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Throughout 2004 and 2005, Haiti’s unelected de
facto authorities, working alongside foreign officials,
integrated at least 400 ex-army paramilitaries into the
country’s police force, secret U.S. Embassy cables reveal.
For a year and a half
following the ouster of Haiti’s elected government on Feb. 29,
2004, UN, OAS, and U.S. officials, in conjunction with post-coup
Haitian authorities, vetted the country’s police force –
officer by officer – integrating former soldiers with the goal of
both strengthening the force and providing an alternative “career
path” for paramilitaries.
Hundreds of police
considered loyal to President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's deposed
government were purged. Some were jailed and a few killed,
according to numerous sources interviewed.
At the same time, former
soldiers from the disbanded Haitian Armed Forces (FAdH), who
were assembled in a paramilitary “rebel” force which
worked with the country’s elite opposition to bring down
Aristide, were stationed – officially and unofficially – in
many towns across the country.
As part of this deployment, an
extrajudicial strike brigade was assembled in Pétion-Ville. It
carried out brutal raids (sometimes alongside police), often
several times a week, in the capital’s coup-resisting
neighborhoods, as documented in a November 2004 University of
Miami human rights study.
The secret U.S. dispatches
detailing the police force’s overhaul were part of 1,918
Haiti-related cables obtained by the media organization
WikiLeaks and provided to Haïti Liberté.
The cables show that UN and
U.S. officials saw the program as a useful way to disarm and
demobilize combatants, but the implications of providing
coup-making paramilitaries with government security jobs have
been hidden or ignored.
The cables also make clear
that the US officials – using “redlines” and “red
flags” – took on a leading role in the “reforms,”
minutely following the process of repopulating Haiti’s police.
Millions of dollars in
funding for the demobilization and integration of the FAdH were gathered — mainly through the UN and the U.S. — but officials
also looked to other governments for funding.
Immediately after the coup,
the integration process was carried out by officials of the
so-called Interim Government of Haiti (IGOH), under U.S., OAS
and UN supervision. Then, starting in November 2004, a
longer-term apparatus, the UN’s DDR (Disarmament,
Demobilization, and Reintegration) program, was set up. Part of
its duties included a continued integration of some of the
paramilitaries into the Haitian National Police (HNP).
The U.S. Embassy cables go
into detail about the integration of paramilitaries into the HNP
and other government agencies. One of the most revealing cables
is entitled “Haiti’s Northern Ex-Military Turn Over Weapons;
Some to Enter National Police.”
The Mar. 15, 2005 cable
provides an overview of a gathering two days earlier in Cap-Haïtien
attended by Haiti’s de facto Prime Minister Gérard
Latortue and the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative
to Haiti, Juan Gabriel Valdès. The officials oversaw a “symbolic
disarmament,” where more than “300 members of Haiti's
demobilized military in Cap-Haïtien” turned in a token seven
weapons and then boarded buses to the capital.
The UN and IGOH officials
parked the paramilitaries at Port-au-Prince’s Magistrates’
School, where many other ex-soldiers were being placed.
The cable describes how
previously high-level IGOH officials had made promises to the
ex-FAdH paramilitaries. Some “of the ex-soldiers in Cap-Haïtien
said they had been told by the PM's nephew and security advisor
Youri Latortue and the PM's political advisor Paul Magloire that
they would be admitted into the HNP,” explained the cable by
U.S. Ambassador James Foley. “This raised a red-flag for us
and the rest of the international community...”
But at the Mar. 13 meeting,
Gérard Latortue “made clear this was not the case,”
telling the paramilitaries “that integration into the HNP
would be a possibility for some, but they had to understand that
not everyone would make it into the police. Ex-soldiers
not qualified for the HNP could be hired into other public
administration positions (e.g., customs, border patrol, etc.),”
Foley wrote.
But the UN and IGOH
authorities wanted to keep some of the ex-military together as a
cohesive unit prepped for integration into the police, the cable
reveals. The officials handed the matter over to UNOPS, a wing
of the UN that focuses on project management and procurement.
Accordingly, “UNOPS has
been working to relocate both the Managing Office [for
Demobilized Military] and the approximately 80 individuals from
the Magistrate's School to a former military camp in the
Carrefour neighborhood outside of Port-au-Prince,” wrote
Foley. (In March 2011, the author visited an ex-FAdH-run
training camp in the Carrefour area.)
UN and U.S. officials
appear to have often focused on achieving symbolic successes
like the “demobilization” of paramilitary forces. “The
symbolism of the ex-military disarming and leaving Haiti's
second-largest city represents a significant breakthrough,”
Foley concluded in his Mar. 15 cable.
At the time, around 800
ex-military men were being housed in Port-au-Prince, with UN
help.
Of the 400 former soldiers
integrated into the police, about 200 came in 2004 from the 15th
graduating class of HNP cadets (called a “promotion” in
Haiti), and 200 from the 17th promotion in 2005, the
cables say.
The number 200 was no
coincidence. The Embassy had told the IGOH that “the USG
[U.S. Government] would not support more than 200 former
military being included in Promotion 17” because “the USG
was concerned that inclusion of ex-FADH in large numbers would
detract from ongoing police reform measures; they therefore had
to be closely scrutinized,” a May 6, 2005 cable explains.
This cable also reveals
Washington’s dominance of the police force’s reconstruction. In
a meeting, the Embassy told the HNP’s chief Léon Charles that “the
practice of allowing a class of people to receive special quotas
for class enrollment (as had happened with the ex-FADH) had to
end,” wrote Foley. Dutifully, “Charles agreed and stated
that the practice would end immediately.”
This did not mean that
ex-soldiers wouldn’t continue to be integrated, only that “future
recruitment drives would make no distinction with regard to the
former military, but would also not discriminate against anyone
for previous duty in the Haitian Armed Forces,” Charles
said, according to the cable.
An Apr. 5, 2005 cable
explains that the 16th promotion of 370 HNP cadets
included “none of [those who] had a history of ex-FADH
activity.”
In another Mar. 15,
2005 cable entitled “DG [Director General] Charles Update on
Ex-FADH in the Haitian National Police,” Foley outlined how
the process of integration was occurring with new HNP cadet
classes.
“OAS officials
charged with vetting police candidates reported approximately
400 ex-FADH candidates at the Police Academy on March 11
undergoing physical fitness testing,” his cable explained.
The men, who had just previously served in paramilitary squads
around the country, were vying for 200 slots in the HNP. The
cable explains that a number of such individuals had been hired
in prior months.
Police chief Charles,
stated “that the ex-FADH from the 15th class who were rushed
on to the streets last fall [of 2004] would return to class.”
It was clear that officials felt somewhat worried about the new
men they were bringing into the police force, so they decided
that the ex-FAdH cadets from the 17th promotion
would, upon graduation, “be deployed throughout Haiti on an
individual basis and not as a group.”
Charles added that,
among the 200 ex-FAdH in the 15th promotion, most “had
been assigned to small stations in Port-au-Prince,” adding
that, “although they were disciplined, they were older and
physically slower.”
OAS officials noted
that Haitian police officials who were now assisting the OAS in
its vetting process feared some of the former soldiers they were
interviewing: “HNP personnel assisting the OAS with the
vetting program were afraid to interview some of the ex-FADH
candidates out of concern they might be targeted if the panel
disqualified an applicant.”
The U.S. embassy
closely supervised how Haitian de facto officials
conducted the integration, worried about the impact of any
failures. Foley was pleased that Charles was holding ex-soldiers
to “the same requirements as civilians for entrance into the
HNP,” a policy resulting from “continuous pressure from
us,” he wrote in the Mar. 15 cable. But Foley worried about
“political pressures and decisions of PM [Gérard] Latortue,
Justice Minister [Bernard] Gousse, and others,” his cable
reported.
“We have raised
this issue with them on countless occasions, pointing out the
real danger the IGOH runs of losing international support for
assistance to the HNP if the process of integrating ex-FADH into
the police does not hew to the redlines we have laid down,”
Foley wrote.
Embassy officials,
along with the OAS mission, would “monitor the recruitment,
testing, and training process, including a review of the written
exam, test scores, and fitness results.”
Ambassador Foley
added that “the pressure to bring ex-FADH into the HNP
remains high.” He was likely referring to the calls made by
some of Haiti’s most powerful right-wing politicians and
businessmen, many having established relationships with the
paramilitaries back when they were soldiers.
Furthermore,
Chief Léon Charles was “worried that others in the IGOH had
made unrealistic promises to the ex-FADH about jobs in the HNP
in order to convince them to demobilize,” the ambassador
wrote.
Charles “fretted
that the Cap-Haïtien group set an example that others may
follow, and indicated the IGOH could have over 1,000 former
soldiers looking for jobs soon, including the 235 from Cap-Haïtien;
300 from Ouanaminthe; 200 from the Central Plateau; 150 from Les
Cayes; 100 from Arcahaie, and 80 from St. Marc.”
The second Mar.
15 cable concludes “that the USG was willing to contribute $3
million to the DDR process but could not release the funds until
the IGOH concluded an agreement with the UN on an acceptable DDR
strategy and program.” The U.S. Embassy, playing a dominant
role, was also clearly seeking to operate in accord with a
transnational policy network — U.S. officials had helped to
oversee other such integration processes in El Salvador and
Iraq, and the DDR program has been deployed in a number of other
countries where UN forces operate, such as Burundi, the Central
African Republic, Cote d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo,
Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, Afghanistan,
Nepal, and the Solomon Islands.
After Charles
provided information on the monitoring and processes through
which the ex-FAdH paramilitaries were integrated into the police
force, Ambassador Foley remarked in an Apr. 5, 2005 cable: “The
fleeting reply to requests for updates on human rights
investigations demonstrate the HNP's inability to perform
internal investigations.”
During their
first year in office, IGOH authorities appear to have received
far less oversight in their handling of ex-FADH integration into
the police. “Until now, the Interior Ministry and/or the
Managing Office [for Demobilized Soldiers] have been in charge
of identifying possible ex-FADH candidates for the HNP,”
Foley wrote in one of his Mar. 15 cables. Then he made clear
Washington’s oversight: “This needs to change, so that
ex-FADH candidates for the police come out of the
reintegration/counseling process that the UN (with U.S. support
through the International Organization for Migration) will
manage.”
While former
soldiers were being integrated into the HNP, hundreds of police
who had been loyal to Aristide’s government were fired, their
names and positions documented in a list put together by Guy
Edouard, a former officer with the Special Unit to Guard the
National Palace (USGPN). In a 2006 interview, Edouard explained
that some of these former police and Palace security officers
had been "hunted down" after the coup. Furthermore, with
US support, Youri Latortue, a former USGPN officer and Prime
Minister Latortue’s security and intelligence chief, had led
efforts to "get rid of the people he did not like,"
Edouard said.
Gun battles
continued to occur between the Haitian police and a handful of
gangs in the capital’s poorest slums well into 2005, and on
numerous occasions, police opened fire on peaceful anti-coup
demonstrations. “April 27 was the fourth occasion since
February where the HNP used deadly force,” explained a May
6, 2005 cable. The Embassy was vexed that “despite repeated
requests, we have yet to see any objective written reports from
the HNP that sufficiently articulate the grounds for using
deadly force. Equally disturbing are HNP first-hand reports from
the scene of these events. These are often confusing and
irrational and fail to meet minimum police reporting
requirements.”
The HNP,
however, was working with UN forces in conducting lethal raids.
Léon Charles acknowledged that UN troops had a “standard
practice” of putting more lightly armed HNP forces in front
of its units as they moved into Cité Soleil, and this “often
resulted in the HNP overreacting and prematurely resorting to
the use of deadly force,” the May 6 cable notes.
In a 2001 study
published in the academic journal Small Wars and Insurgencies,
researcher Eirin Mobekk explained how the U.S. worked to
integrate large numbers of former soldiers into the HNP as
Aristide, to thwart future coups, dissolved the FAdH in 1995.
Washington’s strategy was to hedge in Lavalas with the new
police force.
A decade later,
this policy was resurrected. Just as Washington recycled part of
the military force that carried out the 1991 coup, it recycled
part of the paramilitary force that carried out violence leading
up to the 2004 coup.
The WikiLeaked
cables reveal just how closely Washington and the UN oversaw the
formation of Haiti’s new police and signed off on the
integration of ex-FAdH paramilitaries who had for years prior
violently targeted Haiti’s popular classes and democratically
elected governments.
Jeb Sprague will publish a book on paramilitarism later this
year with Monthly Review Press. He has a blog at
jebsprague.blogspot.com and tweets as
Jebsprague. |
