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By Steve Fainaru, Globe Staff, 05/02/99

Carl Dorelien, who as head of personnel for the Haitian army helped hold his country at gunpoint until 1994, now lives comfortably in Florida. "Believe me, I am clean," he said.

PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. - Carl Dorelien was once a small-time dictator, and a proud one at that. He was part of a clique of military officers who held Haiti at gunpoint until 1994, when the junta's abuses became so grave that the Clinton administration dispatched 20,000 troops to the tiny Caribbean nation to restore order.

An outspoken colonel, Dorelien had been head of personnel for the Haitian army, which had seized power from President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991. He oversaw a 7,000-man force whose well-documented campaign of butchery included murder, rape, kidnapping, and torture, leading to the deaths of some 5,000 Haitian civilians over three bloody years.

''This is a good agreement for the United States and for Haiti,'' President Clinton told Americans after the junta stepped aside. ''The military leaders will leave.''

Dorelien left, but where he went is another story. He is living with his family in this Florida resort community, on a visa granted him by the same government that launched a full-scale invasion and spent $2.2 billion to remove him and his fellow officers from power. His past has remained largely hidden, even after he made local news in 1997 by winning a $3.2 million jackpot in the Florida lottery. Lottery officials described him as a penniless immigrant.

But in a recent interview here, Dorelian spoke candidly about his past. ''I was a member of the Haitian army high command,'' he said, a miniature $2,500 gold bar dangling from his neck. ''I lived like a king in my country.''

Dorelien's case is not an isolated one. A Globe investigation has discovered a broad range of people who have gained refuge in the United States over the last several years despite evidence of their involvement in serious human rights abuses. The list includes three alleged participants of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, two who are living in New England; several former henchmen of the murderous regime of Somali strongman Mohammed Siad Barre; 15 Haitian military officers who Dorelien said joined him in America; and a Salvadoran general accused of covering up the massacre of four American churchwomen in 1980.

Like Dorelien, who said he received a five-year visa from a friendly US military officer, some entered the country with the knowledge - and even the assistance - of US government officials.

''It is really appalling to think that the United States has become the retirement home of choice for murderers and despots,'' said William P. Ford, a New York attorney whose sister Ita, a nun, was killed by members of the Salvadoran National Guard in the 1980 massacre.

Dan Cadman, chief of the Immigration and Naturalization Service's national security unit, said the agency has become increasingly concerned about human rights offenders who have taken refuge in the United States. Although the magnitude of the problem is unclear, he said, it is the logical outgrowth of numerous recent international conflicts, the historic practice of the United States to take in persecution victims, and the difficulties of screening the 6.5 million people issued visas to enter the country each year.

''You don't want, in an ideal society, even one monster in your midst,'' said Cadman. ''The concern is deep, but that doesn't necessarily suggest there is a widespread problem.''

Some human rights monitors compare the problem to that of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of Nazis who slipped into the United States following World War II. The phenomenon ultimately led the Justice Department to set up a special anti-Nazi unit, a $3.7 million program described by supporters as the most effective anti-Nazi operation in the world.

But human rights monitors complain that the US government has taken the presence of other war criminals less seriously than the Nazis despite evidence that their numbers also are high.

''It's in the thousands,'' said Gerald Gray, who last year founded the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability, a nonprofit organization funded by Amnesty International that strives to bring violators of human rights to justice. The group has compiled information on dozens of cases and has filed two lawsuits: one against a Bosnian Serb refugee in Atlanta who allegedly tortured prisoners with pipes, bats, and other deadly objects during the war in the Balkans. The other suit is against a former Chilean secret police officer living in Miami despite allegations that he tortured and executed a former government official as part of a 1973 terror campaign under General Augusto Pinochet.

Pinochet, who ruled Chile from 1973-90, is under house arrest outside London, awaiting a decision on whether he can be extradited to Spain to face prosecution for crimes against humanity and torture.

''They're everywhere - Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, you name it,'' said Gray.

Human rights stance raises troubling issues

The problem raises a number of thorny questions for the United States at a time when the Clinton administration has made human rights a centerpiece of its foreign policy. To varying degrees, the issue of how people are treated by their government has played a role in nearly every military action undertaken by the administration, including the recent NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia over Kosovo.

However, the emphasis on human rights also has forced the United States to confront its own past, and a number of uncomfortable alliances that were forged, often in the name of fighting communism during the Cold War. On a March trip to Guatemala, President Clinton apologized for US support of Guatemalan military forces who massacred tens of thousands of unarmed Mayan Indians during a 36-year civil war, which began in 1954 with a CIA-engineered coup against a democratically elected government.

The arrest of Pinochet, who also came to power with CIA assistance, has shaken international law and emboldened human rights advocates who believe the case has set a precedent for holding perpetrators of atrocities accountable. Pinochet, who was immune from prosecution in Chile after being declared Senator for Life, was arrested last October after traveling to London for surgery on a herniated disk.

''This has been a wake-up call for a lot of people,'' said Reed Brody, advocacy director for Human Rights Watch in New York. ''The rules of business-as-usual may change.''

But it remains unclear how the new rules might be applied, particularly in the United States, where laws make it difficult to prosecute foreigners for crimes committed abroad. Up to now, human rights advocates have relied on an obscure 1789 law, the Alien Tort Claims Act, and difficult-to-enforce international treaties to prosecute foreigners accused of atrocities. Their rare victories have been mostly symbolic, such as a $47 million judgment in 1996 by a federal judge in Boston against a Guatemalan general held responsible for the rape and torture of an American nun and nine others. The general, Hector A. Gramajo, was hit with the lawsuit just before his graduation from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He returned to Guatemala and has paid no compensation.

An examination of alleged human rights offenders living in the United States reads like a rogue's gallery from the worst armed conflicts of recent years:

The Globe has discovered two Bosnian refugees who settled in New England after allegedly participating in ethnic cleansing operations in the former Yugoslavia. They are part of a spate of recent reports of former Serb combatants who made their way to the United States - apparently by exploiting a chaotic refugee crisis similar to the one now unfolding in Kosovo, as well as serious weaknesses in the refugee screening process. Even before Kosovo, the Serb campaign of murder, rape, torture, and mass deportation had created some 2 million refugees in the Balkans, including 83,247 who entered the United States between 1993-98.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service regional office in Portland, Maine, has opened an investigation into the case of a 39-year-old Bosnian Muslim in Burlington, Vt., after the Globe developed evidence that he had been a member of a Serb paramilitary unit that participated in the forced removal of some 60,000 Muslims and Croats in northwestern Bosnia. The man denies being a member of the unit.

The INS also is conducting an investigation into the case of Jezdimir Topic, 56, who settled with his family in the Boston suburb of Everett after the war. The agency opened that probe after witnesses told the Globe that Topic had been a guard at the notorious Trnopolje prison camp, a converted schoolhouse where numerous cases of murder, rape, and torture reportedly occurred. Topic, who declined to comment, has not been accused of directly participating in the atrocities, but witnesses said he did nothing to stop them.

INS officials said both men could be deported if the allegations turn out to be true.

In addition, another former member of a Serb paramilitary unit, Dragan Borcic, entered the country as a refugee last year and is employed at a meat-packing plant in Bismarck, N.D. Borcic confirmed in an interview he was a member of the paramilitary group, but said, ''We only attacked those people who had weapons.''

Dorelien, the Haitian colonel, told the Globe that 15 high-ranking military officers - the entire junta, with the exception of supreme commander Raoul Cedras and Brigadier General Philippe Biamby, his chief of staff - have been allowed to immigrate to the United States.

According to Dorelien, the list of former officers living in the United States includes Major General Jean-Claude Duperval and Ernst Prud'homme, a high-ranking member of the Bureau du Information et Coordination, a notoriously violent propaganda unit. Saying he spoke for the entire group, Dorelien declined to give their addresses. He said most reside in Florida and New York.

''We are all here,'' said Dorelien. ''Plus, other members of the staff at different periods of time during those three years. Remember, all members didn't stay in the same position between 1991-94. Sometimes Cedras would change his staff. Those former members, they are here, too.''

Dorelien said despite the fact that they have gained refuge, the former officers continue to seethe over the Clinton administration's policy toward Haiti.

''When we are watching TV and President Clinton says something about Haiti, we smile, because he knows that he's lying, and we know that he's lying,'' said Dorelien. ''But we don't say anything, because we have to be careful. They accepted us here, so we have to take it.''

The US government also has failed to address other high-profile cases in which alleged perpetrators of crimes have been allowed to reside in the United States despite protests from victims and their families.

Last year, while investigating the massacre of the churchwomen in El Salvador, representatives of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights in New York discovered that Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, a retired Salvadoran general, had been living in Florida, even though he had been implicated in a widespread coverup of the crime.

In one of the most heinous crimes of El Salvador's 13-year civil war, the women - three nuns and a layworker - were kidnapped by members of the Salvadoran national guard, taken to a remote location, raped, then shot to death. The case was solved only after US authorities circumvented a widespread coverup by the Salvadoran military and developed independent evidence against the national guardsmen.

Vides headed the National Guard at the time of the murders. He appointed an internal investigator who helped the gunmen change their weapons and personally ordered them not to confess to anyone, according to testimony from the gunmen. In 1993, a United Nations Truth Commission, supported and partially funded by the US government, concluded that Vides ''knew that members of the National Guard had committed the assassination and...had facilitated the concealment of facts, obstructing the respective judicial investigation.''

In an interview recently at his spacious home in Palm Coast, near Daytona Beach, Vides, 61, adamantly denied his involvement in the coverup and said he had entered the United States by applying for a visa through normal channels within the US consulate in San Salvador. ''I ask myself over and over if there is anything I have done wrong, and I can't find anything,'' he said.

Ford, the brother of one of the nuns, said he was sickened to learn last year from the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights that Vides and retired General Jose Guillermo Garcia, the Salvadoran defense minister at the time of the murders, were both living in Florida. ''It's just pulling a scab off a very deep wound,'' he said.

Ford said he asked the Justice Department why Vides had been allowed to enter the country. ''The explanation is, `We're looking into this and we'll tell you promptly.' That was in November,'' he said. ''We have yet to hear any substantive explanation.''

Russ Bergeron, an INS spokesman, said he could not talk about Vides' case because of privacy restrictions. But he said the Truth Commission's allegations about Vides' involvement in the coverup emerged after he already had been admitted into the United States through ''normal immigration procedures.''

In New York, similar outrage greeted the news that Emmanuel ''Toto'' Constant, who once headed the Haitian death squad FRAPH, has been living with his aunt in a two-story home in Queens. The paramilitary unit headed by Constant was believed to be responsible for some of the most gruesome crimes of the Haitian regime.

Constant entered the country through Puerto Rico on a multiple-entry visa often issued to officials of foreign governments, INS officials said. In 1995, then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher ordered that Constant's visa be revoked, noting in a letter to Attorney General Janet Reno that Constant's ''presence and activities in the United States seriously undermine...compelling foreign policy objectives'' and gives the impression ''that the United States is permitting Mr. Constant to use the United States as a base of operation for FRAPH.''

An immigration judge issued a deportation order against Constant, but the State Department later balked, saying that his presence in Haiti could destabilize the government. The INS, which had taken Constant into custody, released him after determining that he did not present a threat to public safety in the United States. In a highly unusual resolution last year, the New York City Council called the government's refusal to extradite Constant ''unconscionable'' and said his presence ''can have dire consequences for the City of New York.''

Efforts to contact Constant were unsuccessful, but sources in the Haitian community said he recently tried to enhance his image by offering $7,000 to a prestigious Masonic order in Brooklyn in an unsuccessful effort to gain membership.

Dorelian's story appears to offer the first evidence that US military officials issued visas to Haitian military leaders, even as US troops were expelling them from power in 1994.

According to Dorelien, he requested his visa on Oct. 26, 1994, just before Aristide, who had been restored to power by US troops, sent him into exile in Spain. He said he told the US military attache, Lieutenant Colonel Steven Lovasz, that he didn't want to leave Haiti without a US visa. He said Lovasz took his passport, then returned to Dorelien's home later that night.

''He knocked on my door and he said, `Colonel, I don't come to see you. Where is your wife, Mrs. Dorelien?''' Dorelien recalled. ''I called her, and we had a glass of wine together while my wife got dressed. She came down and [Lovasz] stood up and said, `Mrs. Dorelien, during these three years, your husband gave us all kinds of trouble. But he is one of the Haitian officers that the US officers respect, because he always told the truth. And that's why we decided to give him a US visa for five years.'''

According to his family, Lovasz has retired from the military and is working in security operations on a project for the Exxon Corp. in Cameroon. Attempts to reach him were unsuccessful. Bergeron said the INS could not comment on Dorelien's case because of privacy restrictions.

A rosy picture before the fall

Before the coup to overthrow Aristide in 1991, Dorelien had commanded a base where the Haitian army kept most of its tanks, sources in Haiti said. He was regarded as instrumental to the success of the coup, and was rewarded with a position as assistant chief of staff to Philippe Biamby, heading all personnel decisions for the Haitian army.

As Dorelien describes it, his $3.2 million lottery jackpot was actually a step down. In Haiti, he said he didn't quite live in a house. ''My house in Haiti is a palace,'' he exclaimed, laughing.

Dorelien justified the coup by suggesting that Haitians, who elected Aristide overwhelmingly, were not educated enough to elect a president. ''If someone doesn't know how to read, or to choose, how can you talk about democracy?'' he said.

Contrary to numerous human rights reports, he denied that the Haitian military slaughtered its perceived opponents. He claimed that US officials had paid people to steal corpses from local morgues, then lay the bodies in the street and shot them to make it appear that they had been murdered.

Dorelien recalled participating in the dramatic eleventh-hour negotiations with former President Carter, retired General Colin Powell, and former Senator Sam Nunn that finally led the junta to step down. At one point, he said he hesitated to shake hands with Carter because he did not want to touch a hand that had come in contact with Aristide, whom he described as ''the devil.''

''I said, `President Carter, before coming here, did you shake hands with Aristide?''' Dorelien recalled. ''I was surprised when he said, `No, why?' I said, `If you shook hands with him, his bad spirit would still be on you, and you could never (get it off). ' I don't know what you believe, but that is what we call Haitian reality.''

Dorelien acknowledged that many bad things had been said about the Haitian military, but he said that he was neither corrupt nor violent.

''Believe me, I am clean,'' he said. ''If I wasn't clean, I wouldn't be here. I wouldn't have the respect that I have from people from the Pentagon, from people of the State Department.''

<FONT COLOR="Blue">Apres</FONT c>

MIAMI (Reuters) - A former Haitian army colonel who was convicted in his absence last year for his role in a bloody 1994 massacre in Haiti has been arrested in Florida and faces deportation, immigration officials said on Friday.

Carl Dorelien, who was sentenced to life in prison, also played a key role in a coup against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide soon after the start of his first term in 1991. The former military officer left Haiti in 1995 and had been living in Port St. Lucie, Florida.

Dorelien was arrested on Thursday by Immigration and Naturalization Service agents who caught him as he left his home. He was taken to an INS detention center in Miami for deportation proceedings, INS spokesman Rodney Germain said.

Dorelien was one of 37 high-ranking military officials convicted and sentenced to life in prison by a Haitian court in November last year following a massacre by soldiers of residents in the town of Gonaives in April 1994.

Residents were shot at, arrested, beaten and had their houses burned. Up to 15 people were thought to have been killed as soldiers punished residents for their support for the ousted Aristide. Last year's trial of officers responsible for the massacre was seen as a step forward for human rights in Haiti.

Dorelien lived in near poverty with a relative when he first arrived in the United States but he later won $3.2 million in the Florida lottery.

He was placed on an INS removal list July 1997 but allowed to stay in the United States pending an appeal. That was rejected and he was issued a final order to leave in June last year.

Germain said it was not clear exactly when Dorelien would be deported.

``We have to work with the foreign country, which in this case is Haiti, to get the travel documents and at that time we can remove him,'' he said.

After Aristide was restored to power in 1994 following a U.S.-led military invasion of the Caribbean nation, many of the military officials involved in the coup that had ousted him fled Haiti. Several ended up in the United States.

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