Haiti Under U.S. Pressure to Release Neptune

The outgoing U.S. ambassador to Haiti recently joined a chorus of politicians expressing outrage over the unlawful imprisonment of former prime minister Yvon Neptune, who, along with many other politicians and activists belonging to former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s Famni Lavalas party, has been kept in the notoriously foul National Penitentiary for over a year without trial. Last Tuesday Juan Gabriel Valdes, U.N. special envoy to Haiti, suddenly insisted on Neptune's immediate release, and soon after Haiti's new justice minister reportedly denounced the U.S.-backed interim government’s practice of imprisoning people without any hope of trial.

Why the sudden outrage?

Insiders predict that the interim government is preparing to stage a massive release of imprisoned Lavalas politicians—but only the soft ones. Ira Kurzban, former lawyer for the Aristide government of Haiti, says the release has been calculated to make it easier for a faction of Lavalas that appears to be in the U.S.’s good graces to run a candidate in the upcoming presidential elections.

"Neptune cooperated with them from the beginning—they’ll let him go, and probably a hundred or so others," Kurzban tells the Voice. Weeks before the coup, in February 2004, Neptune was arrested on charges that he’d ordered the killings of several anti- Lavalas rebels after a well-publicized clash between pro- and anti-government armed groups. Last week U.S. ambassador James Foley told reporters that no one has come forward with "the least evidence, the least clue, the least testimony" that would implicate the former Prime Minister.

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