Report reveals horrific truths of life in Haiti

Posted on Tue, Feb. 22, 2005
JIM DEFEDE/COMMENTARY
Miami Herald

For 10 days in November, Thomas Griffin traveled throughout the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. It was his 10th trip to Haiti in a decade and by far his most horrifying.

‘’The inhumanity that is happening just off our shores is appalling,’’ said Griffin, a Philadelphia attorney and former Justice Department official who has been investigating human rights abuses in Haiti and Latin America for years.

Based on his trip — and interviews with past and present government officials, police officers, former soldiers, U.N. peacekeepers and gang leaders — Griffin and Irwin Stotzky, director of the Center for the Study of Human Rights and the University of Miami Law School, issued a 51-page report last month.

‘’Didn’t The Miami Herald already dismiss this as a Lavalas report?’’ Griffin asked derisively when I spoke to him on Monday. Lavalas is the political party of former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Griffin was annoyed his report wasn’t taken more seriously by the news media, which cited his previous work for the left-leaning National Lawyers Guild, and also because Stotzky was once a board member for the Aristide Foundation.

‘’What is happening in Haiti is wrong, no matter what anyone’s politics is,’’ Griffin said.

And he is right.

The pictures, the words, the statements by those who are both for and against the return of Aristide speak for themselves in this report, which can be found at www.law.miamiedu/news/368.html.

The United Nations, which has several thousand troops in Haiti, has done little to end the violence and may actually be exacerbating it.

While Lavalas supporters are not entirely innocent, this report suggests, rather convincingly, that there is an ongoing campaign to use the police, along with hired street gangs and former soldiers, to hunt down and kill members of Lavalas, particularly in the city’s slums.

‘’There is a feeling of a truly repressive war against the poor,’’ Griffin said.

The most powerful sections of the report are those that tell individual stories. Griffin followed the police on a raid in the Bel Air neighborhood on Nov. 18. When the police pulled out, Griffin found bodies littering the street, including that of a middle-age woman the police left to die.

Another victim, Inep Henri, 35, had been shot in the head, but his family did not want to take him to the hospital, for fear of the police. Griffin and his team convinced the family it was necessary or Henri would die.

The Red Cross refused to send an ambulance, so Griffin’s team arranged a pickup truck to carry Henri out of Bel Air. They had to pretend Henri was dead in order to get through a police checkpoint.

Two hours after Henri arrived at the city’s general hospital, Griffin’s team found him ‘’still alive on a cot, but having received no treatment,’’ the report notes. ``Investigators convinced doctors to examine him. One doctor got up, slapped Inep in the head to see if he was awake, then pinched his upper arm for a reaction. Inep was still alive. The doctor went back behind his desk to sit.’’

As Griffin learned, doctors would only treat Henri if his family paid in advance. Henri died the next day, never having been treated.

‘’While checking on Inep Henri . . . investigators also observed a boy lying on his back, naked and exposed on a cot in the middle of the emergency room,’’ the report states. ``He was shivering in a pool of his own blood, eyes closed. When he moved, blood splashed onto the floor.’’

The boy, Ginel Valbraun, 12, said he had been shot by police. The report includes pictures of a gaping wound on his right thigh.

‘’Doctors refused to treat him because he had no money,’’ the report states, adding that investigators paid to get the child medical attention. ``Investigators last saw him on Nov. 21, still alive, but still naked and in a soaked, old bandage.’’
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Forwarded by the Haitian Lawyers’ Leadership Network
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“Men anpil chay pa lou” is Kreyol for – “Many hands make light a heavy load.”

See, The Haitian Leadership Networks’ 7 “Men Anpil Chay Pa Lou” campaigns to help restore Haiti’s independence, the will of the mass electorate and the rule of law.
www.margueritelaurent.com/law/lawpress.html