Numerous Haitian human-rights violators have resided in the United States in recent years, unmolested by the authorities. Their hands and souls are bloody from carrying out the repression of the Duvalier dynasty, or the overthrow of the democratically elected Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991, or the return to repression after the coup. Among their numbers are:

Luckner Cambronne, Haitis minister of the interior and defense under Francois Papa Doc Duvalier and adviser to his son and successor, Jean Claude Baby Doc Duvalier.

Army Lt. Col. Paul Samuel Jeremie. After Baby Doc was forced to abdicate in 1986, Jeremie was convicted of torturing Duvalier opponents and sentenced to 15 years in prison. He escaped in 1988.

General Prosper Avril, another Haitian dictator, responsible for the torture of opposition activists, whom he then displayed, bloodied, on television. Forced out by angry mobs in 1990, he was flown to Florida by the US government, where he might have lived happily ever after except that some of his former torture victims brought suit against him. At one point in the process, he failed to make a court appearance and thus defaulted. He fled to several countries trying to find haven. Meanwhile, in 1994, a US federal judge awarded $41 million to six Haitians living in the US.

During the period of Aristides exile, 1991-94, Colonel Carl Dorelien oversaw a 7,000-man force whose well-documented cam-paign of butchery included murder, rape, kidnapping and torture, leading to the deaths of some 5,000 Haitian civilians. The good colonel has found a home in Florida as well.

We also have leading Haitian death-squad leader Emmanuel Constant, former head of FRAPH, the paramilitary group of thugs which spread deep fear amongst the Haitian people with its regular murders, torture, public beatings, arson raids on poor neighborhoods and mutilation by machete in the aftermath of the coup against Aristide. He was on the CIA payroll in Haiti and now lives in New York. The State Department refused a Haitian extradition request for Constant and stopped his deportation back to that country. Constant apparently knows of a lot of skeletons in the American closet.

Other Haitians of this ilk residing in the United States include Major General Jean-Claude Duperval, and Ernst Prudhomme, a former high-ranking member of the Bureau du Information et Coordination, a notoriously violent propaganda unit.

Armando Fernandez Larios, a member of a Chilean military squad responsible for the torture and execution of at least 72 political prisoners in the month following the 1973 coup, is now residing in the United States. Fernandez has publicly acknowledged his service as a member of the military squad, as well as his role as an agent of Chiles notorious secret police, the DINA, during the Pinochet regime. He struck a plea bargain with US government prosecutors, pleading guilty to being an accessory after the fact in the DINA-sponsored 1976 Washington, DC bombing murder of former Chilean dissident official Orlando Letelier. The Chilean government report-edly would like Fernandez

extradited from the US, but his lawyer in Miami has said that the 1987 plea-agreement between his client and the Department of Justice stipulated that Fernandez would never be returned to Chile. Department of Justice officials have declined to comment on the degree of Fernandezs protection under the terms of the agreement, which is under court seal. 6

Michael Townley of Chile played an even more significant role in the Letelier assassination. He served some time in a US prison and is now in the Federal Witness Protection Program. So if you see him, you dont know him.

Argentine admiral Jorge Enrico, who was associated with the Escuela Mecanica in Buenos Aires, the infamous torture center of the Dirty War period (1976-83), now freely enjoys Hawaii when he wishes.

At least two former members of the Honduran armys Battalion 316 (see Torture chapter), a CIA-trained intelligence unit that murdered hundreds of suspected leftists in the 1980s, are also known to be living the good life in South Florida.

Kebassa Negawa of Ethiopia was a defendant in an Atlanta case for torture. When he lost the case and his wages began to be garnished, he disappeared.

Also a resident is Sintong Panjaitan, an Indonesian general responsible for the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre in East Timor that took hundreds of lives.

At Washingtons insistence, Thiounn Prasith was the Cambodian envoy to the United Nations for Pol Pots Khmer Rouge from 1979 to 1993, even though the Khmer Rouge were ousted from power in 1979. Prasith was a leading apologist for Pol Pots horrendous crimes and played a major role in their cover up. (See Pol Pot chapter.) He resides in peace and comfort in Mount Vernon, New York.7

General Mansour Moharari, an Iranian who was in charge of prisons under the Shah, and thus is no stranger to the practice of torture, has lived in the US for many years despite a price being put on his head by the Iranian mullahs.

Twenty former South Vietnamese officers who have admitted to committing torture and other human-rights violations during the Vietnam War are residing legally in California.8

Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, numerous other Vietnamese in California carried out a violent terrorist campaign against their countrymen who were deemed not sufficiently anti-communist, sometimes merely for calling for resumption of contacts with Hanoi; others were attacked simply for questioning the terrorists actions. Under names such as Anti-Communist Viets Organization and Vietnamese Organization to Exterminate Communists and Restore the Nation , on hundreds of occasions they assaulted and murdered, burned down businesses and vehicles, forced Vietnamese newspapers to cease publishing, issued death threats, engaged in extortion and many other aspects of organized crime... all with virtual impunity, even with numerous

witnesses to some murders. In the few cases where arrests were made, suspects were generally released or acquitted; the few who were convicted had their wrists slapped.9 This clear pattern of law-enforcement neglect suggests some kind of understanding with higher-ups in Washington. If there was indeed a see-no-evil federal policy, the most likely explanation would be the powerful, lingering antipathy toward any Vietnamese with a presumed leaning toward Hanoi.

Additionally, a number of persons from the former Yugoslavia who have been accused of war crimes by their fellow nationals are also living in the US, although in most cases it appears to be due to American bureaucratic failings, rather than a knowing offering of haven to the henchmen of former allies.

The above doesnt include all the dictators cum terrorists whom the United States was kind enough to fly to safe havens in third countries (enabling them to be reunited with their bank accounts), such as those from Haiti who are still alive: Gen. Raoul Cedras and President Jean-Claude Baby Doc Duvalier; as well as the nefarious police chief Joseph Michel Francois.

In 1998 President Clinton went before the United Nations to speak about terrorism. What are our global obligations? he asked. To give terrorists no support, no sanctuary. 10

Extradite or prosecute

The system of international criminal prosecution covering genocide, terrorism, war crimes and torture makes all governments responsible for the criminal prosecution of offenders. Under this basic principle of universal enforcement, countries where alleged offenders are found are obligated either to extradite them for prosecution by a more directly affected government (e.g., the country where the offenses were committed, or the country of citizenship of the victims or the abusers), or to initiate prosecution themselves. The Pinochet case in the UK was begun in 1998 as an example of this.

The US government strongly supports this principle of extradite or prosecute in theory, and in fact invoked it a few years ago in a proceeding before the International Court of Justice as the basis for seeking extradition from Libya of two men alleged to be responsible for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103. The US government also strongly supports the application of this principle to those indicted for war crimes by the International War Crimes Tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. One of those indicted as a war criminal by the Rwanda tribunal was discovered in Texas, arrested, and bound over for criminal extradition by a federal court in that state.11

Yet, when it comes to the relics of the Cold War being given haven in the US, as listed above, Washington chooses to neither prosecute nor extradite, although Cuba, for one, has asked for the extradition of a number of individuals.

Zero tolerance for other havens