Jean-Claude Bajeux

Jean-Claude Bajeux is a professor and director of the Ecumenical Center for Human Rights in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and also one of the leaders of the political party the National Congress of Democratic Movements, also known as Konakom. He and his family left Haiti in October 1993 after their house was attacked by members of the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haïti (FRAPH), a paramilitary organization trying to undermine support for ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The Bajeaux family returned to their home country following the reinstatement of Aristide in 1994.

Bajeux's credibility as a source for unbiased reporting on the human rights situation in Haiti was called into question after he joined the anti-Aristide coalition called the Group 184. This became especially true after he justified the shootings of unarmed civilians by the Haitian National Police on September 30, 2004. Bajeux coined the termed "Operation Bagdhad" to describe the mysterious beheadings of several police officers whose bodies were found the same day and later used to explain the reaction of the police. The first reference to the term "Operation Baghdad" can be found in an Associated Press report from October 3, 2004, "Aristide's partisans have begun an urban guerrilla operation that they call 'Operation Baghdad,' human rights activist Jean-Claude Bajeux said Saturday. The decapitations are imitative of those in Iraq, and they are meant to show the failure of U.S. policy in Haiti." Requests by human rights organizations and journalists for an independent autopsy of the corpses were denied after the government claimed the bodies of the beheaded police officers had been cremated the day after their discovery.

Bajeux has also been taken to task for his claims that victims of a raid by United Nations forces, in the seaside shantytown of Cité Soleil on July 6, 2005, were actually killed by Aristide partisans. Bajeux claimed that unarmed civilians had actually been murdered by gang leaders sympathetic to Aristide as a reprisal for their welcoming the news that a local resistance leader, Emmanuel "Dred" Wilme, had been killed in the raid along with four of his lieutenants. UN officials have repeated his assertions to explain the deaths of at least 23 unarmed victims during the July 6 raid, but extensive testimony from survivors and video evidence of the assault directly contradict Bajeux's version of events.