23023: Durban: NY Times Editorial-Justice Scorned (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Lance Durban <lpdurban@yahoo.com>

Justice Scorned in Haiti

August 20, 2004

When the Bush administration pushed for the ouster of
Haiti's democratically elected president earlier this year,
one of its main complaints was his reliance on armed
political gangs to sustain his rule. Now the new government
that Washington helped install in Jean-Bertrand Aristide's
place has permitted a scandalous judicial exoneration of
one of Haiti's most notorious political gangsters,
Louis-Jodel Chamblain. Mr. Chamblain just happens to have
been a leading force in the February rebellion that helped
force Mr. Aristide from office.

Mr. Chamblain's violent history goes back more than a
decade. Under the military government of the early 1990's,
he was one of the leaders of a death squad that is alleged
to have murdered thousands of people.

After American troops restored democracy to Haiti in 1994,
Mr. Chamblain fled to the Dominican Republic. Haitian
courts twice convicted him in absentia for politically
motivated killings - once for organizing the 1993
assassination of Antoine Izméry, a pro-Aristide business
leader who was dragged from a church service and shot, and
another time for complicity in the death squad massacre of
residents of Raboteau, a slum on the outskirts of Gonaďves.


Under Haitian law, Mr. Chamblain was entitled to new trials
after his return from exile. The first, in the Izméry case,
was held this week. In a quickly convened overnight
proceeding, the prosecution produced just one witness - who
claimed to know nothing about the case - and Mr. Chamblain
was promptly acquitted.

Washington rightly deplored the haste and "procedural
deficiencies" of the Chamblain retrial. But it should not
have been particularly surprised.

Haiti's justice minister, Bernard Gousse, earlier suggested
that Mr. Chamblain might be pardoned "for his great
services to the nation" as a leader of the anti-Aristide
rebellion in February. Before that, Prime Minister Gérard
Latortue had publicly hailed another rebel leader, who had
also been convicted in the Raboteau massacre, as a "freedom
fighter.''

Mr. Chamblain's earlier trials in absentia may have been
flawed as well, although they were less hastily prepared
and conducted. A poorly staffed, unprofessional and highly
politicized judicial system has been a serious problem in
Haiti for decades. But the current Haitian government -
sponsored by Washington, led by internationally known
technocrats like Mr. Latortue and protected by a U.N.
peacekeeping force - is supposed to be setting a better
example. Instead, it has given another ugly example of a
Haitian government that shields its political gangster
allies from justice.