HAITI: New Threat of Violence Hovers over Government

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Oct 1 1996 (IPS) - Reports of a foiled plot by opponents of Haiti’s government to create disorder in the country has drawn fresh attention to the country’s fragile security situation.

Haitian police officials said they stopped the plot this weekend by arresting former Haitian Army soldier Joseph Jean- Baptiste and Jean Claude, a member of the paramilitary Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH). The two men were caught Saturday with a cache of weapons in the house of former FRAPH leader Emmanuel Constant.

Yet the arrests have not allayed fears that Haiti’s new police forces still lack training and experience, and may not be able to prevent further plots from FRAPH and other rightist groups.

“Haitian security forces are fairly weak,” Jocelyn McCalla, executive director of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights (NCHR), told IPS. “If forces opposed to the government seek to take over power, they can be rather successful.”

At the same time, McCalla added, forces loyal to the 1991-94 military regime of Gen. Raoul Cedras are not likely to overthrow President Rene Preval’s government anytime soon.

“If you were really planning a coup d’etat, you would not do it in Constant’s house,” McCalla said. The FRAPH leader, who now resides in New York, is notorious in Haiti for alleged crimes during the Cedras regime and for his self-proclaimed role as an informant for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Haitian police agreed that Jean-Baptiste and Claude were not planning to oust Preval when they collected a cache of grenades and automatic weapons. Rather, they were likely planning to commemorate the fifth anniversary of former President Jean- Bertrand Aristide’s temporary overthrow with a new burst of violence, officials say.

“I wouldn’t characterise the plan as a coup d’etat,” Felder Jean Baptiste, a police spokesman, told Reuters. “They wanted to create disorder by killing government and police officials, as well as to spread terror in the slums.”

But the Preval government insists that it is in control of the security situation, and the threat of violence, or a repeat of the 1991 coup against Aristide, is low.

“There is always concern for the security of the country, but I don’t think that this concern is so great right now,” Haitian Foreign Minister Fritz Longchamps told IPS.

Longchamps conceded that opposition groups remain in the country, and may still plot against it. But he added, “I don’t think the problem today is security, I think Haiti’s problem is economic.”

Others are not so sure. “Security, and the lack of it, continues to be a key determinant of progress in Haiti,” McCalla said. “As long as (the police) cannot provide it, economic progress cannot occur.”

More importantly, some groups argue, as long as FRAPH loyalists and other government opponents remain at large and unpunished, the cycle of violence Haiti has seen may recur.

“Having never faced prosecution for human rights abuses, demobilised Haitian soldiers and former paramilitary troops find few impediments to continuing criminal acts,” Human Rights Watch says in a report issued last week.

“Each time a supposedly reformist regime took power, Haitians were asked to forget the past, to look forward to a new era,” the report adds. “But rather than build the rule of law, soone~r or later this impunity emboldened the reactionary forces to resume political killing.”

The use of Constant’s house in the weekend plot is just the latest sign that persons accused of crimes who go unpunished may still threaten Haiti. Constant was released from a U.S. detention centre in June on charges of violating immigration procedures, but has not been extradited to Haiti.

“As long as he remains free, he can do what he wants,” McCalla argued.

“I can think of no case where someone so clearly implicated and charged with crimes has been allowed to walk away with impunity,” said Kim Ives, a member of the New York-based Haiti Support Network.

The U.S. government has taken no action to monitor the activities of such New York-based former FRAPH leaders as Constant and Jodel Chamblain.

“The government has in fact discouraged pursuit of Constant and Chamblain, despite the fact there has been a legal team working on the matter,” Ives argued. The FRAPH activists have been charged in New York for organising the assault and mutilation of Alerte Balance, a Haitian woman who now also lives in New York.

U.S. officials contacted by IPS in recent weeks have said that Washington has made no final decision on whether Constant will be deported. But sources say the agreement Constant secured that ended his detention in June give him the freedom to choose not to return to Haiti even if he leaves the United States.

For some of Constant’s critics, the lesson is clear: cooperation with the United States, including his tenure as a CIA informant, have paved the way for his impunity.

“The U.S. government’s cover-up of the crimes of FRAPH, which was founded by Constant while he was allegedly on the CIA payroll, suggests that U.S. authorities are trying to prevent revelation of U.S. complicity in violent crimes in Haiti,” Human Rights Watch researcher Sarah de Cosse argued last week.

Constant and other FRAPH leaders may become even more of a problem after the end of November, when some 1,000 U.N. troops in Haiti are scheduled to leave, added William O’Neill, head of the NCHR’s human rights project. “Haiti needs time (to train its police).”