Haiti and the Jean Dominique Assas­si­na­tion: An Inter­view with Mario Joseph and Brian Con­can­non
-Jour­nal of Hait­ian Stud­ies, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2007

Haiti : Jean Dominique, sept ans deja! La jus­tice a-t-elle oublige?
-Amnesty Inter­na­tional, April 3, 2007

AHP News, April 2 — Eng­lish Trans­la­tion (Unofficial)

How impor­tant is Jean Dominique? by Michele Mon­tas and Jan Dominique

Six years ago, on April 3, 2000, jour­nal­ist Jean Leopold Dominique was killed yards away from his sta­tion, Radio Haiti.

It has been six years and still jus­tice has not been served for this free speech activist. As of today, his mur­der­ers, as well as those who mur­dered Jean Claude Louis­saint, and two years later Maxime Seide to shut down the move­ment for jus­tice, are still walk­ing the streets freely.

With the oh-so trou­bling voice of Radio Haiti no longer around, the April 3 mur­der cases have not moved for three years in a con­spir­acy of silence and impunity.

The pre-trial ‘instruc­tion’ pro­ceed­ings, taken over by four dif­fer­ent judges, lasted 2 years and 10 months. It was agi­tated and bloody. Sus­pects died in prison under strange cir­cum­stances. Wit­nesses were killed. A judge went into exile after receiv­ing threats. Almost every State insti­tu­tion tried to stop the inves­ti­ga­tion: arrest war­rants ignored by the police, Sen­ate oppo­si­tion to wav­ing off a Senator’s par­lia­men­tar­ian immu­nity, police offi­cers pub­licly threat­en­ing a judge, the Head of State tem­porar­ily refus­ing (in 2002) to renew the man­date of the judge lead­ing the case.

After a not so sub­tle inter­ven­tion by the Min­is­ter of Jus­tice of the time, the inves­ti­ga­tion the­o­ret­i­cally reached its con­clu­sion on March 21, 2003, a month after Radio Haiti was forced to shut down fol­low­ing an assas­si­na­tion attempt, a mur­der and numer­ous threats to its jour­nal­ists. Even though the instruc­tion pro­ceed­ings from May 2000 to Jan­u­ary 2002, had heard tens of wit­nesses and had impli­cated about 20 accused, Judge Bernard St Vil for­mally charged six indi­vid­u­als for the death of the jour­nal­ist. No one who actu­ally ordered or planned the mur­der was named.

On April 3, 2003, the fam­ily of the jour­nal­ist made appeal the pre-trial investigation’s con­clu­sions. On August 4, 2003, Port-au-Prince’s Court of Appeals ordered a new inves­ti­ga­tion and freed three of the six con­victed indi­vid­u­als. The other three appealed to the Supreme Court, thus sus­pend­ing the entire case. Mean­while, those three indi­vid­u­als, Jeudy Jean Daniel, Dim­sey Milien and Marken­ton Philippe, broke out of prison.

On March 14, 2004, the police fol­lowed two of Judge St-Vil’s orders and arrested a for­mer assis­tant to the mayor of Port-au-Prince, Harold Severe, charged on Jan­u­ary 28, 2003, and Roustide Petion, alias Douze, for their alleged impli­ca­tion in the April 3 murders.

On June 29, 2004, the Supreme Court rejected the Appeal of sirs Dym­s­ley Mil­lien named Tilou, Jean Daniel Jeudi named Guimy and Mark­ing­ton Phillipe against the order of the Court of Appeal of Port-au-Prince .

Thus, the Supreme Court con­firms the Court of Appeal’s ver­dict that a new judge should be named to find the spon­sors of the crime. On April 3, 2005, five years exactly after the April 3 mur­ders, the case was handed to a new judge. To this day, a year later, the case is still on hold accord­ing to the RNDDH which has fol­lowed the case closely for the past six years: The case of Jean Leopold Dominique and Jean Claude Louis­saint has been handed to Judge Jean Perez Paul, Pres­i­dent of the Asso­ci­a­tion Nationale des Mag­is­trats Hai­tiens (National Asso­ci­a­tion of Hait­ian Judges) (ANAMAH).

This judge, well known for his Decem­ber 30, 2005 order in favour of alleged kid­nap­pers, decided to hand back the case to Chief Judge, protest­ing that the Min­istry has not given him suf­fi­cient means to do his work. But the judge did not resign; he is still work­ing on other cases. Since when does a judge choose his own cases? And no one says a word.” the RNDDH said.

Six years after the April 3 mur­ders, how impor­tant is Jean Dominique?

Anaes­thetized by the vic­tims in suc­ces­sion, in a strong cli­mate of impunity and with so much crime it’s almost com­mon, some might ask why we keep fight­ing for this case, it’s because it is the most well-known one of our recent his­tory, and it should not be left for­got­ten because some peo­ple are try­ing to put us to sleep by repeat­ing over and over again that an inves­ti­ga­tion is under way. Shouldn’t it be time for rec­on­cil­i­a­tion and eco­nomic part­ner­ship? Who cares about jus­tice? After all, aren’t we hold­ing, for many years now, con­ven­tions of cor­rup­tion, vio­lence and impunity in a soci­ety which has made for­get­ting the best tool to survive?

Despite recur­ring polit­i­cal tur­bu­lence related to cor­rup­tion, after Duva­lier, after the coup or after Aris­tide, the nation never seems to ask peo­ple to pay their dues. Kid­nap­pers are freed almost as soon as they are arrested. The same stands for assas­sins. While a case like Raboteau, which had the strongest evi­dence ever put together in our judi­ciary sys­tem, is stopped for pro­ce­dural defect, and no one from our so-called civil soci­ety com­plains, you can count on one hand the num­ber of legal penal­ties that are not can­celled by the eter­nal jus­tice of the winners.

This impunity is every­where in our daily lives, from defama­tion in our media to the filth thrown in the streets. A friend was telling me about a car dri­ver who was ask­ing a mer­chant to move her stand which was right in the mid­dle of the Rue du Cen­tre and the answer he gets is ” pouki m’ta fe sa, pa gen leta”. Every­body can break the law with­out the fear of being pun­ished, whether it is minor infrac­tions or mur­ders. Impunity is lead­ing us into this daily anar­chy, and still we keep our eyes shut, accom­plices or guilty.

How impor­tant is Jean Dominique? Once we have cho­sen impunity for the mur­ders of the four Jean, Jean Marie Vin­cent, Jean Pierre Louis, Jean Lamy and Jean Dominique, shouldn’t we have expected the mur­der of Brig­nol Lin­dor, or the spon­sored mur­der of deputy Marc Andre Diro­gene or the tor­ture inflicted on our poet and jour­nal­ist Jacques Roche? How can we be sur­prised by this dan­ger­ous spi­ral of aggres­sion which has made so many of us feel sor­row and pain? By see­ing jus­tice as trou­bling, aren’t we all guilty of mur­der and cor­rup­tion? Aren’t we all accom­plices by stay­ing shame­fully silent?

How impor­tant is Jean Dominique? Some will say that demand­ing jus­tice for Jean Dominique or oth­ers today is not polit­i­cally cor­rect, as it may dis­turb this frag­ile and arti­fi­cial sta­bil­ity that some try to call reconciliation.

Why insist on jus­tice today for Jean Dominique?

The answer lies in all those who are abused daily by lit­tle gang lead­ers, who are excluded, mar­gin­al­ized and denied of jus­tice, those who mas­sively voted on Feb­ru­ary 7 for the end of inse­cu­rity, know­ing very well that this mon­ster feeds off of impunity and injus­tice, those who have fought for 30 years against a cor­rupt State, to put an end to the destruc­tive games of power and money, and to change their lives. Those who do not have the courage, or the lucid­ity to under­stand that impunity can no longer be the result of power, money, judi­ciary or polit­i­cal games, of “kache fey kou­vri sa”, they will be the next vic­tims, just like the State of law and the democ­racy we are try­ing to build

New York, April 3, 2006.