Despot's return to ravaged country has upset many survivors of his regime
BY JACQUI GODDARD, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH JANUARY 24, 2011 2:04 AM
It was known to some as Haiti's Auschwitz, a camp where innocent hordes met with death at the hands of a regime determined to cleanse the country of dissenters and democratic thinkers.
Hidden inside a slum, where residents now face their own daily battles for survival, crumbling walls and concrete slabs are all that remain of Fort Dimanche, where tens of thousands were tortured and killed under the successive dictatorships of Francois Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude, from 1957 to 1986.
The stories of what happened at this notorious prison are horrific -- beatings and savage abuse, blood running through cells, corpses hauled into mass graves.
"This was the Duvaliers' torture chamber. This was their own hell they created," said Robert Duval, one of the few who made it out alive.
Now Haitians are haunted by more than just memories. Holed up in a villa overlooking the sprawl and suffering of Port au Prince is Jean-Claude Duvalier, 59, one of the 20th-century's most infamous despots.
Sitting stiffly at a wooden table, his speech seemingly slightly impeded, he appeared unable to move his neck and shoulders.
His words, read from a sheet of paper, were similarly weak for a leader who claimed to be here to promote reconciliation. There was no outright apology for his crimes -- just a vague nod to the past, and a rented crowd to cheer him on.
"I take this opportunity to express once again my deep sorrow to those of my fellow countrymen who say, rightly, that they were victims under my government," he said late on Friday in his first public pronouncement since he arrived.
But speaking no more of those victims, he offered "sympathies to my millions of supporter s who, after my voluntary departure from Haiti in 1986 to avoid a bloodbath and to allow a swift resolution to the political crisis, were left to themselves".
He said thousands of his own supporters were "assassinated, suffocated, interrogated, subjected to tire necklaces burnings; their houses, their possessions were pillaged, uprooted and torched" after he fled to France.
He was back, he said, to help rebuild his earthquake-scarred, politically-divided country, though he did not specify how.
Rented crowd
He shuffled off to wave grandly from a terrace to a throng who waved photographs of him and broke into song: "If Duvalier is back, there will be no hunger."
He said he was "impressed by the welcome I have received, especially from the crowd of young people who don't know me." But their attendance at the villa was engineered. "We were paid 10 Haitian dollars ($1.25) to show up," said one.
The rented mansion is far removed from the realities that Duvalier claims he has returned to Haiti to help fix.
From this wealthy mountainside neighbourhood of Montagne Noire, the elite gaze down upon the grey slums and camps that are home to millions.
"It's not just a house, it's a town in there -- in fact, a small country," said one of the few passersby.
The shocking reappearance of the despot known as Baby Doc, who ruled for 15 years after inheriting the leadership in 1971 from his late father, Papa Doc, has put another surreal kink in Haiti's bizarre and beleaguered landscape, clouding the road to recovery after decades of political chaos, bloodshed, corruption, last year's earthquake, last November's fraudulent elections and an ongoing cholera epidemic.
Suspicions abound as to Duvalier's true motivation.
Corruption charges
The bulk of the fortune that he had upon leaving Haiti in 1986 is said to have gone -- initially on high living but latterly on an expensive divorce -- and he is back just as the international community is topping up the coffers with billions in earthquake aid.
According to reports he needed to show Swiss authorities that he was not wanted on criminal charges in his homeland in order to unlock access to $5.7 million in Swiss bank accounts.
If so, his return backfired when he was met with corruption charges for looting Haiti's treasury during his rule and a lawsuit for crimes against humanity.
His presence has sent chills through those who survived his repression.
Duval, 57, can remember the screams that filled Fort Dimanche during the 17 months that he was incarcerated without charge in the mid-1970s.
Estimates of the number killed under the Duvaliers' rule start at 30,000. Duval was one of just 106 prisoners released alive from the prison in 1977.
"Duvalier should be in prison himself right now. I was mad that he came back, angry, shocked. He is a worthless person," he said, picking his way through the ruins of the walls that once held him.
As a child, he remembers watching live executions on television, children being made to go to the national stadium to watch opposition activists shot by a firing squad, and of how they were indoctrinated into making the sign of the cross while giving thanks to "the Father, the Son, and Duvalier."
He remembers seeing neighbours hauled off at gunpoint to a place from which they never returned.
He remembers the political prisoner who was strapped to a chair at the roadside and burned.
He was never told why he was arrested at the age of 22, other than that he "probably rubbed people up the wrong way" with pro-democracy talk.
"I found myself in a four metre by 4.25 metre cell with 40 other men, day in, day out, never seeing the sun. People died, two or three every day. Sometimes we kept the body in the cell to get the extra ration of food until the body would start smelling too bad. Then we'd call, 'Death' and they'd take the body away in a wheelbarrow," he said.
Fights over rations
Other times, prisoners fought over the food ration -- usually just a bit of rice. At one point Duval said, his weight dropped to 99 pounds.
Prisoners slept curled on tiny mats made of banana leaves.
"That was your bed, but it was also your coffin," said Duval.
"Some people died because they became crazy. In Fort Dimanche, you had to be very sharp mentally to survive. You would say to yourself that surviving is a victory against the regime."
Others in Haiti had a different view of the former regime. Roger Marbial, 59, a former member of the Tonton Macoute, the sinister paramilitary force set up by Papa Doc, claimed that he never harmed a fly, but added: "Even if I had, I would not say so."
He insisted that the volunteer informants were there simply "to watch Duvalier's back" and that a small minority gave it a bad name. Duvalier, he claimed somewhat naively, was a victim, not a persecutor.
'False nostalgia'
"He was just 19 when he became president -- it was
others around him who did the bad stuff. He wasn't the one who had the real power," he said.
The chances of Duvalier returning to power are remote, but there is concern over the ignorance with which some people weigh up his legacy and the potential for instability that their sympathy for him could cause.
"Particularly the younger generations, they have no knowledge of what life was really like under Duvalier, they say times were good when they weren't. They have this false nostalgia," said Pierre Esperance, the director of Haiti's National Network for the Defence of Human Rights.
A slum community has grown up over the ruins of Fort Dimanche, its residents largely oblivious to the painful history of the site.
Duval traced the perimeter of what used to be a cell, now just a line of bricks, as Dera Denord, 48, watched from the shack that served as his home.
"I know this was Fort Dimanche and that when people arrived here they never came out again. Duvalier was a mean guy, that's accepted. But under him, things were cheaper. Now life is harder," said Denord, as Duval shook his head in despair. "I'm happy that Duvalier's here. I think he would be good for Haiti."
Duval clenched his fists to his chest, as if in pain. "When Baby Doc came back, I had the same feeling I had in the prison, like my chest closing in on me," he said. "It's painful. Baby Doc is back and I don't want him here. I don't forgive. I don't forget."
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