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29150: Ayiti Chanje (news) Human rights, not politics, should be priority for Haiti (fwd)
From: Ayiti Chanje <ayitichanje1804@hotmail.com>
Human rights, not politics, should be priority for Haiti
By Michael Deibert
Submitted to AlterPresse on September 11, 2006
http://www.alterpresse.org/spip.php?article5133
A recent article in the British medical journal The Lancet 'Human rights abuse
and other criminal violations in Port-au-Prince, Haiti: a random survey of
households,” [1] rather than serving as a sober analysis of the myriad of human
rights abuses that occurred under Haiti’s 2004-2006 interim government, appears
to be little more than part of an ongoing attempt to rehabilitate the public
image of former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and elements of his
political party, Fanmi Lavalas [2].
The article in question, quoted extensively by Mr. Aristide’s U.S. attorney,
Ira Kurzban, in a recent editorial in The Miami Herald [3], was co-authored by
Athena R. Kolbe, who has previously written extensively about Haiti under the
nom de plume Lyn Duff. Described as "a friend of Aristide" in a 2004 article
[4] in the magazine "Dissident Voice," Ms. Kolbe worked at Mr. Aristide's
Lafanmi Selavi center for street children, which served as one of the nexuses
for the gangs who terrorized Haiti during the latter’s 2001-2004 tenure as
Haiti‘s president. All of this naturally begs the question of how Kolbe/Duff's
“research” into the issue of human rights violations and the perpetrators can
be regarded as objective when she states that for three and half years she was
an Aristide employee, and states that her sympathies are solidly with Haiti’s
disgraced former president.
The atmosphere of violence in Haiti today did not spring out of a vacuum. With
some of the ghastly rapes and murders carried out in the town of Saint Marc as
the Aristide regime sputtered to its bloody dénouement in February 2004 [5, 6]
- including one in the ruins of the city's burned-out commissariat by the
pro-Aristide Bale Wouze (Clean Sweep) gang - carried out in the presence of
Corps d'Intervention et de Maintien d'Ordre (CIMO) and Unite de Securite de la
Garde du Palais National d'Haiti government forces (at the time reporting
directly to Mr. Aristide’s National Palace), one must ponder whether these
sexual assaults were happening with government sanction.
In his Miami Herald editorial, Mr. Kurzban writes that “The University of Miami
School of Law's Center for Human Rights, led by the prominent human-rights
author and professor Irwin Stotzky, Harvard University's Human Rights Clinic
and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti all detailed executions
and systematic human-rights violations after Aristide's removal.”
While no one disputes the fact that human rights abuses took place during the
2004-2006 interim government in Haiti (in a personal aside, I lost several
friends to Haiti’s violence during this period), the devil, as they say, is in
the details.
The University of Miami School of Law's Irwin P. Stotzky was a long-time board
member of Mr. Aristide’s aptly misnamed "Foundation for Democracy” and his own
biography on the school’s website [7] announces that “he has served as an
attorney and adviser to Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.” The only
attorney in Haiti thanked by name in the pages of the university’s voluminous
Haiti report was for a considerable time an employee of an Aristide
government-funded legal organization, the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux.
One of the report’s key claims - that pro-Artistide armed gangs congealed after
the president’s departure - has been revealed to be false by the reporting of
many journalists, foreign and Haitian, working on the ground in Haiti since
2001 [8,9].
The Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) , for its part, listed
Mr. Kurzban as one it’s founders and "a member of the Board of Directors" in a
24th March 2005 letter sent to Santiago A. Canton, Executive Secretary of the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the OAS [10]. Though the
organization is ostensibly headquartered in Oregon, where its lead attorney
resides, donations are directed to be sent to a Florida address, where Mr.
Kurzban resides. The group’s 2005 annual report lists $53,836 of contributions
from several "individual supporters" with long-standing links to Mr. Aristide,
including Mr. Kurzban himself [11]. Recently, the organization has busied
itself with an attack on a Haitian public servant of unimpeachable integrity,
Port-au-Prince chief prosecutor Claudy Gassant, who had to flee Haiti for his
life during Mr. Aristide’s tenure while attempting to investigate the murder of
Haiti’s most prominent journalist, Jean Dominique, and who the IJDH maligns as
a "a prominent Lavalas critic” in a recent press release [12].
In a similar vein, when Mr. Kurzban writes that Haiti’s 2004-2006 interim
government “paid a U.S. law firm $250,000 a month retainer solely to bring
against Aristide a civil suit that was ultimately dismissed,” he errs in that
the case was in fact withdrawn with an option to refile, not dismissed. When it
comes to the subject of expenditures, Mr. Kurzban declines to reveal that,
according to US Department of Justice Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA)
filings, his own law firm received an astonishing $4,648,964 from the Aristide
government of behalf of its lobbying efforts alone between 2001 and 2004 [13] ,
and that Mr. Kurzban still serves as Mr. Aristide’s attorney in the United
States. By way of putting things in perspective, Mr. Kurzban was thus earning
from the Haitian state more than 2,000 times the average yearly income of any
one of the more than 7 million people in Haiti who survive on less that $2 per
day. For his part in Mr. Aristide’s propaganda campaign, the public relations
firms of former U.S. congressmen and head of the Congressional Black Caucus Ron
Dellums received the relatively modest sum of $989,323 over the same period.
Though the Lancet report chronicles no rapes or murders committed by Fanmi
Lavalas partisans, something that flies in the face of the on-the-ground
reporting of journalists who have worked in Haiti for the last two years, it
may be instructive to recall that, over the last two years, defectors from Mr.
Aristide’s party have charged publicly that former president was orchestrating
a large part of Haiti’s violence from exile with the connivance of former
officials of his government [14]. Citing the July 2005 murder of Haitian
journalist Jacques Roche, a May 2005 attack on a Port-au-Prince marketplace
that killed seven people and saw a large part of the market, which served the
capital's poor, burned to ashes and what they charged was a campaign of rape by
gangs supportive of the exiled president in the capital’s slums, last year four
of Haiti’s most politically progressive organizations - the Groupe d'Appui aux
Rapatries et Refugies (GARR), the Plateforme haïtienne de Plaidoyer pour un
Développement Alternatif (PAPDA), Solidarité des Femmes Haïtiennes (SOFA) and
Centre National et International de Documentation et d'Information de la Femme
en Haïti (EnfoFanm) - all signed a petition calling for Aristide to be judged
for his crimes against the Haitian people [15].
Rape and other transgressions, unfortunately, appear to be looked upon as just
another weapon in the arsenal of some of Haiti's politicians by which they can
crush opposition to them and whatever designs they may have on power. It is
high time that it be denounced without regards to who is committing it, and
that foreign lawyers, journalists, researchers and others stop attempting to
shield the guilty from having to answer for their crimes.
Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle
for Haiti (Seven Stories Press). His website is www.michaeldeibert.com. His
blog can be read at www.michaeldeibert.blogspot.com.
1.
“Human rights abuse and other criminal violations in Port-au-Prince, Haiti: a
random survey of households,” by Athena R Kolbe and Royce A Hutson, The Lancet,
31 August 2006.
http://www.ijdh.org/pdf/Lancet%20Article%208-06.pdf#search=%22%22'Human%20rights%20abuse%20and%20other%20%22%22
2.
“Journal reconsiders article about Haiti rights abuse,” by The Associated
Press, 9 September 2006.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/world/haiti/15478115.htm
3.
“Latortue's disturbing legacy,” by Ira Kurzban, The Miami Herald, 7 September
2006.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/15458244.htm
4.
“Debunking the Media's Lies about President Aristide,“ by Justin Felux,
Dissident Voice. 14 March 2004.
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Mar04/Felux0314.htm
5.
“Town taken from rebels feels heat of reprisal,” by Marika Lynch, The Miami
Herald, 24 February 2004.
http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/haiti/reprisal.htm
6.
Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press) by
Michael Deibert, November 2005.
http://www.sevenstories.com/Book/?GCOI=58322100397020
7.
University of Miami School of Law Faculty bio
http://www.law.miami.edu/facadmin/faculty/istotzky.html
8.
“Haitian Gangs Combat Demonstrators,” Gerry Hadden report for National Public
Radio‘s “All Things Considered,” 10 February 2004.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1669612
9.
“Militias' might key to Aristide's grip on power,” by Steven Dudley, Boston
Globe, 19 February 2004.
http://www.boston.com/news/world/latinamerica/articles/2004/02/19/militias_might_key_to_aristides_grip_on_power/
10.
"Letter to Inter-American Commission on Human Rights," 24 March 24 2005.
http://www.ijdh.org/articles/article_recent_news_march-24-05.htm
11.
IJDH Annual Report 2005.
http://www.ijdh.org/pdf/ijdhannualreport05.pdf
12.
“Demand Fairness for René Civil” by the Insititute for Justice and Democracy in
Haiti, 31 August 2006.
http://www.ijdh.org/articles/article_halfhourforhaiti_8-31-06.html
13.
Foreign Agents Registration Unit (FARA) Semi-Annual Reports (Haiti), 2001-2004.
http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/fara/
14.
“Un ancien zélé partisan d’Aristide passe aux aveux,” by Radio Metropole, 28
January 2005.
http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:aO5_sLjpRAEJ:www.delhti.cec.eu.int/fr/presse/revue/Janvier2005.doc+%22Un+ancien+z%C3%A9l%C3%A9+partisan%22&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1
15.
“Pétition citoyenne pour réclamer la mise en accusation de Jean-Bertrand
Aristide et de ses partisans en Haïti,” by PAPDA, GARR, EnfoFanm and SOFA, 26
July 2005.
http://www.alterpresse.org/article.php3?id_article=2929
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