Haiti: Upsetting the powers that be

It was during the first of what would become many humanitarian missions for Griffin, an immigration lawyer who first witnessed Haiti's dismal poverty on that day in 2000. ''He was so weak he couldn't speak," said Griffin, 42, who was raised in the Boston area and moved recently to Philadelphia. ''His grandmother had brought him on the back of a donkey."

By the time Gima arrived at the clinic in mountainous Fond-des-Blancs, said Griffin, he weighed just 30 pounds and was so far beyond help that medical staff sought only to make him comfortable in his last days.

On a trip in November, increasingly aware of Haiti's political chaos, Griffin packed a borrowed digital camera. Ten days later, he returned to Philadelphia with a collection of horrific photographs. Soon to follow was a report documenting the violence and despair churning in the slums of one of the world's poorest countries.

''I'm working to upset the powers that be," he said. ''I want to awaken all of us complacent people who seek to avoid the gruesome inhumanity of the world and how it always victimizes the most innocent and weakest."

Griffin's report -- titled ''Haiti: Human Rights Investigation, November 11-21, 2004," with photos of brutalized bodies and mutilated, abandoned corpses -- is grabbing attention. Last month he addressed diplomats at the Canadian Parliament, officials at the Organization of American States, and the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington.

''The United States certainly has a responsibility to stabilize Haiti," congresswoman Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, said in a phone interview. ''We helped destabilize it."

Concerned by news of political prisoners and former government officials being held without charges, Waters flew to Haiti last month to investigate. Griffin's report, she said, played a part in her decision to go. ''The prisons were in deplorable condition," she said. ''People were thrown in jail without charges. There were filthy mattresses and many people crammed into small cells." Waters said the United States should call on Haiti's interim prime minister, Gerard Latortue, to release the political prisoners.

''People have forgotten the whole issue of Haiti," said Larry Birns, head of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, which monitors US-Latin American relations. ''The Griffin report has reawakened indignation."

Driven by faith
Griffin said his Roman Catholic faith is the engine that drives him. His education at Boston College High School illuminated the role of service and aimed him toward his life's work.

''It really impressed in me to make ourselves the best so we can serve others," said Griffin, who earned his law degree from Suffolk University. ''If Jesus is the center of your life and you listen to his words, he's asking you to love so much that, to society, it becomes radical."

''How we treat the least among us, that is how we treat God," he said.

And it is mistreatment that Griffin has recorded.

Toward the end of his visit to Haiti, a gun battle erupted. When it ended he went into Port-au-Prince's Bel Air neighborhood and found 35-year-old Inep Henri, who had been shot in the eye. Henri's family tended to his wounds at home rather than take him to the city hospital because, they said, police often take shooting victims from hospitals and execute them. Griffin persuaded the family to have Henri hospitalized. When he later found Henri at the city hospital, he lay untreated in a crowded emergency room. Despite Griffin's pleas, Henri was not treated and died, Griffin said.

Griffin, a founding partner of the Philadelphia law firm Morley Surin & Griffin, paid his own way to Haiti with the goal of writing a report the world would read. After his return, he completed one for the University of Miami School of Law's Center for the Study of Human Rights. Graphic photographs of Henri and others are included in the document, which alleges rampant human-rights abuses and implicates the interim Haitian government.

Raymond Joseph, spokesman for the Haitian embassy in Washington, called the report ''one-sided," saying Griffin was a supporter of deposed president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and ''failed to document acts of violence first committed by pro-Aristide gangs against the police." Griffin said that he has ''nothing to do with Aristide" and that what he reported and photographed speaks for itself.

Fighting for the disenfranchised is nothing new for Griffin. He was part of a delegation that brought attention to the unsolved 2001 killing of human-rights lawyer Digna Ochoa in Mexico.

Griffin said he also knew a great deal about Paul Farmer -- the physician and anthropologist who founded the Boston-based nonprofit Partners in Health, which offers community-based healthcare in Haiti -- and considers him a tremendous inspiration. Griffin said he met and talked briefly with Farmer, who has written extensively about health and human rights, when he spoke in Boston.

'Totally dedicated'
Griffin grew up one of five children. His parents divorced when he was a teenager, and his mother raised the children alone. He spent 10 years as a federal probation and parole officer in New York and Boston before becoming a lawyer.

Retired federal probation officer George Santa Cruz said he is not surprised by Griffin's commitment to justice. ''He's passionate about Haiti, the people there, and their suffering," said Santa Cruz, who worked with Griffin in Boston and traveled with him to Haiti. ''He's a brave man morally, as well as physically, and that combination has served him well as far as what he's doing in Haiti."

Griffin's connection to Haiti and a respect for the resilience of the families he came to know in the country's poorest neighborhoods began with volunteer work. In 2000, while a member of St. William's parish in Dorchester, Griffin first visited Haiti with the St. Boniface Haiti Foundation. ''Tom works at great personal risk for the people who have no voice," said Rita Russo, vice president of programs at St. Boniface. The Boston-based nonprofit works with US Catholic parishes to provide healthcare for Haiti's poor.

Griffin is ''totally dedicated not only to the Haitian cause, but to wherever he sees injustice and a lack of human rights," said Francois LaTour, director of Philadelphia's Haitian Community Center, who has worked on immigration cases with Griffin for several years.

February marked the first anniversary of the sudden departure of Aristide, who is in exile in South Africa. Whether he was forced out or chose to resign remains a point of controversy.

In addition, ''the security and human-rights situations in Haiti have seriously deteriorated since the massive prison escape of Feb. 19," said Ettore Di Benedetto, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, an independent nonprofit. ''Allegations of excessive use of force by police and police killings, including summary executions, must be investigated," Di Benedetto added.

Haiti is also dealing with an AIDS crisis. ''It faces the most serious situation outside of sub-Saharan Africa," said Mark L. Schneider, senior vice president of the International Crisis Group. ''The reality is that Haiti's health infrastructure is almost nonexistent. Its public hospital and health clinics were weak, underfunded, and understaffed even before the political crisis of a year ago, and they have not even begun to recover."

Although he felt called to pursue justice for poor Haitians, he wants to focus on his immigration work and his wife and young son, who worry about his dangerous and time-consuming passion.

''I'd rather not be an activist on this issue," said Griffin, sitting in his living room in a Philadelphia suburb. ''But I guess people are listening, and that's all I ever wanted."
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