26246: Craig (news) Haitian Women Sue Former Strongman (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Dan Craig <sak-pase@bimini.ws>


Haitian Women Sue Former Strongman
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: September 13, 2005
*Filed at 10:25 a.m. ET*

NEW YORK (AP) -- It's been more than a decade, but one woman can still hear the 
tiny voice that broke through the silence after she was brutally raped by 
paramilitary officers in Haiti. "Mom, did you die?" her young son asked her in 
the darkness. "Did you die?"

The mother survived the 1994 attack in Haiti to become a plaintiff in a lawsuit 
in Manhattan federal court against the soldiers' leader, Emmanuel 'Toto' 
Constant, a former strongman who once boasted that voodoo and the CIA shielded 
him from trouble.

She and two other immigrants now living in the United States -- who insist on 
anonymity out of fear of reprisals against their families in Haiti -- claim 
Constant sanctioned systematic rape to silence dissent. The 40-year-old 
mother's story differs in one dramatic way: She bore the son of one of her 
attackers.

"I need to demand justice," she said about Constant in a recent telephone 
interview arranged by the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and 
Accountability. "I blame him personally for making my family live in misery."

Lawyers for the alleged gang-rape victims plan to ask a U.S. district court 
judge in the coming weeks to enter a default judgment against Constant, 47, 
because he's ignored the case since being served a complaint in January. That 
would open the door for a hearing to determine damages.

Constant has lived in exile in New York City since slipping into the United 
States in 1994. He reportedly sometimes stays at the home of an aunt and works 
for a mortgage broker. He did not respond to messages left at both locations; 
court records contain no name for a lawyer.

Despite a 1995 deportation order, Constant has been allowed to remain in the 
United States because Haiti's judicial system has never stabilized enough to 
ensure he would be treated fairly, said State Department spokesman Steve Pike.

"We'll continue to evaluate his status to determine when his removal to Haiti 
would be prudent," Pike said.

A 6-foot-4 son of a military officer, Constant emerged as the feared leader of 
a right-wing paramilitary group, the Front for the Advancement and Progress of 
Haiti, or FRAPH, after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's presidency was 
toppled in 1991. Human rights groups allege that between 1991 and 1994, FRAPH 
terrorized and slaughtered slum-dwellers loyal to Aristide.

Constant once boasted that he was a paid informant for the CIA. He also claimed 
he had the power of voodoo in him.

Speaking through an interpreter in Creole, the woman who was brutally beaten 
recounted her ordeal.

Her husband, a taxi driver, made the mistake of campaigning for Aristide's 
return, putting up posters of him on telephone poles around their impoverished 
neighborhood in the capital of Port-au-Prince. In 1992 he was arrested -- then 
vanished forever.

Anguished, she stood outside her home, crying and cursing the military. She 
"wouldn't shut up about it," she said, until soldiers decided to retaliate.

There was a beating and a brief jailing. But the real horror began with a knock 
at her door on April 19, 1994. Five men entered, accosted her and took turns 
raping her in front of her three small children.

"I kept screaming, 'Why me? Why me?'" she recalled.

Three months later, the soldiers returned, again raping her and severely 
beating her 8-year-old son. The family fled to the hills above Port-au-Prince, 
where the woman fell ill. A doctor stunned her with the news she was pregnant.

"I thought if I have this baby, it would drive me mad," she said.

She considered an abortion. The doctor convinced her she was too sick to 
survive it. She had a healthy boy who blended into the family. But he now has 
questions about his father, and has a mother reluctant to answer them.

"He deserves to know and understand, but he's still too young to explain 
everything," she said.

Once Aristide was restored to power in 2001, the woman was able to visit the 
United States on a tourist visa. Yet another government overthrow in Haiti last 
year made returning too risky, so she applied for political asylum.

She wept when asked if she missed her children, now under the care of relatives 
in Haiti. Her thoughts are especially with the one born of brutality.

"I love my son, very, very much," she said. "He's no different to me than any 
of my others, except that I always pray a little bit harder for him."

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Haiti-Strongman-Lawsuit.html