Srebrenica, 15 years on

On the 15th anniversary of the massacre of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, I thought it an apt time to repost this piece I wrote in 2006, which focuses in part on such ill-famed individuals as Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali and Arundhati Roy and their denial of the war crimes that took place during the Balkan wars. Good rebuttals from actual journalists such as Ed Vulliamy and survivors such as Kemal Pervanic included within.

MD


9 October 2006

Freedom speech and its perils

(Read the original article published here)

Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist with Novaya Gazeta who had probably done more than any other single person to expose the horror of the war in Chechnya and the involvement of Russian officials in some of its most ghastly aspects, was murdered on Saturday at her Moscow apartment. Her book, A Small Corner of Hell, was one of the definitive portraits of the agony inflicted on the Chechens, and how actors on both sides of the conflict cynically profited from it. When she died, she had been working on an article regarding the use of torture in the regime of Chechnya’s pro-Moscow premier Ramzan A. Kadyrov, which, she told The New York Times in April, would likely include evidence of torture by Kadyrov’s police and paramilitaries, and perhaps even testimony from at least one witness who had been tortured by Mr. Kadyrov himself.

Whoever ordered the contract killing, for which at this point no suspects have been apprehended, the intent seems fairly clear: To silence one of Russia’s most powerful voices for human rights, democracy and government accountability. Someone was so threatened by what Politkovskaya would say or write that they decided, in the cold calculations of the brutal, that killing her was an appropriate price to pay to ensure her silence.

It is sadly ironic that this silencing of a dissenting voice should come just days after, for the second time in recent weeks, Columbia University, one of the most respected institutions of higher learning in the United States and a fixture on the educational landscape here in my own city of New York, appeared to bow to the voices of intolerance in allowing a scheduled speaker to be silenced by those who differed from their views.

This time the speaker, invited by a campus Republican group, was Jim Gilchrist, the head of the Minuteman Project, which assembled hundreds of volunteers last year, some armed, to patrol the Arizona-Mexico border for illegal immigrants. As Mr. Gilchrist spoke, several dozen protestors stormed the stage, unfurled banners and began shouting him down and, by some accounts, attempted to push him off the stage. You can watch film of the disruption here. As the fracas erupted mere weeks after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was invited, then disinvited, to the campus in the midst of popular outcry, one can fairly ask whether the level of debate at one of our nation‘s most prestigious (and expensive) universities has sunk to the level of sloganeering and fear of allowing the other side be heard. Though I personally have no respect at all for the virulently anti-immigrant and xenophobic position of Mr. Gilchrist and his group, much as I have no respect for the frothingly anti-Semitic rantings of Mr. Ahmadinejad, either our campuses here in the United States are places of free inquiry, where the airing of the views of the minority are given equal protection as the views of the majority, or they are not. On his weekly radio program, New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took the right approach, by stating that “I think it’s an outrage that somebody that was invited to speak didn’t get a chance to speak…There are too many incidents at the same school where people get censored.”

It seems that this current of intolerance is more and more a facet of public discourse in North America. I have experienced it first-hand. At about this time one year ago, I published my first book, Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press), my chronicle of my experiences in that Caribbean country since 1997. Despite some historical sidetracks, the book is chiefly a chronicle of the years between the return of Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s government to Haiti by a U.S.-lead multinational force in 1994 to his overthrow and exile amidst massive street protests against his rule and an armed rebellion a decade later.

Having been involved with Haiti for many years and having seen what Mr. Aristide, his government and his Fanmi Lavalas political party had brutalized and cynically exploited the poor majority of Haitians, I was conscious writing the book that, in order to portray accurately the roles of some in Haiti’s fractured and often violent political landscape, some holy cows would have to be slaughtered. I would have to speak honestly about the massive payouts made by the Aristide government to lobbyists and political actors in the United States, several of whom, including former U.S. Representative Ron Dellums, still wield considerable power with my country’s elected representatives. I would have to speak of the break I had with the analysis of some of those who, in progressive circles in North America, had been allowed to speak virtually unchallenged as authorities on Haiti for many years. The statements of individuals such as the American doctor Paul Farmer, whose public health work among Haiti’s poor I had always admired but whose continued vocal support of the Aristide government - a government that was victimizing that very same strata of Haitian society - I couldn’t condone, and Noam Chomsky, whose critiques of Haiti’s political travails were delivered via his tenured professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, needed to be addressed by someone who had lived and moved among the Haitian people, spoke their language, and saw their struggles if there was ever to be an honest discourse of how to best help the country among progressives in the United States. As I regarded Mr. Chomsky’s work on Haiti in particular as fairly marginal to the larger discussion of the fate of Haiti’s poor, though, I restricted my commentary on him to only two (rather unflattering) paragraphs in the book’s 454 pages.

As the book was published, however, admitting that they themselves had not even read it in its entirety, Mr. Chomsky and his literary agent, the author Anthony Arnove, who, like Mr. Chomsky, has made a comfortable living for himself adopting a “radical” position while making sure to steer well clear of the line of fire, launched a campaign against the book by berating my publisher Seven Stories (which also publish several Chomsky titles) on its contents and attempting, so it seemed, to scuttle its publication, or at least the press' support of it. Phone calls were made, emails were sent. Seven Stories, to its credit, stuck to its guns and published the book as written. Why, one might ask, would two such established authors be so threatened by a book penned on a poor Caribbean country by a working-class journalist and writer whom they had never met and whose work they admitted they had barely read? I must say that I was surprised, with all that is going on in the world, that my little book would warrant such attention from two individuals who like to portray themselves as champions of free speech.

These attempts to squelch the book ran roughly concurrently with the campaign against the talented young British journalist Emma Brockes, whose October 2005 interview with Mr. Chomsky in The Guardian caused a great deal of controversy, asking, as it did, tough questions about Chomsky’s relationship with what The Times (UK) columnist Oliver Kamm quite accurately described as “some rather unsavoury elements who wrote about the Balkan wars in the 1990s.”

The furor at the time centered around Ms. Brockes confronting Chomky with the fact that he had lent his name to a letter praising the “outstanding” (Chomsky’s own words) work of a journalist called Diana Johnstone. Johnstone’s 2002 book Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Pluto Press), argues that the July 1995 killing of at least 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica was, in essence (directly quoting from her book), not a “part of a plan of genocide” and that “there is no evidence whatsoever” for such a charge. This despite the November 1995 indictment of Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for “genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war” stemming from that very episode and the later conviction by the same tribunal of a Bosnian Serb general of aiding and abetting genocide in Srebrenica. Johnstone also states that no evidence exists that much more than 199 men and boys were killed there and that Srebrenica and other unfortunately misnamed 'safe areas' had in fact “served as Muslim military bases under UN protection.” In 2003, the Swedish magazine Ordfront published an interview with Johnstone where she reiterated these views. Chomsky was also among those who supported a campaign defending the right of a fringe magazine called Living Marxism to publish claims that footage the British television station ITN took in August 1992 at the Serb-run Trnopolje concentration camp in Bosnia was faked. ITN sued the magazine for libel and won, putting the magazine out of business, as Living Marxism could not produce a single witness who had seen the camps at first hand, whereas others who had - such as the journalist Ed Vulliamy - testified as to their horror.

In fact, as recently as April 25, 2006, in an interview with Radio Television of Serbia (a station formerly aligned with the murderous and now-deceased Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic), Chomsky stated, of the iconic, emaciated image of a Bosnian Muslim man named Fikret Alic, the following:

Chomsky: [I]f you look at the coverage [i.e. media coverage of earlier phases of the Balkan wars], for example there was one famous incident which has completely reshaped the Western opinion and that was the photograph of the thin man behind the barb-wire.

Interviewer: A fraudulent photograph, as it turned out.

Chomsky: You remember. The thin men behind the barb-wire so that was Auschwitz and 'we can't have Auschwitz again.'

In taking this position, Chomsky seemingly attempts to discredit the on-the-ground reporting of not only Mr. Vulliamy - whose reporting for the Guardian from the war in Bosnia won him the international reporter of the year award in 1993 and 1994 - but of other journalists such as Penny Marshall, Ian Williams and Roy Gutman. In fact, Vulliamy , who filed the first reports on the horrors of the Trnopolje camp and was there that day the ITN footage was filmed, wrote as follows in The Guardian in March 2000:

Living Marxism's attempts to re-write the history of the camps was motivated by the fact that in their heart of hearts, these people applauded those camps and sympathized with their cause and wished to see it triumph. That was the central and - in the final hour, the only - issue. Shame, then, on those fools, supporters of the pogrom, cynics and dilettantes who supported them, gave them credence and endorsed their vile enterprise.

In his interview with Brockes, Chomsky stated that "Ed Vulliamy is a very good journalist, but he happened to be caught up in a story which is probably not true."

In a November 2005 column, Marko Attila Hoare, a Senior Research Fellow at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Kingston (London), wrote thusly:

An open letter to Ordfront, signed by Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy and others, stated: 'We regard Johnstone's Fools' Crusade as an outstanding work, dissenting from the mainstream view but doing so by an appeal to fact and reason, in a great tradition.' In his personal letter to Ordfront in defence of Johnstone, Chomsky wrote: 'I have known her for many years, have read the book, and feel that it is quite serious and important.' Chomsky makes no criticism here of Johnstone's massacre denial, or indeed anywhere else - except in the Brockes interview, which he has repudiated. Indeed, he endorses her revisionism: in response to Mikael van Reis's claim that 'She [Johnstone] insists that Serb atrocities - ethnic cleansing, torture camps, mass executions - are western propaganda', Chomsky replies that 'Johnstone argues - and, in fact, clearly demonstrates - that a good deal of what has been charged has no basis in fact, and much of it is pure fabrication.'

Pretty astounding stuff, huh? But, faced with a relentless campaign by Mr. Chomsky and his supporters The Guardian, to its eternal shame, pulled Brockes’ interview from its website and issued what can only be described as a groveling apology that did a great disservice not only to Ms Brockes herself, but also to former Guardian correspondent Vulliamy and all those journalists who actually risked their lives covering the Bosnian conflict, to say nothing of the victims of the conflict themselves.

The caving-in focused on three points, the chief of which appeared to be the headline used on the interview, which read: “Q: Do you regret supporting those who say the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated? A: My only regret is that I didn't do it strongly enough.”

Though this was a paraphrase rather than a literal quotation, the fact of the matter was that it did seem to accurately sum up the state of affairs: Chomsky had actively supported Johnstone, who in turn had claimed that the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated and not part of a campaign of genocide. The Guardian brouhaha prompted, Kemal Pervanic, author of The Killing Days: My Journey Through the Bosnia War, and a survivor of the Omarska concentration camp, to write that “If Srebrenica has been a lie, then all the other Bosnian-Serb nationalists' crimes in the three years before Srebrenica must be false too. Mr Chomsky has the audacity to claim that Living Marxism was "probably right" to claim the pictures ITN took on that fateful August afternoon in 1992 - a visit which has made it possible for me to be writing this letter 13 years later - were false. This is an insult not only to those who saved my life, but to survivors like myself.”

Chomsky complained about that, too, forcing The Guardian to write in its apology that, ignoring the fact that it was Chomsky’s characterization of the Serb-run camps that seemed to outrage Pervanic the most, “Prof Chomsky believes that publication (of Pervanic’s letter) was designed to undermine his position, and addressed a part of the interview which was false…With hindsight it is acknowledged that the juxtaposition has exacerbated Prof Chomsky's complaint and that is regretted.”

So Emma Brockes (whom I have never met), in this instance, at least, was silenced. There but for the grace of God (and a few gutsy editors) go I and many other journalists who have challenged the powerful.

Retracting our steps slightly, the actions of Chomsky and Arnove were by no means the only efforts to silence the voices of chronicled in my book or that of its author. The others - vituperative and false attacks by a violent and erratic Aristide crony named Patrick Elie, the eruption of Mr. Aristide’s attorney Ira Kurzban and a red-face, apparently unstable man named Jack Lieberman into a shouting, semi-hysterical tirade during a reading of mine in Miami resulting in the summoning (by whom I don’t know) of security personnel, photos of corpses emailed to me last November by a seemingly unbalanced graduate student from California named Jen Sprague, a December 2005 email from Miami celebrating the July 2005 murder of Haitian journalist (and friend) Jacques Roche - continued after the book’s publication and could make an entertaining if disturbing article in themselves. However, at the moment they would serve as a distraction from the issue at hand. Having lost so many friends to Haiti’s political violence over the last decade, I felt that the threats, whether they be professional or personal, that would be visited upon me because of the book were a small price to pay to get the truth of what happened to Haiti out.

This triumvirate of episodes as I have been mulling over them - the murder of Politkovskaya, the shutting down of free discouse at Columbia University and the campaign of a small privileged, insular and delusional elite to prevent the publication of views they deem objectionable by various methods - reminds me of nothing so much as the lyrics of Woody Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd,” as relevant today as when it was penned in 1939:

Yes, as through this world I've wandered
I've seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.

As long as those in positions of power, wherever they may be, are unchallenged authority figures assured of uncritical press coverage and an adoring public, no real dialogue will ever take place. From our prevaricating, duplicitous president here in the United States on down, they must be challenged. The fact is, some people can only react to criticism and dissent by trying to silence those individuals who are dissenting, quite often journalists. Free and open discourse? As human beings, perhaps, I think we still have a long way to go. But we as journalists cannot back down, cannot be intimidated into silence by those who would want to keep us from reporting unpopular and uncomfortable truths. There is too much at stake for us to take even a step back in defending our rights to report honestly on the struggles of the poor, the disenfranchised and the powerless. Journalists like Anna Politkovskaya paid the ultimate price so that struggle could go on, and we owe their memories at least that much.

Good neighbours?

Good neighbours?

Published: June 08, 2010

Foreign Direct Investment

Haiti and the Dominican Republic have endured a fraught relationship over the past 200 years, but could the latter’s response to the former’s recent earthquake lead to a more mutually beneficial partnership in the future? Michael Deibert investigates.

(Read the original article here)

When an earthquake devastated a large section of Haiti in January, no country responded more empathically than the Dominican Republic, which shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with Haiti.

Despite what has been an often stormy and distrustful relationship between the two countries – due in large part to the many Haitian occupations of the Dominican Republic, as well as the long history of abuses committed against the almost 1 million Haitians living in the Dominican Republic – Dominicans almost immediately began fundraising drives and gathered supplies. These were then ferried across the border to Haiti by a combination of local relief organisations and ordinary citizens.

“I had been visiting Haiti for such a long time, and have such good friends over there, that I knew I had to do my best to help,” says Juan Pablo Fernandez, president of Químicos & Plásticos, a Dominican company that supplies raw materials to the industries of both nations. After the earthquake, Mr Fernandez and his employees joined other Dominican businesses in transporting privately donated relief supplies to Haiti’s stricken capital, Port-au-Prince.

The Dominican response to the earthquake just might have eased some of the mutual recrimination brought on by an oft-tragic shared history stretching back two centuries.

In 1822, then Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer invaded the eastern part of the Dominican Republic. Despite this, country succeeded in declaring its independence in 1844. Another Haitian leader, Faustin Soulouque, who would go on to declare himself emperor of Haiti, then invaded the Dominican Republic twice.

In 1937, following the expulsion of Haitian cane cutters by Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, even more Haitian labourers flooded the Dominican Republic, then led by dictator Rafael Trujillo, who would rule the country from 1930 until his murder in 1961. That October, under Mr Trujillo’s orders and for reasons that still remain unclear, Dominican soldiers and police massacred an estimated 20,000 Haitians.

Haitians continue to stream into the Dominican Republic looking for work today, even though they continue to face “severe discrimination”, according to the 2009 Human Rights Report issued by the US State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. But though both countries have experienced authoritarian regimes and high levels of corruption, their economic and investment portfolios paint a markedly different picture, analysts say, especially over the past two decades.

Revealing data

Before the earthquake, according to the CIA’s World Factbook, the GDP real growth rate for the Dominican Republic was 1.8% during 2009, and the GDP per capita was $8300. In Haiti, these figures were 2% and $1300, respectively. While average life expectancy for the Dominican Republic is 73 years, the figure in Haiti is just 57 years. To add to Haiti’s woes, according to its government’s Preliminary Damage and Needs Assessment, the damage bill from January’s earthquake was in the region of $7.9bn.

While two-thirds of Dominican exports remain bound for the US, foreign remittances, mostly from the US, continue to account for nearly one-tenth of the country’s GDP, and there remains a robust tourism industry. Boasting the largest economy in the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic currently has approximately 50 free trade zone parks, producing everything from textiles to electronic devices and pharmaceuticals. The country’s financial sector has also largely stabilised since the collapse of its second-largest bank, Banco Intercontinental, in 2003, which had to be bailed out by the Dominican treasury at a cost of some $2.2bn.

“Business is increasing on a daily basis [in the Dominican Republic] and there is much optimism,” says Aryam Vázquez, an economist who covers country risk for Wells Fargo’s emerging markets unit in New York. “The banking sector is much better regulated than in the past, and we have seen concerted efforts by successive governments to stabilise the domestic demand market.”

Across the border

Before the earthquake, Haiti seemed to be regaining some of its financial footing following the chaotic presidency of Jean-Bertrand Aristide between 2001 and 2004 and the often erratic rule of the interim government that replaced him. Relations between Dominican president Leonel Fernández, in office since August 2004, and Haitian president René Préval, who has governed since May 2006, are said to be warm. During their mutual first term in office in the 1990s, Mr Fernández made the first official state visit by a Dominican leader to Haiti since the 1937 massacres.

Political instability in Haiti has led to environmental degradation and economic atrophy. While Haiti was ruled by a series of ravenous civilian and military dictatorships for much of the past 50 years, Joaquín Balaguer, a long-time Trujillo consigliere who led a series of authoritarian governments in the Dominican Republic over the past half-century, was taking steps to prevent the country from sliding into the environmental disaster that was befalling Haiti, including using the Dominican army to prevent extensive deforestation. Haiti, on the other hand, has lost 90% of its tree cover over the past 60 years (and about one-tenth between 1990 and 2000), with the resulting erosion destroying two-thirds of the country’s arable farmland.

Hope beyond the despair

Despite such statistics, there is hope that out of the tragedy of January’s earthquake there lies an opportunity to help Haiti advance beyond the modest improvements in economic stability and security of recent years.

Haiti’s garment industry, once a pillar of its economy, has benefitted in recent years from measures that provided certain Haitian textiles with duty-free status when entering the US. Last year, Haitian firm the WIN Group, along with the Soros Economic Development Fund, announced their intention to construct a $45m industrial park in Port-au-Prince’s Cité Soleil slum region, a project that has been put on hold in the aftermath of the earthquake.

The OTF Group, a competitiveness consulting firm, has continued to advocate for the creation of “growth clusters” around Haiti, a proposal that fits closely with the Haitian government’s desire for decentralisation, economic diversification and the “decongestion” of the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area, rather than rebuilding as before.

Such measures might well provide a possible future at home for the Haitians currently living in the Dominican Republic and spell a less fractious new era for two nations whose economic destinies, despite frequent tensions, remain inextricably linked.

Trinidad’s gas sector declines

Trinidad’s gas sector declines

June 08, 2010

By Michael Deibert

Foreign Direct Investment

(Read the original article here)

As supplies of liquefied natural gas dry up in Trinidad and Tobago, the industry’s future on the islands is in doubt.

Once the top supplier of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to the US, the Caribbean dual-island nation of Trinidad and Tobago has seen the growth in its production of this lucrative fuel decline sharply in recent years.

The lack of forward motion has led to speculation about possible future paths for developing the sector.

In the years following the country’s first LNG investment in 1996, Trinidad and Tobago’s export capacity grew substantially and reached some 14.7 million tonnes of LNG per year by 2005.

The Atlantic LNG Company of Trinidad and Tobago, owned by the state and the local subsidiaries of LNG giants BG Group, BP, Repsol YPF and Suez, operates an LNG plant at Point Fortin, in Trinidad’s south-west, and four liquefaction trains, including one currently measured as the largest in operation in the world. Plans to develop a fifth train have as yet not materialised.

The battle for Trinidad’s recent general election focused more attention on the government’s approach to developing this most lucrative of natural resources.

In the run-up to the May 24 election, incumbent prime minister Patrick Manning, a trained geologist, put an increased focus on industrial facilities in addition to LNG development.

The fate of the country’s reserves became a political football in Mr Manning’s electoral struggle against former attorney general Kamla Persad-Bissessar. Mr Manning’s People’s National Movement, which had governed the nation since 2001, lost the election to Mr Persad-Bissessar’s United National Congress party.

[Note: The UNC won the May 24 elections]

Since a peak in 2002, the country’s gas reserves have declined by more than a quarter, with a notice­able drop-off in exploration. Three years ago, Houston-based consulting firm Ryder Scott issued a report warning of declining natural gas reserves in the country.

A recent report from liquid flow measurement specialists Badger Meter Inc suggested that, while by 2014 Trinidad will only provide 0.49% of all oil demand in the Latin American region, its LNG output, which formed 19.83% of the region’s supply last year, will continue to contribute an impressive 19.12% by 2014.

There are, however, thought to be substantial undiscovered LNG reserves in the country’s shallow and deep waters. Mr Manning told a political rally in Trinidad in May that 62% of the nation’s reserves are still unexplored.

Michael Deibert interviewed on KPFK Pacifica Radio

I was interviewed today about my recent trip to Colombia on Suzi Weissman's show Beneath The Surface on KPFK Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles. My segment begins at about the 40 minute mark and can be heard here. For more background on the current situation in Colombia, please read my articles from the Bajo Cauca region of Antioquia and from Medellín.

The Face of the Deepwater Horizon disaster

(A bird mired in oil on the beach at East Grand Terre Island along the Louisiana coast on Thursday, June 3, 2010. Photo by Charlie Riedel of the Associated Press.)

Most things are never meant.
This won't be, most likely; but greeds
And garbage are too thick-strewn
To be swept up now, or invent
Excuses that make them all needs.

- Philip Larkin, "Going, Going"

Human Rights Defender Floribert Chebeya Bahizire Killed in Democratic Republic of Congo

"Floribert Chebeya was killed in circumstances which strongly suggest official responsibility," U.N. investigator for extrajudicial executions Philip Alston said in a speech to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on Thursday.

(Please read my article, Congo: Between Hope and Despair, originally published in the Summer 2008 edition of the World Policy Journal and providing background of the conflict in the DRC, here)

DR Congo: Prominent Human Rights Defender Killed

Joint Government and UN Inquiry Needed into Death of Floribert Chebeya Bahizire

June 3, 2010

Human Rights Watch

(Read the original release here)

(New York) - The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo should urgently open a credible and transparent investigation with United Nations assistance into the death of the prominent human rights defender, Floribert Chebeya Bahizire, Human Rights Watch said today.

Chebeya's body was found on June 1, 2010, soon after he had visited police headquarters in Kinshasa. On June 2, the Kinshasa police chief, Jean de Dieu Oleko, announced that Chebeya's death resulted from a criminal act and that the police were investigating. Chebeya's driver, Fidèle Bazana Edadi, is still missing.

"Floribert Chebeya's shocking death is a serious blow for human rights in the Congo," said Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. "The announced police investigation needs UN help if it is to be credible and transparent and bring all those responsible to justice."

Chebeya was the executive director of one of Congo's largest and most respected human rights organizations, the Voix des Sans Voix (Voice of the Voiceless), based in Kinshasa, the capital. He was among Congo's most vocal human rights defenders, regularly exposing abuses by the country's security services and the government over many years.

Over the years, Chebeya had been threatened and intimidated repeatedly by Congolese authorities as a result of his work. In recent weeks, he had reported that he believed he again was under surveillance by the security services.

On June 1, Chebeya received a telephone call requesting his presence at the office of the inspector general of the national police, Gen. John Numbi, his colleagues told UN officials. He left his office at 5 p.m. to attend the meeting. A few hours later he contacted his family and said he was still waiting at the police inspectorate, but after 9 p.m. all communication stopped.

On June 2, the police said that Chebeya had been found dead in his car in the Mont Ngafula area of Kinshasa. By midday on June 2, a police account implying that Chebeya's body had been found in the back seat of his car with used condoms and a sexual stimulant was circulated to journalists and others in Kinshasa, though no investigation had begun.

The authorities initially refused requests by Chebeya's family and UN human rights officials for access to the body. Today a family member, a colleague, and UN representatives were allowed to visit the morgue on the condition that they could not touch the body. They identified Chebeya and noticed a medium-size bandage on his forehead, apparently covering a wound. The rest of his body was covered with a sheet, which was not removed during the visit.

"The Chebeya family's very limited access to his body and conflicting police statements about the cause of death raise serious concerns about what really happened," said Van Woudenberg. "These irregularities indicate there may already be an attempt to cover up the truth."

Human rights defenders and journalists in Congo have faced increasing risks as a result of their work. Previous assaults and killings have rarely been properly investigated or those responsible brought to justice.

On July 31, 2005, Pascal Kabungulu Kibembi, a human rights defender, was shot dead at his home in Bukavu, in eastern Congo. His death was followed by the killing of two well known Radio Okapi journalists, Serge Maheshe in June 2007 and Didace Namujimbo in November 2008, also in Bukavu. In November 2005, Franck Ngyke, a journalist, and his wife, Hélène Mpaka, were murdered outside their home in Kinshasa. The investigations and subsequent trials into each of these killings were led by the Congolese military authorities and were marred by serious irregularities.

Human Rights Watch urged the minister of justice and human rights to create a commission of inquiry immediately, including Congolese and UN officials, as well as a representative from the Congolese human rights community, to investigate the death of Chebeya.

"The Congolese authorities should take every possible step to bring Chebeya's killers to justice and not repeat the botched investigations of the past," Van Woudenberg said. "UN and Congolese human rights officials should play a role to ensure that the government investigation is genuine and not merely for show."

Like Colombia, Iconic City Remains a Place of Promise and Peril

Like Colombia, Iconic City Remains a Place of Promise and Peril

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

(Read the original article here)

Medellín, COLOMBIA , Jun 3, 2010 (IPS) - The homes of the barrio of Comuna 13, tightly packed improvised brick and concrete structures that take on a semi- rural nature the closer one gets to the murky swift-moving Río Cauca, blanket the hills of the western edge of this city of 2.5 million.

A district of some 135,000 inhabitants, Comuna 13 represents the complicated renaissance of a city famed for producing both Colombia's most famous painter (Fernando Botero) and the world's most notorious drug trafficker (Pablo Escobar).

Abutting this grindingly poor area is the Parque Biblioteca José Luis Arroyave, a sparkling new multipurpose complex that features a library, an exhibition hall and a community- run cafeteria. Within view of its doors, a new metrocable system ferries commuters to and from their hillside dwellings at dizzying heights in a series of cable-propelled eight-passenger pods, cutting travel time for community residents in half.

"In a zone very affected by violence and poverty, we wanted to organise this project and work trying to reclaim public space and benefit the population here," says Mauricio Mejía, who works with the Proyecto Urbano Integral, an urban development project based on similar initiatives in Brasil and originally spearheaded by Medellín's former mayor, Sergio Fajardo.

Along with the city's former director of urban projects, Alejandro Echeverri, in 2009 Fajardo - in office from 2003 until 2007 and currently running for vice president on a ticket with former Bogota mayor Antanas Mockus - was awarded the Curry Stone Design Prize, an eminent architectural award that cited the duo's "bold and ambitious public works plan" for Medellín as having "helped revitalise its poorest neighbourhoods".

The award set out for particular commendation the city's 42,200-square-foot Orquideorama (a botanical garden topped by a wooden meshwork roof somewhat resembling unfurling flowers), and the nearly-prehistoric looking obsidian Parque Biblioteca España.

However, Medellín continues to exist as a paradox: On one hand a lush, green city vibrating with life and stunning modern architecture, and on the other hand a place of frightened people who speak in whispers of criminals they refuse to even name. And it has remained quite a deadly place for many of its inhabitants.

During the first three months of 2010, Medellín's murder rate increased 54.8 percent from the previous year. Only steps away from the Parque Biblioteca and in other barrios around the city, drug gangs continue to dominate, the fallout, many locals say, of an incomplete or ineffective demobilisation process of the country's ring-wing paramilitary groups undertaken by the government of outgoing President Álvaro Uribe.

"This is a war where impunity reigns," says a church worker who has been active in Medellín's poorest neighbourhoods for many years and who did not wish to be named. "There is silence, fear, and people can't talk about what's going on."

An umbrella group of paramilitary factions, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), were formed by Carlos Castaño in 1997 and thereafter acted as a ruthless counterpoint to the Colombian state's war against Colombia's two rebel groups, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and the smaller Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN). During the most violent years of Colombia's civil war, it was the AUC, not the Colombian army, that succeeded in driving the FARC and ELN from the comunas around Medellín.

Linked to dozens of massacres throughout the country, the AUC began a demobilisation process in 2002 whereby significantly reduced sentences were offered in exchange for paramilitary members confessing their crimes, making amends with their victims and ceasing criminal activities. Castaño himself was murdered in April 2004, allegedly in a dispute centered around the AUC's deepening involvement in the drug trade, and his body recovered two years later.

In Medellín, this demobilisation process took on a particularly chaotic and violent nature.

One of the most powerful leaders of the AUC, Diego Murillo Bejarano aka Don Berna, was (like Carlos Castaño's brother Fidel) a former close associate of the drug trafficking Medellín Cartel, having acted as one of the top enforcers for a faction run by the Galeano family, who were eventually dominated by sectors loyal to the late drug kingpin Pablo Escobar.

Having commanded the AUC's Bloque Cacique Nutibara, which had around 1,000 members, as well as the Bloque Héroes de Granada, which was thought to have numbered slightly over 2,000, amidst demobilisation Murillo Bejarano's faction of the AUC fought a brief, vicious war of attrition in Medellín's slums with the Bloque Metro of Castaño loyalist Carlos Mauricio Garcia, alias Double Zero, who was found murdered in May 2004.

Following the demobilisation process - which many in Medellín claim was largely a charade where non-paramilitary actors were recruited from around the city to go through the motions of pacification - Murillo Bejarano, despite sitting in a Colombian prison under the terms of the country's Justice and Peace Law, is said by residents and authorities to have become the dominant criminal figure in the city.

Murillo Bejarano's omnipotence over what is colloquially referred to as the Oficina de Envigado (named after the Medellín neighbourhood where many narcotraffickers live) extended to such an extent that the tit-for-tat slayings and turf wars that have marked the city over the last two decades gradually decreased as he solidified his control over many of the city's criminal gangs. There was even a term used by locals for the enforced calm Murillo Bejarano brought to the city's criminal underworld, donbernabilidad, a mordant pun on the Spanish concept of gobernabilidad, or governability.

It was, however, a consolidation that had deadly consequences for those who questioned it. A number of community leaders in Medellín, such as Haider Ramírez from Comuna 13 and Alexander Pulgarín from the La Sierra neighbourhood, have been murdered in recent years, with the latter killing being characterised in a report by Colombia's government as "a premeditated act" designed to silence a voice that would not go along with criminal system being put in place in the slums.

When Murillo Bejarano was deported to the United States in May 2008 along with a slew of other top AUC leaders to face drug trafficking charges, the Oficina de Envigado is said to have badly fractured. One of the group's chieftains, Fabio León Vélez Correa, alias Nito, was murdered in September 2009 and two remaining factions have formed with guns drawn behind one of two leaders, known by their aliases as Valenciano and Sebastian.

Colombian government estimates say that the groups operate in of Colombia's 32 departments and boast around 400 members.

It is the chaos of this power struggle, residents say, that has led to the palpable spike in violence as ever- diminishing and reorganising groups of traffickers vie for control of the city and access to the Río Cauca, a key conduit for cocaine and arms smuggling, as well as human trafficking.

Despite the palpable sense of hope in Colombian cities such as Medellín these days, the incomplete demobilisation of the paramilitaries, along with the continued threat of the not- yet-vanquished rebel groups, will continue to present a serious challenge to whoever wins this month's presidential contest to succeed the eight-year tenure of Álvaro Uribe.

"These groups basically took the generous offer of demobilisation by Uribe," says Bruce M. Bagley, the chair of the Department of International Studies at the University of Miami and a longtime Colombia observer. "But demobilise is a relative term."


Michael Deibert is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University and the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press). His blog can be read at www.michaeldeibert.blogspot.com

Amid Elections, Armed Groups Hold Colombian Town under the Gun

Amid Elections, Armed Groups Hold Colombian Town under the Gun

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

(Read the original article here)

CAUCASIA, Colombia , Jun 1, 2010 (IPS) - Rolling through this mountainous region of central Colombia, the brown waters of the Río Cauca wind through mist-shrouded hills before joining up with the larger Río Magdalena and emptying out into the Caribbean Sea.

In this area, known as Bajo Cauca and characterised by campesino farms and gurgling waterfalls, the dusky hues of the river are an apt metaphor for the violence that has had residents here existing in fear since the beginning of the year.

"We've never lived what we're living through now," says Fernanda Márquez (not her real name), whose son was kidnapped by the larger of Colombia's two main rebel groups, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), 13 years ago. "They kill innocent children, throw bombs, kidnap. It's terrible."

For much of the last year, groups of warring drug traffickers have battled for control of this strategically important city and surrounding towns along the river. As Colombians go to the polls this month to choose a successor to President Álvaro Uribe, the groups continue to wage a scorched-earth battle to determine dominance over the smuggling of narcotics, weapons and people along the river.

According to police, between Jan. 1 and May 26, there were 74 murders in the Bajo Cauca region, and at least 24 grenade attacks, though other sources say the number of the latter is closer to 44.

During one recent week alone here, six people were killed during the invasion of a farm, gunmen killed a mother and her nine-year-old son, a 14-year-old boy died during a grenade attack, a 21-year-old labourer disappeared and the home of Leiderman Ortiz, the crusading publisher of the La Verdad de Pueblo newspaper, was damaged by yet another grenade.

All of this occurred despite a massive police and military presence in the region and recent arrests of dozens of individuals believed to be linked to the groups.

Ground zero for this turf war has been the riverside town of Caucasia, a ramshackle place with a metropolitan population of around 120,000 and where two groups - Los Rastrojos and Los Urabeños (both aided by a subset of a gang known as Los Paisas) - are vying for control. Anonymous pamphlets in town regularly threaten death to the groups' perceived enemies.

"There are alliances between these criminal gangs and the subversive groups, particularly the FARC," says Colonel Luis Eduardo Herrera Paredes, chief of Bajo Caucau's Comando Operativo de Seguridad. "We have seen a panorama where the criminal bands organise the distribution (of cocaine) and the FARC protect the cultivation process. The majority of these murders are among these criminal groups."

The groups have their roots in Colombia's long and bloody internal armed conflict, where far-left rebels of the FARC and the smaller Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army or ELN) have squared off against the Colombian state and paramilitary groups allied with localised political and economic interests. Critics charge that the paramilitaries often worked as little more than a ruthless wing of Colombia's official security services.

Formed in 1997, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defence Forces or AUC) represented the coalescing of these localised militias.

Largely under the aegis of Carlos Castaño, whose father had been kidnapped and killed by guerillas and whose brother, Fidel, was a major paramilitary leader and drug trafficker before he allegedly died in combat in 1994, the AUC went from a series of largely autonomous collectives to a tightly-organised combat-ready outfit that moved through the country like a murderous scythe, depriving the guerillas of safe havens and murdering, often in quite ghastly fashion, any whom they suspected of supporting them.

In addition to the drug trade, despite its designation as a terrorist organisation by the United States and the European Union, and the credible linking of the AUC to dozens of massacres, the group was also able to derive income from international firms doing business in Colombia, who continued to make payouts to the AUC to protect their business interests. Chiquita Brands International, for example, was fined 25 million dollars by the U.S. government in 2007 for doing so.

Operating as anti-subversive shock troops for the first five years of its existence, by 2002, when the AUC started negotiating potential demobilisation with the Colombian government, the group was increasingly consumed by the business of drug trafficking, leading to violent schisms between leaders.

Castaño, who was known to have objected to the AUC's deepening involvement in the drug trade despite his own past links to traffickers, disappeared in April 2004. His body was found two years later, allegedly the victim of a plot orchestrated by his brother, Vicente, who himself later disappeared and was believed to have been murdered.

The antecedent of the two of the current groups warring in Bajo Cauca, the Rastrojos and the Urabeños, to the AUC are direct and vivid.

At its height, one of the most numerically significant wings on the AUC was its Bloque Central Bolívar, which numbered around 6,000 combatants and was led by Carlos Mario Jiménez, better known by his nom de guerre, "Macaco".

After the Bloque Central Bolívar demobilised at the beginning of 2005 under Colombia's Justice and Peace Law, which required paramilitary members to confess their crimes, making amends with the victims and cease criminal activities in exchange for substantially reduced sentences, Jiménez entered a Colombian prison. However, charging that they broke the terms of their deals by continuing to be actively involved drug trafficking, Colombian authorities extradited him and several other top AUC leaders to the United States in May 2008 to stand trial for conspiring to import cocaine.

In Caucasia, local residents and authorities say, the current leader of the Rastrojos, who goes by the alias "Sebastian", was an active member of Jiménez's Bloque Bolívar. A 2009 Colombian government memorandum concluded that the Rastrojos were active in 10 of Colombia's 32 departments and had around 1,400 members.

Until his arrest in early 2009, the Urabeños were led by Daniel Rendón, known as Don Mario, a former member of the AUC's Elmer Cárdenas bloc, which never even perfunctorily went through with the demobilisation process.

"It's only about money," says Jesús Alean Quintera, the director of the Fundación Redes, a human rights organisation that works in the Bajo Cauca region and has extensively documented that activities of the groups, particularly with regards to minors, both in Caucasia and the neighbouring community of Nechí. "The recruitment of children into these groups has become a real problem."

Now, with even the thinnest veneer of ideology stripped away, groups such as Los Rastrojos, Los Urabeños, Los Paisas and Las Águilas Negras (thought by some to be a front group for Los Urabeños) are free to collaborate with Colombia's rebel factions in the service of a more tangible reward, and the people of Caucasia wonder when their situation will change.

"There are a lot of killers of 13 or 14 years old these days, both boys and girls" says Leiderman Ortiz, the local journalist who survived the grenade attack. "We're living through a war, though terrorism here, and we think that all the authorities, from the president on down, need to understand how grave this situation is."

Michael Deibert is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University and the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press). His blog can be read at www.michaeldeibert.blogspot.com.

Jamaicans hope to separate crime, politics

(Given recent events in Jamaica, there has been some interest that I repost this story I wrote from the country in 2006, which contextualizes a bit of the violence we are seeing today. MD)

Jamaicans hope to separate crime, politics

By Michael Deibert

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Published October 3, 2006

KINGSTON, Jamaica

When Donald "Zeeks" Phipps, one of Kingston's best-known "dons," was found guilty on two counts of murder and given a life sentence in April, many hoped it was a sign the country's politicians had put behind them their links to the gunmen who hold sway in the capital's slums.

The ruling People's National Party (PNP) and opposition Jamaican Labor Party (JLP) head toward a likely general election this year in this Caribbean country of nearly 3 million people. Opinions are mixed on whether they have abandoned their long-standing links with dons, the politically minded leaders of crime groups.

"Depending on your political allegiance, if you're a 'bad man' you look to your [political representative] to maybe help you get bail and make sure that the police treat you properly," said Carolyn Gomes, executive director of the human rights group Jamaicans for Justice. "And there are links between the gunmen and politicians, which go beyond begging for bail."

One of the chief political mentors of Portia Simpson Miller, Jamaica's prime minister, was a PNP stalwart named Anthony Spaulding, who served as minister of housing for the fiery socialist Michael Manley from 1972 until 1980. Historians say Mr. Spaulding, Mr. Manley, former JLP leader Edward Seaga and several other politicians introduced the violent tribalism known as "garrison politics," overseeing the construction of 40,000 low-income homes then purportedly distributing them as patronage to PNP supporters.

Mr. Manley and Mr. Seaga regularly attended the funerals of ghetto gunmen during the heyday of their political rivalry in the 1970s and 1980s.

Mrs. Simpson Miller came to office when she won the constituency for West St. Andrew in 1976. Her district encompassed regions of Western Kingston, where the rule of gunmen is the strongest.

"There is a stigma attached to our community because of the violence that exists around here at times," said Selvin Stewart, who teaches business at Trenchtown High School in West Kingston. "They say that the majority of problems come from these communities, but the smallest amount of effort is placed in places like this. If you want to change the problem, lend more support."

Mr. Stewart was sitting on a homemade wooden bench across the street from a modest reading center the community has opened. This is the neighborhood where Bob Marley and a host of other reggae icons grew up. Residents are slowly transforming Mr. Marley's former house into a museum with the help of a local architect. Like most in the district, the building is a modest affair of poured-concrete, one-story apartments around a common yard.

Flags of the Rastafarian faith flutter in the breeze, and murals of Mr. Marley, who died of cancer in a Miami hospital 25 years ago, and several other reggae legends decorate the walls. Raphael "Meadow Gong" Smith, a community leader fatally shot under murky circumstances in London in 1999, also is memorialized.

The rooftops of the beginning of Mrs. Simpson-Miller's district are visible in the distance. The neighborhood is also the home district of Jamaica's finance minister, Omar Davies.

Though Mr. Phipps was a PNP partisan who controlled an impoverished area around the Kingston's Mathews Lane, just south of Trenchtown, some of his cohorts have become businessmen.

Most prominent are Christopher "Dudus" Coke, who police say controls the JLP enclave of Tivoli Gardens, and his deputy Justin O'Gilvie. Mr. Coke is the son of Lester "Jim Brown" Coke, a longtime JLP enforcer whose Shower Posse was one of the most notorious gangs to migrate from Jamaica to the United States, and who died in a fire in a Jamaican prison cell in 1992.

That year, the killing of another Coke son, known as "Jah-T," set off rioting in which a score of people died. Jim Brown's gang is said to have taken an active role in violence during Jamaica's 1980 election campaign in which 889 persons were killed.

Jamaica's police say they are prepared for whatever comes in the coming campaign.

"As a police force, we are sending out a very strong, clear message that if anybody, from whichever party or affiliation, is involved in violence or threats of violence around politics, that we will be pursing them with all the vigor of the law," said Mark Shields, deputy commissioner for crime in the Jamaica Constabulary Force.

"We do not care who you are, because if you are involved in any form of violence and expect to hold an AK-47 in one hand and a ballot box in the other, we're not going to be having any of that," Commissioner Shields said.

Police officials say the Kingston dons operate with greater independence from the political leaders as they pull in money from drug trafficking and other illegal enterprises. Consequently, organized crime is contributing to Jamaica's spiraling homicide rate, which reached a record high of 1,650 last year. An average of 12 police officers are fatally shot each year on the island.

Trenchtown is divided into fiefdoms among several dons. A deceptively cheery, husky, middle-aged man in dreadlocks controls the area of the reading center and the Marley home.

The people of Trenchtown, where Mr. Marley probably did more than any other person to bring Jamaica into world consciousness, wait for the government to help them in daily struggles against poverty and crime.

"There are great qualities and great potential within this community, but, of course, it is a community that needs help," said Selvin Stewart, a Trenchtown High School teacher. "There are persons here that are forging ahead. It's rough, but they're forging ahead."

Hola desde Bogotá

Arriving in Bogotá on Sunday morning I descended into a cool rush of bracing Andean air and the nerve centre, politically and otherwise, of this country that I have so long wanted to visit. I will be here for two weeks to work on some stories in the capital and throughout Antioquia Department and, not coincidentally, to witness the country's first presidential election that will mark that end of the rule of President Álvaro Uribe in office since 2020. Thus far a very intriguing place in many regards.

Michael Deibert named Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University

In a very positive development, I have been named a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University in the United Kingdom. As the Centre's mission is to promote processes of reconciliation and forgiveness by non-violent means at all levels throughout the world, I hope that this role will help to draw attention to Haiti's reconstruction efforts and other issues near to my heart going forward.

Haiti’s peasantry key to reconstruction

Haiti’s peasantry key to reconstruction

By Michael Deibert

AlterNet

(Read the original article here)

When US First Lady Michelle Obama paid a surprise visit to Haiti this week to survey reconstruction efforts after that country’s devastating January earthquake, she set foot in a nation that has been transformed as profoundly as at any time since its 1804 revolution defeated Napoleon's army and abolished slavery.

In the tremor three months ago, Haiti’s Direction de la Protection Civile estimated that 222,517 people lost their lives, while at least 250,000 were injured. Of the nearly 1.2 million displaced persons, nearly 600,000 are thought to have migrated from the capital Port-au-Prince and its environs back to Haiti’s countryside. This reverse migration, after years of peasants flowing into the Haitian capital from desperately poor agricultural areas in search of jobs that did not await them, will likely have a significant affect on Haiti’s political and economic trajectory going forward.

Haiti’s peasantry, which makes up a majority of the country’s 9 million people, were suffering grievously even before the earthquake, the victims of both the short-sighted policies of the international community and the venality and brutality of Haiti’s homegrown political leaders. With a recent meeting on Haiti held at the United Nations concluding with nations and organizations pledging nearly $10 billion to Haiti, it is important that Haiti’s peasantry not be forgotten, and that the international community remember the ways in which it has failed them, and Haitians in general, in the past. It is a litany that would be written as farce had the results not been so tragic.

In the 1940s, the United States sponsored the Société Haitiano-Américaine de Dévelopment Agricole in an ill-fated, half-baked attempted to cultivate rubber in Haiti, an effort that ended up harming the very farmers it was designed to help.

Between 1980 and 1983, when tests showed nearly a quarter of Haiti’s pigs were infected with African Swine Fever, the U.S- Canadian funded Program for the Eradication of Porcine Swine Fever and Development of Pig-Raising destroyed 1.2 million Kreyol pigs, pigs that formed one of the backbones of the peasant economy. Of the replacement pigs that were delivered, many soon died, unable to adjust to the rough world the Kreyol swine had grown so accustomed to, and an already difficult rural economy suffered another blow.

Further undermining Haiti’s ability to feed itself, in typically duplicitous fashion then-Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, implementing an economic adjustment plan mandated by the International Monetary Fund and further turning the screws on a political bloc that he could never win over, cut tariffs on rice imports to the country from 35 percent to 3 percent in 1995. This further undermined the peasant economy despite the fact that Haiti for many years had produced low-cost, inexpensive rice for domestic consumption. After 1995, that is, after implementing the economic policies of the international community, it effectively lost the ability to do so.

Former President Bill Clinton, still deeply involved in Haiti, has since expressed regret for his role in this, of a piece with his regret for failing to lift a finger to stop Rwanda's 1994 genocide, a “regret” that led him - at best - to turn a blind eye to vicious ethnic cleansing by Rwandan soldiers and Congolese rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo throughout the 1990s. But this day late, dollar short approach to international affairs will do little good if not followed up with concrete action.

The Haitian government’s Preliminary Damage and Needs Assessment, a document said to have been largely drafted by Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, was put forth in March and advocated an ambitious re-envisioning and decentralizing of Haiti, looking to “decongest,” rather than rebuild as before, the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area while advocating a “refounding” of the Haitian state.

In a country with a long history of an often violently abusive imperial presidency (a tradition that, despite his other faults, current President René Préval has not adhered to), decentralization may be an important tool to break the hold a traditionally corrupt executive branch and dysfunctional political class based in the capital exercise over the rest of the country, active as they have been in filtering out any money that may come into the country while granting precious little in return.

With the mass migration from Port-au-Prince back to Haiti’s countryside, it is essential than any rebuilding effort take into account, along with programs for Haiti’s urban centres, a sustained effort to aid Haiti’s peasantry, who have been in an economic tailspin for decades now and whose migration to Port-au-Prince, where they lived on top of one another in woefully substandard housing, at least in part led to the death toll in January’s earthquake being as high as it was.

Over the past 50 years, 90 percent of Haiti's tree cover has been destroyed, with the resulting erosion destroying two-thirds of the country's arable farmland. With little left to hold the topsoil when the rains fall - often torrentially after prolonged spells with no precipitation at all - they rush in torrents down the mountains, carving gullies and carrying crops and seeds along with them, sweeping vital minerals into the country's rivers to be deposited, uselessly, in the sea. Storms that kill a handful of people in neighboring countries kill thousands when they reach Haiti because of this precise dynamic. I have stood many times with Haitian peasants under the unfurled Caribbean sky outside of villages with names like Fonds-Verettes, Papay and Maissade and listened to Haitian farmers, so powerless in the face of their own government and international interests, tell this sad tale.

But the Haitian peasantry do have their advocates. Grassroots peasant organizations such as the 200,000 member Mouvman Peyizan Nasyonal Kongrè Papay and Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan, the former led by 2005 Goldman Environmental Prize winner Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, have been advocating for decades for Haiti’s rural majority to be taken into account in the discussion of their fate by those politically powerful forces both inside and outside of Haiti.

The patience of Haitians - who have reacted to a terrible catastrophe with incredible dignity and restraint in the three months since the earthquake - is often remarked upon. But it is not, nor should it be be, perceived as endless. It was in Haiti’s countryside, among the peasantry, that leaders such as Charlemagne Péralte and Benoit Batraville led the strongest resistance to the 1915-1935 U.S. military occupation of Haiti and now, with the resources of rural families stretched to the breaking point by the influx of so many new mouths to feed, the international community must, at long last, take their needs into consideration among their glittering conferences and meetings.

Such an approach is not only the morally right thing to do, given the role the international community has had in helping to impoverish Haiti, but it is also the only way to guarantee long-term security and development, not only in Haiti but indeed across the island of Hispaniola as a whole.


Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press) and a Visiting Fellow at the the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University. His blog can be read at www.michaeldeibert.blogspot.com.

A vote of confidence?

A vote of confidence?

Published: April 15, 2010

Foreign Direct Investment

(Read the original article here)

After a particularly turbulent year, hopes are high that Guinea – the world’s largest exporter of bauxite – is moving towards democracy following the announcement of elections in June. Michael Deibert reports.

After one of the most tumultuous years in a history that has been often fraught with dictatorship and misrule, the west African nation of Guinea faces a critical few months as it attempts to make the transition to democratic rule.

The world’s largest exporter of bauxite, containing almost half of the world’s known reserves, Guinea was a collection of small communities on the fringes of larger African empires until the area was colonised by France in the 1890s. Existing in the colonial sphere until October 1958, it gained independence under the leadership of Ahmed Sékou Touré.

On gaining independence, Mr Touré set about creating one of Africa’s more durable dictatorships, complete with one-party rule and pervasive security services. Though he fended off a rebel invasion in 1970, Mr Touré nevertheless appeared to be controlling his perceived domestic opponents until his death in 1984.

Brutal rule

Following Mr Touré’s death, a weak provisional government was soon toppled by Lansana Conté, an army officer who continued to rule the country in an authoritarian fashion for more than two decades. Despite allowing some elections a decade into his rule, brutality, including incidents such as the deaths of more than 120 people during the suppression of a nationwide strike in early 2007, continued to blight the country’s international reputation.

When Mr Conté died in December 2008, power was seized by the Conseil National de la Démocratie et du Dévelopement (National Council for Democracy and Development or CNDD), a 32-member, military-dominated body that saw power concentrated in the hands of Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, the CNDD’s president.

Though citizens initially welcomed the mercurial Mr Camara, who frequently pledged to root out corruption and set the country on the path towards democratic elections, by mid-2009 he had reneged on a pledge not to stand as a candidate in upcoming elections.

Protest clampdown

In September 2009, a rally held in Guinea’s capital, Conakry, urging Mr Camara to step down, was met with an orgy of violence by military personnel. According to the UN, at least 150 people were killed and scores of women raped in attacks that had an ethno-religious dimension. The assaults resulted in an arms embargo placed on the regime by the EU and the Economic Community of West African States.

Then in December last year, Mr Camara narrowly survived an assassination attempt by a group of soldiers, led by his top aide Abubakar ‘Toumba’ Diakite. Mr Camara was flown to Morocco for medical treatment, and then moved to Burkina Faso in January of this year to convalesce. Mr Diakite remains at large.

The military junta, now headed by Brigadier General Sékouba Konaté, who assumed the presidency after Mr Camara’s shooting, appointed Jean-Marie Doré, an opposition politician who heads the Union pour le Progrès de la Guinée (Union for the Progress of Guinea), to oversee the upcoming elections.

In late February, the formation of a new government was announced, consisting of a 32-member cabinet, including half a dozen members of the CNDD. Among their number was Lieutenant Colonel Moussa Tiegboro Camara, who has been accused by a UN panel of being one of the chief instigators of the September massacre, as well as Commander Claude Pivi, who has been accused of being party to torture. The two men now serve as special advisors to Guinea’s effort to combat the country’s drugs trade.

In an early March decree, Mr Konaté, still the acting head of state, announced that elections would be held on June 27, 2010, with a second round of voting to be held on 18 July should any candidates fail to secure an absolute majority.

Worth the risk?

Despite its tumult, Guinea has remained a tantalising prize for some investors, with the Chinese firm China International Fund, a little-known entity that has extensive operations in Angola, entering into a $7bn mining deal with the regime.

Companies such as United Company Rusal, the word’s largest aluminium producer, and AngloGold Ashanti, the planet’s third largest gold-mining company, whose previous activities in the Democratic Republic of Congo have raised the ire of some human rights advocates, also have extensive operations in the country.

The mining sector continues to account for more than 70% of the country’s exports, and though Guinea has recently benefitted from an increase in commodity prices, political instability saw the economy grow only by an estimated 1% in 2009. The country’s GDP per capita also remains among the world’s lowest, hovering around $1100 for 2009.

Election cynicism

However, despite its fitful steps towards transforming its political system, some observers think it unlikely that the June election deadline will be achieved, and that investors would be wise to approach Guinea with caution in the near term.

“The Doré government is the farthest Guinea has come to beginning to transition to democratic rule in over two decades,” says Sebastian Spio-Garbrah, west Africa analyst for the Eurasia Group, a political risk research and consulting firm based in New York. “However, lack of financial resources and the predominant role played by the military mean that the transition to democracy will still be fraught.”

Why Haiti’s Debt Should Be Forgiven

A friend of mine recently asked me why Haiti, among all countries, deserved to have its international debt forgiven, as the Inter-American Development Bank recently did to the tune of $479 million.

Aside from the reason that I personally find most compelling - that Haiti has suffered one of the worst natural disasters in history, we have the means to help them and it is simply the right thing to do - there are, in my view, other compelling reasons why Haiti’s debt should be forgiven. Haiti is in far worse shape than quite a few countries I have seen in Africa, with over half of it’s people living on less than US$1 a day, with only the people of Somalia and Afghanistan suffering from higher rates of hunger, and with 90 percent of its tree cover gone (these are statistics from BEFORE the earthquake). But there are also arguments for debt forgiveness that, in my view, go to explain how, though Haiti’s political class has done a handy job of wrecking the country over the last two hundred years, they have had plenty of help from the international community.

In 1825, only 21 years after on independence, a French fleet appeared in Port-au-Prince harbour and threatened to bomb and destroy the Haitian capital unless the country agreed to pay an indemnity for the “intemperance” of having seized its freedom and having outlawed slavery. Haiti was forced to accept a debt of 150 million francs in exchange for France accepting the nation’s independence, a debt that took decades to repay and economically ravaged the country.

One of the reasons that the death toll in the earthquake was so large was that, in recent decades especially, tens of thousands of people have been migrating from the countryside into Port-au-Prince, where they lived in shockingly substandard housing that made them especially vulnerable to natural disasters such as the one that occurred. But why, we must ask ourselves, did they come into the capital in the first place?

In 1980-83, when tests showed nearly a quarter of Haiti’s pigs were infected with African Swine Fever, the U.S- Canadian funded Program for the Eradication of Porcine Swine Fever and Development of Pig-Raising (PEPADEP) succeeded in destroying the 1.2 million Kreyol pigs (kochon kreyol) that formed one of the backbones of the peasant economy. PEPADEP officials paid for the pigs before they slaughtered them, or, in many cases, promised to pay for them or replace them and never did. Most of the replacement pigs that were delivered soon died, unable to adjust to the rough world the Kreyol swine had grown so accustomed to, and an already difficult peasant economy suffered another blow.

Further undermining Haiti’s ability to feed itself, in typically duplicitous fashion in 1995 then-Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, implementing an economic adjustment plan mandated by the IMF and further turning the screws on the peasantry that he could never win over, cut tariffs on rice imports to the country from 35 percent to 3 percent. This further undermined the peasant economy despite the fact that Haiti for many years had produced low-cost, inexpensive rice for domestic consumption. After 1995, that is, after implementing the economic policies of the international community, it effectively lost the ability to do so.

In my view, “we” in the international community have helped get Haiti into its current sorry state, and debt relief is one tool at our disposal to help try and get it out. Given our dubious history there, it would be downright immoral not to use it.

President Obama signs historic health care bill

The 44th President of the United States does what presidents for 100 years have been unable to do. One of the happiest moments that I have witnessed in American political life and, hopefully, a step towards a slightly more human and compassionate nation. Perhaps some of the 45 million Americans (like me) without health insurance will now be able to get some.

MD

Michael Deibert interviewed on KPFK Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles

I sat down for a fairly wide-ranging interview about Haiti with Suzi Weissman on her show Beneath The Surface on KPFK Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles this week. The podcast of the entire show can be found here. My segment appears about 17 minutes into the program.

From rubble to recovery

From rubble to recovery

Published: February 13, 2010

Foreign Direct Investment

(Read the original article here)

A huge recovery challenge lies ahead for Haiti after its devastating earthquake, but could the rebuilding programmes bring about an essential economic restructuring? Michael Deibert reports from Port-au-Prince.

The incremental economic progress that Haiti, an impoverished Caribbean nation of 9 million people, had been experiencing over the past several years was brought to a cataclysmic halt late on the afternoon of January 12, when a 7.0 earthquake centred just south of the capital city sent the pillars of state and industry crashing to the ground in a heap of dust.

In a matter of seconds, Haiti’s Palais National, Palais de Justice, Parliament and many government ministries were either totally or partially destroyed. The top command of the UN mission, whose troops had been supporting the government of president René Préval since his 2006 election, lost their lives, along with an estimated 200,000 Haitians. Factories collapsed onto their owners and workers alike, and entire neighbourhoods tumbled down the brooding mountains that surround the capital city’s bay.

Further devastation

Haiti, already desperately poor but having experienced its first sustained period of political calm and stirrings of foreign investment interest in many decades, seemed as if it would be reduced to an even graver level than it had been before: mortally wounded, traumatised, ungovernable. In addition to the buildings destroyed, Haiti had also lost some of those best placed to aid its tenuous economic recovery, among them one of the country’s most respected economists, Philippe Rouzier, as well as Jean Frantz Richard and Murray Lustin Junior, the director-general and director of operations, respectively, at the Direction Générale des Impôts, the country’s main tax office in the capital.

According to the International Organisation for Migration, as of early February at least 460,000 people were still living in 315 spontaneous settlements throughout Port-au-Prince, while the World Food Programme said that more than 1.6 million people had received ­supplies since the start of the earthquake response.

Economic focus

But Haiti’s industrious population knows a little something about struggle and perseverance, even in the face of such a devastating tragedy. Within days of the earthquake, the country’s market women, taxi drivers and other labourers had returned to the streets, resuming commerce among the hundreds of thousands camped out between the shells of ruined buildings. Capital residents began to flow back into Haiti’s countryside, seeking family solace among the loss.

From a terrible misfortune, some hoped that Haiti might still have set in motion the seeds for a new beginning. Despite the ousting of a popular prime minister last autumn, Haiti’s modest economic engine, buoyed by an extended period of relative political tranquillity and an improved security situation, continued chugging along under a new prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, seemingly bearing out a December 2008 UN report asserting that it was striking “how modest are the impediments to competitiveness relative to the huge opportunities offered by the fundamentals” in the country.

Last year, billionaire George Soros’s Economic Development Fund announced plans to create a $45m industrial park in Cité Soleil, one of the capital’s poorest neighbourhoods, while two new hotels were set to open along the country’s lush south coast.

At the same time, the OTF Group, a competitiveness consulting firm credited with breathing new life into Rwanda’s tourism, coffee and agro-industry sectors following the country’s 1994 genocide, praised the business opportunities in Haiti. Focusing on several key “growth clusters” to drive economic development, it hoped to help create 500,000 jobs in Haiti within three years.

Following the earthquake, though reassessed, the group said its conclusions did not necessarily need to be shelved, just pushed back for six months to a year.

“The outmigration from [Port-au-Prince] is a huge opportunity to reverse the migration trends of the past two decades,” says OTF director Robert Henning. “If reconstruction can create opportunities and jobs outside of the capital, this will achieve an important goal of redistributing the influence and economic weight of Haiti.”

Trade possibilities

Though the country’s interior has been severely deforested over the past few decades, local groups, such as the Mouvman Peyizan Nasyonal Kongrè Papay, have worked for years on reforestation and irrigation projects and some areas, such as the Artibonite Valley, remain relatively fertile. With Port-au-Prince’s harbour severely damaged and the likelihood of recurrent large-scale earthquakes extremely high, according to the US Geological Survey, international attention has for the first time begun to look seriously at developing Haiti’s long-neglected interior with manufacturing and agricultural initiatives.

A long border with neighbouring Dominican Republic, which lends itself to the possibility of free-trade zones, and possible ports that might conceivably be expanded around the country – including Miragoâne (in the country’s west), Saint-Marc (in the middle region) and Cap-Haïtien (in the north) – would seem to support this possibility for future investment.

Following a decision last year by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank to cancel $1.2bn of Haiti’s debt – with the latter institution approving an additional $120m in grants for investments in key sectors such as infrastructure, basic services and disaster prevention, the G-7 countries told Haiti after a post-earthquake meeting in Canada in February that the country’s debts to the body did not need to be repaid.

New beginning

None of this in any way minimises the grievous shock – physical, psychological and economic – that Haiti’s people and its government have suffered because of those terrible moments in January. But, day by day, it appears to be picking itself up, dusting itself off and trying to decide where it will head from here.

“The extent of this disaster is also due to the fact that this country has not been managed, or rather has been ill-managed, for the past 50 years,” says Michèle Pierre-Louis, a civil society leader and former prime minister of Haiti. “Maybe after mourning our dead and saving the lives of the survivors, we should start thinking about ways to put together our energies, our solidarity, our creativity to rebuild our capital under some kind of strong leadership… [which] could eventually lead to rebuilding the entire country. Now is the time.”

Haitians Find Help Through the Airwaves

My interview (along with Emilio San Pedro) on WNYC's The Takeaway this morning on the importance of Haitian radio can be heard here.

Thoughts on recent Haiti commentaries

As a progressive reporter and analyst working on the ground in Haiti, I have gotten fairly used to reading ignorant commentary on the Caribbean nation of 9 million over the years.

Last month, the dust had not even settled from the earthquake that destroyed large sections of Port-au-Prince and killed some 2000,000 people when the voices of intolerance and opportunism set about savaging a country that was already on its knees.

The irony of Rush Limbaugh - a man so obese that he can barely stand maligning a nation of the chronically underfed - telling listeners not to support the hundreds of thousands made homeless by the quake met the venomous snake-oil rhetoric of Pat Robertson, who denounced those buried under the rumble for having made “a pact with the Devil.” Further libeling the dead, the American basketball player Paul Shirley wrote that “shouldn’t much of the responsibility for the disaster lie with the victims of that disaster,” a remark that got him wisely fired by ESPN.

Unfortunately, though, the right are not the only ones whose views of Haiti seems to have been colored by political prejudice and misunderstanding. In recent years, a small but noisy sector of the international left has been equally irresponsible in its commentary about Haiti, with some commentators wishing to see all foreign countries in terms of facile good guy-bad guy scenarios

Center for Economic and Policy Research co-director Mark Weisbrot - a man so intellectually lazy he often gets the basic details of Haiti’s history wrong - characterizes despotic former Haitian ruler Jean-Bertrand Aristide as “Haiti's democratically elected president...kidnapped by the US and flown to exile in Africa,” Naomi Klein, interviewing Aristide in his gilded South Africa exile (where the South African government underwrites his expenses to the tune of that of a government minister), wrote that Aristide is proof of her own anti-globalization credo, as she credulously repeats Aristide’s contention that he was ousted because of his resistance to the “privatization” of Haiti’s state industries. Writing in the Guardian after having spent only two months in Haiti and having written of his support of Mr. Aristide before having ever set foot in the country, the academic Peter Hallward concludes that “Aristide's own government...was overthrown by an internationally sponsored coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and left much of the population smouldering in resentment.”

These assertions would likely be news to the people I spoke to in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, when the city was still reeling from the impact of the quake, the fires still smoldering and the bodies still perfuming the air with the sickly-sweet decay of human flesh. To the people I did speak to in places like the capital’s crowded Delmas road, along, the busy Route Freres and even in Aristide’s former home of Tabarre, the reaction to the former president’s January offer to be flown to Haiti veered between disparaging comments that Aristide was a criminal to bitter observations that Aristide should buy a ticket and come dig with his hands through the rubble like everyone else, rather than waiting to be ferried home like a returning emperor. During a visit to Haiti’s countryside last summer, I found the response to the mention of Aristide’s name even more hostile. The president’s Fanmi Lavalas party, badly divided and unwisely banned from upcoming legislative elections, can still rouse a few thousand people for street rallies in the capital, but the movement seems largely a spent force and Haitians seem largely to have moved on.

In Haiti, a small, poor country where few people can speak or write English proficiently, the left, like the right, seems to feel that they have found the perfect canvas on which to outline their own theories and agendas, no matter how irrelevant they may be to the struggles of Haitians as whole. This cock-eyed view of history is only heightened by the habit of visiting foreigners to surround themselves with the capital’s political class, a strata of society that the Haitians themselves have learned to despise to such a degree that many poor people I spoke to last month openly hoped for a U.S. occupation of the country (something I think would be a mistake).

Perhaps the palme d'or of recent ignorant commentary on Haiti may belong to Lawrence Harrison, director of the Cultural Change Institute at the Fletcher School of International Affairs at Tufts University and the former director of the USAID mission to Haiti from 1977 to 1979.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Harrison lays the blame for Haiti’s ills at the altar of the country’s indigenous religious construct of vodou, opining that “its followers believe that their destinies are controlled by hundreds of capricious spirits who must be propitiated through voodoo ceremonies...a species of the sorcery religions that Cameroonian development expert Daniel Etounga-Manguelle identifies as one of the principal obstacles to progress in Africa.”

Further, Harrison informs his readers, following the overthrow of the French in 1804, free Haitians “were left with a value system largely shaped by African culture” and quotes the economist Sir Arthur Lewis (“himself a descendent of African slaves”) as saying that former slaves “inherited the idea that work is only fit for slaves."

Let me say this plainly: Lawrence Harrison would collapse of exhaustion if he put in half a day’s work that I have seen peasant farmers and urban laborers put in during the course of a single day in Haiti. In Haiti, securing the most basic necessities of existence is a daily, titanic struggle that people like Harrison, Limbaugh,Weisbrot et al, secure behind their desks and probably never having had to put in a strenuous day’s work in their lives, will never understand as they hide behind their pompous theories.

Vodou and its value system, in the nearly 15 years I have been traveling to Haiti, are no more arcane or nonsensical than the cosmology of Christianity, Judaism, Islam or Hinduism. I have, in fact, seen vodou act as an important spiritual succor for people in a place where death, premature and unnatural, is a blighted daily companion, and a sense of disconnect from one's heritage a real concern.

Several years ago, while chatting with a vodou priest known as Ti Papi in the crowded Bizoton quarter of Port-au-Prince, he told me the following:

When there's tires burning in the streets, when there's coup d'etat, when there's everything else, we are still doing our ceremonies, we are still beating our drums. Politicians come and go but voodoo is always here. If it wasn't for voodoo, we would already be occupied, either by the Americans or the Dominicans. Voodoo? It's been our sovereignty, over the years.

It’s a Haitian point of view, like the political point of view of Haiti’s people, that outsiders would do well to listen to.

Between the corrosive racism of some on the right and the tired rhetoric of some on the left - each based in no way in the reality on the ground in Haiti - we have an irresponsible, ahistorical approach to the country that in no way helps to ameliorate the situation of Haiti’s poor majority. When novice commentators try and shove Haiti into their own unsophisticated binary worldview, it damages, rather than advances, the cause of Haiti’s poor. By attempting to bestow a sheen of legitimacy on a disgraced leader or by maligning Haitians’ spiritual beliefs, these commentators, far from engaging in genuine inquiry and scholarship, are in fact showing the most grievous disrespect to Haiti and its people.

Haiti deserves better than this, and it is time that foreign commentators on the country actually spent some time there, away from their comfortable desks and apartments, speaking to actual Haitians in the back of sweltering camionettes, in crowded shantytowns and in hardscrabble peasant fields, far away from the echo-chamber of the intelligentsia in which so much of the right and the left often marinate.

The Haitians, the everyday Haitians who have struggled so long against such great odds to build a decent country and to provide for their families despite so many obstacles, deserve to have their voices heard without the filter of the prejudices of perhaps well-meaning but ignorant foreigners. We owe them at least that, I think. The Haitians have a lot more to teach us about their country than we can teach them.

Haitian Radio Returns to the Air

Haitian Radio Returns to the Air

By Michael Deibert

Posted Friday, Feb. 5, 2010

Slate

(Read the original article here)

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Haiti's radio journalists, many of whom have long experience of operating under dictatorships and elected governments with little tolerance for critical press coverage, know a thing or two about adversity. But nearly a month ago, when Haiti's capital was devastated by an earthquake that leveled large sections of the city and killed at least 150,000 people, local reporters were suddenly faced with a whole new set of challenges.

"We try and orient people to where aid is being distributed, and every day we announce messages about people who are still missing," says Wendell Theodore, the silken-voiced news director of Radio Metropole in the capital's Delmas region. His own home destroyed, Theodore now broadcasts the names of the missing from under a tree in the radio station's yard, next to the tent he has slept in since his house collapsed.

"I saw our building shake," says Rotchild Francois, director of the capital's RFM radio in the Pétionville district, who was at his desk in the studio when the earthquake struck and dashed into the street with a dozen other employees. The station lost a reporter in the quake and was knocked off the air for five days. Reporters from Radio Galaxie, Radio Magic 9, and Radio Télé Ginen were also killed.

Francois now spends his days combing the capital, trying to paint an audio picture of what is happening and to get information on the air about where aid is being distributed, the location of feeding and medical centers, and other important information. Many of the station's employees, fearful of aftershocks, refuse to enter the building.

"People come here to send messages to their relatives that they are OK or to have people call to say that they are OK," says Francois. "We do that every day."

Why journalists might be fearful was illustrated vividly when I was in the studio of Radio Kiskeya interviewing its director general, Marvel Dandin. As Dandin explained how the station, which had been knocked off the air for a week, had resumed broadcasting on an abbreviated schedule, a brief aftershock set the damaged, cracked building trembling and sent people running from the studio into the street.

Radio has historically played an important and politically significant role in Haiti's civic life, where newspapers are few and far between and difficult to decipher for a population often unable to avail themselves of proper schooling.

Radio Soleil, a Catholic station, played a key role in spreading information during the ouster of the Duvalier family dictatorship, which ruled Haiti from 1957 until 1986, during which time freedom of the press was practically nonexistent.

Independent journalism was a dangerous business during the revolving military juntas that controlled the country after the Duvalier regime collapsed. Under the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in office from 2001 until 2004, reporters were physically attacked by government partisans while covering demonstrations; they were also imprisoned and forced to flee the country as a result of threats against their lives.

Several journalists have been killed in Haiti in recent years, among them Radio Haiti-Inter Director Jean Dominique in April 2000, Radio Echo 2000 reporter Brignol Lindor in December 2001, and Jacques Roche, a TV host, poet, and an editor at the daily newspaper Le Matin, who was kidnapped and murdered in 2005.

But despite powerful forces arrayed against independent reporting, Haiti's journalists have persisted in the face of such adversity—good preparation, some might say, for today's challenges.

"I ran to my house and found that my wife had died," says Marcus Garcia, director of Radio Mélodie FM, a station that has continued broadcasting with the aid of generator despite the lack of electricity or telephone service. "But life has to continue, and if my wife was alive, she would want me to continue as I am doing, working for the people."

Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti.

Michael Deibert interviewed on KDVS

My interview on KDVS radio's It's About You, hosted by France Kassing, was broadcast today and can be heard here. The show also features a section about Howard Zinn and an interview with Nick Buxton about the United Nations climate negotiations in Copenhagen. My portion begins around the 30 minute mark.