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27338: Hermantin(News)Disarmament mission beleaguered by arrests in Haiti (fwd)
lhermantin@hotmail.com
Posted on Tue, Jan. 24, 2006
Miami Herald
Disarmament mission beleaguered by arrests in Haiti
The U.N. mission to disarm and retrain members of the armed factions in Haiti
appeared to be set back by the arrest of former Aristide supporters. The
mission chief said the lack of amnesty for the men is a major impediment to its
success.
BY REED LINDSAY
Special to The Miami Herald
PORT-AU-PRINCE - After more than a year in one of the armed groups based in
this city's Bel Air slum, Emmanuel Aristide gave up his gun in the hopes of
becoming a plumber.
The 21-year-old Aristide and 13 other young men from Bel Air in November became
the first to join a program by U.N. peacekeepers offering job training,
education or small-business loans to members of armed groups who surrender
their weapons.
But three weeks ago, Aristide, who is no relation to former President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, ousted in a 2004 revolt, was arrested by Haitian police
on charges of murder, kidnapping and arson related to his membership in the
group.
His arrest was the latest setback for the Disarmament, Demobilization and
Reintegration program run by the U.N. mission here, a mission already widely
accused of failing to quell the bloody violence spread by the armed groups that
include both supporters and opponents of the former president.
While similar programs have helped disband guerrilla and other armed factions
in Sierra Leone, Mozambique and El Salvador, the program here so far has
managed to collect only 30 weapons.
''This is not the nail in the coffin for DDR, but it clearly doesn't help,''
said Desmond Molloy, a former Irish army officer who heads the DDR program
here, of Emmanuel Aristide's arrest.
BACKLASH
News of the arrest reverberated throughout Bel Air, where participants in the
DDR program say they now fear for their lives. Robert Montinard, a local leader
of former President Aristide's Lavalas party who endorsed the disarmament
program, says he has received death threats from armed groups accusing him of
betrayal.
Molloy complained that the DDR program originally envisioned for Haiti is
impossible to execute in part because the current interim government, selected
after President Aristide's ouster to rule the nation until new elections, has
refused amnesty for armed supporters of the former president.
''I could do my work if we had an amnesty,'' said Molloy, who ran the DDR
program in Sierra Leone before coming to Haiti in 2004. ``But there is no
political space for an amnesty or for national reconciliation.''
The interim government instead has gone after supporters of the former
president; for example, jailing former Prime Minister Yvon Neptune and the Rev.
Gerard Jean-Juste on what human rights observers say are political charges.
A report published last year by the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey estimated
that Haiti's myriad armed groups -- excluding the former military, abruptly
disbanded in 1995 -- have some 13,000 weapons, mostly leaked from government
stockpiles.
The U.N. mission's initial efforts to disarm the former military were undercut
in 2004 when the interim government offered ex-soldiers some $30 million in
compensation for the army's abolition, without conditioning the payment to the
hand over of their weapons, including guns they took home when the armed forces
were disbanded.
Molloy later refocused the program to target the armed groups in the slums of
Port-au-Prince, many of them loyal to the populist President Aristide.
''When I say our DDR program has been blocked, I mean it has been blocked for
people who want an opportunity,'' said Juan Gabriel Valdés, a Chilean diplomat
who heads the U.N. mission here. ``The case of Emmanuel Aristide is . . . a
typical case of a gangster who would like to go back to a normal life, who has
been arrested by a state that . . . has put him in prison where he will have no
possibility of recuperation.''
Molloy says Emmanuel Aristide was included in the DDR program because his name
was not on a list of 83 wanted criminals given to him by the Haitian police.
In early November, Emmanuel Aristide and 13 other members of an armed group in
Bel Air handed over four ancient military rifles, a grenade launcher and four
handguns.
They spent a month at DDR's Port-au-Prince rehabilitation center where they
were given career advice and taught about conflict prevention, civic duties,
human rights and HIV/AIDS, among other subjects.
But in mid-December, two members of the National Disarmament Commission, the
Haitian government's counterpart to the DDR, publicly accused the DDR program
of harboring criminals, citing Emmanuel Aristide's participation. Less than a
week later, Haiti's judicial police arrested Aristide at his home.
Judicial Police chief Michael Lucius said Aristide was wanted since October
2004 and showed a manila folder bulging with witness testimonies implicating
Aristide in crimes and a wanted poster with his photo.
In a brief interview held in Lucius's office, Aristide said he was innocent. He
said he had been beaten by police and pulled up his pants to reveal a partly
healed gash on each of his shins. Lucius denied Aristide was beaten.
RISK OF ARREST
Molloy says he is still hopeful the DDR program will incorporate as many as
1,000 members of armed groups in the next two years. But he acknowledges that
he cannot give any guarantees that other DDR participants will not be arrested.
''There are many more guys out there who would do the program, but everybody is
afraid now,'' said Frantz Lafortune, 22, a Bel Air resident who entered the DDR
program with Aristide and hopes to begin studying to be an auto mechanic in
mid-January. ``If they're going to do this to us, how will they disarm
everybody else? People have lost their trust, and everybody is saying we are
sellouts to the foreigners.''