24358: Hermantin (NewsReport reveals horrific truths of life in Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Posted on Tue, Feb. 22, 2005

COMMENTARY

Report reveals horrific truths of life in Haiti

JIM DEFEDE
jdefede@herald.com

For 10 days in November, Thomas Griffin traveled throughout the Haitian
capital of Port-au-Prince. It was his 10th trip to Haiti in a decade and by
far his most horrifying.

''The inhumanity that is happening just off our shores is appalling,'' said
Griffin, a Philadelphia attorney and former Justice Department official who
has been investigating human rights abuses in Haiti and Latin America for
years.

Based on his trip -- and interviews with past and present government
officials, police officers, former soldiers, U.N. peacekeepers and gang
leaders -- Griffin and Irwin Stotzky, director of the Center for the Study
of Human Rights and the University of Miami Law School, issued a 51-page
report last month.

''Didn't The Miami Herald already dismiss this as a Lavalas report?''
Griffin asked derisively when I spoke to him on Monday. Lavalas is the
political party of former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Griffin was annoyed his report wasn't taken more seriously by the news
media, which cited his previous work for the left-leaning National Lawyers
Guild, and also because Stotzky was once a board member for the Aristide
Foundation.

''What is happening in Haiti is wrong, no matter what anyone's politics
is,'' Griffin said.

And he is right.

The pictures, the words, the statements by those who are both for and
against the return of Aristide speak for themselves in this report, which
can be found at www.law.miami.edu/news/368.html.

The United Nations, which has several thousand troops in Haiti, has done
little to end the violence and may actually be exacerbating it.

While Lavalas supporters are not entirely innocent, this report suggests,
rather convincingly, that there is an ongoing campaign to use the police,
along with hired street gangs and former soldiers, to hunt down and kill
members of Lavalas, particularly in the city's slums.

''There is a feeling of a truly repressive war against the poor,'' Griffin
said.

The most powerful sections of the report are those that tell individual
stories. Griffin followed the police on a raid in the Bel Air neighborhood
on Nov. 18. When the police pulled out, Griffin found bodies littering the
street, including that of a middle-age woman the police left to die.

Another victim, Inep Henri, 35, had been shot in the head, but his family
did not want to take him to the hospital, for fear of the police. Griffin
and his team convinced the family it was necessary or Henri would die.

The Red Cross refused to send an ambulance, so Griffin's team arranged a
pickup truck to carry Henri out of Bel Air. They had to pretend Henri was
dead in order to get through a police checkpoint.

Two hours after Henri arrived at the city's general hospital, Griffin's team
found him ''still alive on a cot, but having received no treatment,'' the
report notes. ``Investigators convinced doctors to examine him. One doctor
got up, slapped Inep in the head to see if he was awake, then pinched his
upper arm for a reaction. Inep was still alive. The doctor went back behind
his desk to sit.''

As Griffin learned, doctors would only treat Henri if his family paid in
advance. Henri died the next day, never having been treated.

''While checking on Inep Henri . . . investigators also observed a boy lying
on his back, naked and exposed on a cot in the middle of the emergency
room,'' the report states. ``He was shivering in a pool of his own blood,
eyes closed. When he moved, blood splashed onto the floor.''

The boy, Ginel Valbraun, 12, said he had been shot by police. The report
includes pictures of a gaping wound on his right thigh.

''Doctors refused to treat him because he had no money,'' the report states,
adding that investigators paid to get the child medical attention.
``Investigators last saw him on Nov. 21, still alive, but still naked and in
a soaked, old bandage.''






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