A brief pause

In the span of a few days, we have seen the killing of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the successful explosion of a small nuclear device in the mountains above the town of Kilju by the "starving, friendless, authoritarian nation" of North Korea , and now news that forces in southern Somalia pledging loyalty to a rather radical Islamist doctrine have declared a holy war against neighboring Ethiopia on Sunday, due to the latter country's cross-border meddling. This gives the overall impression of an altogether crappy week in the making, and its still only Tuesday. To keep readers' spirits up, here is something at least pleasant to look at, the float of the G.R.E.S. Acadêmicos do Salgueiro samba school at this past year's Carnaval in Rio.

Free speech and its perils

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.

Death Penalty: Jamaicans Debate Re-introduction

My new article for the Inter-Press Service on the debate currently raging in Jamaica about the possible resumption of the death penalty there, and of the frightening ordeal of Carl McHargh, was published today and can be found here.

London Calling

This has nothing (and everything) to do with politics, but procrastinating over a new story, I just stumbled across one of the best things I have ever found on the internet: Former Clash frontman Joe Strummer and his band the Mescaleros playing a version of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wilde Side” in Saint Anne’s in Brooklyn in April 2002. Strummer would pass on from a heart attack eight months later. Moving and beautiful stuff. The guy remains a great hero of mine, I must say. Those interested in a full appreciation of Strummer’s importance in bringing music of conscience to punk and beyond should read Billy Bragg’s essay “The Joe I Knew” as it appeared on the BBC here.

Jamaicans hope to separate crime, politics

My article on Jamaica's upcoming electoral season, drawn from my visit to the island last month, was published in today's Washington Times and can be read here.

On September 30th

Two years ago yesterday, as I sat in my apartment in Rio de Janeiro working on my first book, a young man that I knew from the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Cite Soleil, Winston Jean-Bart, better known as Tupac, was shot at a demonstration calling for the return of Haiti’s ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. As Tupac passed by the Boston section of that sprawling shantytown with hundreds of others, the group was fired upon by a gang lead by Robinson “Labanye” Thomas, working in tandem with elements of the the Police Nationale d’Haiti (PNH). Tupac’s brother, a dear friend of mine of many years named James Petit-Frere, known on the streets as Billy and, like Tupac, the leader of a pro-Aristide gang in Cite Soleil, went back to avenge his brother’s death, only to be grievously wounded by a bullet to the stomach, pulled out of a hospital bed by Haitian police and thrown into jail. After a strenuous effort on the part of many of James’ friends, we succeeded in locating him and, displaying great courage as the Haitian capital was in the midst of the pro-Aristide uprising that became know as Operation Baghdad, among those who got in to see him was friend of mine, a Haitian physician, who made his way into James’ cell in order to examine and treat his wounds. James survived, but his time on this earth was proved to be short lived, as he escaped from prison in a massive February 2005 jailbreak in Port-au-Prince and, as I have heard now from multiple accounts, was shot and killed by police as he attempted to make his way back to Cite Soleil a short time later. I had last seen him in Cite Soleil in early 2004, just as it was becoming apparent that Aristide was hanging on to power by the faintest tether. Mr. Aristide fled Haiti on February 29th, 2004, and left the brothers, and all of his other supporters, to their fates. Now, along with his moneyed defenders in the United States and elsewhere, Mr. Aristide sits in safety, but I, to say nothing of the family they left behind, will never be able to see James or Tupac again. It is a great loss, for those of us who considered ourselves their friends and for Haiti because, given the opportunity, I think there was much that those boys and others like them could have done for their country.

In the intervening two years, there have been many people that I have known in Haiti who have passed on from this life to whatever lies beyond: Labanye himself, betrayed and killed by his own deputy, Evans Jeune, in collusion with his fierce opponent, Emmanuel “Dread” Wilmé; the historian and author Gerard Pierre-Charles, who I watched struggle to uphold his country‘s fragile democratic gains; the art dealer Issa el Saieh who first introduced me to wonders that the artists of Haiti were producing even among the country’s worst civil strife; Butteur Metayer, one of the leaders of the armed rebellion that finally helped drive Mr. Aristide and his tyrannical, unjust regime from power (in revenge for the killing of his own brother and to be succeeded by only more bloodshed); the journalist Jacques Roche, who sometimes shared a table with me at the Tropical Bar in Port-au-Prince; the jovial “mayor” of Nazon, Jean Alonce Durosel, known to all who were his friends as Verdieu; and, most recently, the community leader Esterne Bruner. Though not all died violently and not all were admirable figures, I can’t help but think that, in their last moments, all of them may have looked around and wondered about what Haiti had become. A country, as a friend of mine once wrote, where almost all of the choices available to the population are bad choices. Do you stay in the countryside and starve, or do you go into the gang-infested neighborhoods on the capital to try and scramble for whatever scraps are left over once the politicians (with a few exceptions) and their foreign helpers are done fighting over them? Do you pick up a gun and defend whoever is in power at the time, or do you reject violence and put yourself at the mercy of those who do have weapons? Or, if you are of a slightly higher social strata, do you continue struggling to make your country a better place and to make a living there, against very long odds and against the very real ever-present threat of violence, or do you go abroad, take your family with you and forever turn your back on the only place you will ever likely really feel at home, along with all the guilt and regret that comes with it? These are the choices those in Haiti are forced to make everyday.

There have been too many bodies in Haiti. I feel I have too many to remember this Guede, almost more than I can count. Over two years into the United Nations mission in Haiti and over 100 days into Rene Preval’s presidency, the suffering and the killing in Port-au-Prince continues. Amidst these struggles, the United States Congress, to its never-ending shame (if such a thing still exists in Washington), spurred on by House Republican leaders, decided to postpone consideration of H.R. 6142, the Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement (HOPE) Act. Florida Democratic representative Kendrick B. Meek (whom I saw briefly during his 2003 visit to Haiti), evidently one of the few members of this august body whose conscience has not totally been eviscerated, issued a statement saying of the Congress that “If Haiti were important to them, they would have included Haiti in the Central American-Dominican Republic Free Trade Act. The President and Congressional Republicans not only pushed CAFTA-DR through Congress, but once it passed, the President held a signing ceremony in the White House. Haiti requires such attention..”

Indeed. So among these melancholy anniversaries, where does one look for hope?

To Haiti, of course, and to the words of Jacques Roche who, before his murder in July 2005, recorded three CDs of him reading his own work entitled Le Vent de Liberte. Among the contents of the CDs, was a poem, poignantly titled Survive:

You can destroy my house
Steal my money
My clothesAnd my shoes
Leave me naked in the middle of winter
But you cannot kill my dream
You cannot kill hope
You can shut my mouth
Throw me in prison
Keep my friends far from me
And sully my reputation
Leave me naked in the middle of the desert
But you cannot kill my dream
You cannot kill hope
You can put out my eyes
And burst my eardrums
Cut off my arms and legs
Leave me naked in the middle of the road
But you cannot kill my dream
You cannot kill hope
You can cover me with open sores
Poke an iron into the wounds
Take pleasure in torturing me
Make me piss blood
You can shut me away without pen or paper
Treat me like a madman
Drive me mad
Humiliate me
Crush me
Give me no food or water
Make me sign my surrender
But you cannot kill my dream
You cannot kill hope
You can kill my children
Kill my wife
Kill all those I hold dear
Kill me
But you cannot kill my dream
You cannot kill hope
-Jacques Roche

Murder in Fontamara

At least eight have been killed and many wounded in attacks by gangs against residents in the southern Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Fontamara this week, Haiti's Radio Kiskeya reports. It appears that Dymsley "Ti Lou" Milien, one of the accused gunmen who killed Haiti's most famous journalist, Jean Dominique, in April 2000, and whose presence in the Martissant neighborhood I revealed this summer in an article for the Inter-Press Service, was among the assailants.

Residents of Fontamara, like those of Martissant, where dozens of people were killed in gang wars this summer, are accusing Police Nationale d’Haïti (PNH) forces and the MINUSTAH mission of, at best, passivity. In more melancholy news, Esterne Bruner, a grassroots community leader from the Grand Ravine section of Martissant, whom I met and interviewed in July and who had been shot once by rampaging gangs before, was killed on September 21st. Politicians and criminals continuing to fight for miserable power and the Haitian people caught in the middle.

In the struggle for accountability and transparency, Haiti's Le Matin has published the French-language version of one of my articles, Les droits de la personne doivent primer sur les intérêts partisans, last week.

Brasil stays in foreign investors’ good books

The Financial Times' Foreign Direct Investment (fDi) magzine this week published a piece I wrote on the rosy Brazilian economy, submitted quite a few months ago but still relevant with the country's upcoming presidential election next month. The are some interesting comments from Guido Mantega, uttered when he was still president of Brazil’s Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimiento Economico e Social (BNDES) and before he became Minister of Finance (his current job). You can check it out here.

Hauling HIV/AIDS Out of the Closet

Of some of the most important insights I was able to gain during this trip to Jamaica, I think one of them was that the struggle against HIV and AIDS takes many forms, and one of them is the struggle against bigotry. You can read about what I found here.

Grieving Father Takes on Police Impunity

My new article addressing the problem of police brutality in Jamaica and the steps being taken to address it can be found here.

A trip to Alligator Pond

My friend Jan Voordouw of the Panos Institute of the Caribbean and I took a break from journalistic endeavours to travel through Jamaica's still pristine southwestern coast yesterday, spending awhile in the little fishing village of Alligator Pond before taking a remote road along the Caribbean and seeing nary another soul and, indeed, no signs of human habitation at all for many miles. Given such conditions, the area is reportedly a favored point on entry for drugs and firearms coming into Jamaica, the latter of which are increasingly arriving from Haiti, many officials say. It was enjoyable nevertheless to find a part of this heavily touristed island where fishermen can still ply their trade unencumbered by sprawling private hotels, and the gentle hospitality of country people is still the rule of the day.

Recruiting Soldiers

I'm recruiting soldiers
For Jah army
Recruiting soldiers
Jah time is now
Satan forces
They all rise up to fight
They all rise up to fight
Jah and the saints...

But there is confusion
In high places
About the lamb that was slain
And all these years I hear them say
They're building a nation
But all these tricks were just a game

Hear them praising old Marcus Garvey
Hear them exalting his name
But all these times they be doing that I say
If he was here right now he'd go to jail the same

- Peter Tosh

On the passing of Joseph Hill

I suppose it is appropriate that I am in Jamaica as I first learn of the stilling of one of the greatest voices that reggae ever produced, that of Culture lead singer and songwriter Joseph Hill, who passed away a month ago while on tour in Germany. The driving force behind, among other reggae, classics as the epochal 1977 hit Two Sevens Clash, See Them A Come, I'm Alone in the Wilderness and International Herb, Hill was, for my money, one of the greatest songwriters the genre ever produced, able to effortlessly meld biblical imagery with a clear message of hope, perseverance and resistance that resonates today as well if not better than it did during the group's heyday in the late 1970's. During a highly economically disadvantaged time in my life, I watched Culture play an outdoor concert in Miami in 1997, and the old master had lost none of his power or fire. I think I feel something of him lingering tonight in his island home. Jah-Jah see them a come, but I and I a conquerer.

Bipartisan opportunism and Haiti?

Just arrived in reggaeland under the cover of darkness last night, flying through a crimson sunset that turned, all of a sudden to night. I spied a recent posting by the investigative journalist Lucy Komisar on her blog that suggests the money trail surrounding Haiti's ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, which saw the public relations firms of former U.S. congressmen and head of the Congressional Black Caucus Ron Dellums receive $989,323 for three year's lobbying, may have by no means been a merely partisan affair, as any student of realpolitik can appreciate.

Komisar suggests that Alice Fisher, head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division and a Bush political appointee, served as as a partner at Latham & Watkins in 2004, then the Wall Street counsel for IDT, the world's third ranked international phone company. The company, as Komisar notes has been "accused in two lawsuits of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks to former Haitian president Aristide beginning in 2003 to get a sweetheart deal with Teleco, the Haitian government phone company." The Securities and Exchange Commission, the United States Attorney in Newark, NJ, and a federal grand jury are investigating the charges.

The CEO of IDT, James Courter, is a prominent for Republican congressmen from New Jersey, and prominent Republicans on IDT's board include former UN ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, former New York congressman and Republican vice presidential nominee Jack F. Kemp, former Virginia governor James S. Gilmore III, and former Minnesota senator Rudy Boschwitz

Some have charged that Fisher is blocking an agreement to share seized Haitian drug money that would help Haiti pursue the bribery case in US courts. This is an interesting development that bears watching to see where it will head.

Stuyvesant Town and the life of the American wallet

The New York Times had a highly interesting Op-Ed today on the way insurance giant Metropolitan Life's sale of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village - the 110 building East River enclave built in the 1950’s, as housing for World War II veterans and their families - has increased the fears on many New Yorkers that "Manhattan is becoming more and more off limits to all but the truly wealthy." As someone has never been able to afford to live in Manhattan, opting for and in fact preferring the ethnic polyglots of Brooklyn and Queens, the article helps put in perspective the quandary that many cities face, but is perhaps brought out in greatest relief here in the Big Apple.

The lifeblood of this city comes from its middle and working classes, the thousands of waitresses trying their hand at acting for the first time as they arrive from Minnesota, the young guys working grunt jobs shuffling papers at law firms or advertising agencies while secretly working on that first novel or first screenplay, those musicians who deliver furniture as a way to make ends meet, not to mentions the tens of thousands of immigrants who drive New York's taxis, keep its subway system running (ahem), run the myriad of restaurants that give the five boroughs their endless culinary vocabulary and give the gift of their art, music, language and intellect to this sprawling mass of humanity we know as New York. If we, year by year, are priced farther and farther away from the nexus of the expression of that energy, if not its creation - which Manhattan has been and remains for the entire world - then what? What comes to fill the place of all those who give New York its personality but can no longer afford to live within its boundaries?

My dear friend Nomi Prins, a journalist and Senior Fellow at Demos, has recently come out with a new book tackling just such subjects, Jacked: How "Conservatives" are Picking your Pocket (Whether you voted for them or not), published by PoliPointPress, which examines the real struggles that the working class in America face today, struggles that often get ignored in both the mainstream and self-described "progressive" press, which seems to prefer ceaseless armchair commenting on foreign affairs to actually getting one's feet wet with reporting. Nomi did get he feet wet, traveling through the South in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, far west to Seattle, to Detroit and beyond, as the book conducts a guided tour of the American wallet. Literally. Examining a driver's license leads to a discussion of gasoline prices, energy policy, and Iraq, while the Social Security card leads Ms. Prins' analysis that the Bush administration's efforts to "reform" Social Security have in fact weakened it. Having not finished the book yet, I can't give a full account of it, but so far it is an engaging look at the actual hardships of working people in Bush's America, and as such should definitely be worth a look.

Le Prix du Sang

On Tuesday, Véronique Valmé, who decided to return to Haiti from abroad two years ago, was laid to rest at the Eglise St-Pierre in Petionville. I never met Véronique personally, though I do know at least one of her relatives. She was shot and killed on Saturday night in what was apparently a failed kidnapping attempt, along with her namorado, Karl "Karlito" Lubin Zounon, who was of Haitian-Béninois extraction as they left my favorite restaurant in Port-au-Prince, Anba Tonel. A presumed assailiant was also killed.

Three more lives - joining those of people I did know, like Jacques Roche, James Petit-Frere, Winston Jean-Bart and others - brought to a violent early end for what? "Where will this all end?" some Haitian friends have asked me. From the humblest bidonville in Port-au-Prince to the wealthiest mansions in Laboule and Fermathe, hardly a home has been untouched by the violence that has swept through the country in the last five years, and my fear is that the government of Rene Preval and the UN forces in Haiti thus far seem powerless to stop it.

No doubt the predators of this poor country, in Haiti and abroad, sustain themselves on a steady diet of deaths like these, each one able to be used for political ends, useful in the quest, by their willing accomplices and their acolytes blinded by arrogance or naiveté, in the struggle for "miserable power," as the Haitian people suffer continually and without respite. Haiti’s greatest author, Jacques Stephen Alexis, wrote of his Haitian protagonists in his finest book, Compere General Soleil, published in 1955, that "The closer they came to the promised land, the more they felt the net tightening around them."

In 1983, at the height of the dictatorship of Jean-Cluade Duvalier, Pope John Paul II visited Haiti and thundered "Haiti must change" in reference to the violent, authoritarian state apparatus. Those words still ring true, but what must change today is the system of social and economic exclusion, the pernicious flow of guns and drugs through a fragile, easily corruptible state and the cancer of violence that has cut through so many lives. Much like the people I witnessed displaced from their homes by violence in Martissant this past July, Véronique and Karlito were doing nothing, harming no one, when that violence visited itself upon them.

Haitians and the international community must take a hard look at themselves and ask how they can stop that violence's bloody march forward before another generation of young men in the slums are lost to the gun, before any more journalists are cut down for simply practicing their craft, and before any more people, simply out for a night on the town, become yet another element in the litany of lives whose potential we will now never know.

Commission Episcopale Nationale Justice et Paix report

Amidst all the furor over the highly-questionable Lancet article on the human rights situation in Haiti (composed by a researcher stating that she is plainly a supporter of Haiti's former president Aristide and lauded by Mr. Aristide's well-paid Miami lawyer), what has been lost in the shuffle is the fact that Haiti’s Commission Episcopale Nationale Justice et Paix - a genuinely non-partisan body - recently released a report where it stated the following:

"Many political and even economic sectors are involved with violence and weapons. It is important to remember that fact. This is not about making accusations, but we must be conscious that arms do not resolve anything. Those who commit acts of violence, who are responsible for such acts must face that truth and accept their responsibility. The State must also face its responsibility and fight violence and impunity."

The Commission counted 2506 dead victims of violence during the 47 months it has been operating.

The full report can be read here.

Human rights, not politics, should be priority for Haiti

The Haitian information resource AlterPresse has published my latest Op-Ed on the situation in that Caribbean country. You can read it here.

Journalists line up for the Bush gravy train

In testimony to the fact that supporters of Haiti's disgraced former president are not the only ones greedy or stupid enough to accept money from a government in exchange for defending backwards policies, today's New York Times reveals that the Bush administration’s Office of Cuba Broadcasting paid 10 journalists in the United States "to provide commentary on Radio and TV Martí, which transmit to Cuba government broadcasts critical of Fidel Castro." The group included three journalists at El Nuevo Herald, the Spanish-language sister newspaper of The Miami Herald. This would seem yet another example, much of a piece with the payments doled out by the Education Department in 2005 to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams for newspaper columns and television appearances praising Mr. Bush's education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act, of a government obsessed with dipping its fingers in aspects of civic life where it doesn't belong. A report from the Government Accountability Office after the Williams affair came to light in 2005 said the Bush administration had disseminated "covert propaganda" in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.

It would seem that there is more than enough legitimately critical reporting to be done on the Castro government, and incidents like this only serve to harm people who want to report objectively from the region. One wonders what these journalists were thinking, and who was asleep at the switch at the Herald to let them get away with it. For my own part, I'll prefer to remain poor and independent.

Human rights or political gamesmanship?

A recent article, "'Human rights abuse and other criminal violations in Port-au-Prince, Haiti: a random survey of households," by Athena R Kolbe and Royce A Hutson, published in The Lancet, Volume 368, Number 9538, 02 September 2006, appears to be the latest salvo in campaign to keep some Haitian politicians from being held to account for the abuses they committed against the people of Haiti.

While no one disputes the fact that human rights abuses took place during the 2004-2006 interim government in Haiti (in fact I personally lost several friends during this period), many of us who follow the country closely have reason to believe that this report was in fact composed as part of an ongoing attempt to rehabilitate the public image of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his political party, Fanmi Lavalas. There is compelling evidence to suggest that the coordinator of the research, and one of the two authors of the Lancet article, Athena Kolbe, is in fact a pro-Fanmi Lavalas journalist who goes by the name Lyn Duff. At the end of the article "We Won't Be Peaceful and Let Them Kill Us Any Longer" - Interview with Haitian Activist Rosean Baptiste, interviewed by Lyn Duff, 4 November 2005, San Francisco Bay View, there is an email link to the author: Email Lyn at athenadk@aol.com.

Lyn Duff is described as "a friend of Aristide" in Justin Felux's article, 'Debunking the Media's Lies about President Aristide', published by Dissident Voice on 14 March 2004, and worked with Aristide's Lafanmi Selavi center for street children, which was one of the centers for arming and organizing the gangs who terrorized Port-au-Prince during his tenure (I had several gang-leader friends who passed through there). All of this naturally begs the question of how Kolbe/Duff's "research" into the issue of human rights violations and the perpetrators be regarded as objective when she herself states that for three and half years she was an Aristide employee, who states that her sympathies are solidly with Haiti's disgraced former president and his party. The Lancet report states that no murders or rapes were committed by Lavalas partisans during the past two years, a statement that, given Haiti's climate of partisan violence, beggars belief and flies in the face of eyewitness testimony many journalists have collected.

At a press conference I attended at the outset of 2002 held by several armed pro-Lavalas militant factions from Cite Soleil held at the Centrale Autonome des Travailleurs Haitians (CATH) hall in downtown Port-au-Prince, (sponsored and attended by such Cite Soleil notables as Amaral Duclona, James "Billy" Petit-Frere, Rosemond Titus and others), many women there described how they were repeatedly gang raped by gang members in the neighborhood. As the militants sponsoring the conference were closely affiliated with the Fanmi Lavalas party, it followed suit that those victimizing the women in those zones often were not. Given the factional fighting among the gangs, these did not always hold true, though. Later, some of the pro-Lavalas gangs, especially that commanded by Dread Wilme, became notorious for using rape as an instrument of terror.

As some of the ghastly rapes carried out in Saint Marc in February 2004, including one by a gang lead by Ronald "Black Ronald" Dauphin in the ruins of the city's burned-out commissariat, were carried out in full view of the CIMO and Unite de Securite de la Garde du Palais National d'Haiti forces in the city - who at the time were reporting directly (and hourly) to Aristide's National Palace - one must ponder whether these sexual assaults were happening with government sanction. There are many survivors who can attest to this.

I can recall policeman Jean "Grenn Sonnen" René Anthony, who operated under commissar Emmanuel Mompremier at the Delmas 33 precinct as a torturer and executioner during Aristide's tenure in office before linking up with Rémissainthe Ravix to engage in freelance banditry after Aristide's ouster, went on Haitian radio in early 2005 (I forget which station) to say that he was going to rape and murder PNH spokeswoman Gessy Coicou. I remember being stunned that any station would carry such a declaration.

Rape, unfortunately, appears to be looked upon as just another weapon in the arsenal of some of Haiti's politicians by which they can crush opposition to them and whatever designs they may have on power. It is high time that it be denounced without regards to who is committing it, and that foreign lawyers, journalists, researchers and others stop attempting to shield the guilty from having to answer for their crimes.