[News] Haiti quashes massacre verdicts

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FURY AS HAITI QUASHES MASSACRE VERDICTS
By Reed Lindsay

Sun 15 May 2005

<http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=527092005>http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=527092005 


PORT-AU-PRINCE - In a nation where state-sponsored massacres are as common 
as the impunity granted to their perpetrators, the Raboteau trial shone as 
a beacon of long-denied justice.

In November 2000, a Haitian jury convicted 16 former soldiers and 
paramilitaries for their participation in a bloody 1994 rampage through a 
seaside slum called Raboteau that left at least eight people dead. A week 
later, a court convicted 37 more defendants in absentia.

The trial was praised by the United Nations as "a huge step forward" and 
hailed by international jurists as a milestone human rights case.

But last week the convictions of at least 15 of the Raboteau defendants 
were overturned in one fell swoop by Haiti's Supreme Court in a murky 
ruling that represents the latest in a series of human rights scandals 
since interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue assumed office 14 months ago.

"Raboteau was perhaps the only time [in Haiti] that justice was achieved 
after a massacre, and in a scrupulously fair trial," said Reed Brody of 
Human Rights Watch. "To overturn that verdict is to say that the only 
justice possible in Haiti is the justice of those with guns. It's a sad day."

Legal experts say the Supreme Court's decision, which stated that the case 
should not have been tried by a jury, was based on a technicality. 
According to Brian Concannon, a US lawyer who helped prepare the 
prosecution's case for the 2000 Raboteau trial, the Supreme Court already 
approved the jury trial a year before it began.

"The court not only reversed its previous position, it did so after a 
secret hearing," said Concannon. "The legal justification for the 
about-face is thin. The decision's analysis of the core issue took only 
four sentences."

The Latortue administration has denied exerting any influence over the 
court in its decision, responding to critiques that the government has made 
a habit of trampling judicial independence. Last December, justice minister 
Bernard Gousse removed two prominent judges' caseloads after they had 
ordered the release of prisoners who were political opponents of the 
government.

The Supreme Court's decision comes nine months after paramilitary leader 
Louis Jodel Chamblain was acquitted over the 1993 murder of pro-democracy 
activist Antoine Izmery in a trial Amnesty International condemned as "a 
very sad record in the history of Haiti".

Chamblain has remained in prison awaiting a retrial of the Raboteau 
massacre, a right he is granted under Haitian law because he had been 
convicted in absentia. It was not clear whether the recent Supreme Court 
ruling would lead to the release of Chamblain, who was second-in-command of 
a murderous paramilitary group called FRAPH that was allied with the 
military regime.

The annulment of the convictions appeared to apply only to those convicted 
at the jury trial, and not to Chamblain and other self-exiled defendants 
convicted in absentia, such as paramilitary leader Emmanuel Constant, and 
the three top leaders of the military dictatorship - Raoul Cedras, Phillipe 
Biamby and Michel Francois.

Latortue owes his mandate in part to Chamblain, who helped lead a revolt of 
former soldiers and other armed groups that ousted former President 
Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004, during which all those imprisoned 
for the Raboteau massacre were broken out of jail. Latortue hailed them as 
"freedom fighters" in a speech he gave in Gonaives, the city where Raboteau 
is located.

None of the Raboteau convicts has been recaptured by the US-backed 
government of Latortue, which has begun paying compensation packages to 
thousands of former soldiers despite warnings from experts that doing so 
would undermine a UN-led disarmament program.

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