23059: Esser: Travesty of Justice: Chamblain Goes Free, Latortue and Gousse Cement Their Authoritarian Credentials (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser <torx@joimail.com>

Council On Hemispheric Affairs
http://www.coha.org/NEW_PRESS_RELEASES/New_Press_Releases_2004/
04.57_Jess%20Haiti%20PR.htm

August 25, 2004

Memorandum to the Press 04.57


Travesty of Justice in Haiti: Chamblain Goes Free, Latortue and
Gousse Cement Their Authoritarian Credentials


• A hasty and obviously rigged trial has acquitted Louis-Jodel
Chamblain, a leader of a paramilitary band that was responsible for
several thousand political murders during the military regime of
1991-94 and one of the principle leaders of the rebellion against
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide earlier this year.

• Washington must take responsibility for the conduct of the puppet
regime it installed in Port-au-Prince.

• The Latortue government, bereft of constitutional legitimacy from
the start, has proven that it is more than a collection of
technocrats; in fact, it is an amalgamation of the most brutal and
authoritarian factions of the former Haitian military junta and the
country’s tiny economic elite, who ruled the country during the early
1990’s and have relentlessly attempted to persecute Aristide and his
Lavalas party for more than a decade.

• The ruling deeming Chamblain innocent is a disgraceful action and
has been the subject of wide international condemnation, including
stinging editorials in the New York Times and Washington Post, and
even a cool reception on the part of the State Department. It should
be the basis for a more aggressive attempt by the United Nations and
other international organizations to protect human rights and uphold
the rule of law in Haiti. It also requires an expression of
indignation by the UN Secretary General’s personal representative in
Haiti, the Chilean diplomat Juan Gabriel Valdez, whose previously
elevated reputation is now at stake.

• The illegitimacy of the Latortue government, which has up to now
been cloaked in the rhetoric of a “transitional government” of
“technocrats,” should be seen for what it is – a structure of
brigands playing bit parts in a Pirates of Penzance road show.


Interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue, who is one of several Haitian
expatriates from gated communities in Boca Raton, is now running a
country as if it was a game of Monopoly, with Secretary of State
Powell playing Monopoly Man. Powel created the fiction up earlier
this year that the Latortue regime was legitimate. Since then, the
Haitian government has transgressed without any outside authority
monitoring its daily excesses. On August 17, the wretched caricature
of good government, which translates into the self-indulgence and
injustice that Haiti has experienced since its democratically elected
president was forced out of office on February 29, reached new
heights of degradation when Louis-Jodel Chamblain, one of the
country’s most notorious and murderous gangsters, as well as a leader
of the armed rebellion against Aristide earlier this year, was
summarily acquitted of his crimes in a hoax of a trial that bore the
unmistakable imprints and influence of Haiti’s hard-right Minister of
Justice, Bernard Gousse. Chamblain, formerly the cofounder and chief
of operations of the CIA-supported paramilitary group FRAPH (Front
Révolutionnaire pour l’Avancement et le Progrés Haitiens), who was
responsible for the torture and death of more than 3000 Aristide
supporters and who controlled the military regime that ruled Haiti
from 1991 to 1994, was convicted in absentia in 1995 for the 1993
murder of Aristide financier and businessman Antoine Izmery. But
under Haitian law, he was entitled to a new trial after surrendering
himself to authorities. Human rights advocates had hoped that the
trial would provide an opportunity not only to finally place
Chamblain behind bars for his earlier crimes, but also to examine his
complicity in alleged human rights abuses committed during this
year’s armed rebellion. The silk glove treatment of Chamblain
however, proved to be only the latest and most shocking evidence of
both the totally illegitimate Latortue regime’s bizarre rule and the
outlandish behavior of a number of ethical renegades, such as
Minister of Justice Gousse.


A Sordid History

The Izmery murder has been one of the cases most emblematic of the
reign of terror imposed by the military government and FRAPH during
their three-year regime. Izmery, a leader of the pro-Aristide forces
that mounted a resistance to the military government after the
September 2001 coup, was dragged out of the church where he was
attending a memorial service for his brother, an earlier victim of
government repression, and shot dead in the street by soldiers and
paramilitaries; the church has since become a holy site of pilgrimage
for Aristide supporters. As a leader of FRAPH, Chamblain—a former
member of the Haitian military whose history as a violent persecutor
of Aristide’s Lavalas movement stretched back to the final years of
the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier in the 1980s—bore clear
complicity for the murder. Subsequently, Chamblain fled into exile in
the Dominican Republic when the Aristide government was restored by
U.S. troops in 1994. The following year, he was convicted in a
Haitian court for the Izmery murder, as well as for his role in the
1994 massacre of Aristide supporters in the Gonaïves slum of Raboteau.
Following ten years of exile, Chamblain returned to Haiti in February
of this year as one of the leaders of the armed rebellion that
eventually forced Aristide into exile once again. Once in Haiti, he
lived openly for months without even the feeblest of attempts to
apprehend him by the interim government, which was installed by
Washington in a blatantly unconstitutional procedure after the abrupt
and U.S.-coerced departure of President Aristide. As international
outcry increased over his continued liberty, Chamblain turned himself
in to judicial authorities on April 22 in an elaborate charade of
self-sacrifice, declaring that he would surrender his freedom in
order that “Haiti can have a chance at the real democracy I have been
fighting for.” In doing this, he was accompanied by Justice Minister
Gousse, who extravagantly praised the decision and called it “a good
and noble one,” while neglecting to address the question of why the
government had allowed this convicted murderer to remain at large for
so long.

Chamblain’s codefendant in the trial, Jackson Joanis, a former police
chief in Port-au-Prince, surrendered to authorities on August 9.
Their hurried trial was informally announced by the authorities on
August 12, three business days before it began, violating several
notice requirements contained in the Haitian procedural code. The
trial itself – if this mockery of the Haitian judicial system can be
deemed as such – began late in the afternoon on Monday, August 16 and
continued until the announcement of a verdict early the following
morning. Though few observers and journalists were present for the
verdict itself, due to security concerns regarding nighttime travel,
announcement of the acquittal provoked immediate international
protests. Amnesty International called the trial a “mockery,” while a
spokesman for the State Department said “we deeply regret the haste
with which their cases were brought to retrial, resulting in
procedural deficiencies that call into question the integrity of the
process.” A spokesman for the National Coalition of Haitian Rights
told the AP that only one witness for the prosecution appeared in
court, though the witness did not see the murder and or even claim to
know anything about the case. Meanwhile, Chamblain’s defense
attorneys gloated that the trial was a “great success” for their side

Currently, both defendants remain in jail awaiting further trials on
other charges. Chamblain is still entitled to a retrial for his
second in absentia conviction in the case of the Raboteau massacre.
However, there seems to be little evidence that a second trial will
be any less ludicrous than the first, and it is not even clear if the
Latortue government will seek even the rather pathetic token of
judicial legitimacy afforded by another kangaroo trial. Regardless,
Minister Gousse has stated that Chamblain may be pardoned for “his
great service to the nation” in the rather unlikely contingency that
he is actually convicted for one of his crimes. He has yet to specify
exactly which of the hundreds of murders instigated by Chamblain is
most reflective of this supposedly distinguished service.


Calling a Spade a Spade: Unconstitutional Authoritarianism in Haiti

Ever since the U.S.-sanctioned ousting of President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide on February 29, the majority of the international community
has adopted suspiciously sanitized language to refer to the violent
and undemocratic transfer of power on that day and the subsequent
installation of an unconstitutional and illegitimate government
handpicked by the U.S. ambassador in Port-au-Prince with the approval
of Secretary of State Powell. The elaborate rhetoric about a
“transitional government” of “nonpartisan technocrats” that
Washington spoke about should not be allowed to obscure the reality
of what is properly deemed the thirty-third coup in Haitian history
and the second to be perpetrated against Aristide in a decade. This
reality has been acknowledged in a number of international forums,
most notably in the Caribbean Community, with CARICOM – particularly
since St. Vincent and the Grenadines, St. Lucia and Guyana and
Dominica, have steadfastly raised questions about the legitimacy of
Aristide’s departure. Moreover, the Organization of American States,
which had called on the U.N. to provide military and financial
support for the embattled Haitian president in February, subsequently
passed a resolution in June calling for an investigation into the
circumstances of his supposed resignation and exile.


The UN’s Policy of Limpness

The United Nations, however, has been far less forthcoming, despite
calls for an investigation by nearly one-third of its membership.
This reticence is partly attributable to the threat of a Security
Council veto by Washington or Paris in the case of any serious
attempt to examine the events of February 29; at the same time,
however, Secretary-General Kofi Annan has demonstrated a notable lack
of energy over this issue, producing especially one-sided public
statements that freely cast blame on the Aristide government for the
breakdown of democratic procedures in Haiti while entirely ignoring
the opposition parties’ determined (and largely successful) attempts
to stymie these procedures ever since the 2000 presidential elections
in which Aristide won his second term. More recently, the deployment
of an 8000-member UN peacekeeping force, composed largely of South
American troops and led by Brazil, and the appointment of
distinguished Chilean diplomat Juan Gabriel Valdez as the
Secretary-General’s special representative to Haiti has raised hopes
that the international organization may finally be preparing to
engage seriously in the rebuilding of Haiti’s battered democratic
institutions and promoting greater attempt for the rule of law. But
unless Valdez soon speaks out forcefully, positions himself as an
advocate for the non-discriminatory treatment of Lavalas and calls
for Gousse to immediately step down, his credentials could soon be
tainted.

Yet any such attempt at greater engagement will be fatally and
inevitably flawed if it does not begin with a frank acknowledgement
of the true character of Latortue’s “nonpartisan technocrats.” Not
only has the Latortue regime lacked legitimacy from the start, it has
repeatedly demonstrated in the last six months that, not unlike the
military regime of 1991-94, it is nothing more than a vehicle for the
narrowly conceived interests of the tiny Haitian elite and its
partners among the former military that have battled against
Aristide’s populist and democratic Lavalas movement since its
inception under the Duvalier dictatorship. Not only has the Latortue
regime, usually instigated by Gousse, enthusiastically pardoned
criminals, such as Chamblain, with a proven history of violating the
human rights of Aristide supporters in the past it has overlooked, if
not encouraged the mounting of a second reign of terror targeting
Lavalas members that has unfolded with increasing brutality since
Aristide’s February ousting.

The moment is long overdue for the United Nations and the Latortue
regime’s most loyal patron, the Bush administration, to confront the
prime minister and his henchman Gousse regarding their despicable
history of sanctioning human rights violations. Furthermore Valdez
must bring a broad definition to his responsibilities and, among
other things, call for an investigation of the pardoning of their
perpetrators, while demanding an immediate reversal in the de facto
regime’s undeclared but devastatingly effective war on the Lavalas
party, beginning with a voiding of Chamblain’s ludicrous acquittal.
If the government refuses to cooperate, increased authority should be
given to the UN force to take custody of suspects awaiting trial. The
possibility of international financial or personnel support for the
traditionally corrupt, under-trained and underfinanced Haitian
judiciary should be immediately explored in order to ensure that such
mockery of the justice system does not happen again. It is time to
drop the pretenses that have shrouded Haitian realities since
February. Louis-Jodel Chamblain is a convicted murderer, and the
Latortue regime, the illegitimate product of a U.S.-backed coup. Both
should be awarded the treatment they deserve, which is to be sped to
their retirement homes in Boca Raton.


This analysis was prepared by Jessica Leight, COHA Research Fellow,
and additional research was provided by Eleanor Thomas and Kirstin
Kramer, COHA Research Associates.
.