The Toronto Star
May 22, 1994
Return of the Tonton Macoute Haiti's dreaded civilian killing machine is back under a new name, terrorizing those who dare dream democracy
by Linda Diebel TORONTO STAR
LEOGANE, Haiti
IT'S PLEASANT HERE on the veranda of the school auditorium which, only a few weeks ago, was confiscated from the poor frightened people of Leogane by the very men who are now enjoying the late afternoon breezes from the sea.
Huge painted signs spoil the building's pristine white with the name of their organization: FRAPH. It rhymes with tap and puns on the French word for "hit."
FRAPH is the Haitian Front for Advancement and Progress and here, in this little seaside town about 75 kilometres (43 miles) from the capital of Port-au-Prince, its members have taken over at gunpoint.

Their leader, the inappropriately named Monsieur Innocent, flips through the pages of a yellow legal pad into which he has copied the names of ordinary citizens and to which, with cold eyes, he has just added the (falsely-given) name of the Haitian driver working for The Star.

After carefully making the notation, Nerva Innocent, FRAPH president for Leogane, begins an interview which quickly turns to tirade. At one point, he hisses: "Madame, I said this interview is not over yet."

He is, he says, waiting for the return of Baby Doc.

That's Jean-Claude Duvalier, the plump and spoiled son of the late dictator Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier. Under Papa Doc, who sat in his bath in his top hat and plotted murder, Haiti ran red with blood. His Tonton Macoute militia controlled the country through terror.

Their very name, Tonton Macoute, became synonymous with savagery. They brought him the heads of his enemies; they stoned people to death; and when his successor, Baby Doc, was finally exiled to France in 1986, they didn't go away; they went underground.

The Tonton Macoutes were like the bogeymen of Voodoo legend, the terrible monsters who came in the night to stuff little boys and girls in their knapsacks (macoutes) and carry them off for breakfast.

Tonton is Creole slang for "uncle." Tonton Macoute.

Uncle Knapsack. Uncle Torture. Uncle Death.

"J'etais Duvalieriste!" cries Innocent, throwing his arm into the air in an open-palmed salute. He doesn't really mean, "I was Duvalieriste." He means, "I am - I always will be."

His second-in-command, Pasteur Rene Georges, who wears a baseball cap and snakeskin cowboy boots, boasts: "I was FRAPH before there was FRAPH."

Duvalierism isn't dead in Haiti. The horror has come back.

Since President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted in a coup on Sept. 30, 1991, the military junta has turned the country into a killing field. For the first two years, the generals were satisfied with operating through armed civilian thugs, their so-called attaches. By last September, however, they were confident enough to unearth their organized political-military arm, FRAPH, and set it loose, like a network of zombies, upon the people.

FRAPH pretends to be a political party. But they are modern-day Macoutes, according to human rights workers and populist leaders. They are part of a documented killing machine which includes soldiers, uniformed police officers and attaches and takes part in systemic violence.

FRAPH strategy was worked out at the Quartier-General army headquarters in downtown Port-au-Prince, and in the Cafeteria, the bunker-like police headquarters across the square.

Hurrying between the two, Canadian expatriate Lynn Garrison - an aging soldier-of-fortune and adviser to both army Lt.-Gen. Raoul Cedras and police chief Col. Michel Francois - worked out a campaign of terror for the FRAPH bullyboys.

The generals and thugs who ousted Aristide (and regret not having killed him) met under the slow-moving ceiling fans of the Quartier-General last fall. They call themselves "la famille (family) du trente Septembre." The FRAPH executive was hand-picked by Cedras and Francois, just as was the recently-imposed octogenarian president Emile Jonassaint.

Garrison, with close ties to the Central Intelligence Agency and to, among other powerful American politicians, Senate Republican leader Robert Dole, convinced FRAPH leaders that the United States, Canada and other countries who were sending in peacekeepers as part of a United Nations plan to restore Aristide could be intimidated by mob violence.

He was right.

Hence, the ugly scene at the dock in Port-au-Prince last October. A gang of about a hundred FRAPH thugs, waving pistols and screaming anti-American slogans, forced the U.S.S. Harlan County carrying U.S. and Canadian peacekeepers to turn around. That move ended, likely forever, any chance of Aristide's return. Within three days, Canadian Mounties already in Haiti were recalled by Ottawa.

"I still can't believe we succeeded," FRAPH president Emmanuel "Toto" Constant still boasts. Constant, who was educated in Canada and whose family still lives in Montreal, wears a business suit and carries an Uzi machine gun.

Recently, he bragged on CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes that the Harlan County was his showdown, mano a mano, with President Bill Clinton. Commented Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin from Iowa: "They said they rolled President Clinton. I guess they did."

FRAPH has spread its tentacles into every aspect of Haitian life. The old Duvalieristes have taken advantage of nearly three years of confusion and inaction by the international community, including Canada, to squeeze the Haitian people at the grassroots.

The world has once again turned its attention on Haiti.

At midnight last night a total trade embargo went into effect. An oil and arms blockade, which includes Canadian warships, has been in place since mid-October.

But the blockade leaks like a sieve, thanks to the black market sale of gas from the Dominican Republic. It's easier to buy fuel in Port-au-Prince now, down along the sea in "Little Kuwait," than it was three months ago. The generals who control the market are getting rich.

This time, we're told, the United Nations is serious about the embargo. From Washington, Clinton has warned junta leaders that "it's time to go." There are rumblings of U.S. invasion.

But, with the new Macoute death squads so firmly in place at the grassroots, what the world does now could already be a moot point. It may be too late for democracy to be restored in Haiti for a very long time.

On the day last week that Jonassaint announced he would rule by decree, Aristide's Prime Minister Robert Malval delivered a lament for his nation.

The generals, he said, have plunged Haiti into "the darkness of night."

A whole generation of democratic leaders has been wiped out. It's impossible to say how many people have been killed since the coup. Human rights estimates begin at 3,000. Thousands have been tortured and mutilated. An estimated 300,000 have been displaced.

Over the past 32 months, I've seen the corpses of men, women and teenagers, their skinny bodies full of bullet holes or hacked up by machetes. I've stood with relatives trying to identify their loved ones from a makeshift morgue stacked with bodies. The air was thick with the sickly-sweet smell of death.

I've interviewed people who've lost sons, daughters, wives; who've been beaten or raped; who are living in hiding (dans le maquis, they say in French); and who've left the country and are living in Miami, New York or Kansas City.

Some of the best and brightest are dead and gone.

And in their place - FRAPH.

Innocent says his people are ready to run the next election, a bogus concept under military rule. Still, their people are ready all over the country. Eventually, they want Baby Doc back. In the meantime, they talk of Constant as presidential candidate.

"The situation is worse than under the Duvaliers," says Father Antoine Adrien, a Salesian priest who spent 12 years in exile before Baby Doc was ousted.

"At least when Duvalier was in charge, the Macoutes were accountable to him. Now, nobody is accountable to anybody for the horror," he says.

"And, with the Duvaliers, there was always antagonism between the Macoutes and the army. Now, there is no sign of antagonism between FRAPH and any member of the army. Quite the contrary, they go hand in hand."

Adrien is fearless. An Aristide confidante and adviser, he has continued to speak out despite the risk. His friends live in fear of the phone call that will say he, too, has been killed.

"What can I do?" he asks. "Nobody is safe in Haiti. The killing has become an obsession." Mutilated bodies, sometimes with their faces cut off, are found in the morning in the Rue des Batiments - now called Execution Road - out by the airport. In a few cases, attaches have refused to allow relatives to take away the bodies. So they lie in the sun with pigs rooting at their exposed intestines. Sometimes, someone will leave a little black and white snapshot - like a school photo - on a body. It's all they can do.

Haiti is like the Heart of Darkness. "The horror, the horror," the dying Kurtz gasped in Joseph Conrad's novel.

Colin Granderson, head of the U.N. human rights mission here, says political murders are increasing. Rapes are a new phenomenon. The killers are fearless.

The U.N. mission is a last official witness, and its position is precarious. "Our relations with the military are extremely difficult at the moment," says Granderson. The generals say they are tourists, not human rights observers. Maybe they'll have to go.

The mission puts out regular reports. A few months ago, one reported:

"Two armed men in civilian clothes seized Orilia Joseph, 41, at her house in Cite Soleil at 10 a.m. on October 10. In the presence of her two teenage daughters, they tied her up with electric cable and took her away on their motorcycle. Neighborhood residents said that the men, believed to be attaches associated with the military hospital, tortured Joseph in a house in Drouillard 2 and then tried to hand her over to the Cite Soleil police post, which refused custody because of her condition.

"Her mutilated body was found by her daughter the following day on the road near Drouillard."

The murdered woman was an Aristide supporter.

What the human rights report didn't say was that her body was found headless. Her head was never found.

Cite Soleil is the poorest of Haiti's poor slums. A cesspool. It's the rainy season now, and water rushing down from the mountains forms rivers of sludge. They run through the market, carrying raw sewage, old plastic bottles, rotting orange peels, fish entrails, dead dogs and old tires. It stinks.

No wonder people get sick. They live in excrement. Here, people love Titid, as they affectionately call Aristide, the diminutive priest who was elected with 67 per cent of the vote. So, here, terror tactics must be strongest.

Last December, FRAPH activists went on a rampage to avenge a murdered comrade, torching Cite Soleil, killing an estimated 50 people and displacing thousands of others.

"I understand nothing about what's going on, but I am always afraid now," says Remercil Jean-Pierre, 42. She lives in a cement block with 20 other people. It's unbearably hot, hard to breathe. Sweat pours down her body as she talks about the impossibility of feeding her five children.

In March, her brother Marcel, 26, and sister Roseline, 24, died within eight days of each other. A fever.

"When Titid was here, we could eat. He cared about us," she says. "Now we starve."

Marie-Lisette St. Fleur, 25, lives in the same squalid hut with her two-year-old, Eve-Louse.

"We see bodies almost every day," she says. "We turn our heads. We look away. We know it could be us."

A recent joint report from the Human Rights Watch/Americas and the National Coalition for Haitian Refugees condemns FRAPH.

"FRAPH, while ostensibly an independent political organization, functions as a surrogate for the military," it says.

"Its activities, including public demonstrations, violent thuggery and assassinations, are tolerated, and even encouraged by the army. FRAPH openly identifies with the late Francois Duvalier (Papa Doc) who ruled Haiti through terror from 1957 to 1971."

The report identifies FRAPH's leaders as Constant, 37, son of an army commander under Duvalier and Louis Jodel Chamblain, a former soldier and Macoute who is said to have taken part in the November, 1987, election massacre.

The U.N. human rights mission has implicated both the police and FRAPH in last year's assassination of Antoine Izmery, a merchant and Aristide financial backer. He was dragged from church, forced to his knees, and shot in the head.

"The elaborate plan to assassinate Antoine Izmery would not have been carried out without the complicity, if not the direct participation, of highly placed members of the Haitian Armed forces," says the U.N. report.

"The killers benefited from the complicity and support of the security forces (some of them in uniform) present at the scene. For instance, the assassination team arrived and departed the scene protected and escorted by police vehicles."

The report has identified 15 participants.

"The attache reported to have killed Izmery is identified as Gros Fanfan, while (police officer) Lamour was said to have been inside the church directing the operation. Spotted in a car with Gros Fanfan were three prominent opponents of Aristide: Louis Jodel Chamblain, leader of FRAPH; Mirabeau, former bodyguard for murdered Duvalieriste leader Roger Lafontant; and Fritz-Pierre, a leader of attaches in Port-au-Prince."

Many Haitians have terrible stories to tell about the brutality of FRAPH and the police.

Cajuste Lexiuste, a labor leader with Centrale General des Travailleurs (CGT, for General Workers Union) was arrested by police in front of Radio Caraibes. He described his ordeal in an interview.

"I realized that I was among animals. They were not human beings," he says.

"At first they played with me, taking out their guns and saying I would die. Then, they took me to a little torture chamber where there was a small bed. They pushed my head under it and took turns, about 50 of them, jumping on my back. They started beating me about the buttocks with their truncheons, one after the other. At that moment, I thought I would die.

"I passed out. When I came to, I was in a cell with another man. There were rivers of blood on the floor. Some of it was mine. There were worms in the blood. I couldn't move. There was a worm on my mouth, and I had to ask him to take it off me.

"I spent three days in that room."

After a visit from Granderson and other rights workers, Lexiuste was sent to a military hospital. He had three operations on his buttocks and kidneys. He came to Washington last October to meet with Aristide and never went back. He is still in pain.

Ask FRAPH members about their ties to the police, about the violence, and they stare blankly. Constant talks of political harmony. In Leogane, FRAPH militants Innocent and Georges insist: "We only want peace."

It is Aristide, they say, who is the monster. When they talk about Aristide, they become crazed, rolling their eyes and shaking their fists.

"Aristide is the killer. As God is my witness, he is a crazy man. Aristide will never set foot back in Haiti," says Leogane president Innocent.

"Aristide is a vagabond," adds Georges. "For us, Aristide is already dead."

Innocent swears that he knew Aristide as a child, that he was kicked out of school by the Salesian priests for terrorizing other students, that he is a manic depressive with necrophiliac tendencies (a Lynn Garrison creation) and that he once put human excrement in the holy water.

At his economic think-tank in Port-au-Prince, Dr. Gerald Pierre-Charles says that the issue of bizarre lies about Aristide shows just how unbalanced Aristide's enemies really are.

"They have reconstituted the Duvalier epoque. They have brought back the Tonton Macoutes and chefs de sections (or local warlords)," he says.

"They live in the 17th century. For them, the 20th century doesn't exist. International norms do not exist. Normal human behavior does not exist.

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While Nerva Innocent studies his lists of names and curses the day Aristide was born, men are building boats on a beach a few kilometres away. Every week, hundreds of Haitians risk their lives on the open seas to flee this murderous place.

"Without Aristide, what can we do?" asks Julien Audelin, 22, who is waiting for his chance to leave in spite of the death of his 24-year-old brother at sea in March. His body was never found.

The people here are terrified of FRAPH, and of police Corp. Vital who carries out their orders. People look over their shoulders when they talk, ready to run.

"We are a little people, alone," says Audelin, who hopes the Americans will invade.

"If the Americans do not come to help us, we are lost. You are Canadian," he adds. "Ask Canadians to please talk to the Americans for us. Ask them to help us."

Many also stay behind. They live in constant danger, but they continue to risk their lives. It is worth noting that, despite their greatest efforts, neither FRAPH nor the army has been able to stage a significant demonstration against Aristide in Haiti.

Evans Paul, the mayor of Port-au-Prince, who has been arrested, beaten and forced to live in hiding, has witnessed the execution of his friends - but still he speaks out. This time, the embargo must work, he says. This time, the U.S. must put real pressure on the generals.

"We have a month," he says. "After that, I believe it will be too late for Haiti. We will know that we are really and truly alone."

GRAPHIC: color drawing: Haitian with rifle-bayonet impaling a skull. Star photos (LINDA DIEBEL) STANDING THEIR GROUND: The children of Cite Soleil, the poorest of Haiti's poor slums, where residents remain pro-Aristide. Last December, an estimated 50 locals died in a rampage of terror. FACES OF HAITI: From top, Port-au-Prince Mayor Evans Paul; Cite Soleil resident Marie-Lisette St. Fleur, with 2-year-old daughter; and regional FRAPH official Pasteur Rene Georges.