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Strongman Louis Jodel Chamblain from FRAPH murdered thousands

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   http://www.boston.com/news/world/latinamerica/articles/2004/02/26/haitian_rebels_await_aristides_move/

Philippe is a former army lieutenant and police captain. The front's second in command, Gilberto Dragon, is a former military officer and police major. Both are cited on numerous government and diplomatic reports for their alleged involvement in drug trafficking and racketeering.

The group's strongman is Louis Jodel Chamblain, a former military general who later headed the FRAPH, which stands for Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, which specialists describe as a paramilitary group responsible for murdering thousands of Aristide followers in the early 1990s. The group's systematic use of rape and torture as weapons sparked the massive exodus of refugees that ultimately led to US military action.


http://www.boston.com/news/world/latinamerica/articles/2004/02/26/haitian_rebels_await_aristides_move/

Haitian rebels await Aristide's move
By Steven Dudley and Farah Stockman, Globe Correspondent and Globe Staff, 2/26/2004

CAP-HAITIEN, Haiti -- The leader of a Haitian rebellion that has wrested two-thirds of the country from government control said his troops will not attack the capital while there is still a possibility that President Jean-Bertrand Aristide will resign.

"There's a peaceful negotiation where the opposition asked Aristide to leave and they are still negotiating, so we don't want to be the one breaking the peace talks," Guy Phillippe, the former police captain turned rebel leader, said yesterday from his headquarters in this northern port city. "We want peace to prevail, so we are going to see what the final decision is."

More US missionaries and foreign aid workers left the country yesterday amid fears that insurgents were about to attack the capital. Nonessential United Nations workers have been ordered to leave. Air Jamaica canceled all flights to Haiti.

Meanwhile, President Bush urged civilians not to flee the country as the Coast Guard intercepted a ship off Miami carrying 21 Haitians. Diplomats contemplated sending an international police force to slow the rebels.

"This force would be charged with assuring the restoration of public order and support actions in the field of the international community," Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin of France said in a statement.

Under international pressure, Aristide agreed to a power-sharing arrangement last weekend. But opposition forces rejected it on Tuesday, saying the only solution is for the president to resign.

"They know Aristide is the problem," Philippe added. "We are just waiting for the international community to make the decision that all the people want in Haiti."

The insurgents' steady encroachment on the capital from the north has put the talks between opposition political groups and the Aristide government in question. The insurgents' victories may have more to do with their aura than their military prowess.

Western diplomatic sources estimate that they do not number more than 300 men. But rebel leaders claim to have recruited scores of new members since the uprising began Feb. 5, despite their reputations in Haiti as brutal soldiers andpolicemen, drug traffickers, and death squad leaders.

Philippe is a former army lieutenant and police captain. The front's second in command, Gilberto Dragon, is a former military officer and police major. Both are cited on numerous government and diplomatic reports for their alleged involvement in drug trafficking and racketeering.

The group's strongman is Louis Jodel Chamblain, a former military general who later headed the FRAPH, which stands for Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, which specialists describe as a paramilitary group responsible for murdering thousands of Aristide followers in the early 1990s. The group's systematic use of rape and torture as weapons sparked the massive exodus of refugees that ultimately led to US military action.

"We're very concerned about the reappearance of these people," said Joanne Mariner, Deputy Director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch. "FRAPH was a paramilitary group that committed massacres, extrajudiciary executions, that helped keep repressive control over Haiti. Chamblain was essentially the operational leader, very much involved in the details, the actual abuses committed."

Chamblain's fight with Aristide is personal as well as institutional. Aristide is a former priest who became the country's first freely elected president in 1990. But after just seven months in office, the military ousted Aristide.

Chamblain said that pro-Aristide militias clubbed his pregnant wife to death in their home in the clashes that followed. He started FRAPH shortly afterward.

"It's very hard," Chamblain said of the memory of his wife's death. "It gives me more incentive to fight." Chamblain, who escaped to the Dominican Republic to avoid prosecution, was convicted in abstentia for killing a democratic activist, as well as for the massacre of about 25 people in the seaside slum of Raboteau in 1994.

In interviews with the Globe yesterday, Chamblain, Philippe, and Dragon all said they were fighting for the restitution of the military, which Aristide dissolved and replaced with a national police force after he was restored to power by US troops in 1994.

"The army was demobilized. Now the army has been remobilized and is a constitutional army now," said Chamblain. "Aristide has two choices: prison or execution by firing squad."

Jean Jean-Baptiste Tatoune, another key rebel leader in Gonaives, was another FRAPH member convicted in the Raboteau massacre. He was sentenced to life in prison, but escaped from jail in 2002 with 150 other inmates when gang members attacked the jail with a bulldozer.

Brian E. Concannon Jr., whose family founded the Boston-based Concannon Law Office, represented Raboteau victims in what became the largest human rights prosecution in Haiti's history. Several witnesses testified that Tatoune directed people and took part in the shootings.

"It's sick that they came back," Concannon said of the FRAPH rebels. "He's doing the exact same thing now that he was doing then . . . torturing and killing."

Even after Aristide returned to power, both Philippe and Dragon were part of the new police force. Philippe became the police chief of Cap-Haitien, Dragon the commissaire of an important area in Port-au-Prince. Throughout, they maintained their esprit de corps.

They and 10 other officers soon took on the name "Latinos," because they had trained together in Ecuador and spoke Spanish. Philippe fled to the Dominican Republic in 2000 after he and several other Latinos, including Dragon, were tied to a coup plot.

In 2001, Philippe allegedly acted again, organizing an attack on the National Palace after Aristide was reelected.

Although rebel leaders said no attack was imminent on the capital, episodes of chaos and panic were reported around Port-au-Prince. Looters struck two warehouses holding food and medical equipment reportedly worth nearly $500,000, and car dealership near the airport was torched.

In three weeks, the insurgents have overrun more than a dozen towns, forcing police to flee and analysts to wonder how much support Aristide has in the countryside. Celebration and looting have followed the insurgents' arrivals.

"The people are happy," Philippe told reporters as he listened from his balcony to a group of residents singing in the shantytowns below. "Here in Cap-Haitien we have more than 100 young people ready to die for the cause, ready to die for the country."

Dudley reported from Cap-Haitien and Port-au-Prince; Stockman from Washington.

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.



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Strongman Louis Jodel Chamblain from FRAPH murdered thousands
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