Once again, one man has become the center of a political storm that threatens to foil this country's uphill struggle for stability.
This time, it's not Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former priest and charismatic slum leader who was deposed last year by an armed uprising and forced into exile. It is the man who rose and fell in Aristide's shadow, his former prime minister, Yvon Neptune.
The former senator and radio talk show host has been jailed for a year without charges under a new government installed by the US and is slowly starving himself to death in a minimum-security prison cell.
PHOTO: AP
Last year, Haiti's new government arrested Neptune, 58, accusing him as the mastermind of a massacre in a small northern town, St.-Marc. Prime Minister Gerard Latortue argued that justice was the best way to heal Haiti's wounds, and promoted the case as proof that no one, no matter how powerful, could stand above the law.
But as the anniversary of Neptune's arrest approaches, his continued detention has become an embarrassment to the Bush administration and a symbol of the failures of what was supposed to be Haiti's transition to a fully functioning democracy.
From prison, the former prime minister has denounced his case as a "political witch hunt" aimed at seeking vengeance, not justice, against those who supported Aristide. In February he started a series of hunger strikes to demand that the government try him or set him free.
When a visitor went to the two-story house where Neptune was being held, the former prime minister could not lift his bony body off a foam mattress on the floor of his cell. He was wearing striped boxer shorts and listening to music on a Walkman. His most striking feature was the lines of his rib cage.
"I feel weak," he said barely above a whisper. "Some days I feel weaker than others. But it was my choice to go on hunger strike."
The hunger strikes have sent Neptune twice to the hospital in critical condition and brought expressions of concern, even outrage, about the injustices that continue to plague Haiti's justice system. Only about 20 of the more than 1,000 prisoners at the federal penitentiary have been convicted of crimes; many have spent years awaiting trial.
But Jocelyn McCalla, executive director of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights in New York, said much more is at stake than Haiti's justice system.
Rather than a political achievement for Haiti's interim government, he said, it has become a serious liability less than four months from the start of important national elections.
And rather than uniting this violently polarized society, McCalla said, the case against Neptune has seemed only to keep old political hostilities festering, raising questions about the crimes of the past government, and about the legitimacy of the current one.
"The Neptune case has raised hard questions about the legitimacy of the United States' intervention in Haiti," McCalla said. "The intervention was based on the premise that the United States was ousting a criminal despot, namely President Aristide, who had used his powers to subvert democracy, and that the interim government was going to establish rule of law. That has not happened."
Three weeks ago, the emaciated prisoner was carried on a stretcher to his first court hearing in St.-Marc and testified for several hours, the latest sign that the interim government had begun to buckle under mounting pressure and was seeking a way to expedite the Neptune case.
Months earlier, the government offered to fly Neptune for emergency medical treatment to the Dominican Republic, but Neptune refuses to leave Haiti until his name is cleared of wrongdoing.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS