Convicted Assassin Says He's `Operations Commander' in Haiti
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) -- Rebel leader Louis-Jodel Chamblain, a convicted killer and accused death squad leader, says he has no plans of fading into the shadows.
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled Haiti Sunday _ a departure that created a power vacuum and raised concern that gunmen who terrorized this Caribbean nation in decades past would return to influence.
"I'm commanding operations," Chamblain told The Associated Press Tuesday inside the old headquarters of Haiti's disbanded army, where rebels are setting up their headquarters.
Chief rebel leader Guy Philippe announced he was "military chief," ordering Aristide's police commanders to meet with him or he'd arrest them.
Philippe has not been linked to death squads, but rights groups charge he has a poor human rights record as a police official in the capital.
As corpses show on the streets and reports surface of revenge attacks against members of Aristide's government, human rights groups are pressing interim leaders to rethink their position with rebel leaders like Chamblain.
"These are the death squad people. These are the killers. These are the people I tried to prosecute in the 1990s," said human rights lawyer Michael Ratner, of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City.
Four bodies were spotted Monday on a dirt road, three shot in the head execution-style, hands tied behind their backs. Two more bodies were on the street Tuesday, and six with gunshot wounds were brought to the morgue during the day.
"We see it as a very disturbing portent for Haiti's future," said Joanne Mariner of Human Rights Watch. "There's a potential for a cycle of violence." She noted her organization has already received reports of reprisals against Aristide government officials, including the sacking of homes belonging to former Haitian Police Chief Jocelyn Pierre and government spokesman Mario Dupuy.
Among other rebels, the rights groups are also concerned about Butteur Metayer, a street gang leader who freely admits that he used to go around terrorizing Aristide's opponents, and Remissainthe Ravix, one-time leader of armed youth groups that organized bloody protests against Haiti's government in the 1980s.
Chamblain says he's never killed anyone and is against executions.
But he allegedly ran death squads in the last years of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier's dictatorship in the late 1980s and is more notorious for his role in the paramilitary Front for the Advancement of Progress of the Haitian People, or FRAPH. The acronym in French means "to thrash."
Terrorizing supporters of Aristide's Lavalas Family party, the group was blamed for thousands of killings before a U.S. intervention ended three years of military rule in 1994.
"I never committed murder. I am not a terrorist. I am not a drug dealer. I am not a criminal," Chamblain told the AP.
He was, however, convicted in absentia and sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1993 murder of Aristide financier Antoine Izmery, who was dragged from Mass in a church, made to kneel outside and shot.
A CIA intelligence memorandum implicated him in the 1993 assassination of Justice Minister Guy Malary.
A sergeant in the Haitian army, Chamblain left the army in the late 1980s and reappeared in 1993 as FRAPH's co-founder.