23968: Severe(Pub): Toronto Star story on Prison Riot (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Constantin Severe <csevere@hotmail.com>

Massacre in the `Titanic'
Officials say only 7 died in a Dec. 1 penitentiary riot

But prisoners say dozens more were executed by guards


REED LINDSAY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR

PORT-AU-PRINCE—As U.N. peacekeepers struggled to deal with heavy gunfire
erupting around Haiti's national palace, the smoke billowing from the
penitentiary a few blocks away barely registered.

On Dec. 1, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell was visiting Haitian
President Boniface Alexandre and U.N. peacekeepers were preoccupied with
securing the palace where the two were meeting.

But at the nearby national penitentiary, a tragedy was taking place.
Prisoners in a three-storey cellblock called "Titanic" rioted, breaking free
from their cells, setting fire to mattresses and brandishing water pipes as
weapons. Prison guards called in a special police unit that helped put down
the riot. Police officials said seven prisoners had been killed and more
than 40 wounded.

But prisoners and other witnesses say the government is concealing a savage
bloodbath in which police and guards killed dozens of detainees.

Whether or not these allegations prove true, the killings at the
penitentiary represent another black mark for Haiti's interim government,
which has come under fire for allegedly perpetrating and tolerating a gamut
of rights abuses since taking over last March from ousted president
Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Amnesty International has denounced arbitrary
arrests, illegal detentions and summary executions that witnesses claim were
carried out by the national police.

"I saw everything," said Ted Nazaire, 24, a prisoner on the first floor of
the Titanic who was released two days after the riot and is now in hiding.
"It was a massacre. More than 60 were killed."

Nazaire said police opened fire on the detainees and then went from cell to
cell methodically executing others. He claimed to have witnessed the
executions while hiding under a staircase. When he was later found, he said,
he was badly beaten by prison guards.

Nazaire said the warden and another prison official warned him not to talk
about what he had witnessed, reminding him that they knew where he lived.

His family members complain that police harass them in their home nearly
every day in search of Nazaire, who walks with a limp, is covered with
lesions inflicted by a baton, and has a swollen left eye and a huge bump on
his forehead.

While penitentiary officials refused to grant permission to enter the
prison, chief prosecutor Jean Pierre Audain gave this reporter special
authorization to visit last Wednesday. During the visit, which lasted about
an hour before guards cut it short, estimates given by prisoners on the
number of killed ranged from 40 to 110. All of them refuted the much lower
official figures.

"It's not true," said Frantz Rubin, a detainee whose cell has a view into
the passageway where prisoners allege many of the killings took place. "I
saw more than 30 dead people with my own eyes. We all want justice."

Prisoners eagerly swarmed the visiting journalist, whom they said was the
first to be allowed in, pointing with excitement at bullet holes and what
appeared to be the remains of dried blood on concrete walls. Some hurriedly
handed over shells and the smashed remains of bullets.

In the Titanic, where upwards of 30 prisoners are packed in dank bare cells
reeking of urine, prisoners offered scraps of paper through the bars with
descriptions of what had taken place, lists of the dead and of guards
accused of brutality, pleas for help and an elegy with drawings of coffins.
More than a dozen took off their shirts and pulled down their shorts to
reveal wounds from beatings and gunfire, many with the bullets still lodged
inside their bodies.

Richard Similien, a 33-year-old detainee, said he was forced to cart bodies
from the Titanic to another part of the prison in wheelbarrows normally used
to transport cauldrons of food.

Penitentiary warden Sony Marcellus dismissed the prisoners' accusations as
lies and exaggerations.

"The prisoners will never tell the truth," said Marcellus. The guards "are
trained to shoot in the air, not at prisoners. They would never fire on
prisoners in this way."

Marcellus pointed to an affidavit signed by a justice of the peace who had
seen only seven bodies at the penitentiary the night of Dec. 1.

But Nazaire and the other prisoners are not alone in their allegations.
Rights groups say prison guards asking for anonymity have confirmed that the
official death tally is an underestimate.

An ambulance driver who asked that his name not be published said he
transported more than 30 bodies in a Toyota Land Cruiser in three trips from
the penitentiary to a dumpsite outside the city. He said two other vehicles
also transported bodies. He said he would not show this reporter the site
because he feared for his life.

People who live and work in the streets that surround the penitentiary said
they heard heavy continuous gunfire, which lasted between two and three
hours. A neighbour and a reporter at a nearby radio station, both with views
of a catwalk that runs along the outer walls, said they saw black-clad
police officers with machine guns firing down into the penitentiary and at
prisoners' cells.

Still, evidence that more than seven people were killed at the penitentiary
has gone no further than the testimony of prisoners and anonymous sources.

Audain said he has ordered an investigation of the riot and its aftermath.
Meanwhile, the penitentiary and its prisoners remain shrouded in secrecy.

Since Dec. 1, prison authorities have refused visits from journalists, human
rights observers, prisoners' lawyers and family members, all of whom were
ordinarily allowed to enter.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Only 17 of 1,100 detainees at the penitentiary have been convicted of a
crime
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


At the hospital, three prison guards stand over a wounded prisoner whose leg
is handcuffed to a cot. They prevent anyone from speaking to him.

"It's a total blackout," said Renan Hedouville, head of the Lawyers'
Committee for the Respect of Individual Liberties, a group that was a loud
critic of Aristide's government for rights abuses. "Something shady seems to
be going on here. It's as if they don't want people to know what happened."

Hedouville said while prison riots had taken place under Aristide, visits to
the penitentiary had not been prohibited for such a long time.

Marcellus said visits were restricted for safety reasons, and that the
penitentiary began to permit twice-weekly family visits last Monday.

But dozens of women waiting outside the penitentiary last week said they had
still not seen their husbands and sons. Some have received written messages
or assurances from guards that their relatives are safe, but many are left
to guess.

"I have my son inside — Yonel Pierre," said a frail white-haired woman as
she waited to drop off a portion of rice and beans. "Since Dec. 1, I've
brought food for my son but I haven't received any news from him. Before, I
used to receive the dirty dishes, but now I don't get anything."

Her visits may be in vain. Among the seven dead confirmed by the justice of
the peace is a prisoner named Yanel Pierre, a difference in spelling that
means little in a country with a 50 per cent adult literacy rate. According
to police spokesperson Gessy Coicou, the official death toll is now 10, as
three prisoners wounded in the riot have since died.

The list has not been made public and the guards have not told Pierre's
mother whether her son, who was in a cell on the second floor of the
Titanic, is alive or dead.

While controversy swirls around the number of dead, the riot itself has
drawn fresh attention to the appalling conditions at the penitentiary.

Both prisoners and guards agree the immediate motive behind the riot was a
decision to transfer some detainees, but human rights observers have cited
dismal living conditions combined with mounting frustration at the sluggish
legal system as underlying factors behind discontent at the penitentiary.

Like most of Haiti's prisons, the penitentiary is once again overflowing
after being emptied by former soldiers who helped overthrow Aristide in
February. Floor space in some cells is so tight that prisoners must take
turns sleeping in shifts.

"It was worse than I have ever seen," said Jacques Dyotte, a former warden
who worked for more than three decades in Canadian prisons before taking
over as head of a U.N. program to reform Haiti's penitentiary system in
July, 2000.

Dyotte quit his job in November in frustration after prison authorities
refused to accept offers from the U. N. and Canada to improve conditions at
the national penitentiary.

Last February, former soldiers swept across the country, setting fire to
police stations and freeing 3,500 prisoners from the penitentiaries in the
armed revolt that toppled Aristide. Since then, the prison population has
quickly shot back up to nearly 2,000, but with a much reduced capacity as
many cells were destroyed.

According to Dyotte, the Titanic and other cells at the national
penitentiary were well above maximum capacity.

Dyotte said the U.N. offered $50,000 (U.S.) to repair broken cells and the
Canadian government promised to chip in with materials from its own
penitentiary system and furniture from the Port-au-Prince embassy. Dyotte
said the U.N. also offered $15,000 to buy beds, mattresses and furniture for
the women's penitentiary in Port-au-Prince.

All these offers of help were turned down by Claude Theodat, director of
Haiti's penitentiary system. Theodat refused to be interviewed.

With conditions deteriorating as the prison population continued to rise,
the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) warned Haitian officials of a
pending riot at the national penitentiary in a Nov. 15 report. According to
the author of the report and Dyotte's successor, Regis Charron, nothing was
done.

"Pressure was going up. I told them that at one point the system will break
down, you will have disruption, riots, problems," said Charron. "Inmates are
human beings too and if you keep them in such bad conditions they will let
you know it."

Charron cited insufficient food, overcrowded cells, too few mattresses, and
the lack of productive activities and recreation time as examples of how
conditions had worsened.

Meanwhile, only 17 of the 1,100 prisoners at the national penitentiary —
about 1.5 per cent — have been convicted of a crime, and many detainees have
not seen a judge. According to Charron, a year ago, 10 per cent of the
prisoners had been convicted.

Charron said he has recently received encouraging signals from penitentiary
officials that they might be willing to accept offers by the UNDP to help
improve the prison system. The motives behind their refusal to do so until
now remain unclear.

The detainees at the national penitentiary include some high-profile members
of Aristide's Lavalas party and many others whom rights groups say were
jailed because of their support for the ousted president, or simply because
they happened to live in one of the Port-au-Prince slums that support
Aristide. Detainees with money or political weight can get themselves into
less crowded cells where they are allowed more freedom to walk around
outside. But most prisoners, poor and young, end up in the Titanic.

Likewise, the victims of the violence that has racked Port-au-Prince in
recent months have been mostly poor people from the slums. Some are armed
supporters of Aristide and perpetrators of violence themselves, but many are
simply people caught in the crossfire or young males singled out by police
because they fit the description of an Aristide supporter.

"Everybody in the Titanic is Lavalas," said Nazaire, who was arrested on
Aug. 2 after fighting with his brother. "I'm not for one or the other. I'm
not Lavalas, I'm not anything. But I was arrested just like them. When the
police arrest somebody, it's for a bogus charge like illicit association or
armed robbery. If the police see a poor guy, they see him as Lavalas."