In the span of a mere 48 hours, Haiti’s former dictator Jean-Claude
"Baby Doc" Duvalier has returned to the troubled island from exile in Paris and been
arrested in Port au Prince. France24
reported this afternoon that he had been indicted for theft, corruption, and
misallocation of funds. But those would be just a few of many crimes Duvalier is accused of committing during his 15 years in office,
from 1971 to 1986.
"If he is going to be put on trial, he should be put on
trial [for] all the human rights violations," Javier Zuñiga, special advisor to
Amnesty International, told me by phone. "I think it will be travesty of
justice if [he is tried for] only corruption, and not the extensive torture and disappearances."
Like most
dictators, Duvalier took power promising to change the country’s
old, repressive ways. When he became president at age 19,
Duvalier was trying to clean up the fallout from his father’s messy regime.
Francois
Duvalier, a medical doctor turned autocrat nicknamed Papa Doc, had presided
over a literal reign of terror from 1956 to 1971. The army and the police ran the state and
opponents — or perceived opponents — were jailed and tortured. The press was shut
down and the economy tanked. Taking full advantage of U.S. fears of nearby communist Cuba, Papa Doc convinced Washington to look the other way. With his personal militia, the Tontons Macoutes — named for a traditional
Haitian boogeyman — haunting the streets, Duvalier père had little fear that his crimes would come back to
haunt him, as well.
Baby Doc,
as Jean-Claude was called, promised to do better. The young leader, who was considered "an overweight playboy of little intelligence," when he assumed
power And he did, sort of, relax a
few laws. Press freedom, for example, moderately improved. But he turned out to be a cut off
the old block.
Baby Doc stretched his hands over the entire country by instituting a
system of prefects, or regional governors, who were answerable only to him. They carried out his political whims, everything from assassination to arrests
to intimidation. Overall, between 40,000 and 60,000 people are thought to have
died under the two Duvaliers, father and son
Life under
the Duvaliers revolved around the state’s security apparatus — the army and the
police. "Nobody was safe and nobody had any recourse if he or she was
arrested," recalls Zuñiga, who worked in the country during the Baby Doc years. He
describes the victims of torture and arrest that he saw
firsthand-near-paralyzed from abuse, or sick and dying from gangrene after
their wounds went untreated. "It really was hell." One particularly nasty
locale during the Baby Doc years was Fort Dimanche, an infamous prison outside
the capital, "where people were regularly tortured and conditions were very
bad," Human Rights Watch lawyer Reed Brody explained by phone from Brussels.
And if you escaped the fate of
intimidation, you were also likely to be poor. Very little economic development
took place during that time, says Zuñiga; social services were "almost
nonexistent." Thousands more fled Haiti-the first wave of ‘boat people’ to the
United States.
Then there
was the money that Jean-Claude Duvalier stashed away. Several million dollars
of the Duvalier fortune was frozen in Switzerland, meant to be returned home, though the verdict was later overturned. A case in the U.S. court
system also found Baby Doc liable for $ 500 million of misspent funds. (In a bit of twist,
the former president’s widow took much of his fortune when she divorced
him in 1992, and Duvalier has bounced around semi-destitute in recent
years.)
Human
rights advocates hope that Duvalier will now be prosecuted for his numerous
crimes. "The strongest case in legal terms is the
embezzlement," says Brian Concannon Jr. of the Institute for Justice and
Democracy in Haiti. "For financial crimes, if you’ve got documentation, they’re
easy to prove. [And in this case, we] literally have boxes and boxes of
evidence."
The human rights abuses will
certainly prove more challenging. There has never been a systematic
investigation into what happened during the Baby Doc years, and what few
attempts have reached courts in the past two decades have met obstacles like
statute limits. A case in Paris, for example, was dismissed because the crimes
took place before the country’s relevant laws were in place. "Duvalier himself
was not doing the shooting and torturing," adding another complication, says
Concannon. "But it shouldn’t be that difficult to piece together."
So Haiti waits, as do many of
the exiles and victims who remember life under Baby Doc like it was yesterday."Our
country, I will say again, was done wrong by his trickery and repression, still
today, unpardonable actions," wrote the 82-year-old Haitian poet Gerald
Bloncourt, chairman of an exile group that has advocated to put Duvalier on
trial for over a decade, on his blog
on Jan. 17.
Speaking of Duvalier’s return, he beseeched, "I call upon all those
who share [our concerns] to rise and denounce this latest attack on our ‘Human
Rights,’ [i.e. Duvalier’s return] — this new and colossal contempt for the Haitian people."
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