Haiti- Articles on: Toto Constant, Antoine Izmery, Cuban assistance, destroyed art

Last update: March 7, 2004 at 3:18 PM
Nick Coleman: Haiti’s brutal history largely of our making
Nick Coleman, Star Tribune

March 7, 2004



In 1992, Antoine Izmery sent me grisly autopsy photographs of the
bullet-riddled corpse of his dead brother and begged me — an acquaintance — to
tell
Americans the truth about Haiti. By the time I did, he had been murdered, too.
The Izmerys were descendants of Palestinian Christians who immigrated to
Haiti in the early 1900s. Wealthy merchants, they were early supporters of
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the Catholic priest and champion of the poor who had been the
victor in Haiti’s first democratic election, upsetting a U.S.-backed
favorite.
But their ties to Aristide, who was denounced in Washington, D.C., as a
leftist, made the Izmerys marked men. Within two years after Aristide was
overthrown in a military coup, both Antoine and Georges Izmery were martyred.
Today, democracy in Haiti is dead with them, strangled by an American
government that can send 200,000 troops to the other side of the world to overthrow a
dictator but didn’t lift a finger to save a democratic leader next door.
There is much ignorance and misinformation about Haiti, and the U.S. news
media have done a lazy job of explaining events there. It may be a waste of time
to write anything about the cruelly impoverished country that lives in America’
s shadow and suffers greatly from our indifference (not to mention from the
effects of a brutal American takeover from 1915 to 1934).
But I can’t stop remembering Antoine Izmery.
I met him in Port-au-Prince in 1991, shortly after Aristide had become
president. Back then, hope was alive in Haiti — hope for a new start after 34 years
of the despotism of the Duvaliers, father and son, who remained close allies
of the United States, even as they murdered 50,000 of their citizens.
Despite that long, cozy relationship with the United States, Izmery told me,
Haiti was “worse off than any Communist country.”
It still is: Average annual income for Haiti’s population of 8 million? $480
a year. Average life span? Men 49, women 50. In one of the poorest and most
malnourished places on Earth, Haiti’s misery is a scandal that should trouble
our conscience. But we have no conscience. If we did, we would have done
everything we could to save democracy in Haiti. Instead, the United States has stood
idly by and watched democracy die. And that’s the best-case interpretation.
Some believe we held the gun that killed it.
It was CIA-supported thugs who overthrew Aristide after only seven months in
office in September 1991. The Clinton administration — in that brief interlude
of American support for democratic-elected governments — helped restore
Aristide three years later. But not before 4,000 people had died.
Including the Izmerys.
Georges was gunned down by a hit man who disappeared into a police station
after shotgunning him outside Antoine’s office on May 26, 1992. On the day of
the funeral, the cops — and in Haiti, that word isn’t much different than
criminals — beat up the mourners. Sixteen months later, on Sept. 11, 1993, Antoine
was at a memorial service for the anniversary of a 1988 massacre in which
thugs had burst into a church where Aristide was saying mass and hacked and shot
11 worshipers to death.
This time, they came for Antoine Izmery. They came into the church where he
was praying, dragged him out onto the street, and blew out his brains. A
picture of it was in your newspaper.
He was 46.
The media don’t tell us much about the truth of Haiti because we aren’t
interested and, besides, it is unpatriotic to question our government these days.
We are busy waving the flag and building freedom around the world. Except next
door, in Haiti, where the guys carrying guns and smashing furniture are the
same guys who were convicted, in absentia, for killing Antoine Izmery.
Aristide and his supporters are not entirely without blame, or blood. But as
many of the Minnesota church people, human-rights workers and medical
volunteers who have visited Haiti during the years democracy was clinging to a
foothold can testify, the alternatives are worse.
Aristide came to Minneapolis in 1992, while he was in exile the first time,
to be honored by the Minnesota Lawyers International Human Rights Committee. On
that occasion, he said it isn’t poverty that makes Haitians into refugees. It
is fear, repression and brutality — the same formula that once again is
sending Haitians onto the sea, only to be turned back by the United States, which
says they are fleeing hunger, not homicide.
“There is just one solution,” Aristide said then: “Democracy back in Haiti.”
I remember Palm Sunday 1991, when I saw new President Aristide speak in
front of the National Palace in Port-au-Prince. “Libete ou lanmo!” he shouted to
a cheering crowd. “Demokrazie ou lanmo!”
Liberty or death. Democracy or death.
What it will be in Haiti is not yet decided. But democracy, the cause for
which the Izmerys and so many others died, is on the run. Aristide has been
deposed again, which was the goal all along of the administration of George W.
Bush, builder of democracy, who cut off American aid to Haiti the day he got into
the White House.
Aristide’s enemies in Washington, including all the big freedom fighters,
knew that letting Haiti simmer in its misery would give the gunmen the green
light. Then all we’d have to do is push Aristide on a plane by telling him our
thugs were coming in the door. It’s done.
Like it said on that big sign on that aircraft carrier named Abraham Lincoln:
“Mission Accomplished.” Lincoln would have wept.
-- Nick Coleman is at ncoleman [at] startribune.com.
==============================Newsday (New York)

March 3, 2004 Wednesday
ALL EDITIONS

SECTION: NEWS; Pg. A19

LENGTH: 370 words

HEADLINE: Wanted man may return to homeland

BYLINE: BY RON HOWELL. STAFF WRITER

BODY:

Queens resident Emmanuel Constant, wanted in Haiti in connection with a
massacre, must be a happy man these days, says a lawyer who has been trying to get
Constant deported.

With President Jean-Bertrand Aristide now in exile, Constant's old associates
are riding through the streets of Port-au-Prince like conquering heroes.

"I think he will go back if he sees he can exercise a large amount of power,"
said Brian Concannon, the human rights lawyer, speaking of Constant.

For nine years, human rights groups have been trying to get the United States
to deport Constant to Haiti. They suspect he has been allowed to stay because
of his past ties to the CIA.

Constant has acknowledged working for CIA agents and being paid $700 a month
when he was in Haiti, even as he and his partners led a campaign of terror
against supporters of Aristide, including an alleged massacre in 1994.

In a telephone interview from Washington yesterday, an official at U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement said she had been trying for months to deport
Constant. But Mona Ragheb, chief of the agency's human rights division, refused
to blame any government agency for blocking her efforts.

Concannon, on the other hand, said it's clear U.S. intelligence agents have
applied pressure to allow Constant to remain.

In 1993, Constant, along with an associate, Louis Jodel Chamblain, formed a
group known as the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, known by
its French acronym, FRAPH.

FRAPH is accused of carrying out killings and other acts of terror to
intimidate Haitians who supported the return of Aristide, the leader overthrown in a
1991 army coup. In 1994, then-President Bill Clinton sent 20,000 U.S. troops
to restore Aristide to power.

After that, Constant fled to New York and Chamblain to the Dominican Republic.

Constant has been living in a home on 225th Street in Springfield Gardens,
with his mother. He has not answered numerous calls to the residence.

Like Concannon, Ragheb suggested that Constant may well decide to return to
Haiti.

Constant is free to leave anytime he wants, Ragheb said. "We're not keeping
him here," the official said. "If he's interested in going back and supporting
the new government, well, Sayonara."

GRAPHIC: Photos - 1) Emmanuel Constant in 1994 2) AP File photo - Wanted
Haitian leader Emmanuel Constant, in 1994. Constant now resides in Springfield
Gardens.

LOAD-DATE: March 3, 2004


==============================Saturday, March 06, 2004
The unsung heroes: Cuban Doctors remain at their posts
According to Felipe Pérez Roque, Cuban minister of foreign affairs, Cuba has
a 535-member medical brigade in Haiti, 332 of them doctors. They are
distributed in every department of the country, and have 75% of the 8.3 million
Haitians under their care. To have an idea of how significant their work is one
should be aware that Haiti has less than 2,000 doctors, and almost 90% of them are
offering their services in the country’s capital. Over the last five years,
Cuban doctors in Haiti have given nearly five million medical consultations,
have attended some 45,000 births, and have performed approximately 59,000
operations. During those five years, more than 370,000 Haitians – 80% of them
children – have been vaccinated. It is estimated that nearly 86,000 human lives have
been saved by the Cuban health workers in Haiti. In addition, Cuban
technicians have repaired 2,169 damaged pieces of medical equipment. A total of 247
young Haitians are studying at the School of Medicine founded in their country by
Cuban professors, while another 372 are studying medicine as scholarship
students in Cuba. He added: "I am not saying all of this in order to boast. I say
it with modesty, as evidence of what even a small and blockaded country such as
Cuba can do for its sister countries."

# posted by Patrick @ 9:11 PM

============================================Barbarians at the Gate: rebels destroy
art collection
The chaotic tone of today was set by Philippe's arrival outside a colonnaded
downtown building that was once the headquarters of the disbanded Haitian
Armed Forces. It now houses the Museum of Independence, and a collection of
Haitian art. Greeted by a cheering mob of former army soldiers looking to get their
old jobs back, he told the adoring audience that he was their man. He then
watched as rebels ransacked the building, throwing valuable paintings and an
entire exhibition of 86 voodoo dolls and art over a second-floor balcony into the
crowd. Chanting "Up with Jesus, down with Satan," the crowd proceeded to burn
the works in a giant voodoo bonfire. "We burned it because anything that was
created during the Aristide government has to be destroyed," said the Rev.
Vladimir Jeanty, a well-dressed religious fanatic and founder of the Haitian Party
of God. "This is a sad day for Haitian culture," said Haiti's minister,
Leslie Voltaire (picture). The exhibit opened Jan. 1 to commemorate the country's
200th anniversary of independence and had been widely acclaimed as the
country's first major showcasing of Haitian voodoo art, including unique works by a
deceased voodoo houngan (priest), Pierre Barra. "Haiti is a country of life and
art. They cannot destroy life or art," said Voltaire, whose distraught wife
organized the exhibit. [Source: St. Petersburg Times, Florida]

# posted by Patrick @ 8:02 PM




Note: If you do not wish to receive these emails please respond with
"unsubscribe" to mkarshan [at] aol.com Thank you

President Jean-Bertrand Aristide: "I call it again and again a coup d'etat. I
called it a coup d'etat because it is a modern kidnapping."

First Lady Mildred Aristide: "The coup d'etat is complete. It has been
completed."

Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass: "These people are thugs, they're drug lords,
they're assassins, they're terrorists. To include them in any kind of new
government is morally unconscionable."


``I don't know what's going on, but we are just as much as part of this coup
d'etat as the rebels, looters or anyone else,'' Rangel, D-N.Y., said on ABC's
``This Week.''

Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., said that in a country ``where a true democracy
has recently emerged after decades of autocratic rule,'' the elected president
``has been pushed out by an administration anxious to get rid of him.''

Jamaica's Prime Minister P.J. Patterson:"We are bound to question whether his
resignation was truly voluntary, as it comes after the capture of sections of
Haiti by armed insurgents and the failure of the international community to
provide the requisite support, despite the appeals of CARICOM...The removal of
President Aristide in these circumstances sets a dangerous precedent for
democratically elected governments anywhere and everywhere, as it promotes the
removal of duly elected persons from office by the power of rebel forces."

"He did not resign," he said. "He was abducted by the United
States in the commission of a coup." Robinson says he spoke to Aristide on
a cell phone that was smuggled to the Haitian president.


UN Diplomats fear their Security Council peacekeeping resolution in effect
sanctions a coup! Algerian Ambassador Abdallah Baali: "Aristide was a
democratically elected president who responded positively to a political solution
that
the opposition rejected," (referring to power-sharing deal Aristide had agreed
to but Haitian opposition leaders had rejected) "But the pressure was not
put on the opposition. It was put on him. Today we wonder if we had reliable
information, and enough time to make the right decision."

Rep. Donald Payne, (D-NJ): re UN :``it would be very difficult and
irresponsible for a responsible body and world organization to deal with an illegal
government taking over by force.''