FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Human Rights Lawyers File Petition Against President Martelly’s Pick for Prime Minister

Port-au-Prince, July 13, 2011 -  On Monday, the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) submitted a petition before the Haitian parliament for the High Court of Justice to indict and try President Michel Martelly’s nominee for Prime Minister, Bernard Gousse, for the crimes committed during his tenure as Justice Minister under Haiti’s 2004–2006 de facto regime.

Prime Minister Gerard Latortue’s dictatorship following the 2004 coup d’état murdered thousands and illegally detained hundreds of political dissidents. Mr. Gousse served as the architect of the campaign of political repression, whose victims included Catholic priest and political activist, Father Gerard Jean-Juste. When Judge Jean-Sénat Fleury threw out the false charges against Father Jean-Juste, Mr. Gousse forced Judge Fleury off the bench, flagrantly disrespecting Haiti’s separation of powers.

The BAI is requesting the Senate to seize the High Court of Justice on the assassinations committed by Prime Minister Gerard Latortue’s regime including those of:  Abdias Jean, a journalist, who was killed in a slum called the “Village of God” on January 14, 2005; Ederson Joseph, a school child, who was killed by a hooded police officer in the yard of his home on Rue Estimé at Fort National on January 17, 2005; and Jimmy Charles, an employee of the state-operated telecommunications company, Teleco, and member of Fanmi Lavalas, whose family found his body in the morgue of the General Hospital on January 13, 2005, 8 days after he was illegally arrested and taken to a holding cell in Antigang.

On January 25, 2005, the families of these victims filed a complaint with the prosecutor of Port-au-Prince against Prime Minister Gerard Latortue, Minister of Justice and Public Security Bernard Gousse, Secretary of State of Public Security David Bazile, Director-General of the Haitian National Police (HNP) Leon Charles, Director of the West Department of the HNP Renan Etienne, and the police officers who committed these crimes. Each of these state agents was either an orchestrator of or active participant in the assassinations of Abdias Jean, Edson Joseph, and Jimmy Charles.

On January 24, 2006, the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti and BAI filed a petition before the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights on behalf of Jimmy Charles against the Republic of Haiti.  On April 18, 2006, the Commission directed the Government of Haiti to provide its response within two months.  The Haitian government never responded.

Prime Minister Latortue and Justice Minister Gousse, as members of the Superior Council of the National Police (CSPN), lead a repressive force that systematically violated the human rights of the Haitian people. During Latortue’s regime, the judiciary failed in its principle mission to provide justice to victims of crimes and posed one of the greatest impediments to building the rule of law in Haiti. Instead of enforcing the law, it served as one of the institutions principally responsible for creating impunity, insecurity and instability in the country.

For these reasons, the BAI submitted a petition before the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies to seize the High Court of Justice on the matter of these murders and indict and try Gerard Latortue, Bernard Gousse, David Bazile and their accomplices for their role in these crimes, in accordance with articles 185–190 of the Haitian Constitution of 1987.

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Down­load the press release: Press Release — Bernard Gousse

Kreyol

Les Organ­i­sa­tions des droits humains se réjouis­sent de la demande d’établir une Com­mis­sion de vérité pour ren­forcer les pour­suites con­tre l’ex dic­ta­teur Jean-Claude Duvalier

Pòtoprens, Lendi 11 Jivè 2011 — Biwo Avoka entènasyonal yo (BAI) ap raple pou pèp ayisyen ke nan dat 25 Janvye 2005, fanmi viktim sa yo : Abdias JEAN, jounalis yo te asasine nan katye popilè yo rele « Vilaj de Dieu », nan dat 14 Janvye 2005 ; Ederson JOSEPH, yon elèv lekòl Nasyonal Colbert Lochard, yon kòmando polisye ki te abiye an nwa ak kagoul nan figi yo, te touye 17 Janvye 2005, nan lakou lakay li, nan Ri Estime, sou fò nasyonal ; Jimmy CHARLES, yon anplwaye TELEKO,  ki te manm pati politik Fanmi Lavalas, lapolis te arete san manda 5 Janvye 2005, e mete nan gadavi nan Antigang, apre 8 jou fanmi l t al jwenn kadav li nan mòg lopital jeneral, 13 Janvye 2005. Fanmi viktim sa yo te pote plent nan Pakè Pòtoprens nan dat 25 Janvye 2005 kont otorite ki te la yo, patikilyèman, Premye Minis defakto a, Mesye Gerard Lalortue, minis jistis ak Sekirite Piblik la, mèt Bernard Gousse, sekretè Deta sekirite piblik la David Bazil ; Direktè jeneral PNH, Leon Charles, Direktè depatmantal lwès PNH la, Renan Etienne ak ofisye polis ki te fè krim yo. Chak responsab Leta sa yo te patisipe de prè ou de lwen, kòm otè entelektyèl nan asasina  Abdias JEAN, Edson JOSEPH ak Jimmy CHARLES nan dat ki site pi wo  a.

BAI konstate lajistis nan peyi Dayiti konstitiye yon veritab anpèchman pou etablisman yon Eta de dwa pèp ayisyen ap reklame depi byen lontan, men li prefere fè tèt li pase pou prensipal enstitisyon k ap bay jarèt a enpinite, ensekirite ak enstabilite nan peyi a. Poutèt sa nan dat 24 Janvye 2006, Enstiti pou Lajistis ak Demokrasi an Ayiti  (IJDH) ak BAI te depoze yon petisyon  devan komisyon entè amerikèn dwa  moun (CIDH) pou ka Jimmy CHARLES la kont Repiblik Dayiti.Nan dat 18 Avril 2006, komisyon an te voye yon rekèt bay Leta ayisyen, pou l mande l yon repons nan yon delè ki pa depase 2 mwa. Leta Ayisyen pa janm reponn.

Nan lane 2004 — 2005, Premye Minis Gerard LATORTUE  ak Minis Jistis ak Sekirite Piblik la mèt Bernard GOUSSE kòm manm Konsèy Siperyè Polis Nasyonal la (CSPN) te nan tèt yon fòs represiv ki t ap vyole sistematikman dwa moun nan peyi Dayiti. Pouvwa jidisyè a fayi nan misyon l ki se bay jistis a tout moun ki viktim zak kriminèl.

Pou tout rezon sa yo BAI ekri Prezidan Sena a jou ki lendi 11 Jiyè 2011 lan, pou mande l sezi Wot Kou de Jistis epi ekri Chanm depite a nan menm dat la pou mande yo pwononse sou mizanakizasyon kont gwo otorite sa yo :  Mesye Gerard LATORTUE, mèt Bernard  GOUSSE, Mesye David Bazile ak konpayèl yo. Se pou  Sena Repiblik la transfome l an Wot Kou de Jistis pou jije yo pou krim yo te komèt  sou 3 jèn gason sa yo : Abdias JEAN, Ederson JOSEPH ak Jimmy CHARLES pandan yo te sou pouvwa yo nan lane 2004 rive 2006, jan atik 185, 186, 187, 188, 189 e 190  konstitisyon Ayisyen 1987 la di sa a.

Pou BAI :  Mèt Mario JOSEPH, Direktè, Biwo Avoka Entènasyonal, BAI

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Telechaje dokiman orihinal la:  Press Release — Bernard Gousse KREYOL

As a result of serious violations of the people’s human rights, the BAI, TransAfrica Forum and the Louisiana Justice Institute submit this report concerning political rights to the UN Human Rights Council for its Universal Periodic Review of Haiti.

Download (PDF, 218.38KB)

View French Translation: http://ijdh.org/archives/17973

Former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s triumphant return to Haiti after seven years of forced exile in South Africa signals a new stage in the Caribbean country’s popular and democratic struggle just as a resurgent right wing prepares to lay electoral claim—for the first time ever—to the country’s presidency in a controversial US-backed presidential poll on Sunday.

“Today may the Haitian people mark the end of exile and coup d’état, while peacefully we must move from social exclusion to social inclusion,” said Aristide, referring to the bloody 2004 US-backed coup, the second time he was driven from power after being elected with huge popular majorities.

Aristide’s return comes at a key turning point in the country’s history. Bolstered by a 14,000-strong UN military occupation known as MINUSTAH, and massive international aid following the January 2010 earthquake, Haiti’s tiny right-wing elite have become stronger, economically and politically, than at any time in the last twenty-five years.

This has been dramatically underscored by the return of former dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier from France earlier this year and an openly fraudulent electoral process that has barred Haiti’s most popular political party —Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas—from participation and put forth two right-wing candidates.

Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly, 50, a popular konpa musician, faces off against Mirlande Manigat, 70, the wife, and some say surrogate, of a former right-wing president. Both candidates backed the 1991 and the 2004 coups against Aristide and support the return of the Haitian army, which Aristide disbanded in 1995.

“The international community is imposing their will, using the guns of the UN troops, to impose two very right-wing candidates with Duvalierist elements on the Haitian people,” noted Pierre Labossière of the San Francisco-based Haiti Action Committee.

Aristide’s return, which threatens the resurgent neo-Duvalierist movement and represents a victory for the popular movement, changes the political equation, according to many grassroots activists.

The extent of Aristide’s influence is clear from recently released Wikileaks cables.

A June 2005 State Department cable describes the US and Brazilian governments agreeing “that all efforts must be made to keep Aristide from returning to Haiti or influencing the political process.” In another just released 2005 cable, US and French diplomats threatened to block South Africa’s seating on the UN Security Council unless South African President Thabo Mbeki managed to keep Aristide in exile there.

The French said Aristide’s return would be “catastrophic” and even plotted to hinder Aristide in the logistics of reaching Haiti by air from South Africa.

“There has been a political vacuum at all levels since the absence of Aristide and especially since January 12 [2010 earthquake],” said Yves Pierre Louis, the Port-au-Prince bureau chief of Haiti Liberté, a left-wing weekly newspaper. “Aristide’s presence alone will be like a serum. It will revitalize the popular movement and the struggle against occupation and neo-liberalism.”

“Aristide can’t physically lead the fight against the MINUSTAH. But at least we’ll have somebody who can talk for us,” said 38-year-old Basil Gilène, standing in front of eight heavily armed Brazilian soldiers in Bel Air, one of the popular neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince. “The money they spend for the mess they call elections would have been better spent for housing for the people living in tents on the Champ Mars [in downtown Port-au-Prince] or to rebuild homes in [the hard-hit neighborhood of] Fort National. But instead we see it spent on worthless elections.”

While many grassroots activists welcome Aristide’s return, others caution that electoral politics and a focus on individual leadership has serious limits.

Outside her teeming neighborhood health clinic in Carrefour Feuille, amid earthquake rubble, young teenagers putting on “Welcome Home” Aristide T-shirts, and market women selling US AID food aid, community health activist Rosy Auguste notes the difficulties and mistakes that the popular and democratic movement has made over the last twenty-five years.

Leaders of popular organizations have been forced to move abroad, grassroots groups failed to educate younger generations on the horrors of Duvalierism and the dominant role of international actors in Haitian society continues unabated, says Auguste.

“It is for sure that the big countries have had a big weight in the country and that didn’t begin on January 12 with the huge increase in volume of NGOs in the country,” observes Auguste. “What will change this reality of Haiti, and the international role, is the mobilizations in the neighborhoods and the popular organizations to construct a stronger and more accountable Haitian state.”

One outcome seems certain, though: Aristide’s return will inject new energy into many parts of the popular and democratic movements, whose partisans had begun to despair that their inspirational symbol would never return.

“We in the popular masses, since [the] January 12 [earthquake], we have never found anybody who can get us out of the tents we are under,” said 29-year-old Guillaume Joseph, standing on a street corner with an unexcavated quake-collapsed building next to him. “When you see the misery the people are living in, the problem we have is we need a leader and that leader is Aristide. The elections are nonsense, whether it’s Martelly or Manigat, they are both putschists.”

http://www.thenation.com/article/159347/aristide-returns

Back home: Jean Bertrand Aristide

As Haitians trek to polling stations across that Caricom partner state today for the second round presidential run-off, there remains a puzzling political question for clarification:

Why has the United States administration of President Barack Obama been so intense within the past month in urging the former Haitian president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, to not consider returning to his homeland ahead of today’s election?

Well, at the time of writing, Aristide, the former popular Roman Catholic priest, who was thrice freely elected president of Haiti—and thrice ousted from power by coups in a period of some 13 years (between 1991 and 2004)—had defied US official “advice” and was back in Haiti on Friday.

He had travelled with his family the previous day from South Africa, the country of choice for his forced exile that lasted some seven years, after being ousted from power, with involvement of the USA and France, in February 2004. Amid widespread political turmoil, he was flown out of Haiti on a US military aircraft without any prior knowledge of his final destination.

His lawyer of long standing, Ira Kurzban, explained last week that Aristide was concerned that a new administration in Port-au-Prince “might try to block his return home” if he waited until after today’s run-off election.

But the recurring question that will not go away is: Why has the US State Department been showing such public interest in discouraging Aristide from returning home following his public statement last January that he was ready to return to Haiti, and. had applied for a new diplomatic passport?

Aristide’s mass-based Fanmi Lavalas party which, incidentally, was controversially excluded from participating in last November’s parliamentary and presidential elections by Haiti’s Electoral Council, was rejoicing over his return home when some 168 lawyers, law professors

and human rights advocates based in the USA, were denouncing in media statements “gross interference” with the “personal rights” of the deposed president and “the domestic affairs” of his country.

For the legal director of the Centre for Constitutional Rights it was simply “outrageous” that the US should seek to control when a former Haitian president “can enter Haiti” and, in the process “violates a stack of binding international human rights treaties”.

And Brian Concannon, director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy, has argued that the US attempts to frustrate Aristide from returning to his country ahead of today’s poll was quite contradictory by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s “promotion of democracy and the rule of law in the Middle East”.

From a Caribbean perspective, it is also relevant to note Caricom governments’ collective failure to distance themselves from the US administration’s diplomatic manoeuvres—even to lean on South Africa—to keep Aristide away from Haiti until after today’s crucial run-off poll.

The Community’s Heads of Government, among them outgoing Haitian President Rene Preval, had nothing to say on this sensitive political issue in their eight-page communique released at the conclusion of their two-day meeting (February 25–26) in Grenada.

However, readers may well recall that successive administrations in Washington have demonstrated a peculiar obsession with the presence in Haiti of Aristide —whether or not he is functioning as president of that Caribbean nation that continues to languish in a state of permanent crisis.

The unsolicited advice publicly given by the US State Department that he should delay returning home until after today’s scheduled presidential run-off was the latest example.

On all three occasions when Aristide was forced out of power, having been democratically elected at all times, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had been an accomplice, along with identified corrupt Haitian political and military leaders.

During that period, in contrast, former US president Bill Clinton was to distinguish his leadership in Washington by the firm support he had provided for Aristide’s return to power in October 1994.

By 2004, amid orchestrated domestic political turmoil, the administration of then president George W Bush was to play a leading role, along with France, in ousting Aristide from power after ignoring an alternative democratic approach by the governments of Caricom.

When the unprecedented earthquake-triggered devastation of Haiti occurred in January last year, Aristide was lamenting his absence from Haiti and shown an interest to be back among ‘my fellow Haitians’.

Following the surprise return to the country of ex-dictator Jean Claude Duvalier, Aristide applied for a new Haitian passport and signaled plans to return soon. However, once the passport was delivered he started to experience unexplained complications in official arrangements, including security, to return home.

He thought it necessary then to explain, and subsequently reaffirmed, that he has no interest in becoming involved in the political squabbles over the controversial outcome of last November’s parliamentary elections or in the outcome of today’s second round presidential poll.

Early last month, then US State Department spokesman Philip Crowley was to go public with a claim that Aristide’s return to Haiti before the second round presidential run-off “would be an unfortunate distraction, and that the two participating candidates (Mirlande Manigat and Michel Martelly) should be focus at this time”.

That contention, as voiced by Crowley, provoked an immediate angry protest demonstration by Haitians, including militant activists of Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas party, who had cried “no Aristide, no second round (election)”.

As if bent on pursuing a course of action to deter Aristide from returning home before the run-off poll, a new State Department spokesman, Mark Toner, was to emerge by last weekend to sound a warning with an even more disturbing overtone.

For Toner, Aristide’s return before today’s decisive vote, “can only be seen as a conscious choice to impact Haiti’s elections”, and that Washington was also depending on the co-operation of the South African government to dissuade him from doing to at this time.

Well Aristide is now back home and the presidential poll is taking place. For many Haitians, he remains a symbol of hope. For others, his presence stirs fears and anger over past claims of political wrongdoings as well as uncertainty about the future.

Nevertheless, during his seven years in exile, no credible information was provided by either governments in Port-au-Prince or administrations in Washington (Republican or Democrat), that he has a political agenda to disturb the peace (sic) in Haiti; to affect the conduct of the second round presidential run-off or to engage in any activity that could further add to the endless miseries of his country.

Whatever their own reservations and concerns, the governments of Caricom may have missed a good opportunity to speak, unequivocally, on the fundamental right of the deposed legitimate president of Haiti to return to his homeland, whenever he so determines, and that this should not be based on the thinking and agenda of an administration in Washington.

For now we await the outcome of today’s run-off election to know whether former first lady, Manigat (70), or the popular pop singer Martelly (50) will be the winner to shortly take the oath as Haiti’s newly-elected president—a development for which Aristide (53) would perhaps be a most significant observer.

There is the further recognition that, irrespective of who gets the presidential prize, it would not change the harsh reality that it would have resulted from a flawed electoral process for both parliamentary and presidential elections, including the period of registration of parties and eligibility of candidates, right up to the verification of valid votes.

http://www.trinidadexpress.com/news/Puzzling_US_stand_on_Haiti_s_Aristide-118312564.html