Virtual Truth Commission
Telling the Truth for a Better America
Reports by Country: Haiti

A. Historic U. S. Interventions and Resulting Human Rights Abuses

1. Non-recognition before 1862
  • In 1791, led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, Haiti's slaves rebelled, winning independence from the French. The U. S. fearing the example to its own slave population, refused to recognize Haiti until 1862, imposing an economic embargo instead, not lifted until 1869. Haiti: a history of foreign intervention

    2. U. S. Invasion and Occupation, 1915-1934
  • U. S. Marines invaded Haiti in 1915; when the National Assembly refused to approve a U. S.-written constitution permitting foreigners to own property, the U. S. occupying military forced the president to dissolve the parliament. By the time the Marines left in 1934, they left in place a system that granted political, economic, and military power to light-skinned Haitians. Haiti: a history of foreign intervention

    3. Support for Duvalier Regimes, 1957-1986

    The U. S. considered the regime of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier a bulwark against communisim and supported it generously. Haiti: a history of foreign intervention. During this period the U. S. trained and armed Haiti's counter-insurgency forces, although most American military aid was covertly channeled through Israel to spare Washington embarassing questions about supporting brutal governments. William Blum, Haiti 1986-1994: Who Will Rid Me of this Turbulent Priest?" excerpted from the book, Killing Hope: U. S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II.

    4. Undermining Post-Duvalier Transition, 1986-1991

  • The CIA was "involved in a range of support for a range of candidates" according to one intelligence official. This involvement was authorized by President Reagan and the National Security Council. When the Senate Intelligence Committee demanded to know what the CIA was doing, the CIA balked, and the committee ordered the covert electoral action to cease. William Blum, Haiti 1986-1994: Who Will Rid Me of this Turbulent Priest?" excerpted from the book, Killing Hope: U. S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II.
  • 1987. Col. Gambette Hyppolite, a 1959 School of the Americas Graduate ("Policia Militar para Alistados"), ordered his soldiers to fire against the Provincial Electoral Bureau in Gonaives as part of a larger army campaign to "stop the democratic elections." Information researched by Heather Dean, School of the Americas Watch
  • 1988, Sept 11: St. Jean Bosco Massacre. Armed men broke into the St. Jean Bosco church while Fr. Jean Bertrand Aristide was saying mass and killed 12 parishioners and wounded at least 77. They doused the church in gasoline and set it on fire. Witnesses identified at least two of the gang members as deputies of Col. Franck Roman, a 1956 School of the Americas Graduate ("MP Officer Course"), who was then Mayor of Port-au-Prince. Col. Romain later publicly justified the massacre as legitimate. Information researched by Heather Dean, School of the Americas Watch
  • In another election in late 1990, Aristide won 67.5% of the vote and took office in February 1991. Among his actions which irritated the military was his policy against smuggling and drug trafficking. Aristide was deposed on 29 September 1991 by a military coup in which many hundred of his supporters were massacred, and thousands more fled to the Dominican Republic or by sea....William Blum, Haiti 1986-1994: Who Will Rid Me of this Turbulent Priest?" excerpted from the book, Killing Hope: U. S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II.


    B. U. S. Support for Anti-Aristide Coup, 1991-1994

    1. CIA Support
  • 'No evidence of direct US complicity in the coup has arisen, though, as we shall see, the CIA was financing and training all the important elements of the new military regime, and a Haitian official who supported the coup has reported that US intelligence officers were presenta t military headquarters as the coup was taking place; this was "normal", he added, for the CIA and DIA were always there. William Blum, Haiti 1986-1994: Who Will Rid Me of this Turbulent Priest?" excerpted from the book, Killing Hope: U. S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II.
  • William Blum's book, Killing Hope, details that from the mid-1980's until at least the 1991 coup, key members of Hait's military and political leadership were on the CIA payroll. Both Cedras and Francois, the police chief, had received military training in the U. S. Blum raises the question of what the CIA therefore did with its advance knowledge of the 1991 coup; what the CIA did with its knowledge of the drug trafficking that the Haitian leaders were involved in? In 1986 the CIA created the Haitian National Intelligence Service (SIN), purportedly to fight the cocaine trade, though SIN officers themselves engaged in trafficking, and the trade was aided and abetted by Haitian officials on the Agency payroll. SIN received between 1/2 and 1 million dollars at the same time Congress was withholding $1.5 million in aid for the Haitian military because of its human rights abuses. SIN itself functioned as an instrument of political terror, persecuring and torturing Father Aristide's supporters and other 'subersives.' In 1992 a DEA document referred to SIN as a "covert counternarcotics intelligence unit which often works in unison with the CIA" and in September of that year, work by the DEA in Haiti led to the arrest of a SIN officer on cocaine charges by the Haitian authorities. William Blum, Haiti 1986-1994: Who Will Rid Me of this Turbulent Priest?" excerpted from the book, Killing Hope: U. S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II.
  • Despite a 'leaky and ineffective embargo' during this period, "numerous nocturnal arrivals of US Air Force planes in Port-au-Prince were reproted in Haitian clandestine newspapers...When asked, a U. S. embassy official said the flights were 'routine."

    2. National Endowment for Democracy
  • See detailed write-up under Report by Topic: National Endowment for Democracy. The National Endowment for Democracy, in conjunction with the Agency for International Development, gave $189,000 to various civil groups.

    3. "Toto" Constant and FRAPH
  • See detailed write up under Report by Name: Francois Emmanuel "Toto" Constant With respect to U.S. involvement in the coup, Constant, the main paramilitary leader and acknowledged CIA operative is the most prominent illustration. The rest of US involvement that is known is more subtle but pervasive: most of the coup leaders had training in the US, and the army as a whole was organized and trained by the US. The CIA and the State Department continually undermined Aristide's attempts to return by, among other things, fabricating and distributing negative medical reports. The whole coup was done with US acquiescence. The best evidence of that is the Harlan County incident, where a group of about a hundred thugs armed with sticks made a US warship carrying monitors for the Governors' Island Peace agreement turn tail. Dozens of journalists, and U.S. Embassy officials (including the CIA station chief) were on the docks, unmolested by the crowd that cowed the warship. The organizers of the event report they gave the CIA ample notification of the event.
  • In 1993, Justice Minister Guy Malary was assassinated. According to a leaked CIA memo, the assassination was planned by Toto Constant, whom the CIA has admitted was among its intelligence "assets" in Haiti. Source: Haiti Support Group, "Old Tricks, New Dog: US "Democracy Enhancement", in "This Week in Haiti", Wed, December 22-29, 1998 * Vol. 16, No. 40 (the English section of HAITI PROGRES newsweekly.) For information on other news in French and Creole, please contact the paper at (tel) 718-434-8100, (fax) 718-434-5551 or email at haiticom@blythe.org.
  • In 1994, in The Nation, Allan Nairn, a freelance journalist who has been reporting on Guatemala since 1980, broke the story of the United States government's role in establishing and funding the brutal Haitian paramilitary death squad, FRAPH (the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti). An Interview With Allan Nairn

  • "Among the worst violators of human rights in Haiti" was FRAPH, a paramilitary grup which spread deep fear among the people with regular mruders, public beatings, arson raids on poor neighborhoods, and mutilation by machete. FRAPH was led by Emmanual Constant, who went on the CIA payroll in early 1992. CIA says the relationship ended in mid 1994. William Blum, Haiti 1986-1994: Who Will Rid Me of this Turbulent Priest?" excerpted from the book, Killing Hope: U. S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II.
  • FRAPH was a right-wing paramilitary group that actively supported the military regime, under which suspected opposition activists, trade unionists, peasant leaders and anyone viewed as an Aristide supporter were imprisoned, tortured and/or killed. Ives Marie Chanel, "Abuses Done During Military Rule Still Unpunished By Ives Marie Chanel", InterPress Service, October 4, 1998.

    4. The Result of U. S. Supported Anti-Aristide Coup
  • The State Department annual human-rights report for 1992 stated: Haitains suffered frequent human rights abuses throughout 1992, including extra-judicial killings by security forces, disappearances, beatings, and other mistreatment of detainees and prisoners, arbitrary arrests and detention and executive interference with the judicial process. " William Blum, Haiti 1986-1994: Who Will Rid Me of this Turbulent Priest?" excerpted from the book, Killing Hope: U. S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II.

  • History of U. S. Military Interventions: HAITI/1891/Troops/Black workers revolt on U.S.-claimed Navassa Island defeated. HAITI/1914-34/Troops, bombing/19-year occupation after revolts. HAITI/1994-?/Troops, naval/Blockcade against military government; troops restore President Aristide to office three years after coup. S. Brian Willson, "Who are the Real Terrorists?", citing several sources including William Blum, Killing Hope: U. S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Monroe, Maine: common Courage Press, 1995

    C. Subverting Aristide's Return, 1994

    1. Collaboration with old regime
  • An issue of The Resister, a quarterly magazine of the "Special Forces Underground", 'claimed that right-wing Green Berets sympathetic to the Haitian coup government were able to undermine U. S. military goals during Operation Restore Democarcy in Haiti. The article begins with a scathing, racist condemnation of Aristide and the Lavalas movement. The far-right FRAPH (Front for the Advancement and Progres of Haiti) is described as the equivalent of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion forming a political party. The hated attachEs armed civilian thugs who worked with local police or military units are described as nothing more than a community-watch organization. The article's most explosive claim is that Special Forces members serving in Haiti met with and advised senior NCOs of the now defunct Haitian military, attachEs, and FRAPH members: Source: Tod Ensign, A Real Threat to National Security: Racism in the Ranks, Covert Action Quarterly.


    2. Removal of FRAPH/FaPH Documents, 1994

  • U. S. military forces in Haiti seized 60,000 pages of documents belonging to death squad, FRAPH, and 100,000 pages from the headquarters of the Haitian army, the FADH. The materials consisted of reports, registers and a variety of written files, as well as video-cassettes, audio-cassettes and photographs of torture sessions....Since then, representatives of the Haitian government have been requesting the return of the documents which are believed to contain invaluable and definitive evidence of human rights violations under the military regime. This evidence could be crucial to the legal process against the murderers and torturers who remain unpunished and at large in Haiti. Source: Haiti Support Group, haitisupport@gn.apc.org.
  • Washington insists they will be returned only after the names of US citizens have been excised, apparently for the illegitimate purpose of covering up US complicity in political murder and other abuses. The former US Ambassador to Haiti has stated that information identifying US citizens has already been removed from 113 pages. The Haitian government has asked for the return, in their entirety, of the documents, which contain important evidence needed for the prosecution of cases against the military and paramilitary leaders....The Haiti Support Group joins Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch/Americas, and the independent expert of the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, in demanding the immediate and unconditional return of the documents. "Haiti: US makes a mockery of justice", Source: Haiti Briefing, #29, Aug 1998, Haiti Support Group, London, UK, Contact haitisupport@gn.apc.org

    3. Anti-Aristide Coalition Building in the name of Democracy

    For detail of U. S. efforts to develop anti-Aristide coalitions in Haiti see the separate page for the National Endowment for Democracy, a foreign aid programme founded by President Ronald Reagan and funded by the US government to "promote democracy abroad." Source: Haiti Support Group, "Old Tricks, New Dog: US "Democracy Enhancement", in "This Week in Haiti", Wed, December 22-29, 1998 * Vol. 16, No. 40 (the English section of HAITI PROGRES newsweekly.) For information on other news in French and Creole, please contact the paper at (tel) 718-434-8100, (fax) 718-434-5551 or email at haiti-progres@prodigy.net.

    4. Continuation of UN/US Occupation

  • Prolongation of the occupation. The UN Security Council rubber-stamped another year-long extension for the mandate which allows UN soldiers and policemen to remain stationed in the country. The 300 troops were to have left Haiti on Nov. 30 but had made no preparations whatsoever to do so. Apparently, they knew well in advance how the Security Council would vote on Nov. 26, only four days before the set departure date. The United Nations Civilian Police Mission (MIPONUH) will cost the financially-strapped world body about $33.6 million over the next year. Ironically, it was the UN's largest debtor ~ the US, owing over $2 billion in back dues ~ which forced the renewal in order to provide a fig-leaf for its own force of 500 soldiers, who are also dug in at the Port-au-Prince airport. Both Russia and China obliquely criticized the extension as an example of Washington again using the Council to further its own foreign policy objectives. "We do not see how the situation in [Haiti] differs from many developing countries, which are also encountering drastic problems in the areas of the establishment of democracy, economic development and the struggle with galloping crime," Yuriy Fedotov, Russia's deputy ambassador, told the Council. The UN Mission "has been extended several times 'for the last time' under various names," he said, and the new extension "for the nth time will not enhance the Council's authority or confidence in its decisions." China's UN ambassador, Chen Guesang, took a similar tack, noting that Haiti's situation "does not threaten international peace and security" (the prerequisite for Security Council intervention) and that "stability and development hinge not only on building a professional police force, but also on other factors such as development." Both veto-holders abstained from the vote on the MIPONUH. Not only does the extension violate the UN Charter and the Haitian Constitution but also, most specifically, Article 10 of the new Judicial Reform Law which states that the Haitian government must obtain the immediate "departure of all foreign armed forces" in Haiti. Many Haitian parliamentarians are flabbergasted at President Rene Preval, who promulgated the law in August. Then at US bidding, he agreed to "request" that UN troops stay. "The man has shown himself to be a president who doesn't respect any law, any principle, or any institution," said Artibonite Deputy Samuel Madistin. "And God only knows, in the history of this country, we have seen chiefs of state act like this before, and sooner or later the nation demands retribution."
  • The lawlessness in the upper echelons of power has fomented unprecedented lawlessness down below. As occurs every November when the occupation's mandate is being renewed, a wave of crime and terror has swept through Haiti. Just a few examples: a Canadian monk, Friar Bernardin Jean Hudon, was found hacked to death on Nov. 28 in the southeastern town of La Vallee, near Jacmel. Kurt Mehring, another Canadian who was former president of the Rice Corporation of Haiti and the owner of the Sunset Grill Restaurant in Petionville, was found shot to death in his car on Nov. 17. Four days later, a messenger for the Telemax television station was killed at Delmas 41. One person was killed and another wounded in an armed attack near the Petionville market on the morning of Nov. 23. Later that evening, another woman in the area was almost killed when three gunmen followed and fired on her, blasting out her car window. In Jeremie, an armed gang assaulted the prison and freed 25 convicts and detainees. Even the normally sanguine Felder Jean-Baptiste had to admit that during the last few weeks the crime rate had leapt from 45% to 61%, whatever that means.
  • While the police remain all but immobilized in the face of the criminals, they show an extremely rapid response when faced with popular protest. In early November, the northern plateau town of St. Michel de l'Attalaye was occupied for about a week by the Cap Haitien-based SWAT team -- known as UDMO -- after townspeople rose up against policemen who had arrested and publicly beaten a bus driver over a mere parking incident. This past week, the hot-spot has been Plaisance, where SWAT team units from both Cap Haitien and Gonaives converged last Thursday to crack down on junior high and high school students demonstrating for school repairs and better conditions. Confrontations had been escalating over the previous two weeks, as the Plaisance police kept breaking up growing student demonstrations. One witness says that a SWAT team member, who arrived in town during one skirmish on Nov. 26, shot and wounded one student in the hand and another in the foot. A massive SWAT team deployment occurred hours later, sending most young people and many parents into hiding, including vice delegate Claude Joseph.
  • Source: "Lawless Days", in "This Week in Haiti", Wed, December 2-8, 1998 * Vol. 16, No. 37 (the English section of HAITI PROGRES newsweekly.) For information on other news in French and Creole, please contact the paper at (tel) 718-434-8100, (fax) 718-434-5551 or email at haiti-progres@prodigy.net.

  • The C.I.A. has placed agents within the rebuilt Haitian National Police, where, according to the transition chief for president-elect Rene Preval, they operate outside the control of the legal Haitian government. Summary from the Nation Magazine, February 26, 1996
  • Attempts to implicate Haiti government--murder of Mireille Durocher Bertin, a 38-year-old wealthy elite lawyer, who was a leader of the death- squad FRAPH and a telegenic spokesperson for the putschist regime. In March 1995, on a busy Port-au-Prince street, three people ambushed the car carrying Bertin and her legal client, Eugene Baillergeau, a 46-year-old pilot and reputed drug smuggler. Both died in a hail of bullets. According to the toxicology report, Baillergeau was high on cocaine at the time of his death....The US reaction, however, was swift and severe. Coming just three days before President Clinton was to make a triumphal visit to Haiti (the first by a US president since FDR in 1934), the assassination quickly became a cause celebre of US Republicans. An angry US Embassy, joined by the Pentagon, immediately accused the Aristide government. Within 24 hours of the murders, FBI agents were in Haiti. Forensic experts flew down from Miami, five specialists from the US Army Institute of Pathology conducted the autopsies, and a team of 16 FBI agents began months of investigative work. All the physical evidence from the case was taken to Miami. The FBI targeted Aristide, leaders of the Lavalas movement, including Rene Preval (who is currently president), and a group of anti-coup Haitian Army officers. The FBI agents harassed, threatened, and physically abused their suspects, according to several Haitian officers. Pierre Onil Lubin, a former Haitian army officer who stayed loyal to the Constitutional government during the coup, said that US agents and US Army soldiers threatened and intimated him at gunpoint. The FBI offered Lubin a house in the US, a visa for him and his family, and a bank account with "enough money that he would never have to work again," if he would implicate Aristide in the murder. Source: "Endless Bummer: U. S. Occupation Angling for Four More Years?", in "This Week in Haiti", Wed, October 21-27, 1998 * Vol. 16, No. 31 (the English section of HAITI PROGRES newsweekly.) For information on other news in French and Creole, please contact the paper at (tel) 718-434-8100, (fax) 718-434-5551 or email at haiti-progres@prodigy.net.

  • Purpose of U. S. Military Presence. The U. S. Support Group in Haiti " is a prototype operation of the Pentagon's revised military strategy in the "New World Order." Rather than massing thousands of troops along the old Cold War trenches in Europe and Asia, the new doctrine spreads smaller "special operations" teams throughout world under a series of pretexts, agreements, and mandates. In Haiti, the Pentagon's troop deployment, the third largest in Latin America after Cuba (Guantanamo Bay) and Panama, is sold to the world as a humanitarian mission, a stabilizing presence, and, increasingly, a front-line in the war against drug trafficking. In fact, the U.S. military is using the country as a training ground for how to battle any future uprisings. "American special operations forces have established military ties in at least 110 countries, unencumbered by public debate, effective civilian oversight or the consistent involvement of senior U.S. foreign affairs officials," explained Dana Priest in a 3-article series in the Washington Post in July. The missions often are "helping foreign armies fight drug traffickers, teaching counterinsurgency techniques in countries concerned about domestic stability and sharing U.S. military expertise in exchange for access to top foreign officials." U.S. troops are constantly rotated through Haiti for "exercises," but as the Post explained "military officials questioned about the exercises [worldwide] said, they are becoming familiar with nations where they might one day return to evacuate U.S. citizens, ... deliver humanitarian supplies, or fight a war." In fact, this is what the U.S./UN occupation of Haiti is all about: making U.S. soldiers "familiar" with Haiti and teaching Haiti's new army -- the SWAT-team units of the PNH -- how to protect U.S. interests and the Haitian elite and to repress popular protests and rebellions. As the Post article explains, "U.S. forces are teaching armies how to track down opponents, surprise them in helicopter attacks, kill them with more proficiency or, in some cases, how to lead house-to-house raids in 'close quarters combat' designed for cities." The "enemy" in the Pentagon's new doctrine (which is not really different from the old) is "internal unrest that could threaten a government." (Of course that means a _compliant_ government; otherwise special operations are used to _create_ unrest, as was done in Nicaragua.) Clearly, Washington doesn't yet believe that the PNH can master Haiti's growing "internal unrest," so it wants its troops and the UN's to stay. Source: "This Week in Haiti", November 18-24, 1998 * Vol. 16, No. 35 (the English section of HAITI PROGRES newsweekly.) For information on other news in French and Creole, please contact the paper at (tel) 718-434-8100, (fax) 718-434-5551 or email athaiti-progres@prodigy.net.

  • Popular organizations are also universally opposed to the military occupation. Speaking at a Nov. 12 forum while passing through New York, Ben Dupuy, spokesperson for the National Popular Assembly (APN), noted that the media campaign to sell the occupation is being shadowed by campaigns to create a "drug menace" and to demonize former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whose Fanmi Lavalas party also questions the continued presence of foreign troops in Haiti. Specifically, the Oct. 27 New York Times has asserted that Aristide "associates" are responsible for the flow of drugs through Haiti; the Nov. 12 Miami Herald writes accusingly that "diplomats in Haiti think people linked to former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide are the ones most likely to turn the matter [of foreign troops in Haiti] into a nationalistic issue" (as indeed it is); and the Nov. 8 Los Angeles Times shrieks that Haiti is in danger of becoming "a virtual narco- state -- just a few hundred miles off the American coastline." "This media campaign is a way to prepare people in the U.S. for more military adventures," Dupuy said, referring to U.S. military aggression not only in Haiti, but also toward Iraq and Yugoslavia. Citing a recent book, Dupuy noted that "wars do not begin with bombs; they begin with lies." Right now, the U.S. is using lies to try to keep its forces in Haiti, which was the touch-stone for Latin American independence movements in the last century. U.S. strategists and President Preval may well be underestimating the importance of this history and of the Haitian people's passion for sovereignty. Source: "This Week in Haiti", November 18-24, 1998 * Vol. 16, No. 35 (the English section of HAITI PROGRES newsweekly.) For information on other news in French and Creole, please contact the paper at (tel) 718-434-8100, (fax) 718-434-5551 or email at haiti-progres@prodigy.net.

    5. U. S. Support for Ex-Soldiers and Coup officials.

  • In every village and bidonville across Haiti, harassment, intimidation, robbery, torture and murder by remnants of the disbanded army and death-squads continue. In the summer of 1996, for instance, nearly two years after US troops intervened, well-armed former Haitian army soldiers and civilian attaches attacked key locations in the Haitian capital. The Presidential Palace, Parliament, the main police station, the national TV station, and Aristide's residence were all hit. "There is no point in masking the truth; the disarmament of Haiti cannot be described as a success," senior UN official Adama Dieng conceded to the UN General Assembly last year. "There is therefore a real danger that . . . the demons of the past, with their cortege of disasters, will reappear." But those "demons" have enjoyed the systematic protection and advocacy of US and UN forces throughout the occupation. In one secret Sept. 1995 memo, for instance, the UN emphasized the importance of supporting an organization of ex-soldiers called RAMERISM, who were demanding back pay, benefits, and skills training from the cash-strapped government. "We must continue to encourage the Government of Haiti to address RAMERISM's core issues to defuse any potential threat they could pose if they become further embittered," noted the secret "Threat Estimate" memo. Again, on the issue of justice for victims of the coup, the UN called for accommodation with the putschists: "Addressing the crimes of the de facto government has the potential to be perceived as retribution thus further alienating elements on the right and some members of the economic elite," the memo said. Source: "Endless Bummer: U. S. Occupation Angling for Four More Years?", in "This Week in Haiti", Wed, October 21-27, 1998 * Vol. 16, No. 31 (the English section of HAITI PROGRES newsweekly.) For information on other news in French and Creole, please contact the paper at (tel) 718-434-8100, (fax) 718-434-5551 or email at haiti-progres@prodigy.net.

  • In Haiti, US officials and UN forces have actively blocked the arrest of scores of senior coup officials and attaches. In one case, UN forces prevented the Haitian police from acting on an arrest warrant for former dictator General Prosper Avril, whom a US Federal court has ordered to pay $41 million in restitution to his torture victims. During the November 1995 arrest attempt, foreign officials brazenly broke into President Aristide's confidential communications frequency with Haitian judicial officers. According to Aristide, what transpired was an extraordinary "push-me, pull-you" on-air stand-off where UN officials ordered Haitian police officers not to arrest Avril while Aristide ordered them to do so. Source: "Endless Bummer: U. S. Occupation Angling for Four More Years?", in "This Week in Haiti", Wed, October 21-27, 1998 * Vol. 16, No. 31 (the English section of HAITI PROGRES newsweekly.) For information on other news in French and Creole, please contact the paper at (tel) 718-434-8100, (fax) 718-434-5551 or email athaiti-progres@prodigy.net.

    6. Asylum for Constant in New York

    FRAPH alive and well in 1996. Former death-squad leader, former CIA agent, former unofficial spokesperson for the military and paramilitary forces which held Haiti hostage from 1991 to 1994, Constant today remains a terrorist because his very presence brings fear to the Haitian community of New York and Long Island, just as he did to the residents of Haiti only four years ago. He recently assured reporters that his infamous Revolutionary Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, known as the FRAPH, is alive and well and functioning both in Haiti and in the U.S.. Source: "New York City Council Zeroes in on 'Toto' Constant", in "This Week in Haiti", Wed, September 23-29, 1998 * Vol. 16, No. 27 (the English section of HAITI PROGRES newsweekly.) For information on other news in French and Creole, please contact the paper at (tel) 718-434-8100, (fax) 718-434-5551 or email at haiti-progres@prodigy.net.

  • Intimidation by FRAPH in New YorkKim Ives, who writes for Haiti Progres, testified about interviewing victims of the FRAPH in Haiti during the coup and about the FRAPH's on-going surveillance of "Return Constant" demonstrations here in New York. He also told about an obscene anti-Aristide pro-Duvalier fax that Haiti Progres had received only one month ago from Lionel Sterling, the head of FRAPH's New York chapter. "This is the kind of psychological warfare that the FRAPH is engaged in here in New York, keeping people fearful, while in Haiti the same war is being carried out by armed gangs who kill at least a dozen people every week," Ives said. "The armed gangs were formerly the FRAPH gangs but now they work as anonymous criminals. You can't see them as clearly, but the FRAPH terror continues." Ricot Dupuy, the director of Brooklyn-based Radio Soleil d'Haiti, followed with an emotional account of Constant's attempts to intimidate the Haitian community on Nostrand Avenue in general and his radio in particular. Constant had recently come around that heavily Lavalas neighborhood. "We are respectful of the law, and we said we will not allow him to provoke us into some illegal reaction. We are going to let the law follow its course. We have faith in all the Council members here," Dupuy said. "Toto Constant, as far as Haitians are concerned, is the greatest terrorist on earth today. So let's put an end to hypocrisy. Let's do what's right. Let's return this man to Haiti to be punished." Source: "New York City Council Zeroes in on 'Toto' Constant", in "This Week in Haiti", Wed, September 23-29, 1998 * Vol. 16, No. 27 (the English section of HAITI PROGRES newsweekly.) For information on other news in French and Creole, please contact the paper at (tel) 718-434-8100, (fax) 718-434-5551 or email at haiti-progres@prodigy.net.

    D. Efforts to Bring Change

    1. Justice for Duvalier

  • An end to impunity? Former Haitian dictator Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc") Duvalier has received a notice that he must appear before a court in Grasse in southern France on Mar. 11, 1999 to establish his immigration status. The case was brought by French citizen Jacques Samyn, since under French law any citizen can challenge a foreigner's status in court. Spain's efforts to extradite former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet from Great Britain have inspired French groups and Haitians living in France to go after Duvalier, who was granted residence but not political asylum by France after his 1986 overthrow. [CNN en Espanol 12/23/98 from Reuter]. Weekly News Update on the Americas, Issue #465, December 27, 1998. The Weekly News Update on the Americas is published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York. For more information, contact wnu@igc.apc.org.

    2. Return of Documents

    Petition for Return of Documents.
  • Eleven Haitian organisations, including the Gonaives section of the Justice and Peace Commission, the nine-strong Platform of Haitian human rights organisations, and various youth and peasant organisations, have launched an international campaign to demand the return of the FRAPH/FADH documents in their entirety.
  • A petition calling on President Clinton to immediately and unconditionally return all the documents, unaltered, so that the coup victims can find justice, has already been signed by thousands of people in the US and in Haiti. You can Sign the Petition (English version) as well.
  • The Haiti Support Group has been coordinating the distribution of the petition in Europe. So far, over 1,300 individuals in the UK, Belgium, France, and Switzerland have signed, as have 19 organisations including War on Want, the Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund, the European Clean Clothes Campaign, the Dutch-Haitian Committee, the Swiss Haiti Platform, and a number of Belgian development aid agencies. Contact the HSG at haitisupport@gn.apc.org for more information.
  • In the U. S. A., contact Haiti Advocacy in Washington (202-544-9084).

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