Haiti: In the Kingdom of Impunity
By Michael Deibert
There
are many striking sights to be seen in Haiti today. In the north of the
country, where over 200 years ago a revolt of slaves began that would
eventually topple French rule, a 45-minute journey on a smooth road
traverses the distance between the border with the Dominican Republic
and Haiti's second largest city, Cap-Haïtien, replacing what used to be a
multi-hour ordeal. From Cap-Haïtien itself, a city buzzing with
economic activity, travel to Port-au-Prince, the nation's capital, could
previously be a 10-hour odyssey, but is now accomplished in around 5
hours via a comfortable air-conditioned bus. Once the traveler arrives
in Port-au-Prince itself - a city which, along with its environs, was
largely devastated by a January 2010 earthquake - one finds,
startlingly, functioning traffic lights, street lights powered by solar
panels and armies of apron-clad workers diligently sweeping the
sidewalks and gutters of what has historically been the filthy fiefdom
of Haiti's myriad of warring political factions. To the south, in the
colonial city of Jacmel, which sheltered the South American
revolutionary Simón Bolívar at a critical time during his struggle to
break South America free from the yoke of Spain, one of the most
pleasant malecóns in the Caribbean has been built, facing the tumbling
sea and mountains sloping dramatically in the distance.
But
perhaps no scene in the new Haiti - governed since May 2011 by
President Michel Martelly, now assisted by Prime Minister Laurent
Lamothe, a former telecommunications mogul - was as striking as that
which occurred in the northern city of Gonaives on January 1st of this
year. There, at annual ceremony marking Haiti's independence, President
Martelly, who in a previous incarnation was known as Sweet Micky and was
perhaps the best-known purveyor of Haiti's sinuous
konpa music,
greeted
on the official dais none other than Jean-Claude Duavlier, who ruled
Haiti as a dictator from 1971 until 1986, and fled the country amid
pillaging of the state and gross human rights abuses.
"Despite
everything that has happened in the last 30 years, it is as if they
want us to return to the situation that existed before February 7,
1986," says Laënnec Hurbon, Haiti's most well-known sociologist,
referring to the date of Duvalier's departure.
Duvalier
had taken over from his dictator-father, François Duvalier, a
psychopath who lorded over a terrifying police state since 1957, and had
created the infamous Tontons Macoutes, denim-clad paramilitary
henchmen.
The younger Duvalier was only 19 when he
ascended to office, but he grew into the role soon enough. In a speech
in October 1977 - the 20th anniversary of his father's assumption of the
presidency - the 24 year-old Jean-Claude Duvalier gave a speech in
which he heralded the advent of "Jean-Claudism," supposedly a
liberalizing trend in Duvalierism that would foster economic
development. The near-fatal beating of a prominent government critic,
Pastor Luc Nerée, only weeks later gave a flavour for how limited that
liberalization would be. Fort Dimanche, a Port-au-Prince prison, during
the Duvaliers' reign became known as the Dungeon of Death for the
thousands of government opponents and other unfortunate souls who
perished there.
In a landmark
decision
last month, a Haitian court ruled that Duvalier could be tried for
crimes against humanity and for abuses committed by security forces
during his rule, but deferred a decision as to whether he could be tried
on various corruption charges.
"The Duvalier decision is a little victory against impunity and corruption," says Pierre Espérance, director of the
Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains (RNDDH), Haiti's most well-known human rights organization. "But we still have a lot of work to do."
Along with several other organizations, RNDDH is a member of the
Collectif contre l'impunité, a coalition of groups advocating for legal action against Duvalier.
Duvalier
is far from the only Haitian politician with a trial potentially in his
future. The former boy dictator, now grown gray and sallow in old age,
returned to Haiti in January 2011 in the midst of the contentious vote
that saw Martelly elected. He was followed by another former president,
and arch-rival, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
During his 2001
to 2004 second turn in office and immediately preceding it, Aristide
was accused of, among other misdeeds, arming and organizing paramilitary
youth groups known as
chimeres, presiding over brutal collective
reprisals by his security forces against the rebellious city of Gonaives, and a ghastly
massacre
in the town of Saint-Marc in February 2004, the latter killings by a
combination of police, security personnel from Aristide's National
Palace and allied street gangs having claimed at least 27 lives. In
recent
testimony presented in a Haitian court, Aristide was also accused of orchestrating the April 2000
murder of Jean Dominique, the country's most well-known journalist. Two separate bodies - the
Unite Centrale de Renseignements Financiers (UCREF) and the
Commission d'Enquete Administrative - that
examined financial irregularities from Aristide's time as Haiti's president
found
that "Aristide's government illegally pumped at least $21 million of
his country's meager public funds into private firms that existed only
on paper and into his charities."
Nor can those tasked
with checking the power of the executive branch be viewed with great
confidence, with Haiti's legislative branch of government often
resembling a prison more than a parliament.
Two members
of Haiti's lower house of parliament, the Chamber of Deputies,
Rodriguez Séjour and N'Zounaya Bellange Jean-Baptiste (who as
parliamentarians enjoy immunity from prosecution), have been credibly
accused
of involvement of the April 2012 murder of Haitian police officer Walky
Calixte, but both men remain free with apparent little fear of trial or
even arrest. In the slain policeman's Port-au-Prince neighborhood of
Carrefour, mournful graffiti still reads
Adieu, Walky. Another
deputy, fierce Martelly critic Arnel Belizaire, is alleged by the
government to have managed to get himself elected despite the fact that
he was a
fugitive who had broken out of
jail a few years before [What is beyond debate is that Belizaire is prone to bouts of physical
violence in the parliament itself].
One of President Martelly's chief advisors, Calixte Valentin, was identified as being responsible for the
killing
of a merchant named Octanol Dérissaint in the town of Fonds-Parisien,
near the border with the Dominican Republic, in April 2012. Valentin was
never tried for the crime and remains a free man to this day.
It
is amid such a discordant background - foreign investment flooding into
the country as never before in terms of tourist initiatives and
industrial parks even as Haiti's politic milieu remains deeply
dysfunctional - that long-delayed legislative elections for two-thirds
of the country's senate, the entire chamber of deputies, and local and
municipal officials such as mayors are scheduled to take place in
October. Several political parties have not as-yet signed on to the
electoral plan.
"There are a few parties who chose not
to participate, but it was an open process," says Carl Alexandre, Deputy
Special Representative of the Secretary-General in the United Nations
peacekeeping mission in Haiti, known by its acronym
MINUSTAH.
"It is our hope that those who didn't participate initially will want
to join as the process unfolds, because the alternative is unthinkable.
If the elections are not held this year, in January there will not be a
functioning parliament. There will be no one there."
[The UN mission in Haiti has had its own issues with impunity. A cholera epidemic, all-but-certainly
introduced by Nepalese peacekeepers, has killed over 8,000 people in the country, but the UN has claimed immunity from any damages.]
Around
the country, the Martelly-Lamothe government seems to remain broadly
popular, with one moto taxi driver plying Port-au-Prince's dusty Route
de Freres telling me "they are working well for Haiti," a sentiment I
heard often in my travels around the country. This despite the fact
that - from the crowds in Gonaives chanting "Martelly for 50 years!" to
the huge billboards around the country bearing Martelly's image (in
violation of Article 7 of Haiti's constitution, which bans "effigies and
names of living personages" from "currency, stamps, seals, public
buildings, streets or works of art") - the government seems to have by
no means entirely abandoned the
realpolitik of Haiti's past. As they once did for Aristide, graffiti slogans around Port-au-Prince laud the
bèl ekip (beautiful team) of Martelly-Lamothe.
Haiti's
economy is indeed moving - even roaring - forward, but the old need for
a mechanism for crime and punishment of the country's powerful keeps
knocking on Haiti's door, unbidden, perhaps unwanted, but there
nonetheless. In a marriage of impunity and economy, perhaps the echoes
of Jean-Claudism do not appear so distant after all.
"We
are talking about the situation of impunity that has been the rule
since François Duvalier came to power in 1957, and something has to be
done to stop that," says Sylvie Bajeux, director of the
Centre Œcuménique des droits humains
(CEDH), who also served as one of the officials who investigated
Aristide's alleged financial misdeeds. Like RNDDH, the CEDH is a member
of the Collectif contre l'impunité. "If we don't, we are going nowhere,
we cannot talk about reconstruction."
"Jean-Claude
Duvalier's case has become the symbol for the need to put an end to
impunity," Bajeux says. "He's being charged with monstrous deeds. So
what is going to happen? What happens with Duvalier's case is something
that will affect the whole future of this country, one way or another."
Michael Deibert is the author of In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America's Drug War in Mexico (Lyons Press, 2014), The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books, 2013) and Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press, 2005).
