St. Jean Bosco - Haiti Observer Blog

Former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's presidency has been surrounded in the deaths of thousands Haitians, several of them well-known political figures and activists. Famous assassinations in the country during the 1990s can be classified into two: Aristide's supporters or the former president's critics.

Antoine Izméry was well-known businessman and a strong supporter of Aristide as a pro-democracy activist. He belonged to one of the wealthiest families in Haiti and was a large financier of the former president's campaign in 1990. When Aristide was ousted and exiled by a successful coup d'état in 1991, Izméry remained loyal and formed the Komite Mete men pou Verite Blayi (KOMEVEB), an organization that was aimed at exposing and publicizing the events that transpired during the coup and at bringing back Haiti's democratic form of government under Aristide. Along with this cause came the assassination of his brother, Georges, by the new military regime in power.

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The St. Jean Bosco Massacre in Port-au-Prince occurred on September 11, 1988, in which 13 to 50 parishioners were slaughtered, according to varying sources, and the church burnt to the ground. At the time Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Roman Catholic priest of the Salesians of the Don Bosco order, was saying mass, when the building was rushed by terrorists. Protectors hurried Aristide out of the church to a barricaded residence in one of the outlying church buildings.

The St. Jean Bosco Massacre was not the first time or last Aristide's life would be endangered. He'd already defied six or more attempts on his life, since in 1985 a mass he celebrated incited surfacing tensions, which presaged the coup of Jean-Claude Duvaliers's dictatorship. Following the massacre, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reported that a group of participants in the massacre appeared on Télé Nationale, Haiti's government-owned television station, and promised a 'heap of corpses' at any mass that Aristide celebrated.

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