A Decade Later, Mystery Still Shrouds Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine’s Kidnapping

by Kim Ives, originally posted at Haïti Liberté

Aug. 12, 2017 marked the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of Haitian human rights activist Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, then 52, who had days earlier announced his candidacy for Senator under the banner of the Lavalas Family party of then-exiled former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Lovinsky had just finished a busy day of meetings and travel to Haiti’s countryside with an international human rights delegation, whose members he had dropped off at their guest-house further up the Delmas Road from his home behind the studios of Haitian National Television (TNH) on Delmas 33. Alone, he drove away from them in a jeep that night of Aug. 12, 2007 and was never seen again.

Hearing of the disappearance, Haïti Liberté journalist Kim Ives called Lovinsky’s cell phone about 36 hours later, on the afternoon of Aug. 14.

“At that time, it was not known that Lovinsky was kidnapped, just that he had disappeared,” reported Haïti Liberté on Oct. 21, 2007. “The man who answered the cell phone told Ives that Lovinsky had indeed been kidnapped. ‘I am responsible for this affair [the kidnapping],” the man told Ives. ‘Why have you kidnapped him?” Ives asked. ‘For money,” the kidnapper responded.

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Jocelerme Privert replaces Michel Martelly as Haiti’s President

by Marie Laurette Numa and Kim Ives. Originally posted at Haiti Liberté

Since the Feb. 6 agreement reached between outgoing President Joseph Michel Martelly and the presidents of the Parliament, Jocelerme Privert (Senate) and Cholzer Chancy (Chamber of Deputies), there was no doubt that the interim president would be Jocelerme Privert.

Jocelerme Privert inauguration

Both the 1987 Constitution and the “Group of Eight” (G8) opposition presidential candidates called for a judge of the Supreme Court (Court de Cassation) to fill the presidential vacuum. So the Organization of American States (OAS) – Washington’s “Ministry of Colonial Affairs” – in league with the outgoing Martelly clique and Haiti’s ruling class, had to find a formula with a veneer of legality and compromise. Moreover, they needed an interim president who could act as a fireman to pacify Haiti’s streets while at the same time neutralizing Haiti’s formal and informal opposition groups, particularly the G8.

Since Feb. 7, when Martelly handed the presidential sash to Privert (then President of the National Assembly), the theatre in the halls of power is just to blunt and bluff the revolutionary upsurge that has been boiling across Haiti and assure a smooth transfer of from one neo-colonial regime to another. The majority of parliamentarians came to their seats through the same violent, fraudulent elections of Aug. 9 and Oct. 25, 2015 that have sent the masses into the streets demanding their annulment. So the supposedly democratic “debate” in this rump Parliament is only to fool the naive, silence the recalcitrant, and open the door to haggling for ever-coveted ministerial posts.

What drama they were able to generate with a very tight first vote in the Parliament! In the Senate, Privert got 13 votes and Edgar Leblanc Fils, of the Struggling People’s Organization (OPL), 10. Among the Deputies, Privert got 45 votes and Leblanc got 46. There was one blank ballot and not one vote for Déjean Bélizaire, a former Senate president in 1991 before the coup d’état against former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

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In the News: Aristide supporters protest in Haiti

Originally posted in The Guardian

Thousands mark anniversary of ex-president’s ousting in 1991, with some calling for current president to resign.

Port-au-Prince protestRiot police in Haiti have broken up an anti-government demonstration by thousands of people to mark the anniversary of the ousting in 1991 of the former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

A handful of protesters responded by setting ablaze barricades that blocked a major thoroughfare through the heart of downtown Port-au-Prince.

Critics of the current president, Michel Martelly, gathered under a heavy police presence on Monday morning and marched through the capital’s shanties, all Aristide strongholds. Some demonstrators demanded that Martelly resign because of corruption allegations, while others protested over the absence of elections. Riot police fired teargas at the demonstrators after they left the approved route.

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In the News: After Aristide Testifies to Investigating Judge: Massive March Signals Lavalas Movement’s Resurrection

by Kim Ives. Originally posted at Haiti Liberté

Well over 15,000 people poured out from all corners of Haiti’s capital to march alongside the cortege of cars that carried former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide back to his home in Tabarre from the Port-au-Prince courthouse he visited on May 8.

Fanmi Lavalas Thousands more massed along sidewalks and on rooftops to cheer the procession on, waving flags and wearing small photos of Aristide in their hair, pinned to their clothing, or stuck in their hats.

Led by Fanmi Lavalas party coordinator Maryse Narcisse through a gauntlet of jostling journalists, Aristide had entered the courthouse (the former Belle Époque Hotel) at exactly 9:00 a.m., the time of his appointment to testify before Investigating Judge Ivickel Dabrésil. Aristide had waited with Narcisse in a car outside the court’s backdoor for about 45 minutes. It was only the second time that Aristide had left his home (and the first time publicly) since returning to Haiti on Mar. 18, 2011 from a seven-year exile in Africa following the Feb. 29, 2004 Washington-backed coup d’état which cut short his second government.

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In the News: New Book Exposes Violent Role Of Paramilitaries In Haiti

by Judith Scherr. Originally published by Countercurrents.org

Haiti’s brutal army was disbanded in 1995, yet armed and uniformed paramilitaries, with no government affiliation, occupy former army bases today.

President Michel Martelly, who has promised to restore the army, has not called on police or U.N. troops to dislodge these ad-hoc soldiers.

Given the army’s history of violent opposition to democracy, Martelly’s plan to renew the army “can only lead to more suffering”, says Jeb Sprague in his forthcoming book Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti, to be released mid August by Monthly Review Press.

The role of Haiti’s military and paramilitary forces has received too little academic and media attention, says Sprague, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He hopes his book will help to fill that gap.

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The Other Aristide

Yesterday was Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s birthday and, as we’ve already blogged, there was a celebration in Haiti. Aristide himself didn’t attend, but his wife, Mildred Aristide, made a few remarks at the event.

So that lead me on a bit of a search to see if I could find some good Creative Commons images of Mildred Aristide. I still haven’t found that, but I did stumble upon some interesting quotations which are from a Democracy Now! interview with the former First Lady. At one point of the interview, she talks about the perception of dwelling on the past:

You know, when we were in Central Africa, someone gave us a book on Barthélemy Boganda, who was the founder of Central Africa, the precursor of their independence, because he ultimately — he died before Central Africa gained its independence from France. And there was a line in the book that made me freeze. When they were criticizing Boganda for being critical still of the relations between colonial France and Central Africa, and they kept telling him, “You’re talking about the past,” and that it was a new set of relations between the colonizer and the colony, and Boganda said, “I would stop talking about the past, if it weren’t so present.”

Later, she talks about the Ugandan economist and lawyer, Dani Nabudere:
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