Baby Doc Duvalier returns 'to help Haiti'

HE MURDERED opponents, ran his country into the ground, looted the treasury then fled his starving, poverty-stricken nation on an aircraft loaded with riches.

• Jean-Claude 'Baby Doc' Duvalier returns to Haiti, the country he fled 25 years ago, but is not back 'for politics'. Picture: Getty Images

Yesterday, 25 years after he was driven into exile, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier was back in Haiti, promising to help the people he betrayed.

The former dictator's sudden return to the country he last saw in 1986, when people danced in the streets at news of his departure, caught Haitians and much of the international community by surprise, and prompted fear, suspicion and bewilderment as to his motives.

Coming against the backdrop of an earthquake that killed 250,000 and reduced sections of the capital, Port-au-Prince, to dust, paralysis in the efforts to rebuild, a fatal cholera epidemic, a presidential election crisis and crippling social conditions, the playboy president's re-emergence put one more bizarre twist in Haiti's chaotic landscape.

However, after stepping off an Air France flight from Paris and kissing the ground, the 59-year-old insisted that his intentions were pure. "I am not here for politics," he claimed. "I am here for the reconstruction of Haiti."

It had been an "emotional return," said his second wife, Veronique Roy, who was asked at the airport why they had come. "Why not?" she replied, claiming that they planned to stay for only three days.

Haitian authorities were said to have been informed of Mr Duvalier's arrival shortly before it happened, raising questions as to why the French government had not raised the alert sooner.

His presence threatened fresh instability in Haiti, currently in a political vacuum following fraudulent presidential elections; Mr Duvalier retains a certain following in his homeland, despite his notoriety, and four years ago professed a desire to run for the presidency.

Mr Duvalier presided over a dark chapter in Haiti's history, becoming the world's youngest head of state in 1971 when he assumed the title of "president for life" at the age of 19, following the death of his father, Francis "Papa Doc" Duvalier, who had ruled since 1957.

Their successive dictatorships brought decades of savagery, corruption and the wholesale theft of state funds while the population cowered in fear, poverty and starvation.

Both executed a campaign of bloody oppression, torturing and killing political opponents in their tens of thousands and handing free rein to a bloodthirsty militia known as the Tonton Macoute - Creole for "bogeyman" - to silence detractors. Trade unionism and independent media were crushed. Those who spoke out or agitated for democracy disappeared, sometimes assassinated in broad daylight, their corpses often strung from trees as a warning.

Up to 30,000 people were murdered and hundreds of thousands more driven into exile.

"It is the destiny of the people of Haiti to suffer," Baby Doc once declared, as his people scratched for survival.

By the time a series of popular uprisings finally destabilised his dictatorship in 1986, the international community was ready to help show him the door.

President Ronald Reagan's administration provided a US air force jet to spirit him out of the country under cover of darkness and France, Haiti's former colonial ruler, granted him and his 20-strong entourage asylum - an arrangement that it intended to be temporary, until realising that no other country would take him off its hands thereafter.In the years since his departure from Haiti, he has denied robbing the country and, with gross understatement, referred only to the possibility of his government having committed "physical, moral or economic wrongs" when he asked his people's forgiveness during a French radio interview in 2007.

Current president Rene Prval - who is himself under fire for election-rigging - faced calls to order Mr Duvalier's arrest yesterday.

"Duvalier's return to Haiti should be for one purpose only: to face justice," said Jos Miguel Vivanco, the US director of Human Rights Watch. "Haiti has enough troubles without Duvalier. His presence - unless he is immediately arrested - is a slap in the face to a people who have already suffered so much."