Members of Tt Ansanm hid in the brush - some survived, while others were found and slaughtered by the armed brigades. Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (ICHR), Annual Report of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, 1990-1991, Organization of American States (OAS), General Secretariat, Washington, D.C., 1991. A 1922 internal US army report recognized and justified the execution of women and children, presenting them as auxiliaries of the Cacos (in Gaillard, 1983: 259). The massacre contributed to the emergence a week later of the September 1988 Haitian coup d'tat against the Henri Namphy regime, which brought to power Prosper Avril. [14] In 1971, President Duvalier died[15] and his widow Simone, and son Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier ordered Cambronne into exile. On April 5, 500 soldiers and macoutes arrived in the area and started the killing. Reconpilacin y notas, Santo Domingo: Editora Taller, 1985. Featured peformers: Dave Knowles (alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, flute, clarinet, vocals), Chris Gavin (bass guitar, acoustic guitar, electric guitar), Paul French (organ, electric . Although this killing was not politically motivated, it provoked great concern since it was the first large-scale execution since the return to democracy and suggested that the armys violent tactics against the poor had not ended, even though Aristide had officially abolished it. -. With nearly a half a million informants alone working for the Securitate, every facet of Romanian life was under surveillance, and even the most banal of criticism towards the regime could be met with severe punishment. Haiti Face the Future, EPICA, Washington, DC, 1994. This particular name was earned by one of his endeavors of extorting blood plasma from locals for sale. [citation needed] After Duvalier's death, he was ordered into exile by Duvalier's widow Simone, and son, Baby Doc Duvalier. Literature. Wilentz, A., The Rainy Season. The Roots of Haitian Vodou". Les Cent jours de Rosalvo Bobo ou une mise mort politique, Presses Nationales, Port-au-Prince, 1973. Tontons Macoutes stoned and burned people alive. Gaillard, Roger, Les Blancs dbarquent, III. They were killed in their cells by firing squads. With Andrea Fantauzzi, Aimee Zannoni, Esteban Dager, Edem Atsu-Swanzy. [22] They appeared in force again at polls in 1964, when Duvalier held a constitutional referendum that declared him president for life. This massacre occurred a few days after Lieutenant-General Namphy, one of the leaders of the ruling junta at the time, visited the area and publicly supported the Lucas family and their rights to the land they claimed. Her next novel, Claire of the Sea Light, will be published in August 2013. The most notable action of the Oprichniki, was the massacre at Novgorod where 1,500 nobles and anywhere from three to 30,000 thousand others were executed, reducing Novgorod to a shell of a city. Sign-up for our free weekly e-mail newsletter. They were believed to have been abducted and killed by the MVSN, who were called the "Tontons Macoutes" as a result. Laraque, Paul and Frank, Hati, la lutte et lespoir, Montreal, CIDIHCA, 2003. Grenades and bombs exploded in the daytime and gunfire crackled at night, resulting in what Bernard Diederich, co-author (with Al Burt) of Papa Doc and the Tonton Macoutes, recently called "a day of mayhem, genocide! The total number of victims remains unknown. 3, pp. The most notorious of the camps, Tuol Sleng, is said to have held up to 20,000 prisoners between 1976 and 1978; only seven of those prisoners are known to have survived the camp. _ * (Gaillard, 1983: 40-42, 152 and 282; Gaillard, 1981: 205-213). According to oral testimony gathered by historian Roger Gaillard (1981b, 1983), these included summary executions, rapes, setting houses on fire after gathering their inhabitants inside them, lynchings, and torching civilians alive; one local public figure was buried alive. Day group, London and Bedford Barcode and Other Identifiers Cattle was killed or taken away by looting soldiers. Tonton Macoute | Facts, Information, and Mythology Tonton Macoute "Uncle Gunnysack." A bogeyman of Haitian Creole folklore. Rural people were crushed.". There should be no statute of limitations for judgment on that. Others will decide not to commemorate at all. After the July 1958 Haitian coup d'tat attempt against President Franois Duvalier, he purged the army and law enforcement agencies in Haiti and executed numerous officers as he perceived them as a threat to his regime. Lemoine, Patrick, Fort-Dimanche, Fort-la-Mort, CIDIHCA, 1996. Following Ceausescus removal from power in 1989, the Securitate survived two more years, until it was disbanded and reorganized by Romanian Parliament. (Sleeve) 1971 RCA Limited. Political opponents often disappeared overnight, or were sometimes attacked in broad daylight. Alongside the SS, the Gestapo, under Himmler, played a major role in carrying out the Final Solution, from the liquidation of the Ghettos to transportation of prisoners to the concentration camps. Several families were entirely exterminated. Only one body was recovered and the others may have been disappeared. The occupants of the house were members of a pro-democracy group. As with the notorious Lasalin massacre on Nov. 13, 2018 - perpetrated by G9 leader Cherizier along with paramilitary affiliates and police officers of the regime - these more recent massacres are targeting unarmed civilians in popular neighborhoods that are bases of Lavalas opposition to the regime. In 1983, Pope John Paul II visited Haiti. He came out on to the path and the Tontons Macoute shot him down from a car. (No subsequent reports from international human rights organizations mention this killing). [16], When Franois Duvalier came to power in 1957, Vodou was becoming celebrated for its purely Haitian heritage by intellectuals and the griots after having been let go for years by those with education. 17:09 EST 13 Jan 2010 Hurbon, Laennec, Comprendre Hati, Karthala, , 1987. Torture of Cacos or alleged Cacos by the Marines was also common practice; this included the hanging of individuals by their genitals, forced absorption of liquids, and the use of ceps, simultaneous pressure by two guns on both side of the tibia bone. [17], The Tontons Macoute were a ubiquitous presence at the polls in the 1961 presidential referendum, in which Duvalier's official vote count was an "outrageous" and fraudulent 1,320,748 to 0, electing him to another term. She was seventeen years old. Former journalist Michle Montas still vividly remembers the bullet-ridden bodies lying on the sidewalk near her home on April 26, 1963. For the people of Haiti, though, hope has always been a rare commodity. The intimidation became so extreme that the MVSN, who were rightly known as the Tonton Macoutes, began burning people alive, or stoning them to death. Based on a similar French agency, which the African OCRB often worked with, many crimes by the police force itself have gone unpunished, and a particularly effective method of torture, Le Caf, where one is beaten with a baton and then forced to walk an excruciating distance, became commonplace in interrogations of suspected bandits. Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (ICHR), Annual Report of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, 1988-1989, Washington, D.C., 1990. According to Pierre-Charles (2000), there were several hundred victims during this year alone. My Blog. In Delmas 31, the crowd discovered 7 prisoners at the private residence of macouteErnst Bros (Pierre-Charles, 2000: 56). _ In 1991, the Minister of Justice of President Aristides first government accused army General Williams Rgala, who was Minister of Defense at the time, of having ordered the killing and hence, requested his extradition from the Dominican Republic, where he was living in exile, but to no avail. In 1959, his paramilitary force was called the Cagoulards ("Hooded Men"). The hunt was on. _ *** (Pierre-Charles, 2000: 85-86; Avril, 1999: 146-149; Interviews with witnesses). He has since published numerous books, Papa Doc: The Truth About Haiti Today (1969) and, most recently, Seeds of Fiction: Graham Greene's Adventures in Haiti and Central America, 1954-1983 (2012). Pierre-Charles, Grard, Hati Jamais Plus! On April 21, 2005, the Cour de Cassation (the highest court in the country) invalidated this judgment; the court based its ruling on a 1928 law that prohibited trial by jury for multiple crimes, although this very law had already been nullified by the 1987 Constitution. Tonton Macoute was a Haitian paramilitary force created in 1959 by dictator Franois 'Papa Doc' Duvalier.In 1970, the militia was officially renamed the Milice de Volontaires de la Scurit Nationale (Militia of National Security Volunteers or MVSN, probably taking name from the homonymous Italian Fascist paramilitary organization). 1915 (July 27): Armed supporters of President Vilbrun Sam and General Oscar Etiennes troops slaughtered 167 political prisoners who had been jailed in the National Penitentiary (in Port-au-Prince) during the previous few days. The Haitian Vodou Handbook: Protocols for Riding with the Lwa. The most feared paramilitary group during the 1990s was the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Hati (FRAPH), which Toronto Star journalist Linda Diebel described as modern Tonton Macoutes, and not the legitimate political party it claimed to be. _ ** (Gaillard, 1983: 186-190, 237-241, 259-262; Trouillot, 1990: 102-107; Manigat, 2003: 71-74). _ In addition to the repression of the rebellion, between hundreds and thousands of civilians died or were killed during forced labor operations called corve, mainly the construction of roads throughout the country. According to US journalist Harry Frank (in Gaillard, 1981: 208), US pilots did not verify what type of gathering (a Caco camp, an open farmers market, or peasants on their way to church) they were attacking. Haiti contains relatively small amounts of gold, silver, antimony, tin, lignite Other individuals were killed in the street or while driving their car. 1991 (January 17): In Gervais, Artibonite, 12 peasants were killed and 8 were disappeared (while 20 others were wounded and 494 houses were allegedly set on fire). On April 26, 1986, a group of the dictatorship's survivors and their family members and supporters marched to the ruins of Fort Dimanche to remember the dead. Family members who tried to remove the bodies for proper burial often disappeared themselves, never to be seen again. 1988 (September 11): Event known as the massacre de Saint-Jean Bosco. Under General Namphys rule, unidentified armed men (probably former macoutes) killed at least 13 individuals (and wounded 80 more) inside the Saint-Jean Bosco church in Port-au-Prince, during Sunday mass. This is a secret force of two or three thousand gun-carrying ruffians, wearing no uniforms, a . 1963 (April 26): In Port-au-Prince, macoutescarried out a series of assassinations of the families of alleged opponents to the government after a failed attempt to kidnap Papa Docs son Jean-Claude. A wave of repression hit the members and supporters of the Communist party during 1969, especially in Cap Haitian and Port-au-Prince. At least two anti-Aristide youths, Jean-Baptiste Knol and Joseph Leroy, were thrown alive into a burning building. Family members who tried to remove the bodies for proper burial often disappeared. Following considerable pressure from the United Nations, the OAS and human rights groups, an internal investigation was carried out. The Tonton Macoutes cut out the hearts, eyes and lungs of opponents with machetes, while Papa Doc, who stole almost a billion pounds in foreign aid, insisted that every television and radio programme had to be entirely in praise of his rule. In December 2003, more than 13 years after the event, the investigative magistrate (who was the seventh to work on the case) issued a report indicting 53 suspects, including the various landowners and General Prosper Avril, for nine charges including murder. The first independent black state, set up 200 years ago after a rebellion by African slaves against colonial France, the mountainous island is home to exotic birds and animals and mist-shrouded tropical forests. Recently, Francois Duvalier's grandson, Jean Claude's son, Franois-Nicolas Duvalier, an adviser to Haiti's current president Michel Martelly, wrote an opinion piece praising his grandfather's "republican values" and calling him a "great nationalist.". He often wore a top hat and tails while demanding the skulls of his dead victims were brought to his palace in Port-au-Prince. After an attempted coup d'tat against him in 1958, Duvalier disbanded the army and all law enforcement agencies in Haiti, and executed all high-ranking generals. Thou. They were responsible for unknown numbers of murders and rapes in Haiti. Papa Docs regime, the more brutal of the two, is said to be responsible for 30,000 to 50,000 assassinations and executions. Shortly afterward, killings resumed in the southern part of the border region and lasted throughout the first six months of 1938; several hundred Haitians were killed during this period (several thousands according to Dominican historian Juan Manuel Garcia, 1983). The regime of terror and assassinations imposed by the macoutesand the military continued but no large-scale killings occurred during this period. The Tonton Macoute sat at an otherwise empty table, a bottle of rum and half-filled glass in front of him. From the very well known and notorious, to others that may be new to the reader, here are ten of the most vicious, terrifying secret police forces in (mostly) modern history. [26] FRAPH extended its reach far outside that of the Haitian state and had offices present in New York, Montreal and Miami until its disarmament and disbandment in 1994.[27]. 1964 (August): Event known as the massacre des Vpres jrmiennes. In the locality of Jrmie (in the Southwest of the country), army soldiers led by Lt. Abel Jerome, Lt. Sony Borge, Col. Regala and by macoutesSanette Balmir and St. Ange Bomtemps killed 27 individuals (men, women and children); almost all of them belonged to educated mulatto families. Menu The OCRB became a widely feared secret police and intelligence agency that showed little impunity when it came to those suspected of banditry, and soon the OCRB was essentially deciding at will, without trial, who would be tortured or executed of suspected crimes, guilty or not. The government of Boisrond-Canal and General Nord Alexis fought Antnor Firmins rebel troops (Nord Alexis eventually prevailed and governed until 1908). The Stasi was fundamentally an intelligence agency, and it is estimated that there was one Stasi informant per 160 East German citizens. In March, 1962, Papa Doc devised another refinement - the Tonton Macoutes ("bogeymen"). Tontons Macoutes often stoned and burned people alive. This church was the parish of the priest (and future President) Jean-Bertrand Aristide, then a staunch opponent of military rule and Duvalierism, who may have been the original target of the attackers, before he was evacuated from the church. "1.2. To counteract this threat, he created a military force that bore several names. _ * (Pierre-Charles, 1973: 38 and 44; Leconte, 1999: 38). Genres: Jazz-Rock, Progressive Rock. Massillon Coicou, one of the most prominent Haitian poets of the early 20th century, was the first victim of the killings (his death inspired Le Pote assassin by the French poet Apollinaire.) The court of assize immediately sentenced Desyr to death. OpenSubtitles2018.v3. Learn all about Tonton Macoute on AllMusic. While the Stasi engaged in arrest and torture through the 1950s and 1960s, by the early 70s the secret police began a far more subversive campaign of psychological torture, disrupting a suspected dissident's personal life via a smear campaign, breaking into ones home to reorganize objects and making threatening phone calls, among other less obvious, but continuous provocations. The other four were killed by a firing squad as an example, following an order from Laborde Corvoisier. This letter constitutes the sole written testimony of the acts committed against them. NE 4; Vinyl LP). 06:29 EST 14 Jan 2010. Military Wiki is a FANDOM Lifestyle Community. The militia was created in 1959, modelled on the Italian fascist Blackshirts. The latest chapter began in 1991 when . [6] According to local witnesses before the Truth and Peace Commission in 1995, several dead bodies were thrown into a nearby open mass grave dug on the soldiers orders; several youths were then executed after having dug the grave, and thrown into it; other bodies were allegedly carried away by a truck and were disappeared.. According to press reports, Bal Wouz terrorized the inhabitants of the area with the consent of the local police on that day. The force was created in 1959, only two years after Franois Duvalier became president, due to the threat the dictator perceived from the regular armed forces. Tonton Macoute was a progressive jazz/rock band formed in the UK in 1971 from the remaining 4 musicians of Windmill (2) after the death of lead singer/guitarist Dick Scott in a road accident whilst on tour. Gaillard (1983: 261), adding innocent victims and Cacos killed in combat throughout the occupation, reached the number of 15,000. Repression of these movements followed, then an armed rebellion erupted in January and February 2004. The exact number of victims still remains unknown. 7, New York, 1996. Andrew Malone for the Daily Mail From their methods to their choice of clothes, vodou always played an important role in their actions. [6], Led by Emmanual Constant, FRAPH differed from the Tonton Macoute in its denial to submit to the will of a single authority and its cooperation with regular military forces. The following day, Vilbrun Sam and Etienne were dragged respectively from the consulates of France and of the Dominican Republic, where they had sought refuge, and were lynched by a mob. Historians use the term genocide in reference to this event.
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