30061: Hermantin(News) Haitian describes torture by police to jurors (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Posted on Wed, Feb. 21, 2007


FEDERAL COURT
Haitian describes torture by police to jurors
The horrors of torture in Haiti under a former military regime were outlined in 
a civil trial against a former Haitian army colonel that began Tuesday in 
Miami.
BY ALFONSO CHARDY
achardy@MiamiHerald.com

Lexiuste Cajuste, once a top labor union leader in Haiti, described in detail 
to a Miami jury Tuesday how military-overseen police officers in Port-au-Prince 
tortured him in 1993.

Officers, he said, forced him under the open frame of an iron bed, his back and 
buttocks exposed. Then, he added, officers took turns stomping on his back with 
their boots and beating his buttocks with wooden clubs -- until he lost 
consciousness.

''I felt a lot of pain, and I felt I was going to die,'' Cajuste said in 
Creole, as an interpreter translated his words into English for the jury of 
four women and two men.

Cajuste's testimony came on the first day of a civil trial for unspecified 
compensatory and punitive damages against former Haitian army Col. Carl 
Dorelien, a former high-ranking officer who won $3.2 million in the Florida 
Lottery in 1997 after he settled in Florida.

Attorneys for Cajuste, one of two plaintiffs in the case, claim Dorelien is 
responsible for the torture suffered at the hands of police and military 
officers -- not because Dorelien was personally involved, but because he was a 
member of the high command and his assignment was to ensure military 
discipline.

LINE OF SUITS

The case, filed in Miami federal court by the San Francisco-based human rights 
organization Center for Justice & Accountability, is the latest in a string of 
similar civil actions against foreign-born torture suspects who later moved to 
the United States.

Under the 218-year-old Alien Tort Statute, foreign nationals who suffer serious 
abuse anywhere in the world can sue in U.S. courts if suspected perpetrators 
are in the United States. The center sued Dorelien on Jan. 24, 2003 -- three 
days before he was deported to Haiti.

Matt Eisenbrandt, a Center for Justice & Accountability attorney, acknowledged 
in his opening statement that Dorelien was not personally involved in torturing 
Cajuste or in the other alleged abuses.

But Dorelien bore responsibility because he had been a member of the Haitian 
military high command and his specific assignment as chief of personnel was to 
ensure discipline of officers and to investigate human rights violations 
committed by men under his command, Eisenbrandt said.

''He was a member of the high command, and the high command ran Haiti,'' 
Eisenbrandt told the jurors.

Dorelien was not in the courtroom. Immigration authorities deported him because 
of his record as a human rights violator. He remains in Haiti.

Dorelien's Miami attorney, Kurt Klaus, did not make an opening statement. He 
told The Miami Herald later that he will make his comments to the jurors at the 
end of the trial, which is expected to continue through Friday and perhaps into 
next week.

CLAIMS INNOCENCE

Klaus has said Dorelien is not responsible for the abuses alleged in the 
lawsuit. He has accused attorneys for the Center for Justice & Accountability 
of going after his client because of his Lotto win.

There's only about $808,000 left from the original jackpot, but the money is 
frozen pending a separate legal dispute over whether it should go to victims of 
human rights abuses in Haiti.

The second plaintiff in the case is Marie Jeanne Jean, widow of Michel Pierre 
-- one of 26 men, women and children killed in 1994 by soldiers and 
paramilitary supporters in Raboteau, a poor neighborhood in Gonaives, Haiti. 
She is expected to testify this week.

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