Abstract
Two nongovernmental organizations led the initiative to hold Jean-Claude Duvalier and his key supporters accountable for their crimes against humanity, torture, and illicit corruption. Devoire de Mémoire d’Haiti (Memory’s Duty) and the Collectif contre l’impunité (Collective against Impunity) successfully had him prosecuted because the statute of limitations do not apply to crimes against humanity. DDM has held commemorations with victims’ survivors at massacre sites and grew to supporting the Duvalier litigation, as well as taking witness testimonies, providing traveling exhibits, educating students, and establishing a National Day of Remembrance. The Collectif collaborated with several international NGOs before the Haitian Court and the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights. Both have used digital platforms to document and educate on their activities and findings for the public.
In addition to the editors, I would like to acknowledge and thank Anne F. Fuller, Isabelle Clérié, and Jean-Philippe Belleau for sharing their experiences and ideas studying mass atrocities and memorialization initiatives in Haiti.
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- 1.
In a sense, it is the opposite of today’s Germany, where the leader of the Alternative for Germany for Thuringia, Bjorn Hocke, denounced Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial and condemned the country’s “culture of remembrance” (https://www.deutschland.de/en/never-forget).
- 2.
There are few memorials in Haiti for the 200,000 killed in the 2010 earthquake. An outstanding digital archive of the audio-recorded stories of 100 survivors conducted in the summer and fall of 2010 Claire Payton, are available at http://haitimemoryproject.org/
- 3.
An online archive on the Jean-Claude Duvalier dictatorship has been compiled by Duke University, at https://sites.duke.edu/haitilab/english/jean-claude-duvalier-regime-1971-1986/
- 4.
The United States was often complicit or at least aware of these atrocities as the declassified cable traffic from the 1960s now make clear. (see Anne Fuller’s chapter on the Southeast massacres in Fatton and Carey, Unpublished Manuscript). The US FRAPH files on the Front for the Advancement of Haitian Progress were supposedly returned to Haiti but are unavailable, with its whereabouts unknown (https://www.ijdh.org/tag/fraph/). The United States, among its collaborations, clearly had Toto Constant and has protected him from extradition to Haiti for prosecution.
- 5.
The best arguably is Haïti: Jamais, jamais plus!: Contribution à la mémoire collective et à la lutte contre l’impunité, 1986–1987 by the project, Atelier de Droits Humains of the nongovernmental organization CRESFED (Centre de Recherche et de Formation Économique et Sociale pour le Développement, 2000, Port-au-Prince), led by Gerard Pierre-Charles, in cooperation with the League of Haitian Former Political Prisoners (LAPPH) led by Bobby Duval, both of whom had been exiled until the 1986 end of the 29-year Duvalier dictatorship.
- 6.
My request for a copy of the UN Truth Commission report reviewing violent human rights violations from 1991 to 1994 were not available at the UN headquarters library in New York. The most recent Secretary General’s report for MINUJUSTH has more public information than prior UN reports (UN Document S/2019/198). UN Security Council Resolution 2476 (2019) established the UN Integrated Office in Haiti, replacing the large stabilization missions of the previous fifteen years with a new configuration of 19 UN agencies based in Haiti. UN Security Council UN Security Council Resolution 2476 (2019) established the UN Integrated Office in Haiti, replacing the large stabilization missions of the previous fifteen years with a new configuration of 19 UN agencies based in Haiti (https://www.un.org/press/en/2019/sc13856.doc.htm).
- 7.
The founding members were: Jacqueline Benoît, François Benoît, Marie Marguerite B. Clérié, Guylene B. Sales, Dominique Franck Simon, and Sylvie W. Bajeux. The Benoit siblings were survivors of Francois Duvalier’s attack on their brother, a military officer.
- 8.
See the film produced by Professors Cahal McLaughlin (Queens University) and Siobhán Wills (Ulster University) a 50-minute documentary, It Stays With You: Use of Force by UN Peacekeepers in Haiti, which looks at the impact of raids and bombing from 2005 to 2007 on Cité Soleil, based on interviews filmed about a decade later with survivors and UN officials.
- 9.
Following its own disgrace in failing to protect the Swiss accounts of Swiss Holocaust victims, as well as its role in laundering ill-gotten gain by corrupt rulers, the Swiss government began to freeze accounts of the undeserving and authorized them for the victims of those rulers.
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Henry F. (Chip) Carey. (2020). The Slow Rise of Social Movement Organizations for Memorialization in Haiti: Lutte Contre Impunite, Devoire de Memoire-Haiti and Digitizing the Record on Atrocities. In: Zucker, E., Simon, D. (eds) Mass Violence and Memory in the Digital Age. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39395-3_8
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