Haitian police arrested a U.S. journalist and his Haitian colleague on Sep. 9 at St. Claire's Church in the Delmas district of Port-au-Prince but then released them without charges on Sep. 12.

Kevin Pina, a filmmaker and correspondent for the Pacifica Radio Network’s “Flashpoints” program at KPFA in San Francisco, was arrested on orders from Judge Jean Paul Peres, who claimed that Pina had shown him “disrespect” at the scene and resisted arrest.

Jean Ristil, a free-lance reporter who collaborates with Pina’s news agency, the Haiti Information Project, was also arrested when photographing Pina’s arrest. Both men were held at the Delmas 33 police station over the weekend.

The journalists were covering a police search of the church, presided over by Father Gérard Jean-Juste, who has been imprisoned without charges since July 21 (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 23, No. 20, 7/27/2005).

“We had received an anonymous tip that the police were going to Father Jean-Juste’s residence in order to plant guns,” Pina told Haïti Progrès. “When we got there, we didn’t know that the police or Judge Jean-Paul Peres were inside. When I walked into the rectory and identified myself as a journalist, the judge called me a terrorist and a “blan bandi” [foreign bandit], to which I took umbrage and identified myself again. He claims I hit him. That’s an absolute lie, a bald-faced lie. He also claims that I insulted him inside. If there was any insult, it was because he was trying to impede me from doing my work as a journalist.”

Pina said that Peres’s arrest of him and Ristil was “politically motivated” and that he “should resign as a judge.”

“Peres works closely with the [former opposition front] Group of 184 and was hand-picked by [former de facto Justice Minister] Bernard Gousse to be his successor for an organization of judges called ANAMAH [National Association of Haitian Magistrates], which is funded by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) and U.S. AID,” Pina said. Moreover, Haiti’s current judiciary “is not independent of politics” but is rather “the most highly politicized judiciary in Haitian history.”

Pina said that the conditions in the jail where he and Ristil were held were “awful, just awful” and some of the policemen dispensed treatment that was “bordering on cruel.”

Ristil was released by the judge in the morning of Sep. 12, and Pina had to endure “three and a half hours of ridiculous questioning” by the judge, in which Peres was “obviously lying” and “tried to get me to incriminate myself.”

“But in the end he capitulated because he knew that the arrest had no just cause but was politically motivated and arbitrary,” Pina concluded.

For three years, Washington, Paris and Ottawa working with Haiti’s ruling elite, former soldiers and death-squad leaders carried out a destabilization campaign culminating in the February 29, 2004 kidnapping and overthrow of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

To quell resistance to the coup, armies from the U.S., France, Canada and the United Nations have occupied Haiti and carried out or aided the Haitian police in massacres of thousands of Haitian citizens, including women, children and infants. Hundreds more have been jailed without trial.

It is time that the criminals be judged.

A coalition of Haiti solidarity groups, supported by the Latin America Solidarity Coalition, have banded together to organize an International Tribunal on Haiti, which will hold its first session on September 23, 2005 from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. at George Washington University in Washington, DC, the evening before the major September 24th anti-war march.

At the Tribunal’s opening session, prosecutors will present a detailed background of the coup and preliminary indictments. The background will cover the pre-coup period when the National Endowment for Democracy and the International Republican Institute were training Tonton Macoutes and paramilitary thugs whose violence set the scene for Aristide’s overthrow. The actions of the U.S., French and Canadian governments to destabilize the Aristide government will be exposed.

The Tribunal will also expose, through eye-witness and expert testimony, the truth about the daily slaughter being carried out by masked policemen with the criminal complicity, and increasingly participation, of the U.N. occupation force. (Since June, the U.N. is in charge of the Haitian police.) In the end, the Tribunal will forward individual indictments for those directly responsible for the massacres and crimes against humanity to the new International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

The first session of the International Tribunal on Haiti will begin a seven-month campaign to expose the human rights violations by the Brazilian-led “peacekeeping force” and the de facto government put in place by the Bush administration.

A blue-ribbon Commission of Inquiry, led by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, will be announced at the Sept. 23 session of the Tribunal. A Commission delegation will travel to Haiti in early October to gather eye-witness testimony and to determine what commanders and officials were responsible for which massacres and other crimes.

Buses from New York City

Round-trip bus fare from New York and New Jersey to the Tribunal is only $10. Buses will be leaving at 12 noon from the following locations: Brooklyn at Grand Army Plaza (Flatbush & Eastern Parkway); Queens at Duch Travel, Linden Boulevard & 221st Street; Irvington, NJ at Nye Avenue, corner Springfield & Stuyvesant. For tickets, flyers or more info, contact: A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition (212) 533-0417, Fanm Lakay (718) 512-5173, Haïti Progrès (718) 434-8100, International Action Center (212) 633-6646, KAKOLA (718) 629-4050, Nicaragua Network (202) 544-9355. Tickets are also available at: (Brooklyn) Diaspo Television (718) 576-2667, Radio Lakay (718) 469-4671, Radio Pa Nou (718) 940-3861 (Queens) Duch Travel (718) 527-8594 (Irvington, NJ) Marché Lacaille (973) 374-9697

We Need Your Help Immediately

This will be a costly campaign. We need your help. Travel expenses for the Commission of Inquiry alone will run over $5,000. Renting auditoriums for the public sessions of the Tribunal and travel costs for Haitian witnesses will cost at least that much. We must also subsidize buses - about $10,000 - to bring the Haitian community from the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area to attend the opening session.

Organizers and lawyers are contributing countless hours of their time to this project. But there are many unavoidable costs.

Please give generously. Your tax-deductible check will concretely help to save the lives of mothers, fathers and children who are daily being killed.

Make your check out to: International Tribunal on Haiti/CISPES Education Fund and send it to P.O. Box 8560, NY, NY 10116.

The best and fastest way for us to receive funds is when you give a tax-deductible contribution over the Internet with any major credit card. Go to the secure server of the Nicaragua Network at www.nicanet.org/donate_afgj.htm. Just indicate that your gift is for the International Tribunal on Haiti and then the amount you’d like to give. Follow the prompts to finalize your tax-deductible donation.

(The second of two articles)

We continue this week with selections from Laurent Dubois’ “Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution” (Harvard University Press, 2004). The last installment covered the period from the August 1791 outbreak of the rebellion to the August 1793 slave emancipation proclamation in the French colony of St. Domingue.

Toussaint Louverture was waiting. Part of the torrent of revolution that had swept away slavery in Saint-Domingue since 1791, serving under the command of Jean-François and Biassou, he was by 1793 a powerful and independent leader in the insurgent camps allied with the Spanish. By the beginning of 1794 he was still leading his troops against the [French] Republic in Saint-Domingue...

“I am Toussaint Louverture. My name is perhaps known to you. I have undertaken vengeance. I want Liberty and Equality to reign in Saint-Domingue. I work to bring them into existence. Unite yourselves to us, brothers, and fight with us for the same cause.” With these words, Louverture announced his emergence as an independent political force in Saint-Domingue. He issued the proclamation on August 29, 1793, the very day [French commissioner] Léger Félicité Sonthonax abolished slavery throughout the Northern Province. Although he was calling for liberty, he was not announcing his alliance with the Republic. Instead, he was positioning himself against Sonthonax as the true defender of liberty in Saint-Domingue...

On [April 29, 1794], [French Republican officer] Etienne Laveaux dispatched a letter to Louverture, inviting him to join the French side. Louverture accepted. Within a few days he had gone into “open revolt” against the Spanish. He raised the tricolor flag over Gonaïves and put the parishes of Gros-Morne, Ennery, Marmelade, Plaisance, Dondon, Acul, and Limbé, all under his command, in the hands of the Republic. Writing to Laveaux on May 18, Louverture admitted that he had been “led astray by the enemies of the Republic and of the human race.” After the “avenues of reconciliation” he proposed had been rejected by the French in mid-1793, “the Spanish offered me their protection and liberty for all those who would fight for the cause of kings; I accepted their offer, seeing myself abandoned by the French, my brothers.” After many months, however, he had come to understand that the Spanish aim was to have the blacks “kill one another to decrease our numbers” so that they could force the rest “back into their former slavery.”

From the chapter “Territory”

Louverture and [General André] Rigaud had been allies since 1794, and together they had assured the triumph of the Republic in Saint-Domingue [against incursions by the English and Spanish]. By 1798, between the two of them, they controlled all the troops and territory of the colony. Louverture was technically Rigaud’s superior, but in fact the latter continued to rule over the Southern Province and to command his army independently, as he had since 1793. With the end of the war with the British and the expulsion of [French commissioner] Hédouville, however, the relationship between Louverture and Rigaud rapidly soured. Soon the two were waging a brutal civil war against each other.

The “War of the South,” as the conflict is usually called, is often presented as a racial conflict pitting Louverture’s black army against Rigaud’s free-coloreds...

In fact, however, there was quite a bit of diversity on both sides. There were many free-coloreds and whites who fought with Louverture’s forces during the war, and some of them distinguished themselves for their ferocity against Rigaud’s partisans. And there were also ex-slave leaders who, disenchanted with Louverture’s regime, and particularly with his close ties to returning white planters, took advantage of the war to strike out against his regime. In the north, several ex-slave officers supported Rigaud during uprisings against Louverture, notably Pierre Michel, who had helped to suppress the Villatte uprising [where free-coloreds rebelled against Sonthonax] in Le Cap in 1796. In the west the African-born Lamour Desrances, who controlled mountain areas around Port-au-Prince, also sided with Rigaud. The war cannot be explained simply as a conflict between two racial groups...

Since 1794 Louverture had consistently enforced limits on the freedom of ex-slaves, arguing that such limits were necessary to consolidate and protect emancipation. It was the responsibility of the “people of Saint-Domingue,” as he declared in November 1798, to work to make the colony’s economy flourish; the “safety of liberty,” he explained in 1801, made the rebuilding of the economy of Saint-Domingue “particularly urgent”... To attract foreign merchants, Saint-Domingue had to produce and export its traditional commodities [sugar and coffee]. This was not just an economic necessity; it was also, as Louverture saw it, a matter of political survival. If they were to have a say in their future, the people of Saint-Domingue would need the economic autonomy that could come only from a strong plantation economy. And achieving it would require stifling the aspirations of former slaves who envisioned a future beyond the plantations. But for Louverture this was a price worth paying, as he made abundantly clear in October 1800 by consolidating his labor regulations into one draconian decree.

Louverture militarized plantation labor, applying the ideals of discipline and the methods of punishment used in the armed forces to the colony as a whole. Just as soldiers obeyed their officers, cultivators must obey their duties, those who failed their plantation labor would be punished. Just as soldiers had no freedom of movement and could not leave their units without “the severest punishment,” cultivators who left the plantations without permission would be subject to fines or imprisonment...

In February 1801 Louverture issued another decree that further limited the possibilities open to former slaves... Louverture outlawed the sale of small plots of land under 50 carreaux, or just over three acres. Any sale of larger plots, furthermore, had to be approved by the local administrations under his control, who were to monitor how it was used. The decree made it impossible for relatively poor men and women to acquire land. There were to be only wealthy landowners and landless workers, with nothing in between.

From the chapter “The Tree of Liberty”

“All the chiefs of the rebels have submitted,” [French invasion commanding General Charles Victor Emmanuel] Leclerc boasted to Bonaparte in early May [1802]. Nevertheless, he explained apologetically, the “moment” had “not yet arrived” to move onto the second stage of Bonaparte’s plan: the removal of these officers to France. In fact Leclerc desperately needed these officers, and the troops they brought with them, to maintain his hold on the colony...

Among those who were still actively fighting the French were the officers Sans-Souci and Sylla, the latter set up in a camp in an area called Mapou... Suspecting that Louverture was secretly in contact with and supportive of the rebel groups led by his former officers, in early June Leclerc decided to rid the island of this “gilded negro.” “Toussaint is acting in bad faith,” wrote Leclerc to Bonaparte on June 6, “just as I expected.” The same day, some of Leclerc’s officers, using a clever pretext - that Louverture was needed to work with a local officer to end acts of banditry that had been taking place in the region where he lived - enticed him to a meeting and then overcame the general’s light guard and arrested him. “You are now nothing in Saint-Domingue,” one of them announced; “give me your sword”... His family - including his wife Suzanne, his sons Isaac and Placide, and a niece - were also arrested and sent across the Atlantic with him. As he boarded the ship to exile at Gonaïves, he famously declared: “In overthrowing me, you have cut down in Saint-Domingue only the trunk of the tree of the liberty of the blacks; it will grow back from the roots, because they are deep and numerous.”

From the chapter “Those Who Die”

“Dessalines is coming to the north / come see what he is bringing,” invites a song recalling the general’s final march against the French... [General Jean-Jacques] Dessalines’s magic triumphed in mid-November 1803. Directing a final attack against French positions outside Le Cap at Vertières on the eighteenth, Dessalines sat on a stone, holding his snuffbox, and watched as his troops took the final, crucial hill, conquering “a country, a nation for his entire race.” Finally accepting defeat, Rochambeau negotiated a surrender. The several thousand remaining French troops, along with many white residents of Le Cap, sailed out of the harbor, where they were taken prisoner by waiting British ships. They left behind them upwards of 50,000 dead, the majority of the soldiers and sailors sent to the colony since early 1802. Dessalines marched triumphantly into Le Cap Français, which was soon given a new name: Le Cap Haïtien.