Former Haiti dictator charged with embezzling funds

Port-au-Prince (Haiti), Jan 19 (IANS/EFE) Former Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier was Tuesday charged with embezzling public funds.

The charges were filed after the man known as “Baby Doc” faced questioning for over four hours at the chief prosecutor’s office in Port-au-Prince, the capital and largest city of the Caribbean nation of Haiti.

Duvalier, who left the office accompanied by police officers but without wearing handcuffs, was apparently planning to return to the capital’s Hotel Karibe, where he has been staying since his unexpected return to Haiti Sunday, having spent 25 years in exile in France.

Earlier Tuesday, he was taken to the office after prosecutor Aristidas Auguste and Judge Gabriel Ambroise decided to continue questioning Duvalier there, after spending about an hour with him in his room at the Hotel Karibe.

Groups of followers remained in the area around the prosecutor’s office to lend support to Duvalier, while human rights activists gathered at the doors of the institution to denounce the ex-dictator.

Among those present there was the leader of the group Droits et democratie (Rights and Democracy), Daniele Magloire, who expressed surprise at the lack of information about the open judicial proceeding and the steps that will be followed.

The executive director of the National Network for the Defense of Human Rights, Pierre Esperance, told EFE that “Duvalier was the ringleader for many crimes that were committed between 1971 and 1986, which may be characterized as crimes against humanity”.

Among those crimes are “torture, arbitrary arrest, murder and summary execution. They are crimes that are not subject to the statute of limitations”, Esperance said.

Baby Doc governed Haiti between 1971 and 1986, succeeding father Franois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who seized power in 1957 and launched a regime blamed for numerous killings and human rights abuses and for the embezzlement of hundreds of millions of dollars.

The younger Duvalier has faced civil suits, accusing him of diverting a total of $920 million in public funds he’s thought to have stashed in US, Swiss and French banks.

Amnesty International Monday urged Haitian authorities to arrest and try Baby Doc for crimes against humanity, a call echoed by the Haitian branch of Catholic charity Caritas.

Duvalier’s surprise return to Haiti aggravates the woes of the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country as it struggles to recover from the devastating earthquake of January 2010 amid an ongoing cholera epidemic and political turmoil arising from last fall’s flawed presidential election.

— IANS/EFE