27338: Hermantin(News)Disarmament mission beleaguered by arrests in Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

lhermantin@hotmail.com


Posted on Tue, Jan. 24, 2006

Miami Herald


Disarmament mission beleaguered by arrests in Haiti
The U.N. mission to disarm and retrain members of the armed factions in Haiti 
appeared to be set back by the arrest of former Aristide supporters. The 
mission chief said the lack of amnesty for the men is a major impediment to its 
success.
BY REED LINDSAY
Special to The Miami Herald

PORT-AU-PRINCE - After more than a year in one of the armed groups based in 
this city's Bel Air slum, Emmanuel Aristide gave up his gun in the hopes of 
becoming a plumber.

The 21-year-old Aristide and 13 other young men from Bel Air in November became 
the first to join a program by U.N. peacekeepers offering job training, 
education or small-business loans to members of armed groups who surrender 
their weapons.

But three weeks ago, Aristide, who is no relation to former President 
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, ousted in a 2004 revolt, was arrested by Haitian police 
on charges of murder, kidnapping and arson related to his membership in the 
group.

His arrest was the latest setback for the Disarmament, Demobilization and 
Reintegration program run by the U.N. mission here, a mission already widely 
accused of failing to quell the bloody violence spread by the armed groups that 
include both supporters and opponents of the former president.

While similar programs have helped disband guerrilla and other armed factions 
in Sierra Leone, Mozambique and El Salvador, the program here so far has 
managed to collect only 30 weapons.

''This is not the nail in the coffin for DDR, but it clearly doesn't help,'' 
said Desmond Molloy, a former Irish army officer who heads the DDR program 
here, of Emmanuel Aristide's arrest.

BACKLASH

News of the arrest reverberated throughout Bel Air, where participants in the 
DDR program say they now fear for their lives. Robert Montinard, a local leader 
of former President Aristide's Lavalas party who endorsed the disarmament 
program, says he has received death threats from armed groups accusing him of 
betrayal.

Molloy complained that the DDR program originally envisioned for Haiti is 
impossible to execute in part because the current interim government, selected 
after President Aristide's ouster to rule the nation until new elections, has 
refused amnesty for armed supporters of the former president.

''I could do my work if we had an amnesty,'' said Molloy, who ran the DDR 
program in Sierra Leone before coming to Haiti in 2004. ``But there is no 
political space for an amnesty or for national reconciliation.''

The interim government instead has gone after supporters of the former 
president; for example, jailing former Prime Minister Yvon Neptune and the Rev. 
Gerard Jean-Juste on what human rights observers say are political charges.

A report published last year by the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey estimated 
that Haiti's myriad armed groups -- excluding the former military, abruptly 
disbanded in 1995 -- have some 13,000 weapons, mostly leaked from government 
stockpiles.

The U.N. mission's initial efforts to disarm the former military were undercut 
in 2004 when the interim government offered ex-soldiers some $30 million in 
compensation for the army's abolition, without conditioning the payment to the 
hand over of their weapons, including guns they took home when the armed forces 
were disbanded.

Molloy later refocused the program to target the armed groups in the slums of 
Port-au-Prince, many of them loyal to the populist President Aristide.

''When I say our DDR program has been blocked, I mean it has been blocked for 
people who want an opportunity,'' said Juan Gabriel Valdés, a Chilean diplomat 
who heads the U.N. mission here. ``The case of Emmanuel Aristide is . . . a 
typical case of a gangster who would like to go back to a normal life, who has 
been arrested by a state that . . . has put him in prison where he will have no 
possibility of recuperation.''

Molloy says Emmanuel Aristide was included in the DDR program because his name 
was not on a list of 83 wanted criminals given to him by the Haitian police.

In early November, Emmanuel Aristide and 13 other members of an armed group in 
Bel Air handed over four ancient military rifles, a grenade launcher and four 
handguns.

They spent a month at DDR's Port-au-Prince rehabilitation center where they 
were given career advice and taught about conflict prevention, civic duties, 
human rights and HIV/AIDS, among other subjects.

But in mid-December, two members of the National Disarmament Commission, the 
Haitian government's counterpart to the DDR, publicly accused the DDR program 
of harboring criminals, citing Emmanuel Aristide's participation. Less than a 
week later, Haiti's judicial police arrested Aristide at his home.

Judicial Police chief Michael Lucius said Aristide was wanted since October 
2004 and showed a manila folder bulging with witness testimonies implicating 
Aristide in crimes and a wanted poster with his photo.

In a brief interview held in Lucius's office, Aristide said he was innocent. He 
said he had been beaten by police and pulled up his pants to reveal a partly 
healed gash on each of his shins. Lucius denied Aristide was beaten.

RISK OF ARREST

Molloy says he is still hopeful the DDR program will incorporate as many as 
1,000 members of armed groups in the next two years. But he acknowledges that 
he cannot give any guarantees that other DDR participants will not be arrested.

''There are many more guys out there who would do the program, but everybody is 
afraid now,'' said Frantz Lafortune, 22, a Bel Air resident who entered the DDR 
program with Aristide and hopes to begin studying to be an auto mechanic in 
mid-January. ``If they're going to do this to us, how will they disarm 
everybody else? People have lost their trust, and everybody is saying we are 
sellouts to the foreigners.''