Action

Contact Secretary of State Colin Powell, U.S. Department of State, 2201 C Street NW, Washington, DC 20520, Tel: 202.647.4000. Use our online Legislative Action Center to send an immediate e-mail or fax to Secretary Powell and Roger Noriega, assistant secretary of state for Western hemisphere Affairs.

Telephone, fax or e-mail the State Department's Haiti Desk tel. 202.736.4628, fax 202.647.290l or e-mail Ladd Connell, Haiti Desk Officer connellLF@state.gov.

Contact United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan. Use our online Legislative Action Center to send an immediate message by e-mail or fax. For the direct link to the secretary general, visit Kofi Annan.

Message

-- Urge the administration, as Haiti's largest aid donor and international patron to stop the attacks against civil society and ensure that Father Jean-Juste and all other political prisoners are freed immediately.

-- Urge the United Nations, which maintains a peacekeeping force of more than 3,000 troops in Haiti, to intervene to restore the rule of law and functioning of democracy in Haiti.

Background

Rev. Jean-Juste's imprisonment is the result of just one of the many arbitrary arrests that have been made since the ouster of President Jean-Baptiste Aristide in February 2004. All have been held illegally. Following his arrest, the authorities are reported to have stated that the arrest was a preemptive action based on intelligence they possessed linking him with armed gangs supporting Aristide, but so far, no evidence has been produced.

“This is completely false,” said Jean-Juste, a prayer book under one arm as he stood in the shade of a towering concrete wall outside his cell in the national penitentiary. “People say I was arrested because I could be a potential presidential candidate.… Nobody is following the constitution now. We need to return to democracy, to the rule of law. I lived many years under Duvalier. He killed so many people, but he never kept a priest in jail.”

His arrest is said to be connected with the outbreak of violence that reportedly has caused more than 40 deaths in the country's capital since Sept. 30. On Sept. 7 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued a statement expressing concern “over several key areas in which the basic rights and freedoms of Haitians remain weak and imperiled.”

On Sept. 16, interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue lashed out at critics during an interview on Radio Caraibes, complaining that human rights criticism was making his relations with donor countries difficult. Later that day police raided the offices of the Confederation of Haitian Workers labor union and arrested nine union members, all without a warrant. Hours later, masked men in military attire attacked the office of the Committee for the Protection of the Rights of the Haitian People (CDPH). On Oct. 2, the police raided a radio station and arrested two senators and a former deputy from the opposition Lavalas party who had criticized the government during a radio program.

Already, former members of the disbanded Haitian army have taken over cities in the north and the south of the country. The soldiers are joined by resurgent paramilitaries throughout the Haitian countryside. The unelected Latortue regime has called members of these paramilitary groups freedom fighters and have cut taxes for the rich in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. All this is happening in midst of a humanitarian disaster caused by floods in May 2004 followed by Hurricane Jeanne in September which resulted in the deaths of as many as 3,000 people. The flooding from these two disasters has wreaked havoc, leaving more than 300,000 people homeless.

Renan Hedouville, head of the Lawyers' Committee for the Respect of Individual Liberties, an organization that was sharply critical of Aristide's government for human rights abuses, states, “People are being arrested without warrants and for political reasons and being put in jail without seeing a judge. Women are being raped by police and ex-military and Lavalas members (Aristide supporters) in poor neighborhoods are being killed.

Posted Nov. 16, 2004