What Lies Behind the Unrest in Haiti?

What Lies Behind the Unrest in Haiti?

By Michael Deibert

As soon as Brazil went down in defeat to Belgium in the World Cup earlier this month, the barricades began to appear. In Haiti, a football-loving country whose fans are divided between passionate supporters of Brazil and Argentina, the government of President Jovenel Moïse had just announced an end to subsidies in the price of fuel. Part of the terms of a deal hammered out with the International Monetary Fund earlier this year, the move set prices to skyrocket overnight, with the price of petrol set to increase by 38%. In a country where World Bank figures put more than more than 6 million of Haiti’s nearly 11 million people living on less than US$2.41 per day, the news was too much to bear.

Along with the de rigueur forms of protest - burning tires and barricades made of tree branches, cement blocks and other cast off material - there was very targeted violence, as well. The Delimart, a grocery store along the busy Route de Delmas thoroughfare, was looted and burned. In Pétionville, a once-tony enclave in the hills above the city now ringed with bidonvilles (slums), a mob marched to the glittering Best Western, a favored locale for international diplomats and businesspeople, and shattered its windows and glass facade with hurled stone before moving on to another target. Scores of cars were not stolen, but were set aflame instead, as a kind of smoldering, stygian warning. By Saturday night, the government had reversed itself, indefinitely suspending the fuel hike, and there were calls for Moïse’s Prime Minister, Jack Guy Lafontant, to resign. This past weekend, he did just that.

Less than a year after the end of a United Nations peacekeeping mission in Haiti, known by its acronym MINUSTAH,  after a 13 year presence in the country (which saw, among other distinctions, the unintentional bringing of a cholera epidemic to Haiti by UN troops) and a little over a year since Jovenel Moïse assumed office, Haiti’s political demons, somewhat dormant in recent months, appear animated again. The question is, why now?

Moïse became president as the candidate of the Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale (PHTK), the political current founded by the man who preceded him in that office, Michel Martelly, a famous crooner of Haiti’s konpa music and better known by his nickname, Sweet Micky (Tèt Kale means “bald head” in Haiti’s poetic Creole language and refers to Martelly’s gleaming pate). Like a number of political currents before them including the Lespwa (Hope) coalition of the late René Préval (whose second term as president spanned 2006 to 2011) and the Fanmi Lavalas party of Jean-Bertrand Aristide (whose 2004 overthrow precipitated MINUSTAH’s deployment), PHTK is a juggernaut of opportunistic political operators less focused on a rigid ideology than on ambition, personal and political. Though both Martelly and Moïse worked mightily to bring foreign investment to Haiti, they have done so in a political atmosphere of rampant cronyism and corruption (a value judgment that includes the country’s bi-cameral parliament and opposition as well as the executive) and lingering questions about how $2 billion of money linked to the Venezuelan Petrocaribe fuel program - overseen by Préval and then Martelly - was spent.

Despite the ostensible return to Haiti of democracy more than a decade ago, life for the average Haitian continues to be a series of grinding endeavors to stay just out of the jaws of destitution. Though it is often loathe to issue a mea culpa, the policies of the international community have often contributed to this despair.

In the early 1980s, a U.S.-Canadian funded program killed most of the country’s pigs due to worries they might be infected with African swine fever, and only haphazardly replaced them. A draconian World Bank-sponsored structural adjustment program of austerity and privatization in the mid 1990s lowered the tariff on imported rice from 50 percent to 3 percent, effectively destroying the ability of Haiti’s domestic rice producers to be competitive. For years, assistance to Haiti’s beleaguered agricultural sector has often been only a fraction of its total foreign aid, leading to an influx of internal migrants to cities around the country, especially the capital, Port-au-Prince, where many of them died in Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake.

Much has been made of the muted response by the Police Nationale d’Haïti (PNH), Haiti’s national police force, to the violence. This is doubtless due to at least in part to the prickly relationship between Moïse and PNH chief Michel-Ange Gédéon, whose authority Moïse appeared to undercut with a controversial May decree. Though though many rank and file members of the PNH work diligently for meagre pay under grueling conditions, the moral of the body is constantly undermined by politicians who pay armed actors around the country (referred to as the baz, or base) to commit violence and deliver votes at election time.

Though the use of irregular armed partisans dates back in Haiti at least to the reign of Faustin Soulouque, who ruled from 1847 to 1859, the practice became part of the country’s political DNA during  the 1957-1986 Duvalier family dictatorship (whose milita was the feared Tontons Macoutes) and Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s truncated 2001 to 2004 term (in the shape of quite young gunmen referred to as chimere, after a mythical fire-breathing demon) and now has metastasized down to the most local level. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Martissant.

Set in the southern hills above the capital, Martissant has been carved into smaller zones of influence for various baz leaders, with names such as Ti Bois (Little Woods) and the self-explanatory Grand Ravine. In 2012, a young policeman named Walky Calixte was slain in the zone. Despite what a judge said were phone records linking two parliamentarians - Rodriguez Séjour and M’Zounaya Bellange Jean-Baptiste - to the crime and police protests, Haiti’s parliament refused to lift their colleagues’ immunity and the killers were never brought to justice. When a former Grand Ravine baz leader, Romelien Saint Jean (also known as Tèt Kale though not directly affiliated with the PHTK), was released from prison last month and tried to reassert control, he was slain by his successor, bearing the nom de guerre Bougoy, who has also been linked to the disappearance of Haitian journalist Vladimir Legagneur this past March. Much of the violence in the zone is believed linked to positioning ahead of elections scheduled for next year.

Their families driven into the capital’s slums years ago by the destructive policies foisted upon the country by outside entities, the baz has shown they are still a potent tool in the hands of actors, public and hidden, in Haiti’s political firmament, as an anecdote told to me by a friend in Haiti amid this week’s violence makes clear.

A mob arrived to set fire to a businesses by the house of a woman she knew. Some people from the neighborhood came out to talk with them and to ask them to not go through with it as the building was near a bunch of homes that could have caught fire. After listening to them, the leaders of the mob told the residents they were “sorry” but “we have a job to do and we have to go through with it."

Michael Delbert is the author of Haiti Will Not Perish: A Recent History (Zed Books) and is a Visiting Scholar at Franklin & Marshall College.

Could the gangs of Port-au-Prince form a pact to revitalise Haiti's capital?

Haiti’s leaders have long made use of armed groups to impose their will in the streets of vibrant but derelict Port-Au-Prince, offering precious little in return. Now some of those communities may have had enough 

Michael Deibert in Port-au-Prince

Tuesday 14 July 2015 12.01 BST

The Guardian

(Read the original article here) 

Sitting inside the Day-Glo-coloured nightclub that he runs on a hillside speckled with squat cement houses, Christla Chery, 32, pushes his baseball cap back on his head and outlines his community’s problems.

“We don’t have water, we don’t have electricity, we don’t have anything here. The state is completely absent from this neighbourhood,” he says, as the Caribbean winds clatter over the zinc roof. “This is a prison where we are deprived of our liberty. We would like the freedom of every person here to enter society.”

The neighbourhood of Ti Bois, where Chery has his nightclub, wraps like a necklace around the southern hills of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital. From this remove, the city pulses below: a nearly silent tableau of the tumbling azure ocean, curling smoke rising from burning garbage and thousands upon thousands of cars.
 
Though many refer to Chery and his compatriots as gang leaders, they have a different perception of themselves and their armed followers, whom they refer to as the baz – the base of the neighbourhood. Chery and his men enact a role that falls somewhere between political pressure group, warlord and tax collector, gathering tolls from the various supply trucks that pass along the narrow lanes.

The baz within Martissant – the larger neighbourhood of which Ti Bois is part – have often been in conflict among themselves. Despite being in a strategic location in the city – it overlooks the main road to the south of the country – Martissant was offered precious little by the state, even before the country’s devastating January 2010 earthquake. The baz have functioned in that power vacuum for years as a kind of de facto community government. Now, with Haitian elections scheduled for this year, the various baz are working to maintain a tense peace between themselves.

Haiti’s leaders have made use of armed groups, some quasi-regular and some not, to impose their will in Port-au-Prince virtually since the country’s founding. The history of the capital city has in part been the history of the fighting between these groups. Now that may be changing. “For years, [the politicians] would ask us to burn tyres, to cause disorder … but there was no development,” Chery says. “And we don’t want that anymore.”

Among those trying to facilitate a peaceful coexistence between the various baz in the city is the Lakou Lapè (the name means “peaceful community” in Creole). The two-year-old group has a mission to promote a culture of non-violence and dialogue.

“It’s like three steps forward, two steps backward,” says Louis Henri-Mars, Lakou Lapè’s executive director and the grandson of Haitian author Jean Price-Mars, one of the founders of the négritude movement of black consciousness. “But we know it takes time. Change comes from positive encounters and relationships that make positive connections happen. They allow you to get a different world view to come out of the craziness you’ve been living in.”

Under Faustin Soulouque, who crowned himself emperor and ruled Haiti from 1849 to 1859, the armed groups supporting him were referred to as zinglin. Around the same time, the peasant backers of the renegade general Louis-Jean-Jacques Acaau in the south of the country were referred to as l’armée souffrante (the suffering army). Haitian dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who ruled from 1957 until his death in 1971, formed the denim-clad Tontons Macoutes, a kind of shock troop with the dual purpose of repressing dissent and insulating him from an army coup such as those that had ousted his predecessors. His son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, inherited the Macoute system when he became president as a morbidly obese 19-year-old. Duvalier the younger was overthrown in 1986, returned to Haiti in 2011 and died peacefully there last year, having never answered for his crimes (of which those committed through the Macoutes were only part). Under Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who has the unique distinction of being overthrown not once but twice, the (often quite young) gunmen tasked with protecting the regime were called chimère, after a mythical fire-breathing demon.

As much as the better-known slum of Cité Soleil, Martissant has always been a redoubt of such paramilitaries. Roger Lafontant, a feared Macoute leader who died during the 1991 coup against Aristide, formed an armed group that operated in the area in the late 1980s. Later, the most powerful gang in Martissant was run by Felix “Don Féfé” Bien-Aimé, an Aristide loyalist who orchestrated the murder of at least 13 people in the neighbouring Fort Mercredi district, after which he was nevertheless awarded a patronage job as the director of Port-au-Prince’s main cemetery. He was himself later “disappeared” by the police.

Since 2004, an ever-shifting panoply of groups have occupied the various zones of Martissant – Ti Bois, Grand Ravine, Descayettes and 2eme Avenue. One group, the Lame Ti Manchèt (or L’armée des Petites Machettes, the Little Machete Army), was affiliated with rogue elements of the national police. Another of the largest Grand Ravine gangs was run by Dymsley “Ti Lou” Milien, who broke out of jail after being arrested for his alleged role in the 2000 murder of Haiti’s most prominent journalist, Jean Léopold Dominique. Up until recently, from a foreign mobile number, Ti Lou has regularly called his followers who listen, rapt, as a mobile phone is held aloft to transmit his words.

But relations between Ti Bois and Grand Ravine are now relatively calm, which makes many hope that Martissant can perhaps invigorate some of its long-moribund tourism industry. As hard as it may be to envision after the 2010 quake – and despite being levelled by previous earthquakes in 1751 and 1770 as well – Port-au-Prince was once thought of as one of the glorious cities of the Caribbean. Travelling to Haiti in 1929, the British author Alec Waugh wrote that Port-au-Prince was:

One of the loveliest towns in the New World … The walls of houses and the twin spires of the cathedral gleam brightly through and above deep banks of foliage … It is through wide, clean streets, through the open park of the Champs de Mars, through a town that is half a garden, that you drive out toward the hills.

Martissant itself was one of the hubs for visitors to the capital. Just a few streets below Chery’s house is the beautiful Parc de Martissant, a restful space filled with dripping vegetation and bright bird of paradise flowers. The 42-acre park has now been reclaimed by the Fondasyon Konesans Ak Libète (Fokal), a civil society group working on education, human development and economic issues.

Within the park sits the Habitation Leclerc, an early 19th-century building that was allegedly once home to Napoleon Bonaparte’s sister, Pauline, and her husband, French general Charles Leclerc, who was sent to Haiti to stamp out the slave rebellion that ultimately created the world’s first black republic. The property was eventually purchased by the American choreographer Katherine Dunham, whose 1969 autobiography, Island Possessed, remains an essential read. She turned Habitation Leclerc into a lavish hotel that attracted the jet-set, who availed themselves of nearby casinos and bars staffed by Dominican prostitutes (extraordinarily, despite fear of Aids and three decades of political upheaval, many of these bars still exist). But, by the late 1990s, the property – like some other areas of Port-au-Prince – had been overrun by gangs and squatters.

Recent restoration efforts have begun to return the gorgeous old structure to its former glory. Nor is it alone as a zone of possible rebirth. Outside of Martissant, the district of Bel-Air, which rises on the hills above a broad square that once housed Haiti’s National Palace (destroyed in the 2010 earthquake), has a rich tradition of music and art. For many years it was a centre for the production of drapo vodou, or voodoo flags, beautiful fabric-and-sequin creations bearing representations of the various Iwa (spirits). It, too, fell into disrepair and was heavily damaged in the quake, but it someday might have the potential to be a fascinating neighbourhood again.

Haiti’s current political scene, though, gives rise to concern that national politics will once again factionalise the city’s neighbourhood communities. The outgoing president, Michel Martelly – often referred to as Tèt Kale (Bald Head) – delivered a long, obscene rant against his opponents during a huge concert in the Champ de Mars plaza last month. Among those running to replace him are a senator, Moïse Jean-Charles, whose chief occupation as mayor of the northern city of Milot appeared to be bullying political opponents and journalists, and Jude Célestin, who has been accused by a now-jailed gang leader of involvement in the 2009 disappearance of another government employee. One senate candidate for Martelly’s party, Annette “Sò Anne” Auguste, is running despite being named by a judge for her own alleged role in the Jean Dominique killing.

Strange and somewhat menacing symbolism abounds in the city. Last month, supporters of excluded candidates held a suggestive mock “funeral” for Haiti’s election officials. An unseemly revisionism of the Duvalier years has also taken hold, with magazines advertising “Papa Doc Cigars” printed with the number 57 (the year of his inauguration). The election is also taking place as thousands of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent are being expelled from the neighbouring Dominican Republic, which Human Rights Watch called “ongoing violations of the human right to a nationality”.
In such a context, Mario Andrésol, the head of the Police Nationale d’Haïti (PNH), the country’s national police force, from 2006 until 2012, collected 159,000 signatures to be accepted as an independent candidate for president. On a recent day, he was hosting a meeting of young activists from impoverished regions such as Bel Air and Cité Soleil at his Port-au-Prince home.

“We need to redefine ourselves as a nation, and the vision is to change a corrupted system,” says Andrésol. “We need to have institutional reinforcement. The executive, the legislative and the judiciary are supposed to be independent, but they’re not. The president has too many privileges, too many prerogatives. The president needs to understand that he’s the servant of the people.”

Meanwhile, for many of those in the capital who survived the 2010 earthquake – and were not relocated to the questionable sanctuary of some far-flung new camp – life goes on much as it did before, chache lavi (looking for life). The moto taxi drivers still stand in a line outside of the Djoumbala nightclub. The vendor women still haggle and laugh in the Pétionville market. The residents near the Stade Sylvio Cator still go about their lives in a swirl of dust and exhaust fumes and a cacophony of engines, horns and blaring music. In my old neighbourhood of Pacot, wreathed in bougainvillea and full of houses in Haiti’s distinctive gingerbread style of architecture, delicious cabrit en sauce is still on offer and groups playing Haiti’s plangent rara music still march through the streets.

Haiti’s national character – gentle, kind, good-humoured, quick-witted – stands in stark contrast to the take-no-prisoners blood sport of the country’s political culture. But, beyond the shrill ramblings of its politicians, at a certain hour of the day one is reminded of the words of Jacques Stephen Alexis, one of Haiti’s greatest writers, when he described Port-au-Prince in his 1955 book Compère Général Soleil (General Sun, My Brother):

Towards three o’clock in the afternoon the wind picked up suddenly, galloping and roaring through the city. The pelicans over the port whirled endlessly. The sea put on its fancy green dress and donned shawls of lace foam.

Looking down on the capital from Ti Bois as the setting sun lathers a honeyed light on to the surrounding mountains, one can see what he meant.

And Ti Bois, as it happens, does not appear to be the only baz that is gradually awakening to the fact that Haiti’s politicians have long used them as little more than cannon fodder, providing precious little in return as their districts sank ever-deeper into poverty.

Across town, in the popular quarter of Saint Martin, a rabble-rousing deputy in Haiti’s lower house of parliament – known for his violent background and temper – recently showed up in his constituency to seek support for his political ambitions, as he always had. Instead of finding a receptive audience, he was relieved of his weapon, his money and sent out of the neighbourhood with a message not to return.

Bullet

Photo © Michael Deibert

In July 2006, I picked this shell casing up from the ground in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Martissant , during one of the worst bouts of gang warfare Haiti's capital had ever seen. I was there working on an article trying to explain what was going on, why the violence was happening. Two of the people I interviewed during those visits were killed shortly thereafter, and it was there that I finally learned the fate of an old friend who had disappeared the year before. I don't know why I keep it, but I do, right here next to my collection of books on Haiti.

Note to the Corbett List

I confess some surprise that a single article of mine on Haiti’s former president has sparked such debate as the country confronts its first presidential vote in five years, a vote during which neither Mr. Aristide or any member of the interim government that followed him are candidates. But perhaps in the long run it is useful as it seems to be sparking a needed re-examination on some important aspects of Haiti’s recent history. If such examination would help even in the smallest way for the people of St. Marc who still wait for justice to achieve their aim, then it will have been mightily worth it.

1. Further on St. Marc

It is easy for those who were not in Haiti at the time to mock and dismiss the wrenching first-hand accounts of the survivors of the February 2004 Aristide government assault on St. Marc, or the first-hand accounts of journalists such as myself and the Miami Herald’s Marika Lynch who visited the town shortly thereafter. But one is reminded one of the sage words of the British academic Stephen Ellis who, when describing the incredulity that some ascribed to accounts of Liberia's civil war, wrote that "while descriptions (of the civil war) are routinely dismissed as sensational journalism by high-minded academics, it would be foolish simply to scoff at the opinions of correspondents who glean their impressions at first hand. Journalists acquire detailed knowledge, and an appreciation for the flavor of events, which can escape distant observers."

Simply put, the hypothesis that the reporting of many journalists, local and foreign, in Haiti at the time, the testimony of dozens of witnesses, the research of both Human Rights Watch and the Reseau National de Defense des Droits Humains (RNDDH), all working autonomously, is all part of a seamless, coordinated conspiracy is not a hypothesis that can be accepted by any rational person.

The best quote I’ve ever heard about Haiti’s justice system came from RNDDH’s director Pierre Esperance, who said to me, in connection that the to St. Marc case, that “in our system, the criminal becomes a victim because the system doesn't work.” That is what we saw with relation to the St. Marc massacre. Rather than having a transparent trial to hold the perpetrators accountable, they were sent to sit in jail without any conclusion to the official investigation, like almost every other high-profile case in the country’s history.

A word in defense of the RNDDH, an organization that I have seen do the most important human rights advocacy in Haiti, both in its present incarnation and as the Haiti-branch of the NCHR, since I first began visiting Haiti now nearly 15 years ago.

Though their critics like to bray about RNDDH’s 2004 award of C$100,000 (US$85,382) from the Canadian International Development Agency, most of the group’s funding in fact comes from organizations such as Christian Aid, the Mennonite Central Committee and the Lutheran World Federation. As part of its vitally important work, since that grant, RNDDH has consistently advocated for justice on behalf of a number of Fanmi Lavalas members who it says were victimized under Haiti’s 2004-2006 interim government, including Jean Maxon Guerrier, Yvon Feuille, Gerald Gilles, and Rudy Heriveaux.

RNDDH has shown a commitment to a non-political defense of human rights that a group like the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), under the sway as it is of Mr. Aristide's Miami attorney Ira Kurzban (one of the IJDH’s founders and chairman of its board of directors), or the IJDH’s Haiti partner, the the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), which receives “most of its support from the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti,” have never risen to.

[With the IJDH’s 2005 annual report listing Mr. Kurzban’s law firm in the category reserved for those having contributed more than $5000 to the organization, the group’s 2006 report lists the firm under “Donations of Time and Talent,” and the American Immigration Lawyers Association South Florida Chapter (for which Mr. Kurzban served as past national president and former general council) in a section reserved for those having donated $10,000 or more. Simply put, the IJDH is a creature of Mr. Aristide’s attorney, a man who has a financial stake in rehabilitating the former president. Their work in Haiti should be seen in this context.]

I would like to give the last word on the St. Marc killings to Charlienor Thompson, the coordinator of the Association des Victimes du Genocide de la Scierie (AVIGES), whose feelings of abandonment by the international community in general and the United Nations in particular were summed-up in a heart-rending 2007 open letter to Louis Joinet, the United Nations' independent expert on the situation of human rights in Haiti at the time. In that letter, Thompson wrote of how “we, the victims, who live in Haiti and who have lodged a complaint with the judicial system of our country for more than three years, remain confused and ask ourselves who cares about our case?"

Thompson goes on to ask:

How can we expect justice? Who can testify freely while murderers are free and move with impunity? The majority of people in Saint Marc are afraid. Even those who were direct victims of the acts mentioned above are frightened. The victims are eager to flee the city and witnesses to hide. When will we enjoy the benefits of justice that we demand? In the present circumstances, in what form will it come?


2. Further on Martissant

As happened with regards to the killing of St. Marc, a handful of advocates for Haiti’s former president living in North America have made it their goal to attempt to deceive people that violence in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Martissant came only from one side, that of forces hostile to Haiti’s former president. They seek to convince people, despite the evidence gathered by Haiti’s own journalists and foreign reporters such as myself, that gangs formerly allied to Haiti’s former president did not play an enthusiastic and blood-soaked role in the killings there. Put simply, this is false.

Consider the following:

- A 23 August 2005 broadcast from the capital’s Radio Kiskeya stated "inhabitants of various districts of Martissant (a southern slum of Port-au-Prince) launched an S.O.S to the authorities on Monday so that they would forcefully intervene in a zone infested with heavily-armed gangsters. These inhabitants, the majority of them young people coming from 4th and the 5th Avenue Bolosse, describe the reactivation in the district of groups armed under the regime of Jean Bertrand Aristide which have made their residence in the Grand Ravine zone of Martissant."

- The 19 November 2005 article "Nouvelle montee de tension a Martissant" from the Haitian media outlet AlterPresse stated "The tension went up of a notch these last days within Martissant, in the southern sector of the capital, where confrontations have occurred between rival bands, residents told AlterPresse. Clashes have occurred on several occasions during the last 8 days between the armed bands from Grande Ravine and the Lame Ti Manchet, leaving at least 2 dead and several casualties by bullets."

- A 6 November 2006 statement by the president of Haiti’s senate, Joseph Lambert, himself a member of the Lespwa party of Haitian president Rene Preval, where Lambert directly referred to the violence in Martissant as being part of "Operation Baghdad II," in reference to a fall 2004 explosion of violence by Aristide partisans, and went on to say that "Operation Baghdad 2 takes the form of a means for a sector to politically pressure the executive (branch) in order to find employment." [Note: Despite statements to the contrary, Operation Baghdad was called just that by those carrying it out, as can be heard in this 2004 report from National Public Radio's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro]

- A 4 December 2006 broadcast from Radio Kiskeya which stated that "according to residents (of Martissant) a local gang called Base Pilate was responsible for four murders. The leaders of this armed group are insane with rage after the death of a police officer considered to be one of their allies...The Base Pilate is committed, under the umbrella of the armed gangs of Grand Ravine, to fight without mercy against the Lame Ti Manchet, another rival band based within Sainte-Bernadette lane."

- An 8 December 2006 broadcast, again recorded on the ground in Martissant, from Radio Metropole, stated "Heavy shooting was recorded in the zone of Martissant yesterday ; witnesses confirm that gangsters of Grand Ravine associated with the gang Base Pilate tried to launch an attack against the districts of Descartes and Martissant 1. Residents of Descartes and Martissant 1 affirm that 2 people were killed and several others wounded yesterday evening. "

- A 19 January 2007 broadcast from Radio Kiskeya, which stated that "A wild war has been underway for several months among gangs called Base Pilate and Lame Ti Manchet, which imposes the law of the jungle on Bolosse, Grand Ravine and Ste-Bernadette."



3. Further on Nanoune Myrthil’s infant

Like any other observer, I do not feel that I yet know the full story of the fate of Nanoune Myrthil’s infant, nor have I ever stated otherwise. However, given the statements of Nanoune Myrthil herself, the focus on the case by Radio Haiti Inter (arguably Haiti’s most independent and respected radio station when it was still broadcasting) and Radio Metropole during 2000/2001, and the separate (yet highly similar) declarations of Johnny Occilius, Jean-Michard Mercier and Sonia Desrosiers, it certainly, to me, seems a case worth investigating and by any standard rises to the level of something that is newsworthy. Can one imagine such a case in the United States or Europe, with individuals similarly close to the seat of power making such declarations and the charges not receiving media attention or a thorough investigation? I certainly cannot.



4. Reporting ethically from Haiti

Most journalists I know, whatever other criticisms I may have of them, would never knowingly print information that they knew to be false. This cannot be said for those seeking to deny justice to the victims of St. Marc and Martissant today.

In 2006, Jeb Sprague and Diana Barhona attacked the press solidarity group Reporters sans frontières (RSF), for supposedly receiving money from the International Republican Institute (IRI). When Sprague and Barhona were unable to produce proof of this claim, RSF News Editor Jean-François Julliard responded succinctly "We do not receive any funding from the International Republican Institute. This is a pure figment of the authors' imagination. Your readers can check our certified accounts on our website, rsf.org. "



Also, in 2006, Jeb Sprague attacked the Haiti Support Group, a London-based solidarity organization that has been working at a grassroots level in Haiti since 1992. In an article co-authored with Joe Emersberger and which appeared in the magazine Counterpunch, Sprague claimed that Haiti Support Group head Charles Arthur encouraged people to harass a researcher who had published highly controversial human rights study in the British medical journal, The Lancet (link). Arthur later wrote that "The statements about me in the Counterpunch piece are pure fiction. " Arthur’s full response to Sprague’s allegations can be read here.

In his 2009 article, “Calls Mount to Free Lavalas Activist," Wadner Pierre (along with Sprague one of the co-editors of the Haiti Analysis website) described Ronald “Black Ronald” Dauphin - a man identified by survivors of the February 2004 pogrom as one of the chief members of the group that carried out the massacre - as “a Haitian political prisoner,” attacked the RNDDH and quoted the IJDH which also, curiously, described Ronald Dauphin in a June 2009 press release as “a Haitian grassroots activist, customs worker and political prisoner,” language mimicked closely in the Sprague/Pierre article.

Wadner Pierre, who recently wrote a rather un-gentlemanly piece mocking Haitian presidential candidate Mirlande Manigat on the basis of here age wrote his laudatory article about those accused in the St. Marc killings having never mentioned that he had been described as working for the IJDH’s Haiti affiliated, the BAI , or that he had previously contributed text and photographs to the IJDH website lauding the April 2007 release of Amanus Mayette, another suspect of the St. Marc massacre, a photo essay that since appears to have been removed from the IJDH site.

Given such a record, I am not surprised that Sprague, Pierre, etc would continue their rather fevered attacks against reporters against myself (which I largely responded to in a blog posting here) and against the victims in Martissant and St. Marc.

Our first and only duty as reporters is not to those abroad who have profited from Haiti’s ongoing misery, it is to the suffering in Haiti themselves. Whatever discomfort that causes in powerful circles beyond Haiti is not only deserved, but welcome and necessary if the cycle of impunity that is killing the country is ever to be ended.

With my best regards and hopes for a peaceful election,

MD

A response to Tom Luce

Recently, I was forwarded an article written about me by Tom Luce, a man who runs something called Human Rights Accompaniment In Haiti, Inc. (Hurah). Generally, I don't respond to these sorts of things. While fringe dwellers and organizations can be an interesting subject in and of themselves, indicative as they are of the often smug condescension and paternalism that wealthy foreigners feel about poor people the world over, an entire article examining them, and their habit of haunting the internet day and night, spoiling for a fight and libeling people, would be an esoteric and tedious undertaking indeed. However, I felt that it might be worthwhile for readers if I took some time to respond to some of Mr. Luce's egregious misstatements and outright fabrications.

Accusing someone of "contributing to a proxy war" is a serious charge, Fortunately, judging by Mr. Luce's ponderous and slanderous diatribe against this member of the press, it evidently does not come from a very serious individual. When Mr Luce writes that my article is supporting "the prolongation of this proxy war, poor people killing poor people, as a way for the more affluent and powerful to keep their hands clean and keep hold of their power," he exposes both an appalling ignorance of the situation on the ground of Martissant and of the article he sets out to critique.

Apparently the statement in my article that "all armed groups in the neighborhood have been implicated in the grossest human rights violations by residents," followed by "the international community must demand human rights for all in Haiti, without distinction for political affiliation, as it is truly the only way forward," suggesting as it does one standard of human rights for all groups to adhere to (echoing my November 2005 Newsday editorial, "Ballots instead of bullets"), isn't explicit enough for Mr. Luce, so I will try and hold his hand a little further.

Visiting Grand Ravine, Ti Bois, and Déscartes with two other journalists in the summer of 2006, we came upon a scene of desolation of violence as bad as anything I have ever seen in Haiti. My colleague Thos Robinson shot hundreds of photos as I interviewed dozens of people (including Esterne Bruner) in all three areas of the community in Kreyol (the tapes are still in my possession). I suppose there is some other explanation for what we saw in Ti Bois - the hundreds of burned homes, the hundreds of people fleeing down the hillside with their meager belongings on their heads and the people who grabbed hold of my microphone to tell the story of rape, murder and arson that Grand Ravine gang leaders such as Wilkens "Chien Chaud" Pierre (whom I also interviewed, and is now deceased) and Dymsley "Ti Lou" Milien (wanted for alleged involvement in the slaying of Radio Haiti-Inter's Jean Dominique) were bringing to their district - so perhaps Mr. Luce should return to Haiti and lecture those poor people on how they are bringing a bad image to the "movement" he holds so dear, to stop spreading these vicious lies and to go back to the ruins of their homes and live quietly so that they do not complicate the rigid ideological view of the world people like Mr. Luce cling to from a safe distance. Are these the "affluent and powerful" people Mr. Luce had in mind? Likewise, when Luce writes that there was "no proof" of inter-gang warfare in the region in 2006, he ignores (or perhaps is unable to read?) the extensive listing of Haitian radio reports I provide in my article, all recorded on the ground, in Kreyol, which attest to the very war whose existence Luce tries to hide.

Luce's reference to "violence on the part of alleged Lavalas people" is pure proof of his intellectual dishonesty. If there was violence committed in the name of the Fanmi Lavalas party, it was by "alleged" affiliates because, naturally, no affiliate of the party whose supposed purity Luce fetishizes to such an extent could ever be guilty of violence. To write that "some Lavalas adherents did take up arms in defense of their lives and property before and after the 04 coup" is a nice way of sanitizing what I and others on the ground during the 2001-2004 era saw: A government policy and program of arming young men, some of them barely into their teens, as a means for one political party to bully and terrorize its opponents into submission. I know this because some of those young men were my friends, and, despite their often violent behavior, I had far greater respect for them and the honor with which they conducted themselves than the rancid politicians or their cynical foreign advocates like Mr. Luce who so used them and continue to do so. As we can see, Mr. Luce continues to use the bodies of those young boys as currency to score political points even today.

Likewise, I am rather sure the courageous priest Max Dominique, whose funeral oration for Pere Adrien in May 2003, where Dominique denounced the repressive system Jean-Bertrand Aristide had put in place and likened the chimere to the attachés and Macoutes of yore (and which resulted in political thugs arriving at his door that night screaming for his head) , must be rolling over in his grave at Luce's attempt to evoke his name to bolster his dishonest and highly partisan attempts to excuse the murder of the residents of Ti Bois because, unlike some of the equally long-suffering residents of Grand Ravine, they were not members of the "correct" political movement. It is a shame that Tom Luce wasn't on hand, as I was, one morning in January 2003 when Dominique delivered the funeral oration for three brothers from Carrefour murdered with impunity by the police, their coffins soon to be taken to the front of the National Palace in protest, and where Dominique thundered "No to impunity! No to insecurity! We demand justice!"

That was a rallying cry worth following.

Michael Deibert