Rights Dilemma as Mass Killers Win Haiti Revolt
Mon Mar 1, 2004 04:28 PM ET
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By Michael Christie
MIAMI (Reuters) - When the dust settles after Jean-Bertrand Aristide's fall, a new government is in place and U.S. Marines have restored calm, Haiti will still face an awkward dilemma -- how to deal with the killers and human rights abusers who led the revolt.
Rights groups demanded on Monday that former right-wing militia leaders blamed for thousands of deaths, and who emerged from exile to help topple Aristide, should not be allowed to join any new government, or reconstituted security force.
"These are people who have been involved in human rights atrocities," said Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch.
"It would be a sad day if Haitians woke up and found that Louis Jodel Chamblain and "Toto" Constant and those people who terrorized Haiti for three years were part of the government."
The armed revolt that sent Aristide fleeing into exile was triggered by an uprising in the western city of Gonaives on Feb. 5 by a street gang that once supported him.
It was swiftly joined by ex-soldiers from the coup-prone army Aristide disbanded a decade ago, and by paramilitaries, who arrived last month from the neighboring Dominican Republic.
Among their leaders were some notorious names, such as Chamblain, who ran death squads in the last years of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier's dictatorship in the late 1980s, and Jean Tatoune, implicated in a 1994 slum massacre.
When Aristide was ousted in a coup in 1991 shortly after beginning his first term, Chamblain joined with Constant to form the Front for the Advancement of Progress of the Haitian People, or FRAPH.
THOUSANDS OF DEAD
FRAPH hunted down supporters of Aristide's Lavalas Family party, torching entire neighborhoods, and was blamed for up to 3,000 of the estimated 5,000 deaths that occurred before a U.S.-led occupation ended three years of military rule.
Chamblain was convicted in absentia for the murder of a prominent businessman and Aristide supporter, Antoine Izmery, who was dragged from a church, forced to kneel, and executed.
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