Copyright 2004 Newsday, Inc.
Newsday (New York)
February 29, 2004 Sunday
Behind Aristide's Long Slide:
As chaos continues to reign in impoverished island nation, Haitians debate how much blame their president must shoulder for the mess
BY TINA SUSMAN. STAFF CORRESPONDENT
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - The gates to the presidential palace hung open and unguarded. On the long avenue in front, remnants of barricades lay abandoned: concrete chunks, rusted car parts, gooey remains of burned tires oozing black entrails under a blazing sun.
The supporters of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had manned these fortresses, had for now gone elsewhere. But the fact that the populist preacher-turned-president should now need them for protection against a popular rebellion is a reversal in his standing from what it was 10 years ago.
In 1994, President Bill Clinton and 20,000 U.S. Marines returned Aristide to Haiti three years after his ouster in a military coup. He enjoyed the support of the world and of most Haitians, who had made him their first democratically elected president, giving him a two-thirds majority, in 1990.
By yesterday, though, rebels had captured half the country and were 25 miles from Port-au-Prince. And the White House made its harshest criticism of Aristide yet, saying the "crisis is largely of Mr. Aristide's making," and openly urging him to consider resigning.
Brandishing shotguns and automatic pistols, pro-Aristide gangs roamed the capital yesterday in pickup trucks, ignoring a radio appeal by Aristide to tone down the chaos. Vowing to halt a rebel advance, they stopped motorists at blockades of flaming tires, robbing some, hijacking cars and shooting suspected opponents.
"I've see nine bodies [in the past days]," said Gerry, a young man standing on a corner with friends in the capital's Lalue section.
At a gas station in the suburban Juvenat neighborhood, motorists lined up for fuel, which has become harder to find. "I've been moving around for the last hour and a half looking for gas," said one man. After finding four stations closed, he finally bought some gas at the fifth - for $5 a gallon.
Looters overran the port, bodies dotted the streets and foreigners urged by their embassies to flee stormed to the airport, only to find that all flights had been canceled.
"It wasn't supposed to be this way," said a man who gave his name only as Roby, whose electronics shop was destroyed before dawn yesterday in a firebomb attack.
Next door, Gina Pierre-Louis swept debris from around a charred, naked mannequin and grimaced at the stench of melted nylon from the ruins. She blamed the attack on pro-Aristide gangsters.
"President Aristide comes from the poor class, so his supporters have a problem with the upper classes," Pierre- Louis said, referring to business owners such as herself. "Aristide is the problem."
Ready to fight
Less jaundiced observers also say Aristide helped set the stage for the present turmoil by failing at some things, like democratic and economic reforms, and by doing other things very well, like encouraging Haitians to stand up for their rights.
"Haitians have become more demanding and more ready to fight, or to at least express themselves or question the handling of power, the handling of their civil liberties, and issues like corruption," said Clotilde Charlot, a former associate and close friend of Aristide who became disillusioned with his leadership style after his return to Haiti in 1994.
Whereas Haitians under pre-Aristide regimes were barred from speaking their minds, Aristide won adoration by persuading the poor masses to join him in challenging the powerful elite.
But that very democracy eventually turned on Aristide as Haitians began seeing in him many of the tendencies of past rulers: an increased intolerance of critics; a breakdown of law and order as the police became Aristide's personal protectors; an absence of noticeable economic improvements; assassination of political opponents.
Ignoring weaknesses
How many of those failings were completely Aristide's fault is a subject of debate, even among his critics. Some leaders of the political opposition, many of them past Aristide supporters, say they were too happy to ignore his weaknesses as a politician back in 1990, when they were scrambling to find a presidential candidate to win the country's first free election.
"I supported him. It seemed he was the best to overcome the Tontons Macoutes regime," said Laennec Hurbon, an opposition leader and academic who in 1990 helped persuade Aristide to run for office. Aristide's challenger was a former leader of the Tontons Macoutes militia, which had enforced the 1957-87 Duvalier family dictatorship. "He [Aristide] had no real governing competence. Still, everyone was for him because he was the best at the time," Hurbon said.
At just 37, though, with no experience governing and with constituents and political backers feeding his ambition, Aristide may have been pushed too far too fast, said one Western observer who knew him personally. Aristide faced immense expectations from millions of Haitians who compared him to South Africa's Nelson Mandela.
"But he was young. It was different for Mandela, who had spent all those years in prison being tempered in his views and leadership style," she said. Mandela was 72 when he took office in 1994. "Aristide was pushed directly into power."
Few resources to succeed
From then on, some say the odds were stacked against him. In 1991, less than a year after his swearing-in, Aristide was ousted in a military coup and spent three years in exile. On his return, many say, he was confronted with an intransigent opposition that crippled attempts at governing. By 2001, after national elections widely decried as fraudulent, the United States had cut aid to the hemisphere's poorest nation, virtually sealing Aristide's fate, said Robert Maguire, director of international affairs at Trinity College.
"Not to make apologies for him, but any leader in Haiti needs resources to govern, and unfortunately for Mr. Aristide, those resources did not come," Maguire said.
Aristide's critics counter that any resources he did receive - and they accuse him of getting some money from drug trafficking - were squandered and used to pay high-priced lobbyists to sell his image as a man of the people. Had outsiders, particularly black American politicians swayed by race, not been so gullible, they might have recognized Aristide's weaknesses and prevented things from going so far, they say.
Now, it's difficult to find people hopeful about the future or even willing to discuss it, so fearful are they of ending up on the wrong side of whoever wins the power struggle.
Who's the better leader?
Remy Lyvia, a market security guard, insisted life was better under Aristide than under previous governments. "Under Duvalier, we couldn't speak," he said. "Now we can say whatever we want. That's what we call democracy."
Not quite. Two Americans, longtime residents of Haiti, said they were too afraid to speak but made clear where their sentiments lay. "Things are so bad here, you don't want to talk about it," said one, who divides his time between Port-au- Prince and New York.
Astoundingly, among Aristide critics who are willing to talk, there is an almost unanimous feeling that life was better under the dreaded Duvaliers.
"Duvalier never pretended to be anything but a dictator," said Yanick Lahens, a member of the Platform 184 opposition coalition. "This one, he says he's a democrat, but if you say what you want, you get killed."
Copyright 2004 Newsday, Inc.
Newsday (New York)
March 1, 2004 Monday
Critic: 'He totally lost focus'
BY TINA SUSMAN. Staff Correspondent
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - In the days before democracy, when Jean-Bertrand Aristide was a charismatic priest preaching political reform in Haiti's desperate slums, he would denounce presidential aspirants as "sick."
"They have presidentitis," the diminutive orator would say, characterizing the ailment as one marked by delusions of grandeur and an insatiable desire for power. After Aristide became Haiti's first democratically elected president, many would conclude that he, too, suffered from the disease and had become as bad as, if not worse than, the dictatorial regimes he once defied from the pulpit.
It was a humbling fall from the heady days of December 1990, when Aristide, then 37, won presidential elections with a more than two-thirds majority. In a nation brutalized by decades of military coups and dictatorships, including the 29-year rule of the Duvalier dynasty, Aristide emerged like a savior for the impoverished masses.
"He was magnificent," said Jean-Claude Bajeaux, who served in Aristide's cabinet and who compared his preaching style to that of Martin Luther King Jr. And as Haiti prepared for its first free election, in 1990, Aristide emerged as the clear choice to defeat Roger LaFontant, the one-time leader of the feared Tonton Macoutes militia that had enforced the Duvalier reign of terror.
"We realized we needed to find someone who could appeal to the people," Bajeaux said. "Aristide knew how to move the people. He knew how to get them excited."
Despite his impoverished roots and unassuming appearance, Aristide, the son of a farmer who was lynched when Aristide was an infant, seemed destined for leadership from the moment he became an ordained priest in the Roman Catholic Church in 1982. His sermons earned him the adoration of the masses, who dubbed him Pe Titid, Little Priest in Creole. Throughout the 1980s, when few dared speak out against dictatorships, Aristide used the pulpit to denounce them and showed no fear of the consequences.
On Sept. 11, 1988, 13 of his parishioners died and scores were injured when attackers burst into the church where Aristide was preaching, raked it with gunfire, then burned it to the ground. Aristide was whisked to safety. The incident galvanized Aristide's followers and enhanced his image.
It was an image that grew with successive attempts to silence Aristide: his expulsion from the church's conservative Salesian order, which opposed his political activism; his survival of an apparent coup attempt in 1991 just weeks after taking office; his ouster in a military takeover a few months later.
When, after three years in exile in the United States, Aristide was returned to power by the U.S. government, Haitians celebrated the end of the junta that had ruled in his absence. The euphoria didn't last long. Critics accused Aristide of adopting an autocratic style alarmingly similar to his predecessors and of failing to keep the promises of democracy and economic revival.
Political opponents were jailed or killed, corruption soared, and Aristide surrounded himself with gangs who protected him while leaving regular Haitians living in an increasingly lawless land, critics said. They accused him of using state money to pay high-priced lobbyists to influence backers around the world, most notably black American politicians.
Some critics, most of whom had once backed Aristide, say his weaknesses were clear from the start, thathe was greedy for power, despite insisting he didn't want it, and surrounded himself with yes-men rather than smart politicians.
Nevertheless, he was the best man for the job given his immense popularity during Haiti's transition to democracy.
"A lot of us who were in the inner circle had our doubts, but we felt that the people were speaking so strongly in his favor," said Clotilde Charlot, Aristide's chief of staff during his years in exile in the United States. "We were convinced he would make a difference."
Charlot, now an active Aristide critic and a founder of the Haiti Democracy Project, a Washington think tank, believes Aristide's years in exile sealed his failure as leader of the Western Hemisphere's most impoverished nation. He became caught up in his celebrity, she says.
Charlot said if Aristide had wanted to, he could have returned to Haiti earlier than October 1994. "He totally lost focus," she said.
Even so, detractors supported his return to the presidency in 1994 to show that coups would no longer be accepted.
The constitution barred Aristide from running for a second straight term in 1995, but to many, the government that ruled until the next election in 2000 was little more than a puppet of Aristide. It was led by his close friend Rene Preval, who had served as his prime minister, and the election that put Preval in power with an overwhelming majority was boycotted by most opposition parties.
Similar opposition marked 2000 legislative and presidential elections, which international observers criticized as fraudulent and which prompted the United States to suspend aid to Haiti - a move some observers say made it impossible for Aristide to make reforms.
"He's made other mistakes on his own, but that didn't make his possibilities for successfully governing any easier," said Rachel Farley of the Washington Office on Latin America think tank. "Obviously, one of the main problems in Haiti is the dire economic situation and the lack of jobs. Not a lot of economic progress has been made in Haiti, but it's hard to blame that on Aristide when there was no aid flowing."
Compounding the problem was a "very strong and unrelenting" opposition, said Robert Maguire, the director of International Affairs at Trinity College in Washington, who said Aristide deserves praise for disbanding Haiti's army after his 1994 return to power and for presenting a political platform to Haitians for the first time. With the interruptions in his tenure and the turmoil that marked his time in office, though, he never had the time to clarify his long-term vision for the country, Maguire said.
One thing Aristide's critics and supporters agree on was his success in involving Haitians of all social classes in politics. In the end, though, this may have been his undoing, for it was that unity that joined Haitians in their opposition to him, some observers say.
Copyright 2005 Newsday, Inc.
Newsday (New York)
November 17, 2005 Thursday
They live in fear as he walks free:
Women seek justice in suit against Haitian commander who has lived in NY since '95
BY TINA SUSMAN. STAFF WRITER
Even now, 11 1/2 years after she was gang-raped and beaten by masked men in military uniforms, the woman known as Jane Doe II recoils at giving any hint to her identity or whereabouts.
She won't say when she came to the United States from her native Haiti, except to confirm it was sometime last year. She won't say what state she calls home, what time zone she is in, how old she is, how old her four children are, or give the names of relatives.
One thing Jane Doe II will reveal is her indignation at knowing that the man she says was her chief tormenter, a convicted mass murderer and former Haitian military commander named Emmanuel Toto Constant, has lived in New York since 1995, virtually harbored by the U.S. government under murky circumstances despite a deportation order and a litany of atrocities linked to him.
Over time, that indignation has become too much to bear for Jane Doe II and for two other women, known as Jane Doe I and Jane Doe III, all of whom have been forced, by fear of Constant, to live in the shadows while he walks free. Using a law that permits victims of abuses committed overseas to pursue damages in American courts, they have filed suit in federal court in New York in hopes of punishing Constant.
"I don't see that I have a choice in the matter," Jane Doe II said in a telephone interview as she explained her pursuit of Constant, a reputed killer and torturer with a talent for dodging the law. "I have to stand up and demand justice and demand attention to what happened, because if I don't, it's going to keep happening."
Fueling the urgency of the lawsuit is the political chaos in Haiti, where Constant's critics fear he could go back to his old ways if he returns.
Since a February 2004 coup, the very thugs blamed for enforcing Constant's brutality in the 1990s have taken advantage of the power vacuum to regroup. Chief among them is Louis Jodel Chamblain, Constant's deputy when he commanded the notorious Revolutionary Front for Advancement and Progress in Haiti, or FRAPH, in 1993-94.
"Chamblain is just one step away from Emmanuel Constant, and he has political ambitions and he is in Haiti and he is free," said attorney Moira Feeney of the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability, which is representing the plaintiffs.
Both men fled Haiti in 1995 after the elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, took power. Five years later, they were among dozens of ex-soldiers and paramilitary officers convicted in absentia for a 1994 massacre of Aristide supporters.
Chamblain slipped back into Haiti last year to help lead the coup that ousted Aristide. Three months later, a court overturned the massacre convictions.
Human rights activists said the ruling, along with other court decisions freeing accused human rights abusers, has set the stage for criminals to maneuver themselves into power after presidential elections next month.
Limited options for accusers
The situation has left Constant's accusers few outlets for pursuing justice.
For years, they demanded Constant be returned to Haiti, and in 1995 a U.S. immigration judge ordered Constant deported. Constant repeatedly appealed it on grounds he would face death or persecution under Aristide, and he was allowed to remain in the United States.
With Aristide now out of power and the massacre case overturned, human rights activists acknowledge that deporting Constant might not be the best thing after all.
"Right now there isn't a real rule of law, so it's possible he [Constant] could go back to doing some of the same things," said Brian Concannon, a lawyer who prosecuted the massacre case and who heads the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti.
U.S. criminal courts have no jurisdiction over Constant's alleged crimes in Haiti. That leaves civil action, such as the lawsuit filed by the Jane Does, the only option.
Neither Constant nor an attorney has responded to the suit. Feeney said the next step is to request a default judgment against Constant, which would be followed by a hearing to determine damages.
Laying out the evidence
According to evidence presented in the 23-page lawsuit, Constant led his followers in a bloody campaign against opponents of military rule. Working alongside Haitian soldiers, Constant's FRAPH soldiers would attack known or suspected supporters of Aristide, abducting men from their homes and raping the girls and women, the suit says.
Sons were forced to rape their mothers, and victims were as young as 10 and as old as 80, it alleges.
One night in July 1994, several masked men came for Jane Doe II, a pro-Aristide activist. According to the suit, they beat and repeatedly raped Jane Doe II and her sister-in-law, causing injuries that led to her sister-in-law's death.
Jane Doe II remained in Haiti and continued to fight for democracy but fled after Aristide's overthrow.
Jane Doe I and Jane Doe III tell similar stories. Jane Doe I bore a child as a result of rape.
"If what had happened to me had happened to you, would you be able to sit quietly?" Jane Doe II said, speaking in the rich, throaty Creole of her homeland through an interpreter.
Constant remains a phantom-like figure, his presence felt by those who have known him but his physical being impossible to nail down.
From 1995 until 2001, he spent much of his time in Laurelton, Queens, at a home on a quiet avenue of Tudor-style houses with sweeping lawns and colorful flower beds.
In an interview with Newsday in September 2000, Constant, then 43, denied committing atrocities and called accusations against him "purely propaganda."
Last year, as turmoil in Haiti peaked, Haitian activists began anti-Constant protests in front of the house. Constant went underground.
On a recent afternoon, the barking of a small dog behind the door was the only sign of life at the house, a bit of an eyesore on the idyllic street of well-tended homes. The white paint was faded to gray, and the porch was laden with a tattered sofa, sacks of cast-off clothing and assorted junk, as if someone were moving out.
Constant did not reply to a written note left in the mailbox, and a woman who answered the phone insisted he did not live there and that she did not know his whereabouts.
Evading prosecution
The one place that should know about Constant - the Department of Homeland Security - won't discuss it, a reflection, the plaintiffs' attorneys say, of the role the U.S. government has played in Constant's ability to evade prosecution.
Constant, in several interviews after coming to the United States, said he was on the CIA payroll as it investigated what it viewed as the dangerously leftist Aristide regime. When, in 1995, the United States announced plans to deport Constant, he threatened to dish out more details of CIA involvement in Haiti, and he was allowed to remain in the country.
Since then, his case has bounced through several appeals. In September 2003, an immigration judge rejected his latest appeal, but there is no indication he was deported. He was in New York as late as January, when he was served with the lawsuit, and Feeney said he had been seen in the area since then.
An official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in New York said it was not ICE policy to comment on individuals' files and he could not say where Constant was.
At a hearing last May on the Patriot Act, Rep. William Delahunt of Massachusetts described FRAPH as "a foreign terrorist organization, if there ever should be one," and asked the counterterrorism chief at the Department of Justice, Barry Sabin, to say where Constant was.
Sabin said he didn't know and promised to find out. A spokesman from the congressman's office said Sabin never followed up.
In the meantime, the U.S. government has trumpeted arrests of other alleged Haitian human rights abusers picked up as part of the No Safe Haven Initiative. It was launched by the federal government in 2000 to catch human rights violators in the United States and has resulted in several of Constant's co-defendants in the massacre trial being returned to Haiti.
Jane Doe II acknowledged the challenges of forcing Constant into court but said she hoped the lawsuit was a step in that direction.
"I think if it were just one voice crying out against him, maybe not, but we're not just one voice," she said of the lawsuit. "We're many voices joined together demanding justice, and with many together, the people will prevail."
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