24371: Esser: Prison attack analysis and the reporting on the incident (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

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


The NacoSphere
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/


February 20, 2004


Haiti's Top Political Prisoners Forced From Prison in Daylight
Attack, Returned Next Day
By Benjamin Melancon,


In a daylight attack on the Haitian National Penitentiary in
Port-au-Prince, men dressed in black and armed with assault rifles
drove up and began firing into the air and at the prison, killing at
least one guard, Associated Press reported
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/americas/02/19/haiti.prison.attack.ap/
.  Poorly armed prison guards fled, reported Xinhau
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-02/20/content_2596228.htm ,
the Chinese news agency.  Hundreds of prisoners may have escaped
after the attack, though the AP reported that dozens of police
immediately swarmed around the prison, setting up roadblocks and
searching cars.

Several witnesses said the gunmen took former Prime Minister Yvon
Neptune and former Interior Minister Jocelerme Privert – held at the
prison without charge or trial for many months – by force.

"I saw three gunmen escorting Neptune and several other prisoners,"
Jacques Dameus, who said he was in front of the prison at the time,
told Reuters http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N19410634.htm.
 "When they arrived at the gate of the National Penitentiary, Neptune
did not want to walk any further.  One gunman raised his weapon and
forced him to walk."

Neptune and Privert were later turned over to United Nations
soldiers, a spokesman for the UN force in Haiti said, according to
Xinhau.  The UN promptly returned the two political prisoners to the
coup government and to their cells in the National Penitentiary.

Reuters, Associated Press, and Agence France Presse (AFP) all
reported different, contradictory stories– all based on explanations
from Haiti's coup government.

Police spokeswoman Gessy Coicou told AP on Saturday
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/americas/02/19/haiti.prison.attack.ap/
that authorities have no motive for the attack or suspects.  Many
motives and explanations have been offered since then.

In another article, AP writer Peter Prengaman initially reported
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=516034 that guards
rushed the two jailed members of exiled President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide's administration to "a secret location when inmates began
rioting."  This claim, that prisoner riots prompted guards to move
Neptune and Privert, was dropped in the later AP report.

Whoever took Neptune and Privert from their cells soon gave the two
to the UN force, which (according to some reports) returned them to
their imprisonment by the U.S.-installed post-coup government in
Haiti.  "They are now in the protective custody of the U.N.,"
spokesman Damian Onses-Cardona told the AP.  "They have agreed to
return to the prison."

Before the attack on the prison, media attention had been slowly
turning to police killings of poor Haitians, continued paramilitary
violence, and in particular the fraying of the alliance between the
coup government and the paramilitaries– which may itself have been in
part a result of the increasing media scrutiny.

Haitian government officials had accused paramilitary leader
Remissainthe Ravix and his soldiers of killing four policemen.  Last
week, Ravix spoke to the media by cell phone.  "I and my men have
nothing to do with the killings,"
[http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N16201052.htm Reuters
reported him saying].  "The government is made up of traitors.  They
praised us when we took up weapons to get rid of Aristide.  Now that
they are in power, they want to get rid of us."

Already this focus has changed, led by Agence France Presse.  In an
article titled "Haiti drug gang causes mass prison break-out, former
ministers recaptured" at TurkishPress.com
http://www.turkishpress.com/world/news.asp?id=050220070758.fkvnrr41.xml
, an unnamed AFP reporter quoted an unnamed government official
alleging that the jailbreak, including of the two jailed former
government ministers, was an attempt by drug traffickers to make
money.  In fact, the jail is filled not with convicted drug
traffickers but people held with no charge who mostly come from the
poor neighborhoods where Haiti's exiled elected president had most of
his support.  Despite the eyewitness testimony cited by other news
sorces, AFP uncritically passed on the new official line that Neptune
and Privert "took advantage of the chaos to escape."

Opponents of the coup government, according to a source in Haiti,
suggested that the government staged the attack to distract from its
failed effort to find Ravix and to manufacture a reason for a further
crackdown on supporters of Aristide's Lavalas movement.

Indeed, the fact that more than 300 prisoners escaped on their own
initiative during the attack may have been an accident not intended
by the attackers, who appeared focused on capturing the jailed
ministers and also leaving with a former soldier named Anel Belzaire,
Reuters reported.  The government has not come up with a credible
explanation for the mass break, and initially did not acknowledge it,
yet was instantly there to stop it.  Prisoner director Claude
Theodate originally said he couldn't confirm if any inmates had fled,
however, dozens of police immediately swarmed around the prison,
setting up roadblocks and searching cars, reported the Associated
Press.

Witnesses said the 3:30 pm the attack was very well-organized.  "It
was an operation mounted from both the inside and outside," a guard
told AFP.

If Neptune and Privert were forced out of the prison by the
well-armed attackers, as most news agencies are now reporting, this
does not seem possible without the assistance of prison guards.  The
two ministers from the last elected government do not appear to have
been allowed to speak for themselves yet.

No possible motive has been presented that would explain opponents of
the coup government carrying out the attack, and then turning over
the leaders they were springing, yet this explanation seems to be the
one that increasingly will be presented by the commercial media.  The
AFP claim that drug traffickers trying to make money from the prison
break is equally implausible.  The only explanation that makes sense
is that this is a diversion to help the government and the
paramilitaries get on with suppressing the supporters of democracy,
who refuse to go away or be silent.

For the clearest reports from the attack on the prison are that
Neptune and Privert did not leave voluntarily.  Three men told police
that gunmen escorting a man they recognized as Neptune had forced
them to hand over their car and had driven him away in it, Reuters
reported. 

"I saw Neptune with my own eyes," said Ketel Jacob, who was in the
car. "He seemed to be taken by force."

--

Who Was Behind the Prison Break in Haiti?
by Benjamin Melancon on Mon Feb 21st, 2005 at 06:23:34 AM EST

While it is always possible that pro-Aristide gangs attacked the
Haitian National Penitentiary to free jailed members – presumably
with the help of guards or even former military to pull it off – this
remains an unlikely explanation given the facts known.  Yet it is the
most common explanation presented in media reports of the attack and
jail break.  Establishment press accounts that don’t directly offer
an explanation usually prominently mention the “re-capture” of Prime
Minister Yvon Neptune and Interior Minister Jocelerme Privert – top
officials of the overthrown elected government – and let the clear
implication be that supporters of exiled President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide undertook the attack to free these leaders.

Associated Press reporter Peter Prengaman, alone in the press, denies
that any third party removed Neptune and Privert from the prison.
 Instead, he continues to report
http://www.boston.com/news/world/latinamerica/articles/2005/02/21/
hundreds_of_prisoners_at_large_in_haiti_attack/
that guards secreted the two top political prisoners to a secure
location during the attack.  Prengaman cites unnamed authorities.  In
contemporaneous reports a government source even less credible than
anonymous officials, police spokeswoman Gessy Coicou, repeats the
escape-and-capture line.  "Yvon Neptune and Jocelerme Privert have
been apprehended," she told Agence France Press
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200502/s1306747.htm .  In
conflict with the escape claims, Reuters reporter Joseph Guyler Delva
quoted eyewitnesses in front of the prison who reported seeing Prime
Minister Neptune taken from the prison at gunpoint.  The witnesses
identified the kidnappers as the attackers, not guards, though
Delva's Reuters version is at least conceivably reconcilable with
Prengaman AP report.

Agence France Press has proved the worst of the wire services in
covering this event.  While none have provided coherent explanations,
critical analysis, or key context, AFP has been malevolent in its
misrepresentations.  Each AFP article ends with a stock summary that
lists year-old allegations against Aristide, including corruption and
human rights violations, while mentioning none of the proven crimes
of the pro-coup forces and presenting as mutual the constant,
one-sided violence against people suspected of supporting the popular
president.  AFP repeats government allegations against Neptune and
Privert without saying they have not been charged or faced with
evidence despite being in jail since June and April, respectively.

AFP consistently claims that the prison attack freed the two Lavalas
leaders who were then re-captured.  Details and explanations vary or
are left out.  A notable version was a Sunday article titled "Haiti
drug gang causes mass prison break-out, former ministers recaptured."
 One of AFP’s claims in this article, that Neptune and Privert were
captured after calling embassies seeking asylum – and presumably
failing to find it, the same libel made against Aristide when he was
removed from the presidency at gunpoint one year ago – has already
been refuted by Prengaman.  Chilean ambassador to Haiti Marcel Young
met with the two Saturday and said “they were only concerned about
their security.  Once that was arranged, they asked to go back to the
prison."  Prengaman, remember, reported that Neptune and Privert
never left government custody.  They certainly have not been able to
communicate with supporters; Privert’s wife Ginette has not seen nor
heard from him.  ''I've been waiting three hours, and they still
won't let me in," she told Prengaman outside the prison on Sunday.

Independent journalist Reed Lindsay, in an article published by the
Washington Times, reported from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, details of the
prison break
http://washingtontimes.com/world/20050221-123839-1928r.htm not yet
recorded by any of the wire services.  The additional information
casts further doubt on suggestions, tentatively made by UN and
Haitian officials, that Aristide supporters launched the attack.

One senior police official said on the condition of anonymity that he
suspected former soldiers were behind the prison break.
    It is not clear how such a massive prison break could have taken
place in broad daylight just three blocks from the national palace
and police headquarters in downtown Port-au-Prince, where 125 U.N.
riot police and dozens of Haitian police officers stand guard.
    Nor is it clear how the handful of assailants — witnesses in
front of the penitentiary said they saw only one vehicle and several
gunmen — managed to get past about 40 prison guards and free nearly
500 of the more than 1,200 prisoners in the penitentiary — all before
the police and U.N. troops arrived.
    Marie-Yolene Gilles, an observer for the National Coalition for
Haitian Rights, who had access to the penitentiary yesterday, said
six hooded gunmen dressed in black entered the prison. One off-duty
prison guard was shot and killed outside the penitentiary, but no
guards inside were killed or injured by the assailants.
    Prison authorities refused to allow a reporter to visit the
penitentiary yesterday and Claude Theodat, the chief of Haiti's
prison system, did not return phone calls.
    In the strongly pro-Aristide neighborhood of Bel Air, one man who
claimed to have escaped from the penitentiary said the prison guards
opened the cells and told the prisoners to leave.

Marguerite Laurent, in a February 19 e-mail to the Haitian Lawyers
Leadership Network
http://www.margueritelaurent.com/pressclips/haitianlawyers.html
information list in which she passed on the conflicting Reuters and
AP reports of the attack on the prison, hinted her suspicions that
the prison break serves the interests of U.S.-installed interim
president Gerard Latortue and U.S. Ambassador James Foley.

Lately, it would seems whenever high ranking U.S. official visit
Haiti – there are currently three former U.S. ambassadors who are in
Haiti right now looking at feasibility of election and assessing
"security concerns" for said U.S. elections in Haiti; or, as on Dec.
1, 2004 when Colin Powell was in Haiti – something horrible for the
Haitian poor happens at the Latortue/Foley Haitian concentration
camp, known as, the National Penitentiary.

Let us never lose our focus. It is NOT Haitian infighting that has
brought Haiti to this precipice, this death trap. But said same US
high ranking officials and their policies to destroy democracy in
Haiti at any cost, with any Haitian life, so that their
corporatocracy may rule Haiti through Washington puppets like
Latortue or Bazin, or Apaid, et al.

 They will invent ANY storyline to keep us from focussing on that
truth. But we shall not be distracted. The conflicts manufactured
into Haiti has cost us way too much blood.

While the failure of law enforcement represented by an armed attack
on the prison and the continued freedom of the perpetrators ought to
increase scrutiny of the coup government and United Nations forces
supporting it, successfully branding the political opposition with
the crime could greatly benefit both paramilitaries and the
illegitimate government.  It all depends on how the media coverage
comes down.  Right now it is still up in the air.

At stake is the world continuing to look into, at long last, extreme
and continuing human rights abuses inflicted on the Haitian people by
the U.S., France, Canada, and UN-supported government and by the
paramilitaries.  A recent investigation by the Center for the Study
of Human Rights http://www.law.miami.edu/cshr/ at the University of
Miami law school provides graphic and often horrifying proof of the
state-sanctioned violence mostly against the poor majority in Haiti.
 More specifically at stake are UN investigations into the possible
massacre at the same Haitian National Penitentiary
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/
Article_Type1&call_pageid=971358637177&c=Article&cid=1103496609352
on December 1 and a string of summary executions carried out by
Haitian police
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2005/2/3/115016/9886 .

--


Haiti's real security problem isn't the prison
by Benjamin Melancon on Tue Feb 22nd, 2005 at 06:45:05 PM EST


"... investigators .. observed a boy lying on his back, naked and
exposed on a cot in the middle of the emergency room," the report
http://www.law.miami.edu/news/368.html 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."

Some in the media are not letting the prison attack shake their
focus.  While the Miami Herald editorializes
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/10958451.htm that
the daylight attack shows the need for a "significant presence of
U.S. Marines and soldiers," their own metro columnist
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/columnists/jim_defede/
10958149.htm
detailed what the most recent significant U.S. military presence — to
manage the coup against Aristide's elected government and install the
present government — has wrought.  (The Herald requires free
registration to viewe articles, visit BugMeNot
http://www.bugmenot.com/ to borrow a registration.)

The Herald editorial, aside from ignoring the possibility that the
"why worry?" attack was in part an inside job and the fact that few
of the "vicious and lawless" prisoners have been convicted of
anything, put the big lie in the form of a question: "So what will it
take for the United States to step up to the plate? Another wave of
boat people?"

If Haitians were able to seek refuge anywhere, thousands would be
there now.  The U.S. shut its borders, intercepting boats and sending
the desperate refugees back to continued suffering and worse, even
during the devastating floods of several months back: when Haitians
deserved refugee status not just for economic plight and political
persecution, but environmental disaster as well.

The excerpt that introduced this comment comes from today's opinion
column by Jim DeFede in the Miami Herald.  The atrocities he quotes
come, in turn, from a 51-page report by attorney and human rights
investigator Thomas Griffin and University of Miami Law School Center
for the Study of Human Rights director Irwin Stotzky.

DeFede interviewed Griffin for his column
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/columnists/jim_defede/
10958149.htm
, which I quote from again below.  Griffin let DeFede know he was
angry that the Miami Herald, one of the few media outlets that
covered his report -- released a month ago -- used his political
alignment to try to discredit it.

"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.

(Thanks to Marguerite Laurent
http://www.margueritelaurent.com/law/lawpress.html of the Haitian
Lawyers Leadership Network for passing on DeFede's article in real
time-- she just caught Reed Lindsay's article on the prison break
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-
wohait224153882feb22,0,3161921.story?coll=ny-worldnews-headlines
in Newsday now.)

--
source:
https://listhost.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/haiti-news