Haiti's Jailed Prime Minister Hospitalized During Hunger Strike

Febuary 24, 2005

To Ambassadors
 Juan Gabriel Valdes, Special Representative of the Secretary General of the UN
 Denneth Modest, Special Representative of the Secretary General of the OAS
 James B. Foley, United States of America
 Claude Boucher, Canada
 Thierry Burkard, France
 Marcel Young, Chile

Ever since my unjust and unjustified incarceration at the National Penitentiary on June 27th 2004, my life has been directly threatened on three (3) occasions.

 On the third occasion, Saturday February 19th of the current year, the Government made the decision to place me in isolation, purportedly for my own safety but the end result of this maneuver has been the application of further and apparently intended punishment.  Indicative of this is the fact that after I returned to my initial cell after three (3) days in isolation, I am confronting new restrictions whose sole purpose are to humiliate me and above all to render me to the condition of an animal.

 Dear Ambassadors, surely you are all aware of the Machiavellian reasons for which since the 29th of February of 2004 I have been the brunt of all sorts of persecutions to force me into exile.  Much better than me, you are also aware of the politically motivated vile and cynical objectives of my arbitrary arrest and illegal detention, a detention which has now lasted 8 months and in dehumanizing and insecure conditions.

 Despite irrefutable evidence which you all know some hoodlums in St. Marc in collusion with the NCHR and the Government persist in associating my name with their lies.  This is of course being done to achieve shameful, monstrous, and macabre political ends which would at the same time mask their own acts of vandalism and assassination.

 The Government, cloaked with a spirit of vengeance and with utter disregard for the most elementary principles and practices of law and justice, proceeds with sheer arrogance, not simply to arrest me without a warrant but furthermore to mount a biased and dictatorial Highest Court of Appeals since the constitutional mandate of many of the judges of this Court have long ago expired. They are conspiring to reenact the role of Pontius Pilate in the shamefully illegal case of incarceration and prolonged detention.

 It seems that the Government is so infatuated with its power of "conqueror" that it is drooling over the bountiful returns on its investments in the democide and the destruction of the liberating forces of truth which bring forth justice.

 With hopes that strong and sincere voices of moral authority and the partisans of justice will say unequivocally to the Government that it must cease to ally itself with delinquents, vandals, notorious assassins, and discredited organizations which shamelessly persist in trying to make me out to be a murderer so they can justify for the benefit of the Government my eventual lynching.

 I am sure that the spectacle of my slow and certain death would be much more palatable to the Government and its cohorts.

 To facilitate their purpose I have undertaken a hunger strike so that one day my brothers and sisters who are made to wallow in abject misery will no longer be disdained, starved, scorned and ostracized.

 Yvon Neptune,
 Political Prisoner
 February 24th, 2005
 Central Prison, Port-au-Prince

 CC Congress of the United States of America
 Caricom
 African Union
 Amnesty International
 International Human Rights Organizations
 United Nations (UN)
 Organization of American States (OAS)
 The Press

(English Translation provided in a March 3 e-mail from Marguerite Laurent of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network.  E-mail her from that web page to receive frequent messages on the struggle for democracy in Haiti.)

The NCHR that Neptune seems to consider key to his persecution is probably the National Coalition for Haitian Rights at nchr.org (there is also a separate nchrhaiti.org).  The former has repeatedly accused the Aristide administration of crimes that it ignores in the present government despite far greater proof and magnitude.  As of today the front page of its web site – after more than a solid year of government and paramilitary massacres under the U.S.-installed regime – still has an item from 2003 December 5 condemning Aristide's government for standing by while pro-Aristide demonstrators forcibly ended an anti-Aristide student march.