29464: Holmstead (adds)Re: 29462: RV (discuss) Exposing disinformation on the Dominique case (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

FROM: John Holmstead

(Holmstead comments: Again, I will say it is
legitimate to ask why everyone mentioned in this
article, including Gassant himself, remained silent
during Toussaint's campaign for the presidency. Is
Gassant pursuing the trajectory of his investigation
that he initially leaked to Reporters Without Borders
and later publicly proclaimed according to this
article. And remember, this is the Wall Street Journal
we're talkiing about here not a cabal of "Haiti Action
type folks." Whatever is meant by that. Two plus two
will always equal four and there are plenty of smoking
guns to go around, even in Haiti.)

Quote #1:

"From a judicial point of view, it's a case like any
other," insisted Judge Gassant in a recent interview.
But his actions suggested otherwise: After taking the
case, he sent his wife and son to live with relatives
in Florida.

Quote #2:

Judge Gassant declined to give details about the
investigation, citing confidentiality laws. But a
report published last April by Paris-based Reporters
Without Borders, an independent group that promotes
press freedom around the world, pieces together a
series of apparent breakthroughs.

Quote #3:


In May, Judge Gassant formally accused Sen. Toussaint
of involvement in Mr. Dominique's murder. Since then,
Mr. Toussaint, making use of the immunity he enjoys as
a Senator, has refused to give further testimony to
Judge Gassant, who has sent a request to the Senate
asking for it to lift Mr. Toussaint's immunity.

Quote #4:

"Very few judges would have the courage and the
ability to bring the case as far as Gassant has
brought it," she says. "It's a delaying tactic." Now
living in Florida, Judge Gassant says he probably will
seek political asylum in the U.S.


(Wall St Journal, 29 Jan 02)


The Slaying of a Top Journalist Proves a Critical
Trial for Haiti's Democracy

By JOSE DECORDOBA



PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- On April 3, 2000, a killer
lying in wait gunned down broadcaster Jean Dominique
on the steps of his radio station as he arrived to
deliver the 7 a.m. news.

The murder of the gaunt, intense Mr. Dominique,
considered to be Haiti's most important journalist,
was like a kick to the nation's stomach. Three days of
official mourning were ordered. The columns of Haiti's
wedding-cake presidential palace were draped with
black crepe. Sixteen thousand people crammed the
city's soccer stadium to attend the funeral. At the
service,
then-President Rene Preval, a close friend of the
69-year-old slain newsman, openly wept.

Solving the murder became a key test for Haiti's
embattled democracy. Since U.S. troops invaded to oust
a brutal military regime in 1994, international
human-rights groups have blasted the island nation for
backsliding into lawlessness. In a speech to
legislators, President Preval warned: If you don't "do
everything in your power to find justice for Jean
Dominique, then your own corpses will be found on the
road to impunity."

The case has since taken many a bizarre turn. So far,
the only corpses to be found belonged to two suspects
whom investigators had hoped could lead them to the
mastermind. Two successive judges have themselves been
hounded by death threats, as their search led them to
the doorstep of one of Haiti's most powerful
politicians. "It's a strange, poisonous atmosphere,"
says Camille Leblanc, a former justice minister.

In Haiti, as in many former French colonies, criminal
inquiries are handled by an investigative judge, who
functions as a cross between prosecutor and
grand jury. Despite the lofty title, such officials
receive a meager salary -- typically less than $400 a
month -- and they have little real power. In
the aftermath of the Dominique murder, President
Preval earmarked a few thousand dollars from a
presidential discretionary fund to supplement the
judge's security unit and pay for transportation.

The first judge assigned to the case, Jean Senat
Fleury, had no shortage of suspects. Mr. Dominique, a
pop-eyed man with the sharp features of a bird of
prey, had been an equal-opportunity critic of the
ruling class. Born into the country's light-skinned,
French-speaking elite, Mr. Dominique was
one of few educated Haitians able to cross the abyss
and engage the mass of the country's black,
Creole-speaking people. The power of his microphone
had given him an extraordinary role in the country's
search for democracy, and he used it liberally to fire
staccato bursts of tart-tongued editorial commentary.
For his pains, Mr. Dominique had been twice forced
into exile, the first time under the dictatorship of
Jean Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier and then under the
military regime which in 1991 overthrew President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The front of Mr. Dominique's
radio station,
Haiti-Inter, pockmarked with bullet holes, had been
shot up six times.

"There could be a thousand reasons for his death, but
they boil down to one thing -- he stood in the way of
powerful and dangerous people," says Patrick Elie, a
former senior security official under Mr. Aristide.

In the months before his death, Mr. Dominique took aim
at targets ranging from a local pharmaceutical firm
whose cough syrup was blamed for the death of 80
children to the country's elections board, which he
said had plans to sabotage upcoming polls.

It wasn't long before Judge Fleury turned his
attention to a powerful member of President Preval's
own populist Lavalas Family party, Dany Toussaint.
Dapper and charismatic, Mr. Toussaint is a former army
officer
who at different times has been Mr. Aristide's
personal bodyguard and the chief of Haiti's police.
During his successful run for senate two years ago,
Mr. Toussaint received more votes than any other
aspiring legislator.

Though both were part of the same populist political
movement, Mr. Toussaint had also clashed in the past
with the journalist. Six months before his death, Mr.
Dominique, in a radio editorial, had charged that Mr.
Toussaint was trying to strong-arm him into joining a
slanderous media campaign against two high-ranking
police officials who were Mr. Toussaint's rivals.

"If Dany Toussaint takes other actions against me or
against the radio station, and if I survive, I will
denounce him, shut the door, and go into exile with my
wife and children," he said on air.

An incident at Mr. Dominique's funeral seemed to offer
an ugly punctuation mark to the feud: A group of
chimeres, thugs-for-hire from the city's worst slums,
dropped a pocket-sized election photograph of Mr.
Toussaint into the journalist's open casket.

Ten days after the murder, Judge Fleury ordered the
arrest of an alleged triggerman. According to the
Inter-American Press Association, a trade group that
commissioned a report on the case, the man was a
member of the notorious Road Nine Gang, which operates
in downtown Port-au-Prince, collecting extortion money
from merchants. Several other arrests followed.

In July 2000, Judge Fleury called Sen. Toussaint to
his chambers to testify. The senator complied, but
showed up with a group of supporters who hurled
insults at the judge outside the courthouse. Judge
Fleury received
death threats, and soon resigned, say people close to
the case.

He was replaced in September of that year by Claudy
Gassant. A sliver of a man who barely fills out a
business suit, Judge Gassant is one of a new
generation of Haitian jurists who reformers hope will
remake the notoriously corrupt Haitian justice system.
A specialist in criminology, Mr. Gassant studied law
in France. After his return to Haiti, he was picked as
a promising young lawyer and returned to a special
magistrate's school in France.

"From a judicial point of view, it's a case like any
other," insisted Judge Gassant in a recent interview.
But his actions suggested otherwise: After taking the
case, he sent his wife and son to live with relatives
in Florida.

Judge Gassant declined to give details about the
investigation, citing confidentiality laws. But a
report published last April by Paris-based
Reporters Without Borders, an independent group that
promotes press freedom around the world, pieces
together a series of apparent breakthroughs.

Shortly after the murder, investigators had obtained
detailed information about three stolen vehicles used
by the killer and his accomplices, according to the
report. The vehicles led to Jean-Wilner Lalanne, who
purportedly worked for a network that handled stolen
cars.

When police went to pick him up, they shot Mr. Lalanne
in the buttocks and thigh, wounding him slightly,
according to the IAPA report, published in January
2001. During surgery to mend his thigh bone a few days
later, Mr. Lalanne suddenly died. The surgeon
variously cited a heart attack and a pulmonary
embolism as the cause of death, according to Reporters
Without Borders.

But Judge Gassant later became suspicious. He
discovered that the surgeon
was a close friend of an associate of Mr. Toussaint,
according to Reporters
Without Borders. He ordered an autopsy, but the body
couldn't be located.
Judge Gassant issued a warrant for the arrest of the
Toussaint associate,
and began investigating the doctor for possible
manslaughter.

In November, another suspect was picked up by police
in the provincial town
of Leogane. Judge Gassant hurried over to take custody
of the prisoner. But
the local police handed the prisoner over to a mob
outside instead. The
crowd killed him before his eyes, he says. "I saw the
people cut him into
pieces with their machetes," says the judge. He fled
in his car back to the
capital. The judge ordered the local police chief
arrested, but the police
official was soon released from jail, according to
Judge Gassant.

Nevertheless, Judge Gassant kept on the case. Last
year, he questioned Sen.
Toussaint seven times.

By this time, Sen. Toussaint was attracting
unfavorable attention
elsewhere. In a Dec. 20 letter to Secretary of State
Colin Powell, Sen.
Mike DeWine, a member of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, and Rep. Porter
Goss, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee,
wrote that Mr.
Toussaint was one of two Haitian senators who "have
been credibly linked by
a number of U.S. government agencies to narcotics
trafficking in Haiti."

Mr. Toussaint is also on a U.S. State Department list
of Haitians "credibly
alleged" to have committed "extra-judicial and
political murders" in Haiti.
That effectively bars him from entering the U.S.
According to the State
Department, Mr. Toussaint is a suspect in the death of
a well-known lawyer
and Aristide critic who was gunned down in broad
daylight on a busy
Port-au-Prince street.

Mr. Toussaint, who also runs a security firm in Haiti,
didn't respond to
interview requests, including one hand-delivered to
him on the floor of
Haiti's Senate. In the past, however, Mr. Toussaint
has said the
accusations against him are part of a right-wing U.S.
plot to discredit Mr.
Aristide and the Lavalas Family party. The Haitian
government declined to
comment on the accusations against Mr. Toussaint.

As the judge centered his attention on Mr. Toussaint,
not a week went by
without anonymous death threats, he says. "I received
phone calls reminding
me that I was not immortal," says Judge Gassant.

On one occasion, a Lavalas Family deputy in a car full
of armed men blocked
the judge's vehicle on the street. The lawmaker told
the judge that if he
continued in the direction he was going, he would kill
him. Judge Gassant
says he took it as a threat about his investigation,
not a commentary on
his driving. "He had an Uzi in his hand," he recalls.
On another occasion,
Judge Gassant says, a car full of policemen bumped
into his car by the
National Palace and aimed their automatic rifles at
him menacingly.

In February, Mr. Aristide, a former Catholic priest,
took office again
after an overwhelming electoral victory. Within a few
months, according to
Judge Gassant, he stopped receiving money for office
expenses and gasoline.
Because they weren't paid, some of his bodyguards
stopped showing up, he
adds. A presidential spokesman says Mr. Aristide "is
making every effort to
cast the light of justice on the Jean Dominique case,"
he says.

In May, Judge Gassant formally accused Sen. Toussaint
of involvement in Mr.
Dominique's murder. Since then, Mr. Toussaint, making
use of the immunity
he enjoys as a Senator, has refused to give further
testimony to Judge
Gassant, who has sent a request to the Senate asking
for it to lift Mr.
Toussaint's immunity.

But only three of the Senate's 19 voting members, all
of whom are members
of Mr. Aristide's ruling Lavalas Family party, have
publicly favored
lifting Mr. Toussaint's immunity. One of the three,
Sen. Pierre Prince,
says he has been threatened by Mr. Toussaint. "He said
he had his own
connections with the Ministry of Justice and would use
them to pursue me so
I couldn't open my mouth about the Dominique
investigation," says Mr.
Prince.

Mr. Toussaint hasn't been shy about his defiance of
Judge Gassant. "With or
without immunity, whether [the judge] comes back or
not, he won't ever hear
[the testimony of] Dany Toussaint again," Mr.
Toussaint said in an
interview with Port-au-Prince's Radio Caraibe
recently. Mr. Toussaint's
lawyer, Joseph Rigaud Duplan, says his client is a
victim of a political
conspiracy and calls Judge Gassant a publicity hound.

On Jan 4., Judge Gassant's mandate ended. Soon after,
a supervising judge
took the keys to his office. The fate of the Dominique
investigation rests
now with Mr. Aristide, who hasn't reappointed Judge
Gassant. Guy Paul, the
culture and communications minister, says Mr. Aristide
wants to see justice
done but doesn't know if or when the president will
renew the judge's term.

Last week a superior judge appointed another
investigative judge to the
case. But Haiti's top prosecutor says it was an
interim appointment to keep
the case going until Mr. Aristide makes a final
decision on Judge Gassant's
fate. The appointment outraged Mr. Dominique's widow,
Michel
Montas-Dominique, who has been leading the fight to
bring her husband's
killers to justice. "Very few judges would have the
courage and the ability
to bring the case as far as Gassant has brought it,"
she says. "It's a
delaying tactic." Now living in Florida, Judge Gassant
says he probably
will seek political asylum in the U.S.

Meanwhile, Ms. Montas-Dominique keeps Mr. Dominique's
case -- and even his
voice -- alive at Radio Haiti-Inter, where for three
decades she broadcast
the morning news with him. "At Radio Haiti it is 7
a.m. and I say good
morning all," booms out the raspy voice of the late
Mr. Dominique, captured
on tape, and replayed every morning on Haitian
airwaves.

"Good morning, Jean," replies his widow, live, sitting
near a glass bowl
full of spent bullets collected from past attacks on
the radio station.
"Today is the 641st day that we have been demanding
justice for Jean
Dominique, assassinated at this radio station," she
says, before reading
the day's news.



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