POLITICS-HAITI: Mission Supports Extradition of Coup Leaders

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ives Marie Chanel

PORT-AU-PRINCE, May 15 1998 (IPS) - Haitian efforts to extradite leaders of the 1991 coup were boosted this week through the support of the International Civilian Observer Mission in Haiti (MICIVIH) – a joint body from the United United Nations and the Organisation of American States.

Rodolfo Mattarollo, MICIVIH Assistant Executive Director for Judicial Affairs, said Tuesday MICIVIH approved of the government’os demands for the return of high-level former army officers to face trial for human rights violations and crimes against humanity.

Earlier, Haitian officials filed an extradition request with Honduras for the return of Michel Francois, a former army colonel reportedly a major draftsman of the coup which was estimated to have caused more than 3,000 deaths.

The dossier submitted to Honduran officials accused Francois of murdering 20 people during one night in April, 1994.

Francois was living in the northern Honduran town of San Pedro Sula after fleeing Haiti in October 1994 when the arrival of U.S. troops ended the military regime of Gen. Raoul Cedras.

Mattarollo also urged the United States to return 160,000 pages of documents seized by their army during a raid on offices of the Revolutionary Front for Advancement and Progress in Haiti (FRAPH), an extreme right-wing paramilitary group.

“The documents taken from the FRAPH offices in October, 1994, by the American military belong to the Haitian government, and they should be returned in full”, Mattarollo told IPS.

He announced that MICIVIH would assist Haitian officials who sought the return of the papers, believed to contain information on the perpetrators and accomplices of the violence which gripped Haiti during the 1991-1994 coup. Parents and surviving victims of the violence have held a series of rallies in the past month to demand those accused stand trial in Haiti.

A bill to overhaul the Haitian judicial system, which had been stalled in parliament since the end of 1996, finally was passed last week and has gone for presidential approval. Minister of Justice Pierre Max Antoine said the delay in passing the bill had held up any chance of the coup plotters being put on trial.

The bill calls for the creation of a bureau of “Pursuit and Tracing” to assist coup victims. A special fund for reparations and victims’ aid would also be created.

Mattarollo, however, said that further judicial reforms were necessary if Haitians were to regain confidence in the ability of the state to maintain law and order although he thought that the human rights situation in Haiti had improved over the past months.

“There are no longer instances of system-wide torture and summary execution in Haiti. However, there have been cases of abuse by the National Haitian Police, but they are not systemic problems”, he said. Still there were cases where policemen have been accused of crimes or infractions which had not been investigated, he said.