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.