DAMN IT! Haiti, Part Seventy-Five...Apocalypse NOW.

Just when Haiti gets fully off of the media radar, attorney Tom Griffin, of the National Lawyers Guild, which recently sent a delegation to Haiti, says he saw hundreds of corpses being dumped by morgues in Haiti and describes bodies coming in with plastic bags over their heads and hands tied behind their backs, piles of corpses burning in fields and pigs eating their flesh...

LISTEN...here.

WATCH...here.

The Jamaica Observer is reporting that gang leaders and paramilitaries still control large swaths of northern Haiti, sometimes jailing suspected criminals, sometimes persecuting Aristide supporters. They patrol the streets, dispensing their own brand of justice, arresting and jailing alleged criminals while hoping to eventually become paid police officers or soldiers in a new Haitian army.

Louis Jodel Chamblain, convicted in absentia for the 1994 Raboteau massacre, spends much of his time in Cap Haitien. Most of his men, 20 to 35 years old, have a new long-term objective: to serve in a new version of the Haitian army. Aristide abolished the army in 1995 as a coup-prone machine responsible for human rights violations.

Where are Undersecretary Roger Noriega, or NSA Rice, now?

 

Working on it...

 

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Large coils of new barbed-wire run along the fence outside Canape Vert hospital, and an armed guard checks visitors for weapons. Hospital security is the biggest challenge for the International Committee for the Red Cross in Haiti, where patients have been shot or dragged away by armed gangs during and after the rebellion that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February.

"If tomorrow we have a similar crisis, will people respect the hospitals and see them as a place where the fighting should stop?" asked Felipe Donoso, head of the ICRC in Haiti.

"The answer at this point is no. There has been a terrible erosion of values here..."

 

Amnesty International is particularly concerned for the safety of judges, prosecutors, criminal investigators, victims, witnesses and human rights defenders involved in prosecutions relating to past human rights abuses. Judge Napela Saintil, the chief judge in the trial of those responsible for the 1994 Raboteau massacre, was severely beaten on 30 March by an armed man. The judge told Amnesty International delegates that his attacker had threatened him for the part he played in the conviction, in absentia, of Louis Jodel Chamblain, one of the participants in the massacre.

The delegation interviewed Haitians from across the political and social spectrum. All expressed a profound sense of insecurity and fear for their own safety from one or the other of the armed groups currently at large...

 

...Corpses continue to be found in the bay at Cap-Haitien, Haiti's second-largest city, according to the Associated Press. In addition, "dozens of bullet-ridden bodies have been brought to the morgue in the last month...."

 

...Most disturbing is how the United States handled the rebels and the security situation in Haiti following Aristide's departure. The United States was the first to know that Aristide had left the country, but the last to fill the power vacuum. This slow-footedness resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars of pillaging and looting in the capital. It also allowed the rebels to march unimpeded to Port-au-Prince, where rebel leader Guy Philippe declared, "I am the military chief. The country is in my hands." Philippe then embarked on a national "listening tour," during which his entourage killed at least two people they mistook for Aristide supporters...