Duvalier's dungeon: Unforgivable for some, forgotten by many (Feature)

By Silvia Ayuso Jan 25, 2011, 3:41 GMT

Port-au-Prince - Robert Duval shivers when he thinks about Fort Dimanche, the political prison which for 30 years under the dictatorships of Francois Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude, was the symbol of oppression in Haiti.

Duval spent eight months there in 1976-77, in one of 10 cells measuring just three-by-four metres, which held up to 40 prisoners, 'unless one died,' as he recalled.

Indeed, many died in a prison that has been described as 'Auschwitz for Haitians.'

Last week, Duval became the sixth person to file complaints of human-rights violations against Jean-Claude 'Baby Doc' Duvalier (1971-86), who returned on January 16 to Haiti after 25 years in exile.

'I asked that they try Duvalier and the Haitian Army, because they jailed me, tortured me and almost killed me. They already killed many others over there,' Duval told the German Press Agency dpa in an interview.

The prison was graphically nicknamed L'enfer des hommes, or hell for humans. During the time he was at Fort Dimanche, Duval said, 180 people died, some beaten to death but most succumbing to malnutrition.

'They gave us a piece of bread with coffee in the morning, a bowl of hot corn for lunch that we had to spill on the floor for it to cool down, and they filled that same bowl with water, which we drank fast because that bowl went on to the next cell. And in the afternoon, four spoonfuls of rice or corn. Some 300 calories per day,' Duval recalled.

'In those conditions, you don't last very long. Since they did not want to shoot or use bullets, they let you die like that.'

Duval stands well above 1.8 metres tall, and today has an ample belly. While he was at Fort Dimanche, at age 22, he weighed only 40 kilogrammes.

He was released from the prison through an amnesty brokered by then-US president Jimmy Carter (1977-81). Duval's name had been placed on a list of 13 prisoners: 'I was one of three survivors. All the others had died already.'

Asked how he felt when he heard of Duvalier's return to Haiti, Duval makes a spitting gesture: 'I felt revolted, sick. I physically felt like someone was choking me. It was such a strong psychological blow that he can do that. It's something sordid.'

Duval is well-known around Port-au-Prince for his work as director of L'Athletique d'Haiti, a project to teach sports to children in the impoverished suburb of Cite Soleil.

In fact, Fort Dimanche is not very far from L'Athletique's headquarters. But that does not matter: even if it were hundreds of kilometres away, the torture centre is something that Duval says he could never forget.

In a Haiti where almost half the population was born after Baby Doc left in 1986, Fort Dimanche has faded as a symbol of terror and Oppression. Only a few buildings remain in once-feared complex, and little more than the floor is left of the cells that held Duval and so many others.

The place, ironically renamed Village Democratie, or Democracy Village, became in the years of former Haitian president Jean- Bertrand Aristide (1991, 1994-6, 2001-4), a slum neighbourhood where barefooted children play with bits of plastic and pieces of wood. Their parents are mostly so young that they had not even been born when Duvalier left.

Few among them knows Fort Dimanche's history. Many young people only know Fort Dimanche as a police station of the same name, in a different Port-au-Prince neighbourhood; they are surprised to learn that the site where they live was a prison that held political dissidents just a generation earlier.

Duval called the establishment of a police station by the same name a 'manipulation to erase memories.' He concedes that his own generation - those who suffered under the Duvalier regimes - probably did not do enough to preserve the memory of a time of terror. Younger Haitians barely know about it at all.

'Those of us who were victims of all that did not spend too much time educating the young because we were too busy preserving democratic spaces, and it was difficult to do both things,' Duval notes.

Since Duvalier's return, many young people say they believe the former dictator returned to Haiti 'to help' in the wake of last year's devastating earthquake.

Duval shakes his head with sadness: 'I think we have to have an educational programme on that era.'

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