| Remembering a Champion of the Poor in Haiti |
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| Written by Kevin Pina |
| Monday, 31 August 2009 04:12 |
 Father Jean-Marie Vincent (Photo courtesy of HIP) Haiti's poor remembered the anniversary of the assassination
of Father Jean-Marie Vincent on August 28 in small solemn ceremonies at
his grave site in Port au Prince and in the small town of Jean Rabel in northwest
Haiti where he founded a peasant rights organization Tet Kole Ti Peyizan. They
remembered him for challenging Haiti's wealthy elite by starting literacy
projects and planning an alternative bank dedicated to the poor. They
remembered his courage and the beatings he took at the hands of dictators for
his incessant call that Haiti's dispossessed had every right to take control of
the destiny of the nation. While members of Haiti's moneyed class looked down
upon the poor illiterate souls they ruled through corruption and violence,
Vincent made it clear the poor were not victims and they harbored a
strength and wisdom the rich would never allow themselves to
understand. Vincent once said,
"While the rich are concerned with going to heaven the poor are concerned with
feeding themselves. We must tend to the needs of the poor to feed themselves
before we can talk about the spiritual salvation of those who can already eat."
In the other Haiti, the anniversary of Vincent's
assassination was overshadowed by all the hoopla of rehabilitating Reagan's
trickle-down economic theory in the form of bringing Haiti back into the camp
of the neoliberal-sweatshop development model. The media-hype of a "new Haiti"
being born from the promise of new sweatshops and a recent attempt to raise the
minimum wage to a paltry $3.73 per day from a scandalous $1.75 per day, once
again served to hide the simmering reality of the poor lurking beneath the
surface in this island nation of 9 million inhabitants.
Father Jean-Marie Vincent fought against what has now become
the reality of the US/UN sweatshop development model being imposed upon Haiti
today. This solution to Haiti's economic woes rewards the predatory and
monopolistic wealthy elite at the expense of the masses of the poor in Haiti
and has long been referred to as the "Plan Lanmò," or the Death Plan. Father
Jean-Marie Vincent opposed this development model when Ronald Reagan first
foisted it upon the Haitian masses in the 1980s when it was called the Caribbean
Basin Initiative (CBI), and he would have certainly been vocal in opposing its
recycling today.
Fifteen years ago, Father Jean-Marie Vincent was felled in a
hail of bullets in front of his rectory at Montfortain in the Port au Prince
neighborhood of Christ-Roi. Witnesses described two vehicles carrying members
of Haiti's dreaded Anti-Gang Unit of the Haitian army as those who opened fire on his
vehicle. He was reportedly still alive as the Haitian army purposely led the
ambulance slowly to the hospital allowing him to bleed to death before he could
reach doctors. His death was slow and torturous only fitting to the profile of
the accused such as Capt. Jackson Joanis, Lt. Youri Latortue, and Sgt. Jodel
Chamblain all leading members of the Anti-Gang Unit of the Haitian army at the
time of his assassination in 1994.
Joanis and Chamblain were judged guilty in absentia in 1995
for the assassination of Antoine Izmery, an Aristide supporter and businessman
condemned by his own class as a traitor. Izmery and Vincent were counted among
the victims of the Cedras regime that the US State Department once described as
"one of the world's worst human rights violators." Joanis and Chamblain were
ultimately released under the Latortue regime installed by the Bush
administration in 2004 after a sham trial that Amnesty International called an
"insult to justice." They were
also absolved in the murder of Father Jean-Marie Vincent.
Youri Latortue, a blood relative and security chief for the
US-installed Prime Minister Gerard Latortue in 2004, is now the powerful head
of the Haitian parliament's Justice and Security Commission. He was also
accused of complicity in Vincent's assassination. According to a report released by a delegation of the Center
for the Study of Human Rights in 2004, "A former
high-ranking police official from the USGPN (palace security), Edouard
Guerriere...claims that Youri Latortue participated in the 1994 murder of
catholic priest Jean-Marie Vincent (as did eyewitnesses in 1995), and that he
assisted in the 1993 murder of democracy activist Antoine Izmery. From 1991 to
1993, Latortue was an officer in FADH's [Haitian army] Anti-Gang Unit, the
army's most notorious unit for human rights violations."
The administration of former
president Bill Clinton, who current serves as UN Special Envoy to Haiti while
former First Lady Hillary Clinton is Secretary of State for the Obama
administration, instructed the CIA and the State Department to conduct an
independent investigation into the assassination of Father Jean-Marie Vincent
and supporters of president Aristide in 1994. Leon Panetta, who currently heads
the CIA was Clinton's Chief of Staff at the time the investigation was
commissioned by the Office of the President. Their spokesman at the time, Roger
Shattuck, assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian
affairs referred to their conclusions in a press conference on Sept. 13, 1994
when he stated unequivocally, "The gunman who killed Father Jean-Marie Vincent,
an Aristide ally, on August 28 was connected to the [Cedras] regime." Yet none
of the details of the investigation have ever been made public to this day.
In the end, what is clear is that
UN Special Envoy to Haiti Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and
CIA chief Leon Panetta now hold the power under the Obama administration to
provide the truth behind the assassination of Father Jean-Marie Vincent. They
are now in a position to demand that the files of the CIA and the State
Department be re-opened. Unfortunately, whether they have the political will to
do so may be like much everything else going on in Haiti today. Justice is
inconvenient in their "new Haiti" if it gets in the way of "the country moving
forward." Unfortunately for them, history has proven that it is a foundation of
sand to build a new future based on lies and impunity in a country like Haiti
whose people have shown time and time again they have a long memory.
While providing the truth about
Vincent's assassination may be inconvenient for those who believe they
currently hold the destiny of Haiti in their hands, they should understand more
than others that the poor will never forget the legacy of Father Jean-Marie
Vincent. They will always remember his selfless example of courage and
expressions of love for them because he lived, worked and died in their Haiti. Kevin Pina is a journalist and filmmaker who has been covering events in Haiti since 1991. Pina is also the Founding Editor of the Haiti Information Project(HIP), an alternative news agency based in Port au Prince. |
