spots' in the world, you'll see there's a
large disparity in wealth and there's also a lot of injustice both
within those societies and between those societies and the wealthy
countries of the world. I think that this is at the root of a lot of
the problems that are afflicting poor countries as well as the
wealthy ones.

One of Haiti's fundamental problems is the class divide. Although
different elements of the anti-Lavalas sector had different
motivations, the most powerful actors wanted Aristide removed because
he was governing on behalf of the poor.If you look at Haile
Selassie's famous 1963 speech to the United Nations, that Bob Marley
transformed into his excellent song "War", where he proclaimed that
as long as there's injustice, as long as there's racism, as long as
people's autonomy and sovereignty are not respected, there will be
war. Bob Marley's song said "War in the East, War in the West, War in
the North, War in the South," meaning that sometimes the war will be
contained in places like Cite Soleil and Soweto, but sometimes it
will not. And I think we're seeing that. As long as the wealthy and
powerful countries of the world continue to ignore the principles of
justice in their international relations, we're going to have war.[6]

Fenton: If John Kerry is elected can or will this have a positive
impact on the Haiti solidarity struggles?

Concannon: Certainly John Kerry's election will make a difference. He
espouses a more multilateral, more cooperative, and a more just
approach to foreign policy. I don't think that it will necessarily
make all the difference, nor can solidarity activists rest on their
laurels if Kerry is elected. For example, if you go back to President
Clinton, when he was a candidate in 1992 talking about the de facto
regime [CIA-supported Cedras junta] that was in place at the time,
and the US policy of illegally sending refugees back to that regime,
he called that policy illegal and immoral, and he promised to change
it. But even before he became President, a couple of days before his
inauguration, he issued a statement reversing this position, saying
he was going to repatriate Haitian refugees, the same thing that as
illegal and immoral for the first President Bush to do...So, we
certainly can't rest, we must continue to push for a just foreign
policy toward Haiti, even if Kerry is in the White House.

Fenton: Speaking of Clinton, his administration originated the
"Failed State" terminology that people like Canada's Paul Martin are
now parroting as if the rhetoric was going out of style

Concannon: I think that the rhetoric is highly cynical. The fact that
there were problems with Haiti's government is no surprise.There
certainly were problems - many of them can be traced directly back to
the policies of Canada and the US and the rest of the wealthy
countries. Not coincidentally, most of these countries are former
slave-holding countries and there was a three-year embargo against
Haiti's democratically elected government. There was also diplomatic
isolation, there was persistent support for people who were trying to
overthrow that government both violently and non-violently. Calling
Haiti a "failed state" is a way of deflecting attention away from the
international community's failed policies. It is also an excuse to
suspend the commitment to democracy that wealthy countries always
preach, but so often fail to put into practice.

Despite the challenges of the embargo, and figting an intermittent
but persistent armed attack, the Haitian government was continuing to
provide many basic services. There were impressive, if still
inadequate successes in terms of educational reform. Although they
weren't anywhere near to filling the needs of the country, there were
unprecedented advances in terms of building schools, training
teachers, adult literacy programs. There were also great successes in
terms of justice, some of our work. We had some of the best human
rights cases ever done in Haiti and probably in the entire hemisphere
over the last twenty years or so. Some of these happened with
international support. Had the international community provided more
consistent support, there would have been more consistent successes.
Perhaps most important, before 1996, no Haitian President in history
had served his original term in office and left voluntarily at the
end of it, no more no less. That happened in 1996, and again in 2001.

Haiti's Constitutional regime eventually foundered not because of
competence, but because of politics: the governments insisted on
implementing a mandate that had been given by the Haitian electorate
but with which the wealthy countries [and wealthy Haitians] didn't
agree.

Fenton: On June 1st you wrote an article called "Haiti's Coup and the
Constitution,"[7] Please summarize where constitutional issues stand
in Haiti today. And how has this affected you personally considering
all the work that you've done over the last nine years in Haiti?

Concannon: In terms of the Constitution and the current government,
it came to power through unconstitutional means and is continuing to
govern in a completely unconstitutional way. As in the U.S. and
Canada, there are certain ways to deal with constitutional crises and
interruptions in the normal order. None of these were followed in
Haiti. The Prime Minister was not selected in a constitutional way;
the President was the closest thing to being constitutional, in that
he was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and the Constitution
does provide for the Chief Justice to fill a Presidential vacancy. It
wasn't a vacancy because President Aristide did not resign; his
letter was not a resignation letter. The US State Department hired a
Creole expert to translate it who said that it was not a translation
letter.

Even if there had been a vacancy, the interim President is supposed
to serve for a maximum of three months. We are close to double that
now, and there is no talk of elections before the end of 2005. The
Prime Minister, who was appointed by a process not recognized by the
Constitution, is filling most of the President's roles. He has the
real power, because he has the ties to the international community.

As far as my personal reaction goes, I am of course bitterly
disappointed with these results. We'd been working within the Haitian
justice system since 1995 to try to make the system work, using the
tools of democracy. We were successful in many ways. The places where
we were most successful was when we were able to convince people to
take a gamble on democracy, we convinced people to testify in open
court. We argued that prosecuting human rights violators under the
law rather than engaging in some kind of extra judicial vengeance,
would help establish the rule of law and break the cycle of violence.
We told people that the rule of law would be the bulwark against
these kinds of things happening again.

And the victims very courageously took the gamble, and now they're
looking like suckers because the people they put in jail are now out,
and in power, and are threatening them. This is demonstrated by
several reports, not just ours [Amnesty, etc], that the former human
rights abusers, who've actually been convicted, are back outside on
the streets doing the same things to the same people. And they got
back out on the streets with the help of the wealthy countries that
supposedly promote democracy and the rule of law.

It's obviously a bitter disappointment to see Haiti' nine-year
experiment in democracy thrown out like that. It was not a perfectly
successful experiment, but it was in fact working. People for the
first time ever had a role in their destinies. Democratic
institutions were being developed through painstaking labor. Now
we're not back to zero, we're back to less than zero, since there is
not only a completely undemocratic government in place, you also have
a lot of people who are now going to say 'I'm not going to be fooled
again, I'm not going to take the bet on democracy next time'.

Fenton: The Haitian Constitution doesn't say that in the event of an
'interim govenrment' the Prime Minister--in this case Gerard
Latortue--becomes the de facto head of State, does it?

Concannon: Where Alexandre at least has a veneer of constitutional
support, Latortue has none; it's clear that Latortue is running the
country. The constitution does divide executive power between the
President and the Prime minister, and in fact Latortue is doing most
of the things that are on the President's side of the divide. It's
clear that Latortue is the US man. He's probably spent more time in
the United States in his life than I have. He's the Haitian Ahmad
Chalabi, and he's there to do the US bidding.

Fenton: The EPICA"People's fact-finding mission to Haiti" finds that
what we see in Haiti now is an effective return to the conditions of
1915. Many see US ambassador James Foley as the de facto 'governor'
of Haiti. Would you agree with this characterization?[8]

Concannon: There's another report that came out this week from the
Haiti Accompaniment Project [9], which came to similar conclusions as
EPICA. When you look at the detailed workings, everything from the
airport to the ministries, you have Americans that are involved in
important oversight positions throughout the Haitian government. In
that sense, it is a lot like in 1915, which was the beginning of a
19-year occupation.

It seems like in many of these [current] cases, people are settling
in for the long haul. One person named Terry Stewart was a prison
official in Arizona who was extremely controversial because of
torturing and other mistreatment that went on on hs watch. He was
then sent to Iraq and subsequently sent out of Iraq because he was
too controversial, because of his past history of involvement in
torture. He was then sent to Haiti. I'm not sure if he's still there
but this is an example of the type of American practices that are
being exported to Haiti. [10]

Fenton: What are your thoughts on attempting a new [or continued]
'democratic experiment' in Haiti? Do you agree with Jean Saint-Vil
and others who see the struggle ahead as a long term one?

Concannon: I think that the most hopeful sign is that the Haitian
electorate has always been highly mobilized and very clear in their
desires. I've observed a lot of elections in Haiti--I was an official
observer with the OAS in Haiti for several elections, and I've
unofficially observed several others, and in almost every instance,
the rate of participation of Haitian voters was way above that of any
participation rate you'd have in U.S. elections, and higher than most
elections in Latin America.

That shows that despite the challenges to their democracy, the
Haitian electorate really does care. That is by far the most hopeful
sign, although a lot of what has happened over the last years have
been intended to demobilize the population, to make them care less
about democracy so they're less likely to defend it. I think that
this has not completely worked, and I think that whenever you do have
elections the Haitian people will speak very clearly. This is why the
plan is to delay elections as long as possible. But I think that the
people will keep fighting and I agree with Jean Saint-Vil that
solidarity activists need to be fighting too. We need to take the
long-term view of this and fight over the long haul for the return of
real democracy in Haiti, in which the poor majority has the say, that
has the weight in public affairs that's consistent with their
numbers. Together, we can in fact get Haitian democracy back on track.

Brian Concannon Jr., human rights lawyer and activist, Director of
the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH). Brian has
co-managed the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux [BAI] in
Port-au-Prince since 1996, after coming to Haiti in 1995 with the
United Nations. Concannon is a graduate of Georgetown University Law
Center, and held a Brandeis International Fellowship in Human Rights,
Intervention and International Law from 2001-2003. Since Haiti's coup
d'etat in February, the BAI has switched gears to document continuing
human rights violations. The BAI also runs a training program for
Haitian law school graduates.Mr. Concannon writes and speaks often
about justice, human rights and the democratic transition in Haiti.
He can be reached at brianhaiti@aol.com.

Anthony Fenton, is an investigative journalist and activist, living
near Vancouver, B.C. Fenton has written for ZNet and The Dominion,
'Canada's Grassroots National Newspaper'. He can be reached at
apfenton@ualberta.ca.

[1] Download the latest IJDH reports at http://www.haitiaction.net.
See also, forthcoming, http://www.ijdh.org

[2] See Amnesty's reports at http://web.amnesty.org .

[3] The CPJ's latest can be found here:
http://www.cpj.org/Briefings/2004/haiti_7_04/haiti_7_04.html

[4] During a July 29, 2004 media teleconference from Port au Prince.

[5] Batay Ouvriye said this in a May 25, 2004 interview:
http://www.axisoflogic.com/ See also http://www.batayouvriye.org.

[6] On Selassie's speech and Bob Marley go to:
http://www.bobmarley.com/life/rastafari/war_speech.html

[7] Originally published in the Boston Reporter, June 1, 2004,
available at: http://haitiaction.net/News/bc6_1_4.html";

[8] Ecumenical Program in Central America and the Caribbean. Go to:
http://www.epica.org/haiti/action_haiti.htm"; See also the Quixote
Center's "Emergency Haiti Observation Mission" :
http://haitireborn.org/campaigns/lhl/ob-miss-mar04.php report.

[9] The HAP report is available at
http://haitiaction.net/News/hap6_29_4.html

[10] For more on Terry Stewart in the context of Haiti, see Dominique
Esser and Kim Ives' "Haiti and Abu Ghraib: The US is to "clean up"
Haiti's prisons -- just like it did Iraq's":
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID .