Haiti's New Dictatorship: The Coup, the Earthquake and the Un Occupation by Justin Podur

Author:Justin Podur [Podur, Justin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9781771130332
Google: LOAwMAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 22163989
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2012-01-15T09:48:00+00:00

MORE REVERSALS OF JUSTICE

On April 18, the coup regime finally brought formal charges against ousted Interior Minister Jocelerme Privert, who had already been in prison for ten months without charge.83 The next day the coup regime arrested Ginette Apollon, president of the National Commission of Women Workers (CNFT), at the airport. Her crime was attending a solidarity conference in Venezuela, celebrating the reversal of the coup against Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez three years before. Paul Loulou Chery, coordinator of the Confederation of Haitian Workers (CTH), and his brother Lamour Chery were at the airport to greet Apollon. They were also arrested. The police accused her of receiving money abroad to finance violence in Haiti. Police found about $30-worth of this financing on her person. They were released, but told to return to the police station days later.84

On April 17, ousted and imprisoned Lavalas Prime Minister Yvon Neptune briefly ended his hunger strike and allowed himself to be taken to a MINUSTAH-managed hospital. He continued to warn that the coup regime wanted to assassinate him after smearing him as the author of the ‘St Marc massacre’. On April 21, MINUSTAH took him to a ‘Prison Villa’ in Pacot, very close to the Haitian police headquarters. He tried to warn the UN officials that this was a trap that would lead to his assassination, and returned to his hunger strike in protest. On April 22, between seven and ten paramilitaries who Neptune recognized from the prison system forcibly dragged him into a vehicle and drove him to Saint Marc, where they tried to organize a ‘trial’. When the judge, Cluny Pierre Jules, did not show up, the paramilitaries were at a loss. MINUSTAH sent a helicopter to pick Neptune up and returned him to the prison in Pacot, where he kept wasting away on hunger strike.85 A week later on May 1, the Associated Press repeated reports from Haitian radio that Neptune had fled to exile. The reports were completely false – Neptune was still in prison,86 and even MINUSTAH’s own human rights division chief Thierry Fagart, a French lawyer, criticized the situation on May 5. ‘Since the beginning of the procedure until today, the fundamental rights, according to national and international standards, have not been respected in the case of Mr Neptune and Privert,’ Fagart said.87

While Neptune and Privert languished in prison accused of a fabricated massacre, Haiti’s Supreme Court was overturning convictions in a real massacre. On May 11, The Haitian Supreme Court absolved 1991-coup leaders Raul Cedras and Philippe Biamby, ex-police chief Michel François, and paramilitary commanders Emmanuel Constant and Louis Jodel Chamblain.88 They had been convicted of a massacre of some 15 people in Raboteau, Gonaives, which occurred on April 22, 1994. Their trial and conviction in 2000 under Aristide’s government was a landmark in Haitian history, proof that impunity would not reign and that massacres would not go unacknowledged and unpunished. The symbolism of the final reversal of that decision and the imminent release of Jodel Chamblain from prison was clear.

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