Haïti : que prépare Jean-Bertrand Aristide ?

Depuis sa réinstallation à Port-au-Prince, l’ancien président Aristide s’abstient d’apparaître en public et entretient le mystère sur ses intentions. Du coup, certains s’inquiètent… Sur la route de Tabarre, dans la banlieue nord de Port-au-Prince, des ouvriers s’affairent autour de la résidence de Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Les branches des arbres sont taillées, et les murs fissurés par le dernier séisme, restaurés. « Il est ici, je le vois parfois faire le tour de sa propriété », raconte un voisin. Depuis son allocution télévisée du 18 mars, jour de son retour en Haïti après sept ans d’exil en Afrique du Sud, l’ancien président fait profil bas. Il reçoit régulièrement des amis, mais ne fait aucune apparition publique et s’abstient de mettre les pieds dans sa fondation, pourtant située… en face de chez lui, de même que dans son université, un peu plus loin. « Nous ne l’avons pas revu depuis 2004, confie un agent de sécurité, mais je crois qu’il est capable de se présenter à la prochaine présidentielle sous les couleurs de Fanmi Lavalas, son parti. »
Officiellement, Aristide n’est plus qu’un citoyen comme les autres. Il se consacre à l’éducation (ouverture prochaine d’une filière médecine à l’université) et envisage d’apporter son aide aux sinistrés du séisme. S’il a respecté sa promesse de ne pas interférer dans le scrutin du 20 mars, il serait naïf de croire qu’il a définitivement renoncé à la politique. Depuis la fin du mois de mars, Fanmi Lavalas se reconstruit peu à peu, même s’il a dû faire face, le 29 mars, à la défection de l’ancien Premier ministre Yvon Neptune. « Le comité exécutif remet le parti en branle en vue du congrès national du mois de décembre, puis des élections communales et sénatoriales de l’an prochain, confirme un cadre. Pour le moment, Aristide ne souhaite pas se présenter à la présidentielle, mais nous allons tenter de le faire changer d’avis. »
Même si les procédures judiciaires engagées contre lui (pour détournement de fonds et trafic de drogue) sont en panne, l’ex-« président des pauvres » va devoir compter avec de nouveaux acteurs sur la scène politique : les puissances étrangères, le nouveau président, Michel Martelly, son prédécesseur, René Préval. Certes, il conserve des partisans dans les quartiers populaires de Bel-Air et de Cité-Soleil, mais il n’est plus aussi populaire qu’avant. Et s’il fait encore peur, c’est parce que personne ne sait ce qu’il a en tête. « Et s’il armait à nouveau les jeunes ? » s’inquiète un enseignant.
Justine Spiegel, envoyée spéciale en Haïti.
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Aristide jets back to Haiti and SA foots bill

SEAN CHRISTIE Mar 18 2011 09:28 The South African government has confirmed that ousted Haitian president Jean Bertrand-Aristide will end his seven-year exile in South Africa before the March 20 Haitian elections -- and that the South African taxpayer will now cover the costs of his journey.
"We covered the cost of Aristide's stay in South Africa and now we will facilitate his journey home," said department of international relations and cooperation spokesperson Clayson Monyela.
This could strain Pretoria's relations with Paris and Washington, which have actively sought to delay Aristide's return until after the elections. Monyela said Aristide would announce details of his travel arrangements himself from Lanseria International Airport late on Thursday evening, after the Mail & Guardian had gone to press. It was known that Aristide's lawyer, Ira Kurzban, and actor and activist Danny Glover would accompany Aristide home. Glover recently co-signed a letter to President Jacob Zuma asking that Aristide be allowed to return home.
According to Kurzban Aristide would return to Haiti via private jet, the charter costs of which had delayed Aristide's return thus far. No commercial airlines fly directly to Haiti and it is speculated that the United States government will not allow Aristide to transit through the US. A Lanseria-based charter company said it would cost "well over R6-million" to charter a flight to Haiti.
The cost of Aristide's seven-year stay in the country has run to tens of millions of rands, but it is widely believed he was hosted by South Africa at the behest of the US government. A source well acquainted with issues surrounding Aristide's exile confirmed that South Africa had agreed to keep Aristide until after the Haitian elections and that the French had applied more pressure to ensure that he stayed put.

http://www.mg.co.za/article/2011-03-18-aristide-jets-back-to-haiti-and-sa-foots-bill/

Bon voyage, Jean-Bertrand Aristide

STUART GRAHAM JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA - Mar 18 2011 07:26 Former Haitian leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide left South Africa for Haiti at 11.15pm on Thursday night, after more than seven years in exile in the country.

"The great day has arrived. The day to say goodbye before returning home," Aristide said at a briefing before his departure.
Actor Danny Glover preceded Aristide on to the plane, which left from Lanseria Airport.
Aristide was escorted aboard by International Relations and Cooperation Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, but she did not accompany them on the flight.
They were followed by Aristide's wife Mildred and their children.
"We are delighted to return home after seven years," Aristide told a large media contingent.
"In Haiti also they are very happy because they were waiting for us and they have wanted for us to be back home as soon as possible. It's normal. Their dream will be fulfilled," said Aristide, who read his statement in isiZulu.
'Goodbye interaction'
Nkoana-Mashabane said Aristide, who received a doctorate from the University of South Africa for a comparative study on isiZulu and Haitian Creole, had held a "goodbye interaction" with President Jacob Zuma.
Nkoana-Mashabane said Zuma wished Aristide "bon voyage" and a happy landing as he set about trying to help rebuild Haiti, ravaged by an earthquake 14 months ago.
Aristide left the press conference without taking questions.
His stay in the country cost the South African taxpayer about R5-million a year.
In response to a Parliamentary question last year, Nkoana-Mashabane said that by June 2010 his stay had cost R30-million.
It was reported on Thursday that United States President Barack Obama tried to persuade Zuma to prevent Aristide, a former priest who worked in the slums, from returning to Haiti until it had held its presidential election at the weekend.
Aristide was twice president of Haiti and is popular among the Caribbean nation's poor, who make up the majority on the island.
Concern over return
In his first presidency he was ousted in a coup. He was restored to power in 1994 in a US military intervention ordered by then US president Bill Clinton.
He was re-elected years later, but fled on a US plane during a rebellion in 2004. Aristide claimed the US had kidnapped him.
US National Security Council spokesperson Tommy Vietor told the Associated Press that the United States, along with others in the international community, had deep concerns that Aristide's return to Haiti in the closing days of the election could be destabilising.
"President Obama reiterated ... his belief that the Haitian people deserve the chance to choose their government through peaceful, free, and fair elections [on] March 20," Vietor told AP.
Both of Haiti's presidential candidates, Michel Martelly and Mirlande Manigat, have said that Aristide has the right to return as a Haitian citizen.
South African Minister in the Presidency Collins Chabane said on Thursday that the country could not be held responsible for whether Aristide stayed or returned to Haiti.
"What I should stress is that we are not sending former president Aristide to Haiti.
"He was given the passport by the government of Haiti and we can't hold him hostage if he wants to go," Chabane said.
Aristide has said he will not be involved in politics in Haiti and wants to lead his foundation's efforts to improve education in the Caribbean nation. - Sapa
http://www.mg.co.za/article/2011-03-18-bon-voyage-jeanbertrand-aristide/

Aristide said to return to Haiti this week

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI - Mar 16 2011 07:35 Ex-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide is due to end seven years in exile in South Africa and return to Haiti on Thursday, three days ahead of a presidential run-off election, a source told Agence France-Presse.
"Aristide is expected this Thursday in Port-au-Prince," the source, close to the three-time former president, said on condition of anonymity.
The United States (US) has urged Aristide to postpone his return until after Sunday's vital presidential run-off, saying he should "delay his return until after the electoral process has concluded to permit the Haitian people to cast their ballots in a peaceful atmosphere".
November's first-round election was marred by violence and fraud and the shattered country is still struggling to rebuild after a devastating earthquake 14 months ago that killed about 250 000 people.
Aristide was ousted from office twice, eventually fleeing a 2004 popular uprising aboard a US plane. He accused US diplomats of kidnapping him. Washington denies the charge.
But he remains a popular figure in certain quarters in Haiti, especially in the capital's teeming slums, as well as in the tent cities that have sprung up since the January 2010 earthquake where many decry the slow pace of progress.
US should discuss Aristide with Haiti
Meanwhile, South Africa Deputy Minister of International Relations and Cooperation said South Africa is helping Aristide return to his homeland from exile in Pretoria, and any problems Washington has with that should be taken up with Haiti.
Marius Fransman told reporters on Tuesday that Aristide could return to Haiti in the next few days, or a week. A South African official last week said Aristide planned to return before a presidential run-off vote on Sunday.
US State Department spokesman Mark Toner acknowledged Aristide's right to return from South Africa, but he said returning this week "can only be seen as a conscious choice to impact Haiti's elections".
Fransman said: "It is not our responsibility if America feels that he should only go in two weeks or three weeks or four weeks. They need to engage the Haitian government."
Aristide, a former slum priest, was Haiti's first democratically elected president and remains popular with the poor.
Aristide has been saying for months that he wants to return to help his homeland recover from the January 2010 earthquake. The way was opened when Aristide's diplomatic passport was delivered last month.-- Sapa-AFP-AP
http://www.mg.co.za/article/2011-03-16-aristide-said-to-return-haiti-this-week/

Aristide should be greeted with prosecution, not praise

MICHAEL DEIBERT Mar 02 2011 13:00

The indictment late last year by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of six prominent Kenyans for their roles in violence following that country's disputed 2007 elections was a welcome sign for those seeking to hold politicians accountable for their crimes. Though the ICC has badly bungled what should have been its showpiece case -- against the ruthless Congolese militia leader Thomas Lubanga -- the Kenya indictments nevertheless represented a welcome extension of its continuing mission.
To those of us who have seen Haiti's political convulsions first-hand over the years, that Caribbean nation makes a compelling case for attention by the ICC as perpetrators of human rights abuses often go unpunished or are even rehabilitated in subsequent governments. With one despotic former ruler (Jean-Claude Duvalier) having recently returned and another (Jean-Bertrand Aristide) announcing his intention to do so, one Haitian case, in particular, would seem tailor-made for the ICC's attention.
In February 2004, in the midst of a chaotic rebellion against Mr Aristide's government, the photojournalist Alex Smailes and I found ourselves in the central Haitian city of Saint Marc, at the time the last barrier between Aristide and a motley collection of once-loyal street gangs and former soldiers who were sweeping down from the country's north seeking to oust him.
Several days earlier, on February 7, an armed anti-Aristide group, the Rassemblement des militants conséquents de Saint Marc (Ramicos), based in the neighbourhood of La Scierie, had attempted to drive government forces from the town, seizing the local police station, which they set on fire.
On February 9, the combined forces of the Police Nationale de Haiti (PNH), the Unité de Sécurité de la Garde du Palais National (USGPN) -- a unit directly responsible for the president's personal security -- and a local paramilitary organisation named Bale Wouze (Clean Sweep) retook much of the city. By February 11, a few days before our arrival, Bale Wouze -- headed by a former parliamentary representative of Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas political party named Amanus Mayette -- had commenced the battle to retake La Scierie. Often at Mayette's side was a government employee named Ronald Dauphin, known to residents as "Black Ronald", often garbed in a police uniform even though he was in no way officially employed by the police.
When Alex and I arrived in the town, we found the USGPN and Bale Wouze patrolling Saint Marc as a single armed unit. Speaking to residents there -- amidst a surreal backdrop of burned buildings, the stench of human decay, drunken gang members threatening our lives with firearms and a terrified population -- we soon realised that something awful had happened in Saint Marc.
According to multiple residents interviewed during that visit and a subsequent visit that I made to the town in June 2009, after government forces retook the town -- and after a press conference there by Yvon Neptune, at the time Aristide's Prime Minister and also the head of the Conseil Superieur de la Police Nationale d'Haiti -- a textbook series of war crimes took place.
Residents spoke of how Kenol St Gilles, a carpenter with no political affiliation, was shot in each thigh, beaten unconscious by Bale Wouze members and thrown into a burning cement depot, where he died. Unarmed Ramicos member Leroy Joseph was decapitated, while Ramicos second-in-command Nixon François was simply shot. In the ruins of the burned-out commissariat, Bale Wouze members gang raped a 21-year-old woman, while other residents were gunned down by police firing from a helicopter as they tried to flee over a nearby mountain. A local priest told me matter-of-factly at the time of Bale Wouze that "these people don't make arrests, they kill".
According to a member of a Human Rights Watch delegation that visited Saint Marc a month after the killings, at least 27 people were murdered there between February 11 and Aristide's flight into exile at the end of the month. Her conclusion supported by the research of the Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains, a Haitian human rights organisation.
Following Aristide's overthrow, several members of Bale Wouze were lynched, while Yvon Neptune turned himself over to the interim government that ruled Haiti from March 2004 until the inauguration of President René Préval in May 2006.
Held in prison without trial until his May 2006 release on humanitarian grounds, a May 2008 decision by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found the Haitian state had violated the American Convention on Human Rights in its detention of Neptune, though stressed that it was "not a criminal court in which the criminal responsibility of an individual can be examined". Neptune ran unsuccessfully for president in Haiti's recent elections.
After being jailed for three years without trial, Amanus Mayette was freed from prison in April 2007. Arrested in 2004, Ronald Dauphin subsequently escaped from jail, and was re-arrested during the course of an anti-kidnapping raid in Haiti's capital in July 2006. Despite several chaotic public hearings, to date, none of the accused for the killings in La Scierie has ever gone to trial. At the time of writing, Mr Aristide himself continues to enjoy a gilded exile in South Africa, his luxurious lifestyle and protection package bankrolled by South African taxpayers.
Frustratingly for the people of Saint Marc, far from being supported in their calls for justice, the events they experienced have become a political football among international political actors.
The United Nations independent expert on human rights in Haiti, Louis Joinet, in a 2005 statement dismissed allegations of a massacre and described what occurred as "a clash", a characterisation that seemed unaware of the fact that not all among those victimised had any affiliation with Haiti's political opposition.
The Institute for Justice and Democracy (IJDH), a US-based organisation, has lauded Mr Dauphin as "a Haitian grassroots activist". The IJDH itself maintains close links with Mr Aristide's US attorney, Ira Kurzban, who is listed as one of the group's founders, serves on the chairman of board of directors and whose law firm, according to US Department of Justice filings, earned nearly $5-million for its lobbying work alone representing the Aristide government during the era of its worst excesses. By comparison, the firm of former US congressmen Ron Dellums received the relatively modest sum of $989 323 over the same period.
When I returned to Saint Marc in June of 2009, I found its residents still wondering when someone would be held accountable for the terrible crimes they had been subjected to. Amazil Jean-Baptiste, the mother of Kenol St Gilles, said simply "I just want justice for my son." A local victim's rights group of survivors of the pogrom, the Association des Victimes du Génocide de la Scierie (AVIGES), formed to help advocate on residents' behalf, but have had precious little success in what passes for Haiti's system, broken and dysfunctional long before January 2010's devastating earthquake.
Though Mr Aristide remains something of a fading star for a handful of commentators outside of Haiti - most of whom have not spent significant time in the country, cannot speak its language and have never bothered to sit down with the victims of the Aristide government's crimes there - to those of us who have seen a bit of its recent history firsthand, the words of veteran Trinidadian diplomat Reginald Dumas -- a man who does know Haiti -- seem apt, that Mr Aristide "[acquired] for himself a reputation at home which did not match the great respect with which he was held abroad.''
The ICC has sometimes been criticized for acting as if war crimes and crimes against humanity are simply African problems, taking place in distant lands. The people of Saint Marc, only a 90 minute flight from Miami, know differently. As Mr Aristide currently loudly voices his desire to return to Haiti from his exile in South Africa, doubtlessly transiting several ICC signatory countries (including South Africa itself) in the process, the case of the victims of Saint Marc is one admirably deserving of the ICC's attention.
•Michael Deibert is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University and the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press). He has been visiting and writing about Haiti since 1997.

http://mg.co.za/article/1970-01-01-aristide-should-be-greeted-with-prosecution-not-praise