Haiti ‘more repressive’

Press, 14 March 1985, Page 6

Haiti ‘more repressive’

NZPA-AFP Paris Torture and “total disregard” of constitutional rights are the lot of Haitians under the 28-year rule of the Duvalier family, Amnesty International alleges. The world human rights organisation says in a report that shortly after the President, Mr Jean-Claude Duvalier, publicly ordered an end to torture and arbitrary arrest in the Caribbean republic in March last year, two priests were arrested for translating his orders from the official French into Creole, the language understood by ordinary Haitians. The Government has since become even more repressive, formally banning all political parties and “unauthorised” publications, and arresting and torturing scores of people, including journalists, priests, agronomists, and church ?iand

community workers, Amnesty says. Political prisoners are frequently kept in “longterm incommunicado detention,” the report says, citing the case of a soldier, Eric

Alcindor, who spent two years in solitary confinement after being arrested in possession of an Opposition newspaper.

Another, Bienvenue Theodore, a sergeant, is reportedly still being held without charges six years after his arrest. He was denounced by one of his men, whom he had rebuked for saying all strikers in a labour dispute should be shot.

Prison conditions are severe, Amnesty says.

It quotes several former detainees who said that they had been kept in a 3.6 metres by 3.6 metres cell with 40-50 other prisoners at the main prison in the capital, Port au Prince.

The report notes that Sylvio Claude, founder and leader of the only internal Opposition grouping, the small Christian Democratic spent most of the last years either in

prison, unaer house arrest or, as at present, in hiding. Amnesty said that the 9000-strong “National Security Volunteers,” or “Tontons Macoutes” — famed as the main instrument of repression under the regime of the President’s late father, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier — continue in that role, extorting money and property and brutalising the peasantry.

The indiscriminate mass arrests and executions of the “Papa Doc” era and under his son about 1977 have been succeeded by “more selective” crackdowns, the report says. The latest was November, when about 30 people, mostly agronomists and other rural experts, were arrested. The Government said later that it had foiled a “Marxist-Leninist plot” to assassinate Mr Duvalier, whose official title is Presi-dent-for-Life.