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For three years, Washington, Paris and Ottawa working with Haiti’s ruling elite, former soldiers and death-squad leaders carried out a destabilization campaign culminating in the February 29, 2004 kidnapping and overthrow of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
To quell resistance to the coup, armies from the U.S., France, Canada and the United Nations have occupied Haiti and carried out or aided massacres of thousands of Haitian citizens, including women, children and infants. Hundreds more have been jailed without trial.
It is time that the criminals be judged.
A coalition of Haiti solidarity groups, supported by the Latin America Solidarity Coalition, have banded together to organize an International Tribunal on Haiti, which will hold its first session on September 23, 2005 from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. at George Washington University in Washington, DC, the evening before the major September 24th anti-war march.
What Will the International
Tribunal on Haiti Do?
At the Tribunal’s opening session, prosecutors will present a detailed background of the coup and preliminary indictments. The background will cover the pre-coup period when the National Endowment for Democracy and the International Republican Institute were training Tonton Macoutes and paramilitary thugs whose violence set the scene for Aristide’s overthrow. The actions of the U.S., French and Canadian governments to destabilize the Aristide government will be exposed.
The Tribunal will also expose, through eye-witness and expert testimony, the truth about the daily slaughter being carried out by masked policemen with the criminal complicity, and increasingly participation, of the U.N. occupation force. (Since June, the U.N. is in charge of the Haitian police.) In the end, the Tribunal will forward individual indictments for those directly responsible for the massacres and crimes against humanity to the new International Criminal Court in The Hague.The first session of the International Tribunal on Haiti will begin a seven-month campaign to expose the human rights violations by the Brazilian-led “peacekeeping force” and the de facto government put in place by the Bush administration.
A blue-ribbon Commission of Inquiry, led by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, will be announced at the Sept. 23 session of the Tribunal. A Commission delegation will travel to Haiti as early as October to gather eye-witness testimony and to determine what commanders and officials were responsible for which massacres and other crimes.
Buses from New York City
Round-trip bus fare from New York and New Jersey to the Tribunal is only $10. Buses will be leaving at 12 noon from the following locations:
- Brooklyn at GrandArmyPlaza (Flatbush & Eastern Parkway)
- Queens at Duch Travel, Linden Boulevard & 221st Street
- Irvington, NJ at Nye Avenue , corner Springfield & Stuyvesant
Tickets, flyers or more info: A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition (212) 533-0417, Fanm Lakay (718) 512-5173, Haïti Progrès (718) 434-8100, InternationalActionCenter (212) 633-6646, KAKOLA (718) 629-4050, Nicaragua Network (202) 544-9355
Tickets also available at: (Brooklyn) Diaspo Television (718) 576-2667, Radio Lakay (718) 469-4671, Radio Pa Nou (718) 940-3861 (Queens) Duch Travel (718) 527-8594 (Irvington, NJ) Marché Lacaille (973) 374-9697
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We Need Your Help Immediately
This will be a costly campaign. We need your help. Travel expenses for the Commission of Inquiry alone will run over $5,000. Renting auditoriums for the public sessions of the Tribunal and travel costs for Haitian witnesses will cost at least that much. We must also subsidize buses about $10,000 to bring the Haitian community from the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area to attend the opening session.
Organizers and lawyers are contributing countless hours of their time to this project. But there are many unavoidable costs.
Please give generously. Your tax-deductible check will concretely help to save the lives of mothers, fathers and children who are daily being killed.
Make your check out to: International Tribunal on Haiti/CISPES Education Fund and send it to P.O. Box 8560, NY, NY10116 .
The best and fastest way for us to receive funds is when you give a tax-deductible contribution over the Internet with any major credit card. Go to the secure server of the Nicaragua Network at www.nicanet.org/donate_afgj.htm. Just indicate that your gift is for the International Tribunal on Haiti and then the amount you’d like to give. Follow the prompts to finalize your tax-deductible donation.