MASSACRE À SEGUIN! - Haiti Liberte

This Week in Haiti
Massacre in Seguin!
Police Kill Unarmed Peasants in
Another Controversial Eviction
BAI Sounds Human
Rights Alarm
By Kim Ives
By Kim Ives
Haitian police have killed four people
and destroyed seven homes
in an attempt to clear peasants from
a remote mountain-top park where
they have lived and farmed for the
past 70 years.
The bloody confrontation,
which occurred exactly 25 years to
the day after an infamous 1987 peasant
massacre near the northwestern
town of Jean-Rabel, has incensed the
Southeast Department’s population
and redoubled charges that the President
Michel Martelly’s government is
resurrecting the repressive tactics of
the Duvalierist and neo-Duvalierist
dictatorships which ruled and scarred
Haiti over two decades ago.
The incident was first reported
and photographed by Claudy Bélizaire
of the Jacmel-based Reference
Institute for Journalism and Communication
(RIJN). His photographs of
bloody corpses and burned houses in
Galette Seche/Seguin, a remote locality
near the peaks of some of Haiti’s
highest mountains, have gone viral
on the Internet, Twitter and Facebook.
Meanwhile, the mainstream
media has largely ignored the story
to date.
“A squad composed of 36 officers
of the Departmental Unit of
Law Enforcement (UDMO), directed
by the Departmental Director of the
HNP [Haitian National Police], accompanied
by the Divisional Delegate
of South-East, the Government Commissioner
and a Justice of the Peace,
came to Seguin [in the Marigot commune]
specifically to the La Visite
Park, aboard six vehicles and an ambulance
of the Haitian Red Cross to
launch an operation aimed at evicting
140 families, who have been illegally
occupying [since 1942!] a part of the
Park,” the RIJN reported.
“ Furious at this armed, muscular
intervention, the local people confronted
the police and threw stones.
According to witnesses, the operation
lasted two hours. Many shot were
fired against the protesters and ... five
policemen [were] injured,” according
to the RIJN. “The bodies of four victims
were found and identified [Désir
Enoz - 32 years, Nicolas David - 28
years, Robinson Volcin - 22 years
and Désir Aleis - 18], four children
are reported missing, three houses
were completely destroyed by fire and
four others ransacked, and three oxen
were killed. Yet the day after this tragic
incident, Ovilma Sagesse, the Chief
Constable of the South-East, claimed
these statements were false, saying
that only five policemen were injured
by the park’s occupiers. ‘Given the
aggressiveness of these individuals,
we had to suspend the operation to
avoid having victims.’ The victims’
bodies at the La Visite Park, however,
attest to the contrary.”
Reached by telephone, Claudy
Bélizaire told Haïti Liberté that the
situation in the area remains very
tense, and the local people very angry.
“The population has burned
about 100 hectares of pine forest in
response to the authorities’ intervention,”
Bélizaire told Haïti Liberté.
That figure comes from Frantz Pierre-
Louis, secretary general of the central
government’s southeast office.
The agronomist Arcène Bastien,
the Environment Ministry’s
South East departmental director, in
The body of a peasant killed by police on Jul. 23 during an attempted
eviction in La Visite Park
One of the peasant houses which police destroyed in Seguin
his remarks to the Nouvelliste, denied
that the police committed any
violence against the peasants living
in the La Visite Park, saying that
“30 policemen who accompanied the
delegation of Emergency Preparedness
had to backtrack faced with the
people’s wrath.” He also tried to raise
the specter of a conspiracy, saying
to the newspaper that “troublemakers
had infiltrated the population and
whipped them up against the delegation.”
It seems, nevertheless, that
those who protested against the eviction
of the 140 families and the victims
who were killed by bullets were
not armed in any way. “They did not
have any weapons,” Belizaire told us.
“They only threw stones.”
Recently, Sen. Moïse Jean-
Charles has charged that the government
and big landowners in Haiti’s
north have also begun expropriating
peasants from their land. After the fall
of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1986,
peasants reclaimed many lands
which had been stolen from them and
from the state over decades by the
grandons, as Haiti’s big landowners
are called.
“Today, with Martelly’s accession
to power, all the big shots, the
grandons who seized land around
Milot, have assembled around Martelly,”
he recently told Haïti Liberté
in a long interview (see Haïti Liberté,
Vol. 5, No. 51, Jul. 4, 2012). In the
1980s, the senator was the leader of
the Milot Peasants Movement (MPM).
“They have power in their hands, and
they have begun to attack us.”
Claudy Bélizaire/RIJC
Claudy Bélizaire/RIJC
On Jul. 23, 1987, the grandons
near Jean-Rabel massacred with guns
and machetes at least 139 peasants
affiliated with Tèt Kole Tipeyizan
Ayisyen (the Heads Together of Haitian
Small Peasants). Grandon Nikol
Poitevien famously went on Haitian
television a few days later to claim
that “we killed 1042 Communists.’
In a long declaration on the anniversary,
Tèt Kole decried that “the
criminals still are walking around our
society freely, swimming in state corruption
without any anxiety” and denounced
the government of President
Martelly and his Prime Minister Laurent
Lamothe as undertaking Haiti’s
“liquidation.”
In Le Nouvelliste, the commentator
Roberson Alphonse characterized
the killings in Seguin as “a fiasco”
and “a shame” but argued that
“fundamentally, the efforts to restore
protected areas and to rehabilitate
shrinking woodlands are necessary
“and even”indispensable, given the
park’s biodiversity, endangered for
years by the row crops of the occupants
and the unregulated cutting of
trees for domestic use.”
In his report, Bélizaire said: “After
several hours of discussions with
policemen stationed in the area, community
leaders and families of victims
and grieving neighbors, a Committee
of four members was formed..., an
intermediary was designated by the
population to discuss with the authorities
such as: Nadège Excellus,
representative of women victims,
Estinvil Sainvilus (ASEC), Jean Dais,
community leader, and Pierre Félix, a
Haiti’s foremost human rights law
office, the International Lawyers
Bureau (BAI), has addressed a letter
to Jose de Jesus Orozca Henriquez,
President of the Inter-American Commission
on Human Rights (IACHR),
to call attention to Haiti’s deteriorating
human rights situation.
“The current government under
President Joseph Michel Martelly
appears to be regressing back to the
practices of the former political regime
that were rejected by the Haitian people
26 years ago,” wrote the BAI’s lead
attorney Mario Joseph, who signed the
letter. “This new government tramples
the housing rights of internally displaced
persons (IDPs) who were victims
of the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake,
as well as Haitian children’s right to
education, by applying superficial solutions
to please certain audiences
while misleading the Haitian people
who still wait for the fulfillment of
election promises.”
Copies of the eight-page letter
were also sent to Haiti’s Justice Minister,
the presidents of human rights
committees in Parliament, the UN High
Commissioner for Human Rights, UN
independent expert on the situation of
human rights in Haiti, the U.S. State
Department, Amnesty International,
and members of the U.S. Congressional
Black Caucus, among others.
“The situation in Haiti is often
analogized to a vast conspiracy by
certain representatives of the country
who have created a host of illegal and
cynical strategies: the subjugation of
the Haiti National Police (HNP) and
justice, the attempt to control the mass
media and remobilize the old army, the
cult of personality, etc.,” the letter continues.
“Haitians fear that they are returning
to a past era akin to that under
Duvalier, when a ‘conspiracy against
the internal security of the State’ was
often used to terrorize and imprison
political opponents and/or attempt to
force people into exile, Fort Dimanche
(Fort of Death) and/or into a cemetery,
and where the whims of the regime
and its thugs plummeted the country
into instability and violence.”
“President Martelly’s failure to
member of an area organization. The
negotiations are not over. Note that
since this serious incident, no state
official has come to Seguin, where
barricades have been erected by the
people, in protest. The only item
known about this negotiation was an
envelope of 50,000 gourdes [about $
1,250] promised to each family (50%
before departure, 50% after). However,
the offer, which proposes no place
of relocation, was rejected by the
families involved, who believe that
this amount is insufficient to enable
them to purchase land, find a patch of
fertile agricultural land and relocate.”
The Parc La Visite is one of Haiti’s
three national parks and has one
of Haiti’s last remaining pine forests,
in a country that is 98% deforested.
It has suffered from unauthorized
logging and clearing over the last decades,
which has affected the watersheds
for the cities of Port-au-Prince
and Jacmel.
However, the violence in uprooting
the families in the park is
similar to the uprooting of families
in the Pétionville slum of Jalousie, a
move also being defended as an environmental
imperative.
“ We can easily understand the
need to defend Haiti’s environment
President Joseph Michel Martelly
appears to be regressing back to
the practices of the former political
regime that were rejected by the
Haitian people 26 years ago.
hold elections, and his outrageous actions
with the State University and the
press, the forced evictions of victims
displaced by the earthquake and the
arrest of a Member of Parliament show
that he does not stand for democracy,
human rights or the rule of law.”
The letter, dated Jul. 17, 2012,
is well-footnoted and details violations
of freedom of speech and the
press, constitutionally mandated
elections that have not been held in
a timely manner, the illegal arrest of
a parliamentarian, violations of the
sovereignty of Haiti’s state university
campuses, violations of IDPs’ housing
rights, the inaccessibility of justice and
the inadequate support for victims of
sexual violence in camps, and a host
of cases of impunity and corruption.
“The dislocation of state institutions,
corruption, various scandals,
attacks and intimidation of the press,
arbitrary arrests, illegal and unjustified
prosecution of political opponents, and
impunity are the hallmarks of a dictatorship
that undermines democracy,”
the letter concludes. “This deleterious
and unhealthy environment undermines
the respect for human rights.
The BAI, despite all sorts of threats it
receives, will not close its eyes and be
silent as these dangers haunt Haiti and
Haitian society.”
The full text of the letter can be
found on the website of the BAI’s sister
organization, the Institute for Justice
and Democracy in Haiti, at IJDH.
org.
but any relocation must be done equitably
and with adequate compensation
and planning so that those displaced
can find new homes and not
be left homeless,” Ronald Joseph, a
Jalousie resident, told Haïti Liberté.
Many of the shanty-town’s residents
complain that wealthy residents also
living on the mountain Morne Calvaire,
on whose flank Jalousie sits,
are not being targeted for eviction.
The situation in Seguin has
become so tense that the United Nation
military occupation force has felt
compelled to make a statement distancing
itself from the Martelly government’s
actions: “The United Nations
Mission for Stabilization in Haiti
(MINUSTAH) is concerned by reports
of the deaths of at least four Haitians
and several injured, in circumstances
not yet clear, during an operation of
forced evictions conducted by police
officers,” the note says. “A multidisciplinary
team of the United Nations
was deployed in the field to collect
information to help establish the
facts. MINUSTAH recalls that forced
eviction without providing alternative
adequate housing is contrary to international
human rights, including the
International Covenant on Economic,
Social and Cultural Rights.”
Vol. 6, No. 3 • Du 1er au 7 Août 2012 Haiti Liberté/Haitian Times 9