by SAMER ELATRASH

The list of accused compiled by the International Tribunal on Haiti (ITH) is an odd group. There is a former professor at Université du Québec à Montréal, a Canadian colonel who is credited with having “brought great honour to the Canadian Forces and to Canada,” Haitian death squad commanders and a Jordanian general.

If the group seems bizarre, the circumstances that joined them together were exceptional. Following the ouster of elected Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in early 2004, the United Nations sent a multinational force to support an interim government which held power until elections last February.

The ITH is a mock tribunal that is collecting evidence of what it says are war crimes committed by the interim government and UN soldiers during the transition period. When it convenes in Montreal on Saturday, May 27, the tribunal will take testimony from witnesses and researchers on Haiti, and will send the cases of those it considers guilty to the International Criminal Court (the tribunal is open to the public) in the Hague.

The odds of the ICC accepting the cases, however, are slim. The accused include leading figures in the UN mission, including Canadian Colonel Barry Wayne MacLeod, and politicians who were feted by Western governments after the coup.

But Brian Concannon, an investigating judge for the tribunal, says they’re committed to bringing them to justice, as well as holding accountable governments like Canada’s that came to support the coup.

“We want to put pressure on the international community, which on one hand establishes the ICC and on the other hand undermines democracy,” says Concannon.

While some Western powers said they opposed Aristide because his government committed human rights violations, many human rights groups have denounced the interim government for studding itself with rebel leaders who were implicated in other atrocities. Hundreds were killed in violence after the coup, many of them Aristide supporters.

A fact finding team from Amnesty International, which had been highly critical of Aristide in the past, concluded after visiting Haiti post-coup that rights violations had increased. Amnesty denounced the interim government for pardoning rebel leaders while cracking down on supporters of Aristide’s party Fanmi Lavalas.

“Most of these arrests are believed to be arbitrary: unlawful and based on political grounds and on trumped-up criminal charges,” the group said in the report. The detainees include Annette Auguste, a Haitian folk singer who was arrested in her home by American troops then handed to the Haitian police.

UN troops were also criticized for heavy-handed tactics, as in January 2006 when UN troops shot at unarmed demonstrators, killing at least one protestor.

Concannon, who prosecuted war crimes cases in Haiti in the late ’90s, says there were human rights abuses under Aristide, but not to the extent that there were under the interim government. The tribunal is not considering cases from Aristide’s tenure because the interim government showed a willingness to prosecute Aristide supporters but not violations committed by its own police forces, Concannon says.

The election last February of president René Préval, a former Aristide supporter, raised the question of “whether the justice system is now adequate,” Concannon says. He adds the courts have been stacked with political appointees by the interim government.

The tribunal sits from 3 to 7 p.m. at the Université de Montréal, 3200 Jean-Brillant, Hall E-2215.