Haiti tribunal probes U.S. role in ’04 coup

Toussaint Losier

While debate of U.S.-backed regime change has focused on Iraq and Afganistan, Haiti has often stayed out of the media spotlight.

But as former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark offered during his remarks to the second session of the International Tribunal on Haiti, the most recent instance of regime change on the world stage is the kidnapping and overthrow of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide on Feb. 29, 2004.

“That crime cannot be ignored,” Clark said, addressing a three-judge panel at Suffolk University Law School. “We wouldn’t be here today if that crime had not occurred.”

The panel, which has no legal sanction by any government body, helped gather information for an upcoming case to be tried before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

For three years, according to Clark, the U.S. worked with Haitian elites to destabilize the Aristide administration by cutting off foreign aid, funding political opponents, boycotting elections and arming paramilitary forces. This campaign culminated in the forced exile of the president and the imposition of an unelected interim government in 2004.

Since then, the interim government, with the support of peacekeeping forces from the U.N. Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH), has sought to assert control over large portions of the country where Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas party continues to receive popular support.

New presidential elections have been postponed three times because of the growing insecurity, logistical problems and low voter registration. Recently, the nine-member Provisional Electoral Council set a new date of Jan. 8 date and a Feb. 15, 2006 runoff.

These dates will miss a constitutionally mandated deadline of Feb. 7 to handover power to a new government.

Critics of the interim government have denounced these as so-called demonstration elections to weaken support for popular movements and legitimize the status quo. They argue that Aristide has twice been elected with overwhelming majorities and twice removed by U.S.–backed coups d’etat.

Fanmi Lavalas has refused to participate in the elections, maintaining its call for an end to the killings of political activists, the return of constitutional democracy in the form of the exiled Aristide and the release of more than a thousand imprisoned Famni Lavalas leaders detained without trial, including former prime minister Yvon Neptune and Roman Catholic Priest Rev. Gerard Jean Juste.

Elections, however, were not the focus of the tribunal. Rather, attention centered on the killings and human rights abuses that have occurred in the months since Aristide’s overthrow to collect evidence for a case of crimes against humanity.

The case is to be submitted to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The tribunal’s first session on Sept. 23 collected evidence and found guilty three of the twenty-one indicted officials: the former head of the Haitian National Police Leon Charles, former MINUSTAH military commander Brazilian Lt. General Augusto Heleno Ribiero Pereira, and current Chilean chief Juan Valdes.

The first session also convened a blue-ribbon Commission of Inquiry, headed by Clark, to visit Haiti from Oct. 6-11 and investigate reports of recent civilian massacres. Over these five days in the capital of Port-au-Prince, the commission visited many of the poor neighborhoods including Cite Soleil, Bel Air and Martissant.

They gathered testimony from dozens of victims and eyewitnesses as well as interviews from the commanders of the police and multinational forces. On Nov. 15, another coalition of human rights advocates filed two petitions with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights seeking legal redress for Brazil’s leadership role in the MINUSTAH forces and the United States’ violation of its own arms embargo against Haiti in funding and arming Haitian police forces.

Presenting the commission’s evidence before the court, Clark argued that the UN soldiers “are not peacekeeping forces. Many come from the elite forces of their country, bringing with them their biases against the poor majority.”

Increasingly, UN forces have worked in collaboration with former Haitian soldiers, who took over the police force following Aristide’s ouster, to carry out regular attacks on the capitol’s poor neighborhoods, areas seen as Lavalas’ base of support. “This is not the random violence you see in Iraq or Afghanistan, but the targeted violence like you see in Palestine,” said Clark

In the prosecutions opening remarks to the court, attorney Desiree Welborn Wayne outlined a case of “widespread and systematic assault on the civilian population, particularly those most impoverished and most disenfranchised. Today the truth will be known. It will be heard.”

She addressed a jury of teachers, activists, and labor leaders, many from Boston’s Haitian community. Throughout the five-hour trial, the defense table remained empty, though, the tribunal organizers explained, all the individuals listed on the indictment had been notified and invited to attend the proceedings.

The first witness called to testify was Pierre Sayant, an employee at the National Palace who was forced to go into hiding following the coup. Speaking through a translator, he described how armed men repeatedly came to look for him at his home and how he was finally forced to come to the U.S. because of this political persecution.

When he returned to Haiti in the fall of 2004, the armed men returned to his home, killing his brother who refused to reveal his whereabouts. Wayne described Sayant’s persecution as indicative of systematic assault on anyone believed to be a Lavalas sympathizer.

Where witnesses could not testify directly, members of the commission of inquiry took to the stand to introduce video taped testimony. Human rights lawyer Thomas Griffin described his reaction to interviewing witnesses to the soccer field massacre that took place at Gran Ravin-Martissant on Aug. 20, 2005.

At halftime during a local soccer match, police officers ordered the crowd of 5,000 to lie down on the ground. When few complied, the police shot into the air, and then started shooting into the fleeing crowd.

“When they started to run, almost simultaneously with the shots going off, a band of about two dozen, machete wielding civilians, joined in with the police and came onto the field. Obviously working with the police, as they didn’t stop them. And as the fans and the players started to run away, [the police] started to shoot at them, into their backs, as they ran away,” Griffin recounted.

“The gang of machete forces working side by side with the police continued to shoot and hack those people that they could reach before they got away.”

The video taped testimony noted that the machetes used were marked with initials “PNH” or Haitian National Police. It was reported that the police and their accomplices killed as many as 50 people.

Video taped testimony of additional human rights abuses were introduced by other members of the commission. Cpt. Lawrence Rockwood described an attack on a family by paramilitary prior to the coup on June 23, 2002 leaving six dead. He also introduced testimony from the July 6, 2005, when a predawn MINUSTAH raid on Cite Soleil, killed at least 63 people and injured 30 more.

Dave Walsh, another commission member, introduced an eye witnesses account of a march by Lavalas supporters on May 18, 2004, where the US, Canadian, and French forces who were control of the country at the time blocked the end of the march route and as the demonstrators wound back through the streets of Bel Air, they were shot down by a police ambush.

After several hours of emotional testimony and graphic visual evidence of killings, Wayne gave her closing arguments, asking for the conviction of Police Chief Yves Gaspar for the soccer field massacre and US Brigadier General Ronald Coleman for the Bel Air march ambush.

Though these men had not pulled the triggers themselves, she offered, they were criminally responsible, as these murders took place on their watch and they have since failed to take all reasonable measures to address these abuses.

“The judicial system in Haiti is not functioning but that doesn’t mean victim’s rights can’t be protected.” After a ten-minute deliberation, the jury returned a unanimous guilty verdict for both men.

Nearly two hundred people attended the tribunal, some traveling from as far away as New York to attend. Eddie Toussaint of Boston compared it to the 1967 Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal. When asked why the reality of Haiti is not being carried in the mainstream media, a Hyde Park high school student said, “this is being ignored because it’s a lot of black people who in some way have no value to the U.S. The truth has to get out there.”