Once again, one man has become the center of a political storm that threatens to foil this country's uphill struggle for stability.
This time, it's not Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former priest and charismatic slum leader who was deposed last year by an armed uprising and forced into exile. It is the man who rose and fell in Aristide's shadow, his former prime minister, Yvon Neptune.
The former senator and radio talk show host has been jailed for a year without charges under a new government installed by the US and is slowly starving himself to death in a minimum-security prison cell.
PHOTO: AP
Last year, Haiti's new government arrested Neptune, 58, accusing him as the mastermind of a massacre in a small northern town, St.-Marc. Prime Minister Gerard Latortue argued that justice was the best way to heal Haiti's wounds, and promoted the case as proof that no one, no matter how powerful, could stand above the law.
But as the anniversary of Neptune's arrest approaches, his continued detention has become an embarrassment to the Bush administration and a symbol of the failures of what was supposed to be Haiti's transition to a fully functioning democracy.
From prison, the former prime minister has denounced his case as a "political witch hunt" aimed at seeking vengeance, not justice, against those who supported Aristide. In February he started a series of hunger strikes to demand that the government try him or set him free.
When a visitor went to the two-story house where Neptune was being held, the former prime minister could not lift his bony body off a foam mattress on the floor of his cell. He was wearing striped boxer shorts and listening to music on a Walkman. His most striking feature was the lines of his rib cage.
"I feel weak," he said barely above a whisper. "Some days I feel weaker than others. But it was my choice to go on hunger strike."
The hunger strikes have sent Neptune twice to the hospital in critical condition and brought expressions of concern, even outrage, about the injustices that continue to plague Haiti's justice system. Only about 20 of the more than 1,000 prisoners at the federal penitentiary have been convicted of crimes; many have spent years awaiting trial.
But Jocelyn McCalla, executive director of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights in New York, said much more is at stake than Haiti's justice system.
Rather than a political achievement for Haiti's interim government, he said, it has become a serious liability less than four months from the start of important national elections.
And rather than uniting this violently polarized society, McCalla said, the case against Neptune has seemed only to keep old political hostilities festering, raising questions about the crimes of the past government, and about the legitimacy of the current one.
"The Neptune case has raised hard questions about the legitimacy of the United States' intervention in Haiti," McCalla said. "The intervention was based on the premise that the United States was ousting a criminal despot, namely President Aristide, who had used his powers to subvert democracy, and that the interim government was going to establish rule of law. That has not happened."
Three weeks ago, the emaciated prisoner was carried on a stretcher to his first court hearing in St.-Marc and testified for several hours, the latest sign that the interim government had begun to buckle under mounting pressure and was seeking a way to expedite the Neptune case.
Months earlier, the government offered to fly Neptune for emergency medical treatment to the Dominican Republic, but Neptune refuses to leave Haiti until his name is cleared of wrongdoing.
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