Power Shift In Haiti Puts Rights at Risk

Literacy programs, laws to raise living standards for the vast majority of Haitians who live in poverty, and judicial reforms that brought seminal prosecutions of military and paramilitary figure for past crimes are suddenly at risk. So, too, is Haiti's weak democracy as an appointed government struggles to guide the country until its next elections.

Many members of Aristide's Lavalas Party have fled the country in fear, retracing a route they followed after Aristide's first ouster by a military coup in 1991. U.S. troops returned him to power three years later, and a multinational force that includes 1,000 Marines are again standing in the middle of Haiti's political divide.

Thousands of prisoners have been set free across the country, including former military officers serving time for political killings and many others who say they were wrongly jailed by the Aristide government. Meanwhile, armed civilians from the wealthy hilltop neighborhoods of the capital patrol slums loyal to the president in luxury sport-utility vehicles. Although an exact count has yet to be performed, human rights workers say the number of reprisal killings carried out since Aristide's Feb. 29 resignation could be in the dozens.

"It's hard to think of a more abrupt and complete reversal of the progress we made," said Brian Concannon, a U.S. lawyer with the Bureau of International Lawyers who has helped Aristide's government prosecute groundbreaking human rights cases in recent years. "What has happened is disastrous."

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36889-2004Mar6.html